The Royal Irish Academy

Library Lunchtime Lecture by Dr Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail, UCD.

First lecture in a series organised in association with Roinn na Nua-Ghaeilge, University College Cork, to accompany the exhibition ‘Scribing for Ireland: the Ó Longáin family and the Royal Irish Academy.'

Location: Academy House

Date: October 2015

Disclaimer:

The Royal Irish Academy has prepared this content responsibly and carefully, but disclaims all warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy of the information contained in any of the materials. The views expressed are the authors’ own and not those of the Royal Irish Academy.

Speaker: Professor Tom Dunne

Library Lunchtime Lecture organised in conjunction with an exhibition curated by the Royal Irish Academy Library 'Views of Dublin: original watercolours by George Petrie, MRIA, 1790-1866'. This exhibition, to mark the 150th anniversary of the death of George Petrie, ran from 19 January – 15 February, 2016.

Online exhibition: https://www.ria.ie/news/library/views-dublin-online-exhibition

Location: Academy House

Date: 15 February 2016

Disclaimer:

The Royal Irish Academy has prepared this content responsibly and carefully, but disclaims all warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy of the information contained in any of the materials. The views expressed are the authors’ own and not those of the Royal Irish Academy.

Professor Partha Chatterjee's lecture as part of UCD's 1916 as a Global Event series of lectures

The Launch of 'Trinity in War and Revolution 1912-1923' was preceded by an expert panel discussion in the Printing House, Trinity College Dublin, at 6.30pm on Monday December 7th 2015.

This book situates the history of Trinity College Dublin within the great upheavals and changes that were taking place in Ireland and the wider world in the transformative period between 1912 and 1923. The period saw Trinity and its environs profoundly changed. The book uses Trinity as a way of exploring some of the central themes and tensions of these years, themes that are usually examined separately: Irish involvement in the First World War; the Easter Rising of 1916; the violent struggle for Irish independence; the end of the Civil War; and the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. It views these events through the prism of the university’s development, arguing that these contexts cannot be divorced from one another. Trinity was at the centre— physically, intellectually, symbolically—of these seismic events in local, national and international history, and each had a great impact upon the institution and its development in the twentieth century.

Speakers:

Ciaran Brady (chair), Professor of Early Modern History and Historiography, Trinity College Dublin

Eunan O’Halpin, Professor of Contemporary Irish History, Trinity College Dublin

Ronan Fanning, Professor of Modern History, University College Dublin

Dr Tomás Irish (author), lecturer in Modern History, Swansea University

Dr Catriona Crowe, National Archives of Ireland

Dr Anne Dolan, Associate Professor in Modern Irish History, Trinity College Dublin

Dr Caitriona Clear, lecturer in Modern History, National University of Ireland Galway

Trinity in War and Revolution was launched by the Chief Justice, Susan Denham, in Trinity College Dublin on Monday, 7 December.

This book situates the history of Trinity College Dublin within the great upheavals and changes that were taking place in Ireland and the wider world in the transformative period between 1912 and 1923. The period saw Trinity and its environs profoundly changed. The book uses Trinity as a way of exploring some of the central themes and tensions of these years, themes that are usually examined separately: Irish involvement in the First World War; the Easter Rising of 1916; the violent struggle for Irish independence; the end of the Civil War; and the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. It views these events through the prism of the university’s development, arguing that these contexts cannot be divorced from one another. Trinity was at the centre— physically, intellectually, symbolically—of these seismic events in local, national and international history, and each had a great impact upon the institution and its development in the twentieth century.

Speakers:

Dr Patrick Prendergast, Provost of Trinity College Dublin

Prof. Mary E. Daly, President of the Royal Irish Academy

Susan Denham, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ireland

Dr Tomás Irish (author), lecturer in Modern History, Swansea University

Austerity may be defined as a large fiscal contraction that causes a substantial increase in unemployment. If the government has a budget deficit that is unsustainable, or a debt level that is too high, it is sometimes suggested that austerity is inevitable. For an economy with a flexible exchange rate and debt in its own currency, which includes the Eurozone as a whole, this is simply false. Fiscal contraction can always be delayed until monetary policy can offset the deflationary impact of any fiscal contraction. Unfortunately this is not true for a member of a currency union that requires a greater fiscal contraction than the union as a whole. Even in this case, however, a sharp and deep fiscal contraction will be an inefficient waste of resources. As the macroeconomic theory behind these propositions is simple and widely accepted, the interesting question about the current global austerity is why it has happened.

