When the grim, grey landscape of Ireland in the first half of the 20th Century -- slow-moving, retro-focused, washed-out -- burst suddenly into colour and vivid form during the Seventies, it did so in great part thanks to a small handful of talented, dedicated women.

That decade was one of society's tipping points, when so many of the bad old ways were finally challenged, when long-accepted evils were exposed and declared, when the winds of change blew long and strong.

It became unacceptable to pay women less, deny them rights both within and without marriage, restrict their education, demonise their illegitimate children and refuse them contraception. It was a time of change influenced by the spirit, ideals and style of the Sixties, which had finally filtered through to Ireland, and produced a generation of women journalists who broke moulds and barriers, launched careers and changed forever the way women in this country were thought about, and thought about themselves.

Many have not survived into old age, dying too young and leaving behind them a hole that will not be easily filled. Of this much-lamented bunch -- including Mary Cummins, Nuala O'Faolain, Terry Keane, Mary Holland, Christina Murphy, Clare Boylan, Angela Phelan -- only the brilliant, magnetic June Levine and Nuala Fennell, dedicated, filled with integrity, reached their 70s. The rest were still short of that decade and far indeed from real old age. Neither Clare Boylan, Christina Murphy nor Mary Cummins even made it to 60, all dying in their mid-50s.

"The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away." That's the Bible, Psalm 90:10, and "labour and sorrow" certainly formed part of the strength of these women, but so too did gaiety. They fought bravely, with conviction and a strong sense of what was right, but also gallantly, with wit and grace.

There are many who are still alive and hard at work -- Nell McCafferty, Rosita Sweetman, Elgy Gillespie, Anne Harris, Mary Maher, Maeve Binchy, Mary Kenny to name just some -- but the gaps are large and getting larger. Angela Phelan, who died just weeks ago, wasn't part of the Irish Women's Liberation Movement that sprung so many of them but she had rare flair for her role as a social diarist and was, in her own way, responsible for shaping many of our social attitudes and expectations.

Her passing marks another stage in the gradual dismantling of the vibrant optimism of the Seventies, the sense of possibility and cohesion that inspired every one of these women, despite their many differences of personality and agenda. They were all high on the hope that the world could be a better place, that freedom for many was not just possible, but within grasp. As Rosita Sweetman puts it now, "we were part of a worldwide push for liberation, and we felt that the wax hadn't hardened; there was a real possibility of change. Now, we're snatching the children's allowance and giving it to bankers."

One of the first to wake to the new era was June Levine. Jewish as well as female, June was a double minority. She was also beautiful, voluptuous and stylish; "Elizabeth Taylor in Ivanhoe" is how one friend recalls her. And precocious. By the age of 15 she already had a gig with the Irish Times, but got married and moved to Canada, where life in a small town with three small children proved her political awakening. Convinced she was being buried alive, June fled back to Ireland in the Sixties and threw herself back into journalism.

She worked for various magazines, including Image, and was part of the founding group of the Irish Women's Liberation Movement. She could be intolerant, says one friend -- "astringent," according to Mary Kenny in her fond obituary -- but also kind. Like so many of her contemporaries, she lived her ideals closely, once taking into her own home a prostitute on the run from her pimp. Who would do that now? She was a great friend of Terry Keane, and like Terry, very fond of male company and admiration, suffering through a number of difficult relationships after her divorce, though always giving as good as she got, until finding love and peace with psychiatrist Ivor Browne.

The contradictions were what brought these women to life.They were feminists but loved clothes and fashion. They refuted the yoke of domesticity, but many were, like June, excellent cooks, with plenty of interior design flair. Sexual liberation was important, but very often undercut with a streak of sexual Puritanism. They rejected the stifling burden of family life, but were devoted mothers and homemakers. It was these contradictions that allowed them to speak directly to the women of the country, because they were coming from the same place, with so many of the same values, only with a piercing light to shed on alternatives.

Nuala Fennell also spent time in Canada after getting married, and, like June, found herself invisible "as one of the foot soldiers in the vast army of suburban housewives" in Ireland in the late Sixties. She was the product of a bleak upbringing in Portlaoise in the Forties and Fifties, the daughter of a garda, and a mother whose total lack of fulfilment was a catalyst in Nuala's refusal to remain in the narrow role society had ordained for her. Nell McCafferty recalls her, during the first of those legendary meetings in Mary Maher's front room, as "the epitome of the middle-aged, middle-class, middle-of-the-road bourgeoisie ... this groomed suburban mother".

