Herbert Simms – Simms120 commissioned poem made into a film by Paddy Cahill with piece broadcast on Sunday Miscellany 2/12/18

My poem ‘Owning The Sky’ or ‘The Flats That Simms Built’ has just been turned into a beautiful short film by Paddy Cahill with original music by Irene Clancy and is available to view here

https://vimeo.com/321215951

Last October I was commissioned by the organisers of Simms120 to write a poem about Herbert Simms, the amazing Dublin City Architect of the 1930’s. His buildings are a roll call of social housing in the city – he designed and oversaw all of the Cabra and Crumlin estates as well as Chancery House,  Dolphin House, Pease House, Oliver Bond Fatima Mansions. The conference took place https://simms120.wordpress.com/ and among the other speakers were Eoin O’Mahony (Organiser), architectural historian Ellen Rowley, geographer and former resident of Pearse House,  Mary Broe who brought me around the flats. Meanwhile my essay about Simms, (also read at the conference) was broadcast on

Sunday Miscellany Sunday 2 December 2018

Sunday Miscellany. New Writing: Ebenezer Howard and Dublin’s Garden Suburb, by Gail Seekamp; Lapis Lazuli, by Frank Kavanagh; Home and Herbert Simms, by Nell Regan;

https://www.rte.ie/radio1/sunday-miscellany/programmes/2018/1202/1014645-sunday-miscellany-sunday-2-december-2018/

Nell Regan reading commissioned poem ‘Owning the Sky’ or The Flats Simms Built’ at Simms120 Oct 2018

 

Free talk The Old Coach House, Old Lucan Road, Palmerstown Thurs 27 Sep @ 7.30pm all welcome

THE LIFE OF HELENA MOLONY: NATIONALIST AND FEMINIST Thursday 27th September 7.30pm.
A talk by Nell Regan, author of Helena Molony: a radical life, 1883-1967
At The Old Coach House, Old Lucan Road, Palmerstown.  All welcome.

Hosted by Stewarts Care Library as part of South Dublin Libraries History and Heritage Summer

http://www.southdublinlibraries.ie/sites/all/libraries/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins/filemanager/files/HH18.pdf

Dalkey Book Festival 17 June 2018

Looking forward to speaking at this years Dalkey Book Festival on 17 June at this event

57. Unreasonable Women: the Equality War Goes On

The Masonic Lodge

Next year marks the 100 – year anniversary of women getting the vote in Ireland. Much has been achieved in terms of gender equality, but women are still fighting on many of the same issues and women are still a minority in government today. How important was and is female activism in effecting change and, 100 years after suffrage, where are we now with regards to equality? And what would Markiewicz make of it all?

With Senator Lynne Ruane, Margaret Ward, Nell Regan, Yassmin Abdel-Magied and Martina Devlin.

 http://www.dalkeybookfestival.org/sessions/57-unreasonable-women-equality-war-goes/

Great programme which runs from the 14th June inc Michael Ondaatje, Lionel Shriver, Paul Muldoon, Deborah Levy & many more http://www.dalkeybookfestival.org/

Ireland’s Notable Women @ Dublin Book Festival! 8pm 8 November Blanch Library 

Really looking forward to talking about Helena Molony: A Radical Life at this years’ Dublin Book Festival. I’ll be taking part in the event ‘Ireland ‘s Notable Women’ in conversation with Martina Devlin along with Valerie Packenham on Maria Edgeworth and  Clodagh Finn on Mary Elmes.

8 November, 8pm in Blanchardstown Library – the event is free but booking is advised.

For more information and the rest of the Dublin Book Festival programme see http://www.dublinbookfestival.com/category/news/welcome-2015/irelands-notable-women/

Irish Times and Dublin Review of Books reviews of Helena Molony A Radical Life by Catriona Crowe and Pádraig Yeates

There is a considered and lengthy review of Helena Molony: A Radical Life, 1883-1967 by Pádraig Yeates  in  July’s Dublin Review of Books.

See http://www.drb.ie/essays/selfless-radical

  ” a book that has done more to rehabilitate its subject than anything else written over the past half-century.”
” There is no one better qualified to write her life than Nell Regan, who published what Senia Pašeta has described as “a pioneering biographical essay on Molony” in 2001. That was the fruit of a decade’s intermittent research and meant, crucially, that, in Nell’s own words, “I was lucky enough to be doing my initial research at a time when there were still people alive who had known her”, such as Francis Stuart, Louie Coghlan O’Brien and Finian Czira. She was writing about someone who was the proverbial handshake away and a poet’s insight made that link all the more palpable.”

In May, following on from the launch at Liberty Hall, there was a substantial review by Catriona Crowe in the Books section of the Irish Times,

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/helena-molony-a-radical-life-review-fleshing-out-a-complicated-woman-1.3082767

“This first biography of Molony fleshes out our knowledge of this complicated woman and joins a number of other biographies of women activists during these years whose lives are being excavated by a new generation of historians of Irish women, building on the pioneering work of Margaret Ward’s Unmanageable Revolutionaries and Mary Jones’s These Obstreperous Lassies, published in 1983 and 1988. The decade of centenaries has brought a welcome focus on women involved in feminism, nationalism, militarism, pacifism and socialism during the period.”

Podcast of Sunday Miscellany, RTE Radio 1, 30 April 2017

Delighted to have a piece in this broadcast about the first commemoration of Easter 1916. Great timing as it was also the weekend of the launch of Helena Molony: A Radical Life in Liberty Hall.

You can listen to the podcast here

https://www.rte.ie/radio1/sunday-miscellany/programmes/2017/0430/871473-sunday-miscellany-sunday-30-april-2017/?clipid=2472988#2472988

 

Launch @ 3pm, 28 April 2017, Liberty Hall of Helena Molony: A Radical Life!

All welcome – come along on 3pm, 28 April to Liberty Hall to launch Helena Molony A Radical Life 1883-1967 off into the world.

 

Delighted that it is taking place in Liberty Hall 100 years on from the date Molony, Rosie Hackett & others marked the first anniversary of the Rising so dramatically. Her name seems to be cropping up all over the place this month between One City One book Echoland and the 1917 Rising anniversary.