#LIF2019 newspaper

Bringing Liverpool and Ireland closer together using arts and culture.

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Image Detail from Caillte production (c) Andrew AB

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Fáilte (welcome) to the seventeenth annual Liverpool Irish Festival and this year’s theme of “unique stories, creatively told”.

Ireland’s life, history, tradition and culture is rich with stories – both fact and fiction. During #LIF2019, using many artistic forms, you will hear stories of folk lore and faeries; departure and returns; deep personal tragedies and buoyant, beautiful love. Some stories continue the migration theme we led last year, whilst others unfurl new leaves that wow, educate and amaze.

Coming from across the island of Ireland and diaspora communities, these stories knit together to tell a wider story about far flung islands, dual-heritage lives and travel influenced communities. Questions we have posed include: • W here and how are today’s Irish stories being old and how are we protecting them for tomorrow?

• Where is diaspora life reflected in Irish creativity and how?

• What significant influences, if any, has Irish culture collected from around the world and how are they depicted? What stories do they tell?

• How reflective of a modern Irish person is the creative culture Ireland shows us today?

• Does ‘Irishness’ reflect the whole of Ireland or only certain parts and how is it perceived in non-Irish communities?

• What will Irish storytelling consist of in the future?

We are interested in sharing the unique and incredible stories of Irish people and the creative ways they tell them. Our experience of curating Irish work from Liverpool, Liverpool Irish and Irish artists (from all parts of the island and the diaspora)- suggests that ‘contemporary work’ retains considerable reference to ‘trad’/traditional culture. Curatorially, we have questioned whether this is truly contemporary or if we are -or it is- missing ‘the zeitgeist’.

Is it possible that introspection is part of an Irish cultural phenomenon of re-examination? If so, where will this lead? How is it communicated? What are the effects on artists and audiences today? Does a reliance on trad Irish forms supersede any native culture in which Irish people live? Does this prevent ‘Irishness’ from growing and admitting host cultures in to its identity and expression?

Elsewhere cultures merge and influence one another. Think about how Scandinavian design features in most contemporary homes in Britain and America or how Maori tattoos are seen on bodies across the world and now even in Disney films. Influences from post-war Europe (Bauhaus, constructivism, utilitarianism, surrealism) spread across Europe and America, informing abstraction and surrealism in art and cinema. Yet where is Ireland’s abstract expressionism? Or diaspora influences taken from settlement in Malta, Australia, America, Thailand? How has Ireland kept its palette of green and references to trad music, home, agriculture, knot work and faith at its core? Does this work reflect 21st century Irish values, lived-experiences and identities or does it represent the talents and histories of yesteryear?

Very recently, we have witnessed an emergence of Irish ‘realism’ in film, TV and podcasts with programmes such as The Young Offenders and Cardboard Gangsters*. This could be seen as a progression, perhaps, from some of Ireland’s 19/20th century writing, such as Flann O’Brien, whose works often satirised the poverty Ireland’s poor were subjected to. These depictions move the story away from the ruralism of the Emerald Isle, taking you to urban car parks and the concrete foundations of a new future. What does this new realism (or brutalism) reveal? How do these stories speak to the Irish diaspora? Is this Ireland finding a voice away from traditionalism? * Liked this? See Ireland’s Call (20 Oct, see listings), written and performed by the same writer, actor and Director, IFTA Best Acrtor winner, John Connors.

Whatever Irish creativity does to answer these questions, we know it is beguiling, strongly linked to identity and ambitious in undertaking to preserve, share and understand itself. We can’t wait to share this year’s stories with you and to make plenty more by the Festival’s end!

Use #LivIrishFest, #LIF2019, #madfortrad, #madfornew and #invisiblewomen to celebrate all aspects of the programme. Start connecting. Tell your friends!

Tweet us your thoughts; Instagram us your pictures and spread a little áthas (joy) by live-streaming our events on Facebook, linking us in using our handle @LivIrishFest. Additionally, subscribe to our enewsletter for festival updates at liverpoolirishfestival.com Liverpool Irish Festival is open to anyone of any heritage, age, faith or class.

As our name suggests we draw references from Liverpool, Ireland and the relationship between them, celebrating in the UK’s only arts and culture inspired and led festival. We are proud to share it with you. Once again, faílte (welcome). Bain sult as do chuid ama linn/enjoy your time with us.

About Liverpool Irish Festival Liverpool Irish Festival is governed by a volunteer board, chaired by John Chandler, one of its original founders. The organisation is a registered charity (1100126). We receive regular funding from Liverpool City Council’s Culture Arts Investment Programme, the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Emigrant Support Programme and project funds from Arts Council England’s National Lottery Project Grant Awards. We are proud recipients of sponsorship from Tourism Ireland and Irish language broadcaster TG4.

Dates for your diary: #LIF2020 will take place Thurs 15-Sun 25 Oct 2020. Add it to your diary now!

Our work with today’s artists, musicians, writers and cultural producers suggests that Ireland’s struggle to defend its cultural heartland (music, song, dance, language, visual expression) against oppressors has led to a tendency to hold culture in stasis. This act is subversive; a rebellion story of its own, which holds nostalgia, history and community together. It could be argued that this is precisely what art is for. However, is it possible that by doing this rather than progressing forms and advancing in to new territory, Irish visual arts culture fails to question the past, but presents a well-known trope today?

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EVENTS KEY Film, art and animation Talks and tours Performance and poetry Food & drink Music & song Community, family & sport

TRAIL STRANDS #LIF2019 has four thematic strands:

US Unique Stories, creatively told

IW In:Visible Women

N&C Nook and cranny spaces

FD Family Days Many events cross more than one trail.

Use the symbol above to find trails through the programme.

Ticket Quarter Have you noticed some venues charge as much as 8-15% of fees on top of the ticket price? Rising costs and different ticketing systems can mean costs are passed to customers.

After Liverpool City Council opened the Arena Conference Centre in 2008, it went on to open a serviced ticketing agency called Ticket Quarter. This year Liverpool Irish Festival is selling as many tickets as it can using this system.

We have used some of our public funding to subsidise tickets, removing the administration/fulfilment charge. We can only do this for tickets we control, which we identify using this .

This mark means you will pay the ticket price and nothing more (P+P is an optional add-on). Liverpool Irish Festival is committed to minimising any barriers affecting access to arts and culture and thank our sponsors for enabling us to work towards improving access.

Where time and resource permit, we will do all we can to support community members attendingevents. Anyone struggling to attend, based on costs -or other concerns- should contact us at info@liverpoolirishfestival.com for confidential support.

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/LIVIRISHFEST #lif2019 #madfortrad #madfornew #invisiblewomen

Don’t forget to pick up your #LIF2019 brochure from festival venues and many more!

Bringing Liverpool and Ireland closer together using arts and culture.

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liverpoolirishfestival.com Storytelling, family events, theatre, céilís, music, talks, art, poetry and literature, seisiúns, heritage, film, dancing, food and drink

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24/09/2019 13:23

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Image (c) Naomi McAllister

Irish roots – a daughter’s tale Eithne Browne is a Liverpool success story; star of stage and screen. Who better then, as a Liverpool-Irish orator, to act as an ambassador for the Liverpool Irish Festival?

When we approached Eithne earlier this year, we were thrilled when she accepted the title of ‘Patron’ and came on board to offer her services to support the Festival.

Together we created an event, this August at Sefton Park Palm House, thrilling guests with a stage show involving Eithne and friends in song, dance, skits and poetry. Asked to think about her Irish connections, Eithne takes us on a journey through childhood and an actor’s career. We are pleased to share her story.

I must admit I was shocked when I was asked to be a patron for the Liverpool Irish Festival. I was honest; I haven’t spent much time in Eire since my forties (I’m now quite a bit older!).

But the true connection, of course, is my father and he would be both pleased and proud, I think, to be involved! He was a fine man, a good father and a very dear friend to me. We spent a lot of time together; never forgotten and always remembered with a fond smile. I miss him.

William Brendan Browne was born in Ballina, Co. Mayo on 18 June 1919, son of William and Mary Agnes Browne. Our family has a tradition of sticking to certain names, but more of that anon. They lived at Castle Road, still the family home.

Dad was always referred to as Brendan and, at 16 years of age, he left Ballina to become a seafarer and never lived there again, though his heart and family called him home on a very regular basis (and we would go, too).

Wonderful summers were spent in Ballina and the surrounding coast and countryside. We would embark from Liverpool, sail overnight and alight in Dublin. Then -onto the train- to cross the country to Mayo. I always remember “change at Mullingar”.

The station at Mullingar seemed to mark a halfway point and to me was the centre of Ireland. We’d arrive at Ballina, then all troop down to Morrison Terrace to Auntie Enna and Uncle Willy’s house. Now, two of their children were called Eithne and Mary (my sister a Mary, too), both similar in age. We’ll pair up and you’d never know who was being called for, shouted at or anything; great for getting out of any trouble!

Two things always stick in my mind from that time. One, being put on to the back of a huge shire horse, drawn up outside Morrison Terrace. I was about five years old –a timid child at the best of times- and terrified. I have never repeated the experience and do not ride to this day. Another was sliding in to the Moy River, which flowed along the bottom of the Terrace garden. I was about seven years old –again terrifiedand no, I still cannot swim. The memory of going under and nearly drowning was ever present. I remember being very indignant as I was wearing a dress with a Noah’s Ark print all over it. It should have kept me exempt –and dry- I felt.

I do not swim to this day.

We would spend days on Bartra Island, out in Killala Bay. We would row over in two or three boats, disembark and run free for the rest of the day. These were truly magic times for us.

The men of the party would go fishing; the women set up campfires and blankets; unpack the hampers. And we would be sent to forage for mushrooms, spuds and crabs.

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We could climb and play on the beach or just sit on a blanket and read (me!). As the afternoon drew on we sat ‘round the fires, cooking and sharing the food. And the stories. My mother, Kitty, had a wonderfully fine voice and would be called upon to sing. A memory of being wrapped over in a blanket and cuddled up safe and warm and full of food and family.

Thank you Bartra Island.

Another favourite day was a trip to Enniscrone in Co. Sligo.

I can remember running along the harbour walls and diving on to the beach. There was the horizon…and wind and sand and water and sky. No limits. A family photo (above) shows us sheltering up against the wall – all plastic macs and bobble hats. It sometimes rained in Sligo!

The family also owned a small shop, which also served as a small bar, and above that busy establishment is where a few of us slept. When time for bed was called in Morrison Terrace we would cross the road and then enter by a garden gate.

Ahead of us was the long, dark path through the vegetable garden and lit only by a torch.

We would hurry up the scary garden to the welcoming light of the pub. [We’d be] sent straight through the bar and up the winding stairs (dark again) to a small bedroom. All in bed -whispers and stories and laughter and shouts- until “be quiet up there and get yourselves to sleep!” from Aunt Bridgie, who owned the shop. In the quiet, warm, safe dark, with the hum of voices and laughter down the winding stairs, we slept.

Our Irish life in Liverpool was centred around the Wellington Rooms on Mount Pleasant, known to us –of course- as the ‘Irish Centre’. Many Sundays were spent there to pick up a copy of The Irish Post; buy white puddings; take Irish dancing classes; listen to music that moved the heart. We would meet friends there; attend concerts. My eldest sister, Margaret, lived with Auntie Enna for over 6 months, attending school in Ballina and coming first in Gaelic! About 14 at the time, she didn’t want to come back, but going with her friends to the Liverpool Irish Centre and [dancing] to the ‘showbands’ was a favourite of hers. My own son Neil, now 47, would spend Sundays meeting up with Nanny and Grandad and racing ‘round with the other young bucks there.

Another happy memory of Dad was an evening spent at the Philharmonic Hall. I’d been asked to sing as part of an evening celebrating Irish music. I had the joy of singing with the band The Cream of the Barley; lovely PJ and Stan Ambrose and the other fine musicians. Versions of Four Green Fields and Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye; wonderful, rousing music.

And then, on announcing I would like to sing an old Celtic song for an old Celt in the audience, there was a great cheer, led -I believe- by Jimmy McGovern (a fan of my Pa). I sang an unaccompanied version of She Moved Through the Fair I hope Dad liked it. Others did.

I last toured Ireland in a production of Wuthering Heights.

Cathy was played by Caroline Milmoe (of Coronation Street fame). We all had a wonderful week in Dublin. One night Aswad –the reggae group- played on our stage set after we’d finished.

I remember Caroline and me singing Joni Mitchell songs to the Liffey as we ambled our way back to the hotel. A lovely week made even better by a warm welcome and wonderful audiences.

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And then on to Belfast, where I was to give my governess, Nelly Dean, at the Grand Opera House that next week. Except, disaster struck. Feeling unwell during the performance on the Monday night, I ended up in hospital on the Tuesday. Despite my tears and cries of “but I’m on stage at the Opera tonight!”

I was admitted and spent the next week in bed. It was my fortieth birthday on the Friday and it was spent in an isolation ward in the hospital. No celebrations –all planned in advanceI was in a small room on my own, surrounded by well-wishers’ flowers and cards. It looked like a chapel of rest! I had severe food poisoning; a very miserable time as no performer liked to be off stage. People would look in through the window.

“That’s your one off Brookside!” and pass by. The staff were lovely though and [let] my cast mates in to see me every day.

And, I lost a stone!

Another Irish connection, filmed almost 30 years ago, is at the Mersey Maritime Museum. I was asked to appear in a short, in-house film about the Irish Famine. I was unfortunately given a small bonnet to wear as my character, ‘Mary’. It sadly had the effect –once tied under my chin- of making me look like a little hamster. I did not look hungry in the slightest. In fact, with my little fat face I looked like the cause of the famine and not the effect. Plus the fact that my attempt at an Irish accent was woeful considering my parentage! My pronunciation of “starving” and “potatoes” made my Dad laugh out loud.

Members of my family were brought down to the museum to stand, view and laugh at me.

But before I finish, let’s go back to Brendan. He is the heart of me and who I am. He was a brave, honest, trustworthy man.

At sea all his adult life, he studied hard, passed all his exams to become a Master mariner, finally rising to the rank of Captain.

He held pilot’s licences for many ports worldwide. We have a very moving recording of his words dealing with his personal experiences of the war, especially his time aboard the SS Fabian, which was torpedoed, causing the death of very close friends.

I used part of that recently at a concert to fundraise for the festival at the Palm House in Sefton Park. I was researching the history of the 8th Liverpool Irish and found they landed on Juno beach, in France, on D Day on a ship called The Ulster Prince. My father was later the Captain of that same vessel carrying goods between Belfast, Dublin and Liverpool.

My final picture is of me on board such a vessel, about to set sail with my father at the wheel. In the back, you can see the Liver Buildings and that may be my Noah’s Ark frock!

I wish you a joyous festival. Our ties to Ireland are many and should be treasured and never forgotten“And if it falls unto my lot That I should rise and you should not, I’ll gently rise and softly call Goodnight and may joy be with you all”.

The Parting Glass, 1600s, author unknown.

We would like to thank Eithne for joining us as patron; for developing this article and for her hard work on Quirky Cabaret: Celtic Crossings, which helped to raise much needed funding for this year’s festival. We are thrilled to have her as an ambassador and hope our friends and festival family will endeavour to support Eithne in her ongoing work.

