Patricia Redlich:THE PSYCHOLOGIST and journalist Patricia Redlich, who has died aged 70, was best known as the Sunday Independent's"agony aunt", and her Dear Patricia column was for many years one of the paper's most popular features.
Before taking up journalism she worked as a clinical psychologist with the Eastern Health Board and was also active in trade unionism and politics.
Born Patricia Cribbon in 1940, she grew up in a housing estate in Donnycarney, north Dublin. After spending a year in a TB sanatorium in her late teens, she left for Germany where she studied psychology. There she married Dieter Redlich.
After the marriage ended she returned to Dublin with her son Alex. They lived in Florence Street, off the South Circular Road.
Working with the Eastern Health Board, she joined the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staff (ASTMS), one of the antecedents of the Unite trade union. Active in her branch, she became a shop steward and eventually was elected to the union’s executive as education officer.
She also became secretary of the Ictu women's advisory committee. She represented ASTMS at the World Conference for International Women's Year in Berlin in 1975. That year also she addressed an Irish Labour History Society symposium on James Connolly. And she broadcast a Thomas Davis lecture, Woman and the Family, on RTÉ Radio. In that lecture she expressed strong criticism of women's groups who were taking a feminist stand and declaring war on the male sex. She favoured a different approach, as she outlined in a discussion on marriage in 1976.
The focus had to be on gaining recognition for women as full citizens in law, she said; in education there had to be much greater emphasis on preparation for life; while in marriage there had to be provision for family planning, for creches and for marriage counselling services.
At the Ictu women’s conference in 1985 she said the Catholic bishops should stand for election if they wanted to run the country. This was against the background of clerical opposition to a change in the law making contraception available on a limited basis.
At the same conference, during a debate on strip-searching in Northern prisons, she said she opposed the practice but stated that it should be seen in the context of “the reality of paramilitary violence, the murder of Catholic and Protestant workers and the Provisional IRA campaign which saw the murder of a prison officer last year”.
A member of the Workers’ Party in the 1970s and 1980s, she left in the early 1990s. At her funeral Eoghan Harris said that while she may have “left the socialistic dogma of her early years behind, she never lost its principles”.
After retiring from the Eastern Health Board, she devoted herself to journalism. She began writing for Imagemagazine, and later contributed articles to the Sunday Independent.
Following an approach from the Irish Press, she wrote an advice column for the paper but later returned to the Sunday Independent.
Her colleague Madeleine Keane last week wrote of her column: “All human life was there. And she dealt with all the myriad miseries with intelligence, common sense and decades of experience. She could be tough – very tough – but even if you disagreed with her, ultimately you knew she was probably right.” An early advocate of adequate services for Aids victims, Patricia Redlich also broadcast on parenting and published a guide on sex advice for children. She was a former member of the RTÉ Authority.
During her second marriage she lived in Sandycove, Co Dublin, and enjoyed sailing out of the National Yacht Club. Divorced, she subsequently married Val Rossiter, with whom she lived in Dungarvan, Co Waterford. She took up golf, choral music and shared her husband’s enthusiasm for motorbikes, travelling with him around the continent.
She is survived by her husband Val, son Alex, sisters Ann, Jane and Lesley and brother Paul.
Patricia Redlich: born December 1st, 1940; died August 30th, 2011