Mary Kenny

Mary Kenny (born 4 April 1944, Dublin, Ireland) is an Irish author, broadcaster, playwright and journalist. She is a frequent columnist for the Irish Independent. She was a founding member of the Irish Women's Liberation Movement. She has modified the radical ideas of her past, but not rejected feminist principles.

Mary Kenny grew up in Sandymount, and was expelled from convent school at age 16. She had a sister, Ursula.

She began working at the London Evening Standard in 1966, writing for the Londoner's Diary, and was woman's editor of The Irish Press in the early 1970s.

Kenny was one of the founding members of the Irish Women's Liberation Movement. Although the group had no formal structure of officials, she was often seen as the "ring leader" of the group. In March 1971, as part of an action by the IWLM, she walked out of Haddington Road church after the Archbishop of Dublin's pastoral was read out from the pulpit, confirming that "any contraceptive act is always wrong", saying "this is Church dictatorship". In a follow-up letter to The Irish Times she explained her actions by saying Ian Paisley was right: "Home Rule is Rome Rule".

In 1971, Kenny travelled with Nell McCafferty, June Levine and other Irish feminists on the so-called "Contraceptive Train" from Dublin to Belfast to buy condoms, then illegal within the Republic of Ireland. Later that year she returned to London as Features Editor of the Evening Standard.

In 1973, Kenny was allegedly "disturbed in the arms of a former cabinet minister of President Obote of Uganda during a party", which led poet James Fenton to coin the euphemism "" to mean sexual intercourse. The phrase was first used by the magazine Private Eye on 9 March 1973, but has been widely used since then and was included by the BBC in a list of "The 10 most scandalous euphemisms" in 2013.

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