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CoderDojo’s Co-founder James Whelton’s visit to Presentation College Athenry
Posted: April 29, 2013 in UncategorizedTo mark the ninety-seventh anniversary of the 1916 Rising, the éirígí website is running a series of short biographies of some of those who took part in that most important of insurrections. The series will run from today until May 12, the ninety-seventh anniversary of the executions of James Connolly and Seán Mac Diarmada.
Some of those featured in this series are familiar ‘leaders’ of the Rising, whilst others are activists whose stories are not so well known. The first biography is that of Pádraig Pearse who was executed on May 3, 1916.
Pádraig Pearse
Pádraig Pearse is perhaps the most well-known of the leaders of the 1916 Rising. The image of Pearse, resplendent in his Volunteer uniform, sword by his side, reading the Proclamation of the Provisional Government beneath the colonnade of the GPO, has become an almost mythic symbol of the heroism and idealism of the republican insurgents.
Down the years many biographies have been written about Pearse; some good, some not so good. Some writers have allowed their own political loyalties and their distaste of all things nationalist to cloud their judgment of Pearse, and so they have written of a character that is narrow-minded, fanatic and bloodthirsty. Such biographies portray a complete lack of understanding of the man that was Pádraig Pearse.
It is true that everything Pearse did was with an almost obsessive single-mindedness and that there is an innocence and simplicity to his writings that would not be acceptable in our more cynical world today. But Pearse was more than some simple Irish rebel. He was an innovative educator, a renowned poet and writer, and one of the leading lights of the Gaelic League and the ‘Irish Ireland’ movement. In all areas of his life and in all the projects to which he devoted himself Pearse was motivated by a deeply-felt love of Ireland, her culture and her people, and a firm conviction in the right of the human individual to freedom and happiness. The historian Louis le Roux puts it well when he wrote that, ‘Pearse was more than a patriot, he was a virtuous man.’
The Gaelic League and Scoil Éanna
Pearse developed an interest in Gaelic in his teens and he set out to learn the language so that he might speak it like a native. He joined the Gaelic League at the age of fifteen, and within a few years was teaching and lecturing on the subject throughout the country. He became chief editor of the Gaelic League newspaper An Claidheamh Soluis. He wrote many beautiful poems and short stories, particularly of the people of the west, which are available from any good bookshop and well worth the read.
Pearse was particularly interested in reviving the language through reforming the Irish education system. The Murder Machine was Pearse’s famous polemic against the British system of education in Ireland. Through education the British robbed the Irish child of her identity, her culture and her feeling of self-worth. The mechanical system of education (used not only in Ireland but throughout Europe and beyond) treated the child as a mere cipher, crushing his or her character, rather than allowing the individual to blossom. Pearse regarded the proper role of the teacher as one who fosters the all-round development of the child, rather than one who simply imparts facts and figures. Pearse’s educational theories were in many ways a precursor to the liberationist theories championed by the likes of Paulo Freire decades later.
He was able to put his theories into practice when he established Scoil Éanna – a bilingual school for boys which first opened its doors in 1908 in Ranelagh, before moving to Rathfarnham in 1910. Scoil Éanna was to be ‘a school which shall aim at making good men rather than learned men, but learned men rather than persons qualified to pass examinations.’ Pearse was a wonderful teacher, much loved by his pupils, and the school, although always on the brink of bankruptcy, was deemed to be a success as a model of excellent education.
Arming the Gael
Pearse wished not merely to revive the Gaelic language but to roll back the effects of the English conquest, to end the old slavish mentalities and to instil in the Irish people a sense of self-worth and citizenship. While Irish people continued to look towards London for instruction or approval they could be neither truly free nor truly happy. His work with the Gaelic League led him to believe that political and revolutionary action was necessary for the reconstruction of a Gaelic polity. This was the train of thought that led Pearse into the newly formed Irish Volunteers. The shy poet was on the path to revolution.
Against the backdrop of seven hundred years of foreign oppression, suffering and slavish imitation, he believed that through physical force and self-sacrifice the Irish people could redeem themselves, breaking not only their physical chains but the chains that held their minds.
He was enrolled into the Irish Republican Brotherhood and within a short space of time was sitting on their Military Council. Pearse was also the Director of Organisation of the Irish Volunteers. The IRB intended to use the Volunteers for a national uprising and they secretly elected Pearse as Commandant in Chief of the Volunteers.
