ONCE again RTÉ’s Nationwide has come up trumps and Mary Fanning and team have made a programme which will celebrate the first female veterinary surgeon in Ireland and Britain – Aleen Cust – to be broadcast next Friday, November 5th on RTÉ One at 7pm. Aleen Cust was a pioneering Irish woman born in Tipperary who studied veterinary surgery back in the 1890s at the New Veterinary College in Edinburgh and completed the course in 1900 but was not admitted to the exclusive male register until 1922.

On the outbreak of World War 1, in 1915 Cust left Ireland to volunteer at the front to assist in the treatment and care of horses, working with the YMCA from a base near Abbeville. In 1917 she was appointed to an army bacteriology laboratory associated with a veterinary hospital. She is also listed as a member of the Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps 1n 1918.

In the show Mary Fanning travels to Athleague in Co Roscommon where Cust she practised with a forward thinking vet William Byrne and was accepted by the farmers of the west of Ireland.

Mary meets Fiona Claffey MRCVS on Martin Mannion’s farm in Castlecoote where Aleen Cust tended to cows and horses nearly 122 years ago!

Mary also visits Meta Osborne MRCVS at her Tinnakill House Stud and meets three west of Ireland veterinary surgeons, Donal Connolly, Brendan Gardiner and Ascinta Kilroy who have formed a memorial society to honour the woman who broke the mould and honour her trail blazing path. Their aim is to find her grave in Jamaica, where she died of heart failure in 1937 when visiting friends, and commemorate her memory by placing a head stone on her final resting place.