It always bothers me when a woman is described only in terms of her relationship to the men in her life. Mention the name Maud Gonne, for instance, and someone is bound to add the annoying rider, “muse to poet WB Yeats”.

She was opinionated, strong-willed, polarising and self-assured. She was a businesswoman with a gift for raising money. She was a fierce advocate for social justice and regularly criticised 19th-century landlords.

Our priceless coastal heritage is under threat from climate change but, as Clodagh Finn writes, we are not entirely at the mercy of the elements 

I can’t help thinking that we need the Irish Housewives Association (IHA) now more than ever.

It might not be the job description you’d like to see recorded for posterity, but Kerry-born Elizabeth Sugrue will always be known as Ireland’s female ‘hangwoman’, or Lady Betty for short.

OH, the irony. George Salmon, mathematician, arch conservative and one-time provost of Trinity College Dublin, said that women would enter Ireland’s oldest university over his dead body. And that is how it turned out.

Come with me now, this is special. We’ve been invited to stand in the very spot where Corkwoman Elizabeth St Leger Aldworth discovered the secret rites of a Freemason initiation ceremony some 300 years ago — and was almost put to death because of it.

Ethel Lilian Boole, author of the international bestseller 'The Gadfly', was born in Cork, even if the city doesn’t make enough of that glorious connection

She had a private audience with Pope John XXIII, met the “father of black nationalism” and, as a young businesswoman and single mother, organised Princess Grace’s visit to Ireland, yet few of those things come to mind when Eileen O’Mara Walsh’s name ...

When the lord mayor of Cork, Donal Ó Ceallacháin, called to the Mansion House in Dublin in 1921, Mary O’Sullivan turned him away. She didn’t like the look of him.