A longtime worker for peace and reconciliation in the North

Una O'Higgins O'Malley: Una O'Higgins O'Malley, who has died aged 78, was a founder member of the Glencree Centre for Reconciliation and worked for almost 30 years in the cause of peace in Northern Ireland.

It was 1972's Bloody Friday, when the IRA caused 22 explosions in Belfast and killed nine people, which prompted her to join a picket on Sinn Féin's Dublin office. She became involved with the Working for Peace group, out of which grew the Glencree centre. She sensed that many people in the Republic felt that what happened in Northern Ireland was not their concern whereas she felt compelled to work for peace. Her efforts were not always applauded. "Are you a proper Catholic at all?" an irate republican demanded of her on one occasion.

In 1974 the first Glencree Peace Week was held, the theme of which was respect. Those involved had by now grasped that their task was not so much to sort out the problems of Northern Ireland but rather to better understand what a peaceful island might mean.

But peace was not on everyone's agenda. On a fundraising visit to the United States she was taken aback by a young Irish-American who, speaking on the situation in the "Six Counties", said: "What if two thousand have to die? It will be worth it."

The period of the H-Blocks hunger strike was the worst that she could remember in Dublin, "as swarms of angry people descended upon the city in buses to join in rallies of protest". At a meeting on the issue her remarks were rubbished by a "scathing young man with a very black beard", whose name, Gerry Adams, she had not heard before.

She was born in Dublin, the daughter of Kevin O'Higgins and his wife Brigid (née Cole). Her father, the vice-president of the Irish Free State and minister for justice and external affairs, was assassinated by members of the IRA in July 1927, when she was five months old. She was shocked in the late 1990s to discover that he had had an affair with Lady Hazel Lavery.

In 1987, when she placed a newspaper notice about an anniversary Mass to be offered for the souls of her father and his killers, the son of one of the killers contacted her to tell her of his father's account of the killing. She learnt that her father, with eight bullets in his body, told his attackers that he forgave them and asked for an end to the killings.

The radical republican Peadar O'Donnell told her that her father's killers "did a bad day's work for Ireland", declaring: "He should have been let get on with his work."

She was educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Lower Leeson Street, Dublin, and at Mount Anville. Afterwards she attended Ria Mooney's Gaiety School of Acting where her fellow pupils included Eamonn Andrews and Milo O'Shea.

Deciding on a legal career, she became a solicitor's apprentice. At Law Society lectures she found herself in the company of George Colley, CJ Haughey and Terry de Valera. On passing her Law Final, she went to work for her stepfather Arthur Cox, but quit after a few months to marry Eoin O'Malley.

She joined Fine Gael and during the 1948 general election campaign organised speakers for meetings around the country. When the all-party government was formed she had misgivings about the appointment of Seán MacBride as minister for external affairs. A former IRA chief-of-staff, he had been a suspect in her father's assassination. Disillusioned by John A Costello's declaration of the republic, flouting Fine Gael policy, she ended her involvement in party politics.

Allegations of brutality by a Garda "Heavy Gang" led her to stand as an independent candidate in the 1977 general election. "If you were talking about peace," she explained, "you were talking about human rights and accountability in the administration of justice." Following her unsuccessful election campaign, she discussed joining the Labour Party with the party leader, Frank Cluskey, but nothing came of it.

She became active in the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and was a member of the non-governmental Commission of Enquiry into the Penal System.

A member of the Irish Association, she was also associated with Cooperation North. She participated in meetings organised by the Faith and Politics group, attended theology courses run by the Furrow magazine and was a committee member of the Glenstal Ecumenical Conference.

She organised a peace vigil, sponsored by senior Catholic and Protestant churchmen, to coincide with the arrival in Ireland of Pope John Paul II in 1979.

Two years later, at an audience with him in the Vatican, she presented the Pope with a document setting out her conviction that Irishness and Catholicism should be separately identified and separately honoured.

She withdrew from Glencree on two occasions, but returned and served as president in the 1990s. "I wish that there were many more places like it where people are encouraged to listen and to learn from each other, and where young people get an opportunity to examine and evaluate their own prejudices," she said.

One of her last tasks in the active service of Glencree was in 1995 to present a joint submission with the Corrymeela Community to the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation.

An interview in The Irish Times in 2002 showed that she continued to be preoccupied by the North. "What I've been looking for is a sense that certain people have been gripped by Ireland's need for forgiveness. But healing may not be our strongest calling," she told the interviewer.

Her husband and their children, Kevin, Eoin, Arthur, Christopher, Finbarr and Iseult survive her.

Una O'Higgins O'Malley: born January 25th, 1927; died December 18th, 2005