become a member of the Irish Bar. Ordered.’ This changed with the passing of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act in 1919, and in autumn of that year, Averil enrolled at the King’s Inns, and made history two years later. At the Bar, Deverell sat with the other juniors in a large, crowded room, which in a lecture to the Inner Temple in London, judge and historian Liz Goldthorpe describes as ‘a competitive male workplace, requiring sharp intellect, quick wit, and steady nerves.’ Deverell was evidently equal to the challenge – she is mentioned in the Irish Times in 1931 as having a reputation among her colleagues for witty repartee. In a long, successful career, Deverell built up a steady practice focussing on property, probate and personal injury work, and was also regularly instructed for trade unionists. Goldthorpe describes her as ‘colourful, popular, but reserved’. She acted as a mentor to younger women barristers and was an advocate for equal rights – she insisted on changing the sign ‘Lady Barristers’ on the robing room door, to ‘Women’ Barristers. She remained in practice for more than forty years, becoming ‘Mother of the Bar’. She stayed living in her childhood home in Greystones until shortly before her death and would drive from Wicklow to the Law Library in her ‘souped-up’ Triumph Herald, claiming her unofficial parking space and robing room chair. She retired in 1969 and died on 11 February 1979, the year her friend Mella Carroll was elected first woman Chair of the Bar Council. In her will, she left a bequest to Trinity Law School to fund a lectureship in her name. The first holder of the Averil Deverell Lecturer in Law was Fidelma Macken, who went on to make history herself as the first woman judge in the European Court of Justice. The current holder, Dr Patricia Brazil practises at the Bar, like all previous holders: ‘Because it’s a part-time lectureship, it suits those of us with a Bar practice, and it connects us to Averil Deverell, who was such a formidable barrister herself. My practice informs my teaching and research, and vice versa.’ Dr Brazil’s areas are family law and refugee and immigration law. ‘A few years after taking up the lectureship, I realised that refugee law was a growing area in Ireland and one I practised in, but it wasn’t being taught in Trinity as a stand-alone subject, so I suggested a module which is now very popular with sophisters.’ While Deverell’s areas of practice were more traditional – probate, property, personal injuries and workers’ rights – Dr Brazil sees continuity: ‘Averil Deverell embodied and drove the change that was happening in Ireland for women at the Bar and in the workplace generally. Today refugee law is rapidly evolving and changing. We’re moving from a situation where the government was adamant that there was no alternative to direct provision, to a commitment to end it; and we are now opening up places for refugees coming from camps in Greece and Syria and most recently Afghanistan. There has been significant progress in our approach to refugees, mostly positive. An analogy can certainly be made with Averil Deverell and the focus she put on the then undeveloped field of women’s rights.’ In the November 2021 edition of The Bar Review, themed around ’100 Years of Women at the Bar’, Dr Brazil was asked to give the closing argument. Her article looks at The situation of Afghan Women Judges following the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Citing evidence that women judges have seen their salaries frozen, and suffered death threats, and many are now in hiding, she ends with the sobering point: ‘As we celebrate the centenary of the first women to be called to The Bar of Ireland, and reflect on the many achievements of Irish women lawyers, events in Afghanistan are a salutary reminder that such progress is neither automatic nor inevitable.’ Click here to find out more information about remembering Trinity in your will
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