Caoimhe Butterly

Caoimhe Butterly is an educator, human rights campaigner, trainee psychotherapist and documentary film-maker. She worked for over 15 years with social justice, humanitarian response, education and accessible healthcare projects with refugee and indigenous communities in Mexico, Guatemala, Haiti, Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon. While in Gaza, she trained as an EMT and worked as a volunteer on Palestinian ambulances. She has spent the past seven years based in Dublin, travelling back and forth to refugee camps in Greece, Calais, Italy and the Balkans to work with projects focusing on psycho-social supports. She also produces films that document the courage and journeys of women Human Rights Defenders and those seeking refuge. Caoimhe works in education and with human rights and affected community-led solidarity groups while in Ireland. She is presently completing training as a psychotherapist, with a focus on trauma and resilience.

Catherine Joyce

Catherine Joyce is a proud member of the Irish Traveller community, she has been a human rights campaigner for the past 30 years. She is currently one of the managers of Blanchardstown Traveller Development Group. She received the people of the year award in 1991 in recognition for her contribution to Traveller human rights campaign. She was actively involved in campaigning for ethnic status recognition.
Catherine worked with Dylan Tighe, actor and writer, to write the play ‘The Trailer of Bridget Dinnigan’ which ran for a week in the Project Arts Centre and another week in Axis in Ballymun.  She was on the government delegation to the world conference against racism and xenophobia in Durban in South Africa.

Éadaoin Kelly

Éadaoin is the Principal of St. Mary’s Primary School on Dorset Street in north inner-city Dublin. The school has a diverse community, with 88% of children from minority ethnic groups, who speak English as an additional language. The school is one of only six schools in the country to be awarded a Yellow Flag for its work on Inclusion and Diversity this year, with a focus on anti-racism and discrimination. Éadaoin has spent her career working in schools in areas of social disadvantage in Dublin and London. She is passionate about breaking down societal barriers, giving a voice to the vulnerable and isolated, and working in partnership with the wider community to provide a warm welcome and friendly smile to everyone who walks through the door.
With the support of her committed and energetic school team, Éadaoin has led the development of children’s voices in school, establishing a range of children’s teams to take leadership roles on key projects, including Young Interpreters, Anti-Bullying Ambassadors, Friendship Keepers who are trained in conflict resolution and restorative practice and Lámh Ambassadors who promote the use of Lámh signs to communicate with children with additional needs. These groups allow children the space and time to have ownership, to feel valued and heard and to make a change – key skills for learning and life.
A skilled choral conductor, Éadaoin uses singing and the arts to bring the school community together. She recognizes that one of the most important ways to reduce isolation and increase participation in marginalized communities is by providing children with opportunities to be inspired, to experience, to create and to perform.
Éadaoin represents local principals on the Steering Group of the Grangegorman Area-Based Childhood (ABC) programme in Dublin 7 and the Dublin City North Children and Young People’s Services Committee (CYPSC). She believes strongly in the power of multi-disciplinary approaches and is involved in projects and partnerships that tackle mental health issues, promote positive parenting and support strong transitions from pre-school to primary school.

Marie Mulholland

Marie Mulholland is from Belfast.  At the age of 18 she joined her first women’s group, Belfast Women Against Imperialism and in 1979 was arrested on International Womens Day for protesting the conditions of Republican women prisoners held in Armagh Gaol.
For most of the 80s she was a community worker in West Belfast and instrumental in the campaign to have Divis Flats demolished, once described as the worst housing in Western Europe. She joined NUPE later to become UNISON and spent 16 years as a senior lay trade union activist under the mentorship of its indomitable regional secretary the late, Inez Mc Cormack.
Throughout the 80s and 90s together with a number of close friends and sister activists, Marie helped women in need of abortions to obtain services and supports in Britain by raising funds for their journeys, linking women in need to safe houses and supportive contacts in the UK.
In 1989 against a backdrop of intense sectarian conflict she co-founded the Womens Support Network, a community organisation of working- class women from Republican and Loyalist areas of Belfast actively campaigning on a feminist platform for women’s rights and services. From 1993- 1996, the Womens Support Network was lead organisation in the ground breaking research conducted by the recently deceased Professor Cynthia Cockburn on women in conflict zones when Marie and the WSN worked with women from Palestine& Israel and Bosnia to explore how women from divided communities work together.
Under Marie’s leadership, the WSN developed a number of pioneering projects; Frontline Feminisms and the cross -border projects; Making Women Seen & Heard and the POWER Project. The organisation was also one of the early members of the Equality Alliance in the North which lobbied for the equality clause in the Good Friday Agreement and the development of the North’s equality legislation.
After campaigning for the acceptance of the Good Friday Agreement, Marie headed to Dublin to study for an MA in Women Studies in UCD.  In 2002, she published the first biography of Dr. Kathleen Lynn, revealing Lynn’s lifetime relationship with Madeline Ffrench Mullen both of whom were active in the Irish Citizen Army and revolutionary combatants in 1916.
 In Dublin, she worked for the Equality Authority and had responsibility for developing the sexual orientation equality brief of the agency and the production of the first national report on LGB rights and recommendations. Marie also chaired the Irish Council of Civil Liberties working group on Diverse Families whose findings formed the basis for later Partnership Rights and Same Sex Marriage campaigns in Ireland.  Marie has also worked in women’s drug rehabilitation in Dublin’s North Inner City and with adult survivors of Catholic residential abuse. In 2006 she took a sabbatical to work with the Palestinian Womens Research and Development Centre in Ramallah to assist in organising a conference on Violence Against Women.
Since 2012, Marie has been the co-ordinator of West Cork Women Against Violence, the regional domestic violence support service for women and children where she has now raised enough funds to open later in 2020, West Cork’s first Safe house for women and children.
Marie lives in West Cork with her partner, Tracey. She has very recently celebrated her 60 th birthday and is looking forward to her next adventure- aging with attitude.

