THEMES AND FOCUSES:
• Carleton and Famine
• Carleton’s Biographer
• Carleton and Family History
• Carleton’s Contemporaries

Cost
£50/€60 including lunch, dinner and tea/coffee break;
concession £40/€50
Morning:  £13/€16 or one session £7/€8   including tea/coffee;
concession £10/€12  or one session  £4/€5
Afternoon: £16/€20 or one session £8/€10 including tea/coffee;
concession £12/€15  or one session  £4/€5
Lunch £9/€11  Dinner £13/€15
Evening events: £5/€6

Season ticket £175/€240/$270 or concession £145/€185/$225

MONDAY AUGUST 6th

Except where stated, all events will take place at
Corick House Hotel, Clogher.
www.corickcountryhouse.com

Morning:
10.00am Registration
Tea / Coffee

10.30am Opening of summer school
Opening by Mayor of Dungannon & South
Tyrone Borough Council, Cllr Phelim Gildernew

10.45am Keynote address:
Carleton & others on famine's darkest secret.
Professor Cormac Ó Gráda
Cormac Ó Gráda is a professor in UCD’s School of Economics. Most of his research has been on the economic history of Ireland and further afield. He is the author or co-author of many books and scholarly articles. His books include Famine: A Short History (Princeton, 2009); Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History (Princeton, 2006); Ireland’s Great Famine: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Dublin, 2006); Black 47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy and Memory (Princeton, 1999); Ireland: A New Economic History (Oxford, 1994); and An Drochshaol: Béaloideas agus Amhráin (Dublin, 1994). He was awarded the Royal Irish Academy’s Gold Medal for the Humanities in 2010. Cormac’s work involves a lot of travel, and has brought him to places as far afield as Australia and (frequently) North America, but he lives with his family in Dublin 14. Much of his current research is collaborative, and focuses on topics such as the interaction between economic and demographic change in pre-industrial England and the Little Ice Age. In his spare time he likes to take to the hills. He is a keen follower of championship hurling and Dublin football.

12.00pm Carleton and the famine era
Dr Melissa Fegan
Melissa Fegan is a Reader in English at the University of Chester. Born in Lisburn, she spent her childhood in Shannon, Co. Clare before moving back to Lisburn in her early teens. She did her BA and DPhil at St Hugh's College, Oxford; her DPhil thesis was on representations of the Great Famine in literature, and was supervised by Roy Foster. Dr Fegan teaches nineteenth-century literature and Irish literature, and is programme leader of the MA in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. She has written extensively about the famine period. Her publications include Literature and the Irish Famine 1845-1919 (Oxford University Press, 2002) and ‘William Carleton and the Great Famine’ in Peter Gray (ed.), Victoria’s Ireland?: Ireland and Britishness, 1837-1901 (Four Courts Press, 2004).

1.15pm Lunch

Afternoon:
2.15pm Carleton's Biographer
DJ O'Donoghue
Michael Fisher
Michael Fisher is Chair of the William Carleton Society and this is his first summer school as Director. A freelance journalist, he retired from RTÉ News in Belfast in September 2010, having joined the broadcaster in Dublin in 1979. He is a former BBC News Trainee in London and worked in Birmingham as a local radio reporter. A native of Dublin, Michael has family connections with the Clogher Valley as well as Co.Monaghan. He is a graduate of UCD and QUB and is a previous contributor to the summer school.

3.30pm Interval
Margaret Skeffington (harp)
Book stall open and Tea / Coffee break

4.30pm Life after Horslips
Barry Devlin
Barry Devlin is originally from Ardboe in County Tyrone. He is the third member of his family to visit the William Carleton Summer School, in the footsteps of his sisters Polly (who addressed the first school in 1992) and Marie, wife of Seamus Heaney. He is best known as a musician for his part in the legendary Irish rock band Horslips, who have recently enjoyed renewed fame.

6.00pm Dinner

9.00pm Rathmore Bar, Clogher
P. J. Kennedy, Poet
and Maguire Family (Traditional Music)
Admission: £5/€6

PJ Kennedy is a farmer from Belturbet, Co. Cavan and also a poet who writes in the tradition of Ledwidge or McGahern. Some of his admirers say he is emerging as a latter-day Kavanagh. PJ himself, a retiring fellow, would be alarmed at such comparisons. He comes from the same part of Ireland as McGahern, and he has recorded in some arresting verse some observations of life in small farming communities in Leitrim and Cavan. He farms over 100 acres near Belturbet, handed down in his family through generations. He began his working life away from the farm as a motor mechanic but returned to take over after his father's time. Then there was some dairying, but times change, and today he has sheep and some suckler cows. There are about 50 acres of forestry. His first book of poems in 2007 called Shadows on Our Doorstep includes one called His Teapot. The setting is a wake. "The drained aluminium teapot/ Waited at the edge/ Of the Stanley 8 range./ From work, the once bright frame/ Was bruised, contorted,/ The lid bald without its bakelite crown./ The vent long stuffed/ Its spout running slow/ An old artery closing down." Neighbours had gathered in the kitchen. One boy eyed the pot. "A youngster spoke, 'You'd think he'd be back/ In a few minutes'." There are 30 poems in this little book about byres, beds, bogs and bicycles, weather, townlands, candlesticks and a council pump which wagged its cow-tail handle and served people's needs until "robbers hacked the flange nuts and the ligament./ Only stumps of bare bolts remain.
Review by Joe Kennedy, The Irish Independent, 24 June 2007