Aug 25

Sean O’Casey Festival 2024 : Drama, literature, music, art and history.

The Sean O’Casey Festival 2024 will take place from Saturday 7th September until Friday 20th September. Here are all the events announced so far, with some more to follow.

O CASEY LOGO

We have a fantastic line up this year, with both Irish and International performers, some familiar faces joining us again and some appearing for the first time. As always we have kept ticket prices very affordable, and have a number of FREE events to. We hope to see you there, and please share all these details.

Ireland September 2024_v2TICKETS

Phelim and Tony

TICKETS

LITWTICKETS

Sick and

SMASHERS

THE FOLLOWING ARE ALL FREE EVENTS : 

Sheriff Street

BOOK LAUNCH AND PHOTO EXHIBITION

Monday 9th September @ 7.30pm
Sean O’Casey Community Centre

Independent Dublin publishers Hi Tone Books will release Colm Pierce’s book “Sheriff Street Dublin 1” featuring images of the North Wall community in the late 1980′s early 1990′s.

Exhibition will continue until 20th September

Nancy and MichaelA reading of award-winning Irish playwright David Gilna’s new play, “Nancy and Michael” directed by Frank Allen. Revolution and romance intersect at a pivotal moment of modern Irish history, the 1916 Easter Rising.

FREE BOOKING

When Hitchcockwhen Hitcock back

A free screening of this feature length documentary, which examines the strange collaboration (and non collaboration) between the Irish playwright and the British movie director. 

Tuesday 10th September

Sean O’Casey Theatre

@8pm

This special screening is in memory of Christopher Murray who passed away earlier this year. The author of the definitive Sean O’Casey biography, he was a great friend to the festival and appears in the documentary. 

Charleville Mall Library

In this illustrated talk Joe Mooney will tell the story of Dublin Docklands in this tumultuous period, while Paul O’Brien will reveal the stories behind some of the local names found in war graves and on memorials.

Saturday 7th September @ 2.30pm 

Charleville Mall Library 

Painting by broadcaster, and life long O'Casey fan, Joe Duffy
Painting by broadcaster, and life long O’Casey fan, Joe Duffy

 

WE LOOK FORWARD TO SEEING YOU AT THESE EVENTS AND PLEASE SHARE DETAILS. 

Aug 25

“Runaway Princess, a Hopeful Tale of Heroin, Hooking and Happiness” at the Sean O’Casey Theatre

Ireland September 2024_v2

 The Sean O’Casey Festival 2024 is proud to presents Mary Goggin’s mind- blowing and multiple award-winning solo show, “Runaway Princess, a Hopeful Tale of Heroin, Hooking and Happiness,” for 3 performances September 16th, 17th, 18th.

TICKETS

“Blew me away…rowdy, irreverent, salacious, gracious, insightful, riveting. ”

~ Malachy McCourt, WBAI Radio

In Runaway Princess… Goggin, a writer/actor, featured speaker, educator; and former professional call girl, shares a story of Irish Catholicism, repression, sex and addiction. The tale
is laced with humor and pathos and a multitude of characters she encountered along the way to ultimately finding joy. Runaway Princess… has swept up multiple awards at festivals around the world. In addition, Mary Goggin has become a popular featured speaker and on the subject of human trafficking and violence against women.

“A tale of hope that deserved to be shared.”
~ Edinburgh Festival 2022 (Everything Theatre UK)

“Always riveting, often funny, and ultimately deeply moving.”

~ Galway Advertiser

“Mary Goggin gave a riveting presentation at the GFWC Delaware State Convention. We have never heard such a personal accounting of abuse, addiction, and recovery. Mary gives us hope for a brighter tomorrow. Again, Mary, thanks for coming to Delaware!”

~ Jan Conant, President, GFWC Delaware State Federation of  Women’s Clubs

Mary Goggin 02

WHAT: Runaway Princess, a Hopeful Tale of Heroin, Hooking and Happiness

WHO: Written and performed by Mary Goggin. Directed by Dan Ruth

WHERE:  Sean O’Casey Theatre, St Mary’s Road, East Wall, Dublin 3, Dublin, Ireland

WHEN: September 16, 17, 18 2024

TICKETS:  https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/runaway-princess-written-and-performed-by-mary-goggin-tickets-931934399877

VISIT RUNAWAY PRINCESS: https://runawayprincessplay.com/

Mary Goggin 01

Mary Goggin (AEA, DG, SAG-AFTRA) is a New York based actor born to Irish emigrants and raised in the Bronx. A professional actor for 26 years, Mary has appeared in numerous
stage productions, television, film and commercials. Her Irish Catholic schooling(Glasnevin and Rosscarbery) ,upbringing, theatre degree, and 36 years of sobriety prepared her to write and share this powerful and 100% true solo show…

Dan Ruth (Director) is an award-winning actor and performance artist. His solo play, A Life Behind Bars, has been produced in New York City, Los Angeles and around the country, and is
the winner of the 2016 United Solo Festival Award for Best Autobiographical Show, The 2018 Bistro Award winner for Outstanding Solo Play,” MAC Award for Best Spoken Word Artist andthe 2018 Producers Encore Award from the Hollywood Fringe Festival.

