Born: January 6th, 1942
Died: December 6th, 2021
Terence O’Malley, who has died aged 79, gave early notice of his life-long ability to think outside the box, the principal characteristic of a remarkable life spent between Ireland, India and, most significantly, Afghanistan.
As a teenage boarding pupil at Midleton College, in Co Cork, he decided that he wanted to be home in his native Monkstown, Co Dublin, and persuaded his parents to allow him to complete his post-primary education at High School, Dublin, before reading natural science at Trinity College Dublin.
In an eclectic professional life, he worked firstly on a tea plantation in Assam, northeast India, eventually running the farm of more than 2,000 acres. The plantation was equipped with its own rudimentary hospital and school, and O’Malley became adept as a general maintenance man, including as a road builder.
These skills were to come into great use 30 years later in Afghanistan where, starting in 1991, he became firstly a trustee and later chairman of the charity Support for Afghan Further Education (Safe), which saw him visiting the war-afflicted nation every year from 1992 until his final visit in 2015, when the then deteriorating security situation rendered his visits untenable.
Before this even more remarkable phase of his life, however, O’Malley had made his mark in another typically distinctive way, as a teacher first, from 1969, and then as headmaster, of Aravon School near Bray, Co Wicklow. This followed his marriage in India to Patricia Daybell, a graduate in English from TCD, and a teacher herself.
At Aravon, and once in charge of the school’s first XI hockey and cricket teams, he raised eyebrows with his novel policy of selecting the best players to represent the school, whether or not they were boys or girls. A practice now widely acceptable among all kinds of sporting clubs today in Ireland, at least at underage level, in 1970s Ireland it was highly unusual. After becoming headmaster in 1977, he also widened the school’s curriculum with a stronger emphasis on science and music.
Teaching style
O’Malley’s teaching style and substance were fondly recalled this week by former parents of pupils he had taught, including RTÉ broadcaster Éamonn Lawlor, who wrote that “it was as though the idea of a ‘problem child’ had never occurred to Terry. He saw children, not problems.” Another former pupil said that O’Malley “always encouraged me to have guts, use common sense and trust my instincts”, something O’Malley had certainly learned to do for himself in India.
O’Malley continued teaching at Aravon until 1997, but after 1992 his energy was increasingly taken up with Afghanistan, a country he visited yearly until 2015. His visits were always accompanied by real and terrible dangers: in an interview with the Gorey Guardian newspaper in 2011 (O’Malley and his wife, Patricia, had moved to Ballyfad, Co Wexford, after leaving Aravon in 1997) he remarked that when he first visited the Asian country in 1992 “there were always people armed with rocket launchers and heavy machine guns within several yards of me”.
O’Malley had a different view of the Taliban than most westerners, expressing the view that “’Some of the bad points [of the Taliban] were blown out of all proportion … In 1999, after the earthquake, the Taliban sent medical teams up to the mountains, often with women. When fighting broke out because of the inequalities of aid allocations by at least two international agencies, it was the Taliban that eventually sorted that out.”
Western attitudes
He was also critical of western governments’ attitudes, telling David Shanks of this newspaper in 2000, following the earthquake in Afghanistan the previous year, that sanctions against the country, because it was then still controlled by the Taliban, were preventing much-needed aid from reaching huge numbers of people in need there.
O’Malley also criticised the modus operandi of international aid agencies. In an interview with the international global philanthropy magazine Alliance in 2002, he said that he “was appalled at the way UN and the international aid agencies were poaching staff from national Afghan agencies” by paying drivers and other vital local staff far more than the local NGOs could afford.
He preferred to deal directly with the Afghan NGOs. Safe, working with the Central Afghan Welfare Committee, initiated schemes for computer training for both boys’ and girls’ high schools, despite the resistance of local fundamentalist clergy, for the installation of solar panels, trained women as community health workers, and installed local water schemes in some of the most remote parts of the country, including areas inhabited by the Hazara people, a minority viewed with hostility by many of the Taliban.
Details of Safe's support for many, and ongoing, projects in Afghanistan can be found on the charity's website, safeafghanistan.ie.
Terence O’Malley was born in Manchester, where his father, George, worked for the chemical firm ICI. The family moved to Ireland after the second World War when he was still a small child. He is survived by Patricia; their children, Kate, Clare, Lucy and Jamie; and by his sister Barbara. He was predeceased by his other sister, Kay, earlier this year.