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The history of the Ferguson School of Irish Dance, Liverpool George Ferguson is a linchpin of the Liverpool Irish community, known to many Liverpool Irish families -across recent decades- for his work with hundreds (maybe thousands) of dancers. His school turns 40 years old in 2019 and in honour of this, we asked George to think about his journey to founding the dance school and what it has meant to him. George picks up the story.

In 1966, at the age of 11, I was taken to watch my sister attend her Irish dance class and unbeknown to me, my Mom supplied the two shillings and sixpence needed, to give me a lesson also. By the end of that lesson I could dance The Reel completely and to music! The dance teacher, Marion Turley told mom that I was ‘a dancer’ and, despite several efforts, I have never escaped since then. The Turley Academy is renowned worldwide for world champion dancers and produced Colin Dunne, nine times World Champion, who famously took over the lead in Riverdance, at two days’ notice, when Michael Flatley left.

Both of my parents are Irish; Dad from Fermanagh and Mom from Mayo, so all summers were spent between the two counties, but mostly in Mayo. As dancing was on both sides of the family it followed that we would continue the tradition.

I started the usual round of Feisanna (competitions) in the Midlands (as that was where I was born and brought up), Coventry specifically. Rising through the medals, I attended my first world championships in Dublin, which was a terrifying but great experience. The following year I attended the All Ireland Championships (again in Dublin) and placed third.Later that year I won the Arch Bishop Langley Feis, defeating the reigning world champion. In 1972 I returned to the Mansion House (Dublin) to win the world championship for myself. Two months later I came to the Liverpool Feis and won the first of three consecutive senior championships victories there. Having completed my A-levels I gained a place at Liverpool Art College for a one year course. I fell in love with the city and have stayed ever since.

I obtained an art teaching position at Deyes High School (Maghull) and set up the dance class, having passed my Teagascoir Choimisiuin le Rinci Gaelacha (TCRG- essentially the commission for certifying Irish dance teaching). I undertook my Irish Dance teacher exams in Dublin. In April 1979 -at St. Anthony of Padua, Mossley Hill, Queens Drive- I started with eight dancers on the first night and grew to 40+ quite quickly.

We started attending Feisanna and eventually ended up with three classes across the city. We took teams and solo dancers to local Feisanna and national and world championships in various venues throughout England and Ireland.

As the recession set in, parents were reluctant to attend the Feisanna due to the cost. We had a survey and decided that there were other aspects we were more interested in, rather than relentless competitions. We concentrated on shows, displays and exhibitions, ranging from TV appearances on programmes such as BBC’s A Question of Sport where we danced with John Aldridge, the Liverpool and Irish Republic footballer. Last year (2018) we performed at the Vince Power’s Liverpool Feis, an Irish music festival held at the Pier Head.

Headline acts included Van Morrison, Shane McGowan and Liverpool’s own, Nathan Carter! More recently we performed at The Epstein Theatre with local musicians and the legend of comedy that is Jimmy Cricket in An Irish Hooley, a variety show that featured on the TV program The Irish in the UK. We have even danced for The Sunday Politics Show, which must be a first for Irish dance!

As for me, I performed my last dance to celebrate 50 years of St. Patricks Day performances at the John Mitchell’s GAA presentation dinner dance at The Crown Plaza Liverpool, for the GAA President on 4 March 2017.

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Irish dance has changed markedly over the years. Costumes, hair and steps have responded to the impact of shows, started

by Riverdance. Some would say that since Irish dance is now not the sole domain of those of Irish descent or origin; that it has moved away from its roots and traditions. It has to be hoped that these traditions are not lost for the sake of progress!

From now on it’s over to the next generation of dancers and hopefully my daughter, Cecilia, will continue when I eventually leave off and keep the Ferguson School name going. I know it will be in good hands!

It has been an honour and a privilege to have been involved with generations of dancers and their families, through 40 years of the medium of Irish Dance.

To find out more information about George’s school and his classes, log on to Facebook and search for / George-Ferguson-School-of-Irish-Dance. Alternatively, you can call George direct, being mindful of standard working hours, on +44 (0) 777 188 4724.

George’s dancers will perform at 3pm at the Family Day (Museum of Liverpool) on Sat 26 Oct 2019. An anniversary celebration will also be held, in George’s honour, at the Liverpool Irish Centre on 11 Oct 2019.

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A Day in the Life of the Liverpool Irish Centre Each year the Liverpool Irish Festival takes work to the Liverpool Irish Centre; which we believe should be the spiritual home Liverpool’s Irish community. They are –and have always been- a significant partner of the Festival, providing a valuable social and civic centre and making people welcome year-round. We know the Centre runs a number of projects, sports occasions and festivities and so asked one of the Centre’s managers to give us a day in the life. Richie Billinge does just that.

Promoting Irish culture and providing a place for people to maintain a connection to Ireland is our founding motive.

Throughout the week here you’ll find Irish music, dance and language lessons; social groups and those dedicated to improving health and wellbeing, whilst at the weekends we provide a warm and welcoming place to celebrate some of the things we love best: live music, sport and plenty of craic. Monday evenings are dedicated to traditional Irish music, with the brilliant people of Comhaltas hosting lessons for youngsters on instruments ranging from the bodhrán to the harp. It’s a wonderfully welcoming atmosphere, not only giving children the opportunity to learn an instrument, but to forge lasting friendships.

The same goes for our weekly dance classes run by the Bolger-Cunningham School of Irish Dance, who not only develop children’s Irish dancing abilities, but assist them as individuals, building confidence and providing a place to meet and make new friends; giving them opportunities to take their dancing out to the wider world for special performances in Liverpool, Ireland and beyond.

One of our strongest connections to home is the Gaelic language. Each Thursday evening you’ll find enthusiastic groups of all ages and backgrounds studying Gaelic to maintain

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this critical link. Here at the Liverpool Irish Centre, we encourage it as much as possible with our Gaelic signage and -hopefully in the months ahead- our new Gaelic Garden. Visitors are minded not to walk into the Fir (gents) if they mean to go to the Mná (ladies)!

It was the older generations that migrated in the 1950s and 60s to Liverpool who struggled against great adversity to establish the Liverpool Irish Centre in Mount Pleasant, and although we may be in a different building, you can find these stalwarts of the community here each week on Wednesdays and Thursdays for lunch clubs and afternoon tea dances.

This idea of community is the basis behind everything we do. Maintaining these social connections is very important for our society and for our community’s well-being. For a lot of people, we are their sole connection to home and we try to make it as genuine and special as possible with the likes of our Irish shop, selling goods and fresh produce imported from Ireland; bringing over their favourite singers, bands and acts -from The Whistlin’ Donkeys, Dervish, The Wolfe Tones and Sharon Shannon- and showing live GAA matches; sports that have a magical way of bringing Irish people together.

Our Sláinte Le Chéile (Health Together) project sees four regular events each week all designed to help boost our community’s mental and physical health and well-being.

On Mondays, we have our health walk (and talk!), which involves a leisurely stroll around the lovely Newsham Park and then back here to the Centre for a well-earned cup of tea. On Tuesdays, our Cuimhne/Memories group -for those suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s- meet up to listen to their favourite Irish songs, share stories of old, and enjoy lots of treats from home—Irish soups, biscuits and cake, to name

but a few. Wednesdays are dedicated to our community garden which has been transformed by our hard-working volunteers from a forgotten wasteland into a beautiful environment, now home to a growing number of flowers, birds and insects. *But* not only do we serve the Irish community, but the entire community of Merseyside and beyond. One morning we’ll have scores of young and enthusiastic children learning how to Irish dance, and in the afternoon we’ll play host to a cultural celebration from Sri Lanka, Nepal or the Philippines. Just as the thousands of Irish migrants to the city needed a place to meet and continue their strong connections with home, we offer the same to our diverse community of Nepalese, Tamils, Poles, Keralans, Filipinos and many more. We’re proud to be able to help these groups keep their community links burning bright, just as the Irish needed in the 1950s and 60s when they made the trip across the Irish Sea. We’re never satisfied with the services that we offer. There’s always more to be done and this drives us to keep on looking for ways to serve the needs of our ever-growing and diverse community. It’s said that over three-quarters of those who live in Liverpool have roots in Ireland. If you’d like to find out more about your past we’d be delighted to help you out.

If you’re looking to get involved, either as a volunteer or participant or would simply like to come down and enjoy some live music and a cracking pint of Guinness™, then please get in touch! You can find us at liverpoolirishcentre.org, give us a call on +44 (0)151 263 1808 or email us info@liverpoolirishcentre.org.

Tá súil againn tú a fheiceáil go luath! We hope to see you soon!

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Key to the door – A Liverpool Irish business Liverpool Irish Festival is a member of a small group of Liverpool Irish cultural organisations and businesses called Connected Irish. Though this group, we came to know brothers Conor and Daragh McDonald who run Shenanigans under their umbrella company Iona Group.

Success stories in business are rarely told as often as the failures. As Shenanigans has such a unique vantage in the city, we thought their history may be of interest to you. Conor sets the scene…

Shenanigans is situated on Tithebarn Street, one of the original ‘seven streets’ of Liverpool. The street took its name from the Tithe Barn built by Lord Molyneux in 1524 to store the collected tithes (a tenth of farmer production) of Liverpool and Kirkdale.

Prior to that it was named Moore Street, after the family of that name, but over time, and because of the rise of the building’s use and purpose, ‘Moore Street’ fell from use.

Fig 2. Street map dated 1860. Shenanigans can be seen on the corner of Smithfield Street named Spirit Vaults.

Left is a photograph of The Rising Sun (1979).

Right photograph of Shenanigans (1997).

In 1894 the pub was bought by Peter Walker and Son from a Mr Peter William Haigh from Boundary Lane. It was the first of eleven Walker’s pub on Tithebarn Street.

Daragh and I purchased the closed Tetley pub The Rising Sun. In 1997 the building was renamed Shenanigans, the start of a new chapter! In our hands there have been beach parties (the pub was filled with sand), student olympics, fireworks, full moon parties, bush tucker trials… In 1997 Liverpool was still in the doldrums, showing occasional green shoots of life.

Our intention was to open an Irish Bar that bought a piece of Ireland to the people of Liverpool. A lot of Irish bars at the time, especially in England, were tending toward the ‘plastic Paddy’ look. We didn’t want old rebel pictures and shamrocks on the window; a concept we have stuck with.

We have been operating on Tithebarn Street for some 22 years now, in which time Concert Square, Seel Street and the ripple of streets around it have become a ‘drinking quarter’. Now, the north end and financial district is showing a resurgence. Leeds Street is to be littered with skyscrapers; Vauxhall Road has become a student quarter; the canal has been linked to the Stanley Dock, which in turn now links to The Titanic Hotel. Peel Waters will take you down to Princes Dock and facing that we have Ten Streets. Pall Mall which is the next street over to us is undergoing major development; all combined we feel it is our time to shine.

Fig 1. The Tithe Barn stood directly opposite where Shenanigans stands today.

By 1800 Britain was moving away from agriculture, hot on the heels of the industrial revolution that began to take effect from 1760. There was no longer a need for a building to collect the tithes and so during this time the Tithe Barn fell into disrepair. As it was no longer used it was converted into drinking establishments, shops and smith foundries.

By 1820 most of the old Tithe Barn had gone and the street was widened as Liverpool’s population began to grow and the street became busier.

Whilst the Tithe Barn was disappearing, pubs, spirit or beer vaults -as they were also called- became a common sight; appearing every 100 metres (or 20 rods as was known back then). In 1842 there were 18 licensed premises on Tithebarn Street alone! Most were un-named. This time is probably when the first drinking establishment on the street came into existence, on or close to Shenanigans today. Despite research, it seems virtually impossible to know for sure the exact date of our building’s founding as -during the early 1800’s- house numbers along Tithebarn Street seem to have changed constantly.

Figs 3 and 4. A Walkers sign was discovered after renovations to Shenanigans during the summer of 2013. A little time before Walker’s take over, we know John Brierley Swarbrick was licensee (1893) with a few short term licensees in between, before Marcella Hunter, publican from 1898-1918.

Naturally Guinness is served like mother’s milk, but our selections of beers have grown over the years, now boasting some 15 unique and well-loved draughts and what the draught doesn’t cover you can get in a bottle. The spirit selection is extensive, moving with current trends. A choice of teas and coffees are available and non-alcoholic drinks a-plenty (some quirky often only found in the Emerald Isle).

The first date we have located for a pub on the Shenanigans site is 1841; the first year of official licensing records. The licensee was a Hugh Skellern and the pub had no official name. The earliest name we have found for our pub is The Revolving Lamp, its moniker in 1894, when William Tyson was the landlord.

After the Second World War there was a lot of damage to the area, followed by rebuilding, which helps explain how Shenanigans looks today. A solitary building standing proud, with a slight lean!

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As Liverpool’s only independent, Irish-owned, Irish-run pub, we feel we have lots to offer. A major refurbishment is taking the pub to three floors, including new and accessible toilets, rooftop terrace, function room and music venue. We will remain family, dog and character friendly. As a regular once told me, “you have more difficulty getting out than getting in”.

Shenanigans unique positioning (which 100 yards either way changes the demographic wholly), means the pubs serves a mix of business people, construction workers, students, tourists, and locals. With rustic décor and an Irish heart it feels like a real Dublin bar (think Bruxelles).

We have had hundreds of customers and staff passing through over the years and hope we will continue to do so for many decades to come.

More on Iona Group: ionagroup.co.uk Connected Irish: facebook.com/connectedirish Shenanigans: shenanigansliverpool.co.uk All images reproduced under cultural commons licensing.

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Manchester Irish Language Festival – The story so far Whilst we believe Liverpool Irish Festival is a unique festival –especially within the oeuvre of Irish festivalsit is by no means the only one, even locally. Sharing large-spread and richly diverse Irish communities, Manchester is a city close in distance but distant in cultural character and feel. This year, we highlight one of our sibling festivals –which runs simultaneously with #LIF2019- to show how others do it. The Chair of the Manchester Irish Language Group –Patrick McGuinness- provides the overview.  Manchester Irish Language Group was re-formed in 2004 and has offered weekly Irish language classes at St. Kentigern’s Social Club in Fallowfield since 2007. It is run by volunteers drawn from its student body with about 50 students enrolling for Irish classes each year. The aims of the Group are to promote the Irish language and an awareness of Irish culture for all people with an interest in them. To this end, the Group has been running social and cultural events outside the classroom since 2004. Its main cultural focus is the annual autumn arts festival supported by the Government of Ireland’s Emigrant Support Programme.

The Manchester Irish Language Writing Competition started in 2011 and includes poetry and prose categories, the winners being judged by the guest poet or author and announced at the poetry evening.

Gearóid Mac Lochlainn (Belfast) was the first guest poet in 2009 and Cré na Cille (film) shown that year at the Irish language film study morning, opened by the Lord Mayor of Manchester.

Since then the Group has been honoured to host Irish langauge poets Cathal Ó Searcaigh (Donegal), Galway-based Colette Nic Aodha, Paris resident Derry O’Sullivan, Dublin’s Biddy Jenkinson, Dingle-raised Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Belfast’s Seán Ó Muireagáin. Dublin-based author Anna Heussaff and Scots Gaelic poet Meg Bateman complete he list of esteemed guests.

Background: The festival started in 2009 and grew from the Irish language film study mornings at The Cornerhouse (a film and arts centre) in 2007 and 2008 with the later addition of a poetry evening, writing competition, open mic night, conversation sessions and advanced Irish classes.

