First Among Unequals 15 women who made a breakthrough

FINTAN O'TOOLE

First woman in cabinet

Maire Geoghegan-Quinn entered politics through the traditional route, winning a byelection at the age of 24 after the death of her father Johnny in 1975. But there was nothing traditional about her subsequent career. In December 1979, when she was still only 29, Charles Haughey appointed her as minister for the Gaeltacht, making her the first woman in the history of the State to be a member of government. (Constance Markievicz was minister for labour in the first Dáil of 1919.) She also became, in 2010, the first Irish woman member of the EU commission, where she holds the science, innovation and research brief. Her political effectiveness owed much to her ability to balance absolute loyalty to Fianna Fáil (she never broke ranks over issues like contraception, divorce and abortion) with a capacity for boldness. As minister for justice she steered through a radical decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1993. Her ambition to become taoiseach was thwarted when she was defeated in a contest for the FF leadership by Bertie Ahern. Retired from Irish politics in 1997, citing invasion of privacy in newspaper reports on one of her children. Appointed to European Court of Auditors in 2000.

First woman on High Court

The first woman to serve on the High Court, the second woman ever called to the Inner Bar as a senior counsel (in 1976) and the first woman to chair the Bar Council (in 1979), Mella Carroll blazed the trail for women in the legal profession. From a privileged Dublin background (her father Patrick was Garda commissioner), she was an unlikely feminist icon. As a barrister, she was not associated with women's causes and made her reputation in commercial law. With no known political affiliations, her appointment to the High Court was widely regarded as testament to her diligence and ability rather than an attempt to redress the gross gender imbalance in the judiciary. She did, however, adopt a notably less formal and pompous style on the bench, insisting that she not be addressed as "my lord", or "your lordship", but simply as "judge", or "the court". She presided calmly over many high-profile criminal trials, including that of Catherine Nevin, in which she made groundbreaking rulings on media coverage. She chaired the second commission on the status of women - a role which led to controversy when the anti-abortion group Spuc objected to her hearing its action against a clinic for providing abortion information. Mella Carroll died in 2006, just weeks after her retirement from 25 years on the High Court.

First woman to win Tony Award for best director

The first woman to win (in 1998) the Tony Award for best director on Broadway, Garry Hynes is best known for her work with Druid, the theatre company she co-founded in Galway in 1974. Ireland had a few prominent female theatre directors (such as Ria Mooney and Lelia Doolan) before Hynes burst on the scene, but none had the opportunity to shape her own repertoire from scratch. Working in Galway, which had no existing professional theatre, Hynes had both the challenge and the opportunity of creating something for herself. With extraordinary dynamism and tremendous talent, she created both a company and an individual style. Although she has worked extensively in both Britain and the US, Hynes's work has remained deeply rooted in the west of Ireland. It is with writers connected to the west - JM Synge, MJ Molloy, Tom Murphy, Martin McDonagh - that she has created her most memorable productions. The premieres of Murphy's Bailegangaire, which gave Siobhan McKenna her last great role, and of McDonagh's Leenane Trilogy (she won the Tony for The Beauty Queen of Leenane) are among the most exciting events in Irish theatre in recent decades.

First woman editor of a national daily newspaper

Geraldine Kennedy became the first woman to edit a national daily newspaper when she took over at The Irish Times in 2002. She had already been a pioneering figure as a political correspondent, with the Times, the Sunday Tribune and the Sunday Press. Kennedy's journalistic career began in her native Munster, with the Munster Express and the Cork Examiner before she moved to The Irish Times. As a driven reporter, she revelled particularly in the divisions and machinations within Fianna Fáil following the accession as leader of Charles Haughey in 1979. Her success led to the back-handed compliment of having her phone tapped illegally by Haughey's government. As a result, together with Bruce Arnold, she successfully sued the State in 1987. Kennedy was elected to the Dáil for Dún Laoghaire for the then new Progressive Democrats party the same year and served as its spokesman on foreign affairs and Northern Ireland and as chief whip until she lost her seat in 1989. She returned to The Irish Times as public affairs correspondent, breaking a number of major news stories, including the details of events at the attorney general's office which brought down Albert Reynolds's government in 1994. She then became the paper's political editor before succeeding Conor Brady as editor.

First woman boxing champion

Katie Taylor has two firsts to her name and another in her sights. In 2001, at the age of 15, she won the first official women's boxing match in Ireland when she defeated Alanna Audley. In 2005, she became the first Irish woman to win a gold medal at the European senior championships. Given her dominance of the lightweight division (she has won the world title twice), the hope is that she will go on to be one of the first Olympic champions when women's boxing is included in the 2012 games in London. Having been named as boxer of the tournament at the 2008 world championships in China, Taylor is widely regarded as being pound-for-pound the best amateur female boxer on earth. By 2012, she will be 26 and should be at the peak of her powers. Boxing was in Taylor's blood from her childhood in Bray, Co Wicklow: her father was an Irish champion in 1986 and her mother is a boxing referee. But she is also a talented footballer and has appeared regularly for the Irish international soccer team.

