Margaret Dwyer, who has died at the age of 97, was the last surviving member of a dynamic team of local people who founded the Rose of Tralee festival 57 years ago. Remarkably, considering her immense personal impact on the life of the town, she was neither from Co Kerry, nor was she Irish. Born and reared in the US, she was a second World War widow who, having visited Ireland in 1936, decided to settle here in 1948, three years after her 29-year-old husband, Lt John G Dwyer, was killed in action in Germany.
Seeing Tralee as an ideal town in which to bring up their young sons, Ryle (four) and Sean (three), her choice was amply vindicated. At a time of mass Irish emigration, Co Kerry people were amazed that a young woman would move with her two children from the US to Ireland. But had her new neighbours known even more about her they would have been truly astonished.
During the war, in the course of her job as a radio-telephone operator with AT&T, she talked regularly with both the US president, Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, the British prime minister. With the highest security clearance, she had to listen to the conversation to ensure atmospheric conditions did not garble their crucial trans-Atlantic phone calls.
Naturally, when the boys were growing up, subjects such as her husband's untimely death and her own role in the war were never discussed at home. Only in recent years were those times mentioned to her eldest son, Ryle, a historian, journalist and author of his mother's biography, Across the Waves. Sean, a research chemist, had returned to work in the US.
Initially, when the family moved to Tralee, she realised that other housewives had far less money to spend in those bleak times. Thanks to her war widow’s pension which came to around three times the average industrial wage, she was much better off. It meant, for instance, that she could afford to pay a maid.
From the outset she was involved in community activities and in 1959 she co-founded the Rose of Tralee festival with the aim of promoting the town, an experience that established her reputation as an astute businesswoman. With both boys at secondary school, she gradually became more involved in festival matters, going on to be its first lady president in 1970.
As talk of her prowess spread, she was headhunted as the catering manager on the set of The Playboy of Western World at Inch on the Co Kerry coast. Having worked with Howard Hughes of TWA fame in the US, her flair for tourism was realised when she was appointed sales manager of the Mount Brandon Hotel in Tralee.
Dwyer’s long association with the Rose festival continued until 2003. Having received the freedom of Tralee, her contribution was once again acknowledged in 2012 when she became the first honorary member of the Tralee Chamber Alliance, a body formed to promote the town as a retail and tourism centre.
Her natural ease in the presence of power probably stemmed from chatting to world leaders. Not surprisingly, through the festival she rubbed shoulders with Ireland’s leading politicians, ranging from Éamon de Valera to Seán Lemass, Jack Lynch, Liam Cosgrave, Garret FitzGerald, Charlie Haughey and Albert Reynolds.
Five days before her death, news came from Canada that her younger sister, Therese, aged 88, had died and a portion of her ashes was placed in Margaret’s coffin at Tralee.
Margaret Dwyer is survived by her sons Ryle and Sean.