Mary Hurney's all too brief life has ended, just months after she took up the position as general manager of Galway Airport. In a career filled with challenging assignments, this seemed to be the job that fate had always intended for her and had kept until last, as the best wine. Her years in the tourism industry here in Ireland and abroad were exciting and varied. Mary gave all her jobs - in Hertz, Malone Car Rental, Ryanair and An Post - her total commitment. She accepted the increasing responsibilities easily, modestly and with uncommon good humour, but never underestimating the magnitude of new tasks. She assumed that each required her total commitment and she gave the same wholehearted dedication she expected of others. What was never written into her job description, but you got it anyway, was the infectious love of life and the ability to reach out and make new friends. Many became part of her unique, worldwide extended family.
She led by example. When Ireland's tourism industry needed dedicated professionalism, Mary gave unstintingly of her time, visiting the major tour operators all over Britain and the US. She personified the claim that this is a land of warm and friendly people, that here, strangers are merely friends you have not yet met. Mary had the rare gift of becoming a friend soon after first meetings and she mixed as easily with presidents as with the "plain people".
In giving so much of her time and her personality to her work, she never forgot that it was being done for her family. Her first concern was for her children; their care and protection was paramount. Her own mother and father had been the bedrock on which all her hopes and dreams were founded and she knew she had their full support in all her work.
Her move to Galway last December was in every way the fulfilment of an outstanding career. It offered the promise of great personal happiness and professional satisfaction. New worlds had opened to her; the new career was proving more enjoyable and more rewarding that she had dared hope.
To see these prospects ended so abruptly would test the faith of most, but Mary's immediate family - father, sister, partner, daughter, son - and her most beloved grand-daughter and her hundreds of friends in Ireland and around the world, will take solace from the words in her funeral Mass: "Life is not ended, merely changed." Mary is now travelling with the angels.
J.P.G.