Born: 22 March 1923, Ireland
Died: 29 December 2001
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: Sister Genevieve, Mary O’Farrell
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Bridget Hourican. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
O’Farrell Mary, Sr Genevieve (1923–2001), headmistress, was born Mary O’Farrell on 22 March 1923 in Tullamore, Co. Offaly, fifth child and only daughter of William O’Farrell, farm manager, and his wife, Catherine. She was educated locally by the Sisters of Mercy and was a bright but shy student. Her decision to enter the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul surprised people since she was not notably pious, and the life of that order was known to be especially rigorous. She was, however, struggling with her vocation and was attracted by the fact that the Daughters of Charity were not nuns but members of an apostolic society, and were not cloistered. On 27 November 1941 she entered the society’s house in the Navan Road, Dublin, where she spent a few months caring for mentally disabled children before transferring to St Catherine’s Seminary, Blackrock. She was admitted a seminary sister on 9 March 1942 and donned the habit the following year. To her disappointment she was then sent for teacher training; her preference was to work directly with the poor and she had an aversion to teaching. However, she entered St Joseph’s Technical High School for girls in Manchester in summer 1943. The following year she enrolled at Victoria University, Manchester, but failed her final exams, so had to take her teaching qualification in Sedgley Park College of Education, Manchester. Her first placement was in a boys’ orphanage, where she was given the name ‘Sr Genevieve’. From here she was sent in 1950 to teach at St Mary’s primary school in Lanark, Scotland, a country she grew to love and always returned to for holidays. Six years later she was sent to Belfast.
Arriving in January 1956 to teach at St Vincent’s primary school off the Falls Road, she was appointed in 1958 vice-principal of the Falls Road new secondary modern, St Louise’s. She made her mark immediately; although not appointed principal until 1963, she was known long before this as the most influential person in the school. A vocal opponent of the 11-plus system, which determined on the basis of an examination at age 11 the type of education a child would get, she refused to accept the valuation of her school as an institution for academic failures. Her priorities were discipline, qualifications, and confidence-building, and her obstacles were poor funding (in 1961 there were thirty-eight teachers to 1,000 students) and the students’ family backgrounds of high unemployment and low expectations. Her achievements were considerable from the start. She persuaded an ever-increasing number of girls to stay on past the school-leaving age of 15: by 1962 a minority were studying for A levels, while the majority took a combination of O levels and commercial courses such as book-keeping. The school acted as an unofficial employment agency for school leavers, and became known by certain businesses as a provider of efficient, well-mannered employees. Through a system of ‘courtesy points’ Sr Genevieve instilled self-confidence and manners. One of her first acts was designing a uniform, including beret and gloves, which had to be worn on the way to and from school; she was known to patrol the streets ensuring this.
A formidable figure, Sr Genevieve cultivated an aura of aloofness and authority. She was helped by the strength of will that had characterised her from a young age and by her tall, striking appearance. A former student, Mary Costello, fictionalised her in a novel as Sr Bonaventure: ‘stern, courageous, intelligent; and for a nun, unconventional, an odd-bod. She was also the only nun with sex appeal I’d ever met . . . But she was hard as yesterday’s baps . . . my nerve-endings would contract at the sound of her resonant, Free State voice’ (Rae, 67). Another description was as ‘Margaret Thatcher with a spiritual dimension’ (ibid., 113). However she inspired affection, as well as respect, by her championing of staff and students to the outside world. In her demand for equal status with other schools she took on the prejudices of the education authorities and the catholic church towards working-class girls. Many churchmen found her unnecessarily strident and feminist; however, Cahal Daly, bishop of Down and Connor (1982–90) and archbishop of Armagh (1990–96), though he disagreed with her opposition to selective schooling, paid tribute to her achievements, particularly her stance against paramilitaries.
With the arrival of the Troubles in 1969 came a new role: keeping the school a haven amid chaos. Aware that her students’ lives were now abnormal – many family members were in jail, on the run, or dead – she insisted on maintaining standards and refused to make allowances. Whatever the family trauma or civic upset, students were expected in school on time. If buses were cancelled, they were advised to get up early and walk. At assembly prayers were offered up indiscriminately for all victims of the Troubles. St Louise’s was the first school in Belfast to introduce a cultural studies course, and sixth-formers took part in weekly discussions with their protestant counterparts.
Sr Genevieve took on the British army, refusing to allow them to search the school and, on one occasion, demanding that a soldier who snatched a girl’s beret make a public apology. However, she stated publicly that the most dangerous aspect of life in the Troubles was the paramilitaries’ grip on communities. The school was close to Milltown cemetery, where prominent IRA funerals took place, but Sr Genevieve refused to close the school on these occasions, relaxing this rule only for the funeral of Bobby Sands. Her stance against paramilitaries earned her the title of ‘best man on the Falls Road’ and did her little harm within the community, but her cooperation with British authorities roused criticism. Her acceptance of an OBE in 1978 and her invitation in 1983 to Jane Prior, wife of the secretary of state, to visit the school brought angry denunciations in the Andersonstown News. However, she insisted that enhancing the image of the school benefited the students, and in general her achievements were enough to silence criticism. By 1979 St Louise’s was the largest girls’ school in western Europe; in ten years the numbers had more than doubled from 1,000 to 2,400 after the Ministry of Education had decided, on the basis of the school’s success, to enlarge it rather than build a new one. A significant proportion of the students (perhaps 20 per cent) had qualified for grammar schools but chose to attend St Louise’s. Shortly after Sr Genevieve’s retirement in 1988, it was one of five schools out of 573 to win an award of £50,000 from the Jerwood Foundation.
On her retirement Sr Genevieve served on numerous public boards, including the senate of QUB and the secretary of state’s standing advisory commission on human rights; but these commitments could not meet the demands of her vocation, so she began visiting paramilitary prisoners, whom she encouraged to study for Open University courses. Among the loyalist prisoners she befriended were two of the ‘Shankill butchers’, notorious for their gruesome murders of innocent catholics; she insisted that as they had renounced violence they deserved compassion. Her visits to prisoners continued right up to a stroke in May 1994, which left her paralysed on one side and speechless. After a year in hospital she moved back into the Daughters of Charity’s house in Balmoral Avenue, where she was cared for by sisters, and where she died, 29 December 2001, aged 78.