As commemoration tells us more about the present than the past we must wait and see what form the commemoration of the 1916 Rising will take on its one hundredth anniversary. However, given the pivotal importance of this event in Irish history, it is likely that a significant amount of activity will occur in 2016.

In 1924, a Cumann na nGaedhael government hosted the first official military ceremony commemorating the Rising. While relatives of the executed 1916 leaders were invited, only one (the widow of Michael Mallin) attended. In the aftermath of the Civil War, division characterised the commemoration of the Rising in the 1920s. This continued throughout the twentieth century as both the Irish government and Republicans sought to claim this inheritance. In April 1966, the fiftieth anniversary witnessed an unprecedented amount of activity while a few years later the absence of the official parade down O’Connell Street reflected how its memory was complicated by the outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland. In 1991, the official commemorations surrounding the 75^th anniversary were decidedly muted, while the 90^th anniversary in 2006 saw the reinstatement of the military parade; an event made possible by the advent of peace in Northern Ireland.

In the lead up to the one hundredth anniversary of the 1916 Rising, this project represents an attempt to survey and digitise a selection of University College Dublin’s holdings of material relating to this event. The project’s principal investigators are Professor Mary E. Daly and Professor Diarmaid Ferriter, and its researchers are Carole Holohan and Kirsten Mulrennan. Postcards, poetry, photographs, pamphlets, commemorative material, ephemera, accounts of the Rising and early publications, housed in UCD Archives and Special Collections in the James Joyce Library, have been catalogued and a selection digitised. The diary of JR Clark, an eye witness to the events of Easter Week in Dublin’s city centre, has also been digitised. These items, which will shortly be available through the IVRLA, provide something akin to an exhibition of UCD’s holdings of this type of material and will be of enormous public interest, particularly as we get closer to 2016.

The collection also draws attention to interviews undertaken by Ernie O’Malley, primarily in the period 1948-53. O’Malley conducted 450 interviews with those involved in the revolutionary period. While difficult to decipher, the project has provided a transcript of the interview with Liam Manahan, a member of the IRB and leading member of the Irish Volunteers in Limerick. This provides insight into events in Limerick during Easter Week and into the division in the Irish Volunteer executive. This transcript has been provided courtesy of Cormac O’Malley.

The material which has been selected is of considerable historical and cultural significance and provides an insight into disseminated interpretations and narratives of the Rising that emerged in its wake. This project also provides indexes detailing UCD’s holdings of this type of material which will be of use to researchers, students of all levels and members of the public.

The RCSI was founded at 51 St. Stephen’s Green ‘to supply as far as practicable a Complete Course of instruction in Science applicable to the Industrial Arts, especially those which may be classed broadly under the heads of Mining, Agriculture, Engineering, and Manufactures, and to aid in the instruction of Teachers for the local Schools of Science’. The RCSI educated generations of young Irish and British men and women in the sciences and the College was revitalised when it moved to splendid new buildings on Merrion Street in 1911 (now Government Buildings). In October 1922, in the midst of civil war, the RCSI was officially closed following a bomb scare and part of it was taken over by the Free State government for use as offices. In June 1926 the RCSI was amalgamated with UCD adding staff, students, and a huge library to the Faculties of Science and Engineering.

A public exhibition will open at the HII on December 17, 2009, entitled Reconstructing Irish Science: The Royal College of Science for Ireland (1867-1926). This exhibition will be the first ever devoted to the RCSI and has been designed by the project team, Dr. Marc Caball and Dr. Shane McCorristine. The exhibition consists of three illustrated panels and is intended to give a representative snapshot of the history, library, and teaching staff of the RCSI. Images have been secured for use with the permission of UCD Archives, UCD Library Special Collections, and the National Portrait Gallery, London and there will be a slideshow offering examples of the rich visual content in the RCSI collection. With the broader aim of using the history of Irish science as an opportunity to link the humanities with the sciences at UCD, it is intended that the exhibition will visit the Conway Institute at a later date.

The Reconstructing Irish Science exhibition will be launched  in the UCD Humanities Institute of Ireland with a reception at 4.30pm today, Thursday 17th December.

Find more information on the Reconstructing Irish Science project here.

