Former lord mayor calls for further honours for Elmes
Former lord mayor of Cork Des Cahill has said that a plaque should be in erected to honour Mary Elmes in her native Ballintemple following a decision to name the city’s newest bridge after the woman dubbed Ireland’s Oskar Schindler.
The aid worker, who was born in Cork in 1908, helped hundreds of Jewish children escape Vichy France and the threat of concentration camps.
Mr Cahill, a Fine Gael councillor who met with the family of Ms Elmes during his term as lord mayor, said her loved ones knew nothing of her heroics for decades.
“She never spoke about it,” he said. “The story didn’t come out until she was quite old. She started to talk about it. That is not unusual. We would have a few grandfathers and so on they don’t talk about it [the war].”
Mr Cahill said Ms Elmes should also be recognised in her native Ballintemple.
“There is a plaque in Lichfield Cottage [in Ballintemple] in relation to George Boole,” ,” Mr Cahill told the Neil Prendeville Show on Cork’s Red FM. “A plaque should happen [for Mary Elmes]. That is very appropriate. Even to have it a bit more visible in Ballintemple.”
Mr Cahill said the house where she grew up is known to everyone who lives in the area.
“Everyone would have known the house as Professor Ryan’s house, which is two doors up from Lichfield Cottage, where George Boole lived,” he said.
“They [the Elmes] had a chemist in Winthrop St. She was sent to the London School of Economics in the late ’20s. They went to Spain for a bit. She started doing food runs. She broadened that and started smuggling Jewish children in to the safety of Spain away from the Nazis.”
Mr Cahill said Ms Elmes showed extraordinary bravery given that she was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Paris.
Because of her Irish passport, she was released and rather than going back down to Ireland she went back to Spain and continued to smuggle children in to the safety of Spain,” he said.
Ms Elmes lived a full life, dying in 2002 when she was in her 90s.
In 2015, she became the first and only Irish person honoured as Righteous Among the Nations by the state of Israel, in recognition of her work in the Spanish Civil War and Second World War.
After the war, Ms Elmes was awarded the Legion of Honour, the highest civilian award in France at the time, which she declined on the grounds of not wanting attention for what she did.
Bernard Wilson, who wrote a book about Ms Elmes, told he was delighted to see her works acknowledged in Cork.
“I am honoured to be able to say that I am the person who brought her to the knowledge of people in Ireland,”he said. “It was a wonderful experience.”
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