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In Leitrim, where I like to cycle, the short dark days of winter bring quiet roads and lonely pathways. Few people venture over the hills and across the bogs. This is a time of windy, wet days and cold nights. A time to gather round, light fires, and tell stories. This article was originally published in our sister publication Ireland of the Welcomes. Subscribe to this bi-monthly magazine here.
Every place in Ireland has a name and a story. You just need to know how to look and listen to the past. Across the land, former peoples have left their mark in words and objects that pattern the countryside.
Changing memories: Famine memorials around the world
Today, the Famine is commemorated in memorials all over the world, from sculptures to stained glass windows. Emily Mark-Fitzgerald explains how they offer unique insights into the interplay between Irish history, heritage, memory and meaning
• 24 Mar 2021
Many commentators, especially during the 1990s sesquicentenary of the Famine, have broadly characterised the response of post-Famine generations as a form of cultural silence . However, recent research on the history of Famine memory has modulated this view, and explored the many ways Famine appears as subject and reference in political rhetoric, popular and literary fiction, drama, art and visual culture, from the 19th century through to the present.
We are what we remember. Everyone is made up of what we have experienced, what we recall of it and what we choose to forget.
The choosing is often the critical part. What we edit out of our lives is as much a marker as what we decide to bring with us.
National memory is much the same and the modern State plays a huge part in shaping that conversation. The first generation of the newly independent Ireland, like the founding fathers in new nation states everywhere, were very conscious of how this could be achieved.
Ireland’s history might have been complex and multi-layered but the story we would be told was a simple and straightforward one.
Sligo Shipwreck Mystery Solved – 250 Years After it Sank
17th December 2020
The remains of the large, wooden vessel on Streedagh Strand in Sligo,known locally as the ‘Butter Boat”, and now identified as a 1770 shipwreck named Greyhound which claimed 20 lives. One man - a Mr Williams ‘from Erris’ - was recorded as surviving the wrecking
The National Monuments Service says it has resolved the mystery of a shipwreck off Co Sligo s Streedagh strand where three Armada ships are known to have foundered in 1588.
Research has confirmed that a wreck of a vessel off Streedagh known as the Butter Boat was a Yorkshire coastal trading ship, the Greyhound.