Cashel’s Delia Moclair died on this day in 1971. She was a pioneer who broke new ground in obstetrics, public health and social activism.
In 1922, she became the first woman to be elected Assistant Master of the National Maternity Hospital, despite initial opposition from some of the hospital’s conservative governors.
Moclair, born at John Street in Cashel in 1895, was educated at the Presentation convent, Cashel and the Ursuline convent, Waterford and went on to study medicine at UCD, graduating in 1921.
Moclair’s mother died while at a young age and her death had a lasting impact on Delia who, for the rest of her life, campaigned to improve living conditions and public health. She was one of the first health professionals to insist love and cuddling were as important to a new baby as feeding and changing.
An early supporter of women’s rights, her emphasis was always on ‘back-room’ work, assembling of accurate facts, the building up of a case and its presentation, and then using every opportunity to break down prejudices.
She was one of the first to run pre-marriage courses and ran health and hygiene courses to support young women. She highlighted the importance of midwives and was an early champion of encouraging fathers to take an active role in childcare.
She was vocal about the under-reporting of sexual violence against women. In 1930, she and Dr Dorothy Stopford Price represented the Irish Women Doctors’ Committee at the Carrigan Committee. The committee was set up by WT Cosgrave’s Cumann na nGaedheal government. The two doctors told the committee they knew mothers as young as 13, and that many other young girls only admitted they had been raped if they became pregnant. They highlighted the need for sex and health education.
Their final report issued stark findings, describing “an alarming amount of sexual crime, increasing yearly’. Among its 21 recommendations, the report called for the age of consent to be raised from 16 to 18 and emphasised the need for a series of legal reforms to protect women and children. The Department of Justice, however, vehemently opposed publication of the report. When de Valera’s Fianna Fáil government came into power in 1932, its justice minister, James Geoghegan, deemed it too one-sided, and unfair to men. It was never published. The committee’s transcripts remained sealed in the National Archives until 1999.
Delia Moclair died on 23 November 1971 at Dr Steevens' Hospital, Dublin, of renal failure. The Irish Press newspaper said of her ‘she could be a formidable adversary. Roused to anger by some injustice or misdeed, she was devastating’.
Sources:
https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/arid-41095507.html
https://www.dib.ie/biography/moclair-horne-delia-a10125
