Health tourism pioneer and free-thinking writer

Born: 12 June 1922

Died: 28 August 2022

Sonia Kelly, who has died at the age of 100 after a long, unconventional and colourful life, was best known as the pioneering founder of the Cloona Health Retreat in Westport more than 50 years ago. It was the first of its kind in Ireland. Her ideas on health tourism and nutrition in the 1970s were way ahead of their time and the retreat still operates on the basic principles that she established back then. She was also a prolific columnist, writer, artist and entrepreneur.

Born Sonia McMullin in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), the daughter of Harry McMullin, a tea planter with ancestral connections to Sligo, and Aileen Holmes from Roscommon, she was brought up initially in the UK but orphaned at the age of 14 with her only sibling, Michael. Later she moved to Moyard in Connemara (her father’s tea business partner was from Roundstone) and went to school in Kylemore Abbey, chauffeured there two days a week where she later recalled she was taught “elocution, posture and music”. After a period living with aunts and riding horses in Easkey, she was conscripted into the Auxiliary Territorial Army in the UK, where she learned how to drive but later deserted.

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In order to survive she sold fish from the back of a baby Ford, then started a taxi service and even made sacks at one point

Back in Ireland, she stayed at the Old Head Hotel in Louisburgh owned by Alec Wallace and while there was introduced by Captain Hazel, a friend of Alec’s, to a handsome fisherman 10 years her senior named Josie (Jay) Kelly, the youngest of 18 from an island in Clew Bay. They married in 1939, much to the disapproval of her army relatives. Times were tough for the young couple – “you had to be resourceful or die,” she once recalled. They had five children – later schooled by the writer Eric Cross who remained there until he died – and in order to survive she sold fish from the back of a baby Ford, then started a taxi service and even made sacks at one point.

In the 1950s, enabled by a small inheritance from the sale of the plantation, the Kellys gave up fishing to buy an old woollen mill in Cloona in the foothills of Croagh Patrick near Westport for around IR£2,000. There they started a weaving business called Irish Craft, making crios cushions, hats, scarves, jumpers, waistcoats and skirts which sold to the US. Jackie Kennedy was photographed in one of the jumpers, as was showjumping legend Tommy Wade. The business thrived for years, but when tourism was affected by the Troubles, it put an end to its success and closed down.

An avowed atheist with an interest in eastern religions, she had eccentric plans to house Tibetan refugees after the 1959 Tibetan uprising and set up an independent Buddhist retreat in Cloona

An avowed atheist with an interest in eastern religions, she had eccentric plans to house Tibetan refugees after the 1959 Tibetan uprising and set up an independent Buddhist retreat in Cloona – the chief monk of the first four monks used to cycle around the place in his orange robes – but this foundered when the Irish government refused to let them stay.

After their departure, the idea of a health centre started to take root as she became interested in various aspects of nutrition and health having been influenced by the works of US naturopath Herbert Shelton. How to breathe, eat and exercise correctly was and still remains the basic philosophy of Cloona today which is now run by her youngest son, Dhara who took it over with his late wife Emer Gaffney in the 1980s.

Sharp mind

Right into old age, she remained particular about what she ate and lived on a diet of fish, vegetables and fruit. Her book, A System of Personal Evolution, was published by the Mayo News in the early 1980s and another, The Hungry Road, short stories of rural poverty in the Famine, was self-published in the early 1990s. Another, Doris – Ecstasy for the Elderly was published by Author House in the UK about the escapades of an OAP and her madcap encounters with authority.

Jay died in 1990 after an eight-year illness; Sonia retired to a converted stone coach house at Cloona, leaving the running of the business to Dhara. Never afraid to speak her mind, she wrote for the Irish Farmers’ Journal for 10 years and became a regular columnist for the Mayo News. Even at 90, she remained active with a sharp mind.

Among her many admirers (including a posse of feral cats) was one well-known writer whose postcard from Brooklyn, dated July 2005, she kept on her kitchen dresser. It read: “Your very stimulating columns have just reached me here. They are very subversive for Ireland. Thank you for reminding me that there are fellow thinkers out there. Above all, keep up the good work — Nuala O Faolain.”

Sonia Kelly is survived by her children, Aluine, Morna, Aengus, Ciaran and Dhara, sons-in-law Bob and John, daughters-in-law Helen and Rose, grandchildren, great grandchildren, nieces and nephews. Her brother Michael predeceased her.