'Poverty is an evil. Powerlessness is an evil. Try to make a difference to the world." These are typical of the words which one of the most remarkable Irishwomen of the last century, Sister Genevieve O'Farrell, who died on December 29th aged 78, addressed to the girls in St Louise's Comprehensive College on the Falls Road in Belfast.
The Tullamore-born woman spent three decades encouraging the girls of the Falls and West Belfast to make education their way of fighting poverty, injustice and the other circumstances which threatened to blight their prospects.
She did so with success and with a single-minded determination which saw priests, civil servants, parents, children, British soldiers and IRA members give way to her.
Yet, as a young woman, teaching was the last thing she had wanted as a career and Belfast was the last place she had wanted to go.
She was born Mary O'Farrell to William and Catherine (née McNeill) in Tullamore, Co Offaly on March 22nd 1923. Her father was farm manager and gardener for the Sisters of Mercy in the town.
She was the youngest child and the only girl in the family.
Her brother Patrick became an Augustinian priest and Dominic became a Christian Brother. Her brothers Peter and John took up commercial careers. All predeceased her.
As a schoolgirl, she had no interest whatsoever in entering religious life. But a chance remark about the work done by the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul convinced her she had a vocation.
The Daughters of Charity were known as a very tough and demanding sisterhood who worked with marginalised people. She entered the Daughters of Charity house on the Navan Road in Dublin as a postulant in 1941.
Among the attractions of the Daughters of Charity was the opportunity of working with disadvantaged people without having to become a teacher.
Her disappointment, therefore, was great when she was told, after about two years, that she was to be trained as a teacher. She taught at an orphanage at Mill Hill and later in a school in Lanark before being sent to Belfast in 1956.
Some friends believe she came close to leaving the sisterhood at that point, so much did she dislike the notion of going to Belfast but she decided to try it for six months.
She arrived at Belfast Docks in January 1956, to take up a post at St Vincent's primary school in Dunlewey Street, which served the girls of the Falls.
It had been set up to educate "half-time" girls who worked in the linen mills and who were only released for education two days a week. Conditions for the girls were desperately unhealthy and many died at a young age.
The mission of the school was to help them escape life in the mills. The "half-time" system had disappeared when Sister Genevieve arrived but the mission remained that of helping the girls to get an education for something better than the life of a mill worker.
Before long, Sister Genevieve was encouraging girls to rise above their circumstances, and to do better for themselves .
The Hierarchy decided to build a new secondary school- St Louise's - in the Falls, and asked the sisters to run it for them. Its principal when it opened in 1958 was Sister Ita Polley and Sister Genevieve was appointed vice-principal.
The sisters took the view that the children in their secondary school would get as good an education as could be provided in any grammar school.
They were implacably opposed to the selection system in which children who passed an examination at 11 years of age were sent to grammar schools and others to secondary schools.
Illness forced Sister Ita to retire in 1963 and Sister Genevieve succeeded her. It was these two women and Maire McFadden, who became vice-principal in 1977, who played key roles in the development of St Louise's.
Sister Genevieve was a tall, good-looking, imposing figure of whom many of the girls and teachers were terrified: "teachers are sheep and must be led" she once said.
But the unchanging message which she gave her girls in assembly and which underpinned the school ethos was: "This isn't a second-class school for second-class people. You are as good, if not better, than the girls in any other school in town."
By the time the Troubles broke out, St Louise's was giving girls an excellent education which got them into the civil service and other career employment and out of the dead-end of unskilled work.
With the Troubles came a new role, that of preserving the school as a haven for students despite the chaos and suffering around them.
The British learned to open their roadblocks when Sister Genevieve and her girls appeared. She abhorred violence and condemned the IRA.
Many students lost parents to sectarian murder or in conflict with the British army. Her approach was to encourage the girls to come back to the stability of the school as quickly as possible.
Indeed, such events as riots would simply not be accepted by her as a reason for not turning up for school in uniform and on time the next morning.
She angered Republicans in 1978 when she accepted an OBE and in 1983 when she arranged a visit to the school by Jane Prior, wife of the British Secretary of State.
In the meantime, the school had been expanding. Numbers more than doubled from 1,000 in 1969 to 2,400 in 1979.
Today it is the largest single-sex school in Europe.
In dealing with officialdom, she was absolutely single-minded and went over the heads of officials to get the answers she wanted, a trait which made her deeply unpopular among many of them.
Indeed, her biographer, John Rae, in his fascinating book Sister Genevieve (published 2001 by Little Brown) reported that the word most frequently used by adults to describe her pursuit of the interests of the school was "ruthless".
The same view might have been held by the clergy who crossed swords with her. She had many conflicts with the diocesan trust which owned the school, because of her view that it is better to do what needs to be done and apologise afterwards than to ask permission in the first place.
She retired in 1988 and engaged in many activities.
She visited Republican and Loyalist prisoners in jail, and was accepted by both sides, though not always by prison officers.
She was also a member of the Senate of Queen's University, a member of the Northern Ireland Curriculum Council and of the Secretary of State's Standing Advisory Commission on Human Rights.
In 1994 a stroke left her unable to speak. She was looked after by Sister Declan Kelly, carers and former pupils and by vice-principal, Mairead O'Halloran. Though she was paralysed on one side she was taught to paint by Ms McFadden.
Her honours included an Honorary MA in Education from Queen's University Belfast and an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Ulster.
Sister Genevieve (Mary) O'Farrell: born 1923; died, December 2001