Decade of Centenaries Programme 2023

Programme

Introduction

The Decade of Centenaries in Monaghan has provided a unique opportunity to discuss and debate areas of our recent history, which are viewed from different points of view depending on what part of the community you come from. Buy-in from the whole community around potentially contentious centenaries has been a challenge and we have worked very hard to ensure that all sides of the story are explored and displayed. The flip side of that challenge however is that we have been able to engage directly with sectors of the community who have traditionally been reluctant to interact with us. For us, the key message throughout the Decade of Centenaries has been that of a shared history. It is impossible to fully understand the how’s and why’s of an event unless we explore all reasons for its occurrence. In Monaghan that has meant using these various commemorations as a catalyst for building closer relationships at a local level. Through our series of multi-award winning exhibitions and events, we believe that we have successfully engaged in a very real way with all sectors of our community and while discussion and debate has not led to agreement in some cases, everyone has walked away better informed about their shared history and heritage, and we hope that will lead to a more cohesive society both within the county and the region in the years to come. That will be the legacy of the Decade of Centenaries in Monaghan.

As the various commemorations approached, we reached out to the community generally through social media and advertisements and more directly through community groups, organisations, and local community organisers to both discuss and promote the stories we were telling. We worked with academics and third level institutions to ensure the historical accuracy of our research and we presented this in many forms, most notably major public events, exhibitions, talks, tours, and workshops. We took the curatorial decision to display the information as it was and facilitate discussion on that basis rather than providing interpretation. This provided the intellectual and emotional space for the public to interact with our programme in an inclusive and open manner. One of the key impacts was the discussion and debate that our range of events created within the county. That interaction led to community groups and individuals coming to the Council with stories of their own and objects relating these events. Some of this feedback was negative in that individuals were unhappy with certain people or events being portrayed. All of this information was important as it informed how we developed future events and added to the story and the collections of the county for posterity. Better decisions are made when we have all the information to hand. We can only move forward successfully as a community when we fully understand where we have come from. We hope that will be a lasting legacy in Monaghan and in time we will look back on this period in our county’s history as a watershed, a time when we took a moment to reflect and from that reflection we moved forward to a more equal and inclusive future.

This experience has been the genesis for the large-scale Bordering Realities project, which will culminate in a major new display when Monaghan County Museum opens at its new home in the Peace Campus in 2024 - a once-off, unique, specially commissioned musical and theatrical performances by our young people and creative practitioners in autumn of 2023.

2023 Programme

Local Authorities across the country continue to play an important role in the inclusive remembrance of events and themes connected to their localities from 1921-1923. Monaghan County Council through the Library and Museum services, will coordinate and deliver another annual programme to respectively and poignantly remember this period of time under the following national themes:

1. Initiatives that support broad public engagement

2. Artists and Creative Communities

3. Support for library-led initiatives or collaborations

REALITIES Bordering Youth's Creative Response

This is a multi-disciplinary collaborative project engaging young people through music, drama, dance, creative writing, and arts to respond creatively to partition and the reality of life along a border or indeed what does the word ‘border’ mean to young people today. We commissioned Dr Brendan Scott, Maynooth University to research the key events that took place across counties Cavan/Monaghan and border area. He produced a paper which has been used to devise a programme and working with other creative

GENERATION Music Youth Orchestra

Music Generation Cavan/Monaghan has formed a new Youth Folk Orchestra, with young people from counties Monaghan, Cavan, Fermanagh, and Tyrone who are engaging with the award-winning acclaimed composer Michael Rooney, who has been commissioned to work on a new orchestral piece reflecting Dr. Brendan Scott’s paper. This project is creating great new, high-energy, and reflective music, performing imaginative arrangements, and creating musical and social stimulus for young teenagers from Monaghan & Cavan and surrounding counties to get involved. Other creative practitioners engaged will be Caitriona Ni clericin and Tommy McArdle

ARTS IN EDUCATION Local

Theatre & Dance

Local Arts in Education Partnership Cavan/Monaghan is working with several creative practitioners such as Declan Gorman, Theatre maker and Creative Schools Associate contemporary dance Fiona Keenan-O’Brien who in turn is working with local young people in Cavan/Monaghan responding to Dr Scott’s paper with a theatrical piece to be performed in autumn of 2023. The young people, in response to Dr Scott's historical paper, came up with a fictional village called Masenca and all the secrets it holds.

Devised and performed by members of Kilnaleck Youth Drama Society with movement sequences by Monaghan Youth Dance

Performance Dates:

The Garage Theatre Sunday 22nd October 3pm

Townhall Cavan Thursday 26th October 8pm

Booking on theatre’s websites.

Partners: Cavan County Council and Monaghan County Council Decade of Centenaries and Creative Ireland Teams; Cavan Monaghan ETB through Music Generation Cavan Monaghan and Local Arts in Education Partnership.