Simon Wren-Lewis is currently Professor of Economic Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University, having previously been a professor in the Economic Department at Oxford. He is also an Emeritus Fellow of Merton College. He began his career as an economist in H.M.Treasury, and then moved to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, where he ended up as Head of Macroeconomic Research. In 1990 he became a professor at Strathclyde University, and from 1995 to 2006 he was a professor at Exeter University. He has published papers on macroeconomics in a wide range of academic journals including the Economic Journal, European Economic Review, and American Economic Review. Since becoming an academic he has advised H.M.Treasury, the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility. In September 2015 he was appointed to the British Labour Party’s Economic Advisory Committee. He writes on economic policy issues in various publications and at his blog: mainlymacro.blogspot.com.

Academic work has often had a strong policy focus. In 1989 he published, with colleagues at the National Institute, a study suggesting that an entry rate of 1.95 DM/£ into the ERM was too high, which at the time was a minority view. In 2002 he wrote one of the background papers for the Treasury's 2003 assessment of its five economic tests for joining EMU. He was also the principal external advisor to the Bank of England on the development of its core macroeconomic models. A long time advocate of Fiscal Councils, his 2007 proposal was influential in the formation of the UK‘s Office of Budget Responsibility. Since starting his blog at the end of 2011, he has written extensively about macroeconomic policy in the UK and the Eurozone.

Panel discussion, chaired by Catriona Crowe with Margaret O’Callaghan, Margaret MacCurtain and author Lucy McDiarmid.

The discussion is followed by the launch of At home in the revolution - what women said and did in 1916.

At Home in the Revolution as a publication derives its material from women’s own accounts of the Easter Rising, interpreted broadly to include also the Howth gun-running and events that took place over the summer of 1916 in Ireland. These eye-witness narratives -- diaries, memoirs, letters, autobiographies, and official witness statements -- were written by nationalists and unionists, Catholics and Protestants, women who felt completely at home in the garrisons, cooking for the men and treating their wounds, and women who stayed at home during the Rising. The book’s focus is on the kind of episode usually ignored by traditional historians: cooking with bayonets, arguing with priests, resisting sexual harassment, soothing a female prostitute, doing sixteen-hand reels in Kilmainham Gaol, or disagreeing with Prime Minister Asquith about the effect of the Rising on Dublin’s architecture. The women’s ‘small behaviours’, to use Erving Goffman’s term, reveal social change in process, not the official history of manifestoes and legislation, but the unofficial history of access to a door or a leap through a window; they show how issues of gender were negotiated at a time of revolution.

Speakers:

-Mary E. Daly, President of the Royal Irish Academy

-Lucy McDiarmid, Marie Frazee-Baldassarre Professor of English

-Catriona Crowe MRIA, National Archives of Ireland

-Dr Margaret O'Callaghan, Queen's University Belfast

-Dr Margaret Mac Curtain, historian

Inaugural John Bell Day lecture to commemorate Bell's Theorem which was first submitted for publication on 4th November 1964

1916 Portraits and Lives was launched at the Royal Irish Academy on 2nd November 2015.

In her opening speech, An Tánaiste Joan Burton praised the multifaceted nature of the book: “Portraits and Lives is like a prism that reflects all shades of contemporary thought on 1916 across the spectrum. It is fair, partial and balanced representing the prevailing political ideologies that fed into its planning and its outcome.The biographies are clear and concise, and the stories themselves show that regardless of background, life experiences and shared philosophies can forge a single ideology and identity that yields irrevocable change.The different perspectives reveal a great deal about the social, cultural and political complexities that served as the backdrop to Easter Week.They illustrate that a full appraisal of 1916 is only possible by examining the lives of a cross-section of those at its core.They themselves were open to and nurtured by the seeds of international ideologies that swept Europe and the globe in the 19th and early 20th centuries".

1916 Portraits and Lives is available online, on our website www.ria.ie/publications, and in your local bookshop.

1916 Portraits and Lives was launched at the Royal Irish Academy on 2nd November 2015.

In her opening speech, An Tánaiste Joan Burton praised the multifaceted nature of the book: “Portraits and Lives is like a prism that reflects all shades of contemporary thought on 1916 across the spectrum. It is fair, partial and balanced representing the prevailing political ideologies that fed into its planning and its outcome.The biographies are clear and concise, and the stories themselves show that regardless of background, life experiences and shared philosophies can forge a single ideology and identity that yields irrevocable change.The different perspectives reveal a great deal about the social, cultural and political complexities that served as the backdrop to Easter Week.They illustrate that a full appraisal of 1916 is only possible by examining the lives of a cross-section of those at its core.They themselves were open to and nurtured by the seeds of international ideologies that swept Europe and the globe in the 19th and early 20th centuries".

1916 Portraits and Lives is available online, on our website www.ria.ie/publications, and in your local bookshop.