The Rising
Initially Pearse wished to have a rising in the countryside rather than Dublin so as to reduce the possibility of civilian casualties, but he was overruled by others on the council. After the decision was made to go ahead with the Rising despite the fateful countermanding order, Pearse and the other leaders hastily drew up the Proclamation of the Provisional Government. Pearse was elected President of the Provisional Government.
Throughout Easter Week he remained at the makeshift headquarters in the General Post Office. Throughout those long, hard days he continually roused the morale of the men and women with his fiery speeches and consoled the wounded with kind words. On Friday, with the GPO in flames, the headquarters was moved to No. 16 Moore Street. Here Pearse witnessed the gunning down of a family by the British machine guns. This, coupled with the failure to break through the British cordon, convinced him to agree to seek to negotiate surrender. The British would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender. Finally, with the agreement of the other members of government present, Pearse walked to the intersection of Moore Street and Henry Street and handed his sword to General Lowe. The Rising was over. In Pearse’s eyes it was enough: the first redemptive blow was struck; another day would come.
Along with the other leaders he was court marshalled and sentenced to death. One of the British officers wrote, ‘I have just done one of the hardest tasks I have ever had to do. I have had to condemn to death one of the finest characters I have ever come across. There must be something very wrong in the state of things that makes a man like that a rebel.’
To the British court martial Pearse defiantly stated,
“When I was a child of ten, I went on my bare knees by my bedside one night and promised God that I should devote my Life to an effort to free my country. I have kept the promise. I have helped to organise, to train, and to discipline my fellow-countrymen to the sole end that, when the time came, they might fight for Irish freedom. The time, as it seemed to me, did come, and we went into the fight. I am glad that we did. We seem to have lost; but we have not lost.
To refuse to fight would have been to lose; to fight is to win. We have kept faith with the past, and handed on its tradition to the future. I repudiate the assertion of the Prosecutor that I sought to aid and abet England’s enemy. Germany is no more to me than England is. I asked and accepted German aid in the shape of arms and an expeditionary force; we neither asked for nor accepted German gold, nor had any traffic with Germany but what I state. My object was to win Irish freedom.
We struck the first blow ourselves, but I should have been glad of an ally’s aid. I assume that I am speaking to Englishmen who value their freedom, and who profess to be fighting for the freedom of Belgium and Serbia. Believe that we too love freedom and desire it. To us it is more than anything else in the world. If you strike us down now, we shall rise again, and renew the fight.
You cannot conquer Ireland; you cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom. If our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom, then our children will win it by a better deed.”
Pádraig Pearse was shot on May 3 along with Thomas Clarke and Thomas MacDonagh.
When Thatcher is long forgotten we will remember The Ten.’ Join éirígí’s annual black flag vigil in memory of the 1981 Hunger Strikers. 1pm, Sunday, May 5, O’Connell Bridge, Dublin. Non-party political flags and placards supplied. All welcome. Bígí linn
Stormont decisions could put lives at risk in Newry and Mourne
Posted: April 28, 2013 in Uncategorized28/04/13
Decisions being implemented by Stormont regarding the health service could result in lives being put at risk in the Newry area.
According to éirígí An Iúir, the Stormont Executive’s dual process of cutting back on health service expenditure while simultaneously creating a greater role for the private sector will ultimately lead to the erosion of essential public services.
There is growing concern that the long-term future of many essential services provided at Daisy Hill hospital in Newry is being gradually eroded under the austerity programme being implemented by the parties in the Stormont Coalition. Let’s not forget that Stormont is in the process of implementing over four billion pounds of budget cuts to public services right across the north.
Recent revelations suggesting that Daisy Hill’s Stroke Unit may be closed with its services transferred twenty miles away to Craigavon Area Hospital is the latest example of how Stormont’s cuts could impact upon the people in the Newry and Mourne area.
These revelations are emerging at a time when Craigavon Hospital is clearly over-stretched with staff there already under immense pressure. In the past fortnight, Craigavon Hospital was closed to all admissions after running out of beds. Ambulances were ‘grounded’, the emergency department was working beyond capacity, and the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) was reported to be overflowing.
Such was the extent of the recent crisis that Craigavon was forced to institute a ‘temporary ambulance divert process’. This unacceptable situation is becoming more and more frequent within the major hospitals and Craigavon isn’t the only one to be affected. Similar crises have occurred at Antrim, the Causeway and in Belfast.
