John Bruton to attend school!

FORMER taoiseach John Bruton will be among the speakers at this year’s Thomas D’Arcy McGee summer school in Carlingford, which has as its theme ‘D’Arcy McGee, 1916 and the Revolutionary Republican Tradition’.

Bruton is joined by, among others, David Wilson of the University of Toronto, who will deliver the keynote on ‘ Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Conor Cruise O’Brien and the Irish Republican Army’.

Other internationally renowned historians, academics, politicians and political activists will debate and reflect on McGee’s relevance to the current peace process, and the changing nature of revolutionary republicanism.

This is a topic that is especially relevant in this decade of significant anniversaries.

Mark McGowan, also from the University of Toronto, will speak on ‘Committed to ‘Double Duty’: Canada’s Irish Catholics, the Rising and the Great War’.

‘ The women of the Easter Rising’, is the topic of Patricia Morrissey of Carlingford Lough Heritage Trust; while Nigel Agnew, a minister in the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Ireland, will address the attendance on ‘Bible & 1916’.

‘ Tom Clarke: The soul of the Rebellion’, is the subject of Blackrock, Dundalk, native, Kieran Taaffe, Emeritus Dean of International Affairs at Dublin Institute of Technology.

Retired national school teacher, Margaret Phillips is scheduled to speak on the cultural and literary legacy of Padraig Pearse.

These are just some of the contributors, while the summer school on 22 and 23 August next, will also feature a screening of the 1959 film, Mise Eire, which relates the events in Ireland up to, during, and immediately after the 1916 Easter Rising.

A seafood banquet in Carlingford sailing club has Ray Bassett, ambassador to Canada, Jamaica and The Bahamas, as its after-dinner speaker.

There will be an Canadian-Irish folk night in Carlingford Arms, hosted by Gerry O’Connor and Tommy Sands.

The trial of Padraig Pearse takes place in Carlingford courthouse.

Pearse is charged with committing treason against the people of Ireland in April, 1916, by ignoring their democratic will and leading a violent rising.

The charge is brought by Thomas D’Arcy McGee, who will suggest the Rising was undemocratic and unnecessary.

John Mitchel (1815 - 1875) will defend Pearse.

The summer school will be officially opened by Kevin Vickers, Canadian ambassador to Ireland.

Thomas D’Arcy McGee was born in Carlingford, in 1825, and after emigrating to Boston at the age of 17, he returned to Ireland in 1845 to become a parliamentary correspondent of the Freeman’s Journal.

He joined the Young Ireland movement, and became the leading writer for its newspaper, The Nation.

Radicalised by the Famine and by revolution in Europe, he became a separatist republican, and helped to launch the Irish Rising of 1848.

Wanted for High Treason, in October, he slipped out of Tremone Bay, County Donegal, and escaped to the United States.

D’Arcy McGee moved to Montreal in 1857, eventually becoming a cabinet minister in the Canadian Government.

Regarded by many Irish Nationalists as a man who sold out his country in pursuit of political power, in 1868, he was shot dead by a Fenian sympathiser.