Pat Coyle
Pat Coyle first cooked, then lectured and now communicates for the Jesuits. She cooked for them during the summer of her final year at University College Dublin where she studied English and Philosophy. She lectured for them during her post graduate studied in Philosophy, in the Milltown Institute of Philosophy and Theology. And in 2005 she took up the post of Director of Communications for the Jesuits in Ireland.
She was born in Derry City in 1957 in the shadow of St Eugene’s Cathedral and was ten when the troubles’ started. The Catholic Church and the war on her front street have been two of the most potent patriarchal forces in her life.
She continues to struggle with the impact they have on her as a woman and is grateful for the call they have awakened in her to try and work for justice and peace valuing the equal dignity of every human being regardless of class, gender, creed, colour, status or age.
She qualified as a secondary school teacher, lectured in third level and worked as a journalist, producer and presenter with RTE BBC and UTV. She became a wife, a mother of two children and is now a divorcee.
For a long time she thought she might be something of a failure in the eyes of her beloved Derry mother who often worried that she might never settle into a permanent job. Now happily modern culture has provided her with a jargon word that spares her blushes – ‘multi-skilled’.
