Détails > Programme de conferénce avec résumé

SOFEIR-UCC Conference

Ireland and Transnational Solidarities

21-22 March 2025

 

 

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

 

 

Friday 21 March

8h30-9h00: Registration, Coffees/Teas

Location: Atrium, Ground Floor, The Hub

 

9h00-9h15: Welcome Address

Location: Dr Dora Allman Room, Fourth Floor, The Hub

 

9h15 – 10h15: Plenary 1: Dónal Hassett (Chair: Laura Kennedy)

“Colonial Complicity and the Limits of Irish Anti-Imperialism: The Scheme to Settle Irish Peasants in French Algeria”

Location: Dr Dora Allman Room, Fourth Floor, The Hub

 

10h15-10h30: Coffees/Teas

Location: Atrium, Ground Floor, The Hub

 

10h30-11h30: “Transnational Irelands” Library Exhibition

 

11h30-13h00: SOFEIR AGM (Dr Dora Allman Room) and Lunch (Atrium)

 

13h00-14h25: Workshops 1 and 2

 

Workshop 1 – Ireland and France I

Location: Dr Dora Allman Room, Fourth Floor, The Hub

Chair: Jay Roszman

 

Luke Watson, “International Liberty in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Denis Driscol and the

Cork Gazette”

 

Eighteenth century Irish nationalism cannot be understood without appeal to the wider international context: transnational solidarity and an emphasis on universal liberty were a recurring feature of Irish political discourse, most notably driven by enthusiasm for events in France. The Cork Gazette & General Advertiser, a radical newspaper published in Cork during the 1790s, represents one of the most fascinating aspects of this solidarity, not just between Ireland and France, but between Ireland and the entire North Atlantic world. Denis Driscol, proprietor of the newspaper and a Cork-based United Irishman, was a staunch advocate for the pursuit of liberty. Notably, his politics were significantly advanced even when compared to other United Irishmen: Driscol was both a leveller, arguing for the total restructuring of society, and an abolitionist, condemning the slave trade and the plight of African slaves. Moreover, Driscol was an ardent champion of the French Revolution, and clearly saw the cause of the French Revolution as having lessons to impart on the subjugated people of Ireland.

Thus, through Driscol, the Cork Gazette represents an important facet in the complex relationship Ireland enjoyed with the wider world in this period. While Cork was largely uninvolved in the 1798 Rebellion, Driscol and the Cork Gazette demonstrate that international liberty was a great concern for the county’s radical community. This paper argues that the understudied Driscol and his newspaper are a key component of Irish radical print discourse, and its emphasis on international solidarity highlights Ireland’s place in the wider struggle against imperialism.

 

Sylvie Kleinman, “Beyond Bullets?: Rediscovering the Civic Ideologies behind ‘The Year of the

French’ and the Martial Glory of 1798”

 

Irish popular memory celebrates the solidarity of revolutionary France, sending her soldiers to free Ireland in 1798. Only the armed intervention of Britain’s greatest enemy could achieve democracy and nationhood, and French military propaganda flourished with the rhetoric of Irish rights and freedoms. A glorious defeat, ‘The Year of the French’ was reimagined as an heroic endeavour when France recognised Irish self-determination, inspiring separatists from 1898 onwards to strike again. Though in 1916 French solidarity could not be invoked, De Gaulle’s visit in 1969 reaffirmed the enduring fraternal bond. Scholarly Irish history matured and broadened its scope after 1989, and despite misgivings about the 1998 bicentenary, a new paradigm eventually legitimised popular representations such as military re-enactment. With Brexit, the old triangular dynamic repositioned France as Ireland’s ‘closest neighbour’, and in 2023, the 225^th anniversary of ’98 was marked, though outside academia.

Yet behind this seemingly healthy bond lie contradictions, paradoxes and ahistorical conflations. British-leaning generalisations of the ‘French Revolution’ as bloody Terror still prevail in Irish consciousness, and recent documentaries have depicted guillotining and brutal dechristianisation to illustrate what awaited Ireland in 1798. Celebrations of the YOTF energise localities but are mostly military, unintentionally veiling landmark policies in France which had emboldened Irish (lay) Catholics to seek civic emancipation in 1792. Catholic, and not secularising republican identifiers, equally bound the Irish to France before and after 1798, and even the Irish Huguenot diaspora and post-Norman Ireland have been thrown into the mix. Popular and public heritage favour reductionist ‘great men’ history, often lack factual rigour, or fail to foreground the political ideologies behind the martial glory of ‘98.

 

Raphaël Willay, “The 16^th (Irish) and 36^th (Ulster) Divisions in Northern France and the Fabric of

Transnational Memory”

 

The 16th (Irish) and the 36th (Ulster) Divisions, mostly composed of nationalist Catholics and unionist Protestants respectively, fought on the battlefields of Flanders and the Somme during WW1. These units embodied the complexity of Ireland’s social and political landscape at that time. As a consequence, the events related to the quest for independence, unfolding simultaneously in Ireland, complicated how the sacrifice of these soldiers fighting within the British army should be remembered afterwards. If the 36th Division’s valor at the Somme became a cornerstone of unionist identity, the 16th Division’s heavy losses at Guillemont and Ginchy coincided with the nationalist fervor of the Easter Rising and the perception of the rebels as martyrs persecuted by the British government, overshadowing the efforts made by these men to secure home rule for Ireland. 

On the other hand, the former Western front has become a central locus of remembrance where the memory of soldiers' contributions to the War effort seems to have been preserved and honored in a more visible way. But were the 36th and 16th divisions' sacrifices 'equally' honoured there? This presentation interrogates whether the fractured memory of the Great War in Ireland paradoxically fostered a transnational solidarity centered on remembrance abroad. By exploring memorial practices of the British and Irish in Northern France after World War I, it examines how the erection of memorials and the organization of commemorations on the Somme and in Flanders have helped sustain the memory of Irish soldiers, offering a lens through which to reconsider Ireland’s complex relationship with its wartime past.

 

 

Workshop 2 - Transnationalising Heaney

Location: West Wing 9, The Quad

Chair: Adam Hanna

 

Emer Nolan, “Heaney after 9/11”

 

Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ (1919) and Heaney’s ‘Hope and History’ chorus from his version of a tragedy by Sophocles, The Cure at Troy (1995), are surely the two works by twentieth-century Irish writers most often quoted as commentaries on modern politics. Yeats’s poem, which has provided resonant titles for works by numerous writers and journalists, is read as offering an apocalyptic vision of modern war and revolution and seems in part to represent a revision of Yeat’s earlier cultural-nationalist activism in Ireland. In Heaney’s case, he regarded any expectation that he would wish to engage as an artist with the conflict in Northern Ireland as an unwelcome burden. During the 1990s, the Irish Peace Process, together with other international developments such as the fall of the Soviet Union, seemed retrospectively to confirm the wisdom of this withdrawal. After the award of his Nobel Prize in 1995, Heaney gave a speech largely concerned with Yeats and with the social and spiritual role of the modern artist. He subsequently won a reputation – at a moment when hope and history indeed seemed to ‘rhyme’ – as a beloved public figure and intellectual in Ireland. This has been confirmed by his lionization by such figures as R.F. Foster and Fintan O’Toole. In this paper I will consider Heaney’s revision of Yeats’s modernist politics and the challenge to Heaney’s later poetics represented by twenty-first century developments such as 9/11, the US ‘war on terror’ and the financial crash of 2008.

 

Ellen Howley, “Seamus Heaney and French: Solidarity in the Unfamiliar”

 

Despite studying French as part of his first-year undergraduate degree in Queen’s University Belfast, Seamus Heaney found it an estranging language, describing the experience of learning French vowel sounds in school as one of “defamiliarization.” Nevertheless, he does turn to French poetry at various points across his career, particularly to works that trace themes familiar to Heaney such as death, burial and the role of the writer. This paper examines two poems Heaney translated from French: “The Digging Skeleton”, which appears in North and is based on Charles Baudelaire’s “Le squelette labourer,”; and “Charles IX to Ronsard”, a poem written to celebrate forty years of the Gallery Press and based on a work thought to be written by the former King of France. “The Digging Skeleton” allows Heaney to think through the violence of Northern Ireland in a Parisian setting, finding connections with the eeriness of Baudelaire’s vision of the city. At the same time, Heaney cannot help but insert a stronger poetic I-voice that intensifies the poetic solidarity he finds in “Le squelette labourer.” In “Charles IX to Ronsard,” Heaney picks up on the struggle between poetry and tyranny in the original poem, one written, crucially, by a monarch who oversaw a peak in tensions between Catholics and Protestants in France. Thus, this paper examines how Heaney finds sympathies in French poetry that allow him to explore analogous situations in his contemporary moment.

