Funeral tributes for Mrs Haughey
THE wife of former taoiseach Charles Haughey was remembered at her funeral yesterday as ‘a nationalist to her fingertips’.
Maureen Haughey’s daughter Eimear Mulhern also told mourners that her mother was very proud of her late husband.
Ms Mulhern said: ‘It was so unbelievably fitting that Maureen passed on St Patrick’s Day.
‘Maureen was Irish to the core, she was a daughter of Ireland, a republican in the truest sense of the word, a nationalist to her fingertips.’
The funeral of Mrs Haughey – the daughter of Seán Lemass, another ex-taoiseach – took place at St Sylvester’s Parish Church in Malahide, north Dublin, yesterday morning.
Mrs Haughey died at the age of 91 in the Mater Hospital in Dublin on March 17 following a short illness.
Ms Mulhern said: ‘Her Lemass heritage was very important to her. Quietly she took enormous pride in her father and his legacy.’
Hundreds of mourners gathered for yesterday’s ceremony, including former taoiseach Bertie Ahern and Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin. Former Fianna Fáil minister Michael Woods and businessman Dermot Desmond were also in attendance.
Ms Mulhern was joined at the service by her brothers Conor, Ciarán and Seán. She said her mother was ‘very proud of my father Charlie Haughey’, adding: ‘She was fiercely loyal and she was in his corner at all times.’
Ms Mulhern also said her brother, Dublin Bay North TD Seán Haughey, had been helping their mother compile a memoir. She concluded with one of her mother’s last recollections, in which she said: ‘I think I have led a very interesting life. First of all growing up with my father and being in the early days of Fianna Fáil, and then with Charlie... Living with him, life was never dull, whether it was good or bad, an eventful life.’
Mrs Haughey was buried at St Fintan’s Cemetery in Sutton after the ceremony.
She married Charles Haughey in 1951. He died in 2006.
After his death, she lived in a house at the edge of what had been the family’s 250-acre estate in Kinsealy, north Dublin.