Obituary: Mary Holland, the campaigning reporter, Irish Times columnist, and broadcaster, has died in St Vincent's Hospital, Dublin, after a long illness. She wanted it to be known that she suffered from the degenerative tissue disease, scleroderma, which is not recognised for hospice care.
Mary Holland, in her own quiet, determined way, played a key role in exposing injustice, promoting both understanding and reconciliation in the North, and in doing so helping to lay the basis for the peace process. An outstanding figure of Irish and British journalism, she was the first reporter from a major British newspaper, the Observer, to come to the North in the late 1960s and expose injustice and discrimination against Catholics there.
Mary Holland (68) was also a passionate campaigner on issues of social justice, particularly those affecting women, and was a prominent advocate of abortion rights during the 1983 constitutional amendment referendum.
She was one of the first women in Ireland to publicly acknowledge that she had had an abortion.
Last year she was honoured with a special judges' award for her outstanding contribution to Irish journalism in the ESB Media Awards.
She worked for several British media, including Queen, Vogue, the New Statesman magazines and the ground-breaking Weekend World TV documentary series. In Ireland she wrote for the Sunday Tribune and was a co-founder of Magill magazine. She was also a talented and shrewd theatre critic and supporter of the arts.
Her work in Northern Ireland as a catalyst for political change was acknowledged by the former SDLP leader, Mr John Hume, who said that her 1960s reporting from the streets in the North meant that "for the first time, the situation was fully explained and understood". Geraldine Kennedy, Editor of The Irish Times, said that throughout Mary Holland's career she was unprecedented in her working of the London/Dublin/Belfast axis.
She was a socialist and a believer in a united Ireland, and the strongest theme running through her passionate writing about Northern Ireland was the advocacy of mutual understanding. She tried to explain to a British audience and the Establishment there the roots of what was dismissed by many as mindless, tribal violence. In the Republic she sought to give an insight into the unionist and loyalist mindset.
Though to this day some older unionists would regard her as "no friend of Ulster", Mr David Ervine of the PUP said, "There was always a sense about her that she cared."
While Mr Hume was condemned by many for holding a series of meetings with IRA leaders, Mary Holland characteristically defended the talks which paved the way for the historic movement of republicanism towards constitutional politics.
A regular panelist on RTÉ's Questions and Answers and many other programmes, she was also a doyenne of the British-Irish Association, and was a member of its executive committee for years. She held several offices in the National Union of Journalists.
Though she was born in England, her roots were in west Cork, from where the family had moved. One award she took particular pleasure in was that of "Cork Woman of the Year" in 1990.
She was educated in Fermoy and in Farnborough, England, at a convent boarding school. She studied law at King's College, London, but did not finish. At 18, after winning a Vogue prize for young writers, she became a features writer for the magazine.
As was customary at the time, she gave up her job upon marriage - to a British diplomat. They were posted to Jakarta, Indonesia, but Mary Holland was unhappy with the life of a diplomatic wife and returned to England after only eight months.
She became fashion editor of the Observer, under the liberal editorship of the late David Astor, who later gave her her head to write about Northern Ireland, first as part of a column about injustices in British life called "Them and Us", and later as Irish correspondent.
She made her mark first with a report of police brutality at a banned civil rights march in Derry on October 5th, 1968. An early two-page spread about the North was headed "John Bull's Other Island".
In Derry she met Mr Eamonn McCann, then a leading Northern Ireland Labour Party socialist and civil rights activist, who was to be her partner for some years after she and her husband divorced. They had two children, Kitty and Luke.
In 1979 she was sacked controversially by the then editor-in-chief of the Observer, Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien. He said an article she had written about a Derry woman opposed to violence but who supported the H Block campaign because her son was in the Maze Prison had made him "personally ashamed".
Dr O'Brien said that in all she had written for the paper, Mary Holland's motives had been honourable, professional and devoid of propagandist intent - but that she was a poor judge of the Irish Catholic community, which included "expert conmen and women".
Some of them were fellow travellers of the IRA and some were in the media and the SDLP, he said.
Mary Holland was immediately appointed Irish editor of the New Statesman and became involved with Vincent Browne in establishing Magill. She also became an Irish Times columnist and later resumed writing for the Observer after Dr O'Brien's departure.
Mary Holland's courageous journalism was often surrounded by controversy.
A few days before the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings - the single biggest atrocity up till then - she had interviewed Dáithí Ó Conaill, chief of staff of the IRA, for Weekend World. In it, Ó Conaill had laid down his conditions for a ceasefire. The coincidence of the two events was greeted with outrage and ructions in the House of Commons.
Mary Holland was accused of partisanship, and her boss, John Birt, came under board pressure to sack her.
Explaining his defence of her this week, Lord Birt, former director general of the BBC, said the accusation that her work was "tainted" was unjustified.