This extraordinary memoir is more than its modest title proclaims. Certainly Una O'Higgins O'Malley has lived her own life on the margins of great political and historical events and changes. She was an infant when her father, Kevin O'Higgins, was killed for political motives as he walked near his home on July 10th 1927. This was four years after her grandfather had also been killed.
From then on, despite the killing, she and her sister and mother lived comfortable upper-middle-class lives in Catholic Ireland, not too different from their Anglo-Irish neighbours. But she gradually awoke to what became a compulsion to play some part, however small it might seem, in healing wounds in this country.
Una O'Higgins O'Malley's calm and gentle figure first became known in Ireland when she decided to do something utterly uncharacteristic - she ran for Dβil Eireann in the D·n Laoghaire/Rathdown constituency in the 1977 general election. Indignation at what she perceived as Garda misbehaviour (the "Heavy Gang" controversy) led to that decision - and to everyone's surprise, not least her own, she did much better than expected and rattled the main political parties. (The Women's Political Association joined in her campaign, as it did in the campaigns of other pioneering women of all parties and none during those years.)
The abiding motivation for O'Higgins O'Malley in everything she did once her children were growing up was peacemaking and its essential companion, forgiveness. She was a founder and devoted activist in the Glencree Reconciliation Centre, and was to be found everywhere when gestures had to be made for peace.
Standing outside Sinn FΘin headquarters with her home-made banner in a lonely vigil required courage and was totally foreign to her upbringing and retiring nature; protesting against a childrens' detention centre in Loughan House, she marched with Mary Robinson; she worked on a Prison Reform Commission (unofficial) with this writer - and was as hardworking and fair-minded and low-key as ever. The list of her involvements - most modestly recounted - is immense.
The charm of this book is unexpected - beautiful light-filled days of childhood, gracious houses, old photographs of elegant people and pretty children, major Irish historical figures in top hats at family weddings, a beautiful widowed mother who finds later happiness with the redoubtable Arthur Cox and ensures the family prosperity (a stepfather, by the way, who is eventually embraced into the affection of his initially wary stepdaughter).
The book is peppered with O'Higgins O'Malley's poems, sometimes inspired by great events and frequently moving. Her na∩ve habit of putting some words in capital letters to make sure we don't miss the emphasis is endearing.
It is clear that one of the reasons why she wrote this book is her deep (though not uncritical) religious faith, which is obvious and which runs through the whole book. Early days at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Mount Anville (this writer's alma mater too) strengthened this faith - though, like another alumna, Mary Robinson, being educated by the nuns didn't stop her criticising any religious extremism or intolerance she encountered in later years.
"I have been slow to believe that the lives of women are any less important than the lives of men," she writes. Her early childhood years were in an all-female household, and in her long life, spanning most of this country's independent history, she has seen the crucial background work and support which has been the role of women in almost every sphere. I have no doubt that this book goes a little way towards setting the balance a little more fairly. It might (though I'm not holding my breath) remind the powers that be that more women are desperately needed in the public life of this country.
Forgiveness of her father's killers and a firm determination never to hate have been the hallmark of O'Higgins O'Malley's life and her abiding guide, to the point of embracing and sharing with the assassins in family remembrance ceremonies.
That is why this book deserves to be read and why it should find its own place among the memoirs and history books of 20th- century Ireland.
Gemma Hussey is director of the European Women's Foundation and a former minister for education