The Women who helped shape modern Ireland

We may have bad weather in Ireland, but the sun shines in the hearts of the people and that keeps us all warm.

Marianne Williamson

Well, it’s the weekend that the whole world now seems to turn green, I’m still not sure I get all the hype however, I’m happy to go with the flow! As it’s St Patrick’s weekend I thought I’d celebrate some heroic women that have shaped today’s Ireland!

Brigid of Kildare

As a figure of legend and Ireland's only female patron saint, as well as the goddess of poetry, healing and smith-work in Celtic myth, Brigid (c 451-523) is pretty well known throughout Ireland. That said, I’d argue she hasn't always been celebrated for the right things. During the 19th century, she was held up as a symbol of divine femininity, while generations of Irish schoolchildren still associate her with reed crosses. But she was much more than that: a powerful Abbess who offered an alternative to the confines of domestic life to up to 14,000 women, a peace-weaver, a fearless negotiator who secured women's property rights, and freed trafficked women. And she was also reputed to be an expert dairywoman and brewer!

Grace O’Malley

The pirate queen Grace O'Malley (c. 1577-1597), known also as Gráinne Mhaol, is a mostly romantic figure in Irish folklore, but in reality, she was a fearless leader, canny diplomat, and long-time thorn in the side of the British ruling class. Lord president of Connacht Richard Bingham described her as "nurse to all rebellions in the province for this forty years". Her influence was such that she was granted a meeting with Elizabeth I in 1593 during which, speaking in Latin, she secured the release of her son. "She is remarkable as being the only woman from 16th-century Gaelic Ireland who is recorded as taking a leadership role within her sept," the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes.

Peg Plunkett

Peg Plunkett (c. 1727–1797) was the Ashley Madison of her day, an Irish brothel-keeper in Dublin who, when she retired and found her former clients were slow to settle their debts, responded – to their horror – by publishing three volumes of memoirs. Plunkett was brutally attacked during a raid of her brothel by a gang of upper-class thugs known as the Pinking Dandies, and successfully took the gang leader, Robert Crosbie, to court. One of my favourite stories about her concerns the time she was instructed to make way for the monarch while in London. She replied, “I think part of the road was for my use, as well as for that of the King, and if you English are servile and timid, we Irish are not.” Brilliant!

Lady Jane Wilde

Though much less famous in subsequent years than her middle son Oscar, Wexford woman Lady Jane Wilde (1821-1896) was a significant figure in 19th-century Ireland: a gifted linguist and poet who published under the name Speranza, a documenter of the Famine, a women's rights activist, and a nationalist who used her writing to call for insurrection. In 1864, she and her husband Sir William were at the centre of a sensational court case, after they were sued for libel by Mary Travers, who claimed he had seduced her and was awarded £2,000. Within a few years, Wilde would lose her daughter Isola, her husband, her home, their fortune, and see her son Oscar imprisoned.

Agnes Clerke

Skibbereen-born Agnes Clerke (1842-1907) fell in love with the stars when she first saw them as a child through her father's telescope. Her book, A Popular History of Astronomy during the Nineteenth Century, is still regarded as one of the seminal texts. She won a host of plaudits normally reserved for men and, in 1981, NASA named a crater on the moon, close to where Apollo 12 landed, in her honour.

Annie Russell Maunder

Annie Russell Maunder (1868-1947) is the other Irish woman with a crater on the moon named after her. The Tyrone-born woman studied at Cambridge and, though she graduated as the top mathematician of her year, restrictions on women meant she was not awarded a BA. She got a job as a “lady computer” at the Greenwich Royal Observatory, where her job was to photograph the sun, until her forced retirement after her marriage to her colleague, Walter Maunder, in 1895. Her work was widely studied and published – often under her husband’s name. The crater Maunder on the moon is named after her and her husband, as is the Maunder Minimum, the period between 1645 and 1715 when sunspots were rare.

Dr Kathleen Lynn

The inventory of Dr Kathleen Lynn’s contributions is long: a medical doctor specialising in ophthalmology; a volunteer in the soup kitchens during the 1913 Lockout; medical officer to the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) during the Rising, for which she was imprisoned; a campaigner for equal rights for women; and the cofounder with her lifelong partner, the equally fearless Madeleine ffrench-Mullen (and a budget of €70) of St Ultan’s Hospital for Infants. Not only did Dr Lynn (1874-1955) not get a thank-you from the founding fathers, “by the time of the Civil War, women such as Lynn, who opposed the Treaty, were being castigated as irrational, extremist and almost deranged,” noted Diarmuid Ferriter, written off as “hysterical young women” who should be at home polishing the brasses. She was elected to the Dáil in the 1923 elections, but did not take her seat.

Eva O'Flaherty

Not nearly enough is known about Achill Island's intriguing Eva O'Flaherty (1874-1963), a fashionista, entrepreneur and activist. She was milliner on London's Sloane Street, an artist's muse, and later a businesswoman who founded a textile business. She was also the founder of Ireland's oldest summer school, Scoil Acla, and – for a time – an active nationalist, thought to have been one of the "basket women" couriers during the Rising. Regular visitors to her home included WB Yeats, Paul Henry and Graham Greene.

Margaret Elizabeth Cousins

Born in Boyle, Co Roscommon, Margaret Elizabeth Cousins (1878-1954) refused to be hemmed in by boring stereotypes. She was a unionist, Methodist, nationalist, suffragist, medium, campaigning vegetarian and music teacher who refused to give up her job after she got married. She was jailed in both London and Dublin for smashing windows at 10 Downing Street and Dublin Castle in protest at the exclusion of women's suffrage from the Home Rule Bill. In 1915, she and her husband moved to India where she continued to campaign for women's rights, and organised the first all-India and all-Asia women's conferences.

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