Tag Archives: dublin

Letters offer glimpse of 18th century Ireland, France

Some of the 125 previously unopened letters written by Irish residents living in the Bordeaux region of France during the Seven Years War are now on display at New York University’s Bobst Library.

The letters were discovered two years ago by NYU professor Thomas M. Truxes, and most have been opened and reproduced in a companion book, “The Bordeaux-Dublin Letters, 1757 Correspondence of an Irish Community Abroad,” Edited by L. M. Cullen, John Shovlin, and Truxes.

One of the unopened letters from 1757.

One of the unopened letters from 1757.

In a release, NYU says:

The themes are universal: There are students asking their parents for money, and fathers chastising their children for being disobedient or lazy. There are love letters, letters filled with petty gossip, and letters expressing the frustrations of Irish prisoners of war languishing in French jails.

The Bordeaux-Dublin Letters “reinforce a common humanity across time — the people we see in these letters are no different from people we know today . . . so once you get beyond the handwriting, 250 years just melts away,” remarks Truxes, clinical associate professor of Irish studies and history, who was researching overseas trade in colonial America when he made his fortuitous archival discovery.

The exhibition runs through April 1.

Thanks to J. McConnell for bringing this item to my attention, MH.

Dublin’s newest bridge named after Rosie Hackett

A new bridge spanning the River Liffey in Dublin will be named after labor activist and 1916 patriot Rosie Hackett.

She organized a 1911 strike of women workers at Jacob’s biscuit factor, participated in the 1913 transit workers’ strike and was a member of the Irish Citizen Army during the Rising.

“I’d say she’d be giggling quietly to herself, she would be slightly embarrassed about it, but she’s also be very proud to know that women have come to where they are in Dublin at this stage” her nephew told Morning Ireland.

RTE News reported that of the 23 bridges over the River Liffey, the Anna Livia bridge in Chapelizod is the only other to have an official female name. Anna Livia is the name given to the personification of the River Liffey in James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake.”

Kilkenny picked among world’s friendliest cities

The readers of Conde Nast Traveler have selected Kilkenny city in County Kilkenny as one of the world’s friendliest places. “Charming and full of proud folks who want you to sample their best, Kilkenny is a can’t-miss destination for our readers,” the magazine wrote.

The town of about 25,000 was the only European city in the top 10. (It actually tied with Ubud in Bali, Indonesia). Dublin was named 12th worldwide and Cork city was 20th place. Florianópolis in Brazil won the honor of world’s friendliest.

The Irish Independent reported that “Kilkenny has recently enjoyed a huge increase in its booming tourism industry, and in 2012 welcomed 219,000 international visitors.”

0608-kilkenny

Great Hunger Museum acquires “The Ragpickers”

I’ve written several posts about Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. The museum has just acquired a new painting, “The Ragpickers,” by Henry Allan.

ragpickers

 

 

 

 

 

Niamh O’Sullivan, the museum’s consultant curator and Professor Emeritus of Visual Culture at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, writes in a museum newsletter:

Ragpicking was a common occupation in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Ragpickers eked out a living by rummaging for scraps of cloth and paper and other discarded items to identify anything that could be recycled or sold (even dead cats and dogs could be skinned to make clothes). Ragpickers turned over what they salvaged to a master who would sell it, usually by weight; anything of value was to be returned to the owner or the authorities….Painters and writers of the Romantic period turned the ragpicker into a type of street philosopher who, living from day to day and unburdened by material things, understands human nature. Unobserved, he observes others.

Allan’s image dates to 1900. O’Sullivan suggests the scene “is consistent with the dunes of Ringsend, Dublin, seen from South Lotts,” which is on the south bank of the River Liffey at the eastern edge of the city, near the open sea. The name Ringsend is a corruption of the Irish “Rinn-abhann”, which means “the end point of the tide,” according to Wikipedia. The area went into decline about the time of Allan’s painting as shipping activity moved to other parts of Dublin and ports further south along the coast.

Kennedy’s ’63 trip to Ireland nears 50th anniversary

Before Dallas there was Dublin…and New Ross…and Galway.

Historian Myles Dungan shares his memories of John F. Kennedy’s June 1963 visit to the Irish capitol in a post that sets the stage for next month’s 50th anniversary of the historic trip.

America’s first (and only) Irish-Catholic president “lapped up the blatant adulation,” Dungan writes, as he shared the motorcade with Eamon De Valera.

The U.S. Embassy, the JFK Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, the National Library of Ireland and other organizations are marking the anniversary with a number of special events on both sides of the Atlantic.

We will post more about this anniversary over the coming month. It will be good to enjoy these happy memories before having to recall the dark anniversary of November 1963.

JFK in Dublin, June 1963. Image from thegatheringireland.com

Flag protests continue in Belfast, threaten Dublin

Loyalists demonstrators continue to protest restrictions on flying the British Union Jack flag over Belfast City Hall. Police claimed Saturday they were fired upon by someone in an unruly mob of about 1,000 people.

The protests have reached the one-month mark. Here’s a BBC Q & A explaining the issue, which so far is drawing only lite media attention in the U.S.

But the story could heat up more in the coming week if bus loads of protesters make good on their vow to bring the demonstrations across the boarder to the Republic of Ireland. The Irish Examiner reports the demonstrators want to demand removal of the Irish Tricolour from Leinster House, the seat of government. Said one protest leader:

“Under the Good Friday Agreement we were promised that this would remain part of the United Kingdom. Now we are continually told to move on, and that this is an island of equals. If that’s the case, how do the people in Dublin feel when we come down and ask them to take the flag off the capital in their country? Very annoyed, I would say.”

For me, the issue resonates from my newspaper coverage more than a decade ago about changing representations of the Confederate period in the City of Mobile, Ala., city seal. Confederate partisans wanted to keep the controversial Battle flag image in place, while many African-Americans and tourism/economic development-focused whites wanted it replaced by a less offensive (and less familiar) flag of the Confederate government. Similar controversies have flared across the American South for years.

In Mobile, protests and debate lasted for 18 months before the city government and “Southern Heritage” supporters finally reached a “Dixie détente.” Here’s hoping the flag issue on the island of Ireland doesn’t take as long to resolve, or get any nastier than it’s already been.