Mary Brennan-Holahan, biographer of Sarah Purser and a woman before her time, was born in Abbeyside, Dungarvan, Co Waterford in 1920. After her family moved to the capital, Mary was educated at Loreto Convent, St Stephen's Green.
Like many women of her generation, she was encouraged on leaving school to take a job with the civil service. She worked there until her marriage when she was obliged by the law and practice of the time to surrender her employment.
As a young woman, Mary was a keen competitive swimmer, an active member of the Republican Swimming Club in the 1930s and a regular participant in Christmas Day swims in Dublin Bay. She took a lifelong interest in politics and was an active participant in international and domestic affairs. She became a branch secretary of the Save the German Children Society, which brought German refugee children to Ireland in the 1940s, and was also among the hundreds of thousands of marchers in the Wood Quay demonstrati ons in Dublin in the 1970s.
After her marriage ended in separation in 1965 Mary devoted her energy to supporting her children at a time when neither the law nor social welfare was on the side of the single mother.
It was around this time that she rejected Catholicism as the Catholic authorities were less than supportive of the victims of marital breakdown. In her later years, in the mid 1990s, she joined the Society of Friends and regularly attended meetings of worship until the end of her life, finding great peace in their silent services.
Despite the demands of single parenthood, Mary continued her education, attending various extramural study courses. Her children reared, Mary rekindled her interest in art. She sat extramural examinations in the History of European Painting in University College Dublin and at Trinity College Dublin for which she was twice awarded the Purser/Griffith scholarship.
She also worked for the Institute of Public Administration and became the administrator of the Irish branch of the Royal College of Practitioners and was dedicated to those to whom she referred as "my doctors".
Her personal administrative skills were meticulous and upon her death she left ordered files containing nearly every document she had handled in her life, from details of car parts to theatre programmes dating from the 1930s.
She began to visit Ballyvaughan, Co Clare in 1970 and it became a place close to her heart; she returned each Christmas with her family. She adored the Burren with its unique history and landscape and was a great lover of dogs, breeding red setters as a young woman and taking to dachshunds when she first moved to a flat in the 1960s.
In the year of her retirement from the Institute of Public Administration, Mary began a degree course in History of Art at Trinity College, graduating with honours in 1988 at the age of 68. After this she worked as research assistant to the author Bruce Arnold before dedicating herself to her biography, A Portrait of Sarah Purser, published in 1996. As an art historian Mary was a frequently published and popular guest lecturer on Sarah Purser and the Irish Stained Glass Movement.
Mary Brennan-Holahan died on July 28th after a five-year fight against a severely disabling disease. She is survived by two of her sisters and by her four children.
D.B.