arts and culture
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Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007Galway City’s Writer-in-Residence programme is seeking the experiences of immigrants and returning migrants for a publication it will produce later in the year.
An ad placed in yesterday’s Galway First newspaper notes, “Galway means “Town of the Foreigners”. The ad says they are looking for “your experiences, good, bad, funny or sad. Or just something strange that you may have encountered, or a story about something strange that happened to you, or perhaps to somebody that you know. We welcome stories in any language, but please do not make them any longer than 500 words.” They note they will guarantee anonymity if desired.
Poet Michael O’Loughlin is the writer in residence this year. Contact him by email.
Cannes features Irish migrants on film
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007A story of Irish immigrants in Kilburn will be shown at the Cannes Film Festival. “Kings” was adapted from Jimmy Murphy’s play “The Kings of the Kilburn High Road” by Irish filmmaker Tom Collins. The film tells the tale of six men who move to London for work in the 1970s; they are reunited for a funeral thirty years later.
The filmmaker said in the London Evening Standard:
“Our aim was to make a ‘ foreign’ film in England because I’m no longer sure England as we knew it exists. Our characters still talk in Irish in an attempt to accentuate their personal and national bond and their language is, to them, their last act of solidarity.
“This is an untold story of immigration and loneliness which continues today with migrants from Lithuania, Poland and China.”
The story is told in Irish. Micheál O Meallaigh, Senior Commissioning Editor of TG4, told the Derry Journal: “This is a story told for the first time in our own language but it is also particularly relevant to the growing immigrant population who will be exposed to the same pressures and alienation that the emigrant Irish experienced in foreign territories.�
See the film distributor’s website.
Northampton remembers Lucia at Bloomsday
Monday, May 21st, 2007An Irishman living in Northampton will lead a commemoration of Bloomsday at the grave of Lucia Joyce in Kingsthorpe cemetary in Northamption. Lucia Joyce, the daughter of exiled Irish writer James Joyce, spent many years in a mental hospital before her death in 1982. This will be the fourth Bloomsday the Irish Community Arts Project will spend at Lucia’s grave.
Organiser Peter Mulligan told the Irish Times,
The concept is that the Joyce family, like a lot of Irish people in Northampton, left Ireland for a better life elsewhere and we see Lucia as a focus for that. We relate her life to the Irish diaspora of which she was a part…
She’s buried among East Europeans, Serbs and Yugoslavs because she was born in Trieste. The nice thing is that she’s near the grave of (emigrant writer) Donall Mac Amhlaigh, who lived all his life here working on the M1, M6 and Milton Keynes.
For more information, contact the project.
Drogheda exhibition looks at lives of US undocumented
Wednesday, March 28th, 2007The lives of the undocumented Irish in the US are explored in a new photo exhibition opening at the Highlanes Gallery in Drogheda. “Far from home: A chronicle of the undocumented Irish in the United States” is a collection of images by Drogheda-born, New York-based photographer Seán McPhail. The exhbition is sponsored by the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform.
It runs from March 30 to April 27.
See more at the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform website.
Visit the Highlanes Gallery.
Services meet final needs of emigrants
Tuesday, March 13th, 2007Also on a funereal theme, the Galway Independent is carrying a story on “a mysterious Galway man”, now a New York resident, who has made a most unusual purchase – he has spent $100,000 so that he can be buried under Irish soil in America, where he has spent most of his life.
The Independent reports that Pat Burke from Tipperary and Alan Jenkins from Cork decided to start their website, www.officialirishdirt.com, when they realised that there were many Irish emigrants who wanted Irish soil as part of their funeral commemorations.
While most are contented with a three-quarter-pound bag of the specially-treated soil, which costs $15, the Galway-born businessman had a different idea. Mr Burke says the weathly New Yorker was “in two minds as to where he wanted to be buried (either in his native Ireland or his adopted USA), so he contacted us and got the best of both worlds”.
Pat added, “People living abroad get very sentimental about things and the idea of buying the soil or shamrock seed lets them feel a bit closer to home”.
Visit www.officialirishdirt.com.
Read the whole story at the Galway Independent.
There’s also another company that aims to meet the needs of emigrants contemplating what should happen to their remains – Ashes is a family-run service that will scatter cremated remains in Ireland.
Online funerals aimed at far-flung relations
Tuesday, March 13th, 2007A Belfast firm of undertakers has launched what is reportedly the first online service to allow mourners to view funeral services from abroad, the AP has reported. Clarke & Son say their service came out of requests that tapes of services be sent abroad to far-off relations.
“We have one camera to give you the perspective of the minister looking out to the congregation, one showing the hearse and cortege of mourners outside, and one that looks like you’re sitting in amidst the mourners,” said Jim Clarke of Clarke & Son undertakers in Newtownards, an eastern suburb of Belfast.
The report added,
He said the service last year proved invaluable for two brothers – one living in New Zealand, the other in the United States – who had traveled back to Northern Ireland to visit an ill relative who then died.“They said, ‘There’s no way we can get our wives and families here at such short notice,’ and we had the solution to hand. It really removes a burden for some families,” Clarke said.
Visit S. Clarke & Son’s website.
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