Bridget Dirrane

Bridget Dirrane (15 November 1894 to 31 December 2003) was an Irish nurse, centenarian and memoirist. She was born on Inishmore in the Aran Islands, County Galway, the youngest child of a flannel weaver who also kept a small farm. In 1919 she moved to Dublin to train as a nurse at St Ultan's Hospital. A republican and a member of Cumann na mBan from 1918, she was held in Dublin without being charged in 1920 and went on hunger strike until she was released. In 1927 she emigrated to the United States and continued her nursing career in Boston, in hospitals and as a district nurse, and during the Second World War she nursed in a munitions factory and at a US Army Air Forces bomber base in Mississippi. She became a US citizen in 1940, returned to the Aran Islands in 1966, and died on 31 December 2003 at the age of 109.