When Sister Nicholas Griffey OP, who died on February 19th aged 85, was appointed director of University College Dublin's first diploma course for teachers of the deaf, she was allowed to attend the college only once a year.
The course began in 1957 - and at that time the strict rules of the Dominican Sisters meant she could get permission to go to only one meeting a year in UCD. Vatican II, and the relaxation which followed it, was an unthought of future event.
The incident symbolises a key aspect of the work of this Clare woman. Though shut away from the world she was at the forefront in bringing about advances in the world of deaf people - a world which itself was shut away from the wider world by attitudes and by communication difficulties.
An example of just how cut off that world was came in the early 1950s, when the Director of Education in Scotland sought permission from the Department of Education here to visit St Mary's School for the Deaf in Cabra, Dublin. The permission was readily granted but when the Scottish officials asked exactly were the school was located, the department couldn't tell them - because it didn't know.
The incident, it should be said, led to a visit by department inspectors and to the designation of the school, of which she was principal, as a national special school for the deaf.
When Clare Griffey entered the Dominican Convent in Cabra in 1934 she appears to have done so without having had a specific notion of working with deaf people - she wanted to become a nun.
She was born on June 15th, 1916, one of four children, in Market Street, Ennis, Co Clare. Her father died when she was nine. She was educated at the Sisters of Mercy in Ennis and the Dominican boarding school in Cabra.
She entered the Dominicans knowing she would never be allowed home, even for her mother's funeral. She did not return to Ennis until 1967 when the rules were relaxed following Vatican II.
In 1935, she was assigned to the school for the deaf and her lifelong interest in the education and advancement of deaf people began. She found herself in a world with more than its fair share of pain. The school had been founded in 1846 and had been left more or less to its own devices by the State. The children, in their own communities, were called "dummies". They were regarded as stupid, retarded or mentally ill. They were isolated in their own homes and communities.
Then, for some children came the shattering experience of being put into an ambulance and taken crying and distressed to Dublin, away from their families, with no explanation, because their isolation made it impossible to give them an explanation. Some were sent from county homes, their parents dead, their siblings out of touch. Some, when they finished their education, went back to county homes or psychiatric institutions. Others returned to communities in which they lived lives of further isolation.
The sisters, including Sister Nicholas, came to see their work as attaining justice for deaf people. As she put it later in her autobiography From Silence to Speech (Dominican Publications, 1994): "The sisters wanted to liberate deaf people long before 'liberation theology' became part of our vocabulary."
In 1939, she was sent to St Mary's College of Education, Belfast, for three years to train as a primary school teacher. On her return to Dublin she was assigned to the school for the deaf and became principal two years later.
The pupils learned sign language at Cabra but she found many felt at a disadvantage in later life because they could not lip-read. Visits to schools in England and Scotland convinced her and her fellow sisters that oralism (the use of lip-reading and speech in training deaf children) must be introduced in Cabra for those who could benefit from it.
Her work with the deaf could be said to have had at least two important strands. One was that she kept closely in touch with best practice abroad, studied it and brought it to Ireland. A second was that she continued to press for change and improvement despite a very slow response from the State. For instance, an application for funding to build Rosary School for hard-of-hearing children took 22 years to produce a result - but she persisted until she got it.
Sister Nicholas was instrumental in the establishment of the UCD diploma for teachers of the deaf and she worked tirelessly to educate doctors, educators and health administrators on the reality of deafness and the needs of the deaf. She opened the first post-primary course for deaf students in the early 1960s and this ultimately led to deaf students graduating from university.
That today the early detection of hearing problems is taken for granted owes much to her work. That we have 27 visiting teachers for the deaf, who provide extra help to hard-of-hearing children in their own local schools, is thanks to her efforts. She was closely involved with the establishment of the National Association for the Deaf. She had an international reputation and lectured abroad many times.
On her retirement she went to live in St Joseph's Home for the Deaf in Brewery Road, Co Dublin.
Today the deaf community in Ireland is assertive - so assertive that some of its members oppose the idea of oralism, regarding sign language as a part of their culture which is the heritage of every deaf person. That these controversies can rage at all is tribute to the work Sister Nicholas and her companions did over the years to bring deaf people out of the depths of darkness to which they had been condemned until the last century.
Sister Nicholas Griffey OP: born 1916; died, February 2002