Siobhán Cuffe Wallace Artist, conservationist and one half of Gogglebox’s ‘quirky’ D4 couple
Siobhán Cuffe Wallace was a printmaker/artist, writer, conservationist, and for several seasons, an unlikely personality on the Irish version of the reality television show, Gogglebox.
Born in Dublin, her mother was Patricia Skakel, a sister of Ethel Kennedy, wife of Robert F Kennedy and her father, Luan, a Dublin architect.
The two families kept in close contact over the years and Cuffe Wallace was particularly helpful when another member of the Boston-Irish clan, Jean Kennedy Smith, was appointed US ambassador to Ireland.
She was also particularly close to her cousin Kathleen Kennedy (Townsend) the first female governor of Maryland, as they were around the same age.
She had a great love of all things Irish, as well as learning the language in her later years.
Cuffe Wallace was passionately involved in the restoration of an ancient Gaelic tower house in Co Clare, which has been dated to the 1490s.
On the other side of her family, an ancestor Philip Little was the first Premier of Newfoundland.
At the time of her death, Cuffe Wallace was editing the letters and diaries of one of his descendants, Con Little, who was interned in the Curragh and spent some years on the continent after his release.
Cuffe Wallace died unexpectedly in Dublin on April 3 at the age of 73.
It was somewhat ironic that the day after her death, the HSE said it no longer had an interest in the ownership of Baggot Street Hospital. For some years, Cuffe Wallace and her friends, Tim Ryan and Mick Quinn, led a campaign to have them relinquish control of the landmark Victorian building, so it could be put to some form of community use.
Siobhán Cuffe grew up in Carrickgollogan, near the lead mines in south Co Dublin.
Her father, Luan Cuffe, was an architect whose great-grandfather, Joe, was a wealthy cattle merchant in ‘Cowtown’ off the North Circular Road. He featured in Joyce’s Ulysses as the employer who fired Leopold Bloom for an indiscretion.
She was the eldest of eight children, one of whom, Ciarán Cuffe, is a former Dublin councillor and TD for Dún Laoghaire and currently a Green Party MEP.
Cuffe Wallace attended University College Dublin to study what her husband, Pat Wallace, the former director of the National Museum of Ireland, calls “the family trade” of architecture.
Despite her new profession, her real interest lay elsewhere. She went back to France to study printmaking and etching under Stanley Hayter.
Returning to Ireland and still in her early 20s, she helped establish
the Mansion House Craft Fair. During this venture, she met the powerful civil servant, Pádraig Ó HUIGINN, secretary general to the Taoiseach, Charles Haughey. She asked him about starting a shop in the National Museum and he arranged for her to meet its new director Pat Wallace in 1989.
As he told the large congregation at her funeral mass, “she didn’t get the shop, but she got me instead”. They married in Boston in 1991.
“She had an amazing capacity for friendship across all social strata,” said her husband.
With her interest in architectural history she was known at the offices of the Blue Book in Baggot Street. They shared a building with Midas Productions, who were contracted to film Gogglebox for Virgin Media in Ireland.
“It was Siobhán’s idea and they loved the character of a ‘quirky’ D4 couple,” said Pat. For several seasons they featured in the programme, which was filmed in their Ballsbridge home every Saturday.
Through a quirk of fate and with the help of her mother, she bought Ballyportry Castle, near Corofin, Co Clare, which had been partially restored by its late owner, US architect, Bob Brown.
She became passionately involved in its completion with builder Peadar Burke from Gort, Co Galway, and had visited it just the week before she died.
As well as prints, etchings and constantly sketching, she wrote and illustrated the children’s book Oh We’re Lost about a dog, not unlike her own Jimbo, who gets lost in Herbert Park.
Cuffe Wallace was a doughty conservationist, becoming chair of the powerful Pembroke Road Residents Association and campaigning successfully and not so successfully on issues including the O’Rahilly House in Ballsbridge, BusConnects and Baggot Street Hospital.
Her funeral mass in St Mary’s Church, Haddington Road on Tuesday April 9, ended with a rendition of Raglan Road.