History Show Festival – Afternoon Ticket

2018 is the centenary of the apocalyptic year that was 1918 – twelve months of international conflict, pandemic disease, a crucial election, and advances in women’s rights. It also marks the 50th anniversary of 1968. Remove the ‘Spanish flu’ and all of the above also applies to that momentous year. In tandem with the RTÉ Radio 1 History Show, Hinterland will devote two and a half days to assessing and reconsidering some of the key events of 1918 and 1968.

Entry to the following events:

2.30pm – Liz Gillis

Lá na mBan – Irish rebel women and the Conscription Crisis

While the Labour movement, Sinn Fein, the Irish Parliamentary Party and the Roman Catholic Church all played a major role in ensuring that military conscription was not extended to Ireland in April 1918, the part played by Republican women cannot be underestimated. Liz Gillis is the author of Women of the Irish Revolution and has researched the role of feminist militants in the anti-conscription campaign.

 

3.10pm – Catriona Crowe

The Pen and the Hammer: The Irish Struggle for Female Suffrage

Making a welcome return to the festival (and with more leisure time on her hands since moving on from her position with the National Archives, where she was senior archivist and manager of the Irish Census Online Project), historian Catriona Crowe (Dublin 1911) is contributing to Hinterland on the double this year. To mark the centenary of the extension of the franchise to propertied women over the age of 30 – a rather grudging concession – she will discuss the history of suffragism in Ireland and Britain in the early 1900s.

3.40pm – Pauric Travers

The Conscription Crisis in Ireland

Prof. Pauric Travers was appointed first lay President of St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra in 1999. An educationalist and a distinguished historian, he is a graduate of UCD where he completed his BA and his MA, and of the Australian National University where he completed his PhD. He is a former Academic Director of the Parnell Summer School, and his writing includes Settlements & Divisions: Ireland 1870–1922 (1988), The Irish Emigrant Experience in Australia (Poolbeg, 1991) and Irish Culture and Nationalism 1750–1950 (1992). Professor Travers will discuss the 1918 Conscription Crisis in Ireland when the British government sought, unsuccessfully, to introduce compulsory enlistment.

 

4.20pm – Roy Foster

The ‘Vivid Faces’ in 1918

Shortly after Roy Foster retired as Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford University, the Chair created for him in 1991 was renamed in his honour, proof positive of the status of this most distinguished of academics. Biographer of Charles Stewart Parnell, Randolph Churchill and W.B. Yeats, author of one of the definitive one-volume histories of this country, Modern Ireland 1600–1972, Foster has been at the forefront of Irish academic research (and controversy) for more than 30 years. Channelling his recent work Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland (2014) his talk will examine some of the significant events and personalities of 1918 in Ireland.