COUNTY MUSEUMMonaghan

Monaghan County Museum opened to the public in September 1974, becoming the first full time professionally staffed local authority museum in the state. This was a time of great sorrow and strife for the people of Monaghan. Just four months earlier in May of that year a bomb had gone off just yards from the courthouse in Monaghan Town, killing 7 people. The Troubles were ravaging communities all over Northern Ireland and the border counties and this was the world that Monaghan County Museum first opened its doors to. Very quickly it grew to become a focal point of the community. Reaching out to all sectors to develop links and build a collection which reflected the history and heritage of the area. This commitment to community was recognised at an international level when the Museum received the Council of Europe Prize in 1980. However, celebration swiftly turned to tragedy when the courthouse was burned to the ground in 1981. Thankfully no one was killed and much of the museum collection was saved thanks at first to the valiant work of Monaghan Fire Brigade and then the resulting response from the museum community around the country who came to Monaghan’s aid and helped with the mammoth restoration process that the small staff now faced. The Museum eventually reopened to the public in 1990 at its present home in Monaghan Town.

Now, Monaghan County Museum is moving again. Working in collaboration with partners both within the county council and across the border in Northern Ireland, a capital grant of over €8m was secured from the Peace IV Shared Spaces programme through the Special EU Programmes Body. This funding is being used to construct a new purpose-built Peace Campus in the centre of Monaghan Town which along with being the new home for Monaghan County Museum will also provide space for Monaghan Library, a youth café and service as well as a number of community focussed shared spaces. There will also be a large public realm space around the building to facilitate open-air events. This building will transform the service that the Museum can offer. This new museum will utilise the nationally renowned collections to explore the shared history and heritage of the border region. The displays will act as a catalyst for the visiting public to facilitate conversation and debate and by doing so help to build a more cohesive society. We will be working with many cross-border partners including the Ulster Scots Agency to tell the story of the entire community. The collection will remain at the centre of the service and will be used to deliver a large range of Peace focussed events and programmes, which will be run from the new building once it is opened to the public in 2023. As we adapt to the change of a new building, a new service, and a new way of doing things we will remain true to our mission; that through our collections we will promote the historical richness and cultural diversity of the region and bring that diversity and richness to as wide an audience as possible.

DISPLAY Legacy

Since2012,MonaghanCountyMuseum,likemanyotherculturalinstitutionsaroundthe countryhasdevelopedawiderangeofactivities,exhibitions,andeventstomarkthe variousmilestonesalongthepathofcommemorationthatwehavetreadinlastdecade. Ourpositionalongtheborderhasputusinarelativelyuniquespacetoexplorethese historiceventsinamorenuancedway Thepassageoftimehasallowedustodelve intothestoryfrombothsidesofthecommunity.Workingwithrepresentativegroups fromboththeProtestantandCatholiccommunitiesalongtheborderaswellasour partnershipswithnotablehistorianssuchasProfessorTerenceDooleyofMaynooth

LECTURE SERIES Autumn

For the autumn of 2023, we will be working with academics and local historians to provide an autumn series of talks dealing with the main events of 1923. We are aiming to have 5-6 talks in the libraries and online. We are aiming to have speakers to talk on topics relating to both sides of the community.

This series will allow the community to hear and learn about aspects of 1923 from both a local and national context. It will allow for all sides to have equal opportunity to tell their story and for all communities to hear this story.

OneBOOK Ava's Diary by

OneCOUNTY

Patricia

Murphy

Since 2013, as part of the Decade of Centenaries Monaghan County Library Services has coordinated a community reading initiative called One Book One County where everyone in the county is invited to read the same book and join the community conversations. We have been reading a series of books which deals with Irish history in the early 1900’s up to 1923. For 2022/23, we will be reading ‘Ava’s Diary’ by Irish author Patricia Murphy. Summary of the book – Ava isn’t happy when her mum drags her from America to Dublin after a messy divorce But when she finds a sliver of emerald and a bundle of old letters in the attic, Ava is plunged into a historical mystery. How were the missing crown jewels of Tsarist Russia linked to Ireland’s bloody civil war in 1922? Who was young medical student Molly, who wrote the letters? Why did her brother Jack the Cat smuggle the jewels? Did her football-mad cousin Dan survive his job running messages through the crossfire? Through Molly’s eyes, Ava learns about the death of Michael Collins, deadly ambushes in Kerry and the tragic fate of former comrades….

This programme to date has been extremely positive year on year with more and more schools wanting to partake. It aligns with school curriculums thus making it easier for schools to partake. The discussions and project work produced each year has been overwhelming, with the children and young people enthusiastic and engaging in all elements of the project. A series of workshops including book discussions, historical re-enactments and creative art will take place exploring the themes of the book. All primary schools in county Monaghan are invited to participate plus several schools along the border in counties Fermanagh, Armagh, and Tyrone. As this is the final year of the One Book One County programme under the Decade of Centenaries, a celebration event is planned to take place with all participating schools, authors, and creatives in May 2023.

