Grill an Expert
Over the past year Universities, Councils, Museums and other community and voluntary organisations have organised a range of exciting and educational events to mark the Centenary. A range of experts, academics and others have given lectures and talks on many features of the period.
Our project has supported many of these events and learnt much from them. However knowing our audiences and wanting to do things slightly differently we decided to turn the traditional lecture and question and answer session on its head.
Your Questions Answered
In fact we have decided to drop the lecture altogether and go straight to the Q & A. For our online audiences the soundbite not the sit down talk is required.
For others English is not their first language and it is important to deal with the fundamentals of the topic.
Our audiences are new to the subject. The basics like the difference between Unionism and Nationalism, or the way that laws such as the Home Rule Act are made in the United Kingdom need to be established.
Our project reached out through workshops to a range of ‘new’ audiences and by that we mean school children and young people who are new to the subject; BME communities who are new to Northern Ireland and visitors who are keen to learn more.
Helping You Know More
We listened to them and what they wanted to know and then put questions to the experts and used that information to engage and educate others. It is like a process of distillation which will help new audiences ‘Know Norn Iron’ better.
It has also used lived experience, from local experts and commentators who introduce BREXIT to help explain the dynamics of Partition. Finally we have used examples from other countries will help audiences from those regions understand our issues and perhaps help local audiences see that our problems are not that unique as was once thought.
Dr. Tim Wilson
Senior lecturer, Director of the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence.
His first book Frontiers of Violence – an ambitious comparison of violence in the contested borderlands of Ulster and Upper Silesia between 1918 and 1922 – was nominated for the Royal Historical Society’s prestigious Whitfield Prize in 2010. Killing Strangers: How Political Violence Became Modern appeared in September 2020. Both were published by Oxford University Press.
Malachi O’Doherty
Writer, publicist, photographer. Published in many Irish and British periodicals and newspapers, including Irish Times, Belfast Telegraph, The Guardian, etc.
Author of many books: I Was A Teenage Catholic (2002) The Telling Year (2007), Fifty Years On: the Troubles And The Struggle for Change in Northern Ireland (2019) – among others.
Bernadette Devlin McAliskey
An Irish civil rights leader, and former politician. She served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Mid Ulster in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1974. Presently works with STEP a not-for-profit, rights-based community development organisation based in Dungannon, N Ireland.
Dr. David Hume, MBE
An author, broadcaster, newspaper columnist and community activist with over 30 years experience in community development and delivery of heritage projects. He is author of books on local and Irish history as well as numerous articles, has edited a monthly newspaper and a number of historical journals and has featured on radio and television.
Jason Burke
Historian, researcher, writer and creator of ‘Historical Belfast’ podcast.