Mary Goggin 04O CASEY LOGO

Jan 28

“A RADICAL GHOST” – REMEMBERING JIM LARKIN (150th BIRTHDAY)

Larkin statue

(‘Big Jim’ Larkin died was born 150 years ago on the 28th January 1874). What follows is an unedited extract from an essay by Joe Mooney and the late Sarah Lundberg, completed as part of the Alternative Visions Oral History Project. The final essay was one of two they contributed to “100 Years Later: The legacy of the 1913 Lockout” published in November 2013. This extract looks at the legacy of Larkin, whose influence is memorably described by an interviewee as ‘a radical ghost’.)

“His name endures on our holiest page”

 On the main thoroughfare of our capital city stands the iconic statue of Larkin, the centre of attention. Not a bad achievement for a man labelled in his day as “A menace to the peace of Ireland” and “the devil in human flesh.” Born of Irish parents in Liverpool, he had been a dockworker and was already an experienced trade unionist when he arrived in Ireland. He was an organiser for the National Union of Dockworkers (NUDL) and had been active in Scotland before arriving in Belfast in 1907. He was to come to greater prominence here, leading a strike that foreshadowed many of the tactics soon to be adopted in Dublin, and he had some success in overcoming sectarian divisions in the docks and shipyards. His brand of trade union militancy did not sit well with the leadership of the NUDL, and they soon parted ways, with Larkin moving on to found the Irish, Transport & General Workers Union (ITGWU) in Dublin.

 So, what was Larkins brand of trade union militancy? Soon to be identified as “Larkinism” it was recognised as a form of syndicalism, then a common current in the international Labour movement.

 In 1911, the Dublin Correspondent of The Times offered this summary:

“For the present it is enough to say that the object of Mr.Larkins Union is to syndicalise Irish Labour, skilled and unskilled, in a single organisation, the whole forces of which can be brought to bear on any single dispute in the Irish Industrial world.”

ITGWU POSTER

Larkins fellow trade unionist James Connolly had been an organiser for the syndicalist Industrial Workers of The World (IWW) in the United States. In his “Socialism made easy” he very ably articulated the principles of Industrial unionism –

“that natural law leads us as individuals to unite in our craft, as crafts to unite in our industry, as industries in our class, and the finished expression of that evolution is, we believe, the appearance of our class upon the political battle ground with all the economic power behind it to enforce its mandates.”

 And he stressed

“Every one who has the interests of the working class at heart…should strive to realise industrial union as the solid foundation upon which alone the political unity of the workers can be built up and directed toward a revolutionary end.”

While Larkin himself produced no comparable body of written work, this vision of a trade union movement as a vehicle for a revolutionary, socialist transformation of society was one he shared. Connolly himself would later state that “Our fight in Ireland was neither inspired nor swayed by theories nor theorists. It grew and was hammered out of the hard necessities of our situation.”

 And as one contemporary commentator claimed: “Yet the school in which Larkin had been made and moulded as a labour revolutionary had been one of pitiful and sometimes terrible realism.”

 Both men shared a desire for “less theory and more action” and ‘Larkinism’ delivered this action, with the tactics of sympathetic strikes and the backing of tainted goods becoming key weapons in an escalating of Industrial conflict.

 The playwright Sean O’Casey was part of North Dock community during these years, and half a century later would write:

“Before Larkin came it was the bosses determined the hour the worker should begin the work; the time they should end the day; the food they were to eat; the sort of home they’d live in; the kinda clothes they were to wear (I never saw a worker wearing a tall hat!).We workers went through life with our heads down; if one dared lift a head to look a boss in the face, it was time to go, for, if he didn’t, a day after he would be handed his docket and the foremen of the job pointed out the road to him. The bosses are humbler now. Now the workers have a say about the hours they work, the pay they get, the homes they live in, the clothes they wear, though the cap still suits us far better than the glossy tall hat.”