Extensive primary research on Lemass is necessary to add to the historian’s knowledge of the politician and the man. With this in mind, ‘Speeches of Lemass’, an IVRLA research project conducted by Principal Investigator Professor Mary E. Daly and Researcher Dr Clara Cullen, will draw together for the first time, in an excel spreadsheet, a database of all speeches made by Seán Lemass in a public capacity as Taoiseach.

But, as Clara told me, this was no straightforward endeavour: ‘The first assumption was that all of his speeches as Taoiseach would be recorded and would be in the Government Information Service files in the National Archives. That turned out not to be the case. There were some large gaps.’

‘We then decided, having identified gaps and having had it confirmed by the National Archives that they have no further material, I then went off and looked at the Irish Times online to cover the gaps, and also any individual gaps within these files.’

But these gaps weren’t always so easy to bridge: ‘One small problem that came up with that, of course, was that from the 2nd July 1965 to 12th September 1965, there was a printers’ strike, and no Dublin newspapers. So, you’re hitting yet another research problem.’ This problem could be partially overcome, Clara suggests, by using the archives of the Cork Examiner and the database of the online Irish Newspapers Archive.

As Taoiseach, many of Lemass’s speeches indicating new economic or social policies were made at public events, rather than within the confines of Dáil Éireann.

‘Where he’s raising new ideas, he doesn’t always do it – as far as I can see – in the Dáil. He doesn’t do it on major political occasions. Where he does it is at the annual meeting of the Irish Countrywoman’s Association, or Macra na Feirme, and similar occasions. So then, if it gets shot down, that’s it.’

‘Tom Garvin calls it “kite-flying”, and it’s very, very typical [of Lemass]. You can see, there’s one particular case [in a file from 1961-2], where he’s on an official visit to the different Benelux and European countries: France and Italy, presumably negotiating alliances to support the application into the EEC […] one of these is only a press release in the file, of his prepared speech, but it’s also in the newspaper reports: he mentions the possibility of joining NATO […] and of course, there’s murder.’

The idea was quickly dropped due to the hostile reaction in Ireland, but, as Dr Cullen points out, Lemass was abroad when he suggested the idea: ‘he very safely did it somewhere in continental Europe’.

It was thought that the 1966 commemoration of the 1916 Easter Rising would have yielded a large number of speeches from Lemass. Instead, Clara found that ‘the speeches are very sparse’.

Lemass ‘deliberately decided to keep a low profile’, possibly because of his direct involvement in the Easter Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War. ‘Quite a number of the significant players that were still around just didn’t get too involved’, Clara said.

Nevertheless, one speech made by Lemass during this period stands out: a speech given at the Law Students’ Debating Society of Ireland in King’s Inns in February 1966. Clara summarises Lemass’s speech as saying that ‘we [should] celebrate all of these young men who died for freedom, […] not just those in the G.P.O., but also those who died for what they saw as the principle of freedom on the battlefields of Flanders.’

This IVRLA project collects information about Lemass’s speeches in a single searchable database, providing information as to when and where each speech was given, its content and context and the source references.

To Clara, the project also shows the research potential of digital information sources: ‘[it] will hopefully be a useful tool when it’s completed. But also, I think it indicates some of [Lemass’s] own political approaches and thought processes.’

The IVRLA has been involved in digitally preserving material currently residing in UCD repositories, and providing access to the digitized material through their website, which is currently being expanded to include a research area where connected pilot projects – including Cahill’s on Irish women writers of children’s literature 1870-1940 – will be showcased. Cahill discussed this project in her paper which aims to delineate a literary history of women’s writing for children in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The paper focused on writers L.T Meade and Rosa Mulholland.

As the IVRLA also has an educational component which aims to use the digitised content as a teaching and research resource and also explores the possibilities of digital technologies in the classroom, a workshop was organised on the 2^nd December to bring together the digitised material and a group of primary school children to explore questions of writers’ lives and archives.

Oisin McGann and St Brigid's Sixth Class at the National Library of Ireland

The workshop was organised by UCD, Children’s Books Ireland, and children’s writer Oisin McGann, who led the workshop, and it was held in the National Library of Ireland with a group of sixth-class girls from St Brigid’s NGS, Glasnevin.  McGann discussed the workshop at the symposium and read out some of the girls’ contributions which included a re-write of a passage from an L.T Meade novel and an editor’s letter to a writer of their choice.

