Wall, Maureen (1918–72), historian, was born 27 June 1918 in Seacor, Glenswilly, Co. Donegal, one of eight daughters and one son of Peader MacGeehinn from nearby Fintown; her mother was a native of Glenswilly. She went to Treankeel national school, where her parents were the only teachers. Her father was an enthusiastic local historian and song-collector, who contributed to Henry Morris's Dhá chéad de cheoltaibh Uladh (1934). A native speaker of Irish, he had trained in the De La Salle College in Waterford. Maureen was proud of her native place, ‘that glen where our forefathers so stubbornly and so tenaciously clung to their holdings against considerable odds’ (TS of talk given at the Glenswilly Festival, 1969). Irish was still commonly spoken there by the older generation as late as the 1920s, and even the English that was by then dominant, was distinctive. Maureen retained the accent of the Glen and an interest and fluency in Irish, in which she wrote occasionally.
In 1931, aged 13, Maureen went to the all-Irish College, Colaiste Bríghde, Falcarragh, as a boarder, where she was greatly influenced by the history teacher, An tSiuir Bríd, sister of Pádraig and Seamus Henchy, later respectively director of the NLI and judge of the supreme court. From there she went in 1935 to Carysfort teacher training college in Dublin, and two years later was a qualified primary teacher, working in Sallynoggin. She embarked straight away on an evening degree in UCD, graduating BA (1940). She acted in Irish plays, and was sufficiently keen to attend the Abbey School of acting. In 1944 this active life changed dramatically, when she contracted tuberculosis, and spent long periods in hospital in Dublin and in Switzerland. Her mother and two sisters were to die of the disease.
Unable to resume work as a teacher because of her health, Maureen got a job in the Irish Folklore Commission as a secretary-cum-archivist. In 1954 she married Dr Thomas Wall (1906–85), the commission's librarian, a quiet, scholarly man, best known for his book The sign of Dr Hay's head (1958). During her long convalescence Maureen's interest focused more and more on research, and in 1953 she completed an MA thesis, ‘The General Committee of the Catholics of Ireland, 1767–84’, under the supervision of Professor Robert Dudley Edwards (qv). A year earlier she had joined the department of modern Irish history at UCD, initially as a research assistant/archivist/tutor/occasional lecturer, until appointed a full-time assistant lecturer (1959). She was promoted to college lecturer (1965) and to statutory lecturer (1972), but she died suddenly in Dublin 7 June 1972, before that final promotion took effect.
She was an outstanding, inspirational teacher of undergraduates, noted for her meticulous preparation, and for the enthusiasm for research that shone through her lectures, particularly in her documents course on eighteenth-century catholicism. She died before writing her monograph on this, her main area of interest, but the articles on various aspects she had published (initially as ‘Maureen MacGeehin’), together with some unpublished pieces, were collected in the volume Catholic Ireland in the eighteenth century, edited by Gerard O'Brien and Tom Dunne (Geography Publications, Dublin, 1989). She also taught and published on a range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century topics, including an important survey, ‘The decline of the Irish language’ (in A view of the Irish language (1969), edited by Brian Ó Cuív (qv)), and a scholarly analysis of the origins of partition, ‘Partition: the Ulster question’ (in The Irish struggle, 1916–26 (1966), edited by T. D. Williams (qv)). What most brought her to public notice, however, were two key articles on the stage-management of the 1916 rising by the military council of the IRB (in K. B. Nowlan (ed.), The making of 1916 (Dublin, 1969)), a clinical dissection of the documentary record, all the more effective because of her empathy with the nationalist cause, as opposed to nationalist historiography.
It was characteristic that some of her more important findings were first communicated as radio talks in the Thomas Davis series, a format that appealed because of her commitment to bringing new historical research to the widest possible audience. Also important to her in this respect was her work with the Dublin Historical Association, whose pamphlet series she launched in 1961 with her study The penal laws, 1691–1760. This work was awarded the National University Prize for Historical Research.