Anne Chambers

speaker

137 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 10 May

Anne Chambers’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Well, it's very strange how I suppose history repeats itself both on a personal basis and as you were talking earlier on a political basis.

I was a junior executive officer in the Central Bank of Ireland during the time of Ken Whittaker's governorship.

Tapped me on the shoulder one morning, asked me into his office, which I presumed was to tell me I was sacked or something.

Junior executive officers had much contact with the governor.

And he heard I was from Mayo.

We started talking about the Mayo countryside and particularly the coastline.

And we came to Clare Island.

And I said, that's where the Pirate Queen lived.

And I only knew her through folklore.

Going there on holidays myself as a kid.

And I said to Ken Whittaker, someday I'm going to try and find out, did she really exist?

Because she wasn't in our school history books.

And he put his finger up, as Ken Whittaker would do, and said, why are you saying sometime?

Why don't you do it now?

So in my early...

In the mid-1970s, in my own early 20s, I set off on the voyage to find Grace.

I stayed in the Central Bank and I wrote five biographies during that time.

And in 1972, I made the big decision then to take on the precarious life of a full-time writer.

Well, they are really.

I started off with Grace O'Malley was written out of history for lots of reasons.

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