Bernadette McAliksey and Lelia Doolin in conversation

Now and then it is the 'mavericks', the fighters for lost causes, those brave ones who are often bruised, bloodied but unbroken.

Those who look beyond the 'official line', those who will always be a piercing stone in the shoe of the mighty and who try and capture that most awkward of beasts called truth.

It is sometimes those who took the first steps, sowed the seed, took the blows and paved the way for those with real timing. For is not timing almost everything in realpolitik?

Impartial Reporter columnist Bernadette McAliskey (though for many she will always be Bernadette Devlin who wrote a brilliant biography called 'The Price of My Soul' all those years ago) always stood up for the wounded the bruised and the broken - she still does - and never crawled for the silver coins of success.

And like ex-Official Unionist MP John Taylor, she was riddled with bullets but somehow survived the bloodiest period of the Troubles.

A mental and physical force of nature, whose plain towering intellect and searing logic has impaled many who had the temerity to engage in verbal volleyball with her.

But that is why having Ms. McAliskey interview another strong woman who fought all sorts of battles for the underdog, Lelia Doolin, was a unique slice of the history of really strong women and you could feel the crackling electricity between them.

The documentary is called 'Mad, Bad and Dangerous Women' a quote ascribed to the late Roman Catholic Archbishop Of Dublin John McQuaid about Lelia Doolin who worked in RTE In the late 1960s.

And there were around 100 women there to watch it as part of a unique festival.

"I don't think there are difficult women. There are women who do not believe that their position is centred upon men," said Ms. McAliskey.

Ms. Doolin comes into a room like a breeze, light and sudden, lifting all before her with eloquence, can-do with no notes and sheer sass and carries the room. A born leader who lectured this mere male in broadcast journalism at University College Galway (UCG) many years ago and you never forget her.

She was a fearless producer with RTÉ who wanted to stymie Seven Days, a superb current affairs programme back in the late 1960s, which produced some great programmes on various topics.

Pressure came on from politicians and big business and this was one battle she knew she could not win so she co-wrote a book called 'Sit Down And Be Counted' which gave her ex-bosses a pretty bloody nose.

She cycled around Belfast as part of some cross-community work with the late Fr. Des Wilson in those hairy years from 1974-1978 when she lived on the Lisburn Road and also worked as a journalist, actor, Artistic Director of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and community activist.

Ms. McAlsikey is now 76, while the indomitable Lelia, a native of County Clare, is 89.

Two really feisty women who always called a spade just that and their collective wisdom filled the cinema seats in Bundoran's Cineplex last Friday as part of a unique festival called 'Féile na mBan' or the 'Festival of Women' which hosted various events that celebrated strong Irish women, over four days.

And they don't come any stronger than these two grand dames although their egalitarian souls would baulk at such terms.

Documentary maker Emma O'Grady said it was made during Covid in 2020 and this was the first of six progammes.

"The point of the series was to put influential women over 70 interviewing each other so it was quite different.

"And making the film I was like the first audience member while these two amazing women talked, and it felt like being a child on the rug in your granny's sitting room while she is having a very adult conversation and soaking in all this wisdom."

The hour-and-a-half documentary is quite a feat of verbal volleyball between two veterans and is a riposte in a way to a documentary that Lelia Doolin made on Bernadette McAliskey in 2011 called 'Bernadette- Notes On A Political Journey'.

Ms. McAliskey grew up in a matriarchy and she tells Doolin that she comes from a "long line of widows and that is what I tell my husband when he misbehaves".

Ms. McAliskey tells Ms. Doolin that it was only when she went to Queen's University, Belfast (QUB) in the late 1960s that she realised that men seemed to think that they had some superiority or entitlement to a better opinion, and she had not seen this previously.

Ms. Doolin was born in County Clare and spent her young years between that county and Dublin where her father worked in the Civil Service.

When asked where she got her sense of doing her own thing Lelia Doolin says it was always there.

"Independence was part of me always. I think I was indulged by my parents as I had come after two boys and then me and then another.

"I would say I was an independent cuss from early on and nobody minded but my mother was one of seven sisters so there is a bit of a matriarchy in my family too.

