Born: 7 June 1937, India
Died: 18 July 2017
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Ysabel Mavis Cleave
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Angela Byrne. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Arnold, (Ysabel) Mavis (née Cleave) (1937–2017), journalist and psychotherapist, was born on 7 June 1937 at Mussoorie hill station near Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India. She was the second of three daughters (her sisters were Maureen Cleave (1934–2021), a noted music journalist, and Monica Flanagan) of Major John Clive Tyler Cleave (1894–1946) and Isabella Mary Fraser (née Browne) (1908–2001). Isabella was born in Newtownforbes, Co. Longford, the daughter of Church of Ireland clergyman Canon John Browne and Annie Browne (née Fraser). In the 1920s she travelled to India with her uncle, Colonel William Browne, a British army officer who went on to establish Cambridge school, an English-language boarding school, in Dehradun in 1926. London-born John Cleave’s father, John Henry Wyld Cleave, was a wool importer and his mother, Mary Esther Cleave (née Tyler), was from a Woking mercantile family. John joined the British army in 1914, serving in France before moving to the Indian army (Rajput regiment) in 1916; he and Isabella met and married in Dehradun in 1933.
Early life
Finding the Indian climate unsuited to her small children, Isabella returned to Ireland with Mavis and Maureen in the late 1930s. They had just embarked from Gourock, Scotland, to rejoin John in India when their ship, the City of Simla, was torpedoed in the North Atlantic on the night of 20 September 1940. They were among the 347 survivors rescued from the sinking vessel; three lives were lost in the attack. Isabella, Maureen and Mavis were taken to either Liverpool or Derry (the latter being most likely) and saw out the remainder of the war in Co. Sligo, where John joined them after the war; he died within a year, leaving an estate of £21,595. In 1949 Isabella sold Rathellen, the period country home she and John had bought in Far Finisklin, Co. Sligo, just six years earlier, moving with her three daughters firstly to Crimond, Ardaghowen, Co. Sligo, and then, c. 1955, to Glen Lodge, a six-bedroom Georgian house at Knocknarea, near Strandhill, Co. Sligo.
Arnold later reflected that her ‘solidly middle-class’ upbringing in a tight-knit rural protestant community instilled ‘an innate sense of one’s own superiority’ (Irish Independent, 18 Oct. 1982). She and her sisters were well educated. Arnold attended Alexandra College, Dublin, before completing a post-secondary secretarial course and graduating with a diploma in social studies from Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in 1958. It was at TCD that she met the English journalist and author Bruce Arnold (1936–2024). Sharing an interest in the arts (Mavis was a member of the Dublin Georgian Society, Bruce was part-owner of the Neptune Gallery, both were members of Dublin University Players and Mavis later edited at least two of Bruce’s novels), they married on 1 August 1959 in St Anne’s church, Knocknarea, Co. Sligo. Their happy and devoted marriage produced four children: Emma Isobel, who died in infancy in 1961, Hugo (b. 1962), Samuel (1964–2013) and Polly (b. 1965). The Arnolds lived at Wilton Place, Dublin, before moving to Sandford Road, Ranelagh, and finally settling on Albert Road in the middle-class south Dublin suburb of Glenageary, where they raised their family with the assistance of a live-in nanny.
From lifestyle columnist to feminist campaigner
Mavis Arnold began her journalistic career in the late 1960s by co-authoring a lifestyle column with Bruce in the Sunday Independent, writing on food, wine, design and interiors. From 1969 she had her own column in the Irish Press, mostly covering shopping and household matters. Over the course of her career she also wrote for the Guardian, Sunday Independent, Magill and Irish Medical Times on topics ranging from food and cookbooks to women in politics, and reviewing books on social justice themes.
In 1969 she co-founded the Women’s Political Association (WPA, initially named the Women’s Progressive Association) with politician Gemma Hussey (1938–2024), solicitor and businessperson Hilary Pratt and politician and doctor Mary Henry. The association aimed to improve women’s representation in politics. Arnold served variously as the WPA’s chair, secretary and public relations officer, used her print media platform to promote its work, and regularly published profiles of women running for political office, giving them much-needed coverage in national newspapers. At the Irish Press Arnold was part of a group of emerging influential women journalists that included Mary Kenny and Rosita Sweetman. Her lifestyle column gradually gave way as she found a confident voice to air more serious concerns. From 1971 she started reporting on social issues for the Irish Press but a marked shift took place from the mid-1970s when she contributed more regularly and stridently on women’s issues, including advocating for ‘birth without violence’ (now termed ‘gentle birth’), writing openly about premenstrual tension and interviewing stay-at-home fathers to challenge the widespread negative stereotyping of such men. Contesting the even then-outdated but often repeated notion that working women were stealing earnings from men (and, in turn, food from their children’s mouths), Arnold argued, ‘Women must not be forced, against their will, back into traditional roles. It’s a matter of basic human rights, not revolution’ (Irish Independent, 28 Dec. 1978).