Opportunities to speak Irish have been a key part of the festival programme from the start.

Initially this was at Club Cuideachta events in Manchester city centre, which provided a social setting for conversation in Irish and English to the backdrop of live traditional music.

Recently these sessions have been replaced by Irish-only Pop-up Gaeltacht events.

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Screened at the festival in 2013, Clare sa Spéir, (Dir. Audrey O’Reilly, 2001), is a short film in which unappreciated mother and wife Clare decides to get her family’s attention by staying in the treehouse for 32 days to try to break the world record.

In 2014 the Group was delighted to work with Manchester Irish Writers’ Group to run a workshop in creative writing in Irish and English led by Colette Nic Aodha.

To date fourteen Irish language films, sub-titled in English, have been screened at the festivals as part of the film study morning programme at The Cornerhouse and then at its successor venue HOME with the generous support and encouragement of Programme Manager, Rachel Hayward.

Each screening is preceded by live traditional music, from young members of the Comhaltas Tara O’ Carolan Branch, and followed by a post-film discussion and social gathering.

The emigrant experience as documentary and drama, social and family strife, the surreal and absurd have all been explored in the festivals’ screenings. The comedy film short Yu Ming is Ainm Dom (Dir. Daniel O’Hara, 2003) was followed by Poitín (Dir. Bob Quinn, 1997), a dark tale of greed and revenge, was the double bill for the inaugural film study morning in 2007.

The 2019 festival runs from Tues 15-26 Oct 2019 and will start with an open mic night, Pop-up Gaeltacht and Irish classes. Award-winning guest poet Aifric Mac Aodha will read a selection of her work on Fri 25 Oct 2019 before announcing the winners of the 2019 Manchester Irish Language Writing Competition, the theme of which is escape.

The film morning on Sat 26 Oct 2019 will conclude events with Tom Collins’s film Penance (Aithrí), music, a Pop-up Gaeltacht and a group photograph of Manchester’s Irish language enthusiasts. Previous festivals have explored the enduring Irish themes of leaving, longing, loss and community.

Screen adaptations of plays and books were shown at the 2008 and 2009 festivals. First it was Kings (Dir. Tom Collins, 2007 ), which tells the tale of a group of friends who emigrated from the Connemara Gaeltacht to England in the late 70’s and who meet up again at the funeral of the youngest after 30 years.

It is based on Jimmy Murphy’s play, The Kings of the Kilburn High Road. The following year it was Cré na Cille, Bob Quinn’s 2007 film version of Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s classic 1949 novel.

Set in a Connemara cemetery, it is a dark, humorous tale of jealousy and hatred between two sisters that continues into the afterlife.

Documentaries featured in the festivals include The Pipe (Dir. Risteard Ó Domhnaill, 2010), which chronicles the strife caused in a small community in North Mayo by a controversial gas project. Mise Éire (Dir. George Morrison, 1959) tells of events in Ireland leading up to, during, and immediately after the 1916 Easter Rising, making extensive use of newsreels from the time, with an evocative score by Seán Ó Riada.

Two films dealing with the Irish emigrant experience in America formed a double bill in 2014. Shown first was Lón Sa Spéir (Men at Lunch; Dir. Seán Ó Cualáin, 2012). This reveals the story behind Lunch atop a Skyscraper, the iconic image of construction workers eating lunch while perched upon an iron girder high above Manhattan.

Then followed John O’Donnell’s An Bhean A Shiúil Trasna Mheiriceá (The Woman Who Walked Across America), which reveals how 19th-century emigrant Mary Devine successfully made the most arduous return trip from Kansas to Co. Kerry. Boxer Sean Mannion was born in the 1950s in Ros Muc, County Galway. His boxing career, emigration to America and brush with organised crime in Boston are laid out in Rocky Ros Muc (Dir. Michael Fanning, 2017). We showed it in Manchester in year of its release.

Robert Quinn’s 2010 work Na Cloigne (The Heads) is the only supernatural thriller screened at the festivals so far and relates the story of a young couple who become caught up in the horrible and gruesome murders of two young women.

An Bronntanas/The Gift (Dir. Tom Collins, 2014), is a contemporary thriller shot among a lifeboat crew in Connemara and was shown at the 2015 festival. Lead actor Dara Devaney was the special guest at the post-film discussion.

In 2016 the audience at HOME enjoyed Dathaí Keane’s 2015 Irish language western An Klondike, which follows three Irish emigrants who travel from Montana to the Yukon during the Klondike gold rush of the 1890’s in the hope of striking it rich. Acclaimed filmmaker Pat Collins brought the dramatic life story of legendary sean-nós singer Joe Heaney to the screen in Song of Granite (2017) and it was shown in Manchester last year. The 2019 festival runs from 15-26 Oct and will start with Teanga Unchained (open mic night), Pop-up Gaeltacht and Irish classes.

Aifric Mac Aodha, winner of the 2016 Oireachtas Prize for Poetry, will travel from Dublin to read a selection of her work on 25 Oct and then announce the winners of the 2019 Manchester Irish Language Writing Competition. The film morning (26 Oct) will conclude events with Tom Collins’ film Penance (Aithrí), music, a Pop-up Gaeltacht and a group photograph of Manchester’s Irish language enthusiasts.

Further details about festival events: Writing Competition: https://comortasscribhneoireacht. wordpress.com/ Other events: ask.milg@gmail.com manchestergaeilge.org.uk

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Writing ‘The Spirit of the Reels’

Many Liverpool Irish families have connections with the “band that took the sound of the Liverpool Irish around the world”: the Liverpool Céilí Band. Late iterations of the band continue today, playing regular seisiúns at the Liverpool Irish Centre and locals across the city. For the first time their incredible history has been recorded and is presented in book form for the first time. We asked author Ray Rooney to set the scene for readers and event attenders.  For many years people have said that the story of the famous Liverpool Céilí Band (the Band) from the 1960s and 1970s would make a great book.

After Sean McNamara (also known as Sean Mc) – one of the founder members of the Band– passed away, there was further discussion about the possibility of a book becoming reality. But for all the discussions, it never materialised. Then one day, when work was being done at the family home (where Sean Mc’s wife Brenda still lives) old photos, articles and memorabilia, left undisturbed for years, tumbled from a wardrobe.

This seemed to be ‘a message’ from Sean Mc that Máire Mc (Sean’s daughter and my wife) and I should be getting on with it. The decision was made. Brenda commissioned me to write the book and for Máire Mc to be involved as well.

When starting out I only had a sketchy idea of the Band’s story that was centred on their competition victories. Sean Mc was not a man for boasting about past achievements. So, in undertaking this journey into the past, in the footsteps of these remarkable musicians, I was largely taking a leap into the unknown, but it proved to be an intriguing and fascinating ‘unknown’ that would grip my imagination for years (and still does). We interviewed numerous people. Each of them felt so strongly that the Band’s story should be told, that it made the researching of the book an uplifting experience. In all the trips to Ireland, in all the transatlantic communications and all the contacts across the United Kingdom, it was the deep admiration that people had for the Band that helped to drive me on.

The story that started to emerge was one of how significant the Band were to the history of Irish traditional music and how –though their origins were in Liverpool- they drew tremendous inspiration continuously from Ireland. They had excelled as a céilí band against the highest of competition, inspiring a generation of céilí dancers and changing the way the music was performed. They toured, and not only took #LIF2019

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their music across Ireland, but as far as the United States. They were so loyal to each other and truly enjoyed each other’s company, with much craic and humour accompanying their travels.

In the writing of this book I unearthed a great network of support that the Band had established internationally, in the days long before the internet and mobile phones.

A network of relationships that came, in time, to support me in the writing of this book and helped keep me on a sound footing, regarding the details of events.

The writing of the book became inevitably much more than just the story of the Band. It contains rich seams of the social history of the Liverpool Irish community in the years after the Second World War. It follows the development of Irish traditional music, particularly in relation to the céilís, fleadhs (festivals) and sessions.

It traces the significance of the Band and the legacy that they left behind.

The story of the Band is not just about the victories and celebrations, it’s about the spirit in which the music was played and all the people they engaged with. So, I adopted a direct style of writing to try to set the reader as close to the events as possible to try to convey something of the amazing energy that this group of musicians possessed. I have attempted to keep the narrative ‘rattling along’, as that seemed to be very much in the ‘spirit of the Band’.

So, at the end of this journey of discovery, the book is completed and hopefully the essence of the story is told. The sheer commitment to the music of Ireland by these musicians has been truly remarkable, and it was that, that helped them scale the heights that they have. The writing of the book was a privilege and if you listen closely on any given night – you can still hear ‘The Spirit of the Reels’ echoing down through the streets of Liverpool.

I would like to wish you ádh mór (good luck) -in the spirit of the Band- and hope you enjoy the book.

Ray Rooney will present the book and the Band to Liverpool Irish Festival audiences at the Liverpool Irish Centre (their spiritual home) on Sat 19 Oct 2019.

The book will be available to purchase at the event.

A further event will be held at 3pm on Sun 24 Nov 2019 at Liverpool Irish Centre. See liverpoolirishcentre.org for details

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Gradam Ceoil TG4 & #LIF2019

Last year TG4 joined us as a sponsor. We had so much fun with them that this year we decided to amp up the work and collaborate on two specific music events: Visible Women and Gradam Ceoil (Music Awards), both taking place at the Liverpool Philharmonic Music Room.

Showcasing some of the most outstanding talent Ireland has to offer, TG4 are becoming known for their visionary approach to Irish language broadcasting, inclusion and accessibility. This assists not only with storytelling and talent development, but also keeping communities linked and connected with home. Below, TG4 tell us more about Gradam Ceoil and what it means to them.

TG4 are excited to work with #LIF2019 and specifically to present a very special concert (full details below) with some of the world’s most accomplished Irish traditional musicians, Conor Connolly, Clare Friel and Liam O’Brien, who have each been awarded the Young Musician of the Year award at Gradam Ceoil TG4 in 2019, 2018 & 2017 respectively.

Gradam Ceoil TG4 is the premier annual traditional Irish music awards scheme and academy. An independent panel of adjudicators selects recipients each year. Known as the ‘Oscars of Traditional Music’, national Irish language broadcaster TG4’s Gradam Ceoil awards are broadcast annually, with a live concert and ceremony, shining a spotlight on the crème-de-la-crème of traditional music and song, featuring musicians being recognised by their peers, with awards for their talent and contribution to traditional Irish music.

This special concert in conjunction with the Liverpool Irish Festival will bring a taste of Gradam Ceoil TG4 to Liverpool, showcasing three of the most exciting musical talents to come out of Ireland in recent years.

Conor Connolly hails from South Co. Galway.

One of the most traditional and solid accordion players of his generation, he is an inspiration to many.

An accordion player and singer, his music and song is rooted in his home county, with some of his main influences being Joe Cooley, Charlie Harris, P.J. Conlon and Tony Mac Mahon. His playing is full of heart and soul, with a great understanding and respect for the tradition and the players he learned from. Having played with some of the most renowned traditional musicians we have today, he is well respected by them and highly regarded amongst his peers. He won Young Traditional Musician of the Year, 2019.

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Clare Friel, TG4 Gradam Ceoil Ceoltóir Óg na Bliana/ Young Musician of the Year 2018, was born and brought up in Glasgow, with very close family ties to Donegal.

She is a highly regarded fiddle player and singer playing as part of The Friel Sisters. They have released two albums thus far, playing all over the world in various venues and festivals and have appeared on stage and toured with such acts as Altan, The Chieftains, Moya Brennan, Lúnasa, Sharon Shannon, Cherish the Ladies and the Máirtín O’Connor Trio.

Liam O’Brien is from Miltown Malbay. He was brought up in a very musical family. After starting on the tin whistle he went on to take up the concertina and attended classes with Noel Hill for many years. Liam then went on to study Irish Music & Dance in the University of Limerick. He has now travelled the world playing and teaching. He has been all across Europe, Africa and spent the summer of 2012 touring Japan.

Liam also teaches concertina and banjo as part of the Brid O’Donohue School of Music where his popularity grows and grows. He won TG4 Young Traditional Musician of the Year in 2016.

As well as this outstanding concert, the three artists will share their talent with a pool of budding musicians in a set of free masterclasses, hosted as part of the Liverpool Irish Festival. Each will provide a bespoke workshop in fiddle, accordion and concertina, giving a select number of participants an opportunity to hone their skills under the guidance of these top class performers. Numbers are limited. To apply please email info@liverpoolirishfestival.com quoting ‘TG4Masterclass’, providing your name, chosen session, skill level and key objective for the session.

If you are interested in attending the annual Gradam Ceoil TG4 awards, they will be presented at a live-televised gala concert at The Waterfront (Belfast) in Feb 2020, 9.00pm. You can make a full weekend of it, too, as a dedicated Gradam Fringe Festival brings Belfast alive in song, with a host of free music events and workshops taking place in various locations across the city. This event is not to be missed if Irish traditional music is your thing!

For more information, or to watch previous Gradam Ceoil TG4 awards ceremonies, go to www.gradam.ie and or follow us on Facebook and Twitter @GradamCeoil #GRADAM. Tickets for the Gradam Ceoil TG4 at Liverpool Philharmonic Music Room on Wed 23 Oct are available from the venue direct liverpoolphil.com.

Search ‘Irish Trad Night’.

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Image (c) William Clark

An Irish slave in Antigua In times of hardship resentment and ‘othering’ grows. We witnessed this during the 1919 Race Riots (and the growth of the term ‘miscegenation’); we see it repeated in the 42% rise in hate crime following Brexit and the media scare-mongering that blended migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in to one amorphous threat. With this as a back drop, people also began to bandy memes about ‘Irish slavery’. Liam Hogan’s seven-piece-post on the matter identifies the misdirection this presents, alongside the tactics adopted by the far right to misappropriate history specifically to undermine and diminish the experience of black chattel slavery and the work of those who continue to try and release the truths of these times.

We contacted Liam about his work and about the stories he had discovered during his research. Kindly, he has provided us with the following story connecting Ireland, Liverpool and Antigua and a gentleman known in the 1700s as “Mulatto Jack”  ‘Mulatto’ is an historic term, used primarily to classify people of black and white parents and therefore of mixed heritage.

Its use today is considered racist and we do not recommendor condone its use. It is presented here in the context of historic references only.

Black Atlantic is a term generated by British historian Paul Gilroy in 1993 that connects cultural elements from Africa, America, Britain and the Caribbean that pertain to deep scarring left as a result of slave trading.

“Mulatto Jack” was an Irishman enslaved in Antigua and interrogated during a slave conspiracy investigation in 1736.

What does his plight tell us about Ireland’s historical relationship with the Black Atlantic?

In October 1736 a cadre of enslaved people in Antigua allegedly planned to free the colony’s slave population by overthrowing the British slavocracy that had enchattled and exploited tens of thousands of people for over a century. This was to be achieved by blowing up Governor William Mathew and the heads of the most powerful planter families during their annual ball commemorating the coronation of George II on the 11 October. According to the colony’s investigators this gunpowder explosion, to be ignited in the cellars beneath the ballroom, was one of the agreed signals for various units of armed slaves to march on the harbours, forts and towns killing all before them. However, the ball was postponed until 30 October and in the meantime the conspiracy was uncovered by the planters who investigated after they became suspicious at the “insolence” of the enslaved which had allegedly increased “to a very Dangerous Pitch”.

