My mother, Rose McCann, who has died aged 95, in the 1960s joined the struggle for peace in Northern Ireland.
Part of a generation that tried to resist the anarchy, mob rule and life-denying cynicism of the era, Rose made a home for our family in west Belfast, and planted her flamboyant, abundant garden in surroundings scarred by vandalism, barbed wire and political graffiti. She worked as a counter clerk at the local post office, which was weekly raided by Republican thugs. Her positive perseverance inspired her neighbours, at a time when even the efforts of Mother Teresa of Calcutta to empower local people in Ballymurphy were thwarted by local politics. As Mother Teresa waited to catch a train out of Belfast in 1971, the nuns brought her to my mother for a meal.
In the late 70s Rose marched as a member of the Peace People organisation. At one point she was treated for a nervous breakdown, and then cancer, but after my father’s early death in 1993 she gained a new lease of life.
She created cross-community projects, including quiz nights, afternoon teas and discussion evenings about local problems, and brainstorming sessions to deconstruct sectarian division. Rose and her fellow campaigners also sent letters and met politicians to further the cause of integrated education. She learned yoga and line dancing, sang in the choirs of St Patrick’s Church, Lisburn, and Queen’s University Belfast, and visited Brazil in her 80s.
One of the six children of William Hughes, a ladies’ hairdresser, and Jeannie (nee Corrigan), and named Margaret, but known as Rosaleen – “little Rose”, she was born into a Catholic family in Omagh, not long after Ireland was divided. The family moved to Belfast a few years later.
After the cot death of Rose’s younger brother, Cyril, Jeannie kept her children close and made Rose late for primary school every morning, with the result that she was beaten daily. She was happier at Dominican college, Fortwilliam, and remembered arriving one morning after a wartime blitz to find it untouched among the rubble of the Antrim Road.
She left school at 16, but could always find, discard and pick up another job – during a stint at the aircraft company Short and Harland, she learned book-keeping. In 1959, she married Raphael MacCann, and they moved to Manchester so he could find work as a postman. Rosaleen became a secretary at Manchester grammar school while raising two babies, and the family adopted a more anglicised spelling of Rafe’s surname. But Rose was soon disillusioned with her marriage and, missing Belfast’s “warm humanity”, she insisted they return in 1965, as the Troubles escalated.
She is survived by her children – my sister, Carol, and me – and three grandchildren, Amy, Lucy and Robin, and her sister, Eileen.