 

Przemyslav Michalski, “Czeslaw Milosz and Seamus Heaney: Poetry and Solidarity”

 

In my presentation I would like to discuss numerous similarities between the work of the Polish-American poet Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004) and the Irish poet Seamus Heaney (1939-2013). Heaney once called Miłosz “a giant at my shoulder.” This description expresses Heaney’s admiration for the Polish poet and underscores the constant presence of Miłosz’s work as a source of inspiration for him. The solidarity between the two great poets manifested itself mostly in shared views on artistic creativity, the need to grant poetry an unassailable autonomy from immediate political events, while preserving its relevance to the modern world. While they both may have resented being expected to address current political events in verse (Miłosz in relation to the Solidarity movement which swept through Poland in the early 1980s, Heaney in the context of the unending cycle of violence known as the Troubles), they both understood that there is a social dimension to writing poetry, and that the poet is morally obligated to give voice to the oppressed. To show his respect for the older poet, Seamus Heaney went to Poland to attend Miłosz’s funeral in 2004, and later wrote a cycle of poems in his memory. Perhaps the most tangible result of their friendship is the creation of the Seamus Heaney – Czesław Miłosz Residency with the aim of supporting young writers resident in Ireland.

 

 

14h30-15h55: Workshops 3 and 4

Workshop 3 - Ireland and Palestine I

Location: Dr Dora Allman Room, Fourth Floor, The Hub

Chair: Donal Ó Drisceoil

 

Marie-Violaine Louvet, “Postcolonial Theory and the History of Pro-Palestinian Transnational

Activism in Ireland”

 

The current dynamism of Irish pro-Palestinian activism, unique in Western Europe since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas in 2023, builds on the history of Irish civil society support for Palestine. Since the end of the 1960s and the Six-Day War (1967) as conflicts in the Middle East have followed one another, transnational solidarity links with Palestine have developed from the Republic of Ireland as well as Northern Ireland. They are based on an Irish national narrative in which colonisation serves as a common foundation for the framing of a collective identity marked by the history of imperialist oppression. Activism emanating from civil society has on occasions successfully bent the foreign policy of the Republic of Ireland, as illustrated by its diplomacy at the United Nations and within the EEC/EU with its explicit support for the Palestine Liberation Organisation (1980s) and again, very recently, with the official recognition of the Palestinian state (2024).

This paper will look at the origins and evolutions of organisations involved in transnational solidarity work with Palestine, from the creation of the Irish-Arab Society in the 1960s to the current commitment of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign in support of the international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. The analysis will pay particular attention to what the pro-Palestinian movement reflexively reveals about the persistence of coloniality in Irish society and polity.

 

Adrian Kane, “The Irish Trade Union Movement and Transnational Solidarity”

 

The Irish trade union movement has been in decline since the mid-1980s, when almost two out of three of the workforce were members of a trade union; today less than one in four workers are trade union members. Parallel to this collapse in trade union density, ‘activism’ has also radically declined. Trade unionism has been reduced to a workplace transactional utilitarian form where the worker pays subscriptions to be represented ‘professionally’ by an industrial relations practitioner in matters concerning his/her terms of employment.

Despite this retrenchment there has perhaps almost uniquely been a sustained level of activism and solidarity within the Irish trade union movement for the liberation of the Palestinian people. The events post October 23^rd have given a renewed impetus to support for the Palestinian cause. This paper explores the possibilities available to the Irish Trade Union movement to maximise and harness its collective industrial, economic and political power to assist the people of Palestine in their struggle for liberation. It will also examine historical examples of effective Trade Union transnational solidarity and reflect on how previous struggles might inform contemporary strategies.

 

Ugo Rychman, “Transnational Honeycombs of Irish Surfing”

 

This paper will be based on interviews carried out for the PhD dissertation “Surf as a social and cultural witness in Ireland and in the United Kingdom, 1940-1990”. Those interviews will scrutinize the presence of transnationalism on the Irish surfing scene, from its early days in the 1960s until its popularisation in the late 1980s. Following the development of P. Calvin, we will try and depict the “honeycombs”¹, metaphors of the dynamics of transnationalism.

The perspective of transnationalism is interesting when studying sports, as networks between individuals and institutions are intricate and complex. Then questioning the importance of solidarity within this network could enable us to understand the dynamics between individuals, institutions and nations. In fact, individuals were responsible for the initial spread of surfing in Ireland, some of these individuals eventually founded institutions. In turn, a tradition of solidarity was perpetuated. This part of the paper will focus on the history of the sport.

Similarly, we will consider solidarity and competition as opposed values. Then, the role of each value on the Irish surf scene will be evaluated. Surfing’s dynamics do not resemble that of other sports, and in turn this affected the dynamics of surfing institutions. In this second part, sport dynamics will be the focal point, as Irish surfing competitive events will be analysed.

The last part of the paper will consider the reaction of the Irish surf institutions and individuals to political or social events. The events that could be studied are numerous, as the range goes from the Irish diaspora to the issues in Gaza. The focus will be put on takes of individuals regarding international political and social issues, often initiated by comparison.

 

 

Workshop 4 - Literary Transnational Solidarity

Location: West Wing 9, The Quad

Chair: Maureen O’Connor

 

Andrea Zvoníčková, “Between Nations, Between Selves: Memory, Space, and Solidarity in Elizabeth

Bowen’s The Heat of the Day”

 

This paper explores Elizabeth Bowen’s novel The Heat of the Day through the lens of space, memory, and divided loyalties, highlighting how the construction of individual identities and transnational solidarities is shaped by both physical and psychological spaces. In this wartime novel, Bowen’s characters experience a constant surveillance, both external and internal, that forces them to confront their loyalties - divided between Britain, Ireland, and personal allegiances.

Drawing on Foucauldian ideas of self-surveillance and Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, this paper will argue that spaces in The Heat of the Day, such as Stella’s apartment in London or the isolated space of Mount Morris, function as active instruments of powers. These spaces, steeped in memory, mediate the characters’ internal struggles to prompt them to police their own thoughts and actions. This constant inescapable gaze, both physical and psychological, becomes a means of control and ultimately shapes the characters’ ethical and emotional responses to loyalty, betrayal, and solidarity.

In the process, memory emerges as a key mechanism that anchors these tensions, as memory, tied to specific locations and objects, functions as a bridge between personal and collective histories, revealing the complex relationship between individual agency and transnational solidarities. The paper ultimately suggests that Bowen’s novel provides a subtle commentary on the limitations and potentials of transnational solidarity, as the characters’ inner surveillance reflects a broader cultural and political climate in which the desire for solidarity often clashes with the realities of loyalty and survival.

 

Sarah Levy Volensi, “Solidarity Across Shores: Irish-American Identity and Transnational Connections

in the McCourtian Narrativies”

 

Irish-American solidarity has deep historical roots, dating back to the Great Famine, when the Choctaw Nation provided monetary aid to Ireland during this devastating crisis. This bond of solidarity resurfaced during the Covid-19 pandemic, when Irish donors contributed significantly to Native American communities, a gesture described by The Times as ‘a return of a historic favour from 1847’.

In the writings of the McCourt brothers, solidarity emerges in varied forms and at multiple levels. It is both visible and tangible. The former can be geographically located, referring to spaces and environments where Irish culture is expressed and maintained. The latter relates to affect and emotion, particularly empathy, which is a recurring theme in Frank McCourt's works.

Beyond the Irish diaspora's experiences on American soil, the McCourt brothers’ narratives also highlight other dimensions of solidarity. These include the obvious brotherhood between Frank, Malachy, and Alphie, as well as the curiosity and interactions that arise among Irish immigrants and multicultural communities.

However, the concept of solidarity in their writings is not without its limits. These boundaries — manifesting as rejection, ostracism, and stereotypes — challenge and complicate the characters’ sense of identity. Ultimately, the McCourts often find themselves in a state of in- betweenness, navigating the tensions between their Irish heritage and their American realities.

In conclusion, this paper will explore how the McCourt brothers’ autobiographical narratives engage with and articulate transnational solidarities between Ireland and the United States. It will also consider what these connections reveal about cultural hybridity and the challenges it presents.

 

 

Adam Hanna, “Ireland in Yan Ge’s Elsewhere (2023)”

 

This paper discusses the presence of Irish history, literature, and contemporary politics in Elsewhere (2023), a short story collection by the celebrated Chinese writer Yan Ge. This collection draws heavily on the years Ge spent living in Dublin (2015-2018). It is her first English-language book. Drawing on a recent interview that I conducted with Ge, my paper will examine the development of her interest in Ireland and its history during the three crucial years in modern Irish history that coincided with her residence in Dublin. Paying particular attention to her short story ‘Shooting an Elephant’, I will discuss how Brexit border uncertainties entwine with postcolonial consciousness and a fascination with the works of Joyce to make an exceptional contemporary short story. Throughout my paper, I will contend that Ireland and Irish writers have become emblematic in her imagination as a means of addressing postcolonial linguistic anxieties,  injustice, and the power of the imagination to press back against reality.