Her column was also critical of mainstream political parties; in 1978 she criticised the Fianna Fáil government’s failure to address the lack of private sector maternity leave and the under-representation of women on state boards, observing that women were ‘held in low esteem by politicians who make sure [they] will have neither dignity nor status in the community’ (Irish Independent, 31 May 1978). In 1981 Arnold and Hussey gave evidence on behalf of the women in broadcasting study group to the joint oireachtas committee on state sponsored bodies, in relation to the portrayal of women in advertisements run by Radio Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) and the professional roles filled by women at the national broadcaster. Despite citing her influences as Nuala O’Faolain, Margaret Mac Curtain and American feminism, Arnold was a self-proclaimed moderate voice, mediating the rhetoric of those too-easily branded in mainstream commentary as ‘extremist’. Later, she reflected, ‘When I look back at those early days, I’m almost embarrassed … we were so angry! … We were passionate in our desire for change and there was such a lot to be done’ (Evening Herald, 26 Nov. 1987).
Arnold’s pluralism drew her into the Dalkey School Project, a campaign established in 1975 by a group of parents campaigning for multi-denominational education; the opening of the school in 1978 was a key moment in the slow establishment of multi-denominational education in Ireland. International in outlook, she travelled in connection with her journalism and activism, reporting on women’s lives in Soviet Russia following a week-long visit to Moscow and Leningrad (St Petersburg) in 1979. In 1980 she received a German Marshall Fund grant for a month-long study tour of the US in her capacity as chair of the South Dublin branch of the WPA, producing an unpublished report on women’s participation in American political life. Later, in 2003, she was involved in the European Women’s Foundation, participating in a delegation to Moldova, led by Gemma Hussey, to conduct a training workshop for local female politicians active in the democratisation movement.
From the early 1970s, in the context of challenges to Ireland’s ban on the sale and importation of contraceptives, Arnold was an outspoken advocate for reproductive rights. Reporting on the opening of Dublin’s second family planning clinic on Mountjoy Square in February 1971, she published details of its opening hours and fees and emphasised the social and medical need for such clinics. Publicly opposed to the eighth amendment to the Irish constitution – a complete ban on abortion approved by referendum in September 1983 and enacted into law a month later – Arnold joined the Anti-Amendment Campaign. She contributed to the campaign by editing, together with Peadar Kirby, The abortion referendum: the case against (1982), a collection of anti-amendment arguments from catholic, protestant, medical and ethical perspectives. Arnold’s editorial imprint is visible not least in the contributions highlighting the amendment’s potential negative implications for pluralism and North–South relations, and in the inclusion of protestant viewpoints. Later, she supported the Union of Students in Ireland (USI) in their continued dissemination of information about abortion services in the UK, despite injunctions taken against them, and supported their fundraising for legal costs.
Children of the Poor Clares (1985)
In 1972 Arnold welcomed a young, unmarried, pregnant woman into her family home; the mother and her infant remained there for several months after the birth. The woman shared with a horrified Arnold the physical and emotional abuse, near-starvation and neglect she experienced and witnessed during her fourteen-year residence in St Joseph’s Orphanage, Cavan, run by the Poor Clares religious order. Around the same time, the journalist Heather Laskey heard testimony from a witness to the possibly fatal beating of a little girl in the same institution in the late 1950s or early 1960s. Arnold and Laskey placed notices in local and national newspapers seeking testimonies from people who had been placed in industrial schools as children, had worked in them or were in any way involved in the system. The pair interviewed survivors across Ireland and Britain who had lived in the Cavan home from the 1920s until its closure in 1967, documenting casual brutality, gross neglect, the sending out to work of girls as young as ten years of age, and the sexual assault of at least one girl by the employer she had been assigned by the nuns.
Arnold and Laskey’s research also brought to light the many failures that contributed to the deaths of thirty-five young girls and an 80-year-old former cook during a fire on the night of 23 February 1943 at the orphanage on Main Street, Cavan (all of the nuns survived). When the alarm was raised, the nuns ordered the children back into their smoke-filled dormitories. Some locals who attempted to rescue the girls (having observed smoke coming from the building when leaving a party) believed that the dormitory doors had been locked, and reported a five-to-six-minute delay in the main door being opened despite their frantic banging and ringing of the doorbell, and an attempt to chop it open with an axe. The nuns delayed evacuating the girls for a full fifteen minutes because, it was later claimed, they did not want the men who had gathered outside to see the girls in their nightwear. Arnold and Laskey’s book describes in detail the chaos and terror of the forty minutes between the alarm being raised and the last survivor emerging, with girls leaping from the windows as attempts failed to rescue others from the higher floors.
