ABOUT ANNA MAY DRISCOLL

Anna May was a leading management consultant in the area of behaviour and organisation change. She worked with clients in Europe, Asia, and North America.

A native of Murrough, Ballyvaughan, Co Clare, Anna May left home at 16 to train as a children’s nurse in England. She qualified as a paediatric nurse at St Mary’s Paddington and took up ward supervision immediately on qualification at the paediatric speciality facility at Princess Louise Hospital Kensington. Her work in ante natal and post natal clinics led her to working in family planning and from this into psycho-sexual counselling. She was instrumental in founding the family planning clinic in Limerick at a time when most methods of family planning were illegal in Ireland. She led team building and personal development workshops for a number of voluntary organisations, including the Samaritans. She subsequently returned to full-time education and took a degree in Social Psychology at the University of Kent at Canterbury, England and later studied for a Masters in Organizational Behaviour at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Anna May was a founding partner of Emerge an international management consultancy specialising in organisation development. She pioneered its work in leadership and personal effectiveness. She brought her skills as a trained counsellor and manager to bear on the practical challenges facing executives in private and public sector organisations. She led change projects with major companies across the globe. She developed Emerge’s work in the skills of coaching for performance improvement and offered the first training courses in this area in Western Europe.

An ardent and practical feminist Anna May was inspired in her early teens to better the condition of women in Irish society. The traumatic death of a neighbouring woman shortly after childbirth and the anger she experience from other older women in the community developed an acute sensitivity to the condition under which ordinary women lived their lives. This experience was reinforced when she worked in the deprived areas of Paddington London, again experiencing the special burden that women carried in these families. Later in business organisations in countries as diverse as USA, Malaysia, France, Britain, and Australia, she served as an inspiration for women entering the then closed ranks of management. What started as a teenager’s idealism in Ireland had become a practical philosophy to encourage personal change for people across the world. Her philosophy was based on self help and self reliance. She believed that it was not the roles one held in life that were important but the actions a person took. It was this belief that was at the core of the philosophy of Responsibility Based Leadership™ She lived her life accordingly.

Anna May returned to live in Murrough in the house in which she was born and developed an extensive garden and alpaca farm in addition to her work internationally.

Anna May developed breast cancer in 1998 and while it appeared that she was in complete remission for eight years, the cancer metastasised and she died from secondary dispersion on June 21st 2007 at University Hospital Galway.

Read a profile of Anna May from the Clare People, published Tues 16th March 2010.