Dublin
CNN
—
Trinity College Dublin may have been founded by Queen Elizabeth I, but for over 400 years every building on the prestigious university campus has been named after a man. Until now.
This month, an official ceremony marks the renaming of one of the main libraries at Ireland’s leading university — formerly named after a supporter of slavery — in honor of the internationally acclaimed Irish poet Eavan Boland.
“Eavan Boland’s poetry helped write women back into history,” Mary Robinson, Ireland’s first female president and a former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, told CNN via email. “She redefined the literary canon to include women’s voices and those on the margins,” Robinson said of the poet, who died in 2020.
The striking Paul Koralek designed library that will soon bear the feminist thinker’s name is considered the country’s best example of Brutalist architecture.
A concrete and ashlar granite cube, the late modernist building also comprises a soft side through curved glass bay windows in bronze frames. The built-in, individual study nooks are still used by students 60 years later. Concrete walls, poured on site into Douglas fir moulds, have a faint woodgrain.
Called the New Library when it opened in 1967, a decade later it was named after the renowned 18th-century philosopher George Berkeley. Berkeley, an academic and bishop, profited from the international slave trade and promoted ideas of enslavement throughout his life.
During the global Black Lives Matter movement that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020, students called for the denaming of the library.
Their petition sparked a three-year denaming and renaming process that engaged both the college community and the wider public.
Had the name gone unchallenged it would have been “a quiet endorsement of a past in which other people had suffered,” said Philomena Mullen, assistant professor of Black Studies at the university.
On a personal level, Mullen said she found it “very hard to go in and sit in the building commemorating somebody who thought that somebody like me didn’t have any value.”
After almost a year-and-a-half of deliberation, Eavan Boland was chosen from the 855 public submissions made.
Boland, “Ireland’s leading feminist poet” according to the New York Times Book Review, taught at Stanford University in California for years, having served as director of creative writing for over two decades when she died at age 75.
Removing Berkeley’s name “created a freehold on a piece of architecture that was a really good fit for Eavan Boland,” said Gerardine Meaney, professor of Cultural Theory at University College Dublin.
Mullen told CNN she was also pleased with the choice because “Boland was concerned with who gets written into history, and who is left out.”
‘Fierce and uncompromising’
It’s not the first time Trinity has confronted questions over women’s place in its history.
“Over my dead body will women enter this college,” George Salmon, university provost at the end of the 19th century, is reputed to have said.
A month after his death, Trinity enrolled three women students, becoming the first of the historic universities of Ireland and Britain to admit women, in 1904. (Other universities had opened their degree courses to women sooner.)
It now has a student body that is 60% female and elected its first female provost in 2021.
Boland had become the “public poet” of Ireland, following in the footsteps of the late Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney, Meaney told CNN. “She embodied for people the possibility of being a poet and a woman and a mother.”
But the path to widespread recognition was not easy in a literary establishment dominated by men. Boland’s daughter, Eavan Casey, recalled to CNN that her mother once said, “it would be easier to write a poem about a bomb than a baby!”
“There was no place in Irish poetry for women,” Boland’s friend, poet and novelist Theo Dorgan, told CNN. Referencing Boland’s seminal 1982 book “Night Feed,” he said, “a lot of scholars don’t like to go back that far, to poems about breastfeeding and the domestic — it’s as if that’s not important, and yet it was at the heart of what Eavan did.”
A silt of milk.
The last suck.
And now your eyes are open
Birth-coloured and offended.
Earth wakes.
You go back to sleep.
The feed is ended.
– From “Night Feed”
At the same time, Dorgan said, “she could write the most fierce and uncompromising vindication of the rights of women in her poetry and essays.”
That activist approach was shared by Robinson, who quoted her friend Boland – both of them Trinity College graduates – in her inaugural address as Ireland’s first female president in 1990.
“I look back on our work together as important in the resurgence of Irish feminism in the 1970s,” she said.
Her work also had international resonance. Boland read her poem, “Our future will become the past of other women,” at the UN in 2018 to mark 100 years of the first Irish women being able to vote.
And when Ireland served on the UN Security Council from 2021 to 2022, “we used excerpts from the poem liberally throughout our term, whether working with women from Afghanistan, Myanmar or Northern Ireland; it was inspirational,” Geraldine Byrne Nason, Ireland’s then-Ambassador to the UN and now its envoy to Washington, told CNN.
Boland was also “an extraordinary mentor to so many younger poets,” Meaney said, holding workshops across Ireland during the 1980s which were “pivotal” for those who attended.
Ireland is famed for its writers, many of whom studied at Trinity. Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde have their names on buildings to prove it. But until this moment Trinity has had a failing grade at commemorating its female literary greats.
It’s a blind spot for the wider country too. In 2017, such was the prevalence of an all-male poster of Ireland’s writers that the Irish Times felt compelled to create its own version featuring award-winning female best-sellers.
More recently, Irish novelists Sally Rooney and Claire Keegan have had huge international success.
Cillian Murphy starred in 2024’s film adaptation of Keegan’s Booker Prize- shortlisted novella “Small Things Like These,” and Sally Rooney’s novel “Normal People,” which has sold over 3 million copies, was adapted into a TV show in 2020 that was streamed over 65 million times that year.
Much of Rooney’s novel is in fact set in Trinity College, with actors Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones crossing the cobblestoned squares to attend lectures, or, in Mescal’s case, study in the library in question.
Boland’s name is now part of that campus.
It’s a fitting tribute for a writer who explored how women are kept outside of history, left out of the stories that nations tell about themselves with statues and monuments.
“Heritage is something we choose,” Laurajane Smith, professor of Heritage and Museum Studies at Australian National University, told CNN.
“We decide something is heritage because it has meaning for us in terms of what we want to remember and what we want to commemorate,” she said.
Heritage isn’t a thing of the past, she added, but “all about the present” and “who we want to be.”
Boland’s name on facade
A plaque will be unveiled to mark the renaming of the library at a special event on March 10 but a date for the external signage – Eavan Boland’s name in big letters for all to behold — has not yet been announced.
A spokesperson for Trinity told CNN there were regulatory restrictions on signage on a Protected Structure like the library, calling the ongoing process “a procedural matter.”
The delay has frustrated some. “The new sign needs to go up pronto,” said history student Méabh Scahill, who spoke in favor of Boland at a student-hosted debate on the subject of the renaming.
“I’m sure some people are still calling it the Berkeley library,” she tells CNN. “I feel like people have reverted back”
Old habits die hard. But Eavan Casey has allowed herself to imagine her mother’s name on the facade.
“It will become part of the language of the university,” she said in wonder, as if she couldn’t quite believe it.
For Nessa O’Mahony, part of a network of female Irish poets who have campaigned for greater recognition for Boland, the long wait is nearly over.
“What a glorious thing, as an up-and-coming writer, to make an arrangement to meet a friend outside The Boland!” she said.
“Do you know, I’m looking forward to doing that myself.”