Thekla Beere, an Irish civil servant who chairs Ireland’s Commission on the Status of Women in 1970 and is secretary of the Department of Transport and Power, dies on February 19, 1991, in Killiney, County Dublin. She is the first woman to lead a government department in Ireland.

Beere is born on June 20, 1901, in Kilmore, Columbkille, near Granard, County Longford, one of two daughters of the Rev. Francis John Armstrong Beere, Church of Ireland vicar of Streete, County Westmeath, and Lucie Beere (née Potterton). She attends Alexandra College in Milltown, Dublin, and does a moderatorship in Legal and Political Sciences and an LL.B. at Trinity College Dublin.

Beere joins the Civil Service of the Republic of Ireland in 1924 and works initially in the Statistics Branch. In 1925, she wins a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship and travels extensively in the United States before resuming her Civil Service career. From 1939, she works in the Department of Industry and Commerce where during The Emergency, as World War II is known in Ireland, she works in the area of supply with Minister Seán Lemass. She becomes Assistant Secretary of that Department in 1953. She is the first woman to achieve the rank of Department Secretary, the highest-ranking post in a government department, doing so at the Department of Transport and Power in 1959. President Mary McAleese calls her the “ultimate civil servant.”

Trinity College Dublin confers an honorary doctorate of Doctor of Laws upon her in 1960. After her retirement in 1967 she is active in public life, serving as a governor of Alexandra College and as a director of The Irish Times. She is requested by the Government to chair the Commission on the Status of Women in 1970 and the Beere Report is presented to the Minister for Finance in December 1972. The report provides a model for change in equal pay, the Civil Service marriage bar (which requires female civil servants to resign from their position upon marriage) and the widow’s pension. Her name is mentioned as a possible candidate for the Irish presidency in 1976.

Beere has a lifelong interest in the proceedings of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland and serves as its President. She is a Governor of The Irish Times Trust and chairwoman of the International Labour Organization office in Geneva, Switzerland. She is a member of the organising committee, which on May 7, 1931, sets up An Óige (the Irish Youth Hostel Association), of which she is President from 1968 to 1974. She also has an extensive interest in the arts, in particular the paintings of Cecil King.

Beere dies on February 19, 1991, in Killiney, County Dublin. She never marries but has a 40-year companionship with businessman JJ O’Leary.