Laoise de Brún is the founder of The Countess, an Irish advocacy organisation she started in September 2020. A former broadcast journalist who made documentaries for BBC and Channel 4, she later trained as a barrister.
The Countess is named after Countess Markievicz, the Irish revolutionary who fought in the 1916 Easter Rising and became the first female minister in a modern democracy. Laoise chose the name because she felt the Countess’s vision for Ireland had not been realised. The organisation’s full original name was “The Countess Didn’t Fight For This.”
In five years, The Countess has won several campaigns. They stopped the Department of Education’s plan to replace single-sex toilets with mixed-sex facilities in all new and refurbished schools. They blocked an attempt to remove the word “woman” from maternity legislation. Laoise drafted legislation to separate prison placement from gender recognition certificates, which has passed its first stage.
Laoise and her team campaigned to stop the Irish government collapsing the meaning of marriage and protections for stay-at-home moms in the Irish Constitution and they won by a landslide 73.9% the largest defeat of a constitutional amendment in the history of the state. You can check out Laoise’s interview on Tucker Carlson about the campaign.
In this episode, Laoise talks about how she went down the rabbit hole after the 2018 Pride protest and Sadiq Khan’s response. She explains how her academic background studying Chomsky’s manufacturing consent and media coverage of the Troubles in Ireland (a period of conflict that began in the late 1960s and ended with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998) prepared her for this work. She draws a direct line between Ireland’s treatment of women in the Mother and Baby Homes and today’s policy of placing men in women’s prisons. She discusses the challenges of running an advocacy organisation, the Irish tendency toward conformity, and Brendan Behan’s observation that “the first item on the agenda is the split.” Laoise also talks about the Women’s Coalition on Immigration, a new initiative she recently launched under The Countess umbrella.
Resources and References:
The Countess
Countess Markievicz
Laoise de Brún interviewed by Tucker Carlson
2018 Lesbian Protest at London Pride
Cotton Ceiling
Gender Recognition Act 2015 (Ireland)
Manufacturing Consent
Mother and Baby Homes
Irish Penal Reform Trust
The Best Catholics in the World
Women’s Coalition on Immigration