"They were big, tall strong women and there were 12 in my grandmother's family on the maternal side."

"My father had a very egalitarian mind and that is in me too."

Lelia went to University College Dublin (UCD) and worked as a producer with RTÉ on the famous current affairs programme called 'Seven Days' which tackled some taboo subjects such as money lending and other not often talked about social issues.

When Bernadette McAliskey suggests that Lelia Doolin had a career in RTÉ, the latter retorts: "I have never had a career. I don't do careers and I do work at different things."

Ms. Doolin said the 'Seven Days' crew lived in a caravan outside the main building in RTÉ which gave them a sense of freedom.

Lelia had two young directors working with her- one was a Protestant from West Cork, Dick Hill and the other was the controversial Eoghan Harris who was a '"Stickie" (a member of Sinn Fein the Workers Party who were the political wing of the Official IRA) and wore black from top to bottom and was always full of ideas and "trying to manipulate you to agree with those ideas which he is able for and still does".

She began to see the drama of real life as opposed to the drama on stage and the extent to which politics impinged upon her at the same time as the then Bernadette Devlin was coming to prominence in Northern Ireland and 'Seven Days' was starting to cover the growing upheaval.

Lelia Doolin made a programme on Derry and the state of gerrymandering which led to the iconic "'One Man One Vote' slogan that Bernadette McAliskey and others took up.

But some of her bosses felt she was too radical as 'Seven Days' did programmes on corruption in Ireland and the war in Vietnam.

"They were turbulent and interesting times and you, Bernadette McAliskey, were in the middle of it," said Ms. Doolin.

"After the IRA 1956-62 campaign they became a different movement, and the Civil Rights movement had an impact on me, so I went up to Northern Ireland to find out what was going on and what was behind it all."

Until she worked in current affairs, Northern Ireland was just a place where they went up to play hockey against QUB.

"I was as ignorant about Northern Ireland as you could have imagined, and I had to learn a lot in a year."

But there was an attempt to stifle the coverage of current affairs and censorship came in and current affairs in RTÉ were put into the newsroom and Doolin and two other producers resigned and co-wrote a famous book of protest called 'Sit Down and Be Counted'.

The idea of unfettered coverage was being quashed.

"We were losing what we were set up to do.

"RTÉ was losing its soul as a broadcaster of truth," Ms. Doolin claimed.

"We wanted to challenge this, and we believed we were kowtowing to business and political pressures.

"I think that the book 'Sit Down and Be Counted' still shows what good broadcasting can be."

She went to the Abbey Theatre as Artistic Director and got fired and then went to QUB to study Anthropology in the early 1970s.

"I spent most of my time setting up video groups among Loyalist and Roman Catholic youths up in Ballymurphy with Fr. Des Wilson and those young people taught me a lot.

"He was a great, warm, insightful and wonderful man.

"I was in Belfast from 1974 to mid-1978 and you, Bernadette were displacing ideas all over the place, and it was post-1972 and it was after you were in jail and I lived in a flat on the Lisburn Road which cost me £20 a month and I had the whole of the middle of this enormous house and I went everywhere on a bicycle and I had huge recording machines which were heavy and ungainly and had a great time."

She decided to write her thesis on 'Elements of the sacred and dramatic in Belfast urban enclaves'.

"It was about people's ideas of transcendence irrespective of who or what they were.

"I always believed that there is a great need in the human psyche for something greater than itself."

She was paid £20 per week to live on which was "plenty to live on".

"We used to bring people from Ballymurphy to the Lyric Theatre and I brought a women's darts team from Ballymurphy who wiped the floor with the women's darts teams in Ballyfermot in Dublin.

"But living in Belfast was one of the most educational and enjoyable events in my life from learning about Church of Ireland people and Presbyterians and I lived in a street where the Orange [Order] parades went up and down on the 12th of July.

"Young women were tied to lampposts wearing nappies before they married and there were all sorts of rituals going on.

"I delighted in it because it was part of an amazing culture which I am sure you would also find in Africa."

