It took 433 years for Trinity College Dublin to name one of its buildings after a woman. Even though Ireland’s leading university was founded by Queen Elizabeth I, all its buildings until now were named after men.

The university has officially renamed one of its main libraries after the renowned Irish poet Eavan Boland, who highlighted the role of women in Irish society in her poetry. She has also served as director of creative writing for over 20 years at Stanford University in California.

Mary Robinson, Ireland’s first female president and a former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said, “Eavan Boland’s poetry helped write women back into history.”

The Eavan Boland Library was formerly named after a supporter of slavery, George Berkeley. While he was a well-known philosopher, he also enslaved people and supported slavery. 

When George Floyd, an African-American was killed in 2020, it triggered a global movement called Black Lives Matter. Thereafter, Trinity College students called for the removal of Berkeley’s name from the library, saying it contradicted the university’s core values of human dignity, freedom, and equality. 

The university received 855 public proposals to rename the library after Eavan Boland, according to Professor Eoin O. Sullivan, Senior Dean and Chair of the Trinity Legacies Review Working Group.

Helen Shenton, Librarian and College Archivist at Trinity College Dublin, said, “Under its new name, it will provide an inclusive and inspirational space for generations of students to come, bolstered now by Eavan Boland’s scholarly and feminist reputation.”

The New York Times Book Review has also called Ms Boland “Ireland’s leading feminist poet.” 

Gerardine Meaney, a Professor of cultural theory at University College Dublin, said that Ms Boland followed in the footsteps of the late Nobel Prize winner poet Seamus Heaney.

Poet and writer Theo Dorgan said that Irish poetry once ignored women’s experiences, but Ms Boland changed this by writing about everyday aspects of women’s lives, like breastfeeding and domestic life, in her widely acclaimed 1982 book Night Feed.

The date for the outdoor signage, which will feature Eavan Boland’s name in large letters for everyone to see, has not yet been set, but a plaque commemorating the library’s renaming will be unveiled during a special ceremony on March 10.