Castlepollard native to speak at president’s centenary seminar

A Castlepollard native and historian who teaches at Queen’s University, Belfast is part of a panel of speakers for President Michael D Higgins’ second ‘Machnamh 100’ seminar for the Decade of Commemorations, which will be broadcast live online tomorrow (Thursday February 25).

Dr Marie Coleman, Reader in Modern Irish History at Queen’s, will be the fourth speaker at tomorrow’s seminar, which will be shown on RTÉ Player on 7pm.

The seminar is entitled ‘Empire: instincts, interests, power and resistance’, and will be opened by President Higgins, before a lead reflection from Trinity College, Dublin’s Professor John Horne entitled ‘Ireland at the Crossroad, 1920-21: Nation, Empire, Partition’.

Joining with Dr Coleman as the respondents will be Dr Niamh Gallagher (St Catharine’s College, Cambridge), Professor Eunan O’Halpin (Trinity College, Dublin) and Professor Alvin Jackson (University of Edinburgh), followed by closing remarks from President Higgins and a questions and answer session.

The seminar will be hosted by veteran broadcaster John Bowman.

This is the second in President Higgins’ ‘Machnamh 100’ series of reflections. The second seminar will include consideration of European Empires following the First World War, the British Empire in particular and imperial attitudes and responses to occurrences in Ireland.

It will also include reflections on examples of resistance to Empire in Ireland and resistance to nationalism.

In the seminar, President Higgins will focus on the relationship between culture and empire, and how British cultural hegemony at the time attempted to shape and influence general cultural values in Ireland.

Machnamh 100 is an initiative of President Higgins that builds on his extensive work to date during Ireland’s Decade of Commemorations, in which the President examined and explored the context and enduring relevance of seminal events such as the Lockout of 1913, the First World War, the Easter Rising, the 1918-20 flu pandemic, the general election of 1918 and the First Dáil.

Machnamh 100 is being supported by the Government and by RTÉ.

In today’s Irish Times, Dr Coleman – whose 1998 PhD thesis was on the subject of the Irish Revolution in County Longford – wrote about what the February 1921 ambush of members of the Auxiliary Division at Clonfin, Co. Longford can teach us about “ethical remembering”, a key theme in President Higgins’ Decade of Commemorations speeches.

A former student of Castlepollard Community College, Dr Coleman is one of Ireland’s leading historians on the Irish Revolution and has contributed to a number of important documentaries and publications during the ongoing Decade of Commemorations (2012-23).

For further details on tomorrow’s event, click here.