The former Berkeley library will henceforth be known as the Boland library, in honour of Irish writer and Trinity alumna Eavan Boland, College have announced.
A years-long process to select a new name for the library concluded today as Board voted to approve the proposal of the Legacies Review Working Group (LRWG) chaired by Senior Dean Professor Eoin O’Sullivan.
It will become the first building on campus to be named in honour of a woman.
In an email to staff and students today, O’Sullivan said: “We have arrived at this point because of the hard work and conviction of many people in Trinity’s community, not least the students who not only called for a change in the Library’s name, but who worked with us to achieve that change.”
The announcement follows the “denaming” of the library in April 2023, which removed the name of 18th-century philosopher George Berkeley from the building due to his slave ownership and written defences of slavery.
Members of the College community were invited to suggest names to be considered by the working group. Trinity Ógra Sinn Féin notably campaigned for Theobald Wolfe Tone, revolutionary leader of the 1798 Rebellion.
During the Gaza solidarity encampment in May, protestors used chalk to rename the library in honour of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza in December 2023.
Boland, who died in 2020, was one of the most celebrated Irish poets of the 20th century.
Upon her death in 2020, President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins described Boland as “one of the most insightful inner sources of Irish life”, adding that “the revealing of a hidden Ireland, in terms of what was suffered, neglected, evaded, given insufficient credit, is part of her achievement”.
A literary Irish life
Born to an affluent family in Dublin in 1944, Boland lived briefly in London while her father served as the first Irish Ambassador to the United Kingdom. This experience led her to pen the poem An Irish Childhood in England: 1951, in which she boldly stated that “England to an Irish child is nothing more than what you lost”.
Boland’s mother was prominent painter Frances Kelly, whose work appeared in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics’ art competition, and was a leading figure in Irish modernism throughout the early 20th century.
After attending Holy Child Killiney, she went on to study English language and literature in Trinity, graduating with a first class honours degree in 1966. Her first poetry collection, simply entitled 23 Poems, was published when she was a Junior Fresh student. Throughout her lifetime, she published over ten collections of poetry,
Her most prominent works include In a Time of Violence, a 1994 collection which documents her frustrations with the relegation of women’s voices to the sidelines of the Irish literary canon.
She further wrote about motherhood, social marginalisation, and the intimacies of everyday life, amongst other themes.
Apart from publishing her writings, she was a highly successful academic, having held teaching positions in Trinity and University College Dublin (UCD), as well as being a tenured professor in Stanford University.
She also served as writer in residence in both Trinity and the National Maternity Hospital, and was a staple on the Leaving Certificate English curriculum.
She died suddenly in April 2020 from a stroke, at her family home in Dundrum, Co. Dublin after returning home to Ireland to work remotely, lecturing at Stanford University.