Session 2 of the symposium consisted of papers by Valerie Coghlan and Ciara Ni Bhroin. Coghlan’s paper, entitled “The Liminality of the Bog in Irish Children’s Literature” which surveyed the cultural resonances of depictions of bogs in Irish children’s literature from Patricia Lynch’s The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey (1934) to Siobhan Dowd’s Bog Child (2008).  Coghlan argued that the bog represents, especially in more recent literature, a liminal space that facilitates imaginative engagements with other spaces, times and identities, particularly those most troubling.

Ciara Ní Bhroin’s paper, “Mythologizing the Present – Modern Retellings of Irish Myths for Children” asked why certain myths, such as the Children of Lir, persist in modern retellings. Reasons suggested included the choice made by writers after independence in terms of constructing the new nation, whether certain myths lent themselves to Christianisation, and the fact that the most popular myths are also, relatively, the most recent. Ní Bhroin also pointed to recent changes in retellings including a renewed focus on the god Lugh.

The symposium concluded with a paper by Dr Mary Shine Thompson entitled, “A Bend of the Road: Children’s Literature Studies in Ireland” which surveyed the trajectory of children’s literature studies in Ireland pointing at important achievements made in the field including the establishment of ISSCL and the associated graduate network, outlining gaps in scholarship such as a focus on drama and poetry, and projecting future developments including engagements with the virtual world.

Thompson also raised the question of which methodologies are best suited to children’s literature studies, an issue which was taken up by the roundtable discussion, led by Valerie Coghlan. The participants included Celia Keenan (Director of the MA in Children’s Literature at St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra), Dr Patricia Kennon (Froebel College of education, President of IBBY Ireland, and editor of Inís) and Dr Éilís Ní Dhuibhne (children’s writer as Elizabeth O’Hara and Fellow in Creative Writing, UCD).

Issues discussed included the problems of children’s book reviewing given the very small community involved, and the place of new media. In response to this last issue Keenan stated that she was torn between the view expressed by Kimberley Reynolds in Radical Children’s Literature (2007) on the one hand, who embraces the radical potential of new media, and on the other hand, Jack Zipes’s warning against the commercialisation and financial exploitation of children’s literature.

Lastly, both Thompson and Keenan acknowledged that Irish children’s literature studies would have to answer Jacqueline Rose’s contention that children’s literature suffers from the difference between writer and addressee. The roundtable also discussed whether YA fiction was essentially patronising and debated the issue of hopeful endings in books for children and teenagers.

Children’s author David Maybury attended, and enjoyed the panel discussion which ended proceedings:

The best was kept till last though – with a round-up by Mary Shine Thompson and panel discussion featuring Celia Keenan, Patricia Kennon and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne. This was the most passionate – and engaging – part of the symposium as theories, questions, jokes, anecdotes, questions and hypotheses were thrown around the room at lightning speed.

Maybury singles out IVRLA researcher Dr Susan Cahill for praise, ‘for organising the day – and making the great point (in relation to [a workshop] bringing Oisín McGann, a group of kids and L.T. Meade together): Why not?‘

This workshop had been held for a group of primary school children in the National Library of Ireland on Wednesday 2nd December.

The symposium forms part of  an IVRLA-funded project which focuses on Irish children’s literature, utilising collections in University College Dublin and the National Library of Ireland, namely the John Manning Collection of Children’s Books (UCD Special Collections) and the Máirín Cregan Papers (National Library of Ireland).

Topics covered during the symposium will include ‘The Liminality of the Bog in Irish Children’s Literature’ (Valerie Coghlan, Church of Ireland College of Education) and ‘Mythologizing the Present – Modern Retellings of Irish Myths for Children’ (Ciara Ní Bhroin, Marino Institute of Education).

In addition, children’s author Oisín McGann will give a paper entitled ‘Writing in Tongues: Translating Nineteenth Century Storytelling’, drawing on the workshop for schoolchildren that he will lead at the National Library on Wednesday 3 December.

The symposium will conclude with a lecture by Dr Mary Shine Thompson on ‘Children’s Literature Studies in Ireland’, which will be followed by a roundtable discussion.

If you would like to attend this free event, please contact Dr Susan Cahill at susan.cahill@ucd.ie

For further information about this event, consult the symposium website here.

This blog will publish reports from both events next week.