Nice post.

On a personal level she was a great character.

All through my teenage drinking years and beyond, she was a familiar face behind the bar of Richie’s pub on The Quay, New Ross.
The pub is usually a port of call for me whenever I’m back home to see the parents. A unique atmosphere, good music and a good buzz.

The place won’t be the same without her.

May she rest in peace.

My own view would be that a real solution should be that the religious should be thanked for the work they undoubtedly did do but noting the need for equality of access across the country to what are state funded services that schools and hospitals should be run by boards of management/governors to be drawn from the communities in which they work. Sure we can allow religious to sit on this boards if they are elected/selected by the parents in schools, but not as a matter of right. Primary schools should be accountable to and funded from local government. (though that’s another issue to be addressed)

The regrettable fact is that for too long ‘the people’ gave over their responsibility for running critical services like education and health to people who had an agenda. I think instead of substituting different people with perhaps a different agenda or even the same agenda but under a different guise that what should happen is ‘the people’ taking a more active interest in the running of such institutions. For all that it can’t possibly have prepared her for the Presidency, we don’t, for the most part, even have real functioning PTA’s, such as that Sarah Palin was involved with, in Ireland.

I remember this case when I was a teenager in school. It was a very early ‘speaking out’ (to use Nuala O’Faolain’s term about how non-normative women’s sexuality started to become publicly visible in fragmentary ways in contemporary Ireland). Before anyone rushes off to suggest that it ‘could never happen today’, we should note how consitutional/ legalised inequality in the education system continues to impact on the lives of educators. These appalling legislative norms allow hegemonic sexual norms to feed into other ways of policing sexuality, particularly behaviours of single heterosexual women, lesbians and gay men. Rumour and innuendo become able to operate as a sanction on people’s lives and ensure that only ‘respectable’ people teach ‘our’ children. Ironically, a good woman did teach our children all along: Eileen Flynn.