Maureen Bridget Nolan
Premium memorialLovingly known as “Mo”
8 November 1940 — 20 February 2025 · aged 84
Trinity College Library for forty-four years, Forty Foot swimmer and heart of Crumlin
Dublin, Ireland Born in Inchicore, Dublin Resting at Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, with PaddyAbout Maureen
Maureen Nolan spent forty-four years looking after books older than the Irish state, and she treated every borrower as a long-lost cousin who had come home hungry. She claimed, with a perfectly straight face, to be on first-name terms with the Brian Boru harp.
Maureen Bridget Gilligan was born in Inchicore in 1940, the eldest of five, and left school at seventeen with a head for figures and a handwriting the nuns still talked about. In 1958 she took a job as a library assistant at Trinity College Dublin, intending to stay a year. She stayed until 2002, rising to supervisor of reader services, and in that time she knew which professor kept sweets hidden in the Long Room and which undergraduate was living on tea and the radiator. She found lost books, lost theses and, once, a lost fiancé, who had been reading in the wrong gallery.
She met Paddy Nolan at a céilí in Inchicore in 1961 and married him a year later. They raised Declan and Sinéad in Crumlin, where the kitchen table seated eight, the Sunday coddle fed twelve and no child on the road was ever sent home hungry. Maureen knitted an Aran jumper for every grandchild, did the Irish Times crossword in pen, and swam at the Forty Foot with a group of ladies every Thursday morning, in all weathers, for twenty-eight years. 'The cold is a kind of prayer,' she said. 'You just have to get in.'
After Paddy died in 2021 she kept his flat cap on the hall stand and set out two cups for tea from habit for a month before she could stop. She joined a book club at Crumlin library, where she became its sternest and best-loved critic, especially of any novel with more than one dream sequence. Maureen died peacefully at home on 20 February 2025, with her children beside her and a céilí band on the radio. She is buried with Paddy at Glasnevin. She leaves her son Declan, her daughter Sinéad, five grandchildren and a long shelf of books she rebound by hand.
“The cold is a kind of prayer. You just have to get in.”
- Faith
- Catholic
- Place of birth
- Inchicore, Dublin
- Resting place
- Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, with Paddy
- Passed away
- 20 February 2025, Dublin
Requiem Mass
Monday, 24 February 2025 at 10:00 UTC
Add to calendarLife journey
Secondary school
Presentation Convent Secondary School1952 – 1957 · Inchicore, Dublin
Left with the best handwriting in her year.
Library Assistant
Trinity College Dublin Library1958 – 1980 · Dublin
Started for a year and stayed for forty-four.
Supervisor of Reader Services
Trinity College Dublin Library1980 – 2002 · Dublin
Ran the reading rooms of the Old Library and knew every regular by name.
Thursday swimming group
The Forty Foot1993 – 2021 · Sandycove, Dublin
Twenty-eight years of Thursday-morning sea swims.
Staff Recognition Award
Trinity College Dublin2002 · Dublin
Presented on her retirement after forty-four years.
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Family & connections
Also remembered on Evermore
Maureen is survived by
- Declan Nolan· Son
- Sinéad Nolan-Byrne· Daughter
- 5 grandchildren· Grandchildren
- Bernadette Gilligan· Sister
Tributes & memories
6 people have shared a memory of Maureen.
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Niece in Melbourne
Auntie Mo posted a parcel to Melbourne every birthday, with an Aran jumper far too warm for an Australian summer and a handwritten letter in her perfect hand. I still have forty of them. When I finally came home, she met me at the airport with a flask of tea as though I had been gone a week.
- MC
Thursday swimming group, Forty Foot
Twenty-eight years of Thursdays and Maureen never once got into the water slowly. 'Get in and get it over with,' she would say, and be out before the rest of us had finished screaming. This Thursday we went in for her. It was freezing. She would have said that was the point.
- PD
Historian at Trinity College Dublin
As a doctoral student I was once locked in the Long Room overnight by mistake. Maureen found me at six in the morning, said nothing, put the kettle on and sent me home with a sandwich. She never told a soul, not even the Provost.
- TF
Paddy's friend from the Guinness brewery
Paddy said she was the cleverest woman in Dublin and that he had only caught her by pretending he had read a book. He hadn't. Maureen knew it from the first night and married him anyway, which tells you everything about the size of her heart.
- SK
Neighbour and friend in Crumlin
Maureen and I swapped recipes and gossip over the garden wall for fifty years. The recipes were hers; the gossip was mostly mine. When Paddy died she told me she was fine, then handed me a bag of scones and asked if I would sit with her a while. I sat with her for four years.
- DR
Former colleague, Trinity College Library
Maureen trained me in 1991 with a single instruction: 'Every reader is somebody's child.' She remembered the names of postgraduates thirty years after they left, and she could find a misshelved book by instinct. I have never worked with anyone so quietly indispensable.