Mavis Ramazani

Global Citizenship Educator, domestic violence survivor and single mother  In her capacity as a facilitator in Amnesty International Ireland’s Human rights education programme which facilitates student groups in secondary schools, Mavis guides teachers on how they can engage their students in relevant community based campaigns.  Mavis has also set up a charity called ‘Cooking for Freedom’ for Asylum seekers and refugees living without cooking facilities. Mavis is an activist who shares her knowledge and experience of the International Protection and Direct Provision systems in Ireland with a variety of campaigns that currently exist in Ireland such as Movement of Asylum Seekers In Ireland (Right to work Campaign), and Refugee and Migrant Solidarity Ireland (Solidarity Dinner Campaign).
Mavis also works with young artists within refugee communities to empower them and she connects them with Irish artists to support and guide them.  Some young artists have performed at the National Concert Hall and one young woman participated at Girls Rock Dublin. Mavis was also invited by Trinity College Dublin to be part of their advisory committee on refugee scholarships along with a team of Trinity College academics.  This successfully led to Trinity offering four Asylum Seekers access to scholarships for the academic year 2019/20. Mavis is a domestic violence survivor and an activist for gender based violence. She has built strong relationships through her passion for community work, her work with Individuals, organisations, schools, universities and churches to promote diversity, social inclusion and integration.  She has taken part in different public speaking events both as an individual and as part of a panel, in order to highlight, educate and create awareness of human rights and social injustices. Mavis was invited to a garden party in June 2019 hosted by President Michael D Higgins and Sabina Higgins to acknowledge the work of those supporting asylum seekers and refugees.

Nuala O'Faolain

Helena Nemec

Helena Nemec is a young illustrator and a graphic designer from Zagreb, Croatia. She has a BA in visual communications from the School of Design at Faculty of Architecture in Zagreb, and she graduated at ESAD in Portugal. She loves to draw, and is very interested in animation, graphic novels and street art.
She responded to our call with an illustration of Angela Piskernik. Slovenian botanist won her over with her versatility and she connected with her on a personal level as a nature and bird enthusiast.

Fierce Women WoW Cards will include her Angela Piskernik and Nuala O’Faolain.

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Estella Solomons

Christine Buckley

Eimear McNally

Eimear McNally is a live illustrator, visual facilitator, and a host of creative engagement processes from Dundalk, Ireland. She likes to work large scale.
For our WoW Cards contest she submitted an illustration of Christine Buckley. “I chose Christine Buckley because she is Irish like me and I feel very strongly about the way women have been treated in Irish history. Stories of women affected by the oppressive regime of the Catholic Church in Ireland really resonate with me as someone who was raised Catholic and then rejected that faith. Also, on a purely aesthetic level I like Christine Buckley’s face, she has a lot of character and a hint of glamour.”

Fierce Women WoW Cards will include her Christine Buckley and Estella Solomons.

Check out her website, and follow her on Instagram.

Kathleen Lynn

Lyra Mackee

Chiara Tallarini

Chiara Tallarini is an illustrator and graphic designer from Rome, Italy, currently living in a beach town on the West coast of Ireland. “I love bold colors, simple shapes and playful ideas. The favourite subjects of my illustrations are women that I represent in their everyday lives with a touch of humour”, she says. She sent us the illustrations of Nan Joyce who struck her for “her strength and the passion and dignity through which she expressed the needs of the Traveller community in Ireland”, and Lyra McKee who she admired “for her talent, her wit and the commitment and devotion to the causes of women reproductive rights (during the referendum to repeal the 8th amendment) and the LGBTQ+ community in Ireland”.

Fierce Women WoW Cards will include her Lyra McKee and Kathleen Lynn.

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Nan Joyce

Ana Salopek

Ana Salopek is an artist from Ogulin, Croatia, but she considers the Universe her home. As a proud mum of a five-year-old girl, she occasionally borrows daughter's worldview whereby she is enlightened on what truly matters in life. She creates using digital techniques because they allow her more freedom and believes that during the night her legs lengthen as a giraffe’s neck and then she can reach the stars.

She submitted Diana Budisavljević, Marta Paulin Schmidt-Brina and Nan Joyce, and here is why. “I believe in the human race. I believe in life. I believe in humanity. I believe that we all know that there is only one race - human and that we all deserve the same - happiness, love, and the right to a fulfilled joyful life. Diana, Marta and Nan each represent my beliefs in their own way and in their struggles. Each of them shook, at least for a moment, those who watched from the sidelines.”

Fierce Women WoW Cards will include her Diana Budisavljević and Nan Joyce.

Follow her on Instagram and Facebook, and take a look at her website.

Maude Delap

Tina Vukasović Đaković

Tina Vukasović Đaković is a visual artist and curator from Split, Croatia. In 2013 she got an MA degree in Painting in Arts academy University of Split. She participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Croatia and abroad.

For our WoW Cards contest she submitted Edita Schubert, Diana Budisavljević and Maude Delap. She wasn’t familiar with Irish marine biologist, but Delap’s story and dedication won her over.

Fierce Women WoW Cards will include her Maude Delap and Vinka Bulić.

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