Larkin arrived in Ireland in 1907 and seven tumultuous years later he left for America and would not return for almost a decade. While we are considering the legacy of Larkin a century after his role in the Lockout, it is worth noting that his mythological status had already been achieved at this early stage and would be passed on through the generations and was not something that was created over time. In fact, in subsequent years his many human failings became more prominent, his behaviour and role was not always a positive one, but this has not taken away from or in any way diminished his influence or reverence.

Jim Larkin (centre) in Belfast in 1907, with the Dockers and Carters strike committee.

Jim Larkin (centre) in Belfast in 1907, with the Dockers and Carters strike committee.

 Jim Larkin died in 1947, and his funeral was attended by thousands of workers across the city. Sean Oliver’s father was a child during the Lockout:

“For Dad, it was like the death of a god, also for his entire working class generation. Ever after for my father he was like a radical ghost, telling him what to do when he was in trouble … trying to get better wages . . . Larkin was a god to them. Any time my father got into trouble, and my god he got into trouble, he was nearly sacked several times; it was all about that union, all about bringing it back to Larkinism.”

Larkin rallies the working class

 

This, written in 1919, illustrates the stature he had already received by this time:

“Jim Larkin is the greatest figure in Irish Labour mythology. He has of course very human and realistic significance also, but his first association –possibly we ought to say concussion-with the Irish mind in general was distinctly mythological. To many he is non-human and mythological still. Historians used to hold the view that only after long periods of time do fighters and heroes become transhumans, colossal, legendary, in the racial imagination; latterly there has been a tendency to adopt the theory that the process may be swift if not immediate: that a bold or revolutionary individuality may become a figure of myth and marvel in his own era or the one succeeding it.

Whatever we may think of the general application of the theory there is no doubt of its truth in the case of Jim Larkin. He was a legend in less than a year after he had broken with British trade union officialism to extend his labours amongst the under-men in Dublin and throughout his native land.”

 The author also provided a less prosaic and more direct assessment of Larkins appeal to the Dublin workers:

“The folk in question had been mostly ignored or given up as hopeless by the older trade unionist leaders. In sooth it would not be unfair to say that these were not wanted or even considered by the majority of the strict and conventional unionists. Solidarity was little of a philosophy in those days amongst those who had guided the placid course of the unions, and it certainly did not extend to the “lower” ranks of toil. The majority of the “aristocracy of labour,” the proud and exclusive skilled artisans and craftsmen, had scant feelings of kinship with the weaker brethren, the dockers, carters and casual labourer, who lived mostly in slums, and were dominated and victimized by slum-owners, money-lenders, publicans and more.” 

larkin liberty hall

 Sean Oliver recalls his first manager in the bar trade

“who came to Dublin in 1910 and worked in the pub at the top of Kevin st in 1911…he told me that Larkin had inspired starving ill paid live in barmen to get off their knees and fight for decent wages and decent conditions.”

 Tommy Dunne’s family were amongst the workers locked out in 1913. His grandfather was a dray-man, and an early recruit into the ITGWU. His own father was always conscious of the great sacrifice and suffering of the time when he spoke of Larkin:

 “He just said he was what they needed, you know, there was nobody else to bring them up, to push them. He said it was amazing how many people, that were hungry and all, that went out for him. They were really bad; my father could never understand that …. He was a light for them at the time, I can understand that. The circumstances of employers having the upper hand, making people see that, they had the guts to go out with Larkin, and to follow him, which they thought was right at the time. In the aftermath, some of them would have been sorry, because of the devastation afterwards. Having nothing, trying to make ends meet, you know.”

During the Lockout the Dunne  family were among 62 East Wall families  evicted

During the Lockout the Dunne family were among 62 East Wall families evicted

According to the author and socialist, Liam O’Flaherty, writing in 1927: “The Dock Workers idolized Larkin. Somebody has said of him that he ‘seized the Dublin Workers by the scruff of the neck’ and made them stand erect.” 

Ed_15_Larkins-Release-1-22Nov1913_(1)

Sean Oliver himself became active in the Trade union movement, and remembers an important moment:

“I joined the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, as it was then. I was one of the very last people to have seen it, the old liberty hall. I walked in and I couldn’t get over it, I was twenty two, twenty three years of age. When I went in and saw it I couldn’t believe the dirt and the dust, and yet it was full of history. And the next thing it was gone!”

 He also recalls the impact when “Strumpet City” was first published in 1969:

 “The novel was discussed endlessly. Elderly men were proud to have read it, perhaps the only novel they’d ever read, because they had lived through it.”

