Date: Thursday, 21 November 2019

Time: 2:00pm – 5:45pm

Venue: Irish Architectural Archives, 45 Merrion Square, Dublin 2

The Archives and Records Association, Ireland (ARA,I) is pleased to present a half-day training seminar focused on the topic of diversity and inclusion in Irish archives and records. The afternoon programme will consist of five presentations from speakers who have contributed to the important work of diversifying Irish archives and records and to the wider conversation around archival representation and community engagement.

ARA’s 2018 Glasgow Manifesto re-articulates the association’s commitment to “being an agent for change and reflecting the variety and diversity of the communities we serve”. This aim of this training event is to provide a platform for sharing experiences and strategies, and to reignite the conversation around representation in Irish archives and the ways in which we can engage as a profession to further the goals of the Glasgow Manifesto.

The day’s programme will be structured as follows:

2:00pm-2:20pm: Registration & refreshments (tea and coffee)

2:20pm-2:30pm: Welcome and Introduction

2.30pm-3.00pm: National Library of Ireland: Diversity & Inclusion

Presentation by Maria Ryan, Web Archivist at the National Library of Ireland and member of the NLI’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee

3.00pm-3.30pm: Queer Treasure: Documenting & Preserving Irish LGBT History

Presentation by Tonie Walsh, Civil Rights Activist, Historian, Journalist

3:30pm-4:00pm: Structured Ignorance and Silencing in Irish Archives

Presentation by Katherine O’Donnell, Associate Professor, School of Philosophy University College Dublin and Maeve O’Rourke, Faculty of Law, National College of Ireland Galway

4:00pm-4:15pm: Break

4:15pm-4:45pm: Queer Archival Activism: The Cork LGBT Archive

Presentation by Orla Egan, Author, Activist and Founder of Cork LGBT Archive

4:45pm-5:15pm: Access, Representation and Engagement: Working with Wikimedia Projects

Presentation by Rebecca O’Neill, Project Coordinator at Wikimedia Community Ireland

5:15pm-5:45pm: Q&A and Discussion

ARA,I is grateful to the Irish Manuscripts Commission and the Irish Architectural Archive for letting us use their facilities and to all of our speakers for their participation.

About the Speakers

Maria Ryan

Maria Ryan is the web archivist at the National Library of Ireland and is a member of the library’s Diversity and Inclusion committee. Prior to joining the NLI in 2015, she worked as Digital Archivist on the Abbey Theatre Digitisation Project in the James Hardiman Library, National University of Ireland, Galway.

Katherine O’Donnell

Katherine O’Donnell is Assoc. Prof. History of Ideas, UCD School of Philosophy and is a member of Justice for Magdalenes Research. She was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to study for a Masters in English Literature at Boston College. She won a further fellowship to study at the University of California at Berkeley while completing her Ph.D. thesis on the Gaelic background to Edmund Burke's political thought. She was appointed as a College Lecturer in Women's Studies in UCD and went on to become Director of UCD Women's Studies Centre, a position she held for ten years until 2015. In the academic years 2015/16 and 2016/17 she taught modules in Feminist Philosophy on the University of Oxford's B.Phil programme. In 2017 she was appointed to her current position as Assoc. Prof. in the History of Ideas at UCD School of Philosophy. O’Donnell has won prizes for her teaching, including the UCD President’s Gold Medal for Teaching Excellence (2007) and the British Universities Learning on Screen Award (2014). Her research has been funded a number of times by both the Irish Research Council and the EU Commission. She has published widely in the history of sexuality and gender and the intellectual history of Eighteenth Century Ireland.

Maeve O’Rourke

Dr Maeve O’Rourke has recently taken a post as lecturer in the faculty of Law at NUI Galway. She previously worked as Senior Research and Policy Officer at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. She has also acted as voluntary legal advisor to Justice for Magdalenes Research since 2009, and she is a co-director of the voluntary Clann Project (an award-winning evidence-gathering initiative between JFMR, Adoption Rights Alliance and global law firm Hogan Lovells). Maeve is a barrister at 33 Bedford Row, London, and she is also called to the New York State Bar. Prior to joining the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, Maeve practised in human rights, family law and international mass tort/environmental claims. She worked for the international women’s rights organisation Equality Now, and as a researcher at Harvard Law School and the University of Minnesota Law School Human Rights Center. Maeve teaches university human rights-related courses regularly. She is a graduate of University College Dublin, Harvard Law School and Birmingham Law School. Her PhD, awarded in 2018, focused on the potential for the rule against torture and ill-treatment in international human rights law to better protect older people.

Tonie Walsh

Tonie Walsh was the first openly gay person to stand for election to Dublin City Council. During the 1980s he was a prime mover behind Dublin’s LGBT resource, the Hirschfeld Centre, and also worked as a journalist on OUT, Ireland’s first commercial lesbian/gay periodical. He was the founding editor of GCN, Ireland’s most successful queer publication. Using earlier collections, he founded the Irish Queer Archive in 1997, later transferred to state ownership at the National Library of Ireland. A longtime advocate for safer sex and improved sexual health strategies, Walsh became HIV Positive in 2005, after being raped. He has been an outspoken critic of Government inertia around new HIV and STI infections, and a onetime board member of Gay Health Network. On World AIDS Day 2016, he launched a campaign to build an Irish AIDS Memorial. After almost a decade working as a full-time carer, Tonie Walsh returned to public life with I Am Tonie Walsh. A meditation on friendship, family and community, the one-man show, produced by critically acclaimed Thisispopbaby, premiered at Dublin’s Project Arts Centre in November 2018. Walsh is currently busying himself with a number of other research and writing projects and he continues to independently curate for the Irish Queer Archive.

Orla Egan

Orla Egan is the author of Queer Republic of Cork, Cork’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Communities, 1970s-1990s, published by Onstream Publications in December 2016. She created the Cork LGBT Archive to preserve and share information on Cork’s rich history of LGBT activism and community formation. The digital collection can be found on www.corklgbtarchive.com and the physical collection is in the Cork Public Museum. The Cork LGBT History Exhibition has been displayed in various venues in Cork, Belfast and Berlin. The Cork LGBT Archive received a Hidden Heritage Award from the Irish Heritage Council in 2016 and in 2019 won the inaugural community archives award from the Digital Repository of Ireland. Orla Egan has been actively involved in theCork LGBT community since the 1980s.

Rebecca O’Neill

Rebecca O'Neill holds a PhD in Digital Media from the University of Hull, where her research focused on collaborative online platforms such as Wikipedia as forms of citizen curation. She is the Project Coordinator for Wikimedia Community Ireland, working to promote the use of Wikimedia projects in education, culture and beyond. She has a keen interest in the improvement and expansion of Irish related topics on Wikipedia, as well as the promotion of the use of Vicipéid in Irish language education and activism.