Latest news with #TheTroubles
Irish Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
‘We Irish were never homogeneous. Always hybrids, always mongrels'
For a generation of TV viewers growing up in the early 1980s, the history of Ireland will be forever sketched by the soft, Oxbridge tones of historian Robert Kee in his magisterial series, Ireland: A Television History. The landmark 13-part 1981 series sought to explain Ireland's past during the height of The Troubles, firstly, to an English audience left ignorant by 'the distorting lens of unquestioning assumptions laced with post-imperial incomprehension', as his obituary later described. From Sunday, June 8th, a new telling of Ireland's story from its very first inhabitants to the present day, narrated by Dublin-born Hollywood film star Colin Farrell , will begin on RTÉ . Entitled From That Small Island, the four 50-minute programmes, filmed in 17 countries from Barbados to Australia, are written and produced by Bríona Nic Dhiarmada and directed by Rachael Moriarty and Peter Murphy. READ MORE From the off, the series seeks to merge the skills of historians, archaeologists and scientists to tell the island's history in fresh ways that will both inform and challenge many long-held readings of the past. In the first episode, viewers will come face to face with 'Rathlin Man', whose Bronze Age remains were discovered on the island off the North Antrim coast in 2006 during the clearing of land for a pub driveway. In the past, an artist's impression would have been used to convey to viewers what he looked like in life, but today, advances in ancient DNA sampling mean that an accurate facial reconstruction is possible. 'We know this man's face, the muscles, the structure, the colour of his hair, the colour of his eyes. He's got the gene for haemochromatosis , the supposed Celtic disease. He was lactose tolerant, which shows his diet was very much dairy,' says Nic Dhiarmada. History professor Jane Ohlmeyer is the series' historical consultant and associate producer, as well as the co-author with Nic Dhiarmada of an accompanying book to be published next year by Oxford University Press. The very first people to come here were hunter-gatherers. We don't know where they came from, but they came by sea. That's the only thing that we're sure about — Bríona Nic Dhiarmada Sitting in Ohlmeyer's office in Trinity College Dublin, Nic Dhiarmada and Ohlmeyer enthusiastically describe the origin of the TV series. The idea grew from conversations the two had when they met in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2016, where they agreed to work together to tell a new history of the island from a time without written records – 'pre-history' to historians – up to today. The search into the past was not only useful, but necessary to throw light on the present: 'Gabriel Cooney, the eminent professor of archaeology at UCD, says that what comes before determines what comes after,' says Nic Dhiarmada. The two have clearly enjoyed the experience of nearly 10 years of work and the hundreds of hours of recorded interviews gathered by Nic Dhiarmada: 'Do you know how much fun it is? It's work, but it's powerful craic as well,' says Ohlmeyer. Old shibboleths will be tackled: 'This homogeneous Ireland idea, this little Catholic thing, was never the case. We were never homogeneous. Always hybrids, always mongrels. We didn't set out to prove that, but that's what came out,' Nic Dhiarmada says. [ Northern Ireland youth keen on a more integrated society but feel it is a long way off Opens in new window ] The people who built Newgrange and the other megalithic creations that are so much part of Ireland's international image of today left monuments of stone behind them, but they did not leave behind a DNA heritage, disappearing from history. 'The very first people to come here were hunter-gatherers. We don't know where they came from, but they came by sea. That's the only thing that we're sure about,' says Nic Dhiarmada. [ The Irish passport at 100: Not just a travel document but a declaration of hope and of reclaiming identity Opens in new window ] 'They stayed here and then they just disappeared. They left things behind them like fish traps, or cremated remains, but the latter are not that useful because you can't extract DNA from them.' Then, the first farmers came, having migrated from Anatolia in modern-day Turkey, leaving behind in the boglands of the Céide Fields in north Mayo the earliest signs of organised agriculture found anywhere on Earth. In time, the Anatolian migrants almost entirely disappeared from the DNA record, too, though a skeleton of one of them, known as 'Ballynahatty Woman', was found in a townland near Belfast in 1855. 'They knew she had dark, sallow skin and brown eyes. When I asked what these people looked like, I was told, 'Go to Sardinia, they look like contemporary Sardinians,'' Nic Dhiarmada says. The excavation of the island's megalithic inheritance, especially the most famous of its tombs, Poulnabrone in the Burren in Co Clare, led to the discovery of the remains of a six-month-old child. From That Small Island: Kiloggin Castle From That Small Island: Leuven records 'When they analysed the DNA, they found that she had the chromosomes which showed that she had Down syndrome, had been breast-fed for at least six months and was buried in honour,' says Nic Dhiarmada. Throughout, the TV series will show how the island's history shares common threads with elsewhere, but also where it fundamentally differs from the rest of Europe, largely because it is an island. 