Clodagh Finn: Let Brigid be the cue for all female saints to come marching in

Influential founder of the Church of Kildare will take centre stage on the first public holiday in her honour

The Brigid 1500 Light and Fire Walk, from Brigid 1500 — a programme of events in which will take place in 2024 to commemorate the 1500th anniversary of St Brigid’s death.

IT PLEASES me no end to see Brigid, the influential founder of the Church of Kildare, take centre stage ahead of the first public holiday in her honour on February 6.

The tone of events planned for the coming days is celebratory and inspirational — a much-needed lift to mark the mid-point between the darkness of the winter solstice in late December and the return of brighter, warmer days that will be ushered in with the spring equinox in late March.

It’s edifying to see a genuine attempt to retrieve the truth about an early female church leader who had real power. There’s talk of the goddess Brigid, too, and calls to honour the deity associated with Imbolc, or the beginning of spring.

Bring it on, I say, but let this be just a mere start. Now that Brigid has been properly honoured, surely it’s time we allowed all of our early female saints to come marching in?

What of Attracta, for instance? St Patrick might be hailed as the one who banished snakes from Ireland, but it was Attracta (or Athracht) of Sligo who took up her staff to kill one of the last, most deadly malingerers. 

She was also said to have parted the waters, Moses-like, to deliver the chiefs of Leyny in Sligo from enemy soldiers.

Or what of Canier, from Bantry in Co Cork, who walked on water as an elderly woman to secure a burial plot for herself on Scattery Island at the mouth of the river Shannon?

“She crossed the sea with dry feet as if she were on smooth land,” to quote the Book of Lismore. When she got there, she faced down St Senán when he said only men were allowed on the island.

Or, one of my favourites, Cranat of Fermoy, because she shows that even saints can have an off day? She took desperate measures to stay single so that she could become a nun. When a would-be husband planned to kidnap her (sensitive content warning), she plucked out both of her eyes to put him off.

It worked, but there was a hitch. When she went to restore her sight, one of her eyes was missing. It was later found in a tree with a piece of bark stuck in it. Try as she might, Cranat could not remove the bark before putting it back into her eye socket. It left her with a rather crooked, fierce gaze, it was said.

It’s hard to know how we are to interpret that story, perhaps as a symbol of one woman’s determined, if rather desperate, attempt to follow her own course in life. A more cynical view might interpret it as ‘proof’ that women’s miracles were less powerful than those of men. In any event, it’s a story worth telling along with hundreds more which, incidentally, often feature the theme of blinding, if only temporarily.

Brigid herself was said to have taken out her eyes to ward off a potential husband. 

In another version of the story, she blinded her brother when he insisted she marry.

I’ve even read that holy women kept cranes as pets in early medieval Ireland so that they could peck at the eyes of unwanted suitors.

With Brigid back in the news, surely it is also time to reclaim the rich (and, yes, sometimes gory)
details of these early, undertold myths?

For some, these age-old legends will be considered parables of the power of God, but for me they are wonderful stories with powerful female protagonists that help us to restore the weave of Irish history.

It is great, then, to see 23 of those “wonder women” featured in former school teacher Lorraine Mulholland’s impeccably timed new book, Saint Brigid and Other Amazing Irish Women (Columba Press). In it, she conjures up an early Ireland populated with kickass princesses, girls of power and prophecy, and strong-minded, brave and unwavering women.

While it’s aimed at younger readers (aged nine-plus), here is a book for anyone who wants to see women being lifted from the footnotes of history and myth to become the stars of their own stories.

Opening up difficult issues

Each chapter comes with a worksheet, with tasks and suggestions tailored for schools. It strikes me as a wonderful way to use the darker themes — madness, murder, slavery — to open up discussion of difficult issues. Mulholland’s didactic approach might tell us something about how those stories were used in the past too.

“Myth,” as linguist Jaan Puhvel once wrote, “is deadly serious”. It tells people about the outside world and how to navigate it.

For Mulholland, though: “What is key is that these long-overlooked stories about women and girls are brought back into the light.”

I had never heard of Lí Ban, for example, a young woman who gets trapped in a cave but escapes when she is transformed into a mermaid, half woman, half salmon, by the god of the sea, Manannán mac Lir. She then spends 300 years surfing the waves around Ireland before converting to Christianity.

She is given the choice of living another 300 years or dying and going straight to heaven. She chooses the latter, becoming a saint in the process. Make of that what you will, but her story challenges the usual trope of mermaid as tragic, cursed woman and/or temptress of fishermen.

Lorraine Mulholland’s Lí Ban is free and adventurous. She swims all around the coast of Ireland, surfing the waves, and then, ever curious, goes all the way to the Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic Ocean to see where eels are born. She encounters all kinds of sea creatures before returning home.

Three centuries pass, from the 3rd to the 6th century AD, before she craves human contact and then, when caught in a net by a monk, she is set free again. It is her decision to meet the monk a year later and when she is fished out of the sea, the monks half-fill the boat with water to make her more comfortable.

Fanciful? Of course it is, though, as Mulholland notes: “In the Annals of Ulster, an entry for 890AD records a gigantic mermaid 59.44 metres (195ft) long and whiter than a swan. The length of her hair was 5.5 metres (18ft).”

That is one of several fascinating details in a book that will be enjoyed by anyone interested in hearing the mythology, folklore and origin stories of sainthood from a female perspective.

Incidentally, Lí Ban’s feast day fell on January 27. It’s hardly likely to become a public holiday, but here’s to embracing her story, and those of all the early church leaders. The march of the female saints has only just begun.