Carmel Heaney obituary: Diplomat who took on dissident Irish republicans and sympathisers in US
Born: July 22nd 1924 Died: August 13th 2026 Carmel Heaney was Ireland’s Consul General in Boston, covering the US ’s New England states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont from 1969 to 1983, during the earlier years of the Northern Ireland Troubles. It was a fraught period in Irish America. Her brief from the Department of Foreign Affairs was to dissuade Irish Americans in the New England states, sympathetic to those suffering injustices in Northern Ireland, from sending money to support paramilitary causes there, then estimated at $3,000-$4,000 a month. This had immediate effects where she personally was concerned. In January 1973, republican sympathisers besieged the Irish Consulate General offices in Boston and took control of it for a day in protest at then taoiseach Jack Lynch’s government’s proscribing membership of republican and loyalist paramilitary organisations. Heaney and her team were trapped inside, their communications blocked. However, they succeeded in phoning local TV and radio stations and the newspapers before police arrived to arrest the occupying protesters. Republicans and other sympathisers then began ringing her home at all hours of the day and night to abuse her and play rebel songs down the line. Such was the level of harassment that she and her husband had to move out temporarily. She continued to be proactive in preventing dissident Irish republicans from being honoured in Boston parades. Then came 1981 and the IRA hunger strikes in Northern Ireland. In April of that year, 10 members of the Irish Prisoners of War Committee, Noraid, and the Irish National Caucus burst into the Irish consulate in Boston with a signed letter given to Heaney, which demanded that the Irish government intervene to prevent further hunger striker deaths. They refused to leave the Consulate unless she met them. She did so, for two hours of what was described as robust discussion, the content of which was not revealed by her. As the hunger strikers died, protests by Irish republican sympathisers grew ever more intense in Boston, with some picketing Heaney’s home, carrying placards and throwing stones at her door, while others picketed the Consulate building. In subsequent correspondence with foreign affairs, Heaney made a point of noting that the great majority of Irish organisations in Boston had not been involved in any of this. The eldest of eight children, Carmel O’Leary, as she was then, grew up in Dublin’s Fairview . She entered the Civil Service and then began studying at UCD in the evenings for a BA in history and French, followed by an MA in history, becoming a tutor in history there. In 1965, she became a third secretary at the then department of external affairs. As the US was perceived then to be more accepting of women diplomats, she was posted to San Francisco as Vice-Consul that year and was later transferred to Boston in the same capacity, soon becoming Consul General. While there, she met and married US citizenHenry Heaney. Her marriage meant she was required, under Irish law, to retire, but she resisted this. A local arrangement was agreed whereby, on retirement, she was brought back to the Consulate as a local employee, there being no marriage bar on women working in the US since 1964. She continued acting as Consul General on the understanding that she would be removed as soon as the department could find a man, or a single woman, to fill the role. When the marriage bar was finally removed in 1973, following Ireland’s entry to the then EEC, then minister for the now Department of Foreign Affairs, Garret FitzGerald, reinstated her as a civil servant, and she continued as Consul General in Boston. Such was her work for Irish culture during her time at the Consulate that she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Stonehill College, Massachusetts, for her services to Irish studies. Concurrent with her role in Boston, Heaney was also the only woman on the Irish delegation to the UN between 1966 and 1971, where she vigorously presented the Irish government’s opposition to Britain’s policy of internment without trial in Northern Ireland. In 1979, she rejoined the Irish delegation at the UN and was appointed to the Special Political Committee as Ireland’s Middle East and Cyprus expert, the second woman to do so for Ireland. Before leaving the US in 1983, Heaney was awarded the title Dean of the Boston Consular Corps in recognition of her services while in Boston. On return to Dublin, she was soon appointed to join Ireland’s representation at the UN in Geneva. Not long after she retired in 1989, her husband Henry died, but she continued to remain active in Dublin. She was an adviser to the US Embassy on its Fulbright scholarship programme for a time, as well as on the board of the National Library and at the RDS library in Ballsbridge. With a particular interest in Young Irelander William Smith O’Brien, believing he was something of a forgotten figure in Irish history, she prepared a lengthy study on his life. She began to write for Irish and Irish-US newspapers on international affairs, as well as travel pieces and book reviews. It included regular contributions to the Rite and Reason column in The Irish Times. She was a participant in the weekly philosophical discussion group, the Colloquy, and also took up hiking. To mark her 80th birthday, she climbed Carrauntoohil, Ireland’s highest mountain. At 100, Heaney wrote concerning the afterlife in one of her Rite and Reason columns, saying that: “The essential nature of heaven, whether referred to in the prayers of medieval mystics or used metaphorically in a secular, contemporary context, is that it is a state of happiness and that it lasts forever.” She died last August, aged 102, in Dublin’s Blackrock hospice. Her remains were donated to medical science.