10. The Dark Lady of Doona
Grainne’s Mahaol family were Irish nobility with clients of their own, who looked to them for protection. Simultaneously, they were clients of another, even more powerful family. They traded produce and raw materials for luxury goods, fished, ferried passengers, levied tolls on shipping passing through their waters, and engaged in opportunistic piracy. For protection, the Mhaols built a row of castles facing the sea. Grainne was married in 1546, and bore three children before her husband was killed in an ambush in 1565. The era’s misogynistic laws prevented women from inheriting their husbands’ properties, so Grainne settled on Clare Island, and made it her stronghold and base of operations. To support herself, she turned to piracy.
Grainne started off with three galleys and some smaller boats, with which she preyed on shipping and raided coastal targets. While seething over the laws that deprived her of her husband’s property, and building up her pirate fleet, she consoled herself by taking as a lover a shipwrecked sailor. When her lover was killed by a rival family, the MacMahons, history got its first glimpse of Grainne Mhaol’s ferocity, To avenge her lover, she attacked Doona castle, where her lover’s murderers were holed up, and killed them. That earned her the nickname: “Dark Lady of Doona“.
