Grace O‘Malley

Tales of History and Imagination

This episode we attend a meeting at Greenwich palace, the date, some time in September 1593. The ‘Fairy Queen’ of England, Elizabeth I, awaits the arrival of one Grace O’Malley – the pirate Queen of Connaught. The two rulers had been at loggerheads for decades and in some ways they seemed wildly different characters – one a genteel Law-lord in charge of a nation.... the other a swashbuckling Warlord from beyond the Pail. Were they all that different? The philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us...
“Piracy and war gave place to trade, politics and letters; the war-lord to the law-lord; the privilege was kept, whilst the means of obtaining it were changed”

Today, we discuss Grace O’Malley, the Pirate Queen of Connaught.

Read the episode here.
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Music, writing, narration, mixing all yours truly. No Foley sounds this week.

I'm planning to share bibliographies far more from now on, why not right? In this case I wrote this episode for the first run at a podcast in 2019 using several news articles (many now paywalled) and Anne Chambers 'Grace O'Malley, the biography of Ireland's Pirate Queen'

About the Author: Simone Whitlow is an academic, competitive quizzer, songwriter, history blogger and musician. Though brought up in New Zealand, Simone has some Irish ancestry on her mother's side.

Transgender, she uses she/her pronouns.