The third annual Thomas MacDonagh Hedge School will take place at the Thomas MacDonagh Museum in Cloughjordan, County Tipperary 17-20 September 2025.
The museum, which commemorates the life of poet and patriot Thomas MacDonagh, will host a 4-day programme that includes writing workshops, an art exhibition, inspirational talks, interactive discussions and poetry readings.
The theme for this year’s programme is Political Theatre: Learning from the past? In a series of talks throughout the day on Saturday 20 September, the Hedge School will explore the concept of performative politics, and how politicians engage[d] in a form of spectacle to achieve their aims and harness support from the public. The talks will examine what we learn from the past, and whether these lessons are used to repeat the past or reform our future.
This year is the 110th anniversary of the Funeral of O’Donovan Rossa (1/8/1915); a significant event of political theatre that served as a rehearsal for the 1916 Rising. Williams Rossa Cole, a great-grandson of O’Donovan Rossa, is one of our invited speakers. At 7:30pm on Wednesday 17 September, Rossa Cole will introduce his film Rebel Wife: The Story of Mary Jane O’Donovan Rossa and take questions following the screening. ‘Rebel Wife’ portrays the life of an extraordinary Irish revolutionary, it highlights Mary Jane’s origins as well as her remarkable achievements as a poet, author, public speaker, human rights activist, wife and mother.
On Wednesday and Thursday morning, 18-19 September, James Moran, Professor of Modern English Literature and Drama, Faculty of Arts at Nottingham University, will give a script writing workshop. These workshops will be held at the museum. Places are free but must be booked in advance, the details of which can be found on the museum website, https://macdonaghmuseum.ie/
We are delighted that Culture Night 2025 forms part of the Thomas MacDonagh Hedge School programme. From 7-10pm on Friday night, 19 September the Museum will launch an exhibition by members of the North Tipperary Artists’ Collective who created artworks as a creative response to the themes of this year’s Hedge School. Culture Night will also include informal readings from the work developed in the script writing workshop.
On Saturday 20 September, the museum will present a one-day seminar where distinguished academics and researchers will speak to the art and politics of MacDonagh and his contemporaries, and reflect on the current trends in Irish art and politics. The talks will reflect broadly on the Hedge School theme – Political Theatre: Learning from the Past?.
Our keynote address this year will be given by Dr Leeann Lane, Assistant Professor in the School of History and Geography, Dublin City University. Her presentation is entitled ‘Hunger strike as republican performativity: Mary MacSwiney, Brixton, 1920, Mountjoy 1922, Kilmainham 1923’. Dr. Lane’s talk will include reference to her recently published book on Mary MacSwiney and the role of women in the politics of the revolutionary period.
In their discussion ‘Poetry and Politics: Plural Perspectives’ Dr Ailbhe McDaid and Prof Eugene O’Brien, both of Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, will discuss how poets respond to different political events, and the symbolic (even theatrical) language of poetry to capture the past and current political upheavals.
To close the Hedge School programme, Professor James Moran will deliver a talk on ‘The playwrights and 1916’. In his presentation James will discuss the ways in which Thomas MacDonagh prepared for the Easter Rising by scripting the play When the Dawn is Come. In doing so, MacDonagh prepared for an event that would be deeply informed by theatrical thinking, and which would mesmerise some of the key dramatists of the twentieth century, including Sean O’Casey, W.B. Yeats, G.B. Shaw and Teresa Deevy, all of whom sought a creative response to the Easter Rising. The presentation will feature extracts from well-known plays, including The Plough and the Stars, which caused riotous disturbance at the Abbey Theatre when first performed in 1926.
Una Johnston, Hedge School Chairperson and Museum Director says this year’s programme will be ‘of great interest to anyone interested in drama – dramatic plays, dramatic poems, dramatic women and men, dramatic events – and their impact and influence on Irish culture and politics from McDonagh’s time to the present. Our inspiration was the 110th anniversary of the funeral of O’Donovan Rossa in 1915, and we are thrilled to welcome to the Hedge School, from New York, film director Williams Rossa Cole, the great-grandson of Mary Jane and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa’.
Tickets for the Hedge School 2025 collection of events are available now from Eventbrite.
The Thomas MacDonagh Hedge School 2025 received funding as part of the Creative Ireland programme with support from Tipperary County Council.