The Kennelly Photographic Archive

Contributed by Ciara Breathnach

The Kennelly archive represents a 20-year photo-documentary record of social change in Ireland from 1953-1973, with a particular focus on County Kerry. The enterprising photographers, Pádraig and Joan Kennelly, had a studio in Tralee but did not limit their business to its confines. Apart from studio shots, the Kennellys toured the county taking photographs at various social, church, sporting events and fairs. In 1959 they diversified into the postcard business and shortly after that Pádraig became a freelance cameraman for RTÉ. He established the Kerry’s Eye, which is still a thriving local newspaper, in 1974. Needless to add his media interests influenced his photographic oeuvre and consequently, the archive features the more serious photo journalistic coverage of events like the Moss Moore murder in 1958 (John B. Keane’s 1966 play The Field, was based on this tragic affair, Jim Sheridan’s iconic movie of the same name, was released in 1990).

Requiem for the Poppy: Reflections on Remembrance

Contributed by Sean Brennan

The season of Remembrance is upon us and once again the sign of the poppy challenges both Unionists and Nationalists to remember those ‘faithfully departed’ who died for ‘the Cause’ in that ‘Great War’ of 1914-1918. For many Unionists the act of Remembrance is almost a religious experience as they pay homage to the blood sacrifice of their forefathers, who fell in the fields of Flanders, Gallipoli, Dublin and at Somme. For the Nationalist community who’s father’s, brothers and sons fell along side Irish Unionists all along the Western Front, the act of remembrance is more circumspect and the memory of ‘the fallen’ more sombrely recalled amid accusations of ‘poppydom’ by opponents still angered by the activities of cruel Britannia.

Today, in Ireland, many Nationalists view the poppy as a British war symbol but history shows that in it was French Republican soldiers-during the Napoleonic era who first adopted the poppy to remember their comrades and their citizen’s sacrifice in Modern War.

Come to our launch!

We hope that you’ll all come along to celebrate 6 months of successful blogging on November 19th at 6pm in the Lord Edward on Lord Edward Street in Dublin.  First and foremost we want to thank our contributors and readers in person and meet those of you that we don’t know.  So just in case you couldn’t pick us out of a line up, we offer the following photographic means of introduction:

Juliana

Lisa

Kevin

Interdisciplinarity

Contributed by Michael Cronin

Interdisciplinarity is the common coin of public rhetoric on research. Like a ritual votive offering to placate the restless petulance of funders, public and private, it is has its appointed place in any number of mission statements, strategic plans and research proposals. Nobody is quite sure why it is there but there is general agreement that interdisciplinarity is a GOOD THING. So while the I-word is a must for any statement about the value and future of research there is remarkably little public debate about what it actually means and whether the tins on which it is so prominently displayed do any of the things they purport to do. More worryingly, for young researchers there is a clear disparity between institutional spin on the value of interdisciplinarity and the harsh reality of recruitment and promotion mechanisms which are still clearly rooted in established disciplines.

Review: The GAA, a People’s History

Contributed by Ida Milne

Some of my strongest childhood memories derive from the GAA.  Playing in family groups on the beach in Courtown,  when a radio was switched on and the Dads were collectively lured away to the hypnotic sound of GAA commentator extraordinaire Micheal O’Hehir,  or watching my father and the neighbours hurl on the pitch on our farm as I struggled with a downsized camán, or going to Ferns to welcome the team home from Croke Park with the traditional mountain of burning tyres, the column of black smoke drawing people from miles around to the reception, as Wexford celebrated yet another All-Ireland hurling championship win.  In the 60s the Rackard brothers were legends; when Nicky came into the yard to dose the cattle we hung around, starstruck.

The GAA was and is part of my cultural background. The fact that we went to a different church on a Sunday in no way impinged on that.  But in recent years, I have noticed that historians writing about the involvement of Protestants in the GAA have tended to focus on their otherness, rather than their sharing in the same culture. For me, the GAA was and is part of the ordinariness of life, not the difference.

When The GAA, A People’s History, was published recently, I eagerly anticipated that at last here was a bottom-up history of the association ideally positioned to chronicle  the everyday involvement of members of the Church of Ireland and other non-Catholic denominations or belief systems.

