The Countess Didn't Fight For This: Ireland and the Battle for Women's Rights | Laoise de Brún
Laoise de Brún, founder of Irish advocacy group The Countess and former BBC and Channel 4 documentary maker turned barrister, joins Stella O'Malley to discuss five years of women's rights campaigning in Ireland. Their conversation covers hard-won campaigns, the recently advancing legislation to decouple prison placement from gender recognition certificates, and what it means to defend sex-based protections in a politically charged Irish climate.
Few people arrive at women's rights activism by way of a BBC documentary career and the Irish bar, but Laoise de Brún is not a conventional advocate. A former broadcast journalist whose films aired on BBC and Channel 4, she retrained as a barrister before founding The Countess in September 2020. In this episode she sits down with Stella O'Malley to trace the arc of that journey: what pushed her toward advocacy, what the early years looked like, and where the organisation now stands after five years of sustained campaigning. The name The Countess was a deliberate choice. It invokes Countess Markievicz, the Irish revolutionary who fought in the 1916 Easter Rising and went on to become the first female minister in a modern democracy. That lineage matters in the Irish context: Markievicz's story is one of women forcing their way into public life at a moment when the state itself was being forged. De Brún draws a direct line from that legacy to the present, arguing that protections Irish women fought to secure should not be quietly dissolved through administrative redefinition. The most concrete measure of The Countess's reach is legislative. The organisation has drafted a bill to separate prison placement decisions from gender recognition certificates, meaning that a certificate alone would no longer determine where someone is housed. That bill has cleared its first parliamentary stage, a significant milestone in Ireland's typically slow-moving legislative process. For Irish women — particularly those in prison or working in custodial settings — the question of who shares what spaces is not abstract: it carries direct implications for safety and dignity. Ireland's Gender Recognition Act has been under review for some time, and the debates surrounding it touch on healthcare, schools policy and how institutions respond to children experiencing gender distress. Stella O'Malley brings her perspective as an Irish psychotherapist who has worked with families navigating exactly those pressures. The conversation between two Irish women who have each approached these issues from a different professional vantage — law and journalism on one side, clinical practice on the other — gives the episode a grounded, nationally specific texture that broader international discussions often lack. For Irish listeners, this episode offers something still relatively rare: a detailed account of how domestic advocacy actually works, from the founding of an organisation to the drafting of legislation, told by someone who has lived through it. The Countess has operated in a climate where speaking publicly about sex-based rights can attract significant professional and social cost. De Brún's dual background as journalist and barrister has equipped her to navigate that terrain, but the episode is candid about the difficulties involved. For anyone in Ireland trying to understand how change happens — or fails to happen — on these questions, it is essential listening.
