Latest news with #Anglo-IrishTreaty
The Journal
27-05-2025
- Politics
- The Journal
Bryan Dobson set to chair new State Commemorations Advisory Committee
FORMER RTÉ BROADCASTER Bryan Dobson is set to chair a new State Commemorations Advisory Committee. The committee has been established with the aim of supporting Government and key stakeholders in the planning and delivery of commemorative events. Its mandate will be to maintain 'an inclusive, respectful, and consensus-based approach to all commemorative matters', to offer independent, non-partisan advice to Government when requested and to ensure historical events are commemorated 'accurately' and grounded in primary source material. The committee will also provide guidance on 'sensitive or complex themes' associated with historical events. Dobson, who retired from RTÉ in May last year after 37 years at the broadcaster, will chair the committee, whose members will include former ministers Heather Humphreys and Éamon Ó Cuív. Professor Marie Coleman, a professor of 20th century Irish history at Queen's University Belfast, will also sit on the committee. Other members will include National Archives director Orlaith McBride, National Library Director Dr Audrey Whitty, and Professor Paul Rouse from University College Dublin's School of History. Advertisement Minister for Culture Patrick O'Donovan is expected to officially announce the formation of the committee tomorrow. He will say that the committee will ensure 'that the diverse experiences and perspectives that shape our national story continue to be honoured in a respectful and balanced way'. 'Ireland's story is rich, diverse and often challenging. With the thoughtful guidance of this new Committee, we will continue to honour that story not just as history, but as a shared inheritance that belongs to every citizen,' O'Donovan will say. The Minister will meet some of the committee members tomorrow, where they will view a new acquisition by the State. The typed document is a signed agreement between Éamon de Valera, Austin Stack, Arthur Griffith, and Michael Collins that aimed to address the immediate political crisis arising from the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The agreement was drafted and signed at the Ard Fheis of Sinn Féin, held on 21-22 February 1922 at the Mansion House in Dublin. Some 3,000 delegates from all over Ireland attended the Ard Fheis to interpret the constitution of Sinn Féin considering the Treaty and to decide the party's policy for the upcoming elections. The document will be added to the collection at the National Archives of Ireland and will be available on the National Archives website for researchers to access. A related item, Michael Collins's Memorial Card, will also be shown to the Minister and the committee. Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone... A mix of advertising and supporting contributions helps keep paywalls away from valuable information like this article. Over 5,000 readers like you have already stepped up and support us with a monthly payment or a once-off donation. Learn More Support The Journal
The Irish Sun
27-05-2025
- Politics
- The Irish Sun
Beloved former RTE star bags totally different role 12 months after shock station departure after 37 years
FORMER RTE star Bryan Dobson is set to chair the new State Commemorations Advisory Committee. The group has been set up to "guide future commemorative efforts", according to Culture Minister Patrick O'Donovan, following recent work on the Decade of Centenaries programme that concluded in 2023. 1 Bryan Dobson is set to chair the new State Commemorations Advisory Committee Credit: Fran Veale The committee will include Professor Marie Coleman, former ministers Heather Humphreys and Eamon O Cuiv, Orlaith McBride, Professor Paul Rouse and Dr Audrey Whitty. Ex- RTE reports that the committee is tasked with maintaining an inclusive, respectful, and consensus-based approach to all commemorative matters. Minister O'Donovan said today: "The Decade of Centenaries was a period of deep historical and national significance. Read more in News "As Minister, I am proud of how we, as a nation, commemorated that complex and formative chapter always with respect, sensitivity, and scholarly integrity. "Today, we build on that legacy by establishing a new Commemorations Advisory Committee to guide future commemorative efforts." Minister O'Donovan and some of the committee members met today at the new HQ of the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media to view a historical document recently acquired by the State, a signed agreement between Eamon de Valera, Austin Stack, Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins relating to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. They were also shown a memorial card of Michael Collins. Most read in Celebrity Mr Dobson, 65, He said at the time: "I will miss working with some wonderfully talented and hardworking colleagues. RTE's Bryan Dobson 'looking forward to retirement' as TV veteran issues emotional final message after retirement " "I am grateful too to the listeners and viewers who have given me their time and attention over the years. "I hope to Recently, the former RTE presenter told how he reckons his career in journalism started way back in Transition Year in Newpark Comprehensive school in Dublin, where he made his first radio programme. 'I WASN'T ACADEMIC' Speaking to the Roasted with Mark Moriarty podcast, he said: "I wasn't academic, didn't do a very good Inter Cert or Leaving Cert… I just knew journalism was for me. "And the broadcasting came about because I was never a very good speller, so maybe written journalism wasn't for me." He then ventured into pirate radio, joining Radio Nova, before heading to the BBC. Then, he joined the RTE newsroom in 1987, where he was appointed as anchor of the Six One News in 1996. STANDOUT MEMORIES One of the standout memories of his career was covering 9/11. He was due to do an interview in Government buildings that morning and instead ended up on a marathon session on the news from 3pm that afternoon. Mr Dobson also covered the Good Friday Agreement being announced, the historic visit of Queen Elizabeth II and many more moments. He moved to RTE Radio One's Morning Ireland in 2017 before presenting the News At One throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. DAD WISH Speaking to the Roasted with Mark Moriarty podcast, Mr Dobson also told how he believes that reporters are becoming increasingly subjected to hostility, often as a result of fake news and protests around asylum seekers, and how some reporters are now going for 'Hostile Environment' training. Asked about who his four dream dinner guests would be, he chose "If I could shoot the breeze and maybe go for a pint… I would like that chance."
