Review of the year 2023/24

Posted on: 28 June 2024 by Gerry Diver in 2024 posts

As we enter the summer months – in addition to hoping for some nice weather – it is a good time to reflect upon the many successes enjoyed by the Institute of Irish Studies during the past academic year.

It has been an intensive period of cultural and academic activity which concluded with the return of our critically acclaimed Beckett Festival in late May. We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who attended one of our events or supported the Institute’s work in other ways. We are looking forward to seeing you at one or more of our events again in the very near future.

Congratulations

But first, we would like to congratulate our colleagues Dr Barry Hazley and Dr Eoghan Ahern, who have recently been confirmed as permanent members of staff at the Institute following their contributions over the past years.

Congratulations are also due to our Dr Sean Haughey whose book The Northern Ireland Assembly - Reputations and Realities, we had the honour of launching in October. This important work is the first book-length study of how the Assembly fulfils four key functions of a legislature: representation, linkage, scrutiny, and policy-making. In addition, in February Dr Haughey together with Dr Jamie Pow, Queen’s University Belfast, published their research on Public attitudes to institutional reform in Northern Ireland. Please go to https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/humanities-and-social-sciences/research/research-themes/transforming-conflict/institutional-reform/ to access their findings.

Public events

Dr Haughey’s book launch started a rich and varied programme of events in October. As part of the University’s Liverpool Literary Festival we hosted the winner of the Annual John McGahern Book Prize, which is awarded by the Institute for the best debut work of fiction by an Irish writer in an given year. Congratulations again to journalist and broadcaster Aingeala Flannery who was awarded the Prize for her unique and evocative work The Amusements, depicting and examining a childhood set in a seaside town. The prize was presented by our Professor of Irish Literature, Prof Frank Shovlin, as part of a reading given by Aingeala. To learn more about the John McGahern Book Prize, including links to recordings of readings by past winners, please go to John McGahern Book Prize.

In addition, the Institute also supported a staging of extracts from Eleanor Lybeck's 'arresting, hilarious, and edgy' adaptation of Virginia Woolf's final novel Between the Acts at the Literary Festival by a professional cast. The collaboration between Dr Lybeck and director Jen Heyes of CutToTheChase Productions has led to community workshops with the Liverpool Irish Centre and the Association of Visitors to Immigration Detainees. Funding permitting, a full production of Between the Acts will be staged at Shakespeare North Playhouse this autumn. More information about the project, including a teaser of work so far, is at https://www.aviddetention.org.uk/article/the-making-of-a-play-a-collaborative-effort-in-empowering-voices.

The Literary Festival was quickly followed by the Liverpool Irish Festival, where the Institute supported several events, including a performance at the Tung Auditorium by acclaimed Irish musician, songwriter, and folklorist Lisa Lambe. We were delighted to work with the Irish Consul for the North-West of England, to host, Peace Heroines, an exhibition on women who played a significant role in the Northern Ireland peace process as well as jointly hosting a linked panel discussion involving poets and writers to mark the 25^th anniversary year of the Good Friday Agreement (1998).

The Annual Seamus Heaney Lecture under the academic lead of our Dr Niall Carson has become one of the highlights of our events calendar and in November we were delighted to welcome acclaimed astrophysicist Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell to give its 5^th incarnation. The event started with powerful readings of selected Seamus Heaney poems by Liverpool-born actor Paul McGann. If you missed the Lecture, you can enjoy Dame Jocelyn’s anecdotes of growing up in Northern Ireland and her encounters with poetry below.

Also in November, the Institute hosted a book launch by acclaimed bioarchaeologist Cat Jarman, who was interviewed by our Professor Clare Downham. The discussion on The Bone Chests: Unlocking the Secrets of the Anglo-Saxons was well received by a large audience, with all available copies being sold. We would once again like to thank Wirhalh Skip Felagr for making the event even more memorable by attending in period dress.

