Heritage Events Archive

Seminar Chairman: Professor Raymond Gillespie

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Seminar Programme:

9.45 -10.15 Registration

10.15 - 10.30 Welcome and Seminar Introduction
Conleth Manning: President, CKAS, Professor Raymond Gillespie, Department of History NUI Maynooth and CKAS Honorary Editor

10.30 - 11.10 ‘Kaiser’s Battle: 21 March 1918. A black day for Kildare soldiers.’
James Durney: Council Member, CKAS
On 21 March 1918 forty-two German divisions launched an offensive on the Western Front which they hoped would end the war. The massive German onslaught hit the undermanned British lines where a wedge could be driven through the Anglo-French front. On that first day of the decisive ‘Kaiser’s Battle’ twenty-four Kildare men lost their lives.

11.10 - 11.35 Coffee

11.35 - 12.15 “South Kildare and World War I”
Frank Taaffe: Council Member, CKAS
How the people of Athy and its hinterland responded to the call to arms and how the social, economic and political life of the area was affected by the carnage in
battlefields as far apart as Flanders and Gallipoli.

12.15 - 12.55 “Irishwomen and the First World War: ‘a kind of historically hidden Ireland’
Fionnuala Walsh: Irish Research Council Postgraduate Scholar, Trinity College Dublin
The paper will give a broad overview of the impact of the First World War on women in Ireland focusing on the involvement of Irishwomen in the war effort, their wartime employment and the impact of the war on soldier’s wives. It will move from the national to the local, to look at the wartime experience of women in Kildare.

13.00 - 14.00 Lunch

14.00 - 14.40 “The Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the First World War”
Tom Burke MBE: President, The Royal Dublin Fusiliers Association
Set against the major battles of the First World War on the Western Front in Gallipoli and Salonica, this lecture will present a profile of some of the men who made up the two Regular and five Service Battalions of the RDF; who they were, where they came from and possible motivations for enlistment.

14.40 - 15.20 “Ireland and the Greater War, 1912-1923”
Professor John Horne: Professor of Modern European History, Trinity College Dublin
This talk will reflect on the place of the Irish experiences of the Great War, and the revolutionary decade that led to independence and partition, in the context of a Greater War that spanned 1912-1923 in Europe and the wider world.

Fee: €15 towards a light lunch and Other refreshments is kindly requested at the time of booking.

Please note that prior booking is essential as
admittance will be by ticket only and places are
limited. Tickets will be sent out by post.

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