When I was young my brothers would joke that I was “off writin’ poetry”.

One Christmas I got a typewriter and for a long time afterwards I busied myself with typing. I would mostly write never-to-be-sent letters using phrases such as “on behalf of”. I never once wrote a single line of poetry. At six or seven years of age, I had interpreted “off writin’ poetry” as some sort of slight — any attempt at storytelling was something to be ashamed over.

In the postmortem of our recent referendum, which took the form of tweets, Facebook posts, radio debates, and newspaper articles, there was one phrase, for me, that rendered all other rhetoric mute.

“Personal stories are precious things. To speak can be to suffer twice, especially if you do not know how your story will be heard,” wrote Anne Enright.

The novelist was talking about how the telling of personal stories, not Citizens’ Assemblies, not Oireachtas committees, not posters, was what impacted voters’ decision-making the most. According to RTÉ’s exit poll, 77% of voters said they were influenced by personal stories in the media or by the experiences of people they knew.

Brave people aired their pain in public, risking a repeat suffering, not knowing how their truth would go down.

Enright also discussed how this country’s older generation is one well versed in silence, where stories are taken to the grave, never to be told in this lifetime.

“If you look at the breakdown by age of those who voted, the oldest generation, which was the most conservative, was one in which this kind of speech [public storytelling] was almost impossible — these women might as well have been mute,” she wrote.

In pre-referendum Ireland, younger women told their stories. Rarely, if ever, did we hear from women in their 50s and beyond.

Silence, in this country, has been a sort of malignant tumour — a virus you inherit at birth and pass along the family tree. “Do not air your dirty laundry in public” should have been enshrined in our Constitution.

In a story piled high with injustice, there was one scene in the 2013 film Philomena that seemed to me to be the most cruel. It was where Philomena Lee finds out that her son Anthony (renamed Michael), who she was forced to give up for adoption in 1952, had come looking for her before his death — not once, not twice, but three times. She had been looking for him, but the two had never been connected.

What was her reaction? Not one of righteous rage, no, just stoicism. It was her lack of complaint, lack of anger, when faced with this final injustice, that seemed most cruel to me. After decades of silence and wrong-doing was she not even entitled to her pain?

This week I read an essay called ‘Silence is Broken’ by Rebecca Solnit, from her book, The Mother of All Questions.

“Silence is the ocean of the unsaid, the unspeakable, the repressed, the erased, the unheard,” she writes.

This week in post-repeal Ireland, the political debate turned to legislation, the chattering classes talked about the bishop who urged yes voters to go to confession, and there were discussions in the media about religious tolerance in a secular Ireland.

Meanwhile, all I could think of was those men and women who are still sworn to silence, whose generational code prohibits them from breaking it.

“Silence is what allows people to suffer without recourse, what allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished. If our voices are essential aspects of our humanity, to be rendered voiceless is to be dehumanised or excluded from one’s humanity,” writes Solnit, in her essay that I kept rereading.

While some in our society found their voice in 2018, will their courage encourage others to do the same?

As we know, there are many hurts in our country’s history. We have elderly women who chased cars down driveways as teenagers while their newborn babies were being taken from them. We have other women who were shamed for keeping the child they had “out of wedlock”. As I heard an older woman recall last week: “If you were a single parent in Ireland, even up to the late ’80s, some people treated you like you had leprosy.”

We have much hurt to undo, we have much pain to heal, and we have any amount of stories to tell.

Around about the age of 12 or 13, I heard Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Digging’, talking about how his father’s ability to cut turf was like a form of art, his grandfather’s too. “By God, the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man,” writes Heaney, who finishes up by saying, “But I’ve no spade to follow men like them. Between my finger and my thumb the squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it.” Hearing those words helped me realise that storytelling was as important an endeavour as farming, teaching, building, nursing, and number-crunching.

But not until last weekend did I realise just how healing storytelling could really be.

“Liberation is always in part a storytelling process: Breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place,” writes Solnit.

Over the course of 2018 and before, women told us their stories and we listened. There are many more stories still to be heard. Maybe some will be told at kitchen tables, perhaps some will take the form of letters sent from Canada, Australia, or Dubai, and others will slip out over phone conversations about the weather. They do not need to be for Late Late Show consumption.

Whatever your story, find the courage to tell it, we are ready to listen.