Nuala at the time had started a career as a freelance journalist, working for the women's pages of various newspapers and magazine, including the Irish Press, and would later turn to politics, becoming the country's one and only Minister for State for Women's Affairs under Garret FitzGerald. She lent a much-needed veneer of respectability to some of the antics of the Women's Movement, such as the invasion of the Forty Foot, then firmly men only, where Nuala and her handsome family posed for photographs in their swimsuits, somewhat subduing the cries of "lesbian!" and "whore!" with which the rest of the women were greeted.

When she left the movement in October 1971, Nuala wrote a public letter of resignation, denouncing "the elitist and intolerant group that is using women's liberation as a pseudo-respectable front for their own various political ends"; and later, famously, "Women's lib has not only lost her virginity, but has turned into a particularly nasty harlot."

Many of these inspiring women were spurred on by the dreary realities of their mothers' lives, the frustration either stoically borne or deliberately channelled into a bright daughter and backed up by a steely, selfless determination that this girl would have a better life than theirs. Certainly, for Clare Boylan, this was what started her on the path to writing. After her mother died, Clare described how, "She focused her ambition on me ... she had no education and no money. She did what nearly all her generation did, found a man, got married and went into domestic service." It was a life that Clare's talent as a writer and force of personality would take her far beyond.

Tiny, elfin, with cropped hair and a fragile femininity -- "little Lord Fauntleroy" is how Anne Harris, deputy editor of this paper, recalls her -- Clare was fashion-mad. She was also strong-minded, analytical, clear-sighted and humorous. When just 18 she became a staff writer on the Evening Press, where she won a Benson & Hedges award for excellence in reporting. Later, as editor of Image magazine, she not only shaped the ambitions, appearance and aspirations of half the women in the country, she also, thanks to a gift for spotting and nurturing talent, had a tremendous and benign effect on the young women journalists coming up behind her. Anne Harris recalls, "She gave people a great break. She was a wonderful commissioning editor, and later persuaded me to be editor of Image."

Even when undergoing the horrors of chemotherapy for ovarian cancer, Clare turned tragedy to comedy, and reached out to connect with countless women, by writing about the miseries of going bald, joking that she would have to affect a knitted skull-cap, like the one worn by Sean O'Casey "in his eccentric old age".

Where Terry Keane fits into this company is complex, mainly because the drama of her private life has, sadly, almost totally overshadowed her journalism. It's a pity, because she certainly considered herself a feminist, though not a formal joiner of organisations, and had kindness and friendship for many among the Women's Movement, notably June Levine.

First in her fashion journalism and later (in a way that made the entire country gasp at times), in her social diary page for this paper, Terry wrote with verve and wit. Her style was vivacious and informal and her observations, delivered with great verbal economy, were often spot-on, and remarkably irreverent.

One of her lasting contributions has been the de-mystifying of public figures in this country, because she resolutely refused to be impressed by title alone, demanding a corresponding quality of personality. In a country far too impressed with office holders and the hierarchy of power, this represented a significant shift. And, in a way, with her magnificence of personality, intellect, erudition and the charm that was deemed irresistible to some, though ruthless to others, she was a kind of poster girl for what a woman could be. She was, whatever else, fully realised and deeply engaged with life, and, although rarely associated with the domestic sphere in the minds of her readers, a loyal and devoted mother.

The women journalists of the Irish Times, "Foley's Babes" as they were known, in honour of news editor Donal Foley, came to their career through meandering, circuitous routes that took in much of life along the way, sometimes almost as if they were shipwrecked on the shores of the Women First pages. Schoolteachers, nurses, civil rights activists, these women were exponents of the New Journalism, bringing themselves into everything. And much of what they wrote was entirely personal -- recollections of first dances, first loves, first babies -- but at a time when the whole country was in deep denial about almost everything to do with women's lives -- the circumstances, the expectations, the resonances and desires -- those private memories were instantly political. By telling it like it was, with warmth and humour but also indignation and sometimes disgust, they showed society a picture of itself, and thus allowed it to change.

Mary Cummins was a nurse until a chance meeting with Anne Harris set her on a different path. Anne, then working for the Irish Press and just 21, had been dispatched to a flat full of nurses to do a piece on culchies. One of the nurses asked, "how did you become a journalist?" "I wrote an article," Anne replied. "I'm going to do that too!" was the reaction from the nurse, who was Mary Cummins. And so she did. On the strength of a single letter to Foley, followed by a bit of judicious badgering, she was hired, and went on to write some of the most exceptional pieces published during that exceptional era.

She was eccentric and gorgeous, with a mop of red curls and light, laughing eyes; "a great drinker and a great singer," according to Nell McCafferty, whose autobiography, Nell, is full of tales of their joyful carousing. And she was brave. In 1970 she wrote a piece about her time as a junior nurse in the Rotunda, describing one shower for 30 to 40 patients, one toilet for every 20 patients, with just one bin for sanitary towels. Her contrasting of the public pre-natal unit, with mattresses on the floor where patients lay, "their belongings scattered around them on the floor ... they looked like refugees from some awful disaster," and the private labour ward, "silent, muted cheerful, spotless. Each ward was separate and comfortable," is masterful, because she is at once indignant, highly observant and funny.