 

 

16h00-16h15: Coffee break

16h15-17h40: Workshops 5 and 6

Workshop 5 – Linguistic, Sonic and Ecological Solidarities

Location: Dr Dora Allman Room, Fourth Floor, The Hub

Chair: Catríona Ó Dochartaigh

 

Kerron Ó Luain, “‘I dTreo an Díchoilínithe’: The History and Future of Transnational Irish-Language

Activism”

 

This paper examines Irish-language activism, which has long been shaped by transnational influences. While Irish-language activism emerged as a significant force only in the late 19th century with the founding of Conradh na Gaeilge, transnational solidarities among languages threatened by capitalist-colonialism began to take shape at that time. Despite limited research in this area – most scholarship focuses on transnational literary influences on Irish rather than activism or political organizing – these solidarities can be understood in three key phases:

1. Transnational linguistic solidarities among the Celtic Nations (c. 1893–1922).

2. Transnational linguistic solidarities within the European and later EU context (c. 1922–2022).

3. Emerging linguistic solidarities in the context of global decolonization (c. 2022–present).

The first part of the paper outlines these developments, analysing the movements, activists, and the political-economic forces shaping them.

The second part explores the future potential for strengthening transnational linguistic ties, particularly through anti-capitalist frameworks. A recurring tension in minority-language activism is the divide between reformist, state-centred strategies and radical, anti-capitalist approaches. Reformist efforts often operate within state structures and focus narrowly on the linguistic sector, hindering both intersectional solidarity within nations and consistent transnational collaboration. This section explores ways to overcome these barriers.

In the third and final section, the paper considers the role of radical linguistic solidarities in countering the far-right, which has become increasingly transnational. How can such activism challenge the systems driving both language decline and the rise of fascism?

 

Verena Commins, “Music-making, Irish Language Activism and Transnational Solidarity”

 

Artists in Ireland have long used music as a means of protest, as activism, and as a performative means of demonstrating solidarity as resistance to colonialism. This is often realised through the composition and/or performance of ‘protest’ song. However, recent subject position and advocacy in relation to Palestine has been demonstrated in other ways, as musicians use their platform, status and role to influence fandoms through actions, symbols and iterated support and boycotts. A significant stance within the political- economic precarity of the music industry.

This paper examines the transnational solidarity demonstrated by Belfast Irish language rap trio Kneecap with the cause of Palestine. It sketches historical solidarities between Northern Ireland and Palestine before considering heightened associations found amongst Irish language speakers. It draws on Arar’s (2017) argument that “expressions of international solidarity can be used to maintain local ethnic boundaries and reinforce local divisions” and Millar’s (2018) examination of Irish republicanism’s long history of co-operation and identification with Palestine. This paper, frames Kneecap’s stance in relation to minority Irish language rights as part of a process of decolonisation connecting language rights to identity and political legitimacy, representing a post-conflict shift from music as protest to anti-imperialist solidarity.

 

Marion Naugrette-Fournier, “‘The Church of the Love of the World’: Grace Wells’ Transnational Ark

for Nature”

 

In one of her most acclaimed works, Robin Wall Kimmerer declared that “from the very beginning of the world, the other species were a lifeboat for the people. Now, we must be theirs” (8). This same guiding principle exhibiting an implicit solidarity between the other species and human beings must now be applied by mankind, but the other way round, according to Irish ecopoet Grace Wells, who underlines the urgency of ‘us being a lifeboat for the other species’.

Throughout her poetry, Wells displays a keen awareness of local ecological disaster, as in “Beach Clean”, where she is busy ‘harvesting plastic’, but also mourning the loss of love (The church of the love of the world, 17). Nevertheless, the poet is able to grieve for her soiled local beach in Ireland, her loneliness, but also for the ecological disaster worldwide: “And I carry on with my task, stooped in the river water, /human enough to weep for the oceans, //creature enough to howl for her mate” (18). Wells crafts poems steeped in her local and global concerns for the planet and its creatures, as in “For so long they were our ark, now we must be theirs”. In her poetry, Wells’ poetical space widens by letting in the Anthropocene Angst, extending beyond Irish national borders.

In this paper, we shall attempt to study Grace Wells’ both human and ecopoetic sense of solidarity with the non-human surrounding her, and the transnational urgency of her plea for saving the planet and its creatures, ourselves included, for, as she warns us, “When the Animals Leave They Take Their Medicine With Them” (Fur, 83).

 

 

Workshop 6 - Transnational Nationalisms

Location: West Wing 9, The Quad

Chair: Alexandra Maclennan

 

Pauline Collombier, “Irish Home Rule as a Transnational Issue: New Zealand Women’s Mobilisation

(1883-1911)”

 

In a plea for the development of transnational history in Irish studies, Enda Delaney recommended that moderate Irish nationalism should be studied as a transnational phenomenon since it was “the first broad-based nationalist movement to connect the diaspora in the U.S., Britain and Australia with a vigorous political campaign in Ireland.”¹ In one of her works on Irish women, Senia Paseta pointed out that the recent development in Irish women’s history has focused on the period of the Irish Revolution and on the involvement of women in radical and republican organisations, leading to a neglect of the role women may have played in moderate politics. Yet being a female nationalist “did not necessarily mean commitment to Irish separatism’ and that ‘the history of advanced nationalist women is (…) much better known and understood than the history of constitutional nationalist women.”² As part of new research project aiming to explore how women were involved in the campaign to obtain Irish home rule between 1870 and 1914, our goal in this paper will be to explore how women in New Zealand reacted to the 6 tours involving Irish home rule delegates between 1883 and 1911. As studies of the Irish diaspora have shown, women formed an important share of the Irish immigrants settling abroad and thanks to an exploration of press reports (available thanks to https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/) , New Zealand will serve as a case study to see how women mobilised and participated in meetings and gatherings set up to welcome and hear the Irish delegates.

 

Martin O’Donoghue, “From Transnational Solidarity to Postcolonial Prime Ministers: Nehru and de

Valera as Independent Leaders”

 

In comparing Jawaharlal Nehru and Éamon de Valera, Timothy White framed them as ‘founders’ who ‘helped foster and utilise national myths to fulfil their nationalist aspirations’ in the ‘elite construction of identity’ in India and Ireland. However, while this highlights how both emphasised continuous histories and the essential unity of their ancient nations, Nehru and de Valera also assumed the more prosaic role of governing after independence – often operating in very different contexts from the radical Indo-Irish solidarity which existed in the first half of the twentieth century. As such, this paper seeks to compare them as prime ministers to examine their attitudes to parliament, party, and democracy.

After all, Indian and Irish nationalists criticised the British Westminster system, yet Nehru and de Valera oversaw two of the most successful electoral machines of the twentieth century. In India, this was perhaps unsurprising given the centrality of the Congress in the independence movement and constitution drafting. In Ireland, it spoke to an irony that so many condemned Westminster systems only for the anti-Treaty side of the Civil War to create a highly disciplined party machine in Fianna Fáil. By the 1940s and 1950s, Nehru and de Valera maintained friendship, but both praised aspects of the British parliamentary system, and this paper will conclude by asking to what extent their approaches to systems of government evinced contrast with strands of ideology associated with their respective independence movements.

 

Valérie Morisson, “Eva International: The Irish Biennal as a Lever for Transnational Solidarities

 

EVA International, Ireland’s biennal of contemporary art, has long relied on guest curators to create transnational responses to social or political issues. From 1990 onwards, EVA International has been organized around thematic issues and has included the commissioning of site-specific works. It has invited artists from around the world including ‘peripheral’ countries. The 38th biennal, 2018, curated by Inti Guerrero, probed contemporary nationalisms and protectionisms in an international perspective. It invited international artists to respond to a painting by Seán Keating, Night’s Candles Are Burnt Out (1928–29), celebrating the Ardacrushna dam. Among them was Egyptian artist Inji Efflatoun, whose work les diablesrouges (1964) critically evoked the construction of the Aswan High Dam. Offering a unique opportunity to understand Irish history and challenges in an ex-centric perspective, EVA International establishes alternative networks and co-respondences. So as to put to the fore its commitment to archipelagic curatorial practices our investigation will be more precisely focused on the 2023 biennal. Directed by Polish curator and sociologist Sebastian Cichocki, it was dedicated to the practice of gleaning, « a strategy of survival and resourcefulness essential to those marginalized by the emerging forces of capitalism ». Many works echo Irish culture : a film by the Korean collective ikkibawiKrrr, Seaweed Story (2022) drew a heroic portrait of the haenyeo, all-female divers who harvest seaweed in South Korea, singing in unison at the edge of a cliff ; the works of Ukrainian artist Kateryna Aliinyk related gleaning to survival tactics and war-related famines.

