The Report on the Mother and Child Homes

The Report on the Mother and Child Homes

In the culture of the time, the father, considered the boss of the household in a patriarchal society, felt compelled to do his duty by barring his umarried pregnant daughter from living with the family. Considerations of familial love wilted when faced with the condemnation of neighbors, community and church. Continue reading →

BrigidFest 2021

BrigidFest 2021

BrigidFest speaker, the Hon. Gabrielle Williams, provided much graphic evidence of women’s involvement in the IRA, and in particular their roles as prisoners, and wives, lovers and mothers, and in the no-wash protests and hunger strikes in Armagh Women’s Prison. Continue reading →

Women and the Irish Revolution

Women and the Irish Revolution

If ever there was a case of a favourite chapter in this book, I would choose chapter 2, Lucy McDiarmid’s ‘Comradeship’ on the imprisonment in Holloway prison of Kathleen Clarke and her two ‘tall’ comrades, Constance Markievicz and Maud Gonne, who at times tended to dispute ‘as to which of them had the highest social status’. Continue reading →

Deep Diving with Sirens

Deep Diving with Sirens

Nature of Event: Course: Join Joyce experts Bruce Beswick and Frances Devlin-Glass for a day with Sirens, one of the most pivotal and moving chapters of James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which Joyce experiments with musical form in narrative fiction. What does it add to our understanding of Bloom’s humiliation to have him listening to music while his rival … Continue reading →