Clodagh Finn: A tale of two extraordinary ‘ordinary’ grandmothers

Evictions over a two-week period in June 1887 generated international headlines, and widespread sympathy for tenants

Bridget and James O'Driscoll. Bridget was 14 when she was sentenced to one month's hard labour in Limerick Prison after the Bodyke Evictions. Picture: courtesy of Jim Driscoll

What comes to mind when you hear the word ‘grandmother’?

It is hardly an image of a 14-year-old girl throwing boiling water at the ‘crowbar men’ trying to evict her from her home at Bodyke, Co Clare, during one of the most infamous evictions of the land war of the 1880s.