Mary Holland: Mary Holland, who has died within days of her 69th birthday, was a major figure in 20th-century Irish and British journalism. One who played a crucial and courageous role in opening British eyes to injustice in Northern Ireland, her work laid a vital foundation for the peace process. In the 1960s a British editor told her the North, to which she was to dedicate her journalistic life, would never be a story.
An award-winning journalist and broadcaster who wore celebrity lightly, even shyly, Holland was also a passionate campaigner on social justice issues, particularly those affecting women, and was a prominent campaigner for abortion rights during the debates before the 1983 constitutional amendment. She bravely acknowledged that she herself had had an abortion.
Until July last year, she was a trenchant and wide-ranging Irish Times columnist, and until mid-2000 wrote for many years for the Observer as reporter and columnist. She was also a columnist for the Sunday Tribune.
Former colleagues, prominent politicians, editors and a wide circle of friends used such words as gigantic, generous, principled, compassionate and above all passionate freely in tributes this week.
Her world embraced politics, theatre, trade unionism and the world of letters. Her love of theatre often intersected with the politics of the underdog and women's issues.
In the late 1960s she became known as the first journalist to represent a major British paper, the Observer, in the North, to understand the people and issues on both sides of the sectarian divide. This at a time when the North, though part of the United Kingdom, was considered "foreign news" in Fleet Street and, in the House of Commons, as the exclusive business of the unionist-dominated Stormont parliament.
The Taoiseach and John Hume, the former SDLP leader, have acknowledged that her work in the North was a catalyst to political change. Her reporting in the late 1960s from the streets of Northern Ireland meant that "for the first time the situation was fully explained, and understood", Hume has said. Dr Garret FitzGerald has paid tribute to her insight, empathy and judgment.
She was never afraid to take an unpopular stance. While Hume was condemned by many for running the risk of giving succour to violent republicanism by holding meetings with IRA leaders in the 1990s, Holland defended the talks which paved the way for the historic movement of militant republicanism towards constitutional politics.
She herself was talking to the IRA when broadcasters were banned from doing so under the Republic's Section 31. Her opposition to Section 31 earned her criticism as a republican sympathiser. She also talked to unionists when they were isolated.
A socialist and a believer in a united Ireland, the theme running through Holland's years of writing about Northern Ireland was the advocacy of mutual understanding.
But former colleagues say her own sympathies did not get in the way of balance or wisdom.
Relentlessly she tried to explain to a British audience, and the Establishment there, the roots of what was dismissed by many as mindless, tribal violence. She stayed in people's homes, rather than hotels, getting to know their problems.
Conor Brady, former editor of The Irish Times, has said: "Republicans read her to know what the NIO was thinking. Iveagh House read her to know what the British were thinking. The British read her to know what everyone else was thinking."
Nell McCafferty, a 1960s Derry civil rights activist, said: "We used to read her to see how we were doing - and learned from it."
Geraldine Kennedy, editor of The Irish Times, has said Holland was unprecedented in her working of the London-Dublin-Belfast axis.
Mary Holland was born on June 19th, 1935, in Dover. But her roots were in west Cork. Her family had moved to England from Ardfield, near Clonakilty, and was living in Maidenhead, Kent, by the time she was born.
As an infant, she was sent to live in west Cork with an aunt, a reverend mother of a convent school in Fermoy. Shortly afterwards she was sent to convent boarding schools, first in Rathfarnham and then in Farnborough, Hampshire.
Friends say Holland felt she had missed out on an important part of her life with her parents, who later returned to live in Cork, buying a large house and farm, Seacourt, in Butlerstown, her father's area. The family lived there for a time, but her mother, Margaret, found it too isolated, and the property was sold.
However, she retained a great affection for west Cork, where relatives still live.
Her father, Patrick, was a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Engineers, and had been sent to Malaya to design bridges. There Holland's two elder brothers were born. She considered them her "protectors".
After her parents moved to Ealing in London, Holland did her A levels and then studied law at King's College, London, but did not finish.
Her parents were somewhat anxious that her career choice was far less secure than that of her brothers, who were both doctors.
She told friends that, although she felt her life was glamorous - interviewing such celebrities as Vanessa Redgrave and Laurence Olivier - her father once assured her that he would put the money aside to pay for dental training if journalism didn't work out. Later her parents retired to Canada, where her brothers lived.
Her journalistic career began with Vogue and Queen magazines.
At 18, she began writing for Vogue after winning a competition run by the magazine for young writers.
She had done some secretarial work, in which she was little interested. She also wrote for Plays and Players magazine and wrote theatre criticism for Queen.
She worked for Vogue until marrying Ronald Higgins, a British diplomat. A Vogue interview with the poet Philip Larkin prompted the Observer's great liberal editor, David Astor, to invite her to work for the paper. But during a diplomatic posting to Jakarta, Indonesia, the Foreign Office was chagrined at her vivid reports about the fall of Sukarno.
She rebelled against the strait-laced role of diplomatic wife and returned to London after only eight months.
She became the Observer's first fashion editor. ("My ignorance of fashion wasn't a handicap since the Observer didn't really approve of such frivolity anyway," she wrote later.) She was also TV critic. When her husband returned to London he, too, worked at the paper. She went on to write a column, "Them and Us", which detailed the lives of the underprivileged and examined the issues of race, poverty and inequality in British life.
In 1966, she met the newly-elected Belfast Republican Labour MP, Gerry Fitt, who told her that if she wanted to see inequality and sectarian discrimination she should come to Northern Ireland. Fitt subsequently arrived at the paper's office with a battered suitcase full of cuttings on discrimination, insisting she come to Belfast.
