Location: Monaghan

CARLETON, KAVANAGH & GAVAN DUFFY

Four Seasons Hotel, Monaghan
FREE ADMISSION
10:30am
Conference Registration
Tea/coffee
11am
Professor Thomas O’Grady on his poetry
and Patrick Kavanagh
12.00noon
Art Agnew on Patrick Kavanagh
1.00pm
Lunch Break
2:30pm
Charles Gavan Duffy: Journalist and Patriot:
Brendan O Cathaoir and Aidan Walsh
3:30pm
Break
3:40pm
Mary O’Donnell
4:45pm
The Shemus cartoons in the 'Freeman’s Journal':
Felix M. Larkin
6:00pm
Reception and Book Launch: 'Memories Amidst the Drumlins: Cavan & Monaghan' by the late Terence O’Gorman, Tydavnet.

Thomas O’Grady
was born and grew up on Prince Edward Island. He was educated at the University of PEI, University College Dublin, and the University of Notre Dame. He is currently Professor of English, Director of Irish Studies, and Director of the undergraduate Creative Writing Programme at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. He lives in Milton, Massachusetts with his wife and three daughters.

Art Agnew
is from Inniskeen in Co. Monaghan, the birthplace of the poet Patrick Kavanagh. He will read selected extracts from Kavanagh's works, including ‘The Green Fool‘. He has been involved with the community-run Patrick Kavanagh Centre in Inniskeen since its foundation.

Dr Brendan
O Cathaoir
was born in Co. Clare and spent most of his working life as a journalist with the Irish Times. A life long student of Irish history, particularly the 19th Century. He is the author of ‘John Blake Dillon Young Irelander 1814-66‘, published in 1990 and ‘Famine Diary‘,1998. He has a particular interest in the Young Ireland movement of the 1840's in which Charles Gavan Duffy (pictured left) from Monaghan was involved through the establishment of The Nation newspaper. In 1978 he published a book on John Mitchel.

Aidan Walsh
from Galway was the first curator of Monaghan County Museum when it opened in the Courthouse in 1974. Under his stewardship it won a Europa Prize in 1980. During his time there he met relatives of Gavan Duffy and was able to introduce them to the places associated with the Australian statesman.

Aidan specialised in archaeology and has just completed a series of lectures in County Monaghan on his excavations in 1982 at the landmark Ulster site, the Black Pig's Dyke. He is now an independent consultant in the cultural sector, providing specialist advice on the management and development of projects.

Mary O'Donnell
was born in Monaghan. She has published poetry, novels, short stories and a number of critical essays and literary reviews. O’Donnell moves deftly and at ease between different forms of literary expression, allowing the subject matter to direct her towards its most adequate medium.

She is a previous visitor to the Summer School in 1997 and 2012. She has published five volumes of poetry. The first two collections – Reading the Sunflowers in September (1990) and Spiderwoman’s Third Avenue Rhapsody (1993) – were nominated for The Irish Times Literature Award.

Felix M. Larkin
was born in Dublin. His father came from Newry and his four grandparents also had Ulster roots. He is a retired civil servant who worked in the Irish Department of Finance and the National Treasury Management Agency. He is a graduate of UCD and the Institute of Public Administration, and is a historian by training. His main research interest is the history of the ‘Freeman's Journal‘, the prominent Dublin newspaper published 1764-1924. He is Academic Director of the Parnell Summer School 2013.

6:00pm Reception and Book Launch:
'Memories Amidst the Drumlins - Cavan & Monaghan': the late Terence O’Gorman (Tydavnet).
poems & stories compiled and edited by his daughter Patricia Cavanagh (William Carleton Society).
Speaker: Michael Fisher, Summer School Director

Terence O Gorman (front right) at 1999 Summer School.

Photo from the Impartial Reporter.