EVENTS: Number of historical talks announced for festival taking place in Tipperary
The Thomas MacDonagh Hedge School Talks will take place in Cloughjordan, County Tipperary 17 – 20 September 2025.
The third annual Thomas MacDonagh Hedge School will take place at the Thomas MacDonagh Museum in Cloughjordan, County Tipperary 17-20 September 2025.
On Saturday 20 September, the Hedge School is delighted to welcome a number of speakers, experts in their field, to give talks that reflect the theme of the festival, Political Theatre: Learning from the past?
Opening the talks on Saturday morning, 20 September, Dr Leeann Lane’s keynote address is titled ‘Hunger strike as republican performativity: Mary MacSwiney, Brixton, 1920, Mountjoy 1922, Kilmainham 1923’.
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Mary MacSwiney and her brother, the hunger striker Terence MacSwiney, were brought up immersed in Irish nationalism and the gaelic revival movement.
An education to third level equipped MacSwiney to navigate the deeply conservative societal views of women in which she lived and was a political activist. During the revolutionary period MacSwiney established the Cumann na mBan branch in Cork, and whilst on a lecture tour in America in 1921 (at the behest of de Valera), was elected Teachta Dála for Cork.
With the passing of time MacSwiney’s unconventional and nonconformist life was reduced to a footnote in Irish history. Of Leeann’s ongoing research, Jillian Godsill writes that she has “quietly become one of the leading chroniclers of Irish women whose contributions to independence and national identity have long been sidelined”.
Afternoon talks resume following a luncheon in St Kieran’s Hall, the cost of which is included in the ticket price.
At 2:15pm Dr Ailbhe McDaid and Professor Eugene O’Brien will make a joint presentation entitled ‘Poetry and Politics: Plural Perspectives’. In her talk Ailbhe will discuss the deep alignment between poetry and politics in the Irish tradition.
In 1919, writing from Gloucester Prison, Arthur Griffith recognized the particular influence poets wield when he encouraged his political colleagues to ‘mobilise the poets’ in order to make the case for Irish independence. Poets’ responses to political events are, however, rarely as straightforward as politicians might like, as poets address ethical, aesthetic and poetic obligations in their work. Ailbhe will consider Yeats’ complex interactions with the politics of early years of the State before turning to a more contemporary act of political theatre – the public inquiry.
Ailbhe says that “the public inquiry or commission of investigation is a familiar and, arguably, performative act in contemporary Irish politics”. Such inquiries have been the focus of a number of highly-charged and affecting poems in recent years, that tackle difficult political subjects in original ways.
Ailbhe will discuss sensitive and wrought poems by Thomas Kinsella, Rachael Hegarty, Celia de Fréine’s and Kimberly Campanello to showcase how poets take ownership of these often-dehumanising political gestures in order to reinstate the individuals erased in the processes of political performativity.
Professor Eugene O’Brien’s presentation will dovetail with Dr McDaid’s as he examines the connections between poetry and politics in Northern Ireland. Eugene will focus principally on Seamus Heaney's careful adjudications between both poetry and politics, and on how he has demarcated both.
He will look at his signature text North, as well as some later poems most notably 'The Flight Path' from his collection The Spirit Level. As well as his poetry, Eugene will also include some of Heaney’s prose writing, looking at his comments on the hunger strikes, on the funeral of the hunger striker Francis Hughes in 1981, and at his Nobel lecture Crediting Poetry where he speaks about the Kingsmills massacre. Professor O’Brien says that “for Heaney politics and poetry were intertwined but different, and this will be the strain of thinking that I will examine in my discussion”.
To conclude the day, at 4pm Professor James Moran will deliver a talk entitled ‘The playwrights and 1916’. In his presentation James will discuss the ways in which Thomas MacDonagh prepared for the Easter Rising by scripting the play When the Dawn is Come.
And in so doing, MacDonagh prepared for an event that would be deeply informed by theatrical thinking, and which would mesmerise some of the key dramatists of the twentieth century, including Sean O’Casey, W.B. Yeats, G.B. Shaw and Teresa Deevy, all of whom sought to make a creative response to the Easter Rising. The presentation will feature extracts from well-known plays, including ‘The Plough and the Stars’, which caused riotous disturbance at the Abbey Theatre when first performed in 1926.
Tickets for the Hedge School 2025 collection of events are available now from Eventbrite.