A highly valued friend to the immigrant communities, Dr Teresa Brannick McIlduff, passed away on 12 December aged 62.
A HIGHLY VALUED friend to the immigrant communities, Dr Teresa Brannick McIlduff, passed away on 12 December aged 62.
The late UCD research academic had a huge interest in immigrants and multiculturalism. With husband Eddie McIlduff, she assisted people of many nationalities – including Irish – educationally, socially and financially.
Indeed, Dr Brannick McIlduff and her husband “loved everyone and would regularly invite different nationalities to their home even on special occasions, including Christmas Day,” he commented.
It was a unique and inclusive funeral, he added, noting that his late wife's adopted Muslim family from Bangladesh was given the opportunity to offer prayers “in their own way for the repose of her soul”.
Born in New Inn in east Galway, Dr Brannick McIlduff attended UCG where she studied Mathematics and Mathematical Physics through Irish. She proceeded to UCD to study for a postgraduate diploma in Social Science, and it was there she met and soon married Eddie McIlduff.
At UCD she completed a Master’s degree in Sociology, using ethnographic methods unusual for somebody trained in mathematics but providing a glimpse of the extraordinary intellectual versatility that became a hallmark of her professional career.
After a time as a research assistant in Sociology at UCD, Dr Brannick McIlduff conducted research in epidemiology at the Medico-Social Research Board. She returned to UCD and worked on a research programme in the Department of Industrial Relations, conducting seminal research with Professor Aidan Kelly on changing patterns of industrial conflict.
She continued to work on research on access to higher education with Professor Patrick Clancy and lectured on research methodology in the faculty of Commerce and in the Department of Social Science. She then became a Newman Scholar and completed a PhD in marketing.
Dr Brannick McIlduff’s published work spans the disciplines of sociology, epidemiology, industrial relations, marketing, management and research methods. She edited and co-wrote a number of books, perhaps her most important being her book on action research written with Prof David Coughlan SJ of Trinity College, who celebrated her funeral mass.
More recently, she contributed her methodological expertise to the research undertaken for Judge Yvonne Murphy’s Commission of Investigation into the Dublin Archdiocese.
Dr Brannick McIlduff’s friend and colleague Professor Bill Roche of the UCD School of Business said in his address at her funeral she had a unique ability to put herself into the mind of a student or a colleague with a methodological problem.
Remembered as succinct and crystal clear in teaching style, she delighted in students’ accounts of their professional and life experiences and was adept in helping them to draw out the learning within themselves.
She was strongly committed to equality and social justice, and part of her legacy at UCD is her work towards the recognition of these fields of study in the college in collaboration with her friend Prof Kathleen Lynch.
A person of great fun, she bore her long illness with enormous dignity and courage. Her outlook throughout her illness remained that “everything is important, or nothing is important”. To her, everything scholarly, joyous and life affirming was important.
She is survived by her husband, psychologist Eddie McIlduff.
