The Elizabethan Era’s “Dark Lady of Doona”
Grace O’Malley seethed over the laws that deprived her of her husband’s property, as she built up her pirate fleet. In the meantime, she consoled herself with a shipwrecked sailor, who became her lover. When he was killed by a rival family, the MacMahons, history got its first glimpse of O’Malley’s ferocity. To avenge her beau, she attacked Doona castle, where her lover’s murderers were holed up, and killed them. That earned her the nickname: “Dark Lady of Doona“. She remarried in 1566, but still mad at her sailor lover’s murder, she had another go at the MacMahons in Doona Castle. She seized it in a surprise attack, while the garrison was busy with prayers.
Around that time, O’Malley also went after a thief who stole from her, then fled to a church for sanctuary. She surrounded the church and decided to wait him out, as she taunted him that his only choices were starvation of surrender. He chose a third option, dug a tunnel, and escaped. O’Malley became Ireland’s sea mistress, and a pirate queen who controlled the waters around Connaught with an iron fist. She preyed on sea traffic and coastal communities along Ireland’s western coast, as well as on eastern settlements on the Irish Sea.
