Máire Delaney

Delaney was one of 14 Irish women scientists celebrated on International Women's Day in 2016.

She married Tom Delaney, an archaeologist specialising in the mediaeval period, and moved to Belfast where he worked at the Ulster Museum. She trained in psychiatry and also reported on archaeological anatomy and pathology. When her husband died, she returned to Dublin with their two daughters, finally settling in the village of Ballyboughal. She got remarried, to Pat O'Connell. After working as a psychiatric registrar, her interest in archaeology led her to teaching at UCD followed by a lectureship in anatomy at Trinity College. In her research, she engaged the assistance of many experts worldwide to understand the chemistry of tissue preservation in bog people. In 1999, she and her archaeologist colleague, Nóra Bermingham, began studying a bog body found in Offaly. She was co-author, with Bermingham, of The bog body from Tumbeagh (Wordwell, 2005). The novelist, Erin Hart, based the pathologist character Nora Gavin from her book False Mermaid on Delaney after interviewing her.

Máire Delaney (née de Valera, 1945–2002) was an Irish medical doctor in the fields of psychiatry, anatomy and pathology. She was best known for her research on 'bog bodies'.

She was born in Dublin in 1945. Her mother was from Carndonagh on the Donegal coast. Her father, Eamon de Valera Jr., was a professor and consultant gynaecologist at the National Maternity Hospital, Dublin. Her grandfather was Éamon de Valera, the former Irish President. She was educated at St Louis High School, Rathmines, a convent school, and University College Dublin (UCD) where she qualified as a medical doctor in 1971.