DEATH ANNOUNCEMENT
MAUREEN BRIDGET NOLAN
“Mo”
8 November 1940 – 20 February 2025
Trinity College Library for forty-four years, Forty Foot swimmer and heart of Crumlin
Maureen Nolan spent forty-four years looking after books older than the Irish state, and she treated every borrower as a long-lost cousin who had come home hungry. She claimed, with a perfectly straight face, to be on first-name terms with the Brian Boru harp.
Maureen Bridget Gilligan was born in Inchicore in 1940, the eldest of five, and left school at seventeen with a head for figures and a handwriting the nuns still talked about. In 1958 she took a job as a library assistant at Trinity College Dublin, intending to stay a year. She stayed until 2002, rising to supervisor of reader services, and in that time she knew which professor kept sweets hidden in the Long Room and which undergraduate was living on tea and the radiator. She found lost books, lost theses and, once, a lost fiancé, who had been reading in the wrong gallery.
She met Paddy Nolan at a céilí in Inchicore in 1961 and married him a year later. They raised Declan and Sinéad in Crumlin, where the kitchen table seated eight, the Sunday coddle fed twelve and no child on the road was ever sent home hungry. Maureen knitted an Aran jumper for every grandchild, did the Irish Times crossword in pen, and swam at the Forty Foot with a group of ladies every Thursday morning, in all weathers, for twenty-eight years. 'The cold is a kind of prayer,' she said. 'You just have to get in.'
After Paddy died in 2021 she kept his flat cap on the hall stand and set out two cups for tea from habit for a month before she could stop. She joined a book club at Crumlin library, where she became its sternest and best-loved critic, especially of any novel with more than one dream sequence. Maureen died peacefully at home on 20 February 2025, with her children beside her and a céilí band on the radio. She is buried with Paddy at Glasnevin. She leaves her son Declan, her daughter Sinéad, five grandchildren and a long shelf of books she rebound by hand.
“The cold is a kind of prayer. You just have to get in.”