Here follows the book’s entire discussion of Protestant involvement in the organisation as it appears in the chapter ‘Religion’

PhD Diary: Léan Ní Chléirigh

Contributed by Léan Ní Chléirigh of Trinity College Dublin

Do you consider your PhD to be a job or a vocation? I’m not sure it’s either, I love it but to call it a vocation implies that somehow my PhD will make a difference and unless your a medieval ethnographer (and maybe even if you are) it won’t.

In 20 words or less, tell us why you decided to do a PhD? I genuinely can’t remember, I thought I might be good at it…

Léan’s diary: I have just started my fourth year of research and have had to take stock of what I have done with the last three years of my life, which took about five minutes. I am one of those poor souls whose PhD morphed dramatically in the beginning of third year and as a result some of my first two years’ work became redundant and I was left with only 15,000 words to my name. I know now that it was for the best but I cried for a month when it happened (Oversharing? Anyone who tells you they haven’t cried over their PhD is lying or has no soul).

The history week ahead on tv and radio: 14 November to 20 November

We’ve decided to change the format a little for the tv and radio guide. You can view it now by clicking here or at any time during the week by clicking on ‘The history week ahead on tv and radio‘ on the sidebar (under ‘Pages’). As ever, if there’s anything we’ve missed, please feel free to add it as a comment under the listings. Happy viewing and listening.

Rapairi on TG4

By Lisa Marie Griffith

The first of TG4’s new series ‘Rapairi’, an examination of  Irish outlaws from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, aired last night. The opening show made ambitious claims. The show aims to look at 6 outlaws, tories and raparees as they were referred to in the proclamations of the day, their lives and to establish the reality behind the folklore. It also aims to examine why Irish people are disrespectful to the law. As a social historian of the eighteenth century I have often come across ‘tories and raparees’ in my research. These are men who are on the run, have skipped a court hearing, have escaped from jail and who are known and wanted criminals. Many of these men went into hiding, escaped to rural Ireland and lived like bandits and the term basically described villains and criminals. TG4, however, chose to focus on the raparee heroes of early modern Ireland- gentlemen who had been pushed outside the law because of some injustice that they had suffered.

I will have to admit I was a little bemused by TG4’s twenty-first century version of a raparee; the Rossport 5. Interspersed with their attempt to explain what an early-modern raparee was the programme had clips of the Rossport 5 outside court and anti-Shell-protests.

Review: Judging Lemass

Contributed by Bryce Evans

In the midst of the present malaise in Irish politics and economics it’s tempting to look back to the Great Men of Irish history. Of these Great Men few are as celebrated as Seán Lemass, whose latest biographer is veteran UCD political scientist Tom Garvin. Launching Garvin’s Judging Lemass Brian Cowen staked a typically rodomontade claim to the Lemassian mantle by asserting that Lemass would back the current government’s economic strategy. As demonstrated by Cowen’s reversion to ‘What if?’ history – a dubious form of historical enquiry once dismissed by eminent historian E.P. Thompson as ‘unhistorical sh*t’ – the danger of all this celebrating of Great Men is that everyone tends to get a bit carried away. Lemass, as Garvin states in the book, was ‘not infallible’. This is about as close as the learned professor gets to any meaningful criticism of the authoritarian tendencies of the former Taoiseach though.

Remembering 1989

By Kevin O’Sullivan

In all of the column inches, radio interviews, television series (thanks George Lee) and film festivals (thanks IFI) to commemorate the events of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, something has been bugging me. Isn’t it all just a little, well, quiet? Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure I’ll be as sick of hearing about it as you are in a couple of weeks. It’s just that instead of the wave of coverage we’re experiencing, I’d expected a tsunami.

Listening to Matthias Middell from the University of Leipzig speak at a seminar in the Humanities Institute of Ireland, UCD, last Thursday (5 November), the reason why became readily apparent. It’s because we’re not quite sure what 1989 is, what it means, and whether it was even a revolution. Berlin may dominate our thoughts, but are we that sure about events in Budapest, Prague, Bucharest, or Warsaw? And does anyone have any idea what, if anything, happened in Sofia? Ukraine’s revolution arrived only in 2004, Georgia’s and Kyrgyzstan’s the following year.