Sister Mary Kevin O’Higgins: Carmelite with deep connection to Irish Free State

Sister Mary Kevin O’Higgins Born: June 7th, 1923 Died: March 28th, 2022

Sister Mary Kevin O’Higgins, a member of the contemplative Carmelite Order for 75 years, has died in her 99th year. She was one of the leading figures in the Blackrock Carmel on Sweetman’s Avenue for 50 years and following its closure, she moved to the Monastery of St Joseph in Upper Kilmacud Road, Dublin. A formative influence on those around her, she contributed to the everyday running of the Carmelite Community, partaking in the daily liturgies and bringing her intelligent kindness and playful character to all her encounters.

Sr Kevin was born Maev O’Higgins, the eldest child of Brigid (nee Cole), an English teacher and Kevin O’Higgins, the Cumann na nGaedheal Minister for Justice and External Affairs and leading architect of the Irish Free State.

Her birth – just two weeks after the end of the Irish Civil War – in Government Buildings (now the Department of the Taoiseach), the temporary headquarters of the fledging State and the O’Higgins temporary home, was described as “a symbol of hope, an olive branch, a new beginning”.

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Her grandfather, Dr Thomas O’Higgins, had been killed months before her birth at his family home in Stradbally, Co Laois by the anti-Treaty IRA as a reprisal for his son, Kevin O’Higgin’s role in the execution of captured republicans in 1922-1923.

Soon after the end of the Civil War, the family moved to live in Booterstown but had further tragedy visited on them when their infant son, Finbarr, died of pneumonia within weeks of his birth.

The O’Higgins home in Booterstown, Dunamase was renowned for its many distinguished visitors from the world of politics, law and the arts. In later life, Sr Kevin often spoke about meeting many of these eminent figures. She recalled how her mother told her that “WB [Yeats] perched me on his knee but I was frightened by his beard and I burst into tears, saying ‘I don’t like you’. I spoke similarly to GK Chesterton”.

Tragedy was to visit the O’Higgins family again when months after the birth of her sister, Una, their father was assassinated on his way to Mass in Booterstown Parish Church on July 10th, 1927.

In his homily at Sr Kevin’s funeral, Father Vincent O’Hara spoke of how, when he interviewed Sr Kevin (who took her father’s name upon becoming a nun) in her 80s, her father’s violent death was still etched in her memory even though she was only four at the time. “She even remembered the sound of the shots and the anguished cry of her mother, ‘they got him’.”

In 1940 her mother married a friend of her husband’s, Arthur Cox, the founder of the eponymous law firm and the family moved to live in his house in Carrig Breac in Howth. “They called him Uncle Arthur. They were devoted to him but he didn’t become a father to them,” explains Iseult O’Malley, Supreme Court judge and niece of Sr Kevin. When her mother died in 1961, Cox studied for the priesthood at Milltown Park and moved to Africa as a missionary until his death in a fatal car crash in 1965.

The O’Higgins girls, Maev and Una, were brought up to forgive the vengeful murders of their father and grandfather and went on to dedicate their lives to peace and reconciliation. Una O’Higgins O’Malley through her work as co-founder of the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconcilation, with the Peace People Movement and later the Irish Council for Civil Liberaties, and Maev by dedicating her life to prayer and service to God when she entered the contemplative Carmelite Order at the age of 23. She made her profession of vows in 1947.

As a young girl, Maev O’Higgins was academically minded and following her schooling with the Sacred Heart Sisters in Leeson St, Dublin she obtained a first class honours degree in politics and economics at University College Dublin. While there, she won an award for legal debate at the UCD Law Society. She studied for the bar but didn’t complete her final exams. “She would have been a good lawyer as she learned effortlessly and had a prodigious memory and a great mind for detail,” says O’Malley.

However, the young Maev had other plans and at a weekend dinner dance that she organised for her friends in the Gresham Hotel, she informed them that she wouldn’t be seeing them for a long time because she was entering the contemplative Carmelite Community the following Monday.

The sisters in her community said that she lived “a rich life, full of love for God and people”. She held roles as prioress and bursar during her time at the Blackrock Carmel and when it closed in 1997 (the building is now home to the Blackrock Hospice) she moved to the monastery of St Joseph in Kilmacud, where she became a much loved and appreciated member of that community. She had a great love of nature and animals and enjoyed contact with horses, dogs and birds in the grounds of St Josephs.

In 2017 she joined other members of the O’Higgins family at a reception in the Department of Foreign Affairs to mark the 90th anniversary of the murder of her father. Recalling that event, Fr O’Hara says, “it was moving to see Sr Kevin look intently at photographs of her family, including her parents’ wedding with best man Rory O’Connor [whose execution order Kevin O’Higgins would later sign] and see her look at photos of the funeral of her father and identify various people and doing so with a serenity and calmness that was mightily impressive”.

Due to declining health, Sr Kevin moved into the Cedar House nursing home in Stillorgan where she spent the last five years of her life. She was buried in the little cemetery at the monastery of St Joseph, not far from two other nuns in her community, Sr Mary Teresa Joseph O’Farrell and Sr Mary Angela O’Farrell, both of whom were aunts of Rory O’Connor.

Sr Kevin O’Higgins is survived by her nephews, Kevin, Eoin, Art, Chris, Finbarr and niece Iseult, grand-nieces and nephews, great-grand nieces and great-grand nephews, cousins and Sisters of her Kilmacud Community and wider Carmelite family. She was pre-deceased by her sister, Una (O’Higgins O’Malley), in 2005 and her brother, Finbarr, who died in infancy.