Born: March 12th, 1936
Died: August 15th, 2026
It was 1991 and yet another civil war was in full spate at Tigray in northern Ethiopia when 64 children arrived at the St Louise’s eye clinic in Mekele there from a village 50 kilometres away. All were blind from Vitamin A deficiency.
The clinic was being run by Sr Margaret Coyne of the Daughters of Charity. After treating the children, she set off on foot for the village with necessary medicines and vitamins for people there also threatened with blindness.
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Accompanying her through the war-torn countryside was a young Ethiopian man who had been her interpreter but who she had trained in eye surgery. Recalling that hair-raising journey, he said, “There were aeroplanes over us and we would hide in the bush until the plane had gone. Then we would walk on until the aeroplane came again dropping bombs.”
On that occasion they hid at a bridge. Eventually they got to the village.
Such was the determination of this Galway woman described by a colleague at the clinic as “one of the most impressive people I have ever met”, and whose modesty, another said, was such “very few people know the impact she made”.
She saved the sight of thousands of people through her work at St Louise’s. People travelled great distances on foot to get there, often walking for days. She would clean their feet, with great care. Another colleague observed that this gesture “said almost everything about the way she cared for people. She was showing respect, love and dignity to people who had so little. And they understood it.”
An indication of the circumstances she and colleagues worked in can be gathered from the book Los ojos queue no ven [Eyes that do not see] by Spanish photographers who visited Sr Margaret’s clinic in 2011.
All was “stone and rocks, unpopulated mountains”. But there was “something else” and “when you become aware of it you become paralysed, you are dumbstruck”. It was the realisation that there were “many children and old people, but there are hardly any adults left. Just about everyone between the ages of 25 and 45, approximately, has disappeared.” Aids and war had “been merciless with these people”, they concluded.
It was where Sr Margaret Coyne worked for 23 years.
In 1984, when she arrived to help at a polio clinic, a Swiss nurse was running an eye clinic on her own nearby. She was being withdrawn for her own safety but first trained Sr Margaret, already a qualified nurse, in eye surgery for trachoma to prevent blindness. When the Swiss nurse left, Sr Margaret took on responsibility for the eye clinic.
Then famine struck, killing up to 1.2 million people, displacing 2.5 million more. “Thousands came in from the countryside, starving. Many, many died,” she recalled later. “The first year was very hard,” with people coming in from the countryside after the harvest failed and ending up in mass graves.
Then “help started to come in from all over the world”, she said. At the time she was described as “the driving force in co-ordinating resources as they came in”.
She also continued her work at the eye clinic; 1993 was a very significant year in its operation. A Spanish eye doctor visited then and was so impressed he arranged for teams of Spanish doctors to work at the clinic removing cataracts, usually two teams a year, sometimes four.
In 1995 these doctors founded Prejecto Vision to work with Sr Margaret at the clinic, and soon thousands of people were being treated for all types of eye conditions. Then they set up outreach clinics.
One Spanish doctor described Sr Margaret as “manager, nurse, surgeon, cleaner, accountant, receptionist, the counsellor, logistics expert, driver. It was hard to keep up with her, to her standard. She was an accomplished surgeon who did thousands of procedures for trachoma. She was very fast and could do a lot of patients in a day.”
Soon St Louise’s was regarded as one of the best eye clinics in East Africa with, by the mid-2000s, more than six teams of Spanish doctors there performing 1,500 procedures annually.
A key legacy of Sr Margaret’s time in Tigray was the development of new techniques in eye care, of very high quality surgery at low cost, and the training of more than 200 Ethiopians in eye care.
In 2007, at the age of 71, she was recalled by her order to London where she worked with the elderly and sick for the remainder of her days.
The third in a family of seven, which included Sabina Coyne, wife of former president Michael D Higgins, Sr Margaret grew up on a farm at Cloonrane in Co Galway, on the Galway/Mayo border.
She studied nursing at the then Regional Hospital in Galway, graduating top of her class and receiving the Gold Medal, before studying midwifery in Cork and Scotland. She nursed in London for a time before joining the Daughters of Charity there. Then, when the time came, she volunteered to travel on her own to Mekele in Tigray to work as a polio nurse.
She died in London and will be laid to rest at the Daughters of Charity, Mill Hill, on September 2nd.