On 7 April 1943 an inquiry into the fire opened in Cavan courthouse, with Joseph McCarthy as chair and Brian Ó Nualláin, then an official in the Department of Local Government and Health, as secretary. Legal representatives at the inquiry included John Costello, then senior counsel for the Electricity Supply Board and later taoiseach; Tom O’Higgins, Costello’s junior counsel and later judge of the European court of justice; Tom Fitzpatrick, solicitor and later ceann comhairle; P. J. Roe, representing the Poor Clares, who went on to become a judge; and his junior counsel, Brian Walsh, who later became a supreme court judge. The enquiry ran for eleven days and heard from sixty-four witnesses, with survivors relentlessly cross-examined about their own escapes from the burning building. The resulting report pointed to a myriad of failures ranging from inadequate emergency egress and Cavan district urban council’s lack of firefighting equipment, to the nuns’ delayed action on first noticing the signs of fire. The Department of Education, which had oversight of industrial schools, denied any responsibility for the tragedy. The inquiry assigned no responsibility for the thirty-six deaths. Heather Laskey later asserted, ‘What was clear at the inquiry proceedings was that authority, most importantly the church and State, were determined to take no blame … The only interests not protected at the inquiry were those of the children’ (Irish Independent, 23 Feb. 2013).
The Cavan tragedy had largely faded from public memory until Arnold and Laskey published their sensitive yet unflinching book, Children of the Poor Clares (1985). In addition to exposing the denial of justice for the victims of the 1943 fire, it was also the first book to explore the physical and emotional abuse, malnourishment and neglect of orphaned and abandoned children in religious-run residential institutions and industrial schools in Ireland, suggesting that the grim conditions that prevailed in the Cavan home were replicated elsewhere. The book, which included detailed survivor testimonies, posed such a challenge to establishment Ireland that it took five years to find a publisher. After fifteen rejections, it was finally published in Belfast in 1985. It was an early, lonely voice in what would eventually build to a chorus revealing the horrors that took place behind the walls of Ireland’s residential institutions, paving the way for public enquiries into industrial schools, Magdalene laundries and mother and baby homes. Arguably Arnold’s most significant contribution to Irish public life, Children of the Poor Clares inspired Bairbre Ní Chaoimh and Yvonne Quinn’s play ‘Stolen child’ (2002) and was re-issued in 2012.
Phone-tapping scandal and later life
On 18 December 1982 the Irish Times journalist Peter Murtagh revealed that the private telephones of the Arnolds and Sunday Tribune journalist Geraldine Kennedy had been tapped by gardaí on the order of minister for justice Seán Doherty. In January 1983 Doherty’s successor, Michael Noonan, confirmed the phone-tapping and announced the retirement of Garda commissioner Patrick McLaughlin and his deputy Joe Ainsworth. He also revealed that former minister for finance Ray MacSharry had used Garda bugging equipment to record a conversation he had had with another politician. Kennedy and the Arnolds sued the state in the high court, represented by senior counsel Mary Robinson – known to Arnold from the Anti-Amendment Campaign – for breach of their constitutional rights in June 1984. In January 1987 the high court awarded damages of £50,000 (£20,000 each to Bruce Arnold and Geraldine Kennedy, and £10,000 to Mavis Arnold); the state did not appeal. These events had a real impact on the Arnolds as Bruce’s work suffered and he was reassigned to London. Mavis joked at the time that those monitoring the phone lines would have had to listen to ‘earfuls’ of talk about the ‘women’s movement’ (Irish Times, 12 Aug. 2017).
In the late 1980s/early 1990s Arnold turned her attention to psychotherapy, graduating from the Dublin Counselling and Therapy Centre in 1991. In the same year she joined the inaugural editorial board of Inside Out: the Irish Journal for Humanistic and Integrative Psychotherapy, contributing articles to the journal and to the website of the Irish Association for Humanistic and Integrative Psychotherapy. In 1996–8 she was a member of the voluntary visiting committee of Mountjoy prison, Dublin, later describing this as ‘one of the most frustrating and disheartening experiences I have ever had’ (Arnold, ‘Alternatives to violence’). She loved cooking and tending her kitchen garden and excelled as a host, with her Glenageary home famed for its gatherings. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in early 2008 and latterly lived in Carysfort nursing home, Glenageary, where she died on 18 July 2017. She is buried in the graveyard of St Anne’s church, Knocknarea, Co. Sligo. She is best remembered as a feminist and as one of the first people to bring to public attention the decades of abuse carried out in residential institutions; the title of her book is etched on her gravestone. Her widower, Bruce, whose views did not always align with those of his wife, summed up her career after her death: ‘She was always on the side of the oppressed and disenfranchised’ (The Independent, 1 Sept. 2017).