Devoted teacher, local councillor and fundraiser

Mary Harty, who has died aged 54, was an important voluntary worker for the Irish Motor Neurone Disease Association (IMNDA), which supports sufferers from the disease which claimed her life. She was also a long-serving councillor in her native county of Limerick.

Diagnosed with MND in October 2012, Harty devoted much of her time over the past two years to fundraising, despite a busy schedule as a councillor until her retirement at the May local elections.

She organised a walk involving several hundred people, which raised €25,000, and, five days before she died and when she had already lost the power of speech, an ice-bucket challenge in her own home which drew 60 volunteers. Her efforts also attracted an anonymous donation of €50,000.

Bitter blow

The loss of speech was a particularly bitter blow to a woman who had spent so much of her life in public, first as a prominent member of Junior Chamber Ireland and then, from 1999, as a member of Limerick County Council (LCC), where she was elected cathaoirleach in 2011. She organised the visit of then newly elected President Michael D Higgins, a Co Limerick native, to the council.

Genuine and sincere

According to

Fine Gael

colleague John Egan, her speech “will never be forgotten . . . she put it all together herself. It was genuine and sincere, and outlined the role he was already playing as President highlighting the special issues of social solidarity which had arisen after the collapse of the economy.”

As Cathaoirleach, she had been “an excellent chairperson, and took no nonsense from any of the other councillors, keeping them always to the point.”

Her first public role was with Junior Chamber Ireland (JCI), where she was president of JC Limerick in 1990, then, appropriately for someone for whom oratory was so important as a tool of communication, JC Ireland public speaking manager in 1991. She later served as regional director and development director and was made an honorary life member of Junior Chamber International in 1992.

“Mary was keenly interested in the international aspects of Junior Chamber and especially in Limerick’s twinning with cities outside Ireland,” said JCI’s Seamus O’Neill.

FG associations

Mary Harty was the first baby born on New Year’s Day, 1960, in Limerick, to John J Harty, a farmer from Pallasgreen with strong Fine Gael associations, and his wife, Ellen Riordan, known as Nelly.

Educated locally, she trained as a primary school teacher at Carysfort in Dublin, and, afterwards taught in the capital for two years before returning to her old national school, Nicker NS near Pallasgreen, where she stayed for the rest of her career.

Devoted to her work, both educational and voluntary, Harty never married, but, in the words of her sister Carmel, “her nephews and nieces were her family”. Mary Harty was much loved, her family receiving several hundred letters of condolence following her death. She is survived by her brother, Eamonn, and her sisters, Carmel and Siobhán.