The decision was made by the University Board today after a period of research, analysis and public consultation overseen by the Trinity Legacies Review Working Group (TLRWG).
The change comes after a year of debate on who the new library should be renamed after.
The Eavan Boland Library will be the first building on Trinity’s campus to be named after a woman.
Ms Boland was one of the foremost women in Irish literature, publishing many collections of poetry, a memoir Object Lessons (1995), as well as teaching and lecturing in Ireland and in the US.
She was born in Dublin in 1944 and later attended and taught at Trinity College Dublin. She died in 2020.
The library was previously named Berkeley Library after having been named after George Berkely in 1967.
The naming of the library drew controversy in 2022 as Berkeley bought slaves in the 1700s to work on his Rhode Island estate in 1730-31 and sought to advance ideology in support of slavery.
In August 2022, the Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union announced that it would be referring to the library as the ‘X’ library in all future communications, until Trinity provided a renaming plan.
A Trinity Legacies Review Working Group (TLGWG) was established by the Provost in October 2022.
Its first act was to commission an evidence-based review on Bishop George Berkeley.
In 2022, it opened a public call for submissions on the matter and 855 submissions were received.
In 2023, it reached a consensus that the library be de-named and re-named.
The college will continue to hold Mr Berkeley’s philosophical works in the library collections and continue to teach and to research his works.
A college spokesperson said that “the continued use of George Berkeley’s name on its main Library was inconsistent with the University’s core values of human dignity, freedom, inclusivity, and equality”.
The renaming of the building is expected to bring “a magnificent poetic, scholarly and feminist reputation to a building dedicated to the humanities,” according to Catriona Crowe, a member of the TLRWG.
“Boland’s great achievement was to move women from the object (muse, dream, symbol) of poetry to the subject who was writing the poem,” she said.
“It is a fitting recognition of Eavan Boland’s poetic genius that our main library, used by so many students and staff, will now carry her name,” Trinity College Dublin Provost, Linda Doyle said.
“Eavan’s poetry is well known across the generations, and her outstanding artistic contribution to highlighting the role of women in Irish society is widely appreciated.”
Senior Dean and Chair of the Trinity Legacies Review Working Group, Professor Eoin O Sullivan, said the renaming was possible due to the “hard work and conviction of many people in Trinity’s community, not least the students who not only called for a change in the Library’s name, but who worked with us to achieve that change”.
He said he was “grateful” for the 855 submissions from within Trinity and outside that animated the deliberations and reflections on the matter.
Librarian and college archivist at Trinity College Dublin, Helen Shenton, said: “As a 21st century Library, the name change to this unique library building prioritises the current generation of students’ experience of a welcoming and supportive Library space.”
Ten names had previously been considered for the college library, including: Francis Sheehy Skeffington, Paul Koralek (the architect of the Library building), Oscar Wilde and Wolfe Tone.
