Niamh Bhreathnach’s legacy is combatting educational disadvantage, funeral hears

The legacy of former minister for education Niamh Bhreathnach is her work in combatting educational disadvantage, her funeral has heard.

President Michael D Higgins and members of Ms Breathnach’s family led mourners at her funeral service in Blackrock, Co Dublin, on Thursday.

Ms Bhreathnach, who was best known as the minister for education who abolished third-level fees in 1996, died at the age of 77, on Monday.

Among the symbols of Ms Bhreathnach’s life, brought forward to the altar of St John the Baptist Church by her grandchildren Tom and Alice, were a family photograph and a copy of a government white paper on education policy.

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Chief celebrant Fr Peter O’Connor told the congregation the white paper “Charting our Education Future”, introduced by Ms Bhreathnach in 1995, “has become one of the cornerstones of our education policy”.

In his eulogy, Ms Bhreathnach’s husband Tom Ferris acknowledged she was minister for education, “but going back beyond that” she had taught in Dublin’s Cook Street in a school which served the Oliver Bond flats complex, “and she cared mightily for the children there”.

He said it was a period that “left a stamp on her for the rest of her life”.

He said she put Irish education on a legislative basis at a time when the Department of Education was managed by Civil Service circulars. “Niamh believed that if you wanted to make it happen you had to legislate for it,” he said.

He said policies she introduced as minister combatted educational disadvantage among children and she sensitised him to discrimination against women – particularly with the question: “Tom, how many women were at that?”, when he attended functions.

He quoted from Shakespeare’s sonnet 116, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds”, and concluded by saying: “It has been a great privilege to have loved and been loved by this extraordinary woman.”

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Bishop Eamonn Walsh, retired auxiliary bishop of Dublin, recalled his experience of dealing with Ms Bhreathnach was through arrangements for the “wonderful” Deis schools, schools for the educationally disadvantaged “that she has left us.”

The principal mourners were Ms Bhreathnach’s husband Tom Ferris, the couple’s two children Cliodhna and Macdara, son-in-law Bryan, grandchildren Tom and Alice, and Ms Bhreathnach’s sisters Sighle, Fionnuala and Eadaoin.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar was represented at the funeral by his aide de camp Commandant Claire Mortimer. Among others in attendance from the world of politics were the Minister for Education Norma Foley, Minister for State Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, Labour Party leader Ivana Bacik, former ministers Alex White and Aodhán Ó Ríordáin TD, Cormac Devlin TD, Senator Barry Ward and the Leas Cathaoirleach of Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council, Councillor Michael Clark. A number of civil servants and current and former members of Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council also attended, as did Tom Arnold, formally of The Irish Times Trust, and the newspaper’s columnist and former political editor Stephen Collins.