Transferring more services away from Newry to Craigavon will make an already bad situation even worse.
On top of this, Stormont’s creeping privatisation agenda is gathering momentum in other elements within the health service with the proposed closure of all five residential care homes with the Southern Health Trust area. Two of those are located in Bessbrook and Kilkeel. As result of these closures, residents will be left with no choice but to transfer to residential homes in the private sector where the priority will not be on maximising patient care but on maximising private profit.
Stormont’s privatisation agenda can also be seen in the recent announcement that the new ‘health hub’ for the Newry area will be built as a Third Party Development (3PD) – a new name for the already discredited private finance initiatives.
The fact that the Department of Health is unable to give a precise cost for using this route to finance the ‘health hub’ project should be a source of major concern to all those who want to protect public health services.
It is no secret that that by going down the 3PD/private finance route, the Department of Health is putting the needs of the private sector before the needs of the public. A number of public sector trade unions have made the point that private finance initiatives are a more costly way of providing public services and that where such initiatives increase in costs, cutbacks in clinical budgets are inevitable.
Once Stormont’s private finance initiatives start to impact on clinical budgets that is when lives will be put at risk.
éirígí will mark the ninety-seventh anniversary of the execution of James Connolly with a commemorative event in Arbour Hill Cemetery in Dublin, on Sunday May 12, at 12.30pm.
Speaking from Dublin, Cathaoirleach éirígí Brian Leeson said, “James Connolly continues to be an inspiration and a guide to Irish socialist republicans. Since its foundation in 2006 éirígí has made the annual pilgrimage to Arbour Hill, to pay tribute to Connolly’s courage, determination and foresight, and to rededicate ourselves to the principles of Irish socialist republicanism.
“The annual commemoration is éirígí’s national event to honour all those who gave their lives in the fight for Irish freedom and in previous years has attracted socialist republicans from across Ireland and beyond.
“This year also marks the 100th anniversary of the great Dublin Lockout, when Connolly and Larkin led the workers of Dublin in an epic battle against capitalism. A century later, socialist republicans are still involved in that same fight in communities across Ireland.”
Leeson continued, “A lot can be learned Connolly’s writings, lessons that are as relevant today as they were at the time of their writing. That is why this year’s commemoration is so important. Not only will we honour the sacrifice of our patriot dead, we will also commit ourselves to today’s struggle against the same forces of capitalism which Connolly battled.
“I would encourage people from across Ireland to join éirígí in paying tribute to James Connolly on May 12. Join us at 12.30pm at Arbour Hill and get involved in building a strong, militant socialist republican movement that will finish the business of 1913 and 1916.”
North Staffordshire and South Cheshire
Event
Title:
Prof. Charles Townshend- Easter Rising, Ireland 1916
When:
Mon, 13 May 2013 07:00PM – 09:00PM
Where:
Newcastle-under-Lyme
Category:
North Staffordshire and South Cheshire
Description
Prof. Charles Townshend (University of Keele), Easter Rising, Ireland 1916.
Venue
Venue:
Newcastle Methodist Church
Street:
Merrial Street
ZIP:
ST5 2AD
City:
Newcastle-under-Lyme
State:
Staffordshire
Country:
UK
Description
Newcastle Methodist Church, Merrial Street, Newcastle ST5 2AD
Gissing with more heart
Austrian writer Stefan Zweig resolutely understood the bleakness of individual lives set against the remorseless grinding of a state machinery.
Zweig, a melancholy, intensely feeling writer, was born in Vienna in the 1880s and was a much lauded writer, at home and abroad, in the 20s and 30s. He was a pacifist, and the misery and futility of the Great War is certainly expressed in his writing. His instinctive feel for ‘the little man’, his visceral engagement with socialism, and his Jewishness led to him leaving Austria in 1934, first settling in the UK, and then later in America. Events in Europe very much overwhelmed his intense and empathetic nature.
In this book, suffused with rage, despair and also compassionate, hopeless, solutionless understanding, his
central character is definitely one of the little people. Set in Austria, after the end of the first world war, Christine is…
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County Galway was the homeplace of two distinguished Irish playwrights in the twentieth century: M.J. Molloy (1914 -1994) and Tom Murphy (born 1935). Many of their plays draw on the lives and historical experiences of those living in the north-east of the county, between Tuam, Milltown and the Mayo border. Their work was produced for the wider Irish public by the Abbey Theatre and Druid Theatre Company, but also by the Amateur Drama movement, which was active in every corner of the country through the agency of local theatre groups. This lecture will address the important contribution each of these writers made, through consideration of some of their influential plays, including Molloy’s The Wood of the Whispering (1953) and Murphy’s Famine (1968).