It is exactly the blend she used in a later piece describing a visit to Long Kesh internment camp, making the misery, boredom and squalor of the prisoners' conditions sound out like a trumpet. Mary's daughter, Daisy, was born out of wedlock at a time when this was still scandalous and difficult. When Daisy was just 15 months old, Mary wrote a heartfelt plea for the single mother: "Her child may never know its grandparents, aunts, uncles or cousins. Her child may not know its father. Her child will be the cause of poverty, stress, and an isolation that she would never otherwise have experienced." This notwithstanding, she was a wonderful mother, always able to see the beauty in pain.

Another of Mary Cummins' great friends was Mary Holland; a "big gun" by virtue of the fact she wrote for the Observer. She had also been a feature writer for Vogue, after winning a prize for young writers when just 18. She was from Cork but had been brought up in England, and had all the polish and presence of a big city sophisticate. "She was a marvel," Nell McCafferty recalls, "swanky, beautifully groomed, drifting in a cloud of Estee Lauder." Holland was the most perfect exponent of the truth that being soignee and stylish did not mean instant exile as a feminist or heavy-hitter. "She told me once that the first thing she turned to every Sunday were the fashion pages," says Anne Harris. And this despite the fact that her own perfectly judged reports were frequently on the front page.

She began life in the Observer as fashion editor, and later became the first journalist to really make Northern Ireland news in Britain, turning in often controversial pieces that were filled as much with the ordinary lives of Northern Ireland women as with the extraordinary political and paramilitary doings of the time.

Married to a diplomat, Mary was 32 when she first met Eamonn McCann, describing him as having "the looks of a Sean O'Casey street fighter". She left her husband and had a long, passionate relationship with McCann, with whom she had two children, Kitty and Luke. During the referendum that followed the X Case, she made a deeply courageous admission -- that she had had an abortion -- and was among the first women in Ireland to speak up on such a profoundly divisive matter.

Yet another stalwart of the Women First pages, Christina Murphy was, according to Kevin Myers in his obituary, simply "the greatest journalist of her generation". She came, he goes on to say, "from the first generation which saw that a woman could be properly ambitious about herself beyond church and hearth, and in all sorts of ways was truly a pioneer". You have only to read a piece called "Bachelor Girl or Sour Spinster" she wrote in 1973 to see that.

A good 20 years before Bridget Jones and the Smug Marrieds, Christina decried the patronising attitude of married friends towards her single status in no uncertain terms.

"They settle into their own comfortable suburban lives and regard you with a mixture of envy, suspicion and pity. Wives can tend to regard you as a dangerous femme fatale simply because you are single and available and their husbands knew you before they were married." Christina later married RTE reporter Dermot Mullane and had a son, Eric, but nevertheless, how right she was, how little has changed, and how perfectly she expressed it.

It is this, maybe more than anything, that makes the loss of so many of our best women journalists smart still. Because their writing stands all too well the test of time. It is brave, gracious, funny and wonderfully honest, by any standards. They wrote the kind of stuff that most women journalists would shrink from now, 30-odd years later, exposing themselves without artifice or obfuscation. Where they ventured into the territory now described as confessional journalism (as Nuala O'Faolain did, both in her journalism and with her first memoir, Are You Somebody?), they did it with elegance and a depth of perspective that made these revelations somehow general, not particular. Just as they themselves will not grow old, so their writing will not grow old.

And, what's more, they had a deep sense of camaraderie -- a spirit that had more of fun in it than simple solidarity. There was a connection, a bond forged on long, boozy lunches, nights out, nights in, soul-searching discussions and a commitment to honesty, to truth, to telling about themselves in order to tell something about others. That, too, is gone. Remote working and the wonders of technology mean that now, we need rarely be in the same room as each other, let alone stagger hand-in-hand down the streets at closing time, singing Bread and Roses.

The women I have written about wore no uniform. They were individuals first, feminists second, true to their own set of beliefs and unwilling to compromise that, even when this jeopardised the Movement. That was their strength. What held them together, "the glue", as Rosita Sweetman describes it, was the direness of the situation before them. "The picture was so bad that it was a springboard, and it led to cohesion, holding very different personalities together."

Well, the situation now doesn't look great either; the illusion of parity hides a growing pit of injustice. And so there is a mantle to be picked up; a second, or perhaps third, stage of battle to join. The work begun so courageously is waiting to be finished.

- Emily Hourican

Sunday Independent