Book launches were the theme for our events during the winter months, as we also hosted launches for The Sash on the Mersey - The Orange Order in Liverpool by Mervyn Busteed, Power, Politics and Territory in the ‘New Northern Ireland’ by Dr Elizabeth DeYoung, Finnegans Wake, Ulster and Partition: The sanguine boundary limit by Dr Donal Manning. All three authors are closely associated with the Institute: Dr Busteed is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute and Dr DeYoung and Dr Manning are alumni. Videos of the launches are on our YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@LivUniIrishStudies

Together with Belfast art gallery ArtisAnn the Institute facilitated the free exhibition Visions of the Future: Young Women Artists of Northern Ireland at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith during February and March. This important exhibition provided emerging and recently graduated artists with an opportunity to network and to showcase their work to a London audience. Many of the artists made highly positive connections with the important London art market and we are delighted to hear that a number of paintings were sold.

During April and May the Institute hosted a free exhibition at the Sydney Jones Library, entitled Culture & Citizenship: Tomás Ó Máille. A folklore and song collector, newspaper editor, linguist, and teacher, Ó Máille was a pioneer in numerous ways. His most prescient act was perhaps his commitment to the newest technology of his day – audio recording. From 1928 onwards, he created hundreds of recordings of Irish speakers and assisted in the recording work of many other collectors and scholars. As part of the exhibition, we also hosted a talk by Dr Deirdre Ní Chonghaile on Tomás Ó Máille.

Dr Ní Chonghaile also featured in one of two events we co-hosted with Conradh na Gaeilge Learpholl. Her talk From Galway to Brooklyn: Mícheál Ó Lócháin and An Gaodhal was the second bi-lingual event following on from The Irish Language in Liverpool / An Ghaeilge i Learpholl, featuring our own Dr Eoghan Ahern earlier in the year. We look forward to further cooperation and more Irish/English language events in the near future.

Late May saw the return of the popular Beckett festival with Beckett: Unbound following on from the unparalleled success of the inaugural festival entitled Samuel Beckett In Confinement, which had been held in 2022. Numerous performances of drama, modern dance and music and related discussions occurred in venues across Liverpool, including the Everyman and Stanley theatres, the highly evocative Toxteth Reservoir and the state-of-the-art Tung Auditorium. More than 1500 people enjoyed the innovative programme. We are grateful for the highly positive feedback and excellent reviews we have received, whether direct from our audience or in the national and international media – the festival was featured in The Guardian, The Observer and The Irish Times and Radio 4’s cultural programme Front Row interviewed festival curator Adrian Dunbar. In terms of community outreach and impact, one especially emotive performance involved working with prisoners from HMP Liverpool, who recorded Beckett’s Rough for Radio II. The ‘second leg’ of the festival then moved on to Paris to continued success and rave reviews.

All this would not have been possible without our partnership with Unreal Cities and with The Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame's Keough School of Global Affairs and additional funders: Culture Ireland, The TS Eliot Foundation and the Martin and Rimmer Trusts. We are also grateful to the University of Liverpool Alumni and Friends Fund for their generous support of the Beckett Student Ambassador Scheme and, of course, our fantastic student ambassadors themselves.

Further news and events

In addition to our public events, the Institute joined the GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) for Thinking Futures; Building Recognition: four invite-only events the project bringing together representatives of the GAA and those from a unionist background for an open exchange on the different viewpoints regarding the constitutional future of Northern Ireland. The project fostered a better understanding of the challenges faced by the different communities North and South and we hope to share more news in early July 2024.

During the past year, the Institute’s director Professor Peter Shirlow commissioned two significant opinion surveys to research political attitudes of the people of Northern Ireland. His summaries of the surveys are available at Restoring the Assembly? and Attitudes to the Safeguarding the Union Command Paper.

As we end the academic year, Professor Shirlow and Dr Haughey have secured ESRC and Leverhulme funding to continue their work on elections and democracy building in Northern Ireland.

I would like to once again thank you for your support over the past year and look forward to welcoming you to more of our events in the future.

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