Mother described as an 'almost saintly woman'

IRISH ROOTS:TONY BLAIR has described his Irish mother as an "almost saintly woman" whose death when he was 22 changed his life forever and hardened him for the experiences ahead.

Hazel Blair (née Corscadden) who was brought up in Co Donegal, was from a Protestant family. Her father had been a Grand Master of one of the Orange Lodges and the family were "fiercely Protestant", Mr Blair says in his memoir My Journey.

Mr Blair said his mother was a “decent, lovely woman” who was shy and a little withdrawn in company, but his maternal grandmother was infected by bigotry which was “unfortunately accepted as the norm”.

He revealed that his grandmother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s in later life, had a moment of lucidity when he started to date Cherie Booth, who was a Catholic.

“Whatever else you do, son, never marry a Catholic,” she told her grandson.

Mr Blair said he loved going on holiday to Donegal every year and they would usually stay at the Sandhouse Hotel in Rossnowlagh, near Ballyshannon.

“At that beach I learned to swim in the freezing Atlantic Ocean. I had my first go at chasing girls, aged about 11. I was taught my first chords on the guitar. I drank my first Guinness,” he wrote echoing a statement he made when giving an address to the Joint Houses of the Oireachtas in 1998 when he told the assembly that “Ireland is in my blood”.

He contrasted his father, who was motivated and determined, with his mother, who was “shy, even a little withdrawn in company” and, because of her Irish background, did not share her husband’s Tory leanings.

Mr Blair said his brother Bill and their father kept his mother’s illness from him as he did his final law exams in Oxford. It was only when he came home at the end of his studies that his father revealed his mother had thyroid cancer and that she was dying.

“My world turned upside down, I could not imagine it,” he remembered. “Life was never the same after that. That was when the urgency took hold, the ambition hardened, the recognition grasped that life was finite and had to lived in that knowledge. I miss her every day of my life.”

Mr Blair said that even amid the euphoria surrounding his landslide victory in the 1997 general election, he thought of her. She would have been “utterly proud”, he wrote.

He noted that when he was growing up, Irish people were looked down as “inherently inferior” to British people and were to be employed as labourers but not in a bank. He said the Celtic Tiger and the efforts of U2, Roy Keane and Bob Geldof changed the perception of the Republic and of Irish people in general.