The Changemakers: Eileen Costello's inspirational journey from workhouse to Senate

The only Edith Drury who was born in London on that date, and who has a birth certificate, was a daughter born to Michael Drury and his wife Agnes Hopton in the Strand Union Workhouse, Cleveland Street, St Pancras, London, according to historians and biographers Máire Ní Mhurchú and Diarmuid Breathnach.

Most accounts of her early life give scant details but suggest that some kind of charitable organisation helped her get an education and qualify as a teacher. It says something about her ability and determination that she quickly went on to become principal at St Michael’s Church of England School in London. At the same time, she was nurturing a deep interest in Irish culture prompted, perhaps, by her Irish roots.

In 1896, she went to the first meeting of the London branch of the Gaelic League and, two years later, was the only woman elected to its branch committee. She joined the city’s Irish Literary Society, too, and got to know Lily (Susan) and Lolly (Elizabeth) Yeats, sisters of poet WB Yeats who were doing important work in the Celtic Revival at Cuala Press.

By then, Edith Drury, as she was still known, was already collecting songs. There’s an evocative reference to her transcribing the song Neillí Bán from colleague Michael Breathnach as the pair caught the train home from Woolwich where they had been setting up a branch of the Gaelic League.

In 1902, she represented the London branch at the Conradh Ard Fheis in Dublin and stayed on to help organise an open-air festival on the Aran Islands (Inis Meáin). She would go on to help shape a new Ireland, but it is also true to say that new country shaped her. Around this time, she converted to Catholicism, even though it meant having to resign her teaching position in London. She adopted the Irish name Eibhlín and, a year later, married a Galway doctor, Thomas Bodkin Costello, and moved to Tuam.

Over the next decade, she continued her involvement in education, teaching at the Presentation convent in Tuam and helping to found Coláiste Connacht in Spiddal, Galway, in 1905. Meantime, she accompanied her husband on his rounds and, as she put it, “discovered a rich field of song, practically untouched but in imminent danger of being lost through indifference and neglect”.

She put what she collected into the ground-breaking compilation Amhráin Muighe Seola, which was widely praised when it appeared in 1923.

The Evening Telegraph paid an enthusiastic, if patronising, tribute recognising the many families whose songs were recorded, including the Hession family, “the best-known folk-singers of the distinct”.

The article was gushing in its praise of the songs themselves: “They are exquisite words, set to sobbing, wild music. The verses are an Iliad of the West… Yet this wonderful part of the nation’s heritage was in danger of being lost in the flood of Jazz and music hall inanities which America has set loose even on this ‘primitive’ west country, through the medium of the gramophone. Its people may be primitive in the eyes of these moderns. But they refer in their verse, and even their casual conversation, to the heroes, not only of their own land, but of Greece and Rome.”

Dr Costello, Eileen’s husband, also used his widespread practice to study and preserve archaeological artefacts, local history and folklore. In the 1950s, the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society Journal referred to his consulting rooms as “the most important archaeological information bureau and clearing-house in the West”.

If Eileen Costello was keen on preserving the past, she also wanted to help create a better future. She was the first woman district councillor in north Galway when she was elected for Sinn Féin in the 1920 local elections. During the War of Independence, she hid volunteers on the run in her own home which was often raided by Black and Tans.

When the first Free State Senate was established in 1922, she was elected as a Cumann na nGaedheal senator, one of four female senators. The other three were historian and author Alice Stopford Green, nationalist and suffragist Jennie Wyse Power and philanthropist, theatre-founder and cattle-breeder (she was president Irish Dairy Shorthorn Breeders’ Association) Ellen Cuffe, Countess of Desart.

In the Seanad, Eileen Costello and Jennie Wyse Power opposed the Civil Service Regulation Bill, 1925, which proposed confining women to lower grades in the civil service. It was defeated in the Seanad which delayed its enactment by a year.

They also forced an amendment to the Juries Bill (1927) which had sought to exclude women from juries.

“Women,” Senator Costello said, “were still to be subject to the obligations of citizenship, but their privileges were to be curtailed and restricted.”

While she was anti-divorce (at least in 1928), she campaigned to help unmarried mothers avoid mother and baby institutions by seeking financial aid from the fathers of their children.

She lost her seat in 1934, but continued to be active in public life. During the Second World War, then in her 70s, she organised Red Cross services in her region. She was also one of the founder members of Tuam’s Irish Countrywomen’s Association.

When she died in 1962, the Tuam Herald claimed her as the town’s “first lady”. “Every local cause, charitable or cultural, found in her a ready supporter, and just as her husband was the town’s ‘grand old man,’ so was she its first lady.”

Several years later, in 2021, that same paper recalled her contribution, paying tribute to Eileen Costello, “a woman who dared”.

• Clodagh Finn is co-author with former Lord Mayor of Dublin Alison Gilliland of 'Her Keys to the City', a book that honours 80 women who made Dublin (www.fourcourtspress.ie) Her history of Ireland in 21 women, 'Through Her Eyes' (Gill Books), is just out in paperback, €14.99