The mother of Red Hugh O’Donnell, Ineen-dubh, though daughter of the Scottish Lord of the Isles, was none the less of the old Irish stock.  Her character is finely sketched for us by the Franciscan chronicler who wrote the story of the captivity and mighty deeds of her son.  When the clans of Tir-Conal assembled to elect the youthful chieftain, he writes:  “It was an advantage that she came to the gathering, for she was the head of the advice and counsel of the Cinel-Conail, and, though she was slow and deliberate and much praised for her womanly qualities, she had the heart of a hero and the soul of a soldier.”  Her daughter, Nuala, is the “woman of the piercing wail” in Mangan’s translation of the bard’s lament for the death of the Ulster chieftains in Rome.

Modern critics like to interpret the “Dark Rosaleen” poem as an expression of Red Hugh’s devotion to Ireland, but I think that Rose, O’Doherty’s daughter, wife of the peerless Owen Roe, deserves recognition as she whose

      “Holy delicate white hands should girdle him with steel.”

The record has come down to us that she prompted and encouraged her husband to return from the low-countries and a position of dignity in a foreign court to command the war in Ireland, and in her first letter, ere she followed him over sea, she asked eagerly:  “How stands Tir-Conal?” True daughter of Ulster was Owen’s wife, so let us henceforth acknowledge her as the Roisin dubh, “dark Rosaleen”, of the sublimest of all patriot songs.

In the Cromwellian and Williamite wars, we see the mournful mothers and daughters of the Gaeldom passing in sad procession to Connacht, or wailing on Shannon banks for the flight of the “Wild Geese.”  But what of Limerick wall, what of the valorous rush of the women of the beleaguered city to stem the inroads of the besiegers and rally the defenders to the breach?  The decree of St. Adamnan was quite forgotten then, and when manly courage for a moment was daunted, woman’s fortitude replaced and reinspired it.

And fortitude was sorely needed through the black years that followed—­the penal days, when Ireland, crushed in the dust, bereft of arms, achieved a sublimer victory than did even King Brian himself, champion of the Cross, against the last muster of European heathendom.

Yes, her women have done their share in making Ireland what she is, a heroic land, unconquered by long centuries of wrath and wrong, a land that has not abandoned its Faith through stress of direst persecution or bartered it for the lure of worldly dominion; no—­nor ever yielded to despair in face of repeated national disaster.