Archaeologist, historian, arts administrator, broadcaster and activist Máire de Paor, who was born 100 years ago this month, was a multifaceted person who was also noted for her humanity and warmth. Her achievements are all the more commendable as she lived through a time when attitudes to the role of women in Irish society were decidedly narrow.
She was born in Buncrana, Co Donegal, the second of four children of Eamonn McDermott, a grocer, and Delia McVeigh, a teacher, both veterans of the independence struggle who had left Derry after partition. Following schooling at the Convent of Mercy, Buncrana, she attended UCD, where she became active in the Cumann Gaelach and interested in the writings of Wolfe Tone and James Connolly. She graduated with an MA in 1946, having done a thesis on the Meath first World War poet Francis Ledwidge.
In 1948-1958 she was an assistant lecturer in UCD’s department of archaeology, where she completed her PhD on early Irish Christian archaeology and metalwork, took part in important archaeological digs at Lough Gur and published a book on 10th-century Irish metalwork. Her most well-known book, Early Christian Ireland (1958), was co-written with her husband, historian Liam de Paor, whom she met in UCD in 1944 and married in 1955. They would go on to have four sons and a daughter. “This book, which became a bestseller, was indicative of Máire’s approach to scholarly matters: serious but not solemn and above all accessible,” according to Diarmaid Ferriter, who wrote the entry on her in the Dictionary of Irish Biography.
He ascribed her leaving UCD in 1958 partly to the demands of raising a young family but perhaps also to “her restless and creative spirit, which seemed more suited to a freelance career”. It was also the case that married women were then debarred from permanent contracts in Irish universities; the bar was lifted in UCD in 1966.
Whatever the reason, she travelled to teach in the US, Canada, Scandinavia, France and the UK and spent a year in Nepal with her husband on a Unesco project, becoming active on a committee helping Tibetan refugees there. Ferriter described her as a committed republican, socialist and feminist. She joined the Labour Party and in 1965 contested the senate elections on the National University of Ireland panel on its behalf but was not elected.
The significance of her research on early Christian Ireland was acknowledged in 1960 with her election to the Royal Irish Academy and she served on its council for five terms. She was a founding member in 1967 of Cumann Merriman, which organised the summer school in memory of the 18th century Gaelic poet. This gave her “the opportunity to indulge in all her favourite disciplines, including history, art, culture, language and archaeology, and particularly their use as methods of exploring nationality”, according to Ferriter.
RTÉ recruited her as a researcher and broadcaster in the late 1960s and she researched extensively for radio and television programmes. Among her television credits are These Stones Remain (1971) and Ireland: A Television History (1980). In 1973, she was appointed to the Arts Council, serving on it for the next 20 years. When there were difficulties between the Arts Council chairman, Colm Ó Briain, and the Government in 1982, she championed the council’s independence and its need to resist political interference. In her Arts Council role, she particularly supported the visual and performing arts, and was a skilled administrator and gifted social networker on their behalf.
“Notwithstanding her passionate belief in political equality, she accepted that she was an elitist as far as the arts were concerned, maintaining that original artistic ability was the preserve of a relatively select number of practitioners, whom she worked ceaselessly to discover and publicise,” Ferriter has written.
She had been appointed to the cultural relations committee of the Department of Foreign Affairs and to the interim board of the National Museum of Ireland and she remained active in many roles until shortly before her death at the age of 69 on December 6th, 1994.
On her death, Pat Wallace, afterwards a long-time director of the National Museum, wrote that she was “a Donegal woman whose parish eventually encompassed all of Ireland”. Indeed, her love of archaeology and the arts “brought her into contact with people and cultures all over the world”, the historian Angela Byrne wrote.
To commemorate and honour her, UCD created the Máire de Paor Award for the best PhD thesis each year.
