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DOROTHEA MELVIN

Dorothea Melvin comes from Ballina, County Mayo, West of Ireland. She attended school there and was trained in music and singing with the Royal Irish Academy of Music before taking up primary school teaching in the western counties of Leitrim and Mayo. She moved to London in the late 60’s working in banking and subsequently enrolled in the University of London. In 1971 she returned to Ireland and attended University College Galway, (now National University of Ireland, Galway), establishing the Shakespearian Circle as founding director. She graduated in English (1974) and also with a postgraduate Diploma in Education (1975). She worked as a tutor in English before becoming an administrator with the English Department and personal secretary to Prof. Lorna Reynolds, organizing the Second IASAIL (now IASIL, International Association for Study of Irish Literatures) Conference at UCG in 1975. The following year she became inaugural director of the Galway Family Planning Clinic, the first of its kind based in the west of Ireland. During the late 1970s and 1980s Melvin promoted and campaigned on various women’s health issues and civil and legal rights. Under her direction Medicare Services, which developed out of the Galway Family Planning Clinic, established the first STD Clinic in the region and Melvin also pioneered the treatment of AIDS and AIDS related illness. In 1988 she resigned from Medicare to devote more time to care for [elderly relatives]. She moved with her family to Dublin in 1992 where she has since lived. Melvin has been actively involved in cross-border relations since the 1970s. As director of Cultures of Ireland (1994 -2006) and as the first woman co-chair of the Irish-British think-tank, Encounter, Melvin took a leading innovative role in the background to the Irish peace process, commissioning important studies as well as creative work and organizing numerous conferences and seminars on a myriad of cultural and social matters related to peace and reconciliation in Ireland. Dorothea Melvin was appointed director of PR and Marketing at The Abbey, the national theatre of Ireland (1994-1998) where she was instrumental in bringing loyalist and unionist representatives to Dublin for the first time, when they attended The Abbey Theatre’s production of Frank Mc Guinness’s play, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme (1994), an important symbolic statement of progressive political goodwill at a time of the ceasefires in Northern Ireland. Her work at The Abbey also saw major funding secured from private sponsors for, among other premieres, Thomas Kilroy, The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde and Tony Kushner, Angels in America. During her term of office she organized an important analytical symposium on The Abbey’s role in contemporary Ireland, subsequently published as The Abbey Debate as well as writing a radical review of the theatre’s financial and organizational structures, many of the recommendations of which would be put in place a decade later. Melvin, an independent business and arts consultant, is married to the poet and academic, Gerald Dawe and has two children, Iarla and Olwen. She lives in County Dublin.