 

20h00: Conference dinner (Jacobs on the Mall)

 

 

Saturday 22 March

9h00-10h25: Workshops 7, 8 and 9

Workshop 7 - Abolition and Ireland

Location: Dr Dora Allman Room, Fourth Floor, The Hub

Chair: Claire Connolly

 

Adrian Mulligan, “The Politics of Identity, Memory and Heritage: Recovering Abolitionist

Transnational Solidarities on the Island of Ireland”

 

During the nineteenth century, abolitionism was a prominent and popular movement in Ireland, which was then a part of the United Kingdom, although arguably a colony. Particularly in urban areas, abolitionist societies -many of which were aligned with their British counterparts -played a crucial role in a campaign of transnational networked advocacy which secured the abolishment of slavery in the British Empire, and subsequently in the United States. Despite some prominent but nonetheless ultimately symbolic exceptions however, abolitionism in Ireland remained completely separate from any anti-colonial struggle against British rule, in various guises over time and place. The reasons why can be discerned by considering sectarian divisions then prevalent in society, the fact that anti-colonialism was not the sole dynamic, and that many Irish people were implicated in the business of British colonialism, both in Ireland and through colonial networks. Here, I draw on my own work as a founding board member of the Globe Lane Initiative, through which we take inspiration from Frederick Douglass’ 1845 visit to Ireland for example, to organize events such as #DouglassWeek, or to establish the Cork Abolitionists Trail. In this paper, while I discuss the importance of recovering this particular history of transnational solidarity in a contemporary context, I also seek to illuminate the greater potential it holds, to challenge dominant, but overly simplified historical narratives on the island of Ireland.

 

Joanna Wharton, “‘Mary an African’, Maria Edgeworth, and the Mulloys: Enslaved Subjectivities and

Landlord-Tenant Relations between Ireland and Jamaica”

 

Instances of interracial solidarity are frequently cited as historical counterpoints to Irish participation in the transatlantic slave trade and the system of racial chattel slavery. This paper presents a case study that complicates such a picture. Focussing on the decades preceding the abolition act of 1833, it examines new findings about the celebrated author Maria Edgeworth and her Protestant landowning family, and their relationship with the Mulloys, a Catholic family of tenants on the Edgeworthstown estate, some of whom emigrated to Jamaica in pursuit of wealth. My paper explores the entwinement of a local moral economy in Edgeworthstown with a transatlantic favour economy, where the politics of Irish estate management aligned with the interests of plantation slavery. It illuminates the little-known role of Catholic tenant slave-owners whose generational experience of socio-economic dispossession under British colonial rule in Ireland drove participation in global systems of oppression and exploitation. By focusing on Edgeworth’s involvement in the sale of Mary, an enslaved African, and her children, the paper addresses the chasm between the ideals and practices of Enlightenment liberalism, and interrogates the racialised limits of Edgeworth’s transnationalism. I argue that, beyond solidarity, our own ‘accountability towards the enslaved’ (to use Stephanie Smallwood’s phrasing) demands an effort to recentre the enslaved in Irish-Caribbean histories, however sparse their traces in the archive may be.

 

Susan Manly, “Maria Edgeworth, Transnational Sympathies, and Abolition”

 

Maria Edgeworth’s fictional responses to chattel slavery and abolition have been a subject of scrutiny since the publication of Susan C. Greenfield’s 1997 essay, “‘Abroad and at Home.’” Hitherto unexamined letters from and to Edgeworth now reveal the familial ties that connected Edgeworth to plantations in Jamaica, and enable us to identify the social contacts that she exploited to advance the case of a family of tenants from her Irish estate who had gone to Jamaica to make their fortunes.

Alongside this, I examine Edgeworth’s close connections with the Bowood circle of progressive Whigs whose campaigning from the 1810s to the 1820s focused on criticism of British domination of the Irish economy and the slavery system in British colonies. She was also friendly with a leading campaigner for abolition, the Benthamist John Bowring, to whom she introduced her brother-in-law, Captain Francis Beaufort, because he had “an ardent desire to be made acquainted with those who have served eminently the African cause” (Edgeworth to Bowring, 23 April 1822). Bowring subsequently invited Edgeworth to join a meeting at the anti-slavery African Institution.

The paper thus illuminates Edgeworth’s incompatible stances on these debates: her reinforcement of the plantation slavery system on the one hand, in the form of her legal interventions to secure her tenants’ property in enslaved people; and on the other hand her close political ties to abolitionists. Overall I aim to throw new light on the relationship between “home” and “abroad” in Edgeworth’s thought, and on the power relations and injustices with which she engaged.

 

 

 

Workshop 8 - Solidarity of the Stomach

Location: The Shtepps Auditorium, First Floor, The Hub

Chair: Pauline Collombier

 

Danny Shanahan, “The Hunger Strike in Ireland and India”

 

In 2016, Irom Charmu Sharmila ended her sixteen-year hunger strike, the longest ever recorded. She was protesting India’s Armed Forces Special Powers Act, a 1958 law that still allows for the legalised killing of civilians in the Northeast of India. Commentators have understood her protest solely through the legacy of Indian nationalist struggle. But both the law being protested and her chosen method of resistance made their way to India via Ireland. This paper will trace the transmission of the hunger strike, a technique of anti-colonial resistance to political imprisonment, between Ireland and India in the twentieth century. Beginning with its origins in the Russian anarchist movements of the 1880s and its migration to Ireland via Irish suffragettes, the paper will consider the networks of solidarity and strategy originally created in the wake of the deaths of Terence MacSwiney and Jatindra Nath Das. It will discuss Gandhi’s subsequent hunger strikes as well as his importation of other techniques of resistance from Michael Davitt and the Irish Land League. It will end with a consideration of the legacies of these hunger strikers as models for militants in Ireland and South Asia in the postcolonial era: from the H Blocks and Armagh women’s hunger strikes to Irom Charmu Sharmila herself, the "Iron Lady of Manipur”. Throughout, I will analyse the hunger strike’s symbolic value — its ability to shift the terrain of struggle from outside of the prison walls to the prisoner’s body itself— and its value for struggles globally today.

 

Louise Gerbier, “The Irish Campaign ‘Hunger for Justice/Troscadh ar son na Córa’ for Palestine:

Embodying and Historicising Transnational Solidarity through Hunger Striking”

 

We propose to present and discuss the campaign “Hunger for Justice”, organized across all the island of Ireland in December 2024, which consisted on organizing a day-long fast and vigils for Palestine, with the aim to collect money for the UNRWA and shining light on the Palestinian humanitarian catastrophe. Looking to build strong individual links between Irish people fasting and Palestinian people suffering, the campaign was organized “to illustrate the kinship with Palestinians who are currently being forced into starvation”.

In our presentation, we will discuss how this campaign, which relies on the Irish tradition of hunger striking for justice (troscadh, as it is defined in the Brehon laws), looks at transnational solidarity as an embodied praxis to which every individual can participate. To better discuss its aim of shaming the offenders and bringing them to justice, this physical relation to solidarity should be presented within the anti-imperialist framework foregrounded by its organizers, many of whom have a direct relationship to the 1981 republican hunger strike in HMP The Maze, either being hunger strikers (Laurence McKeown-, or their descendants (Bernadette McDonnell). Discussing the mixed methods of protests used in this campaign, we will aim to bring to light its emotional dimension and the role played by social media in modernizing the pre-Christian Ireland practice of cealachan.

Such a presentation will offer an opportunity to look at both transnational narratives and physical practices relying on a historicized practice of embodied solidarity as well as its memorialization.

 

Paddy Brennan, “The Truly Gaelic Famine: National Chauvinism and Transnational Solidarity in the

Depiction of Food and Hunger in Contemporary Irish Fiction”

 

Flann O’Brien’s 1941 novel, The Poor Mouth, satirises the notion of Irish people possessing a proprietorial attitude towards the experience of hunger and starvation. The novel’s narrator refers to “the truly Gaelic famine that was ours always,” whilst hunger is presented as being on par with the Irish language as a symbol of patriotic fervour and national identity as, at the Feis held in the fictional town of Corkadoragha, “Many Gaels collapsed from hunger and from the strain of listening while one fellow died most Gaelically in the midst of the assembly.” Despite the farcical nature of O’Brien’s narrative, it is nonetheless indicative of mainstream views regarding Irish culture and identity. The historian Hasia Diner writes that “the Irish experience with food— recurrent famines and an almost universal reliance on the potato, a food imposed on them— had left too painful a mark on the Irish Catholic majority to be considered a source of communal expression and national joy,” and she therefore characterises Ireland “as a place where hunger and want defined national identity.”

This paper will examine depictions of Irish culinary culture (or the lack thereof) in fiction by Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright and Frank McCourt. Tóibín’s 2009 novel, Brooklyn, presents the Irish diaspora in New York as both socially and gastronomically insular owing to a reluctancy to interact with other immigrant groups such as Jewish or Italian Americans. However, other texts paint a more nuanced picture of the cultural and culinary exchanges which took place between these different groups. In many instances, food becomes a symbol of solidarity between ethnic groups, rather than a marker of Irish exceptionalism.

