Laoise de Brún
Barrister, documentary journalist and campaigner
Laoise de Brún brings a rare combination to the Beyond Gender table: the cross-examining rigour of a barrister, the storytelling instinct of a documentary journalist, and five years of frontline campaigning in Ireland. In conversation with Stella, Mia, and Bret, she makes the case that Ireland's revolutionary inheritance is directly at stake in today's debate over women's rights.
Laoise de Brún is an Irish barrister and documentary journalist whose work sits at the intersection of law, media, and women's rights advocacy. Her legal training lends her arguments a courtroom precision, while her documentary background gives her an instinct for the human stakes inside abstract policy disputes — a combination that makes her one of the more formidable voices in Ireland's current debate over sex-based rights.
Both qualities are on full display in The Countess Didn't Fight For This: Ireland and the Battle for Women's Rights, her Beyond Gender conversation with Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes, and Dr Bret Alderman. The episode centres on her project named after Countess Markievicz — the revolutionary, nationalist, and suffragist who in 1918 became the first woman elected to Westminster Parliament. The name is a deliberate provocation: de Brún's argument is that the space Markievicz and her generation forced open for women is now being quietly narrowed, and that Ireland's progressive self-image makes it particularly reluctant to see the mechanism by which that is happening.
Five years of hard-won campaigning have given de Brún a ground-level understanding of how Irish public opinion is shaped and how institutions respond — or fail to respond — to organised pressure. She brings that tactical intelligence into the studio alongside her legal and journalistic training, moving between constitutional principle, political strategy, and the everyday concerns of the women whose interests the campaign exists to defend.
The result is one of the more historically grounded conversations Beyond Gender has produced: a reminder that the rights being debated today were not given freely the first time, and that the case for them has to be made again, in every generation, with the same clarity and energy as before.
