María Isabel FoleyMARÍA ISABEL (Maribel) Foley (née Butler), who has died aged 82, was a university lecturer in Spanish and a translator into Spanish of many notable works of Irish literature.
Her love of Spain and her academic career in University College Dublin mirrored her family history. She was born in in 1926 into a Wild Geese family who had moved to Spain from Ireland during the 18th century.
Educated by the Society of the Sacred Heart in Madrid, she witnessed the impact of the Spanish Civil War which left a deep impression on her and, on her own admission, instilled in her a great sense of courage.
During the 1940s she read for the licenciate in classics and philosophy at the Complutense University in Madrid. Later she obtained the doctorate in Spanish Philology and Literature from her alma mater.
In 1956, when the noteworthy Patrick McBride – professor of Romance Languages at University College Dublin – was establishing the UCD Overseas Archive, she was recruited by him as an assistant lecturer in Spanish.
On the day after her arrival in Ireland, she met the secretary of the Dublin Spanish Society, Brian Foley from Athenry, who had to engage in a three-year pursuit to secure her hand in marriage.
Their wedding took place 50 years ago on September 24th, 1959, and it proved to be a long and happy relationship that was blessed with two daughters, Isabel and Ina.
At a time when married women were not encouraged to have careers outside the home, Maribel Foley was one of those remarkable figures who achieved a fine balance between her professional and familial responsibilities.
Furthermore, her strength of character, deep sense of justice and her courage enabled her to help achieve better conditions for women in the workplace: in this instance equality of pay and conditions for women, in particular mothers, working in UCD.
Apart from such activities, her scholarly contribution to academic life was ground-breaking in her research field of Spanish Studies.
Her interest in the contemporary novel and comparative literature resulted in her comparison of the works of EM Forster and Miguel Delibes which she submitted as her doctoral thesis at the Complutense University in Madrid in 1974.
Significantly, she was one of the first scholars to take an academic interest in the works of Kate O’Brien. O’Brien had written on Spain and some of her novels were inspired by Spanish themes.
Foley made great efforts to promote a revival of interest and a wider appreciation of O’Brien’s works among the wider public in the English-speaking world.
Indefatigable in her energetic approach to intellectual engagement, debate and research, after retirement from UCD in 1991, she continued her comparative literary interests and translations.
Between 1991 and 2006, she translated various works by Kate O’Brien, William Trevor, Colm Tóibín, Patrick McCabe and John Banville into Spanish.
In this respect, she did tremendous service to Irish literature by making the works of the aforementioned authors available to the Spanish-speaking world.
Her serious and solid commitment to the promotion of closer cultural relations between Ireland and Spain not only manifested itself in literary scholarship and translation, it was also evident in the challenging manner in which she sparked off responses and enlivened the interest of her students in Hispanic Studies.
She was also the first director of the UCD Spanish Departments Erasmus Programme that enabled Irish students to broaden their intellectual and cultural horizons with corresponding Spanish universities.
The UCD president’s report of 1990-1991 noted her generosity to students and how Foley had arranged “formal hours for the return of essays on a time-consuming individual basis, set up extra classes for the linguistically weak, and was always available for consultation about problems, literary, linguistic or personal”.
Her funeral in Foxrock, Dublin, was attended by a noticeably large number of her former students, many of whom had interrupted their holidays abroad, bearing testimony to their appreciation of her.
Academic snobbery had no place for her. She was equally at home as a lively and engaging participant in formal milieux such as the International Association for Studies of Irish Literatures, the International Symposium on Spanish-Irish Relations, the Merriman Summer School and the Kate O’Brien Weekend as well as being intellectually provocative in the cultural discourses of her local, informal and much loved Sandymount Women’s Group.
Foley could be regarded as the ideal personification of all that is magnificent in the fusion of the Spanish and Irish cultures that informed her remarkable life. Eloquent testimony to this fact was given by King Juan Carlos of Spain, when on December 6th, 1999, he conferred on her the Cross of the Order of Isabel la Católica.
The presentation ceremony took place in early spring 2000.
She died unexpectedly and peacefully last month while on holiday with her family in Spain.
Foley was predeceased by her husband but is survived by her daughters and her five grandchildren
María Isabel (Maribel) Foley: born September 27th, 1926; died August 12th, 2009