NESSA O'NEILL, who has died aged 59, was a well-known figure in Irish circles in London, foremost as a fundraiser and charity worker for the Irish Youth Foundation and War Child.
She was born in Dublin in 1952, one of seven children, but was raised in Carlow and educated at Mount Sackville in Dublin.
She moved to London, met and married John O’Neill and moved to Oxfordshire where her creative energies were channelled into interior design and shaping the early lives of her three children.
However, her strong Irish roots and her instinctive charitable nature led her to join others who, like her, wanted to help the disadvantaged Irish in Britain.
Her early work with the Irish Youth Foundation (IYF), which she helped found in 1989, saw her phenomenal energies put to good use in its fundraising committee, which she chaired, and organising an annual ball for the charity.
In 1998 she played a key role in launching the Women’s Irish Network (WIN) in London, bringing together a small group of like-minded Irish women to help get it off the ground.
WIN continues to be a vibrant network of women who like Nessa want to give something back. To date the organisation has raised over £200,000 for the IYF.
At the turn of the century she became increasingly concerned about more global issues and became a trustee of War Child UK. She subsequently became its head of fundraising and deputy chief executive – founding War Child Ireland along the way.
The charity opened her eyes, and her heart, to the devastating impact of war on children. She spoke passionately about the child soldiers in the Congo, the children orphaned by war and the plight of families in Iraq.
It was a period in her life when her charity work became all-consuming. With typical aplomb she cajoled the rich and the famous into giving up their time and energies to help bring to fruition many of her imaginative fundraising ideas. Her persistence and charisma toppled celebrities, politicians and the most formidable of business leaders. If she was asking, most of them learned early to say yes.
Recently she was able to devote more time to her long-term partner Robert Smith (whom she married in recent months) and the lives of her three children.
She will be remembered by a large circle of friends in London as a vivacious, flamboyant Irish woman who lived life with gusto. Her instinctive kindness and infectious laughter softened a no-nonsense forthrightness when she proffered an opinion. She had no time for false piety or political correctness.
When cancer returned she was sanguine – devastated that she wouldn’t fulfil her many dreams (including a longed-for house in Marrakech and a final visit home to Carlow to see her mum and dad), but grateful for the years she had lived to the full, her three wonderful children and the love of a good man.
She dealt with the debilitating side effects of her treatment, or as she called it “this blasted chemo” with her typical tendency towards understatement.
She is survived by Robert, her children, Malachy, Ciara and Ferga, and by her mother, father and her six siblings – three brothers and three sisters.
Nessa O’Neill: born August 25th, 1952; died April 1st, 2009