Dessie Whelan

Last week Dessie Whelan, from Dublin, lost his life to a drug dealer at the age of 28.

Dessie's common-law wife Melanie, mother to their three young sons, is devastated at the loss of someone she loved very much. He was a man who lived for his family.

He was brought up and lived in Fatima Mansions and went to St James CBS School along with his two brothers. He always came with me to the CPAD meetings and in the course of his young life he saw a lot of young men and women dying from drugs and AIDS. He did not like what he saw and he hated drugs because of this. It made him very strong and he tried his best to do what he could for the younger generation.

Des was a very happy lad and and he was popular with everyone who knew him. He loved his Mam and Dad very much and was a very good son.

He went to meetings all over Dublin with CPAD and was known very well by people everywhere. He loved what he was doing and always felt very proud. He had the best of friends.

I'm proud to be his mother and when his three sons grow up they too will be very proud that he was their father.

Mrs L. Whelan

Maire Halpenny

Lifelong republican Maire Halpenny was recently laid to rest beside her husband and comrade Gerry in St. Patrick's Cemetery, Dundalk.

At the graveside old friends and comrades from the Forties campaign and present-day republicans heard Sinn Féin's Rita O'Hare pay tribute to a quiet, unassuming woman dedicated to the republican cause from her days in County Mayo as Maire Sweeney. She was arrested in 1939 in England along with her two sisters when she as a Cumann na mBan volunteer and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Her late husband Gerry was sentenced along with her.

``Be life long or short God be praised that I mer her,'' are sentiments many of today's republicans in County Louth would bestow on Maire. She was in every way in the Fenian tradition, an unrepentant Irish republican, and she instilled in everyone she met the rightness of the cause.

On one occasion Maire, commenting on her time in jail, said that it was nothing to the suffering of the women republican prisoners of today. That was during the no-wash protest in Armagh prison. And it was through this concern for the suffering of the prisoners that Maire joined with her husband Gerry in working tirelessly for Cumann Cabhrach.

Maire, like so many republican women, was not, in the old maxim, the woman behind the man. Rather, she was the woman who stood shoulder to shoulder with the man.

We mourn her passing, but her memory and steadfastness to the cause of Irish freedom will forever be a beacon to guide those carrying on the cause. May she rest in peace alongside her husband, friend and comrade Gerry.

MF