 

 

 

Workshop 9 - Anti-Capital, Anti-Colonial

Location: West Wing 9, The Quad

Chair: Thierry Robin

 

Michael G. Cronin, “Roger Casement: History, Humanitarianism and Solidarity”

 

Roger Casement offers a compelling historical exemplar of solidarity as a dynamic and mobile political orientation, in which Irish solidarity with victims of capitalist, imperial exploitation in the Global South can in turn fuel a transformative politics within Ireland. However, in recent decades Casement has attracted a style of historical and biographical writing propelled by a determined effort to revise the radical implications of his writing. In this approach, Casement’s radical anti-imperial politics fuelled by solidarity is re-signified as a liberal ethics of ‘humanitarianism’ grounded in identification. His lauded ‘humanitarianism’ abroad is sharply delineated from his ‘extremism’ at home. The paradoxical effects of this reveal the limits of the liberal imaginary; celebrating Casement while denying any rational basis to his politics, and an anti-homophobic affirmation of his ‘sexuality’ that reproduces homophobic recoil from his actual sex life. This paper will explore this discursive ‘Roger Casement’ and what it reveals to us about the politics of solidarity.

 

Olivier Coquelin, “Irish Communists and the Comintern (1919-1943): An Uneasy Relationship

 

Following the creation of the Third International in March 1919, an appeal was launched for the unity of all socialists who had opposed the Great War, which had undermined the international workers’ solidarity advocated by the Second International.

Paradoxical as it may seem, the October Revolution was generally well received in Ireland, not only by the working-class organisations but also by Sinn Féin, which welcomed the Bolsheviks’ stance against the war and in favour of the self-determination of peoples. The pro-Soviet line taken by the Irish Trade Union Congress (ITUC), on the other hand, was essentially motivated by the belief that the working class was indeed in power in Moscow. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that four far-left factions responded to the call for membership of the Third International, soon to be known as the Comintern. Of the four, the Socialist Party of Ireland (SPI) emerged as the successful applicant. Under the leadership of Roddy Connolly (son of James Connolly) and after expelling its reformist members, the party adopted the name Communist Party of Ireland (CPI) in October 1921 and became the Irish section of the Comintern.

However, relations between the Comintern and the Irish Communists proved uneasy over time not least because of the insubordination of leaders such as Roddy Connolly and then James Larkin. This resulted in the Comintern repeatedly reorganising its Irish section.

This paper sets out to examine these sometimes stormy relations and the Comintern’s attempts to tame the Irish Communists – notably with the help of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) – until its demise in 1943.

 

 

Lionel Pilkington, “Speaking Otherwise: Allegory, Irish Theatre and Anti-Colonial Solidarity”

 

How to think about Irish theatre in relation to transnational anti-colonial solidarity when, historically, Irish theatre serves as a global modernizing institution that typically equates decolonisation with the act of reconciling indigenous initiatives to received metropolitan systems? Instead of anti-colonialism being affirmed by Irish theatre, it seems that is rather European colonial capitalism. However, this dead-end impression changes radically when Irish theatre is considered in relation to styles of performance. This paper focuses on the 1980s, the period when Ireland’s political economy changed from the weak distributionism of a post-colonial republican or welfare state model to the country’s current messianically pro-business model along with iron-clad commitments to privatization and all forms of capital acquisition. The examines the extraordinary efflorescence of various institutionally-oriented theatre initiatives in the early to mid 1980s (such as the setting up of various theatre companies, dedicated theatre magazines, theatre archives, and university theatre studies departments) that take place at exactly the same time as a striking deterioration of actors’ pay and working conditions and a critical preoccupation with the idea that Irish actors above all require rigorous re-training as well as imposed conditions of discipline and precarity. I argue that what is at stake in these issues is the independent and sometimes uncanny signifying power of the performing body and, in particular, its ability to subvert or interrupt production using tableau (or other discordant movements and gestures) so as to re-activate an illicit anti-colonial aesthetic regime dominated not by the plenitude and metaphor of the institutional theatre, but by the uncanny and more destabilizing other-speaking of allegory (allos / other; agoria / speaking).

 

 

10h30-10h45: Coffee break

Location: Outside Dr Dora Allman Room, Fourth Floor, The Hub

 

10h45-12h15: Workshops 10, 11 and 12

 

Workshop 10 - Transnationalising Ulster

Location: Dr Dora Allman Room, Fourth Floor, The Hub

Chair: David Fitzgerald

 

Fabrice Mourlon, “Transnational and Trans-textual Solidarities: The Anarchist Movement in Belfast”

 

In the late 1960s, with the onset of the conflict in Northern Ireland, students fled their homeplace to study abroad, especially in Great Britain. During their time in academia they met key people in the growing anarchist movement worldwide and came back home with a fresh and non-sectarian approach to the antagonisms that divided their society. They decided to set up a fluid organization with a library (Just Books) that would act as a hub for the meeting of their members and a place for the dissemination of books and original pamphlets that could not be found in other libraries elsewhere. The new movement was both active locally and internationally as it had established a network of friendly organisations.

This paper explores these international networks and also considers the anarchist movement in Belfast as being trans-social class and as transcending the polarity of the conflict. This research is based on interviews with members of the movement and on the written minutes of the meeting held between them. This invaluable archive will also allow to study how the use of drawings around the text of the written minutes serve as a space for dialogue.

 

 

Charlotte Barcat, “The ‘Derry Model: Reframing Derry/Londonderry as an International Model for

Conflict Resolution and Peace-Building”

 

In the last two decades, with major transformations like the building of the Peace Bridge, Derry/Londonderry, which had long been known worldwide as a symbol for conflict, has been rebranding as a city of peace and more specifically, peacebuilding. Many factors and actors are at play in this transformation, which includes presenting the city as a “model” from which lessons can be drawn in order to inform other countries dealing with conflict resolution and peace-building. The most recent and most visible manifestation of this idea was the “Derry Model”, officially the "Peacebuilding and Conflict Resolution Programme", funded by the European Union via PEACE IV, and run by the Bloody Sunday Trust. The programme, initially focused on specifically Northern Irish issues (parades, legacy and justice, heritage and education, and dialogue), has since taken on an international dimension, and held its first Peace and Conflict International Summer School in June 2023, receiving human rights and social justice activists from the Balkans. This paper will look at how this conviction that international lessons can be drawn from the city’s experience developed, starting with the campaign for justice around Bloody Sunday, which was the initial context for the establishment of the Bloody Sunday Trust, and relied heavily on international parallels and transnational solidarities – and continues to do so, in particular with Palestine, which has been the focus of the last two Bloody Sunday commemorations as well as numerous other events since the 1990s.

 

Magali Dexpert, “The American Connection and Involvement in the Northern Irish Peace Process”

 

Shortly after being elected President, Joe Biden spoke of a “special relationship”¹ between the U.S and Northern Ireland being “alive and well”, as part of his first official overseas trip. On the same occasion, the American President also indicated the U.S would be watching closely to ensure the Good Friday Agreement would be preserved in a context of post-Brexit negotiations².

While thinking about transnational solidarities in the Irish context, the relation and international interactions between the island of Ireland, in particular Northern Ireland, and the United States is one among many other examples that emerge.

Close relations between Ireland and the U.S date back to the 19^th Century principally, when four million people emigrated from Ireland to the U.S. When the Troubles in Northern Ireland began, money and arms flew across the Atlantic, in support of the region’s nationalist community³. In the early 1990s, President Clinton sent the US Senator George Mitchell, whose role was crucial in chairing peace talks in the Province. More recently, the Brexit negotiations revived the U.S. implication in Northern Irish affairs.

In light of these different elements this paper offers to answer to the following question: why is America interested in Northern Ireland? It will examine the evolving nature of transnational solidarities between the U.S and Ireland, in particular Northern Ireland, in a context of conflict resolution and, more recently, post-Brexit negotiations.

 

 

Workshop 11 - Transnational Epistemologies

Location: The Shtepps Auditorium, First Floor, The Hub

Chair: Valérie Morisson

 

Hiram Morgan,”Hugh O’Neill Compared: Historiographies of Resistance”

 

Hugh O’Neill 1550-1616 earl of Tyrone and last inaugurated O’Neill was the greatest opponent of English control of Ireland in the early modern period. The nine years’ revolt he led between 1593 and 1603 brought him, according to divergent commentators, either esteem or notoriety and attracted many international comparisons to other resistance leaders outside of Ireland both historic and contemporary. However, in more recent times his reputation - perhaps because of his willingness to negotiate or because he ultimately failed - has been downgraded in major representations by Sean O’Faolain and Brian Friel. This paper explores the international reputation of O’Neill in the early period and asks why his stock has fallen whilst that of others like this ally the more one-dimensional Red Hugh O’Donnell has risen.

