Appreciation: Mary Holland was an extraordinary woman who made an enormous contribution, through her journalism, to the mutual understanding of peoples and places on this island.
She held up a mirror to Irish society to allow it to see and better understand itself on many of the big political issues over three ground-breaking decades: the liberation and equality of women, the advance of the social agenda of contraception, divorce and abortion and the hope and despair throughout the 30 years of the Troubles to accommodate a new dispensation in Northern Ireland.
Whether she was writing about Fermoy or Farnborough, Mary always had something to say. She hit the right balance on occasions when the heart could rule the head.
She succeeded in explaining ourselves to different audiences at the same time: be it the Irish to the British, the British to the republicans or, so often in the barren political years, the distance between government and politics on the ground. And she captured every nuance in such an understated Irish way.
Mary Holland, like other women journalists of the 1960s, made pioneering strides for the rest of us in journalism, first of all, and on the emancipation of women. Mary was up there with Maeve Binchy, Mary Maher, the late Mary Cummins, Nell McCafferty and Mary Kenny, to name but a few, most of them in The Irish Times.
She played an active role in the social referendums of the 1980s and 1990s where she argued passionately in her columns in the Sunday Tribune, the Sunday Press and The Irish Times for the right of the individual within the State.
She had that wonderful knack, as the political debate increased in decibels, to stand back and represent the unheard voices. Thus, she courageously declared during one of the abortion referendums in the wake of the X case that she had had an abortion. She gave voice to those thousands of women forgotten in the frenzy of adversarial politics.
But, as often discussed with her, Mary Holland devoted her journalistic life to the problems and the people of Northern Ireland. She became captivated by the civil rights marches in the late 1960s and never really left. She was unique among journalists of her generation as the first to cover Dublin, London and Belfast simultaneously.
She made an important contribution to Anglo-Irish relations in explaining to the British that the North was a political, not just a security, problem; conversely, she informed governments and public opinion of the exclusion of unionists from the Irish State.
She spoke to the paramilitaries of both sides when nobody else had lines of official communication with them. The fact that Mary had a column in the Observer as well as The Irish Times added to her influence on events.
Mary won the confidence and respect of political leaders of all persuasions in Northern Ireland over the years. Sometimes she went one way in her columns; sometimes the other. But all the time, she sacrificed her own self-interest to the greater interest of the people.
The signing of the Belfast Agreement marked the height of Mary Holland's career in 1998. It was around that time, too, that her health began to fail her. She dreamed of how she would spend her retirement "dotting the i's and crossing the t's of the accommodation in Northern Ireland". And six years later, that was not to be.
Mary suffered from scleroderma, a little-known degenerative tissue disease, which brought her great pain.
It is so typical of her that, on her death, she wanted it to be known that scleroderma is not recognised for hospice care. It is so typical, too, that she rarely complained in the last few years. For Mary's greatest gift in life was her faith in the human spirit and her love of the imperfection of humankind.
Geraldine Kennedy