'Being an island is hugely important because you're isolated to a degree, or things will come later, or in a different way,' says Ohlmeyer. Nic Dhiarmada interjects: 'Compared to Britain, which has pretty much the same climate, pretty much on the same geographic line, we have 40 per cent less flora and fauna than they do. 'We don't have toads, we don't have snakes, or vipers. Snakes. It wasn't because of St Patrick. They never came, they never got here, because getting to an island is much more difficult.' The later episodes will tell the often-grisly story of colonisation. 'The Catholic Irish in the 17th century suffered enormously. The expropriation of eight million acres of land, a third of the land mass. And it's the best land. And then this transplantation of people to Connaught, effectively into reservations,' Ohlmeyer says. 'That's what we saw later in America in the 19th century. So, all of this happened in Ireland for hundreds of years. Ireland is the playbook for imperialism as it unfolds around the world later. That is something that hasn't been fully appreciated.' However, the narrative so often told in Ireland today that 'we were oppressed for 800 years, that we were always very good, that we never did anything bad, that we suffered under the English yoke is not necessarily true, either,' says Nic Dhiarmada. Instead, the history of Ireland is full of endless contradictions, which need to be understood today: 'We are this exception to everything else. We were a colony, but we were agents of empire – we were colonisers as well.' In the 17th century, thousands of Irish were sent as 'press-ganged' indentured servants to the Caribbean. Many died because of the brutal conditions. 'They all suffered tremendously,' says Ohlmeyer, 'but at the end of the day, their whiteness does afford them some privilege. Over time. In Barbados, some Irish such as the Blakes and Kirwans from Galway profited hugely from sugar.' If they survived, the indentured servants were given plots of land. Some prospered. Others did not; their equally poor descendants today in Barbados are known as 'Redlegs', or 'the Ecky Beckies', as the programmes will show. I think Ireland is having a conversation in a very actually mature way that has paved the way for a very difficult conversation around empire and the legacy of empire — Jane Ohlmeyer 'On the one hand, you have people who are desperately poor, who remain desperately poor. On the other, you have people who go on to become very effective overseers on the plantations and plantation owners themselves,' she says. In Jamaica, the records are filled with stories of the Irish who made good on the backs of others – 'the Kellys, who are as rich as any other plantation owner in 18th century Jamaica, investing it in conspicuous consumption back home in Ireland'. Nic Dhiarmada says: 'The people on the island of Ireland were oppressed, were colonised. They often then went out and did the same thing to others, working for the British Empire, Dutch Empire, French Empire, particularly the Spanish Empire. Ricardo Wall, whose parents had left Limerick, 'ends up running the Spanish Empire in the 18th century, and not only is he running it, he's also then the most amazing patron for other Irish people', she says. Often, they argue, 'the abused became the abusers', particularly in the Caribbean where 'people who themselves had been transported and hideously abused go on to be the most violent and aggressive overseers themselves', says Ohlmeyer. [ 'Nobody knew things were going to get so bad': Catholic RUC officer's defaced headstone at centre of Troubles exhibition Opens in new window ] The challenges posed by the series will not just be for Catholics, or those with a Catholic cultural identity: 'For some Protestants, the 17th century or 18th century issues will be hard. To this day, some don't accept that Ireland was ever a colony,' says Ohlmeyer. Yet, equally, the rigid framing of history for nearly 200 years has hidden stories of Protestants suffering during the Famine, who were written out of the narrative: 'Cholera made no religious distinction,' as one US academic puts it. Any idea that only Irish Catholics suffered in the Famine is 'rubbish, absolutely untrue, a myth', says Nic Dhiarmada, one propagated by some in the Orange Order more comfortable with a framing of history that laid the blame for hunger at the door of 'feckless' Catholics. Jane Ohlmeyer and Bríona Nic Dhiarmada and at Duncannon Fort, Co Wexford Layering on the complications, the two tell the story of the Irish Catholics in India who formed two-thirds of the British military forces there working directly for the Crown, or the East India Company. 