Sheila Cloney left instructions that no eulogy was to be delivered at her funeral. She must have known it would be a brave soul who would defy her wishes, even after she had departed this world. Anyway, who could find words for her?

A friend of Sheila and Seán tells me there was so much more to her than the Fethard boycott that publicly pigeon-holed her. She loved opera. In later years, she played Lyric FM day and night. She was a fine horsewoman. She was a loyal friend. She didn't trust people easily. She was petite and didn't dye her hair when it turned grey. When she was a girl, her father, Tommy Kelly, was a well-to-do cattle dealer who was wont to bundle up his children's perfectly good clothes for poor children he encountered around Wexford's Hook. Sheila would be despatched on horseback to deliver them. Matters of conscience never were optional in the Kellys' DNA.

When she told Fr Stafford to take a flying jump with his 'ne temere' diktat that her daughters receive a Roman Catholic education, she would have been acting on moral instinct. She wasn't planning to change the world. Nor did she intend her father's cattle business to be sacrificed, as it was, along with other prosperous Protestant businesses in the locality. She didn't plan for a movie to be made about it one day; a film she would never watch. Because she spent the rest of her life shunning publicity, most of us imagine Orla Brady, the actress who played her in A Love Divided, when we hear Sheila Cloney mentioned. Even upon her death, no pictures of her appeared in the newspapers.

When the movie was released in the US eight years ago, the League of Decency sneered that it was "based on an allegedly true story" and that "cruel caricatures of the Catholic clergy abound". The league's president, a William Donohue, denounced it as "an anti-Catholic film" whereas it was an anti-demagoguery movie with a wardrobe left over from The Thornbirds. When Sheila Cloney fled with her daughters to Belfast and onward to the Orkney Islands to escape the Catholic church's proprietorial clutches, she was to the holy, patriarchical Ireland of 1957 what the witches were to Salem. Whatever about eluding the Catholic church, a young, strong-willed Protestant woman taking on the establishment of a repressed society had no hope of evading history.

She was feisty. She and Seán had a tempestuous marriage. She once told someone close to her that she loved her husband from the day she met him until the day he died. That will be 10 years ago next October. Seán Cloney spent his last years in a wheelchair, following a motor accident and botched surgery. He too was a champion, pursuing justice for people who had been sexually abused as children by priests in the diocese of Ferns. He reposes in the Catholic graveyard in Templetown alongside an uncle who was a Catholic canon. One of their three daughters, Mary, who died a year before him, is buried in the Church of Ireland graveyard in Fethard-on-Sea. For herself, Sheila chose cremation.

As in life, the Cloneys' love may appear divided but it still triumphs. How fitting that, in the week Sheila died, it was reported that civil marriage ceremonies will soon outnumber their church cousins. Whether she liked it or not, it is her legacy that couples tying the knot these days recognise wedlock as a tough enough challenge without the encumbrance of a procreation-for-Rome decree. A religious ceremony is joyous and meaningful for many couples and it is to be encouraged when appropriate but what Sheila Cloney taught Ireland is that making personal choices is what being grown up is all about.

A Protestant woman I know married a Catholic man in 1979. They chose to have a ceremony in her church, officiated by ministers of both persuasions. After the bride-to-be declined to sign the 'ne temere' pledge to bring their offspring up as Catholics, there were unaccountable delays in acquiring the dispensation from his church which the groom required to marry his Protestant girlfriend. It eventually arrived one week before the wedding, adding to the stress of an already stressful time. The husband has never since entered a Catholic church, other than for funerals.

History is full of accidental heroes because it is in the most prosaic choices that the most seismic shifts occur. As Seán Cloney said in his last recorded interview, God chooses his most humble people to instigate the greatest changes. While Éamon de Valera was praised in the Seanad last week for his intervention in the Fethard boycott, Sheila Cloney went to her resting place without a church eulogy. Can you get more humble?