 

Alfred Markey, “Tracing Solidarities between Ireland, Equatorial Guinea and Palestine: Sean

O’Faolain, Donato Ndongo and Edward Said”

 

Notwithstanding his youthful involvement in revolutionary activity, the key 20th century Irish writer and public intellectual Sean O’Faolain has traditionally been read as an exemplary liberal humanist, as, in effect, a champion of a Eurocentric template of advanced humanity which at best shows benign condescension towards peripheral cultures and subjects. While some recent studies have begun to question traditional interpretations of O’Faolain, these have been undertaken exclusively within the sphere of the English-speaking world.

In this paper I propose, in an act of self-conscious solidarity with the so-called “Global South”, to read O’Faolain in relation to the Spanish-language writer and public intellectual Donato Ndongo, from the former Spanish colony Equatorial Guinea. Like O’Faolain, Ndongo was a key figure in speaking truth to power in the autarkic state which emerged in the early decades of Equatorial Guinean independence. In reading O’Faolain in relation to Ndongo, I will primarily take my cue from the critical work on the role of the public intellectual, and on a renewed conceptualization of humanism, of the Palestinian pioneer of postcolonial discourse Edward Said, while also engaging with the tradition of decolonial critique which has its origins in the sphere of Spanish language influence and the Global South, and which has sought to delink from Eurocentric hierarchies of knowledge and ways of being in the pursuit of more just and sustainable relations for all.

 

Tim Heron/Tadhg Ó hErodáin and Lugh Ó hErodáin, “Healing Ties: Ireland, France, and the

Transnational Traditions of Herbal Medicine”

 

This joint talk by brothers Tim Heron / Tadhg Ó hErodáin (an academic) and Lugh Ó hErodáin (a medical herbalist and translator) will explore transnational connections between Ireland and France in herbalism. First, it will examine historical links between Irish and French herbalists, likely established through monastic networks and scholarly exchanges from the early medieval period. A key figure is Tadhg Ó Cuinn, whose Materia Medica (1415) blends Irish vernacular knowledge with European traditions. Educated at Montpellier, a hub of Graeco-Arabic medicine, Ó Cuinn drew on sources like Platearius’ Liber de Simplici Medicinae, demonstrating Ireland’s engagement with wider medical scholarship. The talk will then shift to the 20th century, using Dr. Henri Leclerc, the French physician who coined “phytothérapie,” as a lens to explore contemporary connections. Herbalism in France suffered a major setback when the Vichy régime outlawed herborisme in 1941, restricting most herbal treatments to pharmacists and leading to the near-collapse of the profession. Lugh Ó hErodáin, who is currently annotating and translating Leclerc’s work into English, will discuss the challenges faced by clinical herbalists in contemporary Ireland and will explain how engaging with Leclerc’s work may contribute to their practice.

 

 

Workshop 12 - Solidarity of the Body

Location: West Wing 9, The Quad

Chair: Angela Flynn

 

Sinéad Kennedy: “Reproductive Justice Beyond Borders: Conceptualising Feminist Solidarities”

 

The question of what constitutes solidarity (and what does not) has long been a source of preoccupation for feminist activists. Feminism itself has long been a contested term but in recent years the term has become so ubiquitous and the concept so elastic, that the designate is now almost meaningless. In order to recuperate and conceptualise the idea of feminist solidarities, this paper draws on Rupp and Taylor (1999) argument that “in every group, in every place, at every time, the meaning of ‘feminism’ is worked out in the course of being and doing”. This requires an understanding of feminist solidarity which recognises that it is the dynamics of doing that constitutes and render feminist solidarity meaningful.

In order to more fully explore this concept of feminist praxis, this paper proposes to consider how a solidaristic, transnational feminist movement might learn from both successes, limitations conflicts of two recent significant feminist movements that were successful in uniting broad coalitions in the fight for reproductive justice; the Irish “Repeal’ campaign and the alliance of Central and South American social movements for reproductive justice. Theses case studies will offer a framework to distinguish between what Varma and Shaban (2024) have designated categories of superficial feminist solidarity where actions may raise awareness, but do so in the service of building consensus and maintaining the status quo, and substantive feminist solidarity which manifests as a praxis that advances demands for social justice and transformative change.

 

Omkolthoum ElSayed ElBadawy, “Transnational Solidarity in Global Healthcare: The Case of Gaza”

 

Transnational solidarity in global healthcare, though essential for addressing crises, faces significant limitations and challenges, particularly in regions like Gaza. Healthcare solidarity relies on coordinated global efforts, shared priorities, and equitable resource distribution. However, these ideals often clash with political, economic, and logistical barriers, undermining effective action.

One key limitation is the fragmentation of international responses. Governments and organizations often have conflicting priorities, influenced by geopolitics and strategic alliances. In Gaza, these divisions hinder the establishment of a unified healthcare support system, leaving the population vulnerable to chronic shortages of medical supplies, personnel, and facilities.

Another challenge is the unequal distribution of resources and influence. While grassroots healthcare initiatives aim to alleviate suffering, they frequently lack the funding or political leverage to address systemic healthcare crises. Conversely, larger global health organizations may prioritize stability or diplomacy over addressing urgent medical needs, further complicating efforts to provide consistent care.

Finally, structural barriers, such as border closures and restrictions on humanitarian aid, severely limit the reach of healthcare assistance in crisis zones. Without addressing these systemic obstacles, transnational healthcare solidarity risks being more symbolic than impactful, failing to meet the urgent medical needs of vulnerable populations.

This study examines the challenges and limitations of transnational solidarity in global healthcare. For example, in the Gaza crisis. The study uses narrative review of relevant literature that examine these issues, to map the position of transnational solidarity to achieve expected goals in relevant literature.

 

 

 

12h15-13h15: Lunch

Outside Dr Dora Allman Room, Fourth Floor, The Hub

 

13h15-14h10: Plenary 2: Bahriye Kemal (Chair: Anne Mulhall)

“Postcolonial and Partitioned Displacement: Interdisciplinarity, Co-creation and Solidarity from the Balcony of the Mediterranean Sea”

Location: Dr Dora Allman Room, Fourth Floor, The Hub

 

14h15-15h40: Workshops 13, 14, and 15

 

Workshop 13 – Ireland and Palestine II

Location: Dr Dora Allman Room, Fourth Floor, The Hub

Chair: Laurence Davis

 

Yasmine Zein Al-Abedine, “The Irish Transnational Solidarity with Palestine and Global Governance”

 

The Irish experience with colonialism and the struggle for independence has cultivated a profound empathy for the Palestinian cause since October 2023 events. This historical connection has invigorated a strong and lasting transnational solidarity movement between Ireland and Palestine. This paper aims to analyze the multifaceted dimensions of this solidarity, focusing on its implications for global governance and international public law. The Irish solidarity movement with Palestine has manifested in various forms; however, it has included political advocacy, civil society activism and cultural exchange. Irish politicians have consistently championed Palestinian rights on international platforms, although Irish civil society organizations have played a crucial role in raising awareness and mobilizing support. Moreover, the Irish diaspora has contributed significantly to the Palestinian cause both financially and through advocacy efforts. Because of this, the bond between these two people remains resilient.

This paper will explore the legal framework that underpins international solidarity movements, particularly in relation to international human rights law and international humanitarian law. It seeks to investigate the ways in which international law can be invoked to support and protect these movements; however, it will also address the potential challenges and limitations they face. When analyzing the Irish case, this paper aims to contribute to a broader understanding of the role of transnational solidarity movements in shaping global governance. Although such movements have the potential to challenge the status quo, they are often met with resistance because they threaten established norms. This highlights their importance in promoting a more just and equitable international order.

 

Mark Walsh and John Murray, “Palestine and the International Mathematical Olympiad: Mathematics

as a Form of Resistance”

 

This paper concerns the impact of occupation and war on Mathematics Education in Palestine. In particular, we attempt to document the struggle of Palestinian students to participate, in 2024, in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), a yearly mathematics tournament for second-level students considered by many the most prestigious mathematics competition in the world. Our role was as mathematicians in Ireland, giving moral and practical support to the Palestinian educational organisation Meshka in training students to compete.

According to the UNHCR, the destruction of Gaza’s schools is so great that over 625,000 children have been denied formal education for over a year. Gaza’s university system has faced similar ruination with campuses razed and alarming numbers of academic staff murdered. Amid what experts call scholasticide, there are students and teachers who resist, improvising a form of classroom experience in tents and burned-out buildings, through WhatsApp messages or Zoom calls during rare moments of connectivity.

One example of such resistance, and the subject of this paper, is the attempt by Palestinian students in Gaza and the West Bank to compete in IMO 2024. Despite the competition’s sixty-five-year history, it was not until July 2022 that a Palestinian team participated. We will discuss the significance of Palestinian involvement in the IMO, the dire challenges facing the students (especially those based in Gaza), their heroic efforts and the role of intellectual activities, like mathematics, in resisting oppression. We hope to convey the importance of transnational solidarity as Palestinians try to protect and rebuild their society.

