When Mary O'Donnell gave a lunchtime reading at the Cuirt International Festival of Literature in Galway last Friday, she drew a laugh with the title poem from her latest collection, about "Unlegendary Heroes".
Inspired by a 1938 folklore survey on the exploits of men (only) in a south Ulster parish, she mused on women who might have been omitted from history:
Kathleen McKenna, Annagola, who was able to wash a week's sheets, shirts and swaddling, bake bread and clean the house all of a Monday
Birdy McMahon, of Faulkland, walked to Monaghan for a sack of flour two days before her eighth child was born . . .
One woman who is in no danger of being written out of records is the 16th-century Mayo pirate queen, Grace O'Malley. This is largely thanks to historian, Anne Chambers, who has just published a revised and updated version of Granuaile. And now she has received not just one, but two offers for a film of the book.
Ms Chambers is off to Los Angeles next week for talks on a screenplay based on her text. She credits much of the interest to the success of Titanic. "The sea is back in business now in Hollywood," she says. She would love to bring Grace O'Malley to the big screen without losing any of the woman's integrity.
As she notes in her revised edition of the biography, O'Malley allowed neither social nor political convention to thwart her ambition. Not only was she a fearless leader, tactician and pragmatist, but also a ruthless plunderer, rebel and a woman who broke a mould. Yet for four centuries, she remained a "prisoner of indifference", with the contribution she made to the social, political and maritime history of her time being conveniently ignored.
Ms Chambers, who hosted her book launch recently in the very male ambience of the light tender, Granuaile, owned by the Commissioners of Irish Lights, believes that the pirate queen was a victim of the "mainly male bias of historical record and analysis", but it was more than male chauvinism that wrote her out of the pages of Irish history.
She did not fit the bill determined and demanded by later generations of Irish historians, where Irish heroes and heroines were "required to be suitably adorned in the green cloak of patriotism, their personal lives untainted, their religious beliefs fervently Roman Catholic".
O'Malley, who took a lover, divorced her husband and gave birth to a son at sea, did not suit the "rosy-hued picture of Gaelic womanhood painted by latter-day male and often clerical historians", Ms Chambers maintains.
Find out why in the revised biography, published by Wolfhound Press at £6.99. And watch out for Nicole Kidman, or perhaps Kate Winslet, testing the water in Clew Bay.