O'Driscoll, Margaret Collins- (c.1878–1945), teacher and politician, was born in Woodfield, Clonakilty, Co. Cork, eldest of three daughters and five sons of Michael Collins , farmer, and Mary Anne Collins (née O'Brien). Her youngest brother was the revolutionary leader Michael Collins (qv). A primary-school teacher, for many years she was principal of Lisavaird girls' national school in Clonakilty, and also taught in Dublin before retiring from teaching on health grounds in 1928. First elected to Dáil Éireann in the 1923 general election as Cumann na nGaedheal TD for Dublin North, she was reelected in 1927 (June and September elections) and 1932, losing her seat in 1933, after which she retired from politics. In 1924 she was one of seventeen Cumann na nGaedheal TDs who protested at the appointment of Peter Hughes (qv) as minister for defence, and in 1926 she was elected a vice-president of the party. The only female member of the dáil between September 1927 and 1933, she had an unexceptional parliamentary career, characterised by adherence to the Cumann na nGaedheal party line and a conservative attitude to social issues. In a dáil debate in 1925 she declared: ‘In the days of my youth it was regarded as a qualification for matrimony that a woman should be able to make her husband's shirts’; when voting for the 1928 censorship of publications bill, which banned indecent literature and publications that referred to birth control, she stated that ‘. . . no vote I have ever given here, or will ever give, will be given with more satisfaction than the vote I will register in favour of this bill’; and she voted with the government in favour of the 1924 and 1927 juries bills, which restricted jury service for women.
She married (8 September 1901) Patrick O'Driscoll, journalist, owner of the West Cork People, and later a member of the oireachtas reporting staff, son of Patrick O'Driscoll, a farmer of Clonakilty. They had five sons and nine daughters and lived at 147 North Circular Road, Dublin. She died 17 June 1945 in Dublin, leaving an estate valued at £2,685.