'Within the British Army, they were treated as if they were indigenous, just like the Indian sepoys. They could never get promoted, even though they enforced British rule,' Nic Dhiarmada says. For decades, historians shied away from telling the fuller story of Ireland's past, especially during The Troubles when everything was politicised 'by both sides in a very unhelpful way, so historians avoided it like the plague', says Ohlmeyer. 'We're in a very different space now. I think Ireland is having a conversation in a very actually mature way that has paved the way for a very difficult conversation around empire and the legacy of empire. 'History muddies the water. Were we the good guys, or the bad guys? We were both. We were the good guys and the bad guys. We had harm done to us, and caused harm to others,' she concludes. From That Small Island begins on RTÉ 1 next Sunday, June 8th at 6.30pm
Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
The figurehead of Irish republicanism v the BBC
Gerry Adams versus the BBC was one of the most high-profile and expensive courtroom showdowns in recent Irish legal history. Two parties who needed no introduction – the figurehead of Irish republicanism against a UK media institution. Sources with knowledge of the case believe the bill is between €3-5m (£2.5- £4m). Both sides had two senior counsel each and the first three rows of the court were filled by barristers and solicitors. Mr Adams was able to do so because the 2016 BBC NI Spotlight programme which contained the allegation was seen by an estimated 16,000 viewers in Ireland. At the time he was a TD (member of the Irish parliament) for Louth. The accompanying online story was also able to be read south of the border – it had about 700 "clicks". It is also fair to speculate that Mr Adams calculated he had a better chance of winning with an Irish jury with little or no memory of The Troubles. This, by the way, could be the last High Court defamation trial by jury in Ireland, as it is in the process of changing the law. The former Sinn Féin leader spent longer in the witness chair than any of the other nine people who testified. His evidence spread across the first seven days – in contrast Spotlight NI reporter Jennifer O'Leary spent three days in the hot seat. At one point Mr Adams reminded a barrister for the BBC: "I'm not on trial here." But his reputation came to form a central part of proceedings, especially for the BBC. As one of his own barristers put it, Mr Adams is "a polarising" figure. To that end, each side had prepared its own video presentation, a life story in two chapters if you like. The BBC showed the jury a montage of news reports of IRA attacks, interspersed with clips of Mr Adams justifying its actions. "What's this got to do with Spotlight?" he asked more than once during cross-examination. As he has all his life, Mr Adams again denied ever having been in the IRA, or being a leading figure on its army council until 2005. His lawyers' video covered the 1990s onwards, depicting Mr Adams as peacemaker, with Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela and the future King Charles III. This, they claimed, was the reputation defamed by the BBC in 2016. Whatever the verdict was going to be, the five week trial has renewed the debate around Mr Adams. His continues to be a past that hasn't gone away.
Irish Examiner
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
The Flats: Italian filmmaker embeds in post-war West Belfast
The pain of the past is still felt in the present in The Flats, a new documentary that examines life after the Troubles. Focused on a number of residents in the largely republican New Lodge flats in West Belfast, the film looks at the nature of trauma through the pain, resilience, warmth and humour of its subjects. Italian filmmaker Alessandra Celesia moved to Belfast in the 1970s and now divides her time between the city and France. For years, she says, she had no intention of making a film about the aftermath of The Troubles - until she got to know some of New Lodge's residents. 'I married someone from Northern Ireland and in 2011 I made a film called the Bookseller of Belfast,' she says. 'The bookseller used to live up the Antrim Road, just up from the flats. I walked in a few years later with the intention to explore that architectural space. Little by little, I understood the history of the place.' As she got to know residents including Joe, a man traumatised from childhood memories, she realised that the impacts were still being felt years later. 'It's like looking at what happens after a war stops, many many years after, down the line,' says Celesia. In some of the film's most memorable scenes, people re-enact the experiencd somehow my characters were stuck in the past,' says Celesia. 'You can still feel it's very present even just in the fact that the flats are very ''70s, and the ghosts of that moment are still there. I thought we needed to find a way to show this past. But you cannot do this kind of process, reenacting, without the people that are feeling being completely on board for that.' Preparations for a bonfire in Belfast, in a scene from The Flats. By then she had gotten to know her subjects well over time. Over the course of re-enactments, she observed, people would take their story and decide how it was going to be told. Some of Joe's experiences unfold through conversations with Rita Overend, a befriender who works with people in the community. 