Her Observer reports, commanding generous space sometimes on the front page, were a sensation. Her long-time friend in Derry, Grainne McCafferty, says her courageous reports "shone a light into this dark corner of the island".
Fitt brought her to a banned civil rights march in Derry on October 5th, 1968, which brought Northern Ireland - and Holland - to the attention of the world. It exploded in images of police violence, of Fitt and others with blood streaming from their heads.
In Derry she also met the man who would change her life, Eamonn McCann, then a leading young Northern Ireland Labour Party socialist and a civil rights activist. She and her husband divorced, and she and McCann moved to London where they lived for six years before moving to Dublin.
They parted. They had two children and remained on good terms, as did Holland with her former husband.
"A big part of what I am comes from Mary Holland," says McCann, who recalls his stunning impression of her in the 1960s in a black mink coat and mini, smoking a cheroot and asking about housing problems in Derry.
Northern Ireland was not fashionable in the late 1960s, but Holland soon made it so. Astor gave her her head to pursue this "moral issue". She was also the youngest ever deputy editor of BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour and occasionally wrote for the Spectator.
Apart from two short breaks Holland worked for the Observer from 1964 until 1979, when she was controversially sacked by the editor-in chief, Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien. He said that an article in the paper's colour supplement about a Derry woman (Mary Nellis, now a Derry Sinn Féin councillor) opposed to violence but who supported the H-block campaign because her son was in the Maze prison, had made him "personally ashamed".
O'Brien said that in all she had written for the paper Holland's motives had been "honourable, professional and free from all propagandist intent" but that she was a poor judge of Irish Catholics. "That gifted and talkative community includes some of the most expert conmen and conwomen in the world, and in this case I believe you have been conned," he told her.
She bounced back from the experience, becoming a columnist for the paper later after O'Brien's departure, but many colleagues and politicians were outraged on her behalf.
She was immediately appointed as Irish editor of the New Statesman, while her growing interest in Irish media led her to co-found Magill magazine in the late 1970s with Vincent Browne.
Colleagues speak of a brilliant journalist who was tough and not always easy to work with because of her standards of professionalism and integrity. Friends remember her as feisty, loyal and generous company.
Despite her heavy workload, she was also in the 1980s an active trade unionist as chair of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) Dublin freelance branch. She was also a regular panellist on RTÉ's Questions and Answers, and presented RTÉ's Politics Programme. She was a valued member of the executive of the British Irish Association for many years.
In 1974, a few days before the Birmingham pub bombings in which 21 people were killed - the single biggest atrocity until then - she had interviewed Dáithí Ó Conaill, chief of staff of the IRA, for the ground-breaking Weekend World TV documentary series.
In it he had laid down his conditions for a ceasefire. The coincidence of the two events brought condemnation down on Holland's head, and there was outrage in the Commons.
Her boss, John Birt, came under London Weekend Television board pressure to "move her on". Lord Birt, a former director of the BBC, still defends his staunch refusal to do so. He says that the accusation that her work was "tainted" was quite unjustified.
In 1988 she reported as an eyewitness on "a moment of amazing rawness" when a baying mob killed two British soldiers. It was one of the dark days in Northern politics. Later still she wrote a poignant account of the 1993 Greysteel victims' funerals, where John Hume, then under pressure over the peace process, was in tears.
Her Weekend World 1980 documentary Creggan was an account of the previous 10 years as seen by families in a working-class Derry estate. Fifteen years later she teamed up again with director Michael Whyte to make Shankill, a programme about working-class Protestants.
In her columns Holland often applied her knowledge of drama to political life. Michael Colgan, director of the Gate Theatre, paid tribute to her "extraordinary integrity" and knowledge.
She chaired a session of the Gate's 1991 Beckett Festival, and was a supporter of Field Day, the Northern women's theatre group Charabanc and later the Dubbeljoint group. She had a wide circle of friends in the arts including Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Jennifer Johnston, Lelia Doolan and Constance Short.
She admired the work of Tom Murphy and Frank McGuinness. A voracious reader of novels, she kept up with everything that was modern. A humanist, she was recently interested in Buddhism.
Her awards included: International Journalist of the Year from the International Press Corporation in 1970 for her Northern coverage; the Prix Italia and British Broadcasting Guild award for Creggan; a Silver Medal from the International Film and Television Festival of New York in 1984 for her London Weekend documentary From the Shadow of the Gun.
As Irish Times columnist she shared in 1989 the Christopher Ewart Biggs Memorial Prize with David McKittrick of the London Independent, for their contribution to creating better Anglo-Irish understanding. In 1991 the Irish community's newspaper in Britain, Irish Post, gave her an award for her contribution to journalism and British-Irish coverage.
In 1993 she won the British Press Awards "Exclusive of the Year" with Eamonn Mallie and Anthony Bevins.
She also won a Lifetime Contribution to Irish Journalism ESB media award and was made Cork Woman of the Year in 1990. This entailed the "freedom of Clonakilty", and she was hailed as "an illustrious daughter of west Cork".
She died in St Vincent's Hospital, Dublin, of a degenerative connective tissue disease, scleroderma, after nearly seven years of illness, which she bore stoically. She had bought an apartment in Spain in the hope that a warm climate would help her condition. But last March she became very ill. Scleroderma, associated with Raynaud's disease, is not recognised for hospice care. She wanted this known.
She was predeceased by her elder brothers Bill and John, and is survived by her daughter Kitty, son Luke, and granddaughter, Rosie.
Mary Philomena Holland: born June 19th 1935; died June 8th, 2004