SHEILA MCALEER: THE DEATH of Sheila McAleer from Carrickmore, Co Tyrone, at the age of 90, removes one of the few surviving links with the Gaeltacht of mid-Tyrone, a strongly Irish-speaking area in the early part of the last century.
Sheila had an encyclopaediac knowledge of the Irish language and general Gaelic heritage of mid-Tyrone.
As a child, she had talked Irish to some customers from Creggan when they came into the family shop in Carrickmore. After qualifying as a teacher, she taught in Creggan, and was close to the last Irish speakers there. The last of these died in 1951.
She accompanied folklorists on visits to record some of them. As Creggan had ceased to be Irish-speaking by the 1940s, they felt their Irish was rusty. Sheila brought a wonder drug which unfailingly restored their forgotten Irish vocabulary - a bottle of whiskey.
After the last native speakers died, Sheila continued to promote Irish. She was a bridge between the disappeared Gaeltacht and the new generation that has taken up Irish over the past decade or so.
Her family had encouraged interest in the Irish language and all things Irish.
When she was a baby, Éamon de Valera and 1916 leader Constance Markievicz were visitors to the family home.
As a child, she remembered former Fenian leaders Joseph McGarrity and Dr Pat McCartan visiting.
She was also a link to Central America. Her father had gone to El Salvador in the early part of the last century to manage a coffee plantation. There, he saved the money to come home, buy a business, and marry.
Sheila kept part of a letter he had written to his girlfriend, later her mother, from El Salvador before their marriage: "How different here with me, neither cold nor snow. We have not even had a shower since October. The rain usually commences in April but this year winter as we call it has been late."
Sheila was the second daughter and fourth and last child of Patrick Campbell and his wife Mary (née Rafferty).
She was predeceased by her husband Joseph. She is survived by her children Cormac, Maureen (Duckenfield), Nuala, Joey and Gráinne, 14 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
Sheila McAleer: born June 18th, 1918; died September 27th, 2008