Aug 27, 2011
Human Rights in Ireland: A People’s History – Call for Texts
The blog authors are organising an event in Druid Theatre, Galway on 10 December this year, to mark Human Rights Day. The event is tentatively called Human Rights in Ireland: A People’s History and is somewhat modelled on The People Speak – the documentary based on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. The event will involve actors and non-actors alike, reading aloud excerpts from texts celebrating key moments which shaped human rights discourse in Ireland (whether on a personal or societal level). We are particularly interested in texts which relate to personal experiences and understandings of human rights, or indeed, violations of rights.
As we are currently putting together a script for the event, we welcome suggestions from you, the readers, for texts which you think are significant and relate to people’s experiences of human rights. Texts from a broad range of sources will be used – books, film, audio recordings, archival material, etc. We are particularly interested in receiving suggestions of surprising or unusual texts which we might not otherwise come across. As a rule of thumb, most of the extracts selected should not exceed about 5 minutes when read aloud. About 20 extracts in all will be included in the reading, and we are reserving a quarter of these for suggestions from the blog readers – although the final decision as to whether a text is used or not will be made by the blog authors. Suggestions can be posted in the comments below, or emailed to myself, Charles O’Mahony or Deirdre Duffy – the organisers of the event. We are aiming to complete a full draft of the script by 7 September, so if you could send us suggestions by then we would appreciate it. Further information on the event will be posted in the coming weeks – so stay tuned!
The testimonies of the survivors in Justice for Magdalenes Ireland, Submission to the UN Committee Against Torture (May 2011) is really powerful and could be really good in this context, see:
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cat/docs/ngos/JusticeMagdalenes_Ireland46.pdf
Obviously the Ryan Report and other documents with firsthand testimonies will be very suitable too.
Hi Aoife, thanks for your suggestion! We have included excerpts from the UPR submission by Justice of Magdalenes and from the Ryan report in the script for the event. Hope you’ll be able to join us in December.