This slave conspiracy narrative was obtained by the planters via the private interrogation, torture and ‘testimony’ of the enslaved. There were no public trials. Thus if -or to what extent- the planters exaggerated or embellished the details of the slave conspiracy remains a subject of debate. What followed this “discovery” were months of brutal,sadistic tortures and the horrific executions of those convicted or suspected of involvement. In total eighty-eight enslaved people were publicly executed. Six were gibbeted alive. Five were broken on the wheel. Seventy-seven were burned alive. Most of the victims’ remains were decapitated and their severed heads placed

on pikes in public view as a warning to the rest of the slave population. The final executions involved the burning alive of eleven enslaved people on 8 March 1737. David Barry Gaspar has noted “there was a stronger inclination towards vengeance than justice” on the part of the judges who seemed “convinced there was a plot before the trials even began”.

Indeed as Vincent Brown has explained, the violent butchery of enslaved Africans and Creoles by their enslavers was “used more to dramatise the power of masters than to construct a community governed by recognizably just laws and punishments”. It could be argued that discussing ‘justice’ in relation to a slavocracy is an absurd exercise, after all, almost eighty people were nailed to the ground and burned to ash despite not committing a single violent act. As was customary in Antigua, each slave owner of the executed was paid public treasury ‘compensation’ for the loss of their ‘property’. The cost of this mass murder was so great that it almost bankrupted the colony.

On the 30 December 1736, in the midst of this bloodshed, three of the colony’s investigating commissioners submitted a report to Governor Mathew. It included a request for advice about “a person called Mulatto Jack” who “was brought before us as a criminal slave concerned in the plot, but he alleged that he was free born in Ireland and stolen thence and sold here as a slave. We think he proved his allegation, and we submit it to the legislature whether this mitigates his crime”. According to Gaspar he had been kidnapped in Ireland around 1720 and was thus enslaved in Antigua for approximately sixteen years.

How did Jack “prove his allegation”? Did he have an Irish accent? Did he speak Irish or did he talk about his family Article continues on p19

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#LIF2019 Pull-Out GUIDE VENUE MAP

FULL VENUE DETAILS ON PAGE 18

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thurs 17 oct

FRI 18 oct

In:VisibleWOMEN

In:VisibleWOMEN

Tate 10am–5pm

Tate 10am–5pm

SAT 19 oct The New Leaf tour St Luke’s Bombed Out Church 10am–11am

SUN 20 oct

In:VisibleWOMEN

In:VisibleWOMEN

Tate 10am–5pm

Tate 10am–5pm

MON 21 oct

In:Visible Women week at Tate Exchange

The New Leaf tour St Luke’s Bombed Out Church 12pm–1pm

HELLO DELIA MURPHY Liverpool Irish Centre 1–3.30pm

SOUTH LIVERPOOL WALK

CELTIC ANIMATION FILM FESTIVAL

St Luke’s Gardens 2pm–4pm

Picturehouse at FACT 2pm–5pm

Scotland Road walk Central Library entrance 2pm–4pm

IndieCork: The Dark Green HORROR Picturehouse at FACT 6pm–9pm

The Spirit of the reels: Liverpool Céilí Band –book launch #LIF official LAUNCH

Jack Lukeman

Liverpool Irish Centre 8pm–10pm and later

British Music Experience 8pm–10.30pm

Liverpool Irish Centre 7.30pm–10.30pm

Ireland’s Call Downstairs, Royal Court 8pm–10pm

KILKELLY Leaf 9pm–11pm

11PM

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9PM

8PM

7PM

6PM

5PM

4PM

3PM

2PM

1PM

12PM

11AM

10AM

MON 14 oct

12PM

D SOLUT O

KEY Talks and tours Film, art and animation Music & song Community, family & sport Performance and poetry Food & drink

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ExhibitionS All dates relate to 2019 unless otherwise stated. All listings were deemed correct at the time of going to print. However, changes do occur. Whilst we will do everything in our power to forewarn all ticket holders of changes, this is not possible in all cases. To be absolutely certain of up-to-date information please visit liverpoolirishfestival.com.

End times are provided as a guide only.

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Bluecoat Display Centre

In the Window: Rory Shearer

Tue 1-Thurs 31 Oct Viewable during shop opening hours. Free, just turn up US | N&C | FD

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TUE 22 oct

WED 23 oct

THUR 24 oct

FRI 25 oct

SAT 26 oct

SUN 27 oct

LIVERPOOL IRISH FESTIVAL Family Day Museum of Liverpool 10am–5pm

#LIF2019 BROCHURE CORRECTIONS Please note that the following corrections are advised for information printed in the #LIF2019 brochure and today’s print: Caillte performances will run at 11am and 1pm on Wed 16 Oct, NOT 1pm and 3pm as printed.

Gradam Ceoil: trio of masterclasses Liverpool Philharmonic Dining Rooms 12pm–4pm

#LIF2019 Official Launch will run at 8pm-10pm on Thurs 17 Oct, NOT 6pm-8pm as printed.

Gradam Ceoil Masterclasses run at 12pm (Conor Connolly, accordion), 1.30pm (Clare Friel,fiddle) and 3pm (Liam O’Brien, concertina) on Wed 23 Oct, not at 12pm, 2pm and 4pm as printed.

Heritage Coach Tour will run at midday (12pm) on Sun 27 Oct, NOT 10am as printed.

Every effort has been made to ensure that these corrections have been issued to those they concern. Online corrections have been made and all ticket holders will have the correct information at the point of purchase. However, we are sincerely sorry for any inconvenience caused. Any concerns should be raised at info@liverpoolirishfestival.com.

Heritage coach tour Liverpool Irish Centre 12pm–2pm

Family Ceili Liverpool Irish Centre 2pm–5pm

Henry McDonald book launch Waterstones 6pm–8pm

TG4’s Gradam Ceoil:An Irish Trad night

R YOUTS T GE I C K E T

Visible Women

Rebels and Friends

Liverpool Philharmonic Music Room 7.30pm–11.30pm

Liverpool Playhouse 7.30pm–9.30pm

Liverpool Philharmonic Music Room 8pm–10.30pm

The Biggest Show In the Country

Musical variety night

John Foster Studio 8pm–10pm

Philharmonic Dining Rooms 8pm–12pm

Rebels and Friends The Biggest Show In the Country John Foster Studio 8pm–10pm

Liverpool Playhouse 7.30pm–9.30pm

R YOUTS T E G ICK E T Rory O’Hanlon Shenanigans 8pm–10pm

R YOUTS T GE I C K E T

Sefton Park Palm House

Watch me grow Thurs 17-Sat 26 Oct Viewable during Palm House opening hours.

Free, just turn up US | N&C | FD

Liverpool Everyman – Street Café and Bar

Materials library Mon 14-Sat 26 Oct Viewable during venue open hours. Free, just turn up US | IW | N&C | FD

*Image (c) Claire Leadbitter

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#LIF2019 Pull-Out GUIDE

VENUE DETAILS 1: Bluecoat Display Centre 50-51 College Lane, L1 3BZ T +44 (0)151 709 1014 E crafts@bluecoatdisplaycentre.com W bluecoatdisplaycentre.com

6: Liverpool Irish Centre 6 Boundary Lane, L6 5JG T +44 (0) 151 263 1808 E info@liverpoolirishcentre.org W liverpoolirishcentre.org

11: Liverpool Playhouse Williamson Square, L1 1EL T +44 (0) 151 709 4776 E boxoffice@everymanplayhouse.com W everymanplayhouse.com

2: British Music Experience Cunard Building, Brunswick Street, Pier Head L3 1ES (access from The Goree) T +44 (0) 151 233 0000 E info@britishmusicexperience.com W britishmusicexperience.com

7: Liverpool John Moores University – John Foster Studio Theatre Mount Pleasant, L3 5UZ T +44 (0) 151 231 2121 E events@ljmu.ac.uk W ljmu.ac.uk

12: Liverpool’s Royal Court - Downstairs Roe Street, L1 1HL T +44 (0) 151 709 4321 E boxoffice@royalcourtliverpool.com W royalcourtliverpool.com

3: Leaf on Bold Street 65-67 Bold Street, L1 4EZ T +44 (0) 151 707 7747 E info@thisisleaf.co.uk W thisisleaf.co.uk/liverpool 4: Liverpool Central Library William Brown Street, L3 8W T +44 (0) 151 233 3069 W liverpool.gov.uk/libraries 5: Liverpool Everyman Theatre Street Café and Theatre Bar Hope Street, L1 9BH T +44 (0) 151 709 4776 E boxoffice@everymanplayhouse.com W everymanplayhouse.com

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8: Liverpool Philharmonic Hall Hope Street, L1 9BP T +44 (0) 151 709 3789 E customerservices@liverpoolphil.com W liverpoolphil.com 9: Liverpool Philharmonic Dining Rooms – upstairs suite 36 Hope Street, L1 9BX T +44 (0) 151 707 2837 W nicholsonspubs.co.uk 10: Liverpool Philharmonic Music Room Hope Street, L1 9BP (access via Sugnall Street, behind the main building) T +44 (0) 151 709 3789 E customerservices@liverpoolphil.com W liverpoolphil.com/music-room

13: National Museums Liverpool/ Museum of Liverpool Pier Head, L3 1DG T +44 (0) 151 487 4545 W liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/mol 14: Picturehouse at FACT Wood Street, L1 4DQ T +44 (0) 151 707 4444 E liverpool@picurehouses.co.uk W fact.co.uk 15: Punch Tarmey’s 31 Grafton Street, Cains Brewery Village L8 5SD T +44(0) 151 315 0575 W punchtarmeys.co.uk

16: Sefton Park Palm House Sefton Park, L17 1AP T +44 (0) 151 726 9304 E info@palmhouse.org.uk W palmhouse.org.uk 17: Shenanigans 77 Tithebarn Street, L2 2EN T +44 (0) 151 255 0000 E shenanigansbar@hotmail.com W shenanigansliverpool.co.uk 18: St Luke’s Bombed Out Church Leece Street, L1 2TR T +44 (0) 771 432 8415 E ambrosereynolds@bombedoutchurch.com W bombedoutchurch.com 19: Tate Liverpool (find us in Tate Exchange) Albert Dock, L3 4BB T +44 (0) 151 702 7400 E visiting.liverpool@tate.org.uk W tate.org.uk 20: Waterstones 12 College Lane, L1 3DL T +44(0) 151 709 9820 E liverpoolone@waterstones.com W waterstones.com

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and community back in Ireland? That he convinced a group of planters in the midst of a slave conspiracy trial suggests that his was an irrefutable claim. He was kept imprisoned until April 1737 when the council decided not to prosecute him as he had already “suffered great hardships” but only on the proviso that his owner, Col. Crump, sent him immediately back to Ireland. At this point his name leaves the historical record.

Jack’s case highlights important aspects of Ireland’s relationship with the Black Atlantic.

1. It raises questions about racial identity in the home nations and the contradictions and conflicts in the planters’ ideologies.

Jack was kidnapped as a ‘free born’ person in Ireland and sold into slavery, but so were most of those that were from West Africa. Jack’s plight was sympathised with because he was Irish, and in the eyes of the planters, freeborn Irish subjects, regardless of their skin colour, were not to be enslaved. Gaspar however sees Jack’s release and transportation to Ireland as less about compassion and more an expedient move to deport a potentially troublesome individual against whom they had weak evidence.

2. Were there other Irish in Antigua? Irish people made up a reasonable portion of the white population of Antigua.

According to William Stapleton’s 1678 census, around 26% of the colony were Irish and a 1702 statute in Antigua identified Irish people as colonists as opposed to ‘aliens’: “that the Number of Aliens thus admitted to settle among us, shall not exceed the One-fourth of English, Scotch, Irish, and Cariole [Creole] Subjects”. While most of the Irish in Antigua were servants and merchants, there were also some Irish planters and slave owners in the colony, from diverse political, social and religious backgrounds, bearing family names such as Browne, Burke, Gaynor, Delap, Nugent, Lynch, Murphy, Skerrett, Tuite, Nihell, and Kirwan.

3. It highlights the presence of Africans or people of African descent living in 18th century Ireland. W.A. Hart estimates their number to have been about 2,000 and that many would have been servants or enslaved. Slave sale adverts certainly appeared in Irish newspapers: “A Neat beautiful black negro girl, just brought from Carolina, aged 11 or 12 years, speaks good English; to be disposed of.” (Dublin, 1768). Black Irish people were also part of the free population and undoubtedly some intermarried. But as Jack’s story makes clear, due to the colour of their skin, they and their families were at risk of being kidnapped in Ireland and shipped across the Atlantic and sold into chattel slavery in the colonies. Racial slavery had been adopted from Iberian slave systems by planters in the Anglo-American colonies since the early 17th century.

As these plantations became increasingly lucrative, and slave populations grew, the laws grew in severity; the racism more absolute. Paths to freedom narrowed exponentially. By 1740 the South Carolina slave code starkly announced that “it shall be always presumed that every Negro, Indian, mulatto, and mustizo, is a slave…” .

4. That Jack was kidnapped in Ireland and sold into slavery reminds us of the significant Irish trade with the plantations.

Throughout the 18th century many hundreds of ships left Irish ports to directly trade with the various European slavocracies in the West Indies. Antigua was heavily reliant on the importation of Irish provisions from the late 17th century on. The Roche and Kelly merchant families of Limerick exported countless tonnes of provisions to Antigua and their contact in the colony, Lawrence Nihell, was also from Limerick. This was one side of the trade between Ireland and Antigua. Planters paid for the import of Irish provisions (beef, butter, pork, etc.) with slave produce (rum, sugar) and this slave produce was sold by grocers all over Ireland. This import of

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provisions from Ireland was crucially important as it allowed the slavocracy to maximise the growth of cash crops for export.

In 1719-1720, likely the year that Jack was kidnapped, over 10% of all the ships that docked in the main port in Antigua had travelled directly from Ireland or stopped there to pick up provisions. According to Thomas Truxes the near nine thousand barrels of beef, landed in Antigua that year, “accounted for one-fifth of Ireland’s plantation export of that article”. Around this time, Irish provisions ships were also known to engage in clandestine slave trading with Antigua, with one trader noting that it was common that they “buy Negroes out of our ships in the Road...which Negroes they carry to Antegua and sell there…”.

In 1733, just three years before the slave conspiracy, most of the beef, pork, butter and herrings purchased by planters in Antigua was exported there by Irish merchants. It is thus no coincidence that when the planter elite in Antigua wrote a public defence of their mass execution and torture of slaves, it was published not in The Metropole, but in Dublin, Ireland.

By 1770 the Irish market absorbed nearly 90% of Antigua’s total rum exports and during 1774 alone over 100,000 gallons of rum were imported to Dublin from Antigua. This lucrative trade relationship continued into the early 19th century.

On a single day in February 1809 the house of O’Connor and More, alone, imported “757 hogsheads, 206 tierces, and 19 barrels of sugar from Antigua, bringing to the revenue near 17,000l.” It was amidst this transatlantic trade in provisions, slave produce and slaves, that Jack was taken by Irish merchants and sold as just another piece of valuable merchandise.

5. Jack’s story recalls how some Irish people were directly involved in the slave trade. Due to the imposition of navigation laws Irish merchants were precluded from directly engaging in the transatlantic slave trade (in Ireland), but many became successful slave traders in English and French slave trade hubs such as Liverpool, Bristol and Nantes.

