The University of Galway’s new library is set to become a state-of-the-art hub for study, innovation and community, rising visibly along the Corrib and expected to open in 2027. With thousands of new study spaces, public acces, and facilities designed for modern research, it represents the university’s future. But its name ensures it will also stand as a memorial to Ireland’s present.
The building will be called the Dr Karen Guinee Library, in memory of Karen Guinee, a medicine graduate who was murdered by her boyfriend in 2006, just days before she was due to officially graduate as a doctor. The University has emphasised that naming the library honours Karen not for the tragedy of her death, but for the life she lived and to remember her brilliance, compassion and promise as a future doctor.
Her family described the “unspeakable trauma” of losing her, expressing hope that students will “carry Karen’s memory forward.” Yet naming a major university building after a young woman killed through male violence inevitably forces a wider question: what does it mean to commemorate women after their deaths, while so many continue to die?
Karen Guinee’s story is not isolated. Her death belongs to a wider national crisis, femicide: the killing of women and girls, most often by men known to them. According to Women’s Aid, 277 women have died violently in Ireland between 1996 and November 2025. Most chillingly, 63% of these women were killed in their own homes. In resolved cases, 87% of women were killed by a man known to them, not by strangers. More than half were killed by a current or former intimate partner. This violence is not a series of separate tragedies, but part of a wider, devastating pattern.
This past January also marks four years since the murder of Aisling Murphy, the 23 year-old teacher killed while jogging along a canal in Tullamore. Her death sparked national grief, vigils across the country and renewed anger about women’s safety in public spaces. But what followed was perhaps even more revealing: women spoke openly about the strategies they have internalised for survival. Avoiding walking alone, sharing live locations, clutching keys, planning routes home. These behaviours are so normalised they are rarely named for what they are: a life shaped by vigilance. Aisling Murphy’s death was not only a tragedy, it was a mirror held up to Irish society, and she is far from the only young woman whose life has been taken.
In 2018, Anastasia ‘Ana’ Kriégel, a 14 year-old Russian-Irish girl living in Lucan, was brutally murdered and sexually assaulted in an abandoned house. Ana’s case horrified the country not only because of its violence, but because of her age, and because her killers were also children, two boys aged just 13. Ana’s story revealed another devastating truth: violence against women and girls does not suddenly appear in adulthood. Misogyny and cruelty begin young, shaped by culture, bullying, entitlement and silence.
Karen Guinee, Aisling Murphy, Ana Kriégel – three different lives, three different circumstances, but one shared reality: Ireland has not yet made womanhood safe.
Women’s Aid notes that in almost all murder-suicide cases in Ireland, the killer is the woman’s current or former male intimate partner. Violence is most often not a stranger lurking in the dark, but someone close, someone familiar, someone trusted.
When the University names its library after Karen Guinee, it is creating a place of remembrance. But remembrance must also come with responsibility. A building cannot undo violence. A name cannot substitute for structural change. Universities, as communities where young people live, form relationships, and shape values, have a critical role to play. Safety must mean more than aspiration. It must mean accessible supports for students experiencing abuse, education around consent and coercive control, and cultures that confront misogyny rather than quietly tolerating it.
Recently there have been significant steps forward. Coercive control is now recognised as a crime in Irish law under the 2018 Domestic Violence Act. Furthermore, since 2023 Ireland has introduced paid domestic violence leave days, allowing victims time to seek help. In November 2025, the European Parliament called for femicide to be recognised as a distinct crime, with Italy passing a bill later that month making femicide punishable by life imprisonment. This progress instills hope onto the future, but progress is not the same as justice, and remembrance is not the same as prevention.
The Dr Karen Guinee Library will one day be filled with students imagining futures, building careers, and planning lives. The hope is that it will also stand as a reminder, not only of a brilliant young woman lost, but of the urgent work still unfinished. Because the question Ireland continues to face is not simply how we honour women once they are gone. It is how we protect them while they are still here.