 

Flore Coulouma, “Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Irish Perspectives on the Palestinian Occupied

Territories”

 

In this paper, I examine the question of transnational solidarities as formulated by three Irish authors, Colm Tóibín, Eimear McBride, and Colum McCann, in the 2017 collective volume Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation, edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman in partnership with the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence, a human rights organization founded by former Israeli soldiers.

While the volume is now over 10 years old, the current events in Palestine/Israel and the vocal expressions of solidarity with Palestinians in Ireland or from Irish intellectuals make it particularly relevant to look at these older essays. In “Imagining Jericho”, Tóibín’s account of his 2016 visit awakens memories of his experience as an investigative journalist and his moving interview of an ailing Yasser Arafat in a Tunis safe house in 1992. In “The End of Reasons”, Eimear McBride meets Palestinian women in Jericho, and it is their voice we hear, weaving together the hardships of everyday discrimination as Palestinians and as women, and their aspirations for a better future. In “Two Stories, So many Stories”, Colum McCann introduces us to bereaved fathers Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin, two friends whose experience will form the basis of McCann’s 2020 novel Apeirogon. I will contextualize the Kingdom of Olives and Ash project and put it in perspective with current expressions of Irish solidarity today.

 

 

Workshop 14 – Solidarity with/from Ireland

Location: The Shtepps Auditorium, First Floor, The Hub

Chair: Fabrice Mourlon

 

Kamel Salmi, “The Great Hunger and the Ottoman Donation: The Story of a Trans-imperial Solidarity”

 

More than a century and a half after the Great Hunger (1845-1852), Ireland's present remains deeply shaped by what happened during that period. This paper explores the enduring influence of the Famine on Irish collective memory, examining it through the lens of charity and international solidarity. A significant yet frequently overlooked chapter in this history is the Ottoman Empire's donation to Ireland during the Famine – a remarkable act of generosity that transcended cultural and religious boundaries. It is a story of consolation that, while questioned by historians, has been passed down through generations. The Ottoman Sultan’s charitable act not only sought to alleviate the suffering of the Irish people, but also left a long-lasting imprint on Irish history. This historical event was commemorated by writers such as James Joyce in his Ulysses, as well as presidents such as Mary McAleese and current President, Michael D. Higgins. Beyond political recognition, local traditions have kept the memory alive; the town of Drogheda honors the event with a commemorative plaque and a football club emblem bearing the Ottoman crescent and star. This study situates the Ottoman donation within a broader framework of consolation through history. By revisiting moments of trans-imperial generosity, Ireland finds a form of liberation: an acknowledgment of shared humanity that counters narratives of isolation and suffering. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates how history can serve as a source of consolation, fostering hope and cross-cultural connections. Through this lens, the Famine’s legacy is not only one of loss but also of resilience and solidarity.

 

 

Evi Gkotzaridis, “Irish Solidarity with Greece during the Bailout Crisis”

 

The rise of SYRIZA in Greece as a credible and inspiring political alternative to the imposition of ruthless austerity measures by the TROIKA sparked an unprecedented level of solidarity within the broader Irish Left-wing movement. This intense grass-root interest in Greek political developments stood in sharp contrast with the official response of the Fine Gael-Labour coalition government. Taoiseach Enda Kenny had denounced Greece’s populist drift and ruled out Irish support for a write-off of Greek debt while Finance Minister Michael Noonan had rejected Tsiprast suggestion of holding a European debt conference to negotiate a new deal between all the indebted countries and their creditors. Moreover, while in 2015 Kenny was trying hard to convince his people not to stray off the straight and narrow path of debt repayment by asserting that Ireland isn’t Greece, Irish literary critic Richard Pine insisted instead that Greece is Ireland and Ireland is Greece. Indeed, in a book published the same year, Pine had set out to highlight the “enormous similarities of a psychic kind” between the two peoples. This moment of historical convergence between the Irish and the Greeks was even epitomized by a captivating documentary, recounting the incredible fate of a famous poem by Brendan Behan, The Laughing Boy, written in memory of Michael Collins and which later became the quintessential anthem of resistance to the military dictatorship in Greece. This paper therefore seeks to reconstruct this moment, showing the different forms that Irish solidarity with Greece took, with the dual aim of better measuring its impact on the Irish Left and its intellectual and political significance.

 

 

Workshop 15 - The US and Ireland

Location: West Wing 9, The Quad

Chair: Lee Jenkins

 

Chandana Mathur, “The Solidarity of Labour and the Labour of Solidarity: The Mnemonic Significance

of Irishwoman Mary Harris Jones in the US Heartland Today”

 

It was at the Labor Day weekend festivities in Princeton, Indiana, in September 1990 that I first met the American industrial workers who have been the key participants in my long-term ethnographic research project. One of the longest continuously running Labor Day celebrations in the US, Southern Indiana’s Labor Day event was first sponsored by the Knights of Labor in 1886, eight years before Labor Day became an official national holiday. I will explore here the event’s longevity in a politically conservative region, the kinds of narrative it has deployed, and the possibilities it may or may not hold for labour mobilisation. An important feature of the recent iterations of this celebration has been their focus on US labour history. Although there is not one single unionised coal mine left in the state of Indiana today, the 19^th century Irish-born labour organiser Mary Harris Jones (Mother Jones), known for her activism on behalf of US mineworkers, remains an electrifying symbol of union solidarity here. I will argue that committed union members in Indiana have undertaken the painstaking labour of solidarity at this low moment for the US labour movement in myriad ways that revolve around Mother Jones -- by organising lectures by prominent labour historians regarding her career at the Labor Day event, by persuading the city council to erect a plaque to commemorate her visit to Indiana, and above all, by remembering Mother Jones as a way of memorialising the lost heyday of labour solidarity.

 

Hope Noonan Stoner, “‘Hymns to the Spirit of Revolution’: Diasporic Irishness and Transnational

Solidarities in the Modernist Poems of Lola Ridge”

 

As a diasporic Irish woman, modernist poet Lola Ridge (1873-1941) was doubly excluded from the new imagined community of the Irish nation, increasingly so as the Irish state adopted a more isolationist, anti-socialist patriarchal nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s. Ridge’s diasporic Irishness lurks at the edge of her poetry, informing her construction of a poetic speaker and her portrayal of another immigrant and diasporic community in America, Ashkenazi Jews, in “The Ghetto” (1918). Her interest in Irish independence and nationhood, especially the role of international labour figures like James Larkin, coloured her involvement in socialist and anarchist causes in America, including the Modern School, demonstrations against the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, and her poetry especially poems dedicated to Irish and American labour figures like Larkin, Tom Mooney and Frank Little. Finally, Ridge combines messages of diasporic longing for and diasporic criticism of Irish nationalist leaders and the Irish Free State in poems like “The Tidings” (1918), “Incognito” (1927) and “Incompatibility” (1927). Scholarship and popular consciousness in both Ireland and America has cast modern Ireland as increasingly progressive and modern Irish-America as overwhelmingly regressive politically. Although there is truth in this portrayal, it is not a monolithic truth. Through the incorporation of transnational and postcolonial feminist theory and diasporic identity theory, this paper argues that Ridge’s poetry offers an alternate narrative of the Irish diaspora in America in the early to mid-twentieth century that spearheaded Ireland’s transnational solidarity with marginalised, racialised, colonised populations around the world and criticised the regressive, conservative strain within politics on the island of Ireland.

 

 

Hafsa Askar, “The Black Panther Party and the Provisional IRA: The Construction of Political and Cultural Images of Anti-imperialist Revolutionaries in a Transnational Perspective”

 

The Black Panther Party for Self Defense was founded in 1966. Tired of the over pacifist rhetoric and methods of the Afro-American Civil Rights Movement and not aligned with the white radicals, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, two young Oakland students, create the Black Panthers in order to organize the Self-Defense of the local Afro-American community. Quickly, it will develop into the most impactful radical organization of its time in the United States. Across the Atlantic, the Northern-Irish Civil Rights movement, mainly inspired by the Afro-American movement, rages in Northern Ireland. In 1969, the historical paramilitary organisation of the Irish-Catholic Republicans, the Irish Republican Army, split over the issue of pacifism and armed struggle. Out of this split is born the Provisional Irish Republican Army, which will soon lead the Republican struggle during the 30 years long war that will oppose Irish nationalists to the British Army and the Anglo-Protestant loyalists in Northern Ireland. In different social, political and cultural contexts, both organisations bore a similar image and were subjected to similar representation and propaganda strategies from the states they opposed.

This paper offers to explore the transnational relationships between both organisations by examining the intersections of their movements. Through the study of the developments of the civil rights movements, the parallel ideologies and practices of both organisations and the connections between the Irish-American diaspora and both struggles.

These ties, often understudied, inform us on global solidarity movements, state enforcement strategies and the racial and cultural aspects of nationalism and imperialism.

