Speaking Ill of the Dead – Morning Ticket

Where history meets the ‘phillipic’ and historians get a chance to visit reasoned and merited opprobrium on influential historical figures who, they believe, had far too much influence on history. Yes, it amounts to dancing on someone’s grave, but they have it coming!

Entry to the following events:

11am – Eamon Darcy

Tackling James Fitzthomas Butler, the 1st Duke of Ormonde, was something that proved beyond seventeenth century Irish rebels. Even Oliver Cromwell himself only managed to remove Butler temporarily from Ireland. But Maynooth University Scholar Eamon Darcy does not fear to tread upon the Duke’s reputation. He may well be able to account for the rogue ‘e’ that found its way into the family title between the time Butler passed as 12th Earl of Ormond and 1st Duke of Ormonde.

11.35am – Glen Gendzel

Making a welcome return to Kells, Glen Gendzel is an historian based at San Jose State University who specialises in American history and the history of the State of California. From both perspectives he is, therefore, ideally placed to cast a cold eye on the political career of Ronald Reagan, former Governor of California, and fortieth President of the United States of America. Reagan’s unrivalled communication skills and amiable demeanour cannot mask his contribution to the current malaise in American political life.

12.10pm – Jennifer Wellington

UCD-based historian Jennifer Wellington, a native of Australia, lectures in modern global history, with a particular emphasis on the cultural history of warfare in the first half of the twentieth century. Her book Exhibiting War: The Great War, museums and memory in Britain, Canada and Australia is due for publication this year. Her target in Speaking Ill of the Dead is the late French President, General Charles de Gaulle. Soldier and statesman, leader of the French resistance movement in WW2, first President of the Fifth Republic, and arch conservative progenitor of the student/ worker Paris riots of 1968 – but was he right to say ‘Non’ to the UK entering the EEC?

12.45pm – Myles Dungan

Myles Dungan examines the legacy of Richard Pigott – the journalist, pornographer and conman who sold his newspapers to the Land League in 1881 and became the most notorious forger of the nineteenth century when he implicated Parnell in the Phoenix Park murders.