Cross-party tributes in Dáil to late former FG TD Nuala Fennell

TRIBUTES WERE paid in the Dáil to the late Nuala Fennell, former Fine Gael TD for Dublin South and first minister of state for women’s affairs, who died in August.

Fine Gael leader Enda Kennydescribed Ms Fennell, who also served as a senator, as "part of an irreversible movement that made the status of women a political issue for the first time in Ireland".

Ms Fennell’s husband Brian and family were in the Dáil for the tributes and a minute’s silence in her honour.

Mr Kenny said: "It is a testament to her life and career that, despite her illness, she put pen to paper and completed her political memoir, Nuala Fennell: Political Woman – A Memoir, just a few weeks before she passed away."

He said: “Nuala described the loneliness of being part of what she deemed an almost exclusively male club during her first period in the Dáil”.

She made “an outstanding contribution as a politician to increasing awareness of domestic violence and the necessity to provide shelter, through the women’s aid movement, for battered wives and those at the receiving end of male domestic violence”.

He added: “It is a measure of the society we then had that the late archbishop Dermot Ryan, she tells us in her book, refused to have his photograph taken with her.

“She was centrally responsible for the abolition of the concept of illegitimacy in Ireland and in establishing a mediation scheme for those whose marriages had broken down.”

Taoiseach Brian Cowendescribed her as "a person and politician of the highest calibre". He said "compassion and commitment were at the core of her politics. She was a woman of great energy and her whole purpose in public life was to advance the cause of equality in Irish society. She was a moderniser and someone who believed passionately in advancing the role of women in Irish life. Her achievements in this regard are significant and she leaves behind a hugely distinguished legacy of improving and promoting equality of opportunity for women in this country."

Labour leader Eamon Gilmoredescribed Ms Fennell as a leader who took on powerful forces opposed to social change, "and brought about the kind of social changes and personal and social freedoms that we now enjoy, and that to some extent, we take for granted."