Life
1946- ; b. Dublin, one of 6 children; Head of WomenՂs Studies and fnd.-dir. of Women’s Education, Resource and Research Centre (WERRC) at UCD where she began teaching in French Dept., as a post-grad. in 1967; prominent in Gay Pride marches and came out as lesbian in the 1980s; chaired National LGBT Federation, [1986]-2006, retiring from UCD in that year; acted as Convenor of the Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment [Abortion] and a founding member of Marriage Equality; appt. to the Higher Education Authority twice and has served on Board on Directors of National Library of Ireland; she has a dg. from an early marriage which ended in separation and later divorce; received Lifetime Achievement award at the GALAS 2015, Hon. DLitt. from Galway University [NUI] and the Freedom of Dublin City both in 2022.
Works
Ed. The Irish Women’s Study Reader (Attic Press 1993) [14 contribs. incl. Mary Robinson and Mary Daly]; with Gráinne Griffin, Orla O’Connor & Alison O’Connor, eds., It’s a Yes!: How Together for Yes Repealed the Eighth and Transformed Irish Society (Orpen Press 2019), ix, 204pp., ill. 8 unnum. pp. of pls.]; ed. Wildish Things (Attic Press 1989), 250pp.
Quotations
‘That is how men like to imagine her, and she has no space, no voice, no right to imagine herself differently - or even to imagine at all. As symbol, “women” is allowed no
history, no story, no capacity for change - she is a given. Her particularity is overwhelmed by the primary demands of the nation. To be free, therefore, Irish women must find some ways of extricating themselves from the double burden of patricarchy and colonisation, whether consciously identified or not. (Ailbhe Smith, ‘Ireland’, in Claire Buck, ed., Bloomsbury Guide it Women’s Literature, Bloomsbury 1992, p.40.)
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