Most notable in Liverpool was David Tuohy. Originally from Tralee, Co. Kerry, he settled in Liverpool in the 1750s.

He captained at least four slave trading voyages from 1766-1771. In 1766 he sailed Sam, a Boston built vessel, from Liverpool to West Central Africa, where he bought 284 African people. There were 32 middle passage deaths crossing the Atlantic. The survivors were sold in Barbados and Grenada.

In 1767 he sailed Sally and on this occasion the 234 surviving slaves were sold to planters in Antigua. On the same ship in 1769 he sailed to the Windward Coast, where he bought 200 African people, and on to the Gold Coast where he bought a further 130 people. En route 87 of his victims died during the middle passage; survivors were sold at Grenada.

A 26.4% death rate. In 1771 he sailed The Ranger to West Africa, purchasing 257 people. 47 died during the middle passage. Survivors were sold at Barbados and Antigua.

By that point he had made enough money to become a slave ship owner and thus he became a part-owner of ten Liverpool slave ships from 1772-1786.

6. How long did Irish people benefit from plantation slavery in Antigua? When slavery was abolished in the British West Indies (1834) the following Irish surnames were present among slave owners in Antigua who claimed compensation payments; Buckley, Burke, Byrne, Collins, Corbett, Curtin, Doyle, Halloran, Keane, Kelly, Lynch, Malone, McCarthy, O’Brien, O’Connor, O’Loughlin, O’Shaughnessy, Ryan and Shiell.

Further Reading Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2008) | Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies: Vol. 43, Antigua (17 January 1737) | David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua (Duke University Press, 1993) | David Barry Gaspar, “A Mockery of Freedom”: The Status of Freedmen in Antiguan Slave Society Before 1760, New West Indian Guide 59, no. 3/4 (1985): 135-48 | W.A. Hart, Africans in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 33 (May, 2002), 19-32 | Liam Hogan, Exaggeration and the appropriation of the torture of enslaved Africans in the “Irish slaves” meme, Medium (2015) URL: https://medium.com/@Limerick1914 we-had-it-worse-eebe705c41a | R.C. Nash, Irish Atlantic Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, The William and Mary Quarterly Vol. 42, No. 3 (1985), 329-356 | Nini Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612-1865 (Palgrave, 2007) | R.B. Sheridan, The Rise of a Colonial Gentry: A Case Study of Antigua, 1730-1775, The Economic History Review New Series, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1961), 342-357 | The Tuohy Papers, Slave trade records from Liverpool, 1754-1792, British Online Archives/ Liverpool Record Office URL: https://microform.digital/ boa/collections/5/volumes/26/the-tuohy-papers | Thomas M. Truxes, Irish-American Trade 1660-1783 (Cambridge University Press, 1988)

The story of ‘Mulatto Jack’ reminds us that human trafficking is still a threat that exists today, despite seeming like a remote issue. In 2016, it was estimated that 40.3m people were victims of modern slavery; 70% women and girls. This figure isn’t decreasing. 10,000-13,000 of these people are believed to be in the UK. Looking at the facts of slavery is important to help us bear witness to and recognise slavery today, thus ensuring misappropriation is tempered is highly important.

Intersted in this subject?

You may be interested on our session about the

1919 Race Riots and dual-heritage day taking place at Tate Liverpool on Mon 14 Oct as part of In:Visible Women, organised with COoL for Black History Month.

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Bringing Liverpool and Ireland closer together using arts and culture.

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Divided loyalties: The Liverpool Irish and the Great War Each year, the Liverpool Irish Festival is approached with new books, stories of Irish bravery or a centenary we ought to be commemorating. This year, Colin Cousins approached us with all three. Having been picked up by The History Press, Colin’s book Cinderella Soldiers: The Irish in Liverpool in the Great War is finding its way on to book store shelves across the country and so it should. Detailing the much overlooked Liverpool Eighth Battalion, Colin has travelled deep in to the psyche of the Battalion, its operations and the treatment of its predominantly Irish service force.

Exclusively for the Liverpool Irish Festival, Colin has written an article about identity, picking up on an individual’s story from a 100 years ago.  If anyone within Liverpool’s Irish community is contemplating what it means to be Irish in 2019, spare a thought for a lonely former Liverpool Irish soldier, recently returned from the front in 1919 who was faced with the dilemma about how and if he should celebrate Ireland’s patron saint.

In a letter to the Liverpool Echo on 17 March 1919, the former soldier related how he, as a Catholic Liverpool Irishman, was struggling to reconcile his military service during the war with the post-war situation in Ireland and the loss of his Liverpool Irish comrades. His own identity is unknown, he chose to sign his letter as ‘J.A.T.’ He wondered whether wearing his shamrock on St. Patrick’s Day might be regarded with ‘a mixture of treason, heresy and [apostasy]’. More ominously, he believed that the humble shamrock might be regarded as a Sinn Fein badge. He had also read Éamon De Valera’s address To the Irish in England, which praised the Irish rebels of Easter 1916 and pointed an accusatory finger at Britain’s Irish ex-servicemen; ‘Whilst you were away crusading abroad, they rose up against tyranny at home’. De Valera argued that their duty now was to support Ireland’s right to self-determination.

J.A.T. claimed that ‘few’ of the Liverpool Irishmen who had enlisted with him at the Old Haymarket in 1914, had any sympathy or care for a ‘political creed’ [that] refused to acknowledge the honour of Major Willie Redmond, brother of the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party who had been killed in action in 1917. He suspected that all Liverpool Irish ex-service men harboured a divided allegiance and faced a similar dilemma.

He was, of course, right about the ‘few’ Liverpool Irishmen who had rejected the rhetoric of the Irish Parliamentary leader John Redmond to go wherever the firing line extended. The Home Rule crisis of 1912 led to the formation of the Irish National Volunteers (INV), formed in response to Sir Edward Carson’s Ulster Volunteer Force. As in Ireland, the majority of the INV membership in Liverpool supported Redmond’s stance on the war. J.A.T.’s ‘few’ represented Liverpool Irish physical force nationalists who rejected the notion for fighting for England; their loyalty was to Ireland. Redmond’s call to arms was echoed by the eloquence of their very own nationalist M.P. for the Scotland Division, the urbane T.P. O’Connor. Between August and December 1914, some 3,500 men had enlisted with the Eighth (Irish) Battalion, King’s Liverpool Regiment.

Writing at the beginning of the Great War, T.P. O’Connor described the Irish in Britain as occupying ‘a curious middle place’. This was reflected in the Eighth Irish’s recruiting poster, emblazoned with ‘Erin Go Bragh’ (from ‘Éirinn go Brách’ meaning ‘Ireland Forever’) and ‘God save the King’. During the war the battalion sought to maintain their Irish identity. They were presented with Irish wolfhounds, celebrated St. Patrick’s Day, wore shamrocks, marched past to the strains of Garryowen and wore green during their boxing tournaments. There was a sense of outrage in Liverpool’s Irish community when the War Office removed the ‘Irish’ designation when reporting casualties; the battalion was referred to as just “Eighth Battalion” of the King’s Liverpool Regiment. T.P. O’Connor raised the matter in parliament. At home, the Liverpool Catholic Herald extoled the virtue and heroism of Irish Catholic Soldiers, while the Liverpool Echo and Evening Express highlighted the plight of the Eighth (Irish) Battalion’s lack of comforts, which was due to the straitened circumstances of their families. Urging the people of Liverpool to donate, the papers argued that there should be no ‘Cinderella battalion in Liverpool’.

One week before the ‘few’ Liverpool Lambs took part in the Easter Rising in Dublin, their former neighbours in the Eighth (Irish) Battalion carried out one of the most famous raids of the war at Blaireville on 17-18 April 1916. They went on to fight with distinction at Festubert, the Somme and Passchendaele. A total of 870 men and 47 officers from the battalion died during the war.

J.A.T. remembered sitting in a trench with three other Liverpool Irishmen on St. Patrick’s Day 1918 waiting for the massive German Offensive, which would come on the 21 March. They made a pact to convene in a pub on the first St. Patrick’s Day after the war. One of the men from Sefton Park was killed on the 21 March, while the other two from Scotland Road were buried in the following month in Hangard Wood. During Mass on 16 March 1919, J.A.T. listened while a priest urged the congregation to pray for the men who had fallen during the war. He made his decision and resolved his dilemma, ‘Today with the regimental cap badge on the side of my coat and the sprig of green on the other, I’ll say my prayer, and drink a glass, in memory of my Irish ‘Tommies’ – ‘traitors to Ireland’ – who died for King George’.

Sources and Credits Liverpool Echo, 17 Mar. 1919 | Imperial War Museum, Q 510. Image of 8th (Irish) battalion, King’s Liverpool Regiment Raiding party, Blaireville, France, April 1916 | St. Helens Library and Archive Services. Recruiting Poster for the 8th (Irish) battalion, King’s Liverpool Regiment | Colin Cousins, Cinderella Soldiers: The Irish in Liverpool in the Great War.

The Irish contribution to military life in Liverpool emerged in 1860 with the creation of the volunteer movement in the city. Originally designated as the 64th Liverpool Irish Volunteer Corps, their creation came about just 13 years after the great influx from famine-stricken Ireland.

The ethnic core of the battalion came from Liverpool’s north end, which included Scotland Road, Vauxhall and parts of Everton, where the Irish constituted an isolated Celtic residuum. The fact that they had been born in Liverpool was immaterial. Liverpool’s Irish children were immersed in a patriotic Celtic culture and became ‘sternly Irishised’. Between its creation and the Great War, the popularity of Liverpool’s part-time Irish soldiers endured a series of peaks and troughs closely aligned to events in Ireland or related to the sectarianism of their host city. By the turn of the century, the status of the newly designated Fifth Liverpool (Irish) Volunteers was restored when a company volunteered to serve in South Africa during the Boer War. This was at a time when Irish nationalists were not only anti-war but pro-Boer.

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The History Press (Stroud, 2019)

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Bringing Liverpool and Ireland closer together using arts and culture.

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Maud Gonne: ‘A Woman of No Importance’ In past years, the Liverpool Irish Festival have worked with Liverpool Hope University and shown plays that considered Maud Gonne’s life. This year, we tie those ideas together and present Dr Trish Ferguson’s thoughts on the political activism, energy and commitment of this mostly unsung heroine, her influence and impact, providing us with yet another unique story.

In 2016, commemorations of the Easter Rising highlighted the significance of the role of a number of women of the Rising, notably Kathleen Lynn, Constance Markievicz, Helena Molony, Elizabeth O’Farrell, Mary Perolz and Margaret Skinnider.

At the time of the Rising Maud Gonne was residing in France, where she had been primarily domiciled since her separation from John MacBride, and as a result she was largely omitted from these centenary commemorations. Recent scholarship on Gonne has tended to maintain the image of her as an Easter Widow, her significance contingent on that of her husband, John MacBride, one of the 16 men executed in the aftermath of the Rising. My recently published monograph, Maud Gonne (UCD Press, 2019), emphasises that her absence from the Rising commemorations is in part due to the fact that the British War Office refused to grant her a passport so that she could return to Ireland in 1916; she was deemed too dangerous a political influence. Examining Gonne’s influence on nationalist politics through philanthropy, activism and journalism before and after the Rising, my study reclaims Gonne as an influential figure who played an important role in the formation of the Irish state.

In 1895, in an article on nationalist politics after the death of Charles Stewart Parnell, William T. Stead wrote of Maud Gonne that ‘although she is hardly likely to be successful where Wolfe Tone failed, her pilgrimage of passion is at least a picturesque incident that relieves the gloom of the political situation’. Little was W.T. Stead aware as he wrote his patronising editorial comment that when he first met Gonne in the late 1880s she was undertaking a secret mission to deliver documents to the head of the Holy Synod in St Petersburg for the Boulangiste Party. This was a venture undertaken for her lover Lucien Millevoye in the interests of their anti-British alliance. By 1892 Gonne was well-known in the press as a prominent Irish nationalist who provided food and shelter for evicted tenants in Donegal. By 1900 she was under close surveillance by Dublin Castle having taken a #LIF2019

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central role in staging a counter-demonstration to protest against the Dublin celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. The police also knew Gonne through her journalism, notably her incendiary ‘Famine Queen’ article that resulted in the seizure of all copies of United Irishman in which it was published. She also came to the attention of British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith on account of the articles she had published in the French newspaper, Le Figaro. All of this is revealed by Gonne in her memoir, A Servant of the Queen, which ends at the time of her ill-fated marriage to John MacBride, and therefore fails to do full justice to her contribution to Irish politics. My study of Gonne’s life emphasises her political acumen, the significance of her journalism, and the foundation of newspapers and pamphlets that highlighted the plight of marginalised individuals suffering under British rule, particularly evicted tenants, the Boers, children and prisoners.

At a time when the English newspapers expressed hostility toward Ireland with descriptions and cartoons of the Irish as monkeys, drunks and terrorist leprechauns, Gonne viewed the press as her battleground. She turned to writing, seeing the ‘pen as her only available weapon’. When a parliamentary report on the use of the battering ram in evictions held that it was ‘only used for the purpose of self-defence’, she published articles with photographic evidence of the battering ram demolishing homesteads as elderly evicted tenants looked on helplessly, highlighting that evictions were a ‘one-sided battle’.

When Gladstone stated that the treatment of Michael Davitt, a prominent nationalist prisoner sentenced to hard labour in Portland Prison, had been ‘in point of decency and indulgence, everything that could reasonably be desired’, Gonne revealed the harsh conditions endured by Irish prisoners in English prisons, highlighting the unsanitary conditions and the prevalence of mental health problems among those in solitary confinement. She also campaigned for the recognition of political status for republican prisoners.

When Gonne contacted Davitt to offer her help for the cause, he initially suspected that she was an agent provocateur.

‘What is this little game?’ he wrote on a letter she sent to him, ‘Probably a Times plot’. As an English-born nationalist, even seen by her close friend Eileen O’Brien as part of the ascendancy, Gonne’s intentions were subject to suspicion throughout her life, but she committed her energies to the public world and to countering British propaganda. The American press took their information on Irish affairs from English news agencies and Gonne complained that ‘American accounts of events in Ireland [are] so distorted that none would recognise them, and the distortion is always to the disadvantage of the nationalists.’ In her self-styled role as the Irish Joan of Arc, Gonne embarked on gruelling lecture tours in America. There she courted the press and featured prominently in American newspapers that printed carefullystaged, full-page photographs of her visiting the graves of nationalist heroes, alongside articles and interviews on the suffering of the Irish under British rule. The San Francisco Call noted: ‘The beautiful patriot is a distinctly modern product.

She believes firmly in the axiom “the pen is mightier than the sword” and it is to the press and the lecture-platform that she looks to for the liberation of Ireland rather than to deeds of physical prowess’. On her return to Ireland, following in the footsteps of Lady Jane Wilde, Gonne became ‘The New Speranza’, establishing and funding newspapers and writing tirelessly to publish on Ireland under British rule.

Having trained as an actress, Gonne turned her attention to the stage upon her return to Ireland, directing the romantic interests of the young poet Yeats instead toward her nationalist propaganda campaign. This culminated in Yeats and Lady Gregory writing a play for Gonne’s nationalist society, Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland), on Yeats’s condition that Gonne would play the title role in Cathleen ni Houlihan. While the impact of the play on men has been well documented, less has been said about the effect of the play on its female audience and players, and on their political involvement in the Rising. Placing women centre stage, Cathleen ni Houlihan galvanised to action a number of members of Inghinidhe na hÉireann. Máire Comerford recorded that the night it premiered ‘my fate was sealed, my course in life set in the direction it was to take’. She also recognised the play’s pervasive impact on her contemporaries, noting that ‘Helena Molony, a founder member, and Maeve Cavanagh MacDowell went on to the Irish Citizen Army’.

