Ireland Archives - Public Seminar

Democracy

A Dystopian Novel for Our Times

What being tyrannized tastes like

May 15, 2025 • by Susan Yelavich

On one level, the premise of Prophet Song (Oneworld, 2023), the recent Booker-winning novel by the Irish writer Paul Lynch, is simple enough: It’s about the existential dilemmas a mother faces in an authoritarian state. But on every other level, Prophet Song exceeds the expectations of a dystopian tale. Instead ...

Activism

Beyond Pro-Choice/Pro-Life Binaries

An excerpt of Repealed: Ireland’s Unfinished Fight for Reproductive Rights

February 6, 2023 • by Camilla Fitzsimons and Sinéad Kennedy

Abortion became illegal in Ireland in 1861 as part of the United Kingdom and Great Britain’s Offences Against the Person Act. But while abortion might not have been talked about much in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was happening. ...

Interviews

“A Terrible Time”

A conversation with Camilla Fitzsimons about the ongoing global fight for abortion rights

February 6, 2023 • by Amalie Thieden and Camilla Fitzsimons

When I was campaigning to repeal the Eighth Amendment in 2018, many older people were very, very, very welcoming of the referendum; they had somebody in their family who had had to travel abroad to get an abortion, or they had experienced or known women who felt they’d had too ...

Uncategorized

Violence and Redemption in Northern Ireland’s Civil War

An Interview With Patrick Radden Keefe

March 16, 2020 • by Patrick Radden Keefe and Plamena Malinova

The following interview with Patrick Radden Keefe the 2020 award winner for nonfiction, is part of a series of NBCC interviews conducted by New School creative writing students. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (PRH) traces the lives of Jean McConville, a widow with ten children ...

Violence and Redemption in Northern Ireland’s Civil War

Feature

Writing Life Under Pressure

An Interview with Anna Burns

May 1, 2019 • by Aubrey Moraif

In March, The New School hosted this year’s National Book Critics Circle awards, which honor literature published in the United States in the previous year. The awards are presented in six categories -- autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry -- and are the only U.S. literary awards chosen by critics themselves. Milkman is ...

Uncategorized

Ireland’s Victory for Marriage Equality, Continued

How Irish was it? And how much of a victory?

July 22, 2015 • by Peter Drucker

I very much liked Sinéad Kennedy’s piece on the yes to same-sex marriage in the Irish referendum. I share her sense that the 62% yes vote on May 22 was an impressive progressive victory. At the same time, I strongly agree with her statement, “As a political ...

Uncategorized

Ireland’s Victory for Marriage Equality

The birth of a new political imagination?

June 18, 2015 • by Sinéad Kennedy

The Irish electorate’s recent resounding “yes” to the question of marriage equality for LGBT people (62% of the electorate, approximately 1.2 million, voted in favour the proposal) briefly turned the international spotlight on Ireland for reasons other than its imploding economic and banking system. Ireland is ...