RTÉ News
27-05-2025
- Politics
- RTÉ News
Dobson to chair new State Commemorations Advisory Committee
Former RTÉ News broadcaster Bryan Dobson is to chair the new State Commemorations Advisory Committee. The announcement was made this afternoon by the Minister for Arts, Media, Communications, Culture and Sport, Patrick O'Donovan. The committee is tasked with maintaining an inclusive, respectful, and consensus-based approach to all commemorative matters. It also includes Professor Marie Coleman, former ministers Heather Humphreys and Éamon Ó'Cuív, Orlaith McBride, Professor Paul Rouse and Dr Audrey Whitty. "The Decade of Centenaries was a period of deep historical and national significance. As Minister, I am proud of how we, as a nation, commemorated that complex and formative chapter always with respect, sensitivity, and scholarly integrity. "Today, we build on that legacy by establishing a new Commemorations Advisory Committee to guide future commemorative efforts," Minister O'Donovan said. The minister and some committee members met today in the new headquarters of the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media to view a recent acquisition by the State. The typed document is a signed agreement between Éamon de Valera, Austin Stack, Arthur Griffith, and Michael Collins that aimed to address the immediate political crisis arising from the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The agreement was drafted and signed at the extraordinary Ard Fheis of Sinn Féin, held on 21-22 February 1922, at the Mansion House in Dublin. Some 3,000 delegates from all over Ireland attended to interpret the constitution of Sinn Féin considering the treaty and to decide the party's policy for the upcoming elections. The document will be available on the National Archives website for researchers to access.
Irish Independent
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Independent
How ‘inertia, incapacity and appalling ineptitude' stymied attempts to redraw the Irish border
In 1925, the Boundary Commission collapsed amid rancour, spying and an absent-minded Irish representative One hundred years ago, the Irish Boundary Commission collapsed in acrimony after the proposal by the three boundary commissioners suggesting a new border in Ireland was shelved and the border remained as it was, as it still is. Under the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, which provided for the prospect of a boundary commission to decide the contours of the border, three commissioners were to be appointed to carry out the task. The chairman was to be appointed by the British government, with the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland governments appointing one representative each.
Irish Times
05-05-2025
- Irish Times
The Irish passport at 100: Not just a travel document but a declaration of hope and of reclaiming identity
Weeks after Terence Reynolds, originally from Cloncowley, Drumlish, Co Longford , died at his home in Yonkers in New York , his daughter Christina found an old suitcase in the attic. '[It had] a single identifying label in cream tape with a handwritten writing stating CLONCOWLEY,' she wrote in reply to a request from the Department for Foreign Affairs for stories about Irish passports. The story of Terence Reynolds is one of scores told in an exhibition on the history of the now 100-years-old passport at Epic , the Irish emigration museum on Custom House Quay in Dublin. Throughout, it has not just been a travel document, but often a declaration of hope in a better future for those who left Ireland's shores, or a reclaiming of identity by many of those in the Irish diaspora today. READ MORE The suitcase was the one Terence Reynolds, a carpenter, had carried from his Cloncowley home: 'Inside, I found what I believe was my dad's very first Irish passport. It was in pristine condition, frozen in time.' His photograph was one she had never seen before, revealing 'a very young, fresh-faced' man 'full of hope, ambition, and the quiet determination that would carry him across the Atlantic'. 'I sat there imagining this young 20-year-old in 1968 getting on a plane for the first time and landing in 1960s New York, taking up abode in Inwood,' his daughter writes. The passport of Terence Reynolds who emigrated from Co Longford to the United States in the 1960s The contribution by Christina Reynolds illustrates one of the key themes of the On The Move exhibition, says Epic's historian, Catherine Healy: 'We really wanted to tap into the emotions around passports.' The first Irish passports were used by WT Cosgrave, Desmond Fitzgerald and the delegation that went to Geneva in 1923 to take up the Irish Free State's League of Nations place 'to resounding applause'. The public began to apply for the passports from April 1924, although significant tensions emerged between Dublin and London over the terminology to be used. Writing from London, Fitzgerald, the minister for external relations, told the department's top official, Joseph P Walshe, of a meeting with 'a most objectionable' Foreign Office official. The British were insistent that the term 'British subject' be used, arguing that any other language breached the Anglo-Irish Treaty and would 'cause endless trouble and confusion'. Regarding the Irish passport as 'a branch' of the British one, the British side, the records show, 'didn't want Irishmen going around over in the US saying that they're not British subjects'. The British arguments were a nonsense, Fitzgerald told them, since 'the term 'British subject' included everyone from (prime minister Stanley) Baldwin to an undiscovered savage in British Guiana'. In the end, an uneasy compromise was reached: 'Ultimately, bearers were described as a 'citizen of the Irish Free State, one of the British Commonwealth of Nations',' says Healy. The Irish Free State passport of Emily Dolan, issued in 1928, part of the exhibition On the Move: A Century of the Irish Passport at Epic, the Irish emigration museum. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill The early troubles did not end there because British consular officials sometimes refused to recognise the passport or doctored it if it was handed in to them, writing 'British subject' in, she says. The first passport, well finished with a hard cover, cost 1 shilling. For most in the 1920s and 1930s, and later, it was not a declaration of pride but an exit document required for emigration. Now available usually within days, for decades passports took longer to get. 'Passport officials were handwriting documents right up until the 1990s,' says Healy. Security has tightened, too. A cabinet illuminated by ultraviolet light highlights just some of the security features of today's passports, including Celtic imagery invisible to the naked eye. Ultraviolet light illiuminates some of the security features of a contemporary passport. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill The latest electronic passports now display the holders' biometric image three times – as a photograph, a laser imprint and a hologram. Tougher security was prompted from the late 1980s following a series of incidents, including the conviction of an Irish official in 1989 who sold passports to North African buyers. Irish passport security measures now include Celtic imagery invisible to the naked eye. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill In 2010, Micheál Martin, then the Minister for Foreign Affairs, ordered an Israeli diplomat to leave Ireland after Israel's intelligence agency, Mossad, used Irish passports in the Dubai killing of a leading Hamas figure. [ From the archive: Fake passports? They're part of a very long story Opens in new window ] The exhibition tells the stories of the famous, and those not so famous. Poet, WB Yeats – by then a senator – travelled on Irish, not British documents, to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm in December 1923. WB Yeats with his wife, Georgie Hyde Lees, in 1923, the year he won the Nobel Prize. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Not every artist thought the same way, however. James Joyce, who lived in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s , never applied for one: 'That surprised me,' says Healy. However, he did seek one during the second World War for his daughter, Lucia, who he tried to move to Switzerland from the Parisian mental asylum where she was staying. 'German officials were already aware that she had British papers and said that it wouldn't be possible. She remained (in Paris) until 1951,' says the Epic historian. Joyce never explained his attitude. 'It could have been purely pragmatic,' she says, 'or possibly resentment against the Free State, which he saw as quite suffocating. James Joyce never applied for an Irish passport, says Epic historian Catherine Healy. Photograph: Getty 'In one of his letters to his son, he says he was advised to get an Irish passport, and he declined and got a British replacement instead. So, he consciously chose not to do so.' For others, however, an Irish passport has been hugely important. Take Abigail O'Reilly, two of whose grandparents, Bill Phillips and his wife, Jean, left Cabra and Fairview respectively for 1960s England. 'They were part of the 'forgotten generation',' says O'Reilly, telling of how her grandparents 'ended up working together on the buses where he was the driver and she the conductor'. During a break in Covid restrictions, O'Reilly moved to Dublin in 2020 for college. 'My grandfather and I have forged a really special bond. He has started opening up to me about his childhood,' she says. Abigail O'Reilly with her mother Fiona O'Reilly and grandfather Bill Phillips Suffering from dementia, his childhood memories are now uppermost in his mind; cycling through Moore Street with friends, knowing Brendan Behan. 'Ireland now seems to hold a much more romantic and nostalgic place in his mind,' says O'Reilly. A year ago, she received her own Irish passport. 'I feel incredibly lucky and proud to have been able to return to a country which my grandparents were not able to remain in. I feel all the more connected to them,' she says. The exhibition also tells of the secrets of the past, including of the adoption of thousands of Irish children who were sent abroad on Irish passports until the 1970s, 'With their birth name in the document', says Healy. She tells the story of Brian Burke, who was born in Dublin to a single mother and spent his first year in St Patrick's Infant Hospital in Blackrock. 'He was adopted by an American couple in the US in the 1950s, even though legislation at the time didn't allow overseas adoptions. In his photo, he's just over a year-and-a-half old,' she says. Once adopted, his name was changed to Daniel Doherty. Before his mother died, his adoptive mother shared with him his carefully kept adoption records. Embarking on his journey to discover his Irish heritage, he requested in 2021, when he renewed his passport seven decades later, that both of his names would appear. And now they do. A year later, he returned to Ireland, learning of 'an amazing family history'. 'I am blessed and thankful for the life I was given and the path I was set on so long ago,' he said. 'I am proud to be from Ireland and I value my Irish citizenship. It has been an amazing journey that started 70 years ago with a little green Irish passport.'