First woman president

Elected in 1990 as Ireland's first female president, Mary Robinson had been seen as a courageous campaigner and a brilliant lawyer but as lacking the popular touch. Robinson used her base in the Seanad (in which she represented Trinity College Dublin from 1969 until 1989) to break political taboos over issues such as contraception and divorce. As a constitutional lawyer, she played a key part in landmark legal challenges on access to contraception and the right of women to sit on juries. In her long campaign for the presidency, Robinson managed to shed much of her image as an aloof intellectual and to crystallise a wider desire for change. As president, she used the office as a way of including previously excluded groups, such as gays and lesbians and the Irish diaspora. She resigned in September 2007 to become United Nations commissioner for human rights.

First Irish woman to climb Everest

Clare O'Leary has a triple first to her name: the first Irish woman to climb Mount Everest (in 2004), first to complete the arduous Seven Summits mountaineering challenge of climbing the highest peak on each continent, and first to make it to the South Pole (in 2008). In March, she came close to a fourth first but had to turn back before reaching the North Pole when one of her team developed frostbite. O'Leary is unlikely to be daunted. Her successful Everest climb followed a failure in 2003 when she was forced off the mountain by a stomach bug, having got to almost 25,000 feet. (Ironically, when she's not completing extraordinary feats of strength and endurance, O'Leary is a medical consultant, specialising in gastroenterology). This, after all, is a petite woman who weighs 50 kilos and has been seen regularly running up the hills of her native Cork with a 15 kilo pack on her back. O'Leary is a veteran of 23 major expeditions worldwide and shows no signs of stopping yet.

First woman president of Ictu

Before she became, in 1999, the first women to lead the Irish Congress of Trade Unions Inez McCormick had long been in the forefront of the fight for equality, in terms both of gender and religion. Born in Belfast in 1946, she left school at 16 but subsequently went to Trinity College Dublin and Queen's University Belfast to train as a social worker. Active in the civil rights movement, she was the first female official appointed by the National Union of Public Employees. She was a founder member of the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Fair Employment Commission in Northern Ireland in 1976. Her work was instrumental in the development of the fair employment laws that were to become part of the architecture of the Belfast Agreement. She was also a signatory to the McBride principles on ethical investment in Northern Ireland.

First woman departmental secretary

When she took over the top job in the Department of Transport and Power in 1959, Thekla Beere was the first woman to become secretary of a government department. She was also unusual as one of the very few Protestants in senior positions in the civil service (her father was a Church of Ireland rector in Co Meath). A mark of the barriers she had to overcome is the fact that Beere, though widely regarded as outstandingly able, was paid less than her male colleagues and would have had to resign if she had married. She instead maintained a very discreet 40-year relationship with a businessmen JJ O'Leary. Perhaps Beere's most important impact, however, came after her retirement. From 1970 to 1972, she chaired the first commission on the status of women, whose report was described by Mary Robinson as "a charter for women in the modern Irish State". In this role, Beere was an important bridge between the emerging women's movement and a cautious officialdom. More than half of the council's recommendations - on issues such as the marriage bar in the civil service, the widow's pension and equal pay - were implemented within a few years. Beere also served on the Irish Times trust and as president of An Oige, which she had helped to found in 1931. She died in 1991.

First woman priest

In September 1990, Janet Catterall became the first woman in the Republic to be ordained as a priest in the Church of Ireland, having previously been the first woman deacon. "I feel a great sense of satisfaction", she told The Irish Times, "that I finally am what I always felt I'm meant to be." Her husband David was already a Church of Ireland clergyman in West Cork. The struggle for women's ordination had been long and sometimes bitter, beginning in 1976 when Catherine McGuinness proposed at the Church of Ireland synod that there was no theological reason why women could not be priests. It was not until 1990, however, that the synod finally voted to approve female ordination. Catterall (originally from Wigan in England) followed Northern Ireland's first two women priests, Irene Templeton and Kathleen Young. Ginnie Kennerly followed shortly afterwards, as the first female rector assigned to a parish in the Republic. "To be a success," Catterall noted, "a woman has to be even better at her job than a man. If I get up in a pulpit and deliver a bad sermon, it's because I'm a woman, whereas a man is just seen as having an off day."

