History Ireland Hedge school at the Anonymous Was A Woman exhibition launch
@ Linen Hall Library, Belfast
Friday 12 April 2019

The exhibition makes use of the Linen Hall Library’s extensive collections and archives to highlight the historical advancements for women across education, employment and politics. The launch was  followed by a special History Ireland Hedge School, A century of Women, chaired by editor, Tommy Graham, with Myrtle Hill and Margaret Ward (authors and advisors of the online exhibition, along with Lydia Walker, www.acenturyofwomen.com), Donal Fallon (Come Here To Me), Baroness May Blood (Women’s Coalition founder).

Supported by the Commemorations Unit of the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht.

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The runaway success of the Atlas of the Irish Revolution (and the parallel TV documentary) and the proliferation of microstudies of the War of Independence and Civil War seems to bear out the adage that, like politics, all history is local. But is it? Do we risk losing sight of the ‘bigger picture’, of a world torn apart by war, revolution, and state formation? What, for example, can either approach tell us about violence directed at women, hitherto ignored in Ireland? To discuss these and related matters, History Ireland editor, Tommy Graham was joined for a lively discussion by John Borgonovo, Fearghal McGarry, Darragh Gannon and Linda Connolly.

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To mark the selection this year (2019) of Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls trilogy as Dublin’s ‘One City One Book’, the History Ireland Hedge School considered the issue of censorship. Banned on its release in 1960, The Country Girls is often credited with breaking the silence on sexual matters in ‘Catholic Ireland’. While by the 1970s such censorship had been considerably relaxed, it was replaced by political censorship in the form of Section 31. That in turn has passed but we are still left with the censorship of onerous defamation laws, not to mention internet and social media ‘trolling’, which has added a new twist to the censorship debate. To discuss these and related matters, History Ireland editor, Tommy Graham, was joined by Donal Fallon (Come Here To Me), Angela Nagle (Kill All Normies), Mary Kenny (Goodbye to Catholic Ireland) and Niall Meehan (Head of Journalism, Griffith College).

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