Jean Kennedy Smith, the youngest sister and last surviving sibling of John F Kennedy, who as US envoy played key role in Northern Ireland’s peace process in the 1990s, has died aged 92, her daughter confirmed to the New York Times. Smith died on Wednesday at her Manhattan home in New York City, her daughter Kym told the newspaper. She was the first Kennedy woman of her generation to take on a serious political job. Like her sisters and the wives of her brothers, she had had roles in family political campaigns, but not in public service. Her father, Joseph Kennedy Sr, had been the ambassador to Britain when she was a little girl, and she had visited Ireland, the land of her ancestors, many times, the New York Times reported on Thursday. In 1993, when she was 65, Bill Clinton named her as ambassador to Dublin, reportedly at the behest of Senator Edward Kennedy, JFK’s younger brother. Smith was at that time a renowned philanthropist and society doyenne, the widow of Stephen Smith, financial adviser to the Kennedy family. In the Republic of Ireland, Smith, according to the New York Times, ruffled feathers, broke rules and brushed aside diplomatic niceties. She was reprimanded by then secretary of state Warren Christopher for removing two senior staff members who disagreed with her views. She visited Northern Ireland and controversially met with Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams, though that was prohibited by American policy at the time. She paved the way for Adams to visit the US and make his case for a ceasefire in the Northern Ireland Troubles. At the behest of Smith, Senator Edward Kennedy and others, Clinton met Adams at the White House in 1995, which also helped diplomacy along a rocky path in decades of violent Dublin-Belfast-London politics to the peace deal known as the Good Friday Agreement signed in 1998. Jean Ann Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1928 to Joseph P and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, a younger sister to John F Kennedy and the Kennedys’ eighth youngest child of nine.