My mother, Miriam Gallagher, who has died aged 77, was an inspirational figure in Ireland’s creative and medical communities. She juggled, with great style, three work-lives – parent, speech therapist and playwright.
She was born in Waterford City, Co Waterford, the second of five children of Maureen (nee Doran) and Michael O’Connor. Michael was a Bank of Ireland branch manager, which meant the family regularly moved home. This gave Miriam a lifelong taste for travel.
After attending the Convent of the Sacred Heart boarding school in Roscrea, Miriam left Ireland in 1957. She au paired in Europe, then moved to London to study speech therapy at the College of Speech Therapists (later Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists) and drama at London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (Lamda). Despite her student poverty, she had enormous fun, dancing the Charleston at Chelsea parties and visiting jazz clubs in Soho.
Returning to Ireland in 1962, Miriam was appointed speech therapist at St James’s hospital, Dublin – the first Irish layperson to practise in the country. She would later work in many other clinics and private practice. Dynamic and eloquent, she co-founded and later chaired the Irish Association of Speech & Language Therapists.
In 1963, Miriam met Gerhardt Gallagher, a forester and visual artist. They married in 1966 and had three children. Defying convention, Miriam kept working – and produced her first book, Let’s Help Our Children Talk (1977).
Miriam had been writing fiction for several years through the community centre Grapevine Arts, and was developing ideas for plays when her work came to the attention of Claire Wilson, a drama teacher in Mountjoy prison. She commissioned Miriam to write a play to be performed by male prisoners at the Dublin theatre festival. Fancy Footwork (1983) received glowing reviews – but nobody was as shocked as Miriam on learning that, after the final performance, her lead actor had escaped.
Over the next 35 years, Miriam’s writing reached audiences worldwide. Her plays were ambitious, surreal and wickedly funny. She had particular affection for her Interludes, celebrations of renowned Irish composers. My favourite was her one-woman show Shyllag, which I directed in 1993 at Andrews Lane theatre, Dublin. Miriam was also an accomplished screenwriter and fiction author – her short film Gypsies (1995) was broadcast on RTÉ and she wrote a novel, Song for Salamander (2004), and two story collections.
In 2012, Miriam was diagnosed with cancer and kidney disease. She found illness frustrating, but kept writing. Her second story collection, Night in Havana, was published last year, and in her final week in the hospice she had a pen in hand, editing new stories.
She is survived by Gerhardt, by their two daughters, Etain and me, and son, Donnacha, and by her siblings, Valerie, Michael and Fidelma.