"The Risen People" - East Wall PEG Drama & Variety Group commemorate 1913 Lockout

“The Risen People” – East Wall PEG Drama & Variety Group commemorate 1913 Lockout

Sharing a recent bus journey with a retired North Wall Docker, travelling along the South quay we discussed the deaths of Nolan and Byrne in 1913. Looking over at the new Luas Bridge being constructed across the Liffey, he mentioned the campaign to name it:

 “I was asked what did I think of the name, calling it the James Connolly Bridge. I was against it; it should be the Jim Larkin Bridge. Everybody knows what Connolly done, but it was Larkin, he was the one, he started it all.”

Jim-Larkin-Grave

A short video of 1913 Lockout commemoration in East Wall featuring “The Day they set Jim Larkin Free” by Black 47 (courtesy Larry Kirwan / Starry Plough Music):

 

(Statue photograph courtesy of East Wall photographer Karl Larkin).

 

CONTACT: eastwallhistory@gmail.com

 

Dec 12

“It’s not goodbye… see you later Lisa” – December 21st @ the Youth Club

Lisa is leaving

A message from East Wall Youth :

“As you may have heard Lisa is finishing up in the youth club… it’s time for her to move on from East Wall Youth please come and join us on Thursday the 21st of December at 6pm in the youth club to wish her all the best for her next adventure Hope you all can make it as we know she would love to see you all before she goes”.

 

Dec 03

EAST WALL CHRISTMAS 2023

404657566_7528463150515592_5580845152584193786_n405230397_7528463170515590_3609392785875150657_n405230252_7528463233848917_7344011238330801692_n 404609583_7528463267182247_5387869193080015903_n

Oct 16

East Wall Halloween Festival 2023

Halloween 01

Halloween 02

Halloween 03

Halloween 04

Oct 16

October 2023 at the Sean O’Casey Theatre

Drinking Habits

Bullied

And for the remainder of the month the fantastic new phot exhibition by James Rickard and Eddie Byrne will be on display, check it out when you are attending these shows.

James and Eddie

Framed prints can be ordered, and all proceeds are donated to the hospice.

Oct 16

Remembering Philip Chevron on his 10th anniversary -

Say A Song

A very special tribute event was held to celebrate the life and legacy of the great Dublin songwriter at the Sean O’Casey Theatre earlier this year. The annual Sarah Lundberg Summer School is held in memory of our friend and colleague who took her own life in 2014, and we felt that this event was one she would have loved, and was an appropriate tribute to the both her and Philip.

To mark Philips 10th anniversary on the 8th October we were delighted to share this playlist of all the contributions from that event, featuring family, band-mates, friends and collaborators all remembering him in their own way.

(A big thanks to Louis Maxwell, GracePark Productions and Conor McKenna for their great work recording and editing this content).

Sep 27

CAREER L.E.A.P. recruitment – next program starting October 2nd, 2023

image001

Last call for Career Leap which is starting this Monday October 2nd. Are you unemployment and 17-25. We have the program just for you. Give Aimee a call on 0870980953 to secure the last few places we have.

 

Applicants can apply here: Career LEAP Application Form 2023 – Google Forms

image007image003image002

 

Sep 24

“No Coward Soul : Jack Nalty (1902-1938)” by Steve Nugent .

 

No Coward Soul Front

First published twenty years ago (2003), “No Coward Soul” was the first comprehensive account of the life of Jack Nalty made available. Written by his nephew, Steve Nugent, his research ensured that the full story of his uncle achieved it’s rightful place and was not simply a few references found in accounts of the Spanish Civil War. Steve’s dedication to this work is all the more extraordinary given that he was living in Canada and in a largely pre-internet age tracking down the pieces of Jack’s life and finding people who held pieces of the story was no small feat.

This weekend the 85th anniversary of Jack Nalty was commemorated in East Wall, It is worth mentioning that the date of Jack’s heroic sacrifice (23rd September) was also the date of Steves birthday. Steve sadly passed away in 2017.

The book is long out of print, but we are delighted to make it available here to read online or download :

NO COWARD SOUL Steve Nugent

NO COWARD SOUL BACK

To mark the 80th anniversary of Jack’s death a plaque was unveiled in East Wall near the former family home. A new booklet “In pursuit of an Ideal” was published. While featuring additional material, this volume was based on Steve’s work and would not have been possible without his original inspiration.

It can be read online or downloaded here:

Jack Nalty In pursuit of an ideal

Nalty plaque

Older posts «

Follow

Get every new post on this blog delivered to your Inbox.

Join other followers: