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Detta O’Cathain obituary: Irish woman who became Tory grand dame

From business to politics, O’Cathain was admired for her humour, directness and dedication

Detta O’Cathain: ‘Britain gave me all my opportunities’, she told a 1997 meeting in Dublin on women in business.

Thu May 27 2021 - 17:07

Detta O’Cathain

Born: February 2nd, 1938

Died: April 23rd, 2021

Detta O’Cathain, who died in Sussex on April 23rd after a short illness, aged 83, was the most successful Irish woman there had ever been in the business and political life of Britain, ending up as a leading Conservative in the House of Lords.

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It was a far cry from her Irish background whose nationalism was signalled by the use of the Gaelic form of the surname Kane. Her paternal grandfather, a customs officer, was an early member of the Gaelic League in Ulster. He was forced by intimidation to move south from Belfast. Her father was based in Cork as a tax inspector when Margaret, known as Detta, the eldest of three children, was born on February 2nd, 1938.

She was at school at Loreto Abbey Rathfarnham and Laurel Hill in Limerick, which was then, she recalled, no different from the Edwardian convent school depicted by novelist Kate O’Brien in Land of Spices. Detta was deprived of her Child of Mary Medal for singing within earshot of the reverend mother “Bimbo, bimbo, what are you going to do”. She still praised the education she received from the nuns, instilling in her discipline and attention to detail. She was always pleased to join in reunions.

The years studying part-time for a degree in French, English and economics in the overcrowded lecture rooms of UCD, where her Jesuit uncle was professor of education, were a less cherished memory. But it improved her prospects in Aer Lingus, where she had been employed since leaving school. There, her ability impressed but her assertiveness was less universally appreciated.

Marriage

She formed an attachment to former RAF pilot Bill Bishop, a twice married Englishman over 20 years her senior who worked for Aer Lingus. They moved to England where they married in 1968, so precipitating a breach with her family. It did not, however, prevent her from caring later for her widowed father in England.

Having no children, she pursued a business career single-mindedly, first with a cement company and then with Rootes Motors to whom she applied protesting against a job advertisement which stated: “the man appointed will be...” In 1976 she landed a post as a planning executive with dairy company Unigate. This equipped her to be an adviser to Tory minister for agriculture Peter Walker in the early 1980s.

If Peter Walker was discounted as “a wet” by Margaret Thatcher, no such label could stick to O’Cathain. The stagnation engendered in the 1960s and 1970s by militant trade unions, inefficient state enterprises and high taxation made her a campaigning free marketer; as such she became a feisty and eloquent presence on the BBC’s Question Time chaired by Robin Day. A bewitching smile added to her appeal.

Her business career advanced, moving to the Milk Marketing Board where she became general manager and performed well, persuading farmers to produce milk rather than butter. The Midland Bank appointed her a non-executive director, making her the first woman to sit on the board of a London clearing bank. She was also on the board of the supermarket chain Tesco.

Barbican Arts Centre

She was, however, denied promotion to a new chief executive post at the Milk Marketing Board. So it was that she was available in 1990 to be head-hunted when the Corporation of the City of London needed a hard-headed manager to iron out inefficiencies in the Barbican Arts Centre, which housed the Royal Shakespeare Company and the London Symphony Orchestra. As a lover of music and literature – Seamus Heaney was a friend – she seemed well equipped.

On her own admission not a person to suffer fools gladly, she found that many employed at the Barbican fell short of her expectations and she forced them out in what some depicted as “a terror”. She was intolerant of creative souls who felt they were above the discipline of costs – “arty-farty types”, she called them.

She had achievements to her credit and her employers were sufficiently impressed to offer her a second four-year term, only to yield in face of an internal revolt and put her on indefinite paid leave of absence

The background of her personal life had not helped. In 1989 her husband suffered a stroke leaving him paralysed and speechless. She nursed him lovingly at home until his death in 2001. It had been a happy marriage. Automatically excommunicated from the Catholic Church by it, she had accompanied her husband to the Anglican Church and became involved in a Bible reading group. It became a lifelong commitment; she read the Bible every day and was inspired.

Peerage

The Barbican appointment had led to her being raised to the peerage in 1991 as Baroness O’Cathain of the Barbican in the City of London. It was a surprise when John Major made the offer – “I thought I was being asked to go to dinner in the House of Lords,” she joked. One of the two peers supporting her at her initiation was former SDLP leader Gerry Fitt. Initially a cross-bencher, she joined the Conservatives when she quit the Barbican in 1995.

Albeit that she always insisted on being called Detta, not Lady O’Cathain, it was nonetheless as a Tory grande dame with no Irish accent that in 1997 she attended a meeting in Dublin on women in business. “Britain gave me all my opportunities,” she exclaimed; “If I had stayed in Ireland I would have remained a grade 3 clerk in Aer Lingus.” She berated Dublin for its pretensions and begrudgery, adding that Britain was actually a much more democratic and classless society.

By now, politics rather than business was uppermost in her life. In the House of Lords she was an uncompromising upholder of the traditional family based on marriage between man and woman. In 2004, an amendment to the Civil Partnership Bill that she got passed in the Lords gave siblings living together the same inheritance rights as homosexual partners. This provoked a gay rights boycott of British Airways on whose board she served. She resigned, so bringing down the curtain of her business career.

She was forthright in debate resisting aspects of the equality and hate speech agenda that would oblige the churches to amend their practices or mute their teaching.

In this she made common cause with Ulster unionist peers. She was also at one with them criticising the Catholic hierarchy for not supporting the RUC, the change in whose name she opposed. “What are Sinn Féin/IRA giving up?” she asked in 2002 deprecating more concessions to them to bring about decommissioning of weapons by the IRA in the wake of the Belfast Agreement.

She had a leadership role getting smoking banned in public places and tobacco advertising prohibited. Her parents and siblings had all succumbed to the effects of the habit.

She was liked on all sides of the House of Lords for her humour and admired for her directness and dedication. She was highly effective chairing the influential committee examining EU legislation. An experience with her mobile telephone when visiting Ireland in 2012 inspired an initiative that ended “roaming charges” within the European Union.

Although long an enthusiastic champion of the internal market of the EU, she accepted there was no going back on the Brexit referendum. “I am buying Britain at the moment,” she told the Lords in 2019 still full of hope for the country she had come to love.

Her funeral took place in the Anglo-Catholic church in Arundel, where she had lived for many years.

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