Clodagh Finn: The many lives of ‘a giant in Irish tourism’

Her anniversary then, which fell on April 3, provides a good opportunity to recall the third daughter of Power O’Mara, a War of Independence exile and son of the great tenor Joseph O’Mara, and Joan Follwell, English socialist and former lover of Bertrand Russell. At least that is how she describes her parents in her fascinating memoir The Third Daughter.

Indeed, we must add ‘writer’ to Eileen’s list of achievements. And scholar. When she was in her sixties, she graduated with a first-class honours in French and English from University College Dublin in 2009.

When she sat down to write, she intended to tell her parents’ story. Her father came from the famous O’Mara bacon family in Limerick, while her mother, Joan Follwell, deserves a book of her own.

“She was the first woman to wear slacks in Limerick … and was famous for her hats — or rather hat — as she always wore a variation of the same one, a turban… She was known, among the more daring of the local lads, as ‘the Egyptian prime minister’,” her daughter recalls.

Eileen intended to focus on her parents’ life but happily also writes about her own, charting her adventures in Belgium, London, and Paris before returning to Dublin in the 1970s where she blazed many trails.

A single paragraph from her obituary gives an insight into her dizzying list of achievements: “She was the first woman to chair the board of a commercial State company, Great Southern Hotels; the founder and first chairwoman of the Irish Tourist Industry Confederation; and chairwoman of Forbairt, now Enterprise Ireland, for five years. Her many other roles included director of Aer Lingus, chairwoman of Opera Ireland, governor of St Patrick’s Hospital, a trustee of the Medieval Trust and Dublinia, and a member of the International Women’s Forum.”

Background

Let’s backtrack, though, because her early years open a window to the artistic life of Dublin in the Fifties and shows what happens when a young woman has the opportunity to travel.

The O’Mara family moved to Dublin after a downturn in their fortunes in Limerick. Power O’Mara got a job as business manager of the avant-garde Globe Theatre in the capital, a job that meant a young Eileen moved in an artistic milieu.

 The poet Patrick Kavanagh once paid her bus fare home when she was a teenager, and she recalls the evening her mother threw Brendan Behan out after he put his boots on the family kitchen table

In January 1959, Eileen moved to London where she spent three “eventful and eye-opening years”. She heard Bertrand Russell, the man who had sent several love letters to her mother, speak about nuclear disarmament in Trafalgar Square. The irony was not lost on her, although she did not approach him afterward.

She and her sister Mary, an anti-nuclear campaigner, had come to hear him speak. Mary has a story of her own to tell. She trained as a nurse and then worked selling encyclopedias to American troops in Germany before becoming the first CIE rail hostess in Ireland and later working with the Economist in London.

Mary was also involved in left-wing politics and African affairs. Through her, Eileen met several people involved in the fight for a free Africa, including “revolutionary hero, Joshua Nkomo, a genial giant of a man from the Ndebele tribe of Southern Rhodesia, known as the father of black nationalism”.

Later in Paris, she led a sort of double life, working as a secretary with the World Union of Catholic Women’s Organisations by day and mixing with writers and artists introduced to her by her Parisian artist boyfriend by night. In 1961, she was part of a delegation that met the Pope during the International Congress. Here is her amusing and gently irreverent memory of the event: “I recall nothing of the ceremony itself, only my shock and horrified amazement when the door opened and a retinue of Swiss Guards carried in the Pope, seated on a silken litter, bedecked in a gold-and-white jewelled chasuble and, I swear, tiny jewelled slippers on his little fat feet.”

She moved between Dublin and Paris in the 1960s and 1970s. When she met Mayo artist Owen Walsh, her friends warned she would be better off with a more ‘steady fellow’. “But once I had made the commitment it didn’t seem right to turn my back just because he was difficult and mercurial … As Paul Durcan so memorably said, he ‘never licked the buttock of any clique’,” she said later.

They separated but remained in contact all of their lives, and she nursed him in his final years. Their son Eoghan was born in 1975. By then Eileen was a single mother and economic independence was her priority. 

Travel company

She set up her own company O’Mara Travel in 1978 and had an early coup when she discovered a booking from the Garden Club of Monaco included its President, Her Serene Highness Princess Grace.

Her former boss rang from Paris, asking if she had the boyaux [guts] to pull it off. She did, and then some.

The success of the trip brought her kudos and a big boost in business, though it meant having to learn to juggle single motherhood and career. She did so, she said, by developing the valuable talent of compartmentalising her life: “I would leave the office, jump into my flashy yellow Volvo (another public declaration of confidence) usually (in pre-metre days) parked right outside the office and tear out to Ranelagh … I would reach home with all vestiges of O’Mara Travel wiped clean from my mind and settle in for a blissful couple of hours in perfect harmony with my two favourite companions, Eoghan and Sophy [the cat]”.

She worried about her son, yet was continually surprised that he showed no ill effects from “being passed around like a parcel”.

Eoghan O’Mara Walsh, now chief executive of the organisation founded by his mother, the Irish Tourism Industry Confederation, says there were no ill effects at all.

On the contrary, his mother taught him so much, he says: “She taught me to be confident of my own ability to think things through, to follow my instincts rather than follow the herd.”

Good advice from a woman who leaves so much behind.