BY DONAL FALLON
IRELAND THEN AND NOW
An excellent contribution to the rte.ie/history website, ‘Ireland Then and Now’, is an ongoing project from photographer and artist David Cleary. In an interactive series, Cleary takes images from the archives and superimposes them on the exact location today, allowing us to pull the historic image across the contemporary and more familiar streetscapes. Examples of note include a barricade at Dublin’s Lincoln Place. One side of the street has been completely transformed; the other is nearly identical.
NEW HISTORIANS IN RESIDENCE
Dublin City Council Culture Company has just announced the appointment of two new Historians in Residence, with Katie Blackwood (Dublin North Central Area) and Elizabeth Kehoe (Dublin Central Area) joining the pre-existing team of Cormac Moore, Cathy Scuffil, Mary Muldowney and Dervilla Roche. Dublin is one of the first local authorities in the world to create such positions; its historians produce an annual History On Your Doorstep publication and are central to the programming of the Dublin Festival of History, which returns this year from 27 September to 13 October. This year the festival will commence with the ‘Big Weekend’ in Dublin Castle, to be followed by two weeks of programming across the city and county of Dublin.
WINIFRED CARNEY AND MARY ANN McCRACKEN COMMEMORATED
Two new bronze statues in the grounds of Belfast’s City Hall mark a significant change in the commemorative landscape there. While City Hall’s interior has long reflected the diversity of history in the city (a particularly impressive stained-glass window honours the shared history of the 1907 Belfast labour dispute, which marked the arrival of Jim Larkin to the city), these new statues ensure greater diversity in who is commemorated outside the building. The monuments to social reformer and abolitionist Mary Ann McCracken and 1916 veteran Winifred Carney are both the work of Studio Sander & Sander. Belfast Lord Mayor Ryan Murphy said that ‘these statues celebrate female achievement, inclusivity and the diversity of the people who have helped shape our city. They will therefore help to educate locals and visitors about our city’s history.’ There has been some predictable outrage, with a member of the Traditional Unionist Voice party condemning the Carney statue for ‘wearing an IRA uniform from the 1916 terrorist uprising’.
AN IRISH PICNIC
Writing recently for RTÉ Culture, Kasandra O’Connell of the Irish Film Institute noted how ‘it is thought that between 75–90% of films from the silent era no longer survive. The reasons for this are varied; studios dumped many silent and black and white films when sound and colour were introduced, believing that the new technology would render the older films valueless.’ So, there is good news in the IFI’s discovery of surviving film from The Callahans and the Murphys, a 1927 MGM film that was believed to be lost. A single reel of film, titled ‘An Irish Picnic’, is a thankfully unearthed fragment of Irish-American cinema history. The film caused great controversy for its stereotypical depictions of the Irish, with MGM withdrawing the film from general release.
UAHN ULADH
Recent months have seen some well-received documentaries exploring the role of women in Irish history, with plenty of coverage for Imelda May’s Lily & Lolly: The Forgotten Yeats Sisters on Sky Arts. One that readers may have missed was Uahn Uladh, an excellent exploration of Agnes O’Farrelly/Úna Ní Fhaircheallaigh. Available now to view on the TG4 Player, this exploration of the first woman to write an Irish-language novel and the first female professor of Irish in University College Dublin offered a brilliant insight into the Gaelic Revival and the language movement from a unique angle. The documentary was made with the support of Northern Ireland Screen’s Irish Language Broadcast Fund.
FIFTY YEARS OF PRIDE
It was in 1974 that eight members of the Sexual Liberation Movement staged the first gay rights demonstration outside the Department of Justice. The organisers of the current Pride Festival note that, ‘while the term Pride had not yet become popularised and it would be several years before Dublin had an organised Pride movement, this is generally accepted as the first Dublin Pride march’. Fittingly, the programme for this year includes much historical reflection, while New Island Books will soon publish a history by Páraic Kerrigan of University College Dublin exploring that journey and other aspects of Irish LGBT history. See https://dublinpride.ie/.
KILKENNY NETWORKS
Continuing until September 2024, Dr Jane Fenlon’s exhibition in Kilkenny Castle explores the earls of Ormond and their place in the early modern world. Beginning with a humble medieval walled town, we find a Kilkenny that ‘grew and prospered, its gradual transformation due partly to its increasingly wealthy merchants and their overseas trading links’. Political and economic histories meet in this beautifully designed exhibition, which nicely complements the recent Four Courts Press collection Magnates and merchants in early modern Kilkenny (reviewed on p. 63). Admission is included with the standard general admission ticket to the OPW site.
MARINO 100
Complete with a beautiful centenary logo produced by designers Helen Lons and Ronan McDonnell, the Marino Residents’ Association in Dublin are organising a series of events across the coming months to mark the centenary of the Marino Garden Suburb, one of the very first significant housing projects of the new Irish Free State. A wide range of events are planned, including lectures exploring the architectural importance of the development. See www.marino.ie/centenary.