Requiem FOR A HOTEL by Ted McCarthy

local award-winning Poet Ted McCarthy to and produce, overseeing the recording and ve for radio and podcast platforms, using the and Museum. The play will encapsulate a a significant period of Irish history and aims to with a dramatic script, a cast of local voice dio effects and perhaps even archival material

will be situated in an unnamed town in an orth midlands of the country. It will be near a ch closes during the narrative. The story of the century will be told through the lives of three family, proprietors of the hotel. Their growing he country into the town, growing business of the premises will be the chief mover of the

e will be refracted through the changing family hotel bar and visitors passing through; these a of political and social life, not just locally but era such as Home Rule agitation, the War of War will be touched on; as will the economic nd resurgence of later in the century Later deal with emigration, a reluctance to speak social attitudes, rupture, and reconciliation with archive musical recordings from relevant music to complement the spoken word – the narrator using a straightforward documentary ther actors voicing various characters will work well as a live event, or equally well as presented live, it would be recorded and

oad to allow for engagement with a wide range and national, from a perspective which is currently relevant The use of multiple-person r these matters to be dealt with sensitively and valid points of view.

y of dealing creatively with our shared history he other events and activities commemorating the decade of centenaries.

The EMERGENCY Radio Play

We have commissioned local writer/historian Kevin McGeough, author of Unsung Heroes: The War of Independence in Monaghan to write, direct and produce part two of radio play series ‘The Emergency’. Kevin will engage local actors to narrate the piece.

Set during the Emergency/WWI it meanders back and forth to key events during the 1919-23 period, with back stories to the characters, which involve some being active in the old IRA in 1919-21 and still looking for a pension, to women in Cumann na mBan who are getting no recognition from the state. One character's father was killed in the War of Independence while other characters had an adventurous time in New York that produced all sorts of rumours about gangsters and invasions. On that subject, there’s a link with the famous Hollywood director Orson Wells, who before going to Hollywood, produced, starred, and directed a radio play about an invasion of sorts that was mistaken for reality by a lot of New Yorkers in 1938. Towards the end of the play the gang mistakenly kidnap a home Guard member on the border, and this is a small tribute to the programme that partly inspired the plays i.e., Dads Army. Adding humour and intrigue, this play will deal with key historical events in a local yet international context but respectively dealing with this sensitive time in our history.

HistoryWRITING COMPETITION

Initiated in 2022, in conjunction with Cathaoirleach Office of MCC, it invites students in primary and secondary schools to research/write about an event/key point of this period in history in the context of County Monaghan. The winning entries will be digitised and available to read on the county council website and copy kept in the local history collection.

That it SHOULD COME TO THIS

This project has been commissioned and led by local playwright Joe Hanratty. The aim of this project is to explore:

- The impact the War of Independence (1919 to 1921) and Civil War (1922-1923) had on the mental health of those involved as members of the IRA e.g., Post Traumatic Stress Disorder / flashbacks / anxiety (known then as Battle Fatigue).

- How some “personal scores”, particularly those related to outstanding land issues & disputes, were settled under the guise of The War of Independence and / or The Civil War.

A public seminar / Lecture will be held and facilitated by eminent historians to outline how the above issues manifested themselves during this troubled period in Irish history. This seminar will shine a light on this side of the struggle and so give a fuller and more rounded picture of the reality of war and open a discussion on issues such as the above.

The project will look at how Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was recognised and dealt with through the mental health system or asylum system of that period and how for many combatants it was never recognised / acknowledged at all, and it went untreated. Many therefore went through a life of mental suffering, depression, and anxiety.

Emerging from the seminar and further research, a play script will be developed which will give a personal insight into the impact the above had on individuals and families caught up in the Struggle for Independence and The Civil War. When a play script is developed it will be directed and casted and cast members will engage in debating the issues raised to prepare their characterisation of the characters involved.

Performance Dates:

Íontas Castleblayney - Friday 6th & Saturday 7th October 8pm

The Garage Theatre Monaghan - Friday 17th November 8pm

Bordering REALITIES Writing the Story

The story of the decade of centenaries in Monaghan is a very nuanced one. There were many personalities at play and these people have several reasons for doing what they did. The key element in the County Museum’s exhibition ‘Bordering Realities’, will be to tell those personal stories in as many ways as possible. We’ll be using objects, accessible displays, images, sound, touch, colour, and exhibition layout but the most central and still the most effective is words. While much research has been carried out over the last ten years into this fascinating time in our recent past, we will be attempting to reflect many stories in the context of their bordering realities. This will require creative people who have experience in script writing. The challenge will be to adequately tell many stories, which overlap and interact with each other using as few words as possible. So often an exhibition can be an overwhelming series of text heavy boards that are simply ignored by most visitors. While we have the facts, we need the expertise to write the story in way that will give the visitors enough information to understand and enjoy their experience but hopefully leave them with the curiosity to find out more.

Funded

BY:

This programme as been funded under Monaghan County Council’s Decade of Centenaries Programme 2023 through The Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.