Liam Nolan relates the story of a remarkable 16th century Irish woman who was an intrepid mariner, pirate, rebel, shrewd political tactician and female trailblazer.

 

Ever since piracy – robbery on the high seas – was first started multiple centuries ago, it has been an almost exclusively male dominated way of grabbing ill-gotten gains. Men ruled the roost by virtue of physicality, strength, personality, leadership, fear, power, chauvinism, and any other qualities required to impose dominance.

But a remarkable 16th century Mayo woman, a very early feminist, against all the odds up-ended the notion that women were not fitted to be sea-going pirates. Her name was Grace O’Malley and she is celebrated in Ireland as the original ‘Pirate Queen’, a truly extraordinary leader respected not only by her own people, but by her enemies – the English.

It’s only in recent times that we have begun to see female ship’s officers, even captains. And yet Lord Deputy Sir Henry Sidney (1529-86) called Grace O’Malley ‘a most famous feminine sea-captain’.
When President Trump sacked America’s top military brass, one of whom was the Commandant of the Coast Guard, that officer turned out to be female, Admiral Linda Fagan.

Women airline pilots are being trained and increasingly employed by major airlines worldwide. And slowly but surely we are starting to see women climbing the corporate ladders and being appointed CEOs of big companies.

None of this was even conceived of in now-feminist-icon Grace O’Malley’s time. Her father was the head of the O’Malleys of Connacht. He was a powerful and experienced sea captain commanding a fleet of ships. He frequently sailed to France, and to Spain, to sell barrels of salted fish, tallow, cattle hides and pine marten skins, and to buy iron, wine and weapons for sale in Ireland.

As Grace – his only daughter – grew up, she longed to go on one of her father’s voyages. At the age of 11 she asked him to take her with him the next time he sailed south to the Iberian Peninsula. He refused. He said that her long hair would become twisted and tangled in the rope riggings of the ship.

Grace’s reaction was swift. She took a scissors and cut her long locks extremely short so as to look like a boy, and embarrass her father into taking her.

If it’s true that Saint Patrick spent 40 days and nights fasting at the top of 2057-foot Croagh Patrick in 441 AD (Tirechán wrote in the 7th century that he did), then on fine clear days, looking out over island-strewn Clew Bay, he had one of the most beautiful and impressive views in the whole of the island of Ireland.

Roughly rectangular, Clew Bay is a large ocean bay on the Atlantic coast of County Mayo. It is six miles wide and extends 12 miles into the coast of Mayo, the third largest of the 26 counties. Scattered all over Clew Bay are its cluster of islands. One early traditional belief was that Clew Bay had 365 islands, one for each day of the year. The cold fact is that there are 141 named islands and islets within the bay, sunken drumlins, sandbars and rocks.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own