Furthermore, she notes Elizabeth O’Farrell and Julia Grennan, who distinguished themselves as dispatch carriers from the GPO and in Easter Week had both been with Inghinidhe in the audience at the first performance of Cathleen ni Houlihan.

Gonne had established Inghinidhe na hÉireann because nationalist societies often excluded women and she felt that ‘this Irish anti-feminism was a handicap to the National Movement’. Her unflinching confidence and charisma drew women within Irish nationalism to place them centre stage again upon the outbreak of the Civil War, when she formed the Women’s Peace Committee. Gonne also established the Women’s Prisoners’ Defence League, publishing a monthly news-sheet under the pseudonym ‘a woman of no importance’, and through the pages of Prison Bars, the newssheet she founded, she decried the patriarchal limitations imposed by Article 41. In 1937 as the Irish state ratified the current Irish constitution, Gonne committed her memoirs to posterity to record her achievements. Her tentative thoughts on her legacy expressed in a letter to Yeats in 1915, that ‘Perhaps when we are dead, I shall be known by those poems of yours’, remain too true.

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Rebels and Friends During #LIF2018 Liverpool Hope University Associate Professor Sonja Tiernan presented a brilliantly received talk at the International Slavery Museum about the life and activism of Countess Markievicz, one of the better-understood Irish suffragists, though still widely unrecognised in Great Britain today. This year, Lynx Theatre and Poetry widens the story about her and her life with Rebels and Friends, a play devised 25 years ago using over 600 archive documents.

Examining the relationship between her and her sister Eva, the play celebrates these two women, their activism, loyalty and passion. Artistic Director, William Anderson, tells us more.  In 1918, the first woman elected to the British parliament was in prison on a trumped-up charge. Following a year of centenary celebrations of (some) women ‘getting the vote’, too few people know about her election. Her name was Constance Markievicz, and Lynx Theatre and Poetry is bringing her unique story to this year’s Liverpool Irish Festival in a new production of the ‘stunning and evocative’ play Rebels and Friends (see listings).

The play tells how Constance and her sister Eva, born into the wealthy Gore-Booth family in Sligo, and described

by W.B Yeats as ‘Two girls in silk kimonos, both beautiful’, rejected the conventions of their class, and dedicated themselves to working people and Irish independence.

The play’s author, Jacqueline Mulhallen said: ‘These were active women, not Lady Bountifuls.

‘Constance was an artist who married a Polish count, but she also ran a soup kitchen in the Dublin lockout and carried sacks of coal up flights of stairs for the needy. In 1916 she was one of the leaders of the Easter Rising and she became Labour Minister in the (illegal) Irish Dail.

‘Eva was a poet and pacifist, defending conscientious objectors in WW1. With her lifelong partner Esther Roper, she campaigned in northwest England for trade union rights, education and the vote for working women. These are women who should never be forgotten’.

A reviewer in Cork (where Lynx had to put in extra seating for the original production) said ‘Rebels and Friends has a documentary sweep ... which lifts it above mere theatre and unfolds history in quite the most absorbing fashion’, and audiences agreed. Peter Burman, a former director of National Trust Scotland said ‘I was so totally gripped by it that I’d totally forgotten where I was’.

Thirty years after it was first staged, this new production of Rebels and Friends has attracted cross-border support with funding from both Arts Council England and the Irish Government’s Emigrant Support Programme, as well as from Unite the Union. After all, with Brexit, it may be a good time to remind people of the problems which underlay the Troubles and the Good Friday peace agreement.

For me, these extraordinary lives, need an extraordinary production to realise them. In addition to the two performers there is a continuous backdrop of some 600 images: archive photographs, Eva and Constance’s rarely seen paintings and drawings and specially commissioned photographs of Ireland, England and Italy. There is poetry, rebel songs, traditional Irish harp and fiddle music and dance. Our new production is choreographed by Siân Williams, who founded The Kosh dance company. Siân is currently Master of Dance at The Globe Theatre (London), and was choreographer for the BBC’s acclaimed Wolf Hall.

Rebels and Friends is still ground-breaking for the richness of its style and for its balance in capturing the political and the personal in the lives of Constance and Eva. Its revival offers a new generation a chance to experience the power of their unique story creatively, as told by Lynx Theatre and Poetry, and to learn more about two women of historical importance who seem to be becoming invisible. After the two performances in Liverpool, the play will continue touring the northwest and then up to Newcastle and down to London.

Details are available at lynxtheatreandpoetry.org/ performances

Mulhallen also wrote a highly successful one-woman play about Sylvia Pankhurst, Sylvia, which was revived a couple of years ago, and has been touring the northwest. ‘It was while I was writing Sylvia that I found out that Eva had inspired Christabel Pankhurst to found the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Despite having an Irish father, I did not know about these sisters, and so the play was an exploration of my own history as well as theirs. In addition, because of the complexity of British-Irish relations, I did not want to interpret the past and their roles, but to bring them to life using their own words and documentary evidence alone’.

Further reading:

Her effectiveness navigating the challenge is shown by the packed houses the play drew in England and Ireland. Between 1989 and 1992 it toured from Honiton to Hexham in England (including The Flying Picket Theatre in Liverpool), and three times around Ireland, including Northern Ireland in 1990.

That year it was also the first play on an Irish theme performed in Birmingham since the bombings of 1974. When it played in Dublin in 1991, Lynx’s staff were drawn from all quarters of the dispute over Ireland.

Patrick Quigley, Sisters Against the Empire: Countess Constance Markievicz and Eva Gore-Booth, 1916-17 (Liffey Press, €19.95) | Sonja Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth: An Image of Such Politics (Manchester University Press, £17.99) | Anne Haverty, Constance Markievicz, Irish Revolutionary (Lilliput Press, 2016) | Jacqueline van Voris, Constance Markievicz in the Cause of Ireland (University of Massachusetts Press, 1967)

Credit: Jacqueline Mulhallen as Constance and Suzy Fry as Eva in the original production of Rebels and Friends © William Alderson

Rebels and Friends Liverpool Playhouse 7.30pm, Fri 25 and Sat 26 Oct £15/£12; liverpoolirishfestival.com

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Caillte

Liverpool Irish Festival has many ways of finding new work. Regularly we receive direct approaches about work artists have created; we also commission work or build funding applications and projects with individuals or organisations that we spot an opportunity with. From time-to-time partners introduce us to new faces, as in the case of Clara Kerr, Glas Creative and their new work: Caillte who were introduced to us by Ambrose and Laura from St Luke’s Bombed Out Church.

Such was the ambition of the work from this young group, teamed with a sensitivity in storytelling, we wanted to further explore how the work came in to existence, what barriers there had been to telling the story and how the creative spark was pursued.

Trigger warning: Caillte is written in response to the Tuam grave findings, thus is a piece about adoption, baby death and faith. As investigations are ongoing and individual and collective trauma is high, we recommend self-care ahead of reading. Whilst there are no graphic statements or images we urge you to be mindful of the content in order to avoid any severe discomfort.

Below, recent graduate, choreographer and chief author of Caillte explores her creative process and the dance’s execution.

Caillte means ‘lost’ in Irish Gaelic.

I am Clara Kerr, a 2019 dance graduate from the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts (LIPA). Caillte is inspired by recently uncovered stories of the mistreatment of women and their children in Ireland’s notorious ‘Mother and Baby Homes’, run by the Catholic Church throughout the twentieth century.

In the last two years these institutions have featured in international news due to the discovery of bones at one such site for unmarried pregnant women: The Tuam Mother and Baby Home (Co. Galway, ROI; operational 1925-1961).

This discovery sparked a national inquiry into what happened in these homes and how both the mothers and children were treated. Many illegal adoptions were discovered, as well as fake death certificates, which were issued to stop the young mothers from looking for their children. It is an extremely sad and very Irish tragedy that is still under investigation.

Having only graduated recently, I have been finding my feet as a choreographer over the last 3 years. I feel dance is the most incredible way to get across a story -or feeling- in an emotionally intelligent and heightened way. To me, dancers are the world’s most beautiful story tellers and I felt this was an important story to tell.

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It was the summer of 2018 when I first heard the awful stories of what happened, in these homes, through a series of podcasts on BBC Radio 4 by journalist Becky Milligan called The Home Babies. I immediately knew I needed to make a piece about the women’s loss and tell their stories.

In her podcasts, Milligan focused her attention on Tuam, the site of a former Mother and Baby Home, where the work of a local historian Catherine Corless had resulted in the discovery of bones. Milligan travelled to Tuam where she asked local people what they knew about the Mother and Baby Home in their town. It was an incredibly insightful and moving series. People responded to Milligan’s sensitive interviewing with poignant stories of what they remembered, which sparked a story inside me: how would it feel to be one of these young women in the home?

I started to develop this idea by -first-and-foremost- doing as much research into Mother and Baby Homes as I could; reading Catherine Corless’s work and lectures and making a visit to the site in Tuam, where the Mother and Baby Home had been. I found it fascinating. I wanted to understand as much as possible before starting to select music and choreograph the pieces. I was struck by how very few women had come forward to tell their stories -through shame or fear- of how their community, the church and even their own family and friends might react.

As I researched more deeply, I knew I wanted the main focus to be the emotional and physical journey of the women that went through the home. I decided to build the story around one girl, beginning at her home (with her happy and comfortable with family and friends); to meeting a boy; telling her parents she was pregnant; being banished by them and arriving at the Mother and Baby Home followed by the tormented journey of being there and learning to cope.

I knew I wanted to end the piece with the girl trying to integrate back into her community. My research had revealed that the girls were often shunned by their communities and families when they returned home and were sometimesforced to find shelter in work houses.

My overall aim for the piece was to make people more aware of this incredibly important and sad part of Irish history, especially in England. I felt it was important to give all the women who suffered in these homes the voice they never had and to help take steps towards justice for these women and their babies. It is a story that is both hard to tell and hard to hear, particularly for Irish audiences. However we cannot deny our history. It became imperative to me to show how emotionally traumatising this experience would have been for these young women, many of whom are still living with the aftermath of what happened and are still afraid to tell their truth.

The creative process of choreographing such an important and moving piece was a process I will never forget. It was a collaborative experience and often the dancers and I worked together to create a story that both the audience and those dancing in it connected with.

It has been such an honour to devise this piece with such a beautiful and supportive group of dancers and friends. I could not have wished for a harder working or more open-minded cast and team.

Caillte is dedicated to all the young Irish women who lost their babies and to all the babies who lost their mothers. I hear your voices, you are not forgotten.

Caillte will be performed and produced by Glas Creative at Tate Liverpool as part of In:Visible Women, which during #LIF2019 will take place as part of Tate Exchange. See

In:Visible Women listings for performance and Q&A details.

Glas Creative is an all-female production company who, through performance, aim to give a voice to those we feel need to be heard. From all across the UK, the team behind Glas Creative has a passion for telling important stories in a beautiful, powerful way.

Liverpool Irish Festival is proud to support this new work.

However, we recognise that much more work (professional and civic inquiry) will be necessary to truly understand and report the experiences of those who were forced to endure the mother and baby homes. A Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation has been set up and is working to interrogate the ecclesiastic, societal and systemic norms that permitted or forced these acts. We do not see this production as a full stop to this work, but part of a much wider conversation. For any one affected by the Tuam story, Clara’s article or Caillte, the following resources are available: The Home Babies can be downloaded and listened to here: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06b5fzl/episodes/downloads See the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation website here: mbhcoi.ie TUSLA -The Child and Family Agency, Information and Tracing Services- can be accessed at tusla.ie/services/ alternative-care/adoption-services/tracing-service Adoption Authority of Ireland (AAI), Information and Tracing Services can be accessed at aai.gov.ie

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Chosen Daughter: Maz O’Connor After questioning my mum -and my nana, who adopted her- the answers we have are as follows: • Yes, Mum’s birth mother was Irish • Yes, the adoption home was run by nuns.

We know very little about her except that she was unmarried, in her late twenties and working in England as a domestic servant when she became pregnant; and no, we don’t know that she was mistreated. There is scant information online about the adoption home, but there are anecdotal recollections on message boards from people who gave birth or were adopted from there claiming that mothers were expected to work around 3 months in exchange for the help the nuns gave them. And, though I wish I knew more, that’s all I can find.

In recent months, Maz O’Connor has released her new album Chosen Daughter, a series of songs prompted by a discussion with her mother. Involving an adoption story, the Liverpool Irish Festival recognises that many Irish families have similar stories in their history, some of which have been discovered and some as yet uncovered. Many may not have discovered their truths, having been deliberately hidden. When reading Maz’s familial story, we recognise that this is one person’s experience, based on the relationship they have with their family and the creative expression they have chosen to use.

Trigger warning: for some, adoption is a highly sensitive subject.

Please read with self-care in mind. If you require support in locating your family’s history, it might be worth considering visiting TUSLA (The Child and Family Agency, Information and Tracing Services) tulsa.ie In the meantime, Maz O’Connor opens up on her family’s past and how it has opened new doors to thinking about feminism, identity and expression.

Last Christmas, my mum and I watched Philomena together.

In case you haven’t seen it, Philomena is a film about unmarried Irish girls, forced to work in laundries run by the Church and give up their babies to American families often in exchange for money. As a woman in her 70s, Philomena enlists the help of an English journalist in her search for her lost son. There is a stomach-turning moment in the film when it is revealed that the adoption records had been destroyed in a fire: none of the children can be traced. It brought something to my own mum’s mind…

That’s funny,’ she said. ‘That’s what happened in my adoption home. All the records were lost in a fire’.

She had never shared this with me before. In fact, believe it or not, my mum and I had barely ever talked about her own adoption. Perhaps when you grow up knowing the facts -and knowing that it makes no difference to how loved you feel by your adoptive parents (or grandparents in my case)- then there isn’t much to discuss. Or at least there wasn’t until we watched this film together and suddenly I had a hundred questions. Was her birth mother Irish? Was the adoption home run by nuns? How much did she know about her birth mother? Was she mistreated?

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Earlier that year my dad had told me a story about another of my female ancestors, or my foremothers as I have taken to calling them. This was the story of my great-aunty Mona, my paternal grandmother’s sister, and how, thanks to her courage, my grandmother came to be educated and live the rest of her life in Liverpool.

The picture below shows my Gran (the one standing up in the middle) and her four sisters; Terry, Gertie, Mona and Brenda. They were all born in Waterford, South East Ireland.

My Gran was the youngest of the sisters and shortly after she was born their father died. Their father was a grocer, and the family lived in the flat above the shop, where they also took in lodgers. When their father died they lost the shop and so they lost their home as well. My great-grandmother, left with five young girls, was really struggling. They had nowhere to live and relied on family members to put them up. This was not a permanent solution, but for five young girls and a single mother, in 1920s Ireland, there weren’t many options. The eldest of the sisters, Mona, made a decision to leave Ireland and travel alone to America where she would become a nun.

She was 16 when she left.

