My mother, Bride Cosgrove, who has died aged 98, was a nurse, doctor’s wife and mother of 15 who grew up and lived in Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Bride, known as Bee, was born in Rathdrum, County Wicklow, while the fight for Ireland’s independence was raging around her. Her father, William Comerford, was a butcher and her mother, Mary (nee O’Neill), came from a horse-breeding family.

Mary was independent-minded and would take Bee and her five sisters on a regular 13-mile trek from Rathdrum to Brittas Bay in the horse and buggy.

Bee went to Arklow Convent school. In 1937 she left to train as a nurse at the Mater hospital in Dublin. Her first job was as a nurse in an Arklow factory, but she soon returned to the Mater where she met Joe Cosgrove, a newly qualified doctor, and they married in 1945.

While Bee stopped nursing in an official capacity after marriage, she continued to support her husband in his efforts. After the second world war Joe became an NHS doctor in the Bogside and the Creggan areas in Derry, Northern Ireland, and Bee worked alongside him as a nurse.

On her first visit to a polling station in Northern Ireland she was stopped by a policeman who had noticed her accent, but because she had been born pre-partition, she had the right to vote in the north, a right she never wasted.

In 1964 Joe was made the first Catholic president of the British Medical Association in Northern Ireland. Bee recalled how all the wives of the association’s doctors had to sit in a separate room while the ceremony was taking place.

Bee and Joe were both politically active and, with Bee’s support, in 1973 Joe stood for the Alliance party in the Derry council elections, and was elected on the first count. Bee worked alongside my father throughout the Troubles of the 1970s and 80s, while also raising 15 children, many of whom also entered the medical profession. One, Mary, had multiple sclerosis, and another, Conor, was born with Down’s syndrome.

Before her death Bee was asked by the local priest why she didn’t attend mass. Her reply was: “Sure I can get the Vatican on the TV.”

Joe and three of her children, Mary, Peter and Conor, predeceased her. She is survived by four daughters, Eithne, Dorcas, Clare and Anne, and eight sons, John, Paul, Joe, Gerard, Patrick, Colm and me.