Fund for Irish Studies: Mary Daly

In 2014, Professor MARY E. DALY was elected as the first female President of the Royal Irish Academy in its 229-year history. Professor Daly is one of Ireland’s most prominent senior historians and is a member of the government’s Expert Advisory Group on Commemorations. She is emeritus professor of history at UCD and served for seven years as Principal of UCD College of Arts and Celtic Studies; she has also held visiting positions at Harvard and Boston College. She has served on the National Archives Advisory Council, the Irish Manuscripts Commission and the Higher Education Authority.  In 2015 she was appointed as a member of the Commission of Inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes. Professor Daly was involved in the commemoration of the sesquicentenary of the great famine 1995-97, and with Dr. Margaret O’Callaghan she directed a research project on the Golden Jubilee of the 1916 Rising, resulting in the publication of a major edited work: 1916 in 1966: Commemorating the Easter Rising (2007). Over the course of her distinguished career, Professor Daly has researched widely and published prolifically, notably: Dublin, the Deposed Capital: A Social and Economic History, 1860-1914 (1984); Women and Work in Ireland (1997); The Slow Failure: Population Decline and Independent Ireland, 1920-1973 (2006); with Theo Hoppen, Gladstone: Ireland and Beyond (2011) and most recently Sixties Ireland: Reshaping the Economy, State and Society, 1957 – 1973 (2016). With Eugenio Biagini she is co-editor of The Cambridge History of Modern Ireland, which will be published May 2017. She is a graduate of UCD and Oxford University, and a member of the Acadaemia Europaea.