A resilient Irish grandmother who was born before the 1916 Rising and had memories of the Black and Tans as a young child, has died aged 105.
Margaret Coleman, originally from Fairymount in County Roscommon, but who lived in Athlone after returning from the UK, passed away peacefully on Monday.
Born in April 1916, just three weeks before the 1916 Rising, the centenarian was one of Ireland’s oldest surviving women.
She had a strong Catholic faith and said in an interview last year with the Westmeath Independent that she said “four or five Rosaries a day” and believed the secret to her long life was “the good Lord himself”.
Margaret lived through the Irish War of Independence from 1919 to 1921, where she remembered the Black and Tans “going around in trucks”, as well as the Irish Civil War and two world wars.
As a teenager, she emigrated to England to train as a nurse. She worked in Essex Hospital nursing British soldiers during World War II and remembers a bomb falling on the hospital.
Margaret was married to her late husband Henry Coleman for 61 years before he passed away in 2015. He was the local postman in her hometown in Ireland and she met him on a visit home to Ireland in 1949.
They married in 1954 and lived in Mottingham, south-east London, and raised three children together, Sean, Mary and an adopted son, Gerard, and they also had two grandsons.
The couple returned to Ireland in the 1980s after Margaret retired at the age of 65 and settled in Athlone.
Her funeral mass will take place on Friday, January 21, in St Anthony's Franciscan Church at 11.30am followed by burial afterwards in Coosan cemetery.
