15. A Badass Irish Icon
Sixteenth-century Irish heroine Grace O’Malley (circa 1530 – circa 1603) was a badass who fought the English on land and preyed upon their shipping at sea. Her English foes vilified her as “a woman who hath imprudently passed the part of womanhood“, and she was mostly ignored by contemporary chroniclers. Yet, her memory lived on in native folklore, and nationalists would later lionize her as an icon of the Irish fight for freedom and struggle against foreign domination.
In the sixteenth century, there were two Irelands, with two distinct cultures. There was Dublin and its surrounding counties, an English enclave ever fearful of the hinterland comprising the rest of Ireland. The rest of Ireland was the land of the native Irish and the Gaelicized Old English, whom those in Dublin viewed as uncivilized and wild, given to raid and strife and interminable violence. Grace O’Malley came from the “wild” part.