Tomás Ó Flatharta

We are delighted to publish a second tribute to Cathleen O’Neill on this blog – this time written by Lorna Siggins for the Sunday Independent, May 11 2025.

A link is here :
Cathleen O’Neill Tribute, by Lorna Siggins; Witty, Irreverent, Tireless Activist, Author, Advocate for Social Change – Sunday Independent

Cathleen’s Death Notice is here ;
Cathleen O’Neill, Death Notice, RIP.IE

All who attended the funeral will remember the hilarious stories and moving tributes. Cathleen, in lock-step with her campaigning friend and activist Joan Byrne, was fearless.

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Cathleen O’Neill, who has died aged 76, was a witty, irreverent and tireless activist, author and advocate for social change whose passion for education and opportunity transformed countless lives.

Described as an “organic intellectual” by Professor Kathleen Lynch of UCD, she said she was one of a rare few experts whose ideas were informed by their own working-class background. She was born and reared in Ballyfermot, Dublin, as the eldest of 13 children, but said in an Irish Times interview in September 2012 that her life “began at 33”.

While she loved school, the scholarship she was awarded for second-level didn’t cover the cost of books, uniform and activities, and she struggled to cover the fee for typing paper.

“For four months, I ducked paying and things were getting nasty,” she told journalist Frances O’Rourke.

“One day I said: ‘Sister Immaculata, I haven’t got your 1/6, I’m never going to have your 1/6.’ And I left. I started work in the sewing factory on Monday.”

She recalled feeling “angry from the age of 13 to 33 — the point at which I joined KLEAR (Kilbarrack Local Education for Adult Renewal) set up by five working-class women.”

She described it as a “magic time”, even though by then she had been married and was now parenting her five children alone. All five women were voracious readers, and four of them set up a group to look at politics and women’s studies.

Prof Lynch, professor emeritus of equality studies at UCD, remembers how O’Neill invited her to Kilbarrack to teach a course and O’Neill, in turn, supported the university in establishing outreach programmes.

“She came to UCD to criticise the colonisation of social class by middle-class people, where academics would take people’s stories, put their own names to them, and claim to know them,” Prof Lynch said.

O’Neill studied equality studies at UCD, followed by a master’s degree. A play which she and KLEAR colleagues wrote, entitled Class Attack, was recorded by the university.

O’Neill also campaigned on disability rights, picketing HSE offices, and often spoke out at “great personal cost”, Prof Lynch said.

Her publications included Telling It Like It Is (Combat Poverty Agency, 1992), and a joint paper with Lynch, The Colonisation of Social Class in Education, had an international impact when published in the British Journal of Sociology of Education in 1994.

In 1995, O’Neill represented KLEAR at the UN Fourth World Women’s Conference in Beijing. That same year, the SAOL project was established in Dublin to provide specialised services for women on methadone.

SAOL colleague Joan Byrne said that she and O’Neill knew they had reached the “peak” of success when they heard a particularly derogatory label — and couldn’t stop laughing about it. Byrne remembered how O’Neill provided endless emotional support and as manager she became known as a “cold callous c**t” .

O’Neill and colleagues had the term engraved on a bracelet for her birthday. The engraver was “horrified”, but O’Neill managed to bribe him with an apple tart, Byrne said.

After post-2008-crash government cuts to the community sector, O’Neill wrote a paper in 2018 with Patricia Kelleher on the devastating impact.

She was profiled in a 2002 film by Louis Lentin, entitled Born Bolshy, which won an award in the US.

Friends say her laughter would light up a room, and she had a beautiful singing voice. Left-wing activist and blogger John Meehan described her as a “feminist, fighter, and great fun”, who “helped make Ireland a better place, especially for women.”

Cathleen O’Neill is survived by her children Derek, Sinead, Róisín, Sean and Siobhan, seven grandchildren and extended family.