Clodagh Finn: A chance to unveil your female heroes

However, it was a woman in a wall that caught my attention on the way to the launch earlier this week. While passing the architectural gem that is the Honan Chapel, I was struck by a beautiful sculpture of a woman’s face, one of six reliefs adorning the capitals at the church’s western entrance.

Apparently she represents Gobnait of Ballyvourney, Co Cork, the early medieval patron saint of bees and beekeepers. I wondered, though, where the sculptor Henry Emery got his inspiration. Was he inspired by a real woman? If so, who was she? 

Isabella Honan

Is it possible that her features were inspired by Isabella (Belle) Honan, the church’s benefactor and a philanthropist who left over £150,000 — €25m in today’s terms — to causes and charities in the city after her death in 1913? Why do we know so little about that extraordinary woman; the last surviving member of a Cork merchant family which made its fortune in the butter trade? 

As Brendan McNamara put it so eloquently in this newspaper last year: “It is perhaps only in her last will and testament that we can hear her voice and discern something of her motivation. In 18 tightly handwritten foolscap pages, her instructions dictate an astounding sharing of her wealth with people and institutions in Cork.”

She also stipulated that any money left to married women “should not come under the control of their husbands”.

Isabella (Belle) Honan, I thought, would certainly be a fitting subject for a portrait, if only we knew what she looked like. I don’t know of any surviving images or portraits of this criminally overlooked woman.

By contrast, I recently came across a photo of another woman with a Honan connection that I hadn’t seen before.

Katherine Anne McCarthy

In 1946, Corkwoman Katherine Anne McCarthy was photographed with fellow members of the French Resistance, mechanic Sylvette Leleu and café owner Angèle Tardiveau. The formidable trio spirited hundreds of Allied soldiers out of occupied France during the Second World War.

Katherine, or Sister Marie-Laurence as she was known in her Franciscan order, continued her work until her arrest on June 18, 1941. She endured “five very difficult interrogations with the Gestapo”, according to her witness statement and spent a year in solitary confinement.

She was later sent to Ravensbrück, Hitler’s notorious concentration camp for women, where she lived in constant fear of being sent to her death in the gas chamber. She managed to avoid selection for the gas chambers at least four times — by hiding and, on one occasion, by climbing out of a window.

“It was immensely lonely,” Catherine Fleming, who has done invaluable research on her life, wrote. “She had to fight with all the moral and physical strength she had left.”

When she was released in 1945, she weighed little more than four stone after years of deprivation, but she went on to make a full recovery. She moved back to Cork and went on to become mother superior at the Honan Home Convent in Cork.

She was recently honoured with a plaque in the northern French town of Béthune. Now, the Women on Walls campaign might offer us an opportunity to pay tribute to her at home too.

Elizabeth Friedlander

Speaking of the Second World War, the story of another woman who fought against the Nazi occupation of Europe is told in the archives at UCC. Elizabeth Friedlander (1903-1984) used her talent as a designer to forge German ration books, Nazi rubber stamps and identity papers for use in the Resistance.

She fled Berlin in 1936 as Hitler rose to power. By then, she had already made a piece of design history by becoming one of the few woman to invent a typeface. It was named ‘Elizabeth’ because her Jewish surname ‘Friedlander’ would draw attention.

When she arrived in London, she was introduced to the Political Warfare Executive, the secret intelligence organisation that produced propaganda designed to undermine German morale.

In the 1960s, she moved to Kinsale, Co Cork, where she continued to work in design until her death in 1984. Wouldn’t it be nice to see her come out of the archive and on to a wall?

Nancy McCarthy

And what about Nancy McCarthy, another woman whose papers are kept at UCC? 

Born in 1902 to Annie and Charles McCarthy, a plumber in Emmet Place, Cork, she qualified as a pharmacist and was one of the first women to run her own pharmacy. She opened her own chemist shop in Douglas in 1946.

That’s only a fraction of her story. To quote a snippet from the UCC archive: “Throughout her life, Nancy played an active and influential role in the cultural life of Cork City. As a young amateur actress, she performed with the Cork Drama League, meeting there the writer Frank O’Connor (then known as Michael O’Donovan) with whom she had a romantic relationship and long-standing friendship.”

Women on Walls

I hadn’t even made it to the launch of Women on Walls at the Glucksman Gallery, but the stories of several women with a link to the campus were already floating around in the ether.

Dr Nessa Lynch, Matheson lecturer in law, technology and innovation at UCC, spoke of another — Mary Boole, a self-taught mathematician, writer and education pioneer who discouraged rote learning. She also happened to be married to George Boole, UCC’s first professor of maths, but isn’t it time she shone in her own right?

We’ve been looking to the past. Jess Majekodunmi, director of the Human Sciences Studio at The Dock, Accenture’s global innovation centre, brought us back to the present with her suggested nomination — the powerhouse that is Joanne O’Riordan, the activist and sports journalist who was born without limbs.

As Joanne herself said: “There’s a lot of ordinary people doing extraordinary things and why not give them a voice?”

Since the Women on Walls campaign began in 2016, some 25 women have been recognised in commissioned portraits at the Royal Irish Academy, the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and Dublin City University, Dr Michelle Cullen, managing director and head of inclusion and diversity, Accenture in Ireland, said.

For the first time, the public is being asked to help choose four women, alive or dead, to be featured in portraits at UCC.

Professor John O’Halloran, university president, said: “We hope the trailblazing women we will spotlight as part of this campaign will inspire and encourage our students, staff, alumni, and the wider community to pursue their dreams and realise their full potential.”

Trailblazing, however, has many iterations, as Dr Avril Hutch, director of equality, diversity and inclusion at UCC, pointed out. The nominee must have worked for the betterment of society, but that could be anything from building a community garden to leading an organisation.

“Leadership comes in many different forms and we want to celebrate that,” she said.

Submit your nomination online before August 6 at accenture.com/womenonwalls.