ALMOST two months on from his well-attended talks in Hunt Museum and No. 69 O’Connell Street, journalist and historian Kevin Myers returns this Wednesday 26 to speak again about Limerick’s contribution during World War 1.
His address is a free Heritage Week event hosted by Limerick Museum and Archives at St Mary’s Cathedral at 6.30pm. It will see the Sunday Times (Ireland) columnist focus on 1915 in particular, when Limerick suffered its worst casualty rate.
Myers has spent over 30 years researching this almost hidden history of Ireland’s involvement in World War 1.
The public lecture coincides with the 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli campaign which