Clodagh Finn: A lesson in how to tell the story of our own ingenuity

How wonderful, then, to see the focus on that extraordinary woman in ‘Ingenious Dublin’, a fascinating new exhibition which opened at the brilliantly quirky Little Museum of Dublin this week.

Sheila Tinney (née Power), the Galway-born mathematician and theoretical physicist, has been back in the news lately because of her connection to J Robert Oppenheimer, the subject of this summer’s blockbuster hit Oppenheimer. In 1941, she completed her PhD on the stability of crystals under the supervision of Max Born — the same physicist who supervised the so-called ‘father of the atomic bomb’.

Seven years later, Tinney was awarded a fellowship to work on nuclear physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in the United States. Oppenheimer, its then director, wrote to welcome her to the Institute. Albert Einstein and Freeman Dyson were among her colleagues. Later, she would tell her students at University College Dublin that she queued up for coffee with Einstein.

One of them, Eoin Bairéad, recalls her lectures in mathematical physics. “She was an impeccable lecturer, extremely exact in every way and very understandable. She was seriously bright and in 1960s Dublin, she was the only female lecturer.”

At least her contribution to science was acknowledged and recognised in her lifetime. She was one of the first women to be admitted to the Royal Irish Academy in 1949, along with botanist Phyllis Clinch, Irish scholar Eleanor Knott and art historian Françoise Henry. She was also a part-time fellow at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies when Erwin Schrödinger was director. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist, whose famous cat experiment shone a light on quantum theory, said she was among “the best equipped and most successful of the younger generation of theoretical physicists in this country”.

She is showcased in ‘Ingenious Dublin’ along with another great woman of science, Dr Máire Delaney, a medical doctor who used her expertise to unravel the human stories contained in Viking bones and 2,000-year-old bog bodies.

The real star of the show, though, is another ingenious woman, Mary Mulvihill. Although, as her husband Brian Dolan and sisters Anne and Nóirín Mulvihill say, she would want science to be in the spotlight, not her.

Though science — and Ireland’s often unheralded contribution to it — does take centre-stage at this exhibition curated with humour and verve by Nigel Monaghan.

Drawing on Mulvihill’s reissued book, Ingenious Ireland, there’s much to discover; from the Carlow man, Samuel Haughton, who developed a humane way to hang people, to the Cork doctor, Vincent Barry, who led the team that developed a cure for leprosy. (On an aside, he has been remembered by Met Éireann in its list of storm names. If we ever get to ‘V’ — and here’s hoping against hope that we do not — it will be called Storm Vincent after him).

The exhibit that jumped out for me, though, was the giant jar of Sudocrem – note it’s ‘crem’ not ‘cream’ — the magic potion that has a place in every Irish bathroom since it was developed by Dublin-based pharmacist Thomas Smith in 1931.

Mary Mulvihill might have been amused to know that a pot of it was on view on Madonna’s bathroom shelf in one of her social-media posts from 2021.

If you fancy an entertaining, eye-opening whistle-stop tour around some of Ireland’s inventions and scientific discoveries, take a spin up to the top floor of the Little Museum of Dublin.

The exhibition runs until January 2024. Don’t worry if you can’t make it, though, as its message is likely to resonate for much, much longer. That is because what Mary Mulvihill did in her too-short life was find a place for science in Ireland’s sense of self by communicating our own often-forgotten inventiveness to a wider audience.

And her infectious enthusiasm continues to inspire. For instance, PhD student Tammy Strickland, who opened the exhibition, said she didn’t realise that she was interested in science communication until she read Mary Mulvihill’s book.

Mary, she said, showed that Irish people are full of curiosity; they are creators, inventors and dreamers. And more than that, we are a nation of storytellers.

There is so much to learn from Mary Mulvihill about how we can retrieve the untold stories of our own ingenuity and, as she did, rescue the contributions of women ignored by history.

Astrophysicist Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell illustrates how we might draw inspiration from her and continue the job of inscribing the full story of Ireland in the landscape around us.

“Mary,” she remarked, “has been very creative in how she puts things side by side; she hangs snippets and stories on places, and enlivens those places through the stories related to them. Geology, archaeology, sociology and technology jostle each other, producing interesting interactions.”

It is also instructive to see how her own formidable legacy has been kept alive since she died, at just 55, in 2015. The Mary Mulvihill Association has instituted a prize in her name, donated her archive to Dublin City University, erected a plaque at her former home in Manor Street, Stoneybatter, Dublin and helped to get her book, Ingenious Ireland, republished by Four Courts Press.

The organisation she helped found, Women in Technology and Science (WITS), also keeps the spirit of her work alive. It supports the global initiative Soapbox Science, where female scientists are invited to literally stand on a soapbox and tell the public about their research in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine.

And it was a WITS member, Fiona Doris, who came up with the idea of an exhibition to honour Mary Mulvihill.

Before she died, Mary was planning to write a book on the famine of 1845, but one that did not privilege one narrative over another. As science journalist Cormac Sheridan wrote in the introduction to her book: “She implicitly demands that we take ownership of the full complexity of Ireland’s history and include in it its great Anglo-Irish scientific tradition.”

Mary Mulvihill, he continued, uncovered — or recovered — many layers of knowledge that had been forgotten or discarded. “In restoring that knowledge to the present era, her work invites us to consider or reconsider the stories Ireland tells about itself and to itself — what it values; what it neglects; and, most of all, what other stories it might include.”

The invitation to take up that exciting challenge has been reissued with the opening of ‘Ingenious Dublin’.