Dara Quigley, who died in April 2017 aged 36, was extraordinarily good at a ridiculously wide range of things.
She could rap. She could understand and explain high-level mathematical concepts. She could write with power and precision about politics, economics and the related vicissitudes of her own life. She could offer a breathtaking compliment. And she could dish out excoriating abuse.
It was the capacity for abuse that first brought her to public attention in November 2014, when Enda Kenny was making a speech in the GPO to launch the Government’s 1916 commemoration plans. Taking her cue from Kenny’s mention of ‘sacrifice’, Quigley walked up to Kenny, loudly demanding to know what sacrifices he had made. Coolly filming with her phone as she moved, she stood just below the Taoiseach and called him a traitor.
The Darndale woman was already an activist in the water movement, and when she began blogging about it she quickly became its unmistakable voice. Behind the brave facade, however, was a more deeply courageous struggle with addiction and other psychiatric issues – and with services, scarred by cutbacks, that were unwilling or unable to help her deal with her multiple burdens.
Inevitably an air of unfulfilled potential hangs over a life stalked by troubles, then tragically cut short: her astrophysics degree at Trinity uncompleted, in its final year, because heroin got the better of her, he columns in Dublin Inquirer abandoned because the writing discipline of traditional journalism was too much; her life lost in a Tipperary lake for reasons we can’t fully grasp.
But if the class war waged by the rich under the name of ‘austerity’ did finally get the better of her, Dara Quigley left us her brilliant words, the example of her fight, and the determination to do justice to the cause she held dearest: a truly equal society, in which every person gets a chance to create, to love, and to flourish.
