10-05-2025
Clodagh Finn: How a true pioneer emerged from the shadows
It is difficult to understand how Oonah Keogh faded from the collective memory when her entry into the Dublin Stock Exchange a century ago (outlined here last week) made such a sensation all around the world.
Her return to the public consciousness was much quieter, and relatively recent, but it happened with the kind of serendipity that gives you goosebumps. It was as if the woman herself wanted to be rediscovered — and reclaimed.
Although that was not how it seemed at first.
When her singular achievement re-emerged in scraps from the archives of the Irish Stock Exchange around 2008, then-CEO Deirdre Somers tried to find out more, but she and her colleagues hit a wall. They were just planning to enlist the public's help when, unannounced and by sheer coincidence, Oonah Keogh's son walked into The Exchange Buildings, off Dame St, in the centre of Dublin.
'I couldn't believe it,' Somers tells Irishwoman's Diary. 'On a Friday we decided to draft a letter to the newspapers. The following Wednesday, I came out of a meeting and was told that Oonah's son, Bayan Giltsoff jnr, had walked in and that he was being held 'under house arrest' in one of the meeting rooms because they knew I would really want to meet him.'
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Oonah's youngest son couldn't believe it either. His wife told him that morning he wouldn't make it past the front door, but his arrival was treated like a godsend. And it was, because the scrapbook of cuttings he brought with him opened a window on the life of an extraordinary woman who challenged so many norms in her lifetime.
Global history
As a young woman, she travelled around Europe and North Africa (albeit accompanied by a governess), she studied art, she made global history by becoming the first woman on the Dublin Stock Exchange, and she fell in love with a Russian artist/designer who came to her door selling chickens.
When she married him in 1933, she resigned from the stock exchange, as expected, and walked down the aisle in 'a gown of ivory satin with long train falling from the waist and golden girdle', according to the wedding notice in the Irish Independent.
She moved to Somerset in England and transferred her stockbroking skills to her husband's business, restoring Tudor houses. She even rolled up her own sleeves to help with the physical building work but her focus was more on the books.
It must have seemed easy after the unimaginable pressures of managing 'fantastically large sums' that had left her weeping at her desk at the Dublin Stock Exchange, as she once put it.
During those years, she had much to negotiate; a falling-out with her authoritarian and later very ill father, the heavy losses suffered by the family business, Joseph Keogh & Co, during the Wall Street crash of 1929, as well as her automatic exclusion from the gentlemen's clubs, the bars and the golf clubs where deals and contacts were made.
She put all that behind her and settled into life in England, and into her new role as a mother. In 1935, Oonah and Bayan's first child Tatiana was born. A son, Rurik, followed in 1937 and, another, Nicholi, in 1939.
Court battles
Oonah Keogh, now Giltsoff, made headlines again in 1943 when she took the Hibernian Bank to court in a row over shares. When she lost, she appealed. She lost again.
It was huge financial blow, writes historian Dr Bláthnaid Nolan in a fascinating 32-page booklet published by the Irish Stock Exchange entitled Oonah Keogh, A Celebration.
'The fact that Oonah appealed the case shows a certain level of tenacity, although it could also have been a last bid effort to allay the astronomical debt that she was now responsible for paying back,' writes Dr Nolan.
In 1947, the Giltsoffs sold up and moved back to Ireland. A fourth child, Bayan jnr, the keeper of his mother's archive, was born in 1945.
They started again and gained new recognition in Kilquade, Co Wicklow, where Bayan Giltsoff designed what became known as the Old Russian Village, a development of about 20 houses, with exposed beams and lead-paned windows reminiscent of a Russian dacha. (Former president Cearbhaill Ó Dáiligh lived in one).
In the late 1950s, Oonah Giltsoff, a Catholic, again upended expectations when she separated from her husband and later moved to Spain with two of her children where she earned a living teaching English. She added fluent Spanish to the fluent French she had mastered as a younger woman.
She was in her sixties by then, but as this quote from a few years before illustrates, age had not dimmed her:
I would have [stayed on at the stock exchange] if I had realised I would feel so young at 53 instead of thinking (as we did then) that one would be starting to wear a lace cap
And Oonah, or Úna as she later spelled her name, would certainly be the kind of person to wear the appropriate headwear. She was an elegant woman who dressed in silk blouses, silk neckerchiefs and skirt suits. She did not approve of women wearing trousers and believed they should wear make-up.
Her life and work was, as the booklet describing both points out, the very embodiment of feminism yet she vehemently denied being a feminist. She hated the word, she said in an interview in 1971. She hated the words 'unisex' and 'equality' too. Women and men should be 'complementary', she said.
And yet, her granddaughter Katushka Giltsoff, a woman who has worked in international finance herself, thinks Oonah would be disappointed at the lack of progress a century on. Yet, she might be pleasantly surprised to see that women now make up 57% of the staff at Euronext Dublin.
The meeting room at Euronext Dublin named after Oonah Keogh. Picture: courtesy of Euronext Dublin
She is celebrated there too. Daryl Byrne, CEO of Euronext, says: 'She is an important part of our history and we talk about her journey and achievements a lot. One of our meeting rooms is named after her.'
A role model
Her legacy, though, needs to be more widely recognised, says her granddaughter, not least because she is an important role model: 'She was a confident, determined woman and I worry that plenty of young professional women lack these traits.'
We might leave the last word to her late son, Bayan jnr, who took a chance more than a decade ago and rocked up to his mother's former work place.
'Despite her extraordinary upbringing, there was a huge amount of personal sadness in her life; losing five siblings before her early 30s, she always saw the positive in life and was always ready with her good humour and practical attitude towards life in general and to fight on against all the odds. Believe me, at times, these were stacked against her.
[She lost her daughter Tatiana too, who died in July 1989. Oonah died eight days later, aged 86. "She just lost her spirit," according to her granddaughter who was with her just before].
'She tried to instil in us all (her children) to always look life right in the eye and amongst many gems of wisdom [was], 'Life takes you at your own valuation', which is very true indeed; a maxim which has taken me through life quite well. She offered and bestowed upon her children great love, some criticism, great advice (not frequently listened to), great wisdom and memories.'