 

 

 

15h45-16h00: Coffee break

Outside Dr Dora Allman Room, Fourth Floor, The Hub

 

16h00-17h25: Workshops 16 and 17

 

Workshop 16 - Ireland and France II

Location: Dr Dora Allman Room, Fourth Floor, The Hub

Chair: John Borgonovo

 

Oliver O’Hanlon, “Étiennette Beuque: Writing for Ireland?”

 

The Irish struggle for self-determination at the turn of the 20^th century drew attention from across Europe, the United States and elsewhere around the world. It generated debate in the international press and also featured in the work of writers of both fiction and non-fiction. One of those who answered the call was French woman Étiennette Beuque (d.1949), who became fascinated by the Irish struggle for independence around the time of the 1916 Easter Rising. It led her to research Irish history and politics and produce several books in French about Irish history and contemporary Irish politics during the 1920s and 1930s. One of her books included a preface by Eamon de Valera. Her writings were reviewed in French journals and in the French press, leading to a greater awareness of the Irish situation among her compatriots. Unlike other French people who wrote about Ireland at this time, Beuque was not a journalist or a novelist but a passionate Hibernophile. This paper seeks to answer the questions of how and why exactly Beuque became interested in Ireland and how she was able to write so much about the country and its politics over such a long period of time. It will analyse some of her writing about Ireland and establish who was in her networks in Ireland, France (and possibly elsewhere), that would have provided her with the information that she needed to write all that she wrote about Ireland and also encouraged her in her writing.

 

Claire Dubois, “A French Journalist writes about the Irish Civil War: Andrée Viollis, Transnational

Feminist Solidarity and Anti-Colonialism”

 

In October and November 1922, Le Petit Parisien, a French republican newspaper published a series of articles describing the trip to Ireland by one of its reporters, Andrée Viollis (1870-1950). Educated at the Sorbonne and Oxford – where she seems to have been receptive to Fabian socialism – Viollis was one of the few women foreign correspondents in France. After contributing to La Fronde – a women’s newspaper – she became a French correspondent for the Daily Mail of London.

A grand reporter, she sought new sources to challenge the canonical reading and interpretation of events of her times. Interspersed with many interviews, physical descriptions and on-site depictions, her reporting bridged the gap between the foreign world and the readers. Her reports on the Irish Civil War focused much more on the role of women than most of the French coverage of events. Bois, her editor, criticized her for lobbying to stop the execution of Erskine Childers and too obviously siding with the Republicans. Her trip to Ireland has been much overlooked, and this paper will show that it shaped her perception of colonialism, in a country dominated by another power than France.

After her trip to Ireland, she stayed in touch with Kathleen O’Brennan and wrote articles about the situation in Ireland in the 1930s. Her report, together with her correspondence, offers an example of transnational feminist solidarity, at a time when the international interaction between Ireland and France was shaped by the aftermath of the First World War.

 

 

Kevin Doyle, “French Support for Irish Republicanism during the Northern Ireland Troubles”

 

The topic of my proposed paper is support for Irish Republicanism in France in the 1970s and early 80s. From the outset of the conflict in Northern Ireland, there was a great deal of interest generated in France, firstly as a result of the civil rights movement, and later due to the Republican movement and the growing armed conflict. The French radical left as well as nationalist movements in Brittany, Corsica and Occitania were involved in a variety of solidarity work with Irish Republicans, and in particular the formation of support groups such as the Comité pour la Liberation du Peuple Irlandais. These organisations were part of a European wide network of similar solidarity groups with direct links to republican and socialist groups in Ireland. Their activities included organising trips to Ireland, inviting Republicans on speaking tours of France, cultural evenings with Irish music, protests, pickets, petitions and the publication of a variety of pamphlets and magazines. This activity reached its peak in 1981 with the H Block Hunger strikes, when large protests and the backing of the French Communist Party bringing the conflict to the forefront of French political life. While solidarity activism continued after this period it was notably more muted, and much of the work focused on defending Irish Republicans arrested in France and the rest of Europe. The paper will look at the challenges this solidarity movement faced, such as ideological fractures, tactical disagreements, poor transnational communication, and fluctuating levels of public interest.

 

 

Workshop 17 – Institutional and Grassroots International Activism

Location: The Shtepps Auditorium, First Floor, The Hub

Chair: Adrian Kane

 

Alexandra Maclennan, “The Irish Anti-apartheid Movement: The Catholic Connection, with a Detour

in France”

 

The Irish anti-apartheid movement is reasonably well documented. The Dunnes Stores protest has remained in public memory. A famous South African refugee in Ireland was Kader Asmal (1934-2011) who started the Irish anti-apartheid movement (IAAM). He and his English wife Louise (1938-2024), who died recently, were indeed banned from South Africa for marrying across the colour bar when it was forbidden by apartheid legislation. Brigid Laffan published a study of Irish government policy towards South Africa in the 1980s. Although it was published by Trócaire, the Catholic Agency for World Development, there is little content about the Church itself. Fast forward forty years, in 2020 a documentary released by Irish historians in cooperation with the Irish embassy in Pretoria recorded the voices of Irish nuns who told stories of the work they did to take care of Africans during apartheid, and of the risks they faced and the hardships they endured. Writing the biography of the first South African cardinal who happens to be of Irish descent, I intend to bring new written archival material to the topic from the archdiocesan archives in Cape Town. Those archives also contain correspondence between the South African clergy and French clergy which offer some new material for comparison in international anti-apartheid Catholic solidarity.

 

Phillippe Brillet, “Is the Catholic Church Still a Key Asset for Ireland in the Field of Transnational

Solidarities”

 

The catholic dimension of Ireland is certainly in decline as a religious affiliation, but it is still rather vibrant as a matter of national identity. This is connected to several factors, among which the longing persistence of the conflict in the North, the still perceived necessity to display a sharp distinction with any kind of Britishness, and the fact that the Church enabled the Irish to positively act overseas on a very large scale, for all the economic limitations of their nation, which was a key source of national pride -and for long almost the only one.

The persistent strength of this dimension, again for all the sharp decline of religious practice, comes a long way to explaining last year’s formal recognition of Palestine, all the more since Ulster Unionism is highly connected to the state of Israel, and even though the common painful legacy of British-made partitions also played a major role in the decision.

Yet beyond this recognition, which still attracts the spotlights and whose rarity in Europe highlights the importance, the Irish catholic church goes -rather discreetly- on with its remarkably large network of cooperation with the South. This extends well beyond the Commonwealth, with notably a strong presence in Latin America, but the bulk of Irish support is dedicated to the former British colonies of Africa. The present crisis of Anglicanism, with a strong majority of its African bishops having last year rejected the authority of the archbishop of Canterbury, is understood as a most remarkable opportunity for the traditionally conservative Irish Catholicism to reinforce its connexion with the many Commonwealth countries in which its assistance is well received -and praised.

 

Molly-Claire Gillett, “The Irish Countrywomen’s Association and the Associated Countrywomen of

the World Conference, 1965: Crafting International Cooperation”

 

Founded in 1910 as the United Irishwomen and renamed in 1935, the Irish Countrywomen’s Association (ICA) emerged from the Irish cooperative movement to join a growing international network of rural women’s societies that promoted adult education, cooperation, and advocacy for rural and women’s issues. In 1965, the ICA hosted the triennial conference of the Associated Countrywomen of the World (ACWW) in Dublin, on the theme of ‘Working Together.’ The conference attracted 250 delegates from forty-six countries and over 3000 visitors; contemporary reporting claimed that it was the largest conference ever held in Ireland. Among the attractions was a handicraft exhibition “to show the best of the traditional handicraft of the visiting delegate’s home countries, to-gether with the best of Ireland’s handicrafts.”¹ Any society affiliated with the ACWW could enter six objects and one painting in the exhibition without adjudication; submissions came from as far afield as Lebanon, Zimbabwe, and Sri Lanka. The international exchange materialised in the handicrafts exhibit and articulated in conference workshops and addresses supports Rhona Richman Kenneally’s assertion that the ICA encouraged Irish women to imagine themselves as “part of a wider, comprehensive, skilled collective,” enacting regional (and even global) agency, while also reflecting an interest in local materials, economies, and place-based cultural heritage.² In this paper, I will consider the handicraft exhibition alongside ACWW conference proceedings to argue that it materialises both a commitment to place and community, and a sense of curiosity about and solidarity with rural women from around the globe.

 

 

 

17h30-18h30: Poetry Reading: Sarah Clancy (Chair: Liz Quirke)

Location: Dr Dora Allman Room, Fourth Floor, The Hub

 

CONFERENCE COMMITTEE

Heather Laird, Hélène Lecossois, Oliver O'Hanlon, Hope Noonan Stoner, Danny Shanahan and Luke Watson

 

CONFERENCE SPONSORS

Ambassade de France en Irlande; Department of French, UCC; Future Humanities Institute, UCC; School of English and Digital Humanities, UCC; School of History, UCC; G.I.S. Eire; SOFEIR