There is a published photograph of Cork's Marina Walk in the throes of an autumnal storm. In oilskins bright as any of the falling leaves, a distant, solitary figure is cycling against the wind, breasting the gale. This was Mairin Morrish on her way to town. A few days before she died in Cork in June she whispered to me: "We won't be skipping along the Marina for a while!" No, I said. But I remembered Karen Blixen and one of the most poignant questions in literature: "Does Africa have a song of me?" It was all I could offer: that the Marina, that Inis Cealtra, that Cahir Con Ri, that hills and townlands from Scandinavia to the Everglades all have a song of Mairin Morrish. Affirmation was the key to her personality and achievements. She seized on what life had to offer, examined and evaluated it and, to the continuing surprise and enjoyment of her family, friends and colleagues, transformed it.
Any detailed appreciation reads like a catalogue, but this is written in friendship and from a relationship in which scholarship was muted to essentials so that the real life of neighbourhood could continue at full pace. Yet to be a friend of Mairin's was always to be learning from what she herself had learned, as scientist, teacher, wife, mother, student, actress, broadcaster and activist. When she was presented with the Hannah Sheehy Skeffington Award by the Cork Women's Political Association in June, her role in the important social changes in this country was emphasised: her association with the CWPA itself was only one indication of her engagements from the Cork Family Planning Clinic of which she was a founder member to the efforts to span the distances, real or imagined, between the women and the children of the North and of the South - and of her willingness, even as a highly respected teacher, to become a student again.
In deciding to study Geology while also taking her M.A. in Women's Studies, Mairin offered a metaphor for her own deepest commitments - excavating the evidence and the truths of our experience.
She was born Mairin Ni Chonchubhair in Dublin, but brought up mostly in Galway. The Irish language was her inheritance and it was the language of the home where, with her husband Noel, she reared eight children. Her radiant use of Irish was enhanced by her support of the work undertaken in Connemara by her brother, Father Sean O'Connor SJ, who died last Christmas. In a way also her acting life was a fusion of many of her talents with her appetite for something bigger, something exaggerated and bold as a way of finding alternatives.
It was not always possible to listen to Mairin in an admiring silence; argument is affirmation too. Together we emptied our lives into the colander of talk, of humour, of knowledge. Together we sifted what was left and almost always found it good. Especially so, for Mairin, was the goodness of the young and their entitlement to be respected and to be happy. Her subject as a teacher was science (her early professional life was spent with the Irish Sugar Company, where she was the first woman to set up a laboratory for the production of a new type of beet seed), but her mission was to imbue in her pupils an unshakeable sense of their own worth as people. Mairin's credo was that we live for one another, we affirm one another, however haltingly, we celebrate one another: that celebration has resonances which she found in the written word, in her garden, in language, in weather, in fossils. And from now on, even if not always with the same energy, so do we who knew and loved her.