Ireland’s rejection of all things Catholic is partly because of the Irish tendency to overdramatise, the ‘grande dame of Irish journalism’ tells Peter Stanford

There has been a lot of talk about lockdown resilience of late. Sitting in her seaside home in Kent, oblivious to the changeable weather and ­sporting a flamboyant purple ribbon tied in her hair, Mary Kenny embodies that refusal to be bowed. “Convent education was very stoical when I was growing up,” she confides. “You were supposed to be very stoical about heating. Cold was good for your character.”

The Church in her native Ireland, I suggest, could do with some of that same stoicism at the moment. A renewed barrage of criticism has been unleashed on it following the publication of the report of an official commission into the mother and baby homes it ran from the 1920s until the last one closed in 1998. It details the “particularly harsh treatment” meted out to their vulnerable residents.

“It is shameful to say so, to even think about it,” Kenny replies, her gaze momentarily averted, “but I had absolutely no idea about them when I was growing up in Ireland. Such places did not figure in my landscape.” Which, she immediately admits, is curious, because in the late 1960s and early 1970s she was prominent as one of the leaders of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement. It made headlines by its efforts (“stunts” she now calls them) to bring the country up to date, including a “contraceptive train” that imported condoms from Belfast in defiance of a legal ban on them dating back to 1935.