Nuala Fennell

Fionnuala Campbell arrived in north County Dublin in 1935 as the third eldest child of a Galway Garda and a Glasnevin woman, entering a world where marriage usually erased a woman's career. She refused that disappearance, writing for women's pages, joining the Irish Women's Liberation Movement, and helping build Ireland's first women's refuge before parliament gave her a voice. The kitchen-table courage became public law when she abolished the legal status of illegitimacy, not through grandeur but through repeated practical pressure.