'I thought, if we need to do a film about trauma, we need to find a way to go very, very deep into the soul,' says Celesia. 'Rita was exceptional for that. She's very powerful because she's from not exactly the same area but from the same background.' The Italian filmmaker's love of Belfast and its people, she says now, is as strong as when she first made the place her home. 'The city has changed so much. I arrived when the big signs of the war, like checkpoints, were all gone. The thing that struck me at the beginning was the army presence, the tanks that they had. 'I adored, immediately, the people and I think what is strong in the film is they have such a dark sense of humour that helped them to go through the wars. "That was something that really stayed with me being an outsider - for people in Belfast, it's all normal. But for me, the way they express themselves, their warmth is so big, that makes them incredible, cinematic creatures. They inspired me so much.' When she first arrived in the city in the 1970s, she recalls, there were not a lot of foreigners. 'Now it's a very cosmopolitan place, which I think it's a very good thing, especially for a place where two communities were against each other for so long.' The stories told in The Flats might be personal, but the response to the film has been universal, having won awards on the festival circuit ahead of its cinema release. The film also won this year's IFTA George Morrison Award for feature documentary. 'It's a time for the world that unfortunately, is filled with wars, and it's a film that has the possibilities to explore what happens 25, 26 years later, (after) the peace agreement,' says Celesia. 'It's not many wars that have that distance, and yet you still have the protagonists. 'I think, especially being Italian, the conflict up there, it's so complicated to understand. I decided from the first day I'm going to stick to the personal wounds, the ones that I can understand and I can explore. The big picture will appear. And I think somehow that paid off. 'The people that I found and the people that I film, they're amazing. I was lucky enough to find those eternal characters in the real people that I found through the film.' The Flats is now in cinemas Read More 41639500[/readomore]
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Paul Durcan obituary
Running through the work of the poet Paul Durcan, who has died aged 80, was a strong ironic engagement with contemporary Irish mores and manners, and much else besides. With his first full-length collection, O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor (1975), Durcan showed himself to be a poet of many gifts, and a complete original. He resembled no one else. His poetry is oblique, exhilarating, unsettling and diverting all at once, and never hesitated to take off into a realm of the surreal. The 22 collections that followed Westport between 1978 and 2016 are a testimony to the poet's inventive powers and his distinctive style, and established him among his contemporaries as a force for enlightenment, an artful riddler and rhymer, or the joker in the pack. Among the outstanding collections are Sam's Cross (1978), Going Home to Russia (1987) and A Snail in My Prime (1993); but certain key poems scattered throughout his body of work continue to make an impact. Six Nuns Die in Convent Inferno, for example, The Beckett at the Gate, Going Home to Russia, and Making Love Outside Áras an Uachtaráin (which cocks a snook at De Valera's Ireland with its pieties and prohibitions). Some are filled with erotic affirmation (Teresa's Bar), or are geared to repudiate misogyny, cruelty, bigotry and so on. The Troubles get a showing, with poems such as the beautiful and mysterious Riding School illuminating the conflict. And some of his poems are simply caustically hilarious: What Shall I Wear, Darling, to the Great Hunger? Incidentally, at one point he pokes amiable fun at the poetry reading (tedious, boring) – but his own readings brought him additional acclaim, with audiences mesmerised by the hypnotic timbre of his voice. The route by which anyone becomes a poet is a mystery, and with Durcan it is even more so. His talent was seemingly not inherited from any of his relatives, and before it burst into full bloom, the young Paul had a number of traumas to overcome, despite – or perhaps because of – being born into a Dublin family of legal high-flyers. His father, John Durcan, was a barrister and circuit court judge. His mother, Sheila (nee MacBride), had practised as a solicitor before marriage. Both his younger siblings became solicitors in due course, and it was expected that Paul would do likewise. He was educated at a Jesuit school, Gonzaga college, in the Dublin suburb of Ranelagh, and went on to University College Dublin to study, among other things, theology. But he never completed his degree. One of Durcan's characteristic practices is to start a poem by concocting an imaginary newspaper