Sir, – I was very sad to hear of Mary O’Rourke’s death (“Mary O’Rourke’s contribution to public life was enormous, funeral hears”, News, October 7th).
Mary was a long-standing supporter of Educate Together. As minister for education from 1987 to 1991, she enabled the opening of Educate Together schools in Cork, Sligo, Kilkenny, Limerick, and North Bay, Rathfarnham, and Ranelagh in Dublin.
She was able to overcome institutional opposition and her interventions enabled Educate Together to become a genuinely national movement.
In 1990, she addressed our annual meeting in Galway and launched the Educate Together Charter, which has become the prime document of aims and values for the whole movement.
The welcome I received from Jennifer Johnston is something I will never forget
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Throughout her career, she was available to the organisation’s officers for advice and assistance in lobbying for educational change.
Later, when she was no longer in office, she served as a member of Educate Together’s board of directors from 2011 to 2017 and made invaluable contributions to the organisation’s fundraising, communications and lobbying efforts.
Mary was always a reliable, courageous, positive and warm-hearted friend. Straight speaking, well informed and with a personal intelligence nurtured by her own and her family’s political experience.
In Educate Together archives there are numerous reports of her powerful, inspiring interventions, and I have many fond recollections of her kind words, her advice, her humour and steadfast support.
She will be sorely missed.
May she rest in peace and my deepest sympathies to all her family, friends and colleagues. – Yours, etc,
PAUL ROWE,
Dublin 15.