First woman university chancellor

Miriam Hederman O'Brien actually recorded a triple first. In 1985, she was the first woman appointed to the board of either of the two main banks, in her case AIB. (Ulster Bank had appointed Margaret Spence to its board a few months earlier). In 1987, she was the first woman fellow of the Irish Management Institute. In 1998, she became the first female chancellor of an Irish university - the University of Limerick. All of which may be a good advertisement for a late start. Because she had asthma, O'Brien did not start school until she was nine. She had, however, ample access to books and music, which was to remain a major passion in her life. Indeed, after boarding school at Mount Anville in Dublin, she went to Rome to study music, which she described as "the most significant experience of my life". She returned to Dublin and studied law and became well known in political circles through her involvement with the Irish Council of the European Movement, of which she became chair in 1977. Subsequently, she was often used by the State as a trusted troubleshooter. She chaired the expert group that carried out the initial inquiry into the scandal of the infection of hundreds of women with hepatitis C by contaminated blood transfusions. She also chaired two particularly important official bodies, the Commission on Taxation which was set up in response to the PAYE protests of 1979 and the Commission on the Funding of the Health Services in 1989. She was called in to inspect the troubled Letterkenny College in 1994 and produced a stinging report on its governance. In 1995, she chaired an independent review group looking into the handling of allegations of abuse against the consultant Michael Shine at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda.

First woman Aer Lingus pilot

When the Aer Lingus flight to Shannon took off from Frankfurt on April 26th 1979, it was embarking on a more epic journey than may have been apparent to the passengers. At the controls was the company's first female pilot, 23 year-old Grainne Cronin. Beside her for the occasion was her father Felim, a senior Aer Lingus captain who had switched with a colleague to be with her. Cronin, born in Co Clare, had "always wanted to fly". But she began her career in Aer Lingus in the only on-board role then open to women - as an air hostess. She gained experience as a pilot of her father's small Piper Club plane based at Weston Aerodrome. Although Cronin was quickly followed by a second woman trainee pilot, Maria Hetherington, she was for a long time the only women captain with Aer Lingus. In 1988, when she was still the sole captain and one of just five women pilots at Aer Lingus, Cronin commanded the first flight with an all-woman crew, assisted by her co-pilot Elaine Egan.

First to discover pulsar stars

Pulsars are a most unusual kind of star that emit powerful pulses of radio waves and have defied attempts to understand them since their discovery in 1967. That discovery was made by Jocelyn Bell. Bell, who grew up in a Quaker family in Lurgan, Co Armagh, failed the 11 Plus exam but went on to study physics at Glasgow University. While doing postgraduate work in Cambridge, she was given the relatively tedious task of monitoring signals picked up by a powerful radio telescope. She began to notice unusual patterns which she at first attributed to interference. She quickly realised, however, that the patterns were regular. Her supervisor suggested that they must be man-made. Bell, however, soon concluded that they originated outside the solar system. She had detected the first example of a previously unknown astronomical phenomenon: the rapidly spinning neutron stars that were christened "pulsars". It was arguably the greatest astronomical discovery of the 20th century. In 1974, Bell's supervisor at Cambridge, Anthony Hewish, was awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of pulsars. There was widespread dismay that Bell did not at least share the prize, though she herself has always been sanguine on the subject. "I believe," she said, "it would demean Nobel prizes if they were awarded to research students." In 2009, she was ranked in an online poll for New Scientist magazine as the most inspirational living woman scientist.

First woman president of the Institute of Accountants

Downes is another woman with multiple firsts: the first female member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants, its first female president, the first female partner in Coopers and Lybrand, and the first female director of Bank of Ireland Management Limited. In 1977, The Irish Times ran a feature on "working wives". Among those interviewed was an accountant called Margaret Downes who had three children aged 13, nine and seven. "I have always worked," she said, "except for perhaps three months of my married life. I have 100 per cent live-in help plus somebody who comes in at any time I am not here. At weekends I take full responsibility for cooking and homework." That it was necessary for a high-flying professional woman to explain her domestic arrangements says a great deal about the different expectations for women and men. Born (as Margaret Gavin) into a large family in Ballina, she studied at UCD and then trained as an accountant under the (subsequently notorious) Russell Murphy before going to work in London. After returning to Dublin, she became a partner in Coopers and Lybrand. In 1984, Bank of Ireland appointed her to its management board, though not to its governing "court of directors".

First woman Garda supt

Women were first recruited to the Garda in 1959, but it took 30 years for the first female to reach the rank of superintendent. Phyllis Nolan had been with this process almost all the way through, joining the force in 1960, becoming a sergeant two years later, an inspector in 1981 and a superintendent in 1989. Nolan, who came from Ballon in Co Carlow, was by 1989 the only one of her cohort of pioneering "banghardaí" to be still in the force. Nolan spent about half of her career before 1989 in Dublin and, as an inspector, she worked in the community relations division in Garda headquarters, particularly on crime prevention and juvenile liaison policies. She became, in 1982, the first woman member of the executive of the International Police Association. As superintendent, Nolan played a strong role in creating sensitivity to victims of rape and sexual abuse and in instituting special training courses in these areas. She suggested that the attitude in such investigations should be "one of sympathy and understanding, yet one in which either consideration does not give way to misdirection".