The death has occurred of Ms Andree Sheehy Skeffington, at her home in Dublin. She was aged 88. Ms Sheehy Skeffington's husband was the late senator and TCD French lecturer, Dr Owen Sheehy-Skeffington.
Her parents, French socialists, were both school teachers and she was born Andree Germaine Denis in Amiens, about 100 miles from Paris, in 1910. Her family got to know the Sheehy Skeffingtons through a mutual interest in French language and culture.
Mlle Denis, as she was then, studied at the Sorbonne while her husband-to-be was a student in Trinity. The couple married in 1935 a year after he became a lecturer in French at Trinity.
Ms Sheehy Skeffington became involved in Irish social politics during the war, specifically on women's problems.
The couple became involved in the Labour Movement and joined the "Council of Action". Ms Sheehy Skeffington became prominent in the Housing Section of the council during the war years and she became a national figure in her own right. She became known for her work with women in Dublin tenement slums. At the time housewives were concerned with the rocketing prices of all essential items, and with a friend Ms Hilda Tweedy, she established in 1942 the Irish Housewives' Association, which became a powerful lobby group at the time.
In 1992 Ms Sheehy Skeffington received an honorary degree from Trinity College for the biography of her husband who died in 1970. Ms Sheehy Skeffington, is survived by her daughter Micheline and sons Alan and Francis and will be buried today at 12.30 in Glasnevin cemetery.