She also successfully campaigned for the inclusion of strong equality and human rights provisions in the Good Friday Agreement, and was a signatory to the MacBride Principles for fair employment.
[5] McCormack was named by the American publication Newsweek in 2011 as one of "150 women who shake the world",[6] and her life and work have been portrayed by Meryl Streep in the documentary play SEVEN.
[7] Born Inez Murphy into an Ulster Protestant family in Cultra, County Down,[1] she attended Glenlola Collegiate School until taking up a position as a junior clerk in the Northern Ireland Civil Service at the age of 17,[8] studying at night for her A-levels.
[9] A restless spirit, she was twice beaten up at protests, once at a Northern Ireland civil rights march and once at an anti-Vietnam war demonstration in London's Grosvenor Square.
[10] McCormack attended Magee College in Derry between 1964 and 1966[1] at the time of the controversial decision to locate Northern Ireland's second university in Coleraine: her "first taste of street politics, and a lesson in the nature of exclusion and abuse of power".
[8] She then attended Trinity College, Dublin from 1966 to 1968, and met Vincent McCormack – a founding member of the Derry Labour Party and former Bogside resident – in London shortly after her graduation.
[11] Just two years later, in 1976 McCormack became the first female full-time official of the National Union of Public Employees (now UNISON)[9] and was given the unprecedented task of recruiting 1000 members within her first five months of employment.
[11] Identifying that part-time women workers in the public sector were typically dismissed as 'too difficult to organise' and thus not unionised, McCormack embarked on the challenge of signing them up to the union, stating, "My whole mode of mobilising them was to make them see that their needs were real, that they were somebody".
[1] Her success in a highly male-dominated environment in combination with her determination to champion the voices of the disadvantaged did not come without challenges, particularly from her male counterparts, recalling "At one meeting I was booed off the platform and called scum," adding, "I was talking about child care and was told that it shouldn't be on a trade union agenda".
[11] McCormack founded and led a broad coalition of groups who successfully argued for strong, inclusive equality and human rights provisions to be included in the Good Friday Agreement.
[1][8] Her pivotal role in the Good Friday Agreement led McCormack to subsequently campaign for the implementation of those equality and human rights provisions as key to an understanding of conflict resolution based on the practice of justice.
Successes include the establishment of a new appointment system for mental health patients attending emergency departments across Northern Ireland, re-housing families from run-down tower blocks, and renegotiation of regeneration plans from which residents have been excluded.
Numerous op-eds and articles by McCormack on the theme of underpinning building peace and prosperity by inclusive socio-economic strategies have been published in recent years, and some of her work was included in the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (2002).