She then worked for Combat Poverty in Mayo.

Bernadette McAliskey then remarked on the futility of the phrase which she said was often used in Derry which went: Somebody would need to.

"It is a phrase that I don't like and it's very simple. If you have a great idea just do it."

Both Bernadette and Lelia are doers rather than procrastinators.

"It's a very simple philosophy."

This was the first interview about herself that Ms. Doolin has given and was once described as the least self-aware person that you could meet.

Her life has been her work.

But Lelia the person has not been interviewed until now.

"I have been involved in many things, but it is never just me. It is always with others."

She was involved in a Mullaghmore campaign in The Burren in North Clare in the early 1990s. A local community group did not want people in large buses going to an Interpretative Centre in a remote area.

"We wanted the centre to be in a village and it took 10 years and I drove from Galway down to various places in Clare to come together with a bunch of people from all over Clare and many of them had never spoken in public in their lives before or had written a line about anything and they became experts and they all grew as did I in their company and together we managed to change the law."

Lelia also saw a Romania post-Ceauscescu rise from the depths of poverty as she gave classes in Irish Film in a "most beautiful country".

Lelia then studied homoeopathy in Galway, where she has been living since 1982, for four years and then she went to Zimbabwe.

"In African countries, disabled women did not exist as humans.

"A campaign was launched for them to become visible in education, theatre, and I went around on a bicycle and met a lot of women there.

"It was a most engaging thing meeting women out there who had nothing, but their smile and they have the most beautiful smile in the world and they were being led by Robert Mugabe before he became a total monster."

She added: "Even in the Republic of Ireland at the moment, the sense of entitlement among people who are senior politicians is shocking to the public."

Meanwhile, Bernadette McAliskey is currently working with immigration since 2000 in Northern Ireland and is delighted at the rise of Black Lives Matter and there is a great growth in young people of colour on this island.

"My heart sings to see how sassy and knowledgeable they are.

"They know about hierarchy, and they know about history which is something that we have unlearned here.

"It comes and slaps us now and then in the North and we muttered and tittered in various proportions about the Free State and its attempts to celebrate The Rising of 1916 and the War of Independence and the creation of the Free State.

"We said you lied to us, and you sold us out but now we are looking at the peace and we are coming to the Remembrance celebration and the acknowledgement of the existence of the Northern State.

"These young people are challenging racism, and you can't be anti-racist unless you are prepared to take on hierarchies, patriarchy, imperialism, slavery and there is a whole new world opening.

"I think that young people from 16-25 who have a new interest about old codgers like us because they think we have knowledge because they are going somewhere we already have been but in a different way."

Ms. McAliskey gave Lelia her views on the concept of hierarchy and mediocrity- the sense of privilege, entitlement and self-importance to which all of Ireland has been reduced.

She added that "nobody takes responsibility for anything. People have mistaken the complexity of taking part in democracy, right of equality and have reduced it to, if you want to speak get elected".

"The mentality is I got elected so I know everything, and I believe that mentality is a manifestation of mass ignorance.

"That does not mean the elected know the slightest thing about economics, culture, art, how many pennies are in a pound.

"This concept of changing how democracy is represented around things like the Citizens' Assembly is a hope for the future."

Lelia does not believe the younger generation can learn from herself and Bernadette because they are going to have to do it all again and make all their own mistakes.

"We need regular Citizens' Assemblies to offer wisdom to what is going on in the island.

"Anyone can see that this is a bogus society in which two or three per cent of people own all of the wealth.

"It's not about wealth it's about allowing people to create and being supported in what they create.

"We pride ourselves in our great writers and artists, but we put out impossible forms to be filled in encouraging you to tell lies- 40 pages of crap."

But Bernadette has the last word on what she describes as the "uncouth, uncultured monetarised, too wealthy for his own good taxpayer who complains to the elected person that his money is being frivolously wasted on the arts as opposed to lowering his taxes so he can make more profit to do more boring things like make more money to leave to his children who if there is any fairness in the world will drink it all".

Power to the people.

Hearing these two titans talking in the light of experience was both illuminating and challenging.