The lecturer Dr. Riana O’Dwyer graduated with both a BA and MA from University College Galway. During a postgraduate year at the University of Lausanne, as a beneficiary of a Swiss Government scholarship, she began research on the work of James Joyce. Her doctoral research was undertaken in Canada, at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, where her PhD was awarded for a thesis on James Joyce’sFinnegans Wake. Returning to Ireland, she taught for a number of years at Queen’s University, Belfast. She has been a lecturer in the English Department at NUI Galway since 1984.
During this period she has lectured at a number of overseas universities, including the University of Texas at Austin and the universities of Barcelona, Trieste, Coimbra, Debrecen and Pecs. She has been a Visiting Scholar at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge University. She was one of the founders of the M.Phil in Irish Studies, subsequently its Director, and remains on the academic board of the MA in Irish Studies. She is currently chairperson of IASIL, the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures.
Dr. O’Dwyer’s personal research interests include Edmund Spenser’s writings about Ireland; nineteenth-century Irish fiction, especially that written by women; the works of James Joyce; recent Irish drama. Research supervision has mainly related to Irish authors, including Banville, Flann O’Brien, John McGahern, Frank McGuinness. Research projects
have included ‘The Ascendancy and the Gaelic World’, a priority research area funded by PRTLI 2 at Galway’s Moore Institute (formerly CSHSHC), and a Millenium Fund grant to research the work of Emily Lawless
some of her Selected Publications:
2009. Tom Murphy and J. M. Synge in the Western World. Tom Murphy at 75: Essays on the Work of a Major Irish Playwright, C. Murry, ed. Dublin: Carysfort Press, pp.
2008. Colonial Contradictions: Emily Lawless’s With Essex in Ireland in Laura Izarra, Beatriz Kopschitz, eds., A New Ireland in Brazil. Sao Paulo: Humanitas Press, pp. 269-284.
2008. Travels of a Lady of Fashion: The Literary Career of Lady Blessington (1789-1849 in Heidi Hansson, ed. New Contexts: Re-Framing Nineteenth-Century Women’s Prose. Cork: Cork University Press, pp. 35-54.
2007. Echoes Down the Corridor: Irish Theatre — Past, Present and Future. Editors Riana O’Dwyer & Patrick Lonergan. Dublin: Carysfort Press. Introduction pp. 1-12.
2002 Women’s Narratives 1800-1840. In Meaney, G. et al. (eds.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vol. 5. Cork University Press, pp. 833-893.
2000 The imagination of women’s reality: the theatre of Christina Reid and Marina Carr. In Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre, Jordan, E. (ed), Dublin, Carysfort Press, pp. 236-248.
2000 ‘There was a kind lady called Gregory’: James Joyce, Lady Gregory and the Irish Literary Revival, in Lady Gregory Autumn Gatherings: Reflections at Coole, Tobin S. & L (eds.), Galway, Autumn Gatherings Publications, pp. 30-50.
1998 Introduction to Woman and Her Master (1840) by Lady Morgan. Volume One in series Irish Women’s Writing, 1839-1888, Luddy, M. (General Ed.), Bristol, Thoemmes Press, pp. iii-xiii.
1996 Nora or Molly / Maker or Muse?: James Joyce and Nora Barnacle, in Krino 1986-1996: An Anthology of Irish Writing, Dawe, G. & Williams, J. (eds.), Dublin, Gill & Macmillan, pp. 40-44.
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Posted: April 27, 2013 in Uncategorized
Shakespeare’s plays tell us a great deal about how the world was understood in the Renaissance. The Tempest is a story about the New World and in Othello, we meet an African general employed in Venice, who has much to say about his experience of witnessing exotic wonders. In this lecture Daniel Carey will describe some major scenes of exploration and travel in the period for reasons of trade and colonialism, with illustrations from contemporary maps and published works. Shakespeare’s contemporary, Richard Hakluyt, opened up a global vista by printing a vast array of accounts from 1589-1600 showing just how important the expansion of world had become.
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Posted: April 27, 2013 in Uncategorized
The View from The DJ booth 