A 71-year-old Irish nun was yesterday awarded one of India's highest honours, rarely bestowed on foreigners, for her contribution to education and social services among the country's poor for more than 50 years.
At a ceremony in the imposing sandstone presidential palace in the capital New Delhi, Sr Cyril Mooney, a Loreto nun from Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), was conferred with the Padma Shree by India's president, A P J Abdul Kalam.
"The honour is for the entire Loreto order," Sr Cyril said on the eve of the award at an informal dinner hosted for her by Kieran Dowling, Ireland's Ambassador to India.
Arriving in the central Indian city of Lucknow in 1956, Sr Cyril, who holds a doctorate in herpetology - her thesis was on lizards - has spent decades working in education. She moved to Kolkata - also the home of Nobel laureate Mother Teresa, another Loreto nun - and has remained there ever since.
India's glaring social and economic inequalities, particularly among its children, led Sr Cyril to use education as an instrument of change and empowerment.
This resulted in the Rainbow School Programme of the late 1970s when Sr Cyril's convent schools, almost exclusively patronised by children of the well-to-do, were thrown open to offspring of the city's poor and abandoned.
The programme has helped some 450,000 of Kolkata's dispossessed children and adults, many of whom have significantly improved their social and financial status.
More recently, with funding from a Dutch NGO, Sr Cyril has expanded the Rainbow programme to provide shelter, care and education to about 1,000 street girls.
"By extension we see her [ Sr Cyril's] well-deserved award as also reflective more generally of the contribution of all the Irish educators who gave themselves so selflessly to the promotion of education in India through the decades," Ireland's Minister of State for Equality, Frank Fahey, said this week in New Delhi.
Earlier, he attended the renaming of a prominent road in Delhi's diplomatic enclave after Éamon de Valera.
"The bonds between us became particularly close as first Ireland, and then India, gained independence in the first half of the last century," Mr Fahey said.
He added that de Valera too acknowledged these ties at a speech in New York in 1920 in which he saw the two countries having a common cause.
"Patriots of India," he told his audience, "your cause is identical with ours."