Peace activist Una O'Higgins O'Malley dies

The death has taken place of Una O'Higgins O'Malley (78), a lifelong campaigner for peace and justice and founder member of the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation.

Ms O'Higgins O'Malley was just five months old when, in July 1927, her father, Kevin O'Higgins, the Cumann na nGaedheal minister for justice and external affairs and a leading architect of the Irish Free State, was murdered.

Despite the fact that this happened just four years after the killing of her grandfather, she was reared in an atmosphere of forgiveness in which the savagery of the Civil War was considered a great evil.

The attitude of her mother, Brigid, and elder sister, Maev, together with her own strong religious beliefs, prompted a life of relentless campaigning for reconciliation. She even came to forgive the killer of her father who had said he had danced on his victim's grave.

In an interview to mark her 75th birthday she told The Irish Times she only once nearly succumbed to bitterness when she discovered the killer's claim that he had danced on her father's grave: ". . . and I got seized with this awful, awful unforgiving cloud, that I hadn't ever felt as badly before. I couldn't stop it, it was like this lava pouring from a volcano. . . I had so often gone to that grave. That happened on Holy Thursday and I thought, 'So much for Holy Thursday and Jesus Christ and all that'. I wanted to throw the whole thing out there and then. But on Good Friday, I made my way back to the church somehow and as I put my foot on the church porch, I had this thought: 'Have a Mass said for them all'. And that was when I felt normal again . . ."

And so it happened that 60 years after the murder of Kevin O'Higgins, his daughter arranged a memorial Mass in Booterstown church for him and his killers.

Well-spoken, elegant and calm, Ms O'Higgins O'Malley was underestimated by the unwary who saw simply her charming, upper-middle-class upbringing with gracious houses, dancing classes and children's parties.

But these comforts were matched by rain-sodden protests outside Sinn Féin offices and constant harassment of at least four cardinals and a pope.

Perhaps one of her greatest achievements was the co-founding of the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation, which played a quiet but significant role in the peace process.