Scoil Mhuire honours pioneering former student Dr Máire de Paor with new display

If students at Scoil Mhuire can pause for a moment in the school corridor this week, their eyes may fall on a new framed display celebrating one of the school’s earliest pupils - and one of Ireland’s most quietly remarkable scholars - Dr Máire de Paor.

The display, unveiled on Monday, marks not only the life of the archaeologist, broadcaster, public intellectual and campaigner, but also the foundational role Scoil Mhuire played in setting her extraordinary journey in motion.

De Paor’s son, Diarmaid, travelled from Dublin to attend the unveiling. A seasoned public speaker in his role as deputy general secretary of the ASTI, he joked that addressing conferences of hundreds never rattles him - but standing in front of 60 Leaving Cert students in his mother’s old school proved an entirely different matter.

“I don’t remember ever being so nervous,” he said afterwards. “Because it was my mum and so personal it was very emotional for me, and I’m not embarrassed to say that I shed a few tears.

“The children were lovely, and so nice. Two of them came out and said: ‘Is that man alright’.

“I met a lot of fine and very impressive students. Buncrana is in good hands if that is the future.”

In pictures: Trade fair draws the crowds to Scoil Mhuire

Máire de Paor was born Máire Mac Dermott in Buncrana on 6 May 1925, the daughter of grocer Eamonn (Ned) Mac Dermott and Delia Mac Veigh, a teacher in the Illies. She grew up on St Oran’s Road, next door to the old Garda barracks, in a family that valued education but in an era when opportunities for girls were limited.

Her older brother Donal - who went on to become a GP who practised in Derry - was destined for college, with family savings set aside for his studies. “She was a girl, and education wasn’t really something for girls at that time,” Diarmaid said. Everything changed when an uncle living in London recognised his niece’s potential. He paid the fees that allowed her to leave Buncrana for University College Dublin. She was barely 17.

“She had nothing against Buncrana,” Diarmaid said, “but she couldn't wait to get out. For a bright young woman in the 1940s, small town Ireland didn't offer a lot.”

What followed was a career that broke academic ground. After taking an undergraduate degree, she completed a master’s thesis on the poet Francis Ledwidge before turning to archaeology. Her doctoral research on early Christian metalwork made history: she became the first woman to earn a PhD from UCD’s College of Social Science and Law.

academic achievements were matched by significant professional contributions. She worked in the UCD Department of Archaeology from 1946 until the mid-1950s, publishing in some of the field’s most prestigious journals. But her career collided with the discriminatory marriage bar of the time: when she married fellow writer and historian Liam de Paor in 1955, she was forced out of her job in the college.

The couple went on to have five children - one daughter and four sons - and collaborated on numerous publications including ‘Early Christian Ireland’, long considered definitive in its field.

Máire became a boundary-crossing intellectual. She lectured across the US, Canada, Scandinavia, France and the UK; taught at Trinity College Dublin; and spent a year in Nepal on a UNESCO project, during which she became active on a committee supporting the 20,000 Tibetan refugees then living there.

In Ireland, she became a researcher with RTÉ in the 1970s. A member of the Royal Irish Academy from 1960, she served on the Arts Council for two decades and was deeply involved with Conradh na Gaeilge and Cumann Merriman, where she was both director and later chairperson.

And when in 2018 the college was planning to create an award for the best PhD thesis in the vast School of Sociology and Law, they reversed the practice of decades and sought a female rather than male academic.

“They wanted to honour the first woman to earn a doctorate in the college, and it turned out to be my mother,” Diarmaid said. UCD asked whether the family preferred the award to bear her birth name or her married name. “We would have preferred it to be called the Máire Mac Dermott, but we knew she would have preferred it to be de Paor. It was a different era, and that’s what she would have been known by.”

Read more: Councillor calls for Politics to be offered as a subject in all Donegal secondary schools

At home, she fostered a culture of openness and debate. “She was a very progressive woman,” Diarmaid recalled. “She ran for the Senate (NUI panel) in the 1960s and came quite close to taking a seat.”

Her liberal instincts distinguished her from much of Irish society at the time. “Jim Kemmy [a former Labour TD] used to tell me that my mother was the first person in Ireland that he’d ever heard speaking publicly about contraception. That'd have been in the early 1960s.”

Their household was “very progressive,” he said. “Growing up, there would have been visitors to our house who were gay or even trans, quite remarkable in the 1970s and 1980s. There was a strong liberal vibe, and very progressive vibe, in our home.”

Despite her international career and reputation, Máire never lost her sense of gratitude for the foundations laid in Scoil Mhuire.

“She always talked with such affection, and gratitude about Scoil Mhuire,” Diarmaid emphasised. “She said that if it hadn’t been for the school, God knows where she would have ended up. As a family, we are very much aware of and so grateful for what the school did for her.”

Her affection for the school ran deep. “She often spoke about how much the nuns did for her. Occasionally, they’d invite her back to give talks, and would be very generous by trying to pay her while other places would offer a 50p book token.”

That impact endures. As someone who visits schools regularly in his union role, Diarmaid says the spirit the happy atmosphere in the school is striking. “You can almost sense when you go in whether it’s a happy place, and Scoil Mhuire is still fantastic.”

Diarmaid and his wife, Liz White, made a weekend of the trip to his mother’s home place. They stayed at the Lake of Shadows Hotel and dined in the Sherpa restaurant - an experience that would have delighted his mother, given the family’s year in Kathmandu.

“If I had a hotline and could have told my mother that I was in Buncrana and eating in a Nepalese restaurant, I don’t think she’d have believed it!” Diarmaid quipped.

They visited her childhood home on St Oran’s Road, where a chance meeting led to an unexpected and emotional glimpse into a place once lived. “We were loitering on the footpath outside when a mother and the little girl who lived there came along. I told her that my own mother had lived here many years ago, and she invited us in. That was really nice. It was a very emotional trip for me.”

Máire de Paor died in 1994, but her legacy as a scholar, broadcaster, advocate and cultural leader continues inspire.

With the unveiling of the new display, Scoil Mhuire has ensured that her story - rooted in Buncrana, carried across the world and driven by an unwavering belief in the power of education - will remain visible to generations to come.

For a young woman who once looked out at the world from a classroom in Buncrana and imagined something larger for herself, it feels a fitting tribute.

And who knows when a student will take a moment when the corridor quietens down to stop and read Máire’s story, and think: if her, then why not me?