Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Muscles rippling, Irish actor Paul Mescal charges across cinema screens in the film Gladiator II, roaring: “This is about survival.” He might have taken inspiration from real-life warriors in his home country, like housewife Ann McStay who had 13 children by the age of 31, including four sets of twins. Facing a furious rhino in front of an emperor, as Mescal’s gladiator does, surely pales in comparison to McStay’s daily life.In 1969, McStay won Housewife of the Year — a long-running but now defunct annual competition broadcast on Irish national television. It is now the subject of a documentary that feels like ancient history, even though it is not. Judging by the laughter and chatter among the largely middle aged and upwards audience at the cinema where I saw Housewife of the Year in Dublin, many women can relate. McStay was apparently left alone to wrangle her children when her husband was out downing pints. “The more kids I had, the more he receded into the pub,” she says in the film. The contest, in which housewives held hands and twirled in their frocks with host Gay Byrne, judged the women on their cooking skills and posed questions about where they met their husbands. At stake was a cash prize and a cooker. It was only scrapped in 1995, the year before Mescal, 28, was born.By contrast, the annual Irish Rose of Tralee beauty pageant has been going strong for 65 years. Prizes include €25,000 euros of world travel, a plug-in hybrid car and a year’s hair styling. Applications for the 2025 edition are now open.Housewife of the Year, and another new Irish film, Small Things Like These, starring Oscar winner Cillian Murphy, about the cruelty of Ireland’s notorious church-run laundries for unmarried women, movingly depict how far Ireland has come. The last infamous Magdalene laundry — a hulking, haunting presence in Dublin’s inner city — closed in 1996.Historian Diarmaid Ferriter says Small Things Like These is “bathed in Dickensian darkness”. Yet the pain of this chapter in Ireland’s past is still unresolved. A compensation scheme for survivors of mother and baby homes only opened last year and preliminary digging and preparatory work has begun at the site of a mother-and-baby home in Tuam, County Galway, ahead of plans for a grisly excavation of 796 babies buried there.While Ferriter challenges Small Things Like These’s depiction of modern Irish history as “one giant, black cloud”, a country that last year failed to pass a referendum updating the constitutional description of a woman’s “duties in the home” is not always as progressive as it likes to think.The flawed wording of the referendum, which led to its comprehensive rejection, “inadvertently showed how misogynistic the state still is”, says Deirdre Foley, a researcher on women’s working lives in Ireland.The National Women’s Council also points out that “significant barriers” to abortion remain, despite its legalisation in 2019. And while a ban on married women holding public sector and many private jobs was abolished in 1973, the prospect of pregnancy can still discourage investors from betting on female entrepreneurs, one recently told me.Still, modern women can take heart at some significant changes to political life in Ireland in the past few years. There has yet to be a female taoiseach, or prime minister, but three parties — the main opposition Sinn Féin, Labour and the Social Democrats — are all led by women. One, the Social Democrats’ Holly Cairns, gave birth to her first baby on election day last November. Irish women are also celebrating a fighter who emerged victorious from a harrowing gladiatorial struggle of her own last year. Hairdresser Nikita Hand from Dublin won a civil rape case against Irish mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor in a case that prompted an outpouring of solidarity with her and a surge in calls to the Dublin’s rape crisis centre.The country is determined to keep pressing for change. As the marchers who gathered at a rally after Hand’s verdict chanted: “We support survivors here.”[email protected]
