Tag Archives: Tomás MacConmara

AN EAST Clare historian is urging children and families to make the most of the current break in our daily routines by documenting the memories and recollections of older generations. While visiting grandparents is banned, as the over-70s cocoon themselves against the Coronavirus, Dr Tomás MacConmara has published an easy-to-use guideline so that children can record phone conversations and learn about life in a by-gone era. The Tuamgraney native believes that now is an ideal time to enhance children’s understanding and appreciation of their grandparent’s lives, and for the older and younger generations to stay connected. “This is an idea I’ve had for a long long time, well before Covid-19,” Dr MacConmara explained. “I’ve always felt there was a tremendous value for younger people to be connected to older generations and tremendous insights that could be achieved from that simple process of talking to and, more importantly, listening to our older people. It was part of our culture for centuries …

The European coordinator of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee in Palestine, Riya Hassan will be in Ennis on Tuesday next to deliver a talk. She will be hosted by the Clare branch of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC). Ms Hassan, who is a Palestinian activist raised in the southern village of Laquia in the Naqab desert, heads up the campaign across Europe and is visiting Clare as part of a tour of Ireland. Her tour marks 10 years since the campaign was launched. The boycott campaign against Israeli goods, similar to the one targeting apartheid South Africa, has grown significantly in those 10 years. IPSC Clare chairperson, Tomás MacConmara, said, “We are honoured to host Riya Hassan to talk about the unstoppable growth of this Palestinian civil society-led movement for freedom, justice, equality and a just peace in the Palestine-Israel region. The BDS campaign has gone from strength to strength and become a major factor in the Palestine-Israel …

AMONGST the most intriguing of the items which will be on display at a 1914 All-Ireland hurling exhibition in the county museum in Ennis will be an oil stock used to anoint Biddy Earley when she died. Historian Tomás MacConmara is hoping that this element of the exhibition will finally dispel the belief that Biddy Earley had cursed the Clare hurling team, thereby playing a role in denying Clare an All-Ireland title between 1914 and 1995. “It’s time to refute that story for once and for all. To be fair to Biddy Earley she was an incredibly important historical figure and actually a very liked figure, certainly in her native Feakle,” Tomás MacConmara said. The fact that Biddy Earley died decades before 1914 suggests that apportioning blame to her on the subsequent short comings of the Clare hurling team was stretching things. “To be very clear on it, she died in 1874; the GAA was formed 10 years later and …