Centuries-old Irish university names building after woman for first time

French president Emmanuel Macron and Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin meet with university staff during a visit Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, Thursday, Aug. 26, 2021. (AP Photo/Peter Morrison)

Ireland’s oldest university has named a campus building after a woman for the first time -- 433 years after it was founded by Queen Elizabeth I.

The main library at Trinity College Dublin, previously named for a slave owner, is now called the Eavan Boland Library after one of the foremost female voices in Irish literature.

“It’s taken us since 1592 to get here, but after 400 years and a bit thank God we have kind of got it right now,” Mary McAleese, Trinity’s chancellor, said in Dublin Monday at the unveiling of a plaque marking the name change.

The library was previously called after the 18th century Irish philosopher George Berkeley, who bought enslaved people for a plantation he owned in America.

But the university removed Berkeley’s name in 2023 in the wake of global Black Lives Matter protests.

At the time, the university said the use of Berkeley’s name was inconsistent with its core values of human dignity, freedom, inclusivity and equality.

It then announced the library would be renamed after Boland who published many acclaimed poetry collections, and taught and lectured in Ireland and the United States.

Boland, who died in 2020 aged 75, documented women’s lives in her poetry, and also looked at the role of women in Irish history and culture.

“It’s happening all over the world,” McAleese, a former Irish president, told AFP afterwards.

“Institutions are finding their voice and the courage to review what is embedded in their past that needs to be looked at again, and told a different way,” she said.

“The renaming is a great opportunity to celebrate women on campus,” Meabh Scahill, a Trinity student who first raised the idea of naming the library after Boland, told AFP.

“It’s also a chance to reflect on our university’s colonial legacy,” the 22-year-old history, art history, and architecture student told AFP outside the building.