The Order she went to live with educated and housed her four sisters in England. She got herself out of poverty and gave her sisters a chance to get an education. This provided her mother the time and freedom to train as a midwife and get her life back on track. But to do this Mona had been required to make a decision, at an incredibly young age, that would alter the course of the rest of her life. She never saw her mother or her sister Terry again; by the time she made her first visit back to Ireland in 1959 they had both died.

I met Mona a few times as a child and always found her warm and full of laughter. It seems she had lived a happy life in California, as a sister with the Order of the Royal Sacred Heart of Mary. I of course knew she was a nun, it was hard to miss the habit, but I didn’t know the full story until recently.

When I did learn of it, it moved me so much that a song came to me about Mona, which I called San Francisco. More songs came when I visited the farm in Waterford that belonged to Gertie (another of the sisters last year. I felt -I stil feelcompelled to tell these women’s stories.

You see, as a feminist, I’m all about choice. To me, feminism is choice; the freedom of choosing and the ability to choose your freedom. However that looks. So if this was Mona’s choice, if she had a vocation– which she apparently did– then this story isn’t necessarily one of injustice. The same could be said of the story of my mum’s birth mother; if she truly had a choice about whether to keep her daughter then her story is certainly less disturbing, if no less sad.

But to be female and Irish at the time meant that their choices were limited. And that’s what moved me: reflecting on my own experiences I am overwhelmed with gratitude for the sacrifices that the women who came before me made so that I can enjoy the life I do. To be learning the stories of my foremothers in 2018, as the Repeal the Eighth movement was finally successful, felt particularly poignant to me. To learn that both of my grandmothers were Irish, in that context, was important to my own understanding of who I am. It was only two generations ago that my grandmothers had such little choice over their own lives. It is only two generations later that young Irish women enjoy a freedom they could only have dreamed of. A freedom of body, freedom of career, freedom of expression. What would they have thought of that? I hope they would be, like me, singing in celebration.

Maz O’Connor will perform as part of

Visible Women at the Liverpool Philharmonic Music Room on Wed 23 Oct 2019. Please see event listing for full details.

Philomena is available on the BFI Player, Netflix and Amazon Prime.

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Kilkelly: The Prick & The Petal Facing Ireland’s scars through art, storytelling and dark folk music.

The Liverpool Irish Festival always likes to challenge our artists (and audiences) to try new things, describe their work publicly and provide additional opportunities in which people can shine.

Since starting their email chain, the Festival and Kilkelly have been discussing storytelling and how different forms provide mechanisms for expression and inspiration for other mediums. Using music as a vehicle and visual art, critical dialogue and mass culture as stimuli, Kilkelly are offering a new presentation of their music. Here, they tell us more about the shape and style of their new album and how the visual art affects the audio art.

Kilkelly’s debut album The Prick and the Petal is an artistic investigation, through song and ‘conceptional’ art, into the psyche of the superstitious, the oppressed and the destitute of old Ireland. It demonstrates how grievances of the past resurface to this day through depression, alcoholism and drug abuse in modern Ireland. The work is a collaboration between songwriter, Conor Kilkelly, (Drogheda, Ireland) and visual artist and band-member Stephanie Hannon (Coventry, England; ancestry, Limerick, Ireland) resulting in fully formed art piece and concept album.

Lamenting lyrics and spoken word guide us through the eleven songs, depicting the scenes of each act with explicit, visceral realism. Accompanied by dark-folk style acoustic guitar, double bass, accordion, cello and percussion; all available in the times of old Ireland.

The artworks, although directly inspired by Kilkelly’s music, are more ambiguous. Heavy in emotion, they paint a story of Ireland that throughout history has only been whispered.

The public airing of grievances, both internal and external are depicted by Hannon representing the plight the characters and her grandfather’s journey from Limerick to Coventry in the 1950’s. Her work encompasses the religious dogma of the time, the treatment of Irish immigrants in England, as well as the mythological superstitious tropes so rampant in the lives of the Irish.

The era in which Kilkelly’s narrative takes place, is unknown, which perhaps suggests that the very same preoccupations of the mind that hold our protagonists hostage, still hold true today. It is only in airing these topics that we urge a dialogue on the hardest topics in Ireland’s past in an effort to defuse the impact they have over the nation today.

Conor Kilkelly says: ‘Anyone who’s lived in Ireland has an uncomfortable relationship with loss. The devastation of the famine, where impoverished people were only allowed sustain their lives with one measly crop (and were left to die or emigrate when it inevitably failed) knows that fleeing is in the country’s DNA. ‘Every recession sees this unconscious fear breach the surface of society, and our young go far afield, as if intuited; a biological survival tool passed down by those lucky enough to have survived before. I left in the last big bust. I went to Berlin. I never confronted why. Said ‘I went on a whim and stayed’, never addressing what the makings of a whim amount to when you boil it down far enough. It was only during the making of this album that I realized the extent of my repression of it all: of leaving, of Ireland’s past, of our theocratic rule for so many years, and how that’s left the psyche of the State reeling and emotionally scarred.

Joined together, as two ex-pat artists living in Berlin, they try to celebrate -and brutally assess- how Ireland’s traumas and eccentricities are held in the minds of those who’ve journeyed away. In Kilkelly’s case, this occurred as a young adult, and in Hannon’s, it is considered through her grandfather’s emigration to England.

The narrative is a simple, and familiar story: two star crossed lovers, ripped apart by the lures of depravity heralded by the desperation of the times. With their relationship in tatters, the lovers separate, and we follow each of them as they journey aimlessly through the recesses of society and the darkest corners of the Celtic mind. Joe and Mary are plagued by guilt, driven mad, to murder, drink, drugs and prostitution, and we, the perceiver, look on through the descriptions of their victims and through their own internal monologues.

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‘I write in the same ‘whim’ like way, in so far as I try to think as little as possible about what I’m saying or doing until I’m faced with the ugly truth of it - the end result. Only then do I decide whether or not I can bear to show it. Thankfully characters emerged that cloak the content’s personal nature, to a degree, and give a narrative I can feel at least superficially [remain] apart from and so deliver the grit and grief of Ireland’s past with respect and with its people as the focus, not me.

‘Only when I found I had eleven songs, all relating to those characters we’ve stumbled upon lying in the gutter, or drinking themselves to death, or simply not being able to cope with the times and fleeing as ‘Anywhere but here will do’ (as one song laments), only then did I realise I had written an album of connected, interrelated songs, dealing with loss -Ireland’s loss- and, as such, mine.

‘Working with Stephanie Hannon allowed these characters to take form, as she instinctively curated and amassed materials that somehow seemed to belong to those I sang for and about.

‘During the creation of the album Stephanie became an Irish citizen, having retraced her grandfather’s steps, who migrated to her birthplace of Coventry. She travelled to his home of Limerick city touring as part of Kilkelly, and we spent time there; contemplated moving there, too. ‘Why not just get a live-aboard boat and forget about everything else?’. As whims go, I think it’s not bad one’.

Stephanie Hannon: ‘I visited Ireland for the first time in 2017, working initially as a photographer for Kilkelly on the first Irish tour. Ireland struck me as a magical place, where the people aren’t afraid to show compassion; aren’t afraid to let their guard down and show emotion. The Irish sing songs for each other.

Felix, Kilkelly’s German bassist cried when he saw this and it was then I realised what an impact these traditional singers truly had, and have. I felt at home and comforted by the fact that my ancestry is there and decided to apply for citizenship. This led to me delving deeper in to my family history. I thought a lot about the way my Grandad was treated as an Irishman living in England and the effect it had on his family and consequently, my family; my dad in particular.

‘My dad’s last encounter with his dad was an all-out brawl. He never forgave himself for that. The role that guilt played in my dad’s up-bringing -and how this is passed on- is striking. To illustrate it, I made a drawing called For Dad’s Dad – part of a series called Flowers For. The Flower’s For series is about the symbolism of flowers; we lay flowers when we lay someone to rest. The drawn flowers act as a gesture of understanding someone’s pain and hardship. Simple in appearance, these drawings are meaningful emblems. Their aim is to privately speak to that person -dead or alive- and offer empathy, uncompromised understanding, and -when applicable- redemption.

‘Conversations with my dad revealed his Catholic up- bringing – which was more prevalent than I had realised. He showed me his “Jesus Box”, with religious paraphernalia, and then while gathering my Nan’s possessions, I unearthed her stone with the words “My Dear Lord” painted on it, among all of the religious trinkets I found in her jewellery box; cherished, but hidden.

I suspect, in a way, this collaboration with Kilkelly is an examination of our collective boxes, passed down, for better or worse, from those who came and went before, hidden no more’ .

Kilkelly will show work and play their music, supported by singer-songwriter Sue Rynhart (and guitarist Rob Luft) at Leaf on Bold Street, Sun 20 Oct 2019, £12 adv/£14 on the door. liverpoolirishfestival.com/events

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Mellowtone and Liverpool Irish Festival - A friendship forged in a love of music The wealth of articles in this year’s newspaper remind us just how many artists and partners we work with year-on-year. We see a steady flow of talent moving across the sector and the city. None more so than in the development and work of firm Festival friends, Mellowtone. On realising they were celebrating their 15th birthday, we thought a celebration was in order and determined a look back was necessary.

David McTague, takes us through the fun we have had together and the stories that remain.

Mellowtone’s relationship with the Liverpool Irish Festival began (officially) way back in 2010. Both organisations are synonymous with music, visual arts and culture so it was a perfect fit for us to start working together, and it’s blossomed into a long and fruitful partnership.

When Mellowtone started out, it was our aim to bring people together to experience music and culture, and to visit unexpected spaces, with a laid back, friendly and sociable atmosphere. We launched in the View Two Gallery, an intimate gallery perched high above the noise and hordes of Mathew Street; an attempt to blur the boundaries between music, art and social time and space; what could a live music show look like and how could we foster a sense of curiosity and community at our events?

As we’re predominantly showcasing songwriters -and with the island of Ireland having so many fine artists (with the thread manifesting through those of Irish heritage)- we always showcase lots of music from Ireland and its diaspora. We invite the festival team to our events all year round, introducing them to new artists and spaces.

This year sees Mellowtone is celebrating 15 years of gigs and parties in Liverpool. We’ve been looking back at some of the things we’ve been up to, with more than a little reminiscing! With so many collaborations with the Liverpool Irish Festival over the past decade it proved difficult to choose what to include, so here are five of my favourite shows…

1. 2010 - Atlantic Massey at the View Two Gallery This event was our first specially programmed for the Liverpool Irish Festival and featured music from Atlantic Massey, a Derry-born Liverpool-based rabble playing folk, rock, traditional Irish music and blues; at times stripped back, raw and eloquent, yet effortlessly moving into a jovial big band feel. The night was opened by mutual friend of Mellowtone and the View Two, Stan Ambrose. Stan charmed the audience with wonderful tales, before bewitching all in attendance with the meditative tones of his Celtic harp.

Rest in Peace, Stan. Also performing were stalwarts of the local folk scene, Dave Owen and Alan Wright, with a specially

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prepared selection of Irish songs, who warmed the crowd up nicely for what was to follow; the drunken, raucous, rock, beat, stomp and songs of Atlantic Massey.

2. 2011 - Irish Songwriters at Leaf on Bold Street For this show we invited the best of Liverpool-based Irishborn acoustic musicians and songwriters to play. The night included a solo performance from Cork-born Richard O’Flynn (who went on to co-found All We Are (Domino Records) and songwriter Ronan Boyle (who hails from Warrenpoint, by the mountains of Mourne), as well as a guest slot from Celticinfluenced songwriter Andy Steele (signed to Talking Elephant).

The evening was hosted by Dave O’Grady, who went on to establish Seafoam Green and to collaborate with Mellowtone.

We released the ensemble’s debut LP -Topanga Mansionon Mellowtone Records (2017), and together co-produced our very own homage to The Band’s seminal “Last Waltz”, which ran for three years at the Philharmonic Hall.

5. 2017 - Seafoam Green at The Vines Ballroom The impressive ballroom at the back of The Vines (aka The Big House) was our home for a night of psyched-out Irish Americana from Seafoam Green, delivered with a spoonful of soul, a heavy helping of blues, and a dash of gospel, topped with the gorgeous harmonies of Dave O’Grady and Muireann McDermott-Long. For the show, the Liverpool Irish Festival commissioned Liverpool-based illustrator Andrew Berry to produce a limited edition screenprint to promote the show.

And, after the gig, it was a hazy walk up the hill for Dave and Muzz to play a couple of acoustic numbers at the Festival’s aftershow at the Philharmonic Music Room, to round the evening off in fine style.

3. 2013 - Mellowtone at The Garden at FACT The concept for this show was to explore and connect the different interpretations, experiences and expressions of contemporary acoustic songwriters from Ireland and its diaspora. The format: an evening of song in an unexpected space. The night featured three performers: host Alan O’Hare, a Liverpool-born musician of Irish heritage, whose music and lyrics explore these themes. The other two acts were Liverpoolbased Irish songwriter Ronan Boyle and Odi an Irish musician, based in Wexford, who travelled to Liverpool to headline the event, her stunning vocals holding the audience rapt. Three very different songwriters and musicians; the first gig in the newly decorated space at FACT and a rather lovely evening.

4. 2015 - Sea Legs at Leaf on Bold Street Probably my favourite collaboration with Liverpool Irish Festival was back in 2015. We worked with the Festival and Quiet Arch to bring Sea Legs to Liverpool for a oneoff performance. It opened that year’s Festival and was the UK’s debut live performance of the project. Sea Legs is a collaboration between songwriter Ciaran Lavery and electronic producer Ryan Vail - two artists from very different worlds.

Ciaran is a folk singer from Aghagallon (with a more than impressive following on Spotify) and Ryan is a minimal electronic artist who creates soundscapes with piano, synthesiser and sampled found sounds. The artists came together to create a beautiful experimental album inspired by maritime life and the coastal surroundings of Donegal, where it was recorded. Featuring wistful vocals, acoustic guitar, beats, textures, spoken word from an Irish poet and fishermen, sea gulls, as well as the wind and the sea; it’s a windswept, quiet and beautiful journey. Be sure to put the headphones on and take a listen.

In such a long relationship, it proved difficult to choose just five, and it would be remiss not to mention the annual Open Mic sessions, which ran at venues including The Magnet and Jacaranda Records. Other notable acts who’ve played include Little Rivers, who opened for Sea Legs back in 2015; Ahab, who headlined Leaf back in 2012; songwriter Emma Lusby who opened The Vines show; the ubiquitous and excellent fiddler Mikey Kenney and the creaky, melancholic and beautiful songs of Derry-born Simon Herron.

This year we’re working in partnership to bring the Berlin -based Irish musician and writer Conor Kilkelly and his band –Kilkelly- to Leaf on Bold Street, supported by Sue Rynhart (see listing for Sun 20 Oct). Long may our collaborative relationship with the Liverpool Irish Festival continue. Onwards!

David McTague. Mellowtone, 2019

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In the Window: Rory Shearer This October Bluecoat Display Centre present ceramicist Rory Shearer (Derry) for their monthly In the Window feature. Selected in response to a brief set by Liverpool Irish Festival and the Bluecoat Display Centre, and supported by the National Design and Craft Council of Ireland, the panel felt Rory’s work best reflected “unique stories, creatively told”.

