The Third Daughter: A Retrospective

By Eileen O'Mara Walsh

"Fascinating both as a social history and as a portrait of a talented woman with a generous soul." Susan McKay, The Irish Times

In this moving and elegant self-portrait Eileen O'Mara Walsh takes us from an unconventional Limerick childhood to years spent in Dublin, London and Paris, returning to Ireland in the 1970s to pioneer a burgeoning tourism industry.

The memoir begins with the marriage of her father Power O'Mara, War of Independence exile, to her mother Joan Follwell, English socialist and protegé;e of Bertrand Russell. As the family falls from middle-class comfort into genteel poverty among the literary and theatrical characters of 1950s and 60s Dublin, the reader is offered fascinating glimpses of Brendan Behan, Noel Browne, Micheál Mac Liammóir, Conor Cruise O'Brien and others.

Eileen leaves Ireland for London at eighteen, coming of age in her brush with left wing groups and then moving to Paris, where she falls in love for the first time with an older French artist. She returns to Dublin in 1962 to the bohemian milieu of painters and writers, among them Patrick Kavanagh, Sean O'Sullivan, Brian Bourke, Camille Souter and Aidan Higgins. There she meets Mayo painter Owen Walsh, embarking on a
lifelong and transformative relationship. In the Irish Times, Susan McKay notes that 'in the 'maelstrom of male egos' that was literary Dublin she has already realised that 'the women who survived in this society had to be Amazonian by force of circumstances if not by nature'.'

The deaths of her parents and sister Ruth are tempered by the birth of her son Eoghan in 1975. She describes how single motherhood galvanized her into establishing her own company and how she found herself at the forefront of Irish corporate life during the 1980s and 90s.

These memories yield shrewd and amusing views of politicians encountered along the way – O'Malley, Haughey, Ahern – as well as the colourful but lesser-known characters who populated Dublin at that time. This lively record traces the arc of a hundred years of family history, from the birth of her father in 1900 to the death of her great love, Owen Walsh, in 2002. The Third Daughter is a poignant, passionate chronicle of a fulfilled life, lyrically rendered.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Lilliput Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781843516538

Eileen O'Mara Walsh

Eileen O'Mara Walsh was born in Limerick in 1941 and began her career with Bord Fáilte in Paris and the Usitravel Group, Dublin, in the early 1970s. She went on to set up her own company, O’Mara Travel, in 1978, and secured the franchise for Club Méditerranée. She established two further companies, Visit Ireland Inc. in 1981, and Heritage Island Ltd in 1992. She was Chair and Director of Great Southern Hotels from 1984 to 1999, a Director of Aer Lingus, Chairwoman of Forbairt from 1993 to 1998, and established the Irish Tourist Industry Confederation in the mid 1980s. She was also Chairwoman of Opera Ireland and Governor of St Patrick’s Hospital. She is currently Trustee of the Medieval Trust and Dublinia, and a member of the International Women’s Forum. On retiring from business in 2006 she was given an honorary doctorate by the Dublin Institute of Technology, and in 2009 was awarded a first-class honours degree in French and English by University College Dublin. Eileen lives in south County Dublin.