MÁIRE MULLARNEY:MÁIRE MULLARNEY, who has died aged 86, was a founding member of the Green Party and for eight years was a member of South Dublin County Council.
Her involvement in politics sprang from an interest in public affairs which led her to join the discussion group Tuairim. In the 1960 she joined the Language Freedom Movement, and participated in Reform, the campaign to ban corporal punishment in schools.
She was also an advocate of home schooling, a proponent of the international language Esperanto, an activist in the women's movement and founder-member of the Irish Family Planning Association, a long-time member of the National Union of Journalists and regular contributor to the Women First page of The Irish Times and a staunch opponent of South African apartheid.
She first encountered Esperanto in 1979, and learnt the language by reading the detective stories of Claude Piron.
Si opiniis ke estis sia misio atentigi kiel eble plej multajn homojn pri Esperanto, kaj asertis ke iu irlandano iom konanta alian europan lingvon povus ekscii legi Esperanton ene de unu tago kaj flue paroli gin post kelkaj monatoj.
(She saw it as her mission to bring Esperanto to the attention of as many people as possible, and claimed that any Irish person with some knowledge of another European language could be reading Esperanto in a day and fluent in a matter of months.)
Esperanto led her to the Green Party which grew out of a coming together in 1981 of Friends of the Earth. The original manifesto of the Ecology Party, forerunner of the Greens, was written on the kitchen table of her home in the Dublin suburb of Rathfarnham.
She stood for election to Dáil Éireann in the Dublin South-East constituency but failed to win a seat. However, she succeeded in getting elected to Dublin South County Council for the Rathfarnham local electoral area in 1991 and served until 1999 when she stepped down.
Born in Dublin in 1921, she was one of the two children of Alexander McCormick and his wife Adelaide (née Rigney). She grew up in Ballydonagh, Co Wicklow, Kenmare, Co Kerry, and Gibraltar where her father was postmaster general.
Educated by the Loreto nuns in Gibraltar and later in Dalkey, she attended the University of Salamanca for a short time and later took life drawing classes at the National College of Art, Dublin. However, she opted to become a nurse, and having trained at Baggot Street Hospital, Dublin, also studied physiotherapy at the Adelaide Hospital.
She married Seán Mullarney in 1946, setting up home in a five-roomed cottage on Carraig Olligan near Shankill, Co Dublin. There she had five of her 11 children and because of the remoteness of the area schooled them at home using the Montessori method.
She did not see herself as mother/housewife but as mother/teacher. Anticipating that she might prompt feminist outrage at the suggestion that mothers should retire to the hearth with their young, she had her response at the ready: "Listen sisters, I am not a one-woman support system for patriarchy. I have not made a bed or ironed a shirt for any of my sons since they were about eight."
Political influences included Hilaire Belloc, GK Chesterton and Ernst Schumacher, and her religious thinking was influenced by the Catholic publishing house Sheed and Ward. She was a member of the Irish Theological Association.
A strong supporter of a Basic Income, whereby a citizen's dividend would be paid to everyone in the State in preference to tax allowances and social security, she believed it would be a "truly enabling revolution".
Her publications include Parents and Teachers (1971), Anything school can do you can do better (1983) Esparanto for hope (1989). Her memoir, What about me? A woman for whom "one damn cause" led to another, was published in 1992.
Predeceased by her husband Seán and their daughters Alison and Martina, she is survived by her daughters Barbara, Janet, Claire, sons Alasdar, Aidan, Pierce, Killian, Eoin and Oliver and grandchildren.
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Máire Mullarney: born September 1st, 1921; died August 18th, 2008