Órfhlaith Foyle

And this is who we are...

The Taliban are raping women and girls they arrest for ‘bad hijab’, but the @UN has assured them no Afghan women will participate and women’s rights will not be discussed at the conference in Doha on 30/6 How nice for the boys @UNWomen #WhatIsMisogyny apple.news/AtQS1pca9Rhuw1…

Congratulations Conor @ConorMontague1

And so. A 12 year old girl is raped in France by 3 young men because she is a Jew. @MichaelaFrueh72 @AhmadMansour__

"You see, my plans for the summer are no plans." — Hannah Arendt

#ThroughHerEyes She was born #otd in 1863, so it's a good day to call for the introduction of a Sarah Cecilia Harrison tour of Dublin city. The work done by this amazing woman, artist, activist, suffragist, first female councillor, friend of the poor, is stitched into the fabric of the city. As her biographer @MCappock wrote in a beautiful piece for Her Keys to the City: 'The traces of her legacy are evident in a multitude of places. Her paintings hang in the Hugh Lane Gallery, the National Gallery, the Royal College of Surgeons, the Law Library and City Hall.' Here are some of those wonderful paintings. For more, Her Keys to the City is still available at just €7.99 from @FourCourtsPress Four Courts Press | Her Keys to the City

@LeggettBohan @artscouncil_ie Congratulations Róisín @LeggettBohan

The glorious news took a while to land on me. Oh, elation such validation. Thank you for lending belief @artscouncil_ie

#ThroughHerEyes On Juneteenth, the annual commemoration of the ending of slavery in the US in 1865, I'm thinking of Sarah Parker Remond who travelled to Ireland in 1858 to talk about abolition. When she spoke, on the invitation of the Dublin Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, she outlined the horrors faced by women in particular ... "on behalf of the female slave, the most deplorably and helplessly wretched of human sufferers. Of all who dropped and writhed under the infliction of this horrible system, the greatest sufferer was defenceless women (hear!) For the male slave, however brutally treated, there was some resources: but for the woman slave, there was neither protection nor pity." Sarah Parker Remond was “hailed with long and repeated plaudits" and praised in the Freeman’s Journal. While Frederick Douglass might be better remembered, he was one of about 30 black abolitionists who came here. Sarah stayed with the same family who had hosted Douglass, as Christine Kinealy writes in this great piece. "Having for the first time experienced equality, she could not bear to return to America. Instead, she completed a degree at a college in London and moved to Italy, where she trained as a medical doctor." She continued to work closely with Irish abolitionists. irishamerica.com/2020/09/sarah-…

John McGahern Prize for debut Irish fiction 2023 shortlist revealed. Huge congrats to ⁦@michaelmagee__⁩ Colin Walsh & Noel O’Regan ⁦@PenguinIEBooks⁩ ⁦@AtlanticBooks⁩ ⁦@GrantaBooks⁩ irishtimes.com/culture/books/…

The Good Crank has been playing to full houses in The Villager. Tomorrow's performance is also sold out, but there is some availability for remaining three performances... eventbrite.ie/e/the-good-cra…

Prose workshop with @hollowaywriter2 eaf.ie/events/the-jou…

Looking forward to reading my poems at the United Arts Club on Friday - where Yeats was a member - a hive of creative energy in a fabulous old Georgian Dublin building. I hear the food is great! And maybe some of the poems will go down well too...

The Good Crank opens tomorrow evening in The Villager in Chapelizod. Opening performance is sold-out, check out the link below for subsequent dates... eventbrite.ie/e/the-good-cra…

'As soon as you label yourself, your writing will be expected to continually fit that mould.'

Delighted to be in such company!

This is depressing. Shame on those at Hay and Edinburgh who caved to fringe activists, thus paving the way for this. It's on them. theguardian.com/books/article/…

The new ⁦@PrivateEyeNews⁩ spells it out for the poltroons of Fossil Free Nooks, litfests, signatories of the virtue-signalling letter against Baillie Gifford etc