Quick Facts
Biography
Gemma Hussey (born 11 November 1938) is a former Irish Fine Gael politician.
Gemma Moran was born in Dublin in 1938. She was educated at Loreto College, Foxrock and at University College Dublin. Hussey had a successful career running a language school in the late 1960s and '70s.
She was elected by the National University of Ireland to Seanad Éireann, serving in the upper house of the Oireachtas from 1977 until 1982. She sat as an independent senator for the first three years, before serving as Fine Gael spokesperson on Women's Affairs (1981–82) and then as Government Leader of the Seanad.
She was first elected to Dáil Éireann on her second attempt, at the February 1982 general election, as a Fine Gael Teachta Dála (TD) for Wicklow.
Hussey served as Minister for Education in the Fine Gael–Labour Party coalition government of Garret FitzGerald from 1982 to 1986, during which time she was heavily criticised by teachers' unions during a bitter pay strike in 1984. In 1986 she was reshuffled to the equally contentious Social Welfare ministry.
Always a liberal and a feminist, she took a strongly supportive position on the legalisation of divorce, which was defeated in a referendum in 1986, and frequently suggested that she supported the liberalisation of Ireland's abortion ban. A member of Fine Gael's liberal wing, which included Monica Barnes, Nuala Fennell, Alan Shatter and Alan Dukes, she was disliked by the conservative wing of the party which included TDs like Oliver J. Flanagan, Alice Glenn and Gerry L'Estrange.
During a meeting with Keith Joseph, Margaret Thatcher's Secretary of State for Education, Joseph boasted to Hussey that he held surgeries once a month, which was considered a high number in Britain. Hussey responded that she had to do clinics three days every week to hold on to her seat as a TD.
The book of her cabinet diaries, At the Cutting Edge, published in 1990, was hailed as the most thorough and realistic account of life inside the cabinet in Ireland. She retired from politics at the 1989 general election.
In 1990 she was sharply criticised within her party for suggesting that she might support the Labour Party presidential candidate, Mary Robinson, a feminist, over the official Fine Gael candidate Austin Currie. Mary Robinson went on to become Ireland's first female president.
An enthusiastic Europhile, Hussey spends a lot of her time now promoting the advancement of women in politics around the European Union.
In the lead-up to the 1997 presidential election, Hussey was mentioned as a possible Fine Gael candidate, and was predicted to do well across Dublin and in her native Wicklow constituency and among supporters of FG and of the Progressive Democrats. In the event the party nomination went to Mary Banotti, who lost heavily to Mary McAleese in the election.