She withdrew quietly and gracefully as she had lived-to die. She was buried, without any fanfare: only the family assembled to see her off. No shots were fired over her grave but if anyone earned the Freedom of the City it was Sybil Le Brocquy. I have been thinking about her the last sad weeks and it’s only the beginning of a long sadness for she has left a gap which can never be filled. Sybil did not belong to the twentieth century. She would, I think, have been most at home with the great ladies of the nineteenth century. All those intelligent charming women who found their intellectual outlet in writing letters, keeping diaries which are now in valuable, who read all the new books with passionate fervour, helped young artists and writers and enjoyed the company of the great names in literature, and at the same time adored their children and reigned like queens over their orderly households.

Sybil, I suppose, would have been described as a blue-stocking and possibly even now might have earned that label but she also loved the sensual joys. She took infinite pleasure in her conservatory and her fragrant oldfashioned garden. "See those delphiniums. I grew them from seed. They were sent to mefrem Frank Hatch in Boston. I suppose it was illegal but I find all illegal things have a peculiar charm. Illegitimate children were once known as love children. Don’t you think that it is beautiful? The children of love ." and then she was of on her favourite subject - Stella’s love-child by Swift, a piece of history on which Sybil was an acknowledged authority. I think as I see her now in the mind’s eye which alas is all we have left, she looked like a Bronte heroine with those high-necked blouses, sensible shoes, black stockings and the hair neatly tucked away under a net. At the same time she emanated style.

Her achievements were remarkable. She was behind all the intellectual reforms and festivities in Dublin over the last forty years and this of course entailed incessant committee work. Four years we both sat on the same committee, a vague operation known as the Friends of the Gate Theatre. We used to adjourn for coffee after the meetings. "I find, when sitting in meetings it’s better not to turn your back on anyone," she said once with a wry smile, "because of the Dublin knife throwers. It’s safer to sit with your back to the wall!"

Her favourite lead-in was "Let’s be frank," or in more desperate moments, "let’s be perfectly frank and honest," and then you knew a slasher was coming. The essential fact about Sybil was she cared and she not only cared, she worked, she campaigned, she carried things through. She was not a radical - it was not in her nature - but she was a good old-fashioned liberal in that she hated injustice, loathed evils like apartheid, and worked untiringly for Civil Liberties. She despised violence and was a consistent gradualist, which the more pushy elements on committees found irritating; but when it came to the whisper in the Minister’s ear she was more potent than any agitator.

Up to the time of her fatal illness she was passionately campaigning for a total reform of the National Library. It was Sybil who by going straight to the Minister (and Ministers listened to Sybil) obtained the subsidy for the Gate Theatre. I suppose she was a gifted amateur except for the scholarly book on Swift and his ladies. Her true talent was for friendship, for dispensing encouragement, affection and admiration. If she admired you she had no inhibitions about expressing it and she was entirely free of envy or jealousy though I may say she could cast a cold eye on pretenders.

I lay these few flowers on the grave of someone who in her quiet way contributed much to the intellectual life of this city who was always in there fighting when the arts were threatened and the first to hasten to the defence of a friend. I last saw her [in] a parochial hall in Stillorgan, when a friend as a gesture of love, presented on the small stage a play which Sybil had written forty years ago. The hall was full of writers, artists and just old friends who had came to pay her tribute. There sat sat Sybil, surrounded by her adoring chil-dren and grand-children innocently enjoying her own works. "Away with tears." It was the culminationaf a beautiful happy life. [End.]