Rory is ‘a thrower’, a ceramicist who works on a spinning wheel to create the base for his work, moulding the clay as the centrifugal force takes a hold, using his hands to steer it in the direction of his choice. It is an elemental art, which always has the mark of the maker upon it; the mark is in the grooves, bellies and collars made by the shape of the hands; the cuts in the surface placed strategically by the maker. Below, we have asked Rory –with assistance from author Elaine Hogg- to talk about his work and tell his unique story. 

work that guaranteed the quality of the piece. I thought that I could replicate that same sense on my work! I have used it ever since (40 years). The other marks convey a similar sense of ‘hallmark’, adding to the surface decoration.

“Winters up here sometimes seem endless. The early signs of summer are, therefore, very welcome; hence the bird stamp.

I recently carved this and used it on my work as a celebration of the ending of winter. I use it on all my work now, not just on work made at a specific time of the year”.

It has been through teaching and in particular in his recent role as coordinator of the HND Fine Art course at Belfast Metropolitan College that new a chapter of concepts and ideas have developed. As artist and teacher, Rory understands that these roles are not mutually exclusive; they have informed an intense attention to surface, evolving in recent years. Now free to bend from form, some of Rory’s work is non-functional, which he attributes to the diversity of his teaching practice and student influence; from listening to the ideas of others and posing himself the same questions asked of his students.

Talking to painters has had a profound effect and the influence of this medium on his work is striking. Visually his pottery is as painterly as any abstractionist but in particular Rory would cite Sean Scully (seanscullystudio.com) in recent years as having an impact on his work.

Rory Shearer was born in Northern Ireland, growing up in Derry, a city full of tension and expectation. Intending to study graphic design at the Belfast art college, by 1972 he found that ceramics had taken over so he graduated with a degree in ceramics, followed by a post-graduate teaching diploma.

Having married artist Helen Shearer, the couple left Belfast to set up a workshop in Newry (1980). He has been involved with education, teaching and craft associations ever since.

After years living in the suburbs with his growing family, Rory recently removed himself from the cityscapes, favouring the country. This has given his work a sense of place, of industry; a place which is visually stunning and physically extreme; difficult. Rory’s pottery does not romanticise the countryside but suggests its beauty, order and strength while remindingus that it is hard work, dangerous and unexpected.

In his early years (as student and studio potter) Rory was influenced by ‘The Leach Tradition’, a standard for modern ceramics set out by Bernard Leach in the 1940’s. Based on the idea that pots were like human beings and drawing deeply on Japanese ceramics traditions, Rory’s work rejected industrialisation, making functional pottery. It had to work.

The form of the work has precedence; ‘form helps the surface, it follows the line’.

Primarily a vessel maker Rory has tried to lose the vessel.

By closing off the vessel he can concentrate on the form’s surface. Some of his pieces are barely containers, but are hollow forms that you want to pick up, touch, move your hand over the surface and examine the exterior closely. Elaine Hogg states: “I find myself looking at this recent work as I would at a large abstract painting, wanting to take it all in from a distance, but compelled to look closer. Rory has broken away from the accepted conventions of his early work in both technique and subject matter”.

Noticing an interesting set of maker’s marks on his pieces, we asked Rory to explain a little about what they stood for and represent of him. “I use a number of stamps to mark my work, the main one is my initials in the form of a seal or jeweller’s stamp with RHS. This was a bit of youthful arrogance way back. My wife Helen, who I met in Art College, is a jeweller/ silversmith (she now works exclusively in porcelain) and I was intrigued by the use of hallmarks and a maker’s mark on her

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Shown at the Bluecoat Display Centre are pieces from The Winter, a series inspired by his local landscape; a reflection of his psyche that simultaneously taps into a universal audience, speaking to all our inner sources. Looking at his glaze techniques and surface design, viewers can see drama in the spontaneity and improvisation, which also reveres process and design. Resisting stylistic categorisation, there is an emphasis on energetic and dynamic gesture, contrasting with a reflective, cerebral focus. Hogg once again: “Imagery is primarily abstract, but based on visual realities”.

Rory describes series The Winter: “Two hills dominate the view from my studio. Immediately on my horizon is ‘The Big Collin’ with its giant wind turbines; the other is Slemish. Both have, in different ways, a variety of moods and visual impact, depending on the time of day, season of the year and local weather conditions. This ever changing display informs my sense of colour and pattern”.

Using photography to compliment drawing; Rory records his surroundings as they move through the seasons. Thus, the ancient, sacred resonance of Slemish alongside the spiritual qualities of the wind-turbines and their impact on the landscape.

Elaine again: “With Shearer’s work depicting an abstract memory, an intimate relationship is created. Multiples are created to explore conversations between the pieces. Layers act as an editing tool, relationships are able to open up, spiritual and with a sense of otherness, a profound reality in them or in behind them. There is a maturity to this new work, which is aimed at the city dweller, whose visual sophistication will respond to the urban and rural elements”.

Scale offers a surface on which to experiment with and there is an excitement at this prospect. Ceramics in exhibition work well in relatively close environments; the viewer is drawn close to the work. As Rothko once said ‘I paint big to be intimate’, and Rory’s intention to experiment in large scale work may make his work more personal, not grandiose or self-important, but landscape enveloping and close. Rory is a thrower through and through; you can feel energy in his pieces. The surface -treated with slips and oxides- evoke the rural Irish landscape.

He sees this time as the final phase of his work, his creativity, and the most exciting. His family have grown up and he feels that the years ahead will be ones of fruitful production. His national and international profile has never been higher and he has never been busier or more enthusiastic.

Elaine Hogg is a Belfast based writer, lecturer and curator.

This piece has been modelled on her article published in Ceramics Ireland with additions from Rory and the Liverpool Irish Festival. We thank Elaine and Declan Shearer for the photographs of Rory’s work. For more: roryhshearer.com, Facebook: /RoryandHelenShearerCeramics or email randhshearerceramics@gmail.com

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Words for Music Perhaps: Setting the Poetry of W.B. Yeats Irish culture is uncompromisingly multi-disciplinary.

Frequently combining music, dance, poetry and prose, it is notable for the use of multiple mediums and the talent and skills these combinations imbue people with. Liverpool Irish Festival has made this feature of Irish culture a significant thread through its programme, allowing us to consider the multi-faceted creative expressions generated by Ireland’s people and diaspora. This allows us to mix and blend art forms, consider others who do the same and how this has happened for time immemorial. Such synergies have also preoccupied Gerry Smyth, Professor of Irish Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University, with particular reference to WB Yeats, his music and prose.  In 2011, Scots-Irish rock band The Waterboys released An Appointment with Mr Yeats, an album that had been ripening within the musical imagination of the band’s leader Mike Scott for decades. Scott had been enamoured of the poetry of Yeats since discovering his ‘inner Celt’ in the 1980s and had already tried his hand with tracks such as The Stolen Child and Love and Death. This was something more ambitious, however: a collection of fourteen songs selected from across the poet’s career, adapted and performed within the characteristic style of The Waterboys.

I encountered that album with a mixture of pleasure and frustration: pleasure, because I think it’s a brilliant piece of work; frustration, because I had myself been planning just such a musical venture for at least the previous twenty years. I also am a lover of Yeats’s poetry, as well as a musician with a strong literary bent. I set my first poem

by Yeats –The Rose Tree– when I was still learning the guitar, back in Dublin in the 1970s, and I had always retained a dream to write and record an album’s worth of material selected from the expansive canon of Yeats’s lyrics. I soon got over my disappointment, however, when I realised that there’s plenty of room for my amateur efforts alongside the more ambitious achievement of Mr Scott and Mr Wickham.

With my literary hat on, I’m happy to claim that WB Yeats was without doubt one of the greatest poets of the modern era. Besides being a theatre manager, an occultist, an Irish nationalist (albeit of a very particular kind), and many other things, Yeats was the writer who -perhaps more any of his contemporaries or any writer sincemade literature matter. A poem by Yeats was (at least in Ireland) a public event. Dauntingly esoteric on the one hand, Yeats was also a great balladeer, with a remarkable ear for the great phrase (many of which have made their way into common parlance): “Come away, O human child”; “a terrible beauty is born”; “what rough beast”; “no country for old men”; “in dreams begin responsibilities”.

And a couple for our own troubled era, perhaps: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity”; “All empty souls tend towards extreme opinions”.

Yeats didn’t share the musical talent of his great contemporary James Joyce; indeed, he was probably the least musical of the great pantheon of twentieth-century male Irish writers, which included Shaw, Synge, O’Casey, Beckett, Behan and Kavanagh. But it seems clear that he was deeply attracted to the idea of music and many of his lyrics have been

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set to music during the 140 years or so since his first publication.

In spring 2018 I finally got around to writing and recording the album that I had promised myself back in Dublin when learning to be a musician. It’s called Words for Music Perhaps: Fifteen Songs Adapted from the Poetry of W.B. Yeats and includes lyrics chosen from right across the poet’s career: the earliest setting is To an Isle in the Water from Crossways (1889), the latest Come Gather Round Me, Parnellites from Last Poems (1936-39).

The process of setting pre-written lyrics is complex. Having recorded and toured an album of Joyce settings a few years ago, my experience suggests that the aesthetics of adaptation represents a wary rapprochement between the poet and the musician. There’s music within the poetry, so to speak, but it’s not the same as the music which another agent –the composer/musician– brings to bear upon the pre-existent poetic lyric. Sometimes the words themselves may suggest a treatment, sometimes you have ideas to do with melody or arrangement that you just want to try out; sometimes your best efforts come to nothing. In this particular instance, a new version of Down by the Salley Gardens was on the cards from the outset; I had got so bored with the maudlin version that has been doing the rounds for so long. The Fiddler of Dooney seems to demand a fiddle part! Parnellites had to be a kind of come-all-ye ballad. And so on.

I play most of the core instruments on the tracks, but I drafted in some friends (and family) to help create the impression of a more communal musical experience. Matters weren’t helped when my preferred studio closed down in the summer of 2018, at which point I had to digitally migrate all the existing recordings from Ellesmere Port to Birkenhead, where the recording was completed.

This album was a labour of love; but my hope is that the songs – deliberately written and arranged as simply as possible – will be learned and performed by other musicians, and so become part of a ‘folk’ engagement with Yeats’s work. Despite his aristocratic (on occasion, authoritarian) leanings, I think there’s a part of the poet who once wrote: ‘Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people’.

The album Words for Music Perhaps: Fifteen Songs Adapted from the Poetry of W.B. Yeats is available to buy from News from Nowhere on Bold Street, and will be formally launched at an event in Liverpool later this year. For details contact Professor Gerry Smyth at Gerrygaroid@aol.com

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Bringing Liverpool and Ireland closer together using arts and culture.

liverpoolirishfestival.com Storytelling, family events, theatre, céilís, music, talks, art, poetry and literature, seisiúns, heritage, film, dancing, food and drink

#LivIrishFest

Company Limited No.4800736. Registered Charity No.1100126

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Acknowledgements Artists, writers, performers, advisors and contributors

Below are the names of the individuals we know the names for. Additionally

As well as running our annual Festival, the Liverpool Irish Festival

there are team members, crews and personnel we may not know in person,

collaborates with partners on events throughout the year. This year

but to whom we are indebted. Thank you all!

included #GlobalGreening and #RiverFestival.

Performers and artists

Lawlor, Gary

Contributors

Jones, Alison

Acton, Brian

Lawlor, Win

Alderson, William

Kelly, Andy

Anderson, Gerry

Leighton, Gary

Aspurohova, Eleonora

Lloyd, Ben

Anderson, Julian

Luft, Rob

Brown, Laura

Lynch, Dorothy

Armstrong, John

Lukeman, Jack

Colleran, Laura

Kerr, John

Bassom, Paul

Mangan, Paddy

Corbin, Kate

McDaid, Breege

Bernadelli, Paola

Mary, Meabh

Feely, Úna

Meenan, Sharon

Bowles, Clare

McAlinden, Gavin

Green, Karen

Morrison, Maureen

Brien, Mick

McGough, Rory

Harwood, Lynne

Morrison, Patrick

Bromley, John

Moore, Christy

Hannigan, Mick

Mullane, Edwin

Bryson, Sandy

Moran, Zak

Harrison, Sam

Ó Clochartaigh, Trevor

Campbell, John

Mulhern, Ultan

Huddleston, Katherine

Ó Coileáin, Seán Cathal

Charters, Michelle

Ni É, Ciara

Jones, Alison

Seddon, James

Colinson, Alan

Ó’Briain,Cormac

Jones, Faye

Seymour, Ciara

Collins, Maeve

O’Brien, Liam

Kelly, Valerie

Spencer, Monica

Connolly, Conor

O’Connor, Maz

Kerr, John

Woods, David

Connors, John

O’Hanlon, Rory

Kerr, Roy

Cook, Catherine

O’Hare, Alan

Leighton, Sonny

Board

Costa, Adam

O’Neill, Lisa

Liao, Zi Lan

Birtill, Tony

Cullen, Carmen

Orr, Casey

Ord, Mick

Chandler, John (Chair)

Duff, Laura

Owen, Steve

McGuigan, Adam

Flaherty, Kath (retired)

Edge, Davy

Pue, Jo

Mulhallen, Jaqueline

Hickman, Prof Mary

Excell, Callum

Rynhart, Sue

Quiery, Greg

Hogan, Paul

Ellwand, Philip David

Shearer, Rory

Randle, Elinor

Lavin, Eamonn

Friel, Clare

Sullivan, Paul

Weatherstone, Andrew

McDaid, Maev (retired)

Gallagher, Siobhan

Vallely, Dara

Griffiths, Julie

Walsh, John

Hampton, Amie

McGrath, Joe (retired) Advisors

O’Donnelly, Pat (Acting Treasurer)

Bogue, Keith

Rushforth, Michelle

Hannon, Stephanie

Writers

Doolin, Maire

Shirlow, Prof Peter

Hart, Anne

Billinge, Richie

Dowling, Ruaidhri

Simon, Wendy (Observer)

Henegan, Madeline

Cousins, Colin

Dunne, Clodagh

Walsh, Emma

Hodge, Pete

Ferguson, Dr Trish

Durney, Sean

Hodgers, Ciarán

Ferguson, George

Ellwand, Philip David

Patron

Jones, Ros

Hogan, Liam

Exley, Matt

Browne, Eithne

Kavanagh, Mariann

McDonald, Conor

Gaffney, David

Kenny, Moira

McDonald, Henry

Gossage, Ruth

Kerr, Clara

McGuinness, Patrick

Green, Karen

Kilkelly, Conor

McTague, David

Haswell, Richard

Kimber, Neil

Rooney, Ray

Hedges, Steve

Kimber, Ros

Smyth, Prof Gerry

Henderson, Claire

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festival FUNDERS

Project funders

2019 Partners Bolger-Cunningham Irish Dance School

firsttake

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Liverpool Irish Festival is a registered charity (1100126). We receive regular funding from Liverpool City Council’s Culture Arts Investment Programme, the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Emigrant Support Programme and project funds from Arts Council England’s National Lottery Project Grant Awards. We are proud recipients of sponsorship from Tourism Ireland and Irish language broadcaster TG4.

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Don’t forget to pick up your #LIF2019 brochure from festival venues and many more!

1

Bringing Liverpool and Ireland closer together using arts and culture.

liverpoolirishfestival.com Storytelling, family events, theatre, céilís, music, talks, art, poetry and literature, seisiúns, heritage, film, dancing, food and drink

#LivIrishFest

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Company Limited No.4800736. Registered Charity No.1100126

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