Obituary: Carmencita Hederman, former lord mayor of Dublin, city councillor, senator and environmental campaigner
She was born Carmencita Cruess-Callaghan on October 23, 1939, into a family in Blackrock, Co Dublin, headed by bacteriological chemist Dr George Cruess-Callaghan and his wife Ita. Carmencita later studied at Trinity College Dublin. Archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid had banned members of his Catholic congregation from attending TCD, but gave Carmencita a dispensation to enrol as a student there. French and Italian were among the subjects she took and she went on to acquire a Master's degree in July 1969.
Earlier, in St Patrick's Church, Blackrock, on June 26, 1962, she married William (Billy) Hederman, a respected doctor and surgeon from Croom, Co Limerick, who served as president of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) in 1990-92.
The couple bought a house on Leeson Street while on honeymoon. In April 1968, when a draft city development plan proposed rezoning the area into office blocks, a letter of opposition she wrote to The Irish Times galvanised her neighbours and a group called Upper Leeson Street Area Residents Association was formed, which successfully campaigned to keep the zone for residential-use only.
On June 22, 1987, she was elected lord mayor of Dublin, succeeding Bertie Ahern. Hederman garnered support from a 'rainbow coalition' of Fine Gael, Labour, Workers' Party, Progressive Democrats and three Independents, including the late Tony Gregory, and won by a single vote over Fianna Fáil's Ned Brennan, who was tipped as the favourite.
The first woman to hold the post in 30 years, during her 12 months in office she played a leading role in Dublin's millennium celebrations of 1988, marking the takeover of the city by the Irish from the Vikings. She was a strong opponent of what she called 'destructive dual carriageways' in the city centre and their effect on inner-city communities. In August 1989, she was elected as an Independent member of Seanad Éireann on the Dublin University Panel along with Shane Ross and David Norris. She found it a difficult place to make significant progress on issues and did not stand in the next general election.
Hederman was very interested in running as an Independent candidate for president of Ireland in 1990.
Securing a nomination requires the support of at least four local councils or 20 members of the Oireachtas.
She discussed the matter at an early stage with then-Fine Gael leader Alan Dukes, who was prepared to consider nominating her if she joined the party and ran as a Fine Gael candidate.
'She would have liked to be a candidate, but she wasn't prepared to adopt the party label,' he said last week. The party later nominated Austin Currie and the successful candidate was Mary Robinson.
More recently, in light of events in Gaza, she supported the successful campaign for TCD to divest from Israeli organisations and academic institutions and companies operating in Occupied Palestine and on the United Nations' blacklist.
She was a mother of five children and grandmother of nine. Her daughter, Wendy, was elected to Dublin City Council as a Progressive Democrat candidate for the Pembroke area in 2004. She was involved in key local issues, but retired from politics in 2007. Predeceased by her husband Billy in 2016, Carmencita Hederman passed away peacefully at the Royal Hospital, Donnybrook, on May 31.
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