headline, or parodying an actual one, such as Cardinal Dies of Heart Attack in Dublin Brothel, for instance. By a singular irony, a comparable headline in the Irish Independent in 2007 alluded to an actual incident in Durcan's own past. Kidnapped by his Family and Put in a Mental Home, it read, referring to a time when things had turned dark for the 19-year-old student. Largely at the instigation of his father, Paul was forcibly removed to a psychiatric hospital in south Dublin, where he received a diagnosis of clinical depression. Worse was to follow: transferred to an asylum near Epsom, in Surrey, he underwent 27 crippling rounds of electroconvulsive therapy. (Durcan always maintained that whatever mental health problems he encountered throughout his life were created, not alleviated, by this awful treatment.) After it was over he returned to Dublin, chastened but not annihilated. He began to enjoy the company of fellow poets, including Michael Hartnett, Anthony Cronin and Derek Mahon, and became something of a protege of the normally aloof Patrick Kavanagh, in whose company at a wedding reception he met Nessa O'Neill. They married in 1969, and she remained an inspiration, a friend and an object of adulation for the rest of his life – even after the pair separated in 1984. They lived for a while in London, where Durcan worked for the gas board, and spent time studying paintings in the Tate gallery (painting was a lasting obsession – in 1991 he brought out a collection of poems about paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland, Crazy About Women). There was also an interlude in Barcelona, and a longer sojourn in Cork, from 1970, where Durcan took a degree in archaeology and medieval history at the university, and wrote a column for the Cork Examiner, while Nessa taught in a prison. But poetry, and life in Dublin, remained his principal resources. From the mid-1970s on, both his literary reputation and his idiosyncratic modus operandi were building up. He wrote extensively about his complicated relationship with his father. In the poem The Company of the White Drinking Cauldrons, from his collection Daddy, Daddy (which won the Whitbread award in 1990), Durcan wrote: I was the only creature in the world Daddy trusted,Which is why in later years he conspired to murder me. From a couple of poems, Going Home to Mayo, Winter 1949, and Crinkle, Near Birr, you get the essence of the story – one minute idyllic, in the former: … And in the eveningsI walked with my father in the high grass down by the river … And then a sour note entering in the latter, with the father calling his son a sissy and urging him to be a man. Then the beatings start – but in the end, a kind of reconciliation is effected. 'Estranged as we were,' he recalled in Hymn to My Father (1987), 'I am glad that it was in this life, / That I loved you.' It is significant that Mayo is the place where father and son are most vividly in accord in his work. Both of Durcan's parents were Mayo-born, and he remembers his paternal grandmother's house, 'all oil-lamps and women, / And my bedroom over the public bar below'. His mother was a niece of Maj John MacBride, who married Maud Gonne and was executed by the British in 1916 for his part in the Easter Rising. Durcan acknowledged his ancestral ties, but resisted the lure of ultra-nationalism. Parodying the 1916 visionaries' prescription for the country – 'Not only free but Gaelic as well, / Not only Gaelic but free as well' – in the two-line poem At the Grave of O'Donovan Rossa (1989), he states: Not Irish merely but English as well;Not English merely but Irish as well. Durcan was the recipient of many honours and accolades, including a lifetime achievement award at the 2014 Irish book awards. He was elected a member of the Irish artists association Aosdána, and was Ireland professor of poetry from 2004 to 2007. A selection of his poems, edited by Edna Longley, was published in 1982, and in 1996 Colm Tóibín edited a collection of essays on the Durcan oeuvre, called The Kilfenora Teaboy. In his last years, Durcan suffered from ill health, but he never relinquished his spirit or his formidable wit. Like his mother, Sheila – as he reported in 2003 in his prose collection Paul Durcan's Diary – he 'always had the keenest sense of the black joke of life'. He is survived by his daughters with Nessa, Sarah and Síabhra, by his son, Michael, from another relationship, and by nine grandchildren. Paul Durcan, poet, born 16 October 1944; died 17 May 2025
Technical.ly
6 days ago
- Politics
- Technical.ly
Thomas P. Foley
Thomas P. Foley is a former college president and the current president of AICUP (the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Pennsylvania, which represents more than 80 nonprofit schools of higher learning). Foley is a Pennsylvania native who has long championed the economic benefits of education, having been able to graduate from universities himself thanks to the help of grants and scholarships. A peace advocate during the height of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, Foley went on to lead large nonprofits and a state department in a Governor-appointed role.
