SEXTON CAHILL:Sexton Cahill, who has died aged 69, played a leading role in the industrial and community life of Limerick city and county.
Originally from Downpatrick, Co Down, he was a former priest and worked in western Nigeria with the SMA order during the 1960s when the Biafran War was being waged in the eastern part of that vast country.
Having left Africa and the priesthood in 1973, he went into industry in the UK, returning to Ireland in 1979 with his wife, Patricia, a former Sister of Notre Dame in Nigeria, and their three daughters. His experience in Nigeria was to inform a deep involvement in tackling Limerick's chronic community problems.
After settling in the city in 1981 to become human resource manager with Aughinish Alumina on the Shannon estuary, Europe's biggest aluminium plant, he devoted 17 years to working on a voluntary basis with the Paul Partnership, a community-based organisation in Limerick which embraces State agencies, social partners, voluntary groups and elected representatives.
Its daunting objective is to turn the tide of Limerick's dire unemployment crisis and under his leadership the partnership produced key reports on quality-of-life issues, including a scrutiny of the equality, or otherwise, of public services in a city where relatively wealthy communities surround neighbourhoods long entrenched in disadvantage.
As chairman, he never flinched from challenging Limerick's perceptions of itself and had special regard for the dedication of an umbrella group of local people who ensured that the Paul Partnership never lost sight of its community objectives.
With an abiding professional interest in the field of human resources, he was well known and much respected in Limerick and Irish management circles. For 16 years after joining Aughinish Alumina, he managed the company's dealings which has a workforce that currently numbers 500.
He then moved to Golden Vale as the co-op's human resource director until it was taken over by the Kerry Group five years later.
He also became involved in the field of higher education in industry and was a former president of the Irish Institute of Training and Development (IITD).
For the last nine years, he worked as a freelance business consultant with a range of companies, including Skillnets - a State-supported body that funds and facilitates training through networks of private companies.
In the end, he was forced to stop working by the return of prostate cancer, an illness that he coped with in a matter-of-fact way.
In September, for instance, he was busy writing up a family tree with the help of other relatives to ensure that subsequent generations would know their roots. Though he left it unfinished, it can now be completed.
He also wrote his own funeral arrangements and chose the readings for requiem Mass. His last days at home were movingly charted in daily bulletins sent to relatives by his wife. The family asked the congregation to wear bright colours, not black, at the funeral.
Symbols of his four passions - a book on the Nigerian civil war, his honorary medal as a Fellow of the IITD, the logo of the Paul Partnership, and a copy of the revised constitution of the Milford Hospice Friends Association of which he had been a member for 20 years - were presented at the offering and placed on his coffin.
He is survived by his wife, Patricia, his daughters, Rachel, Maria and Clare, his sister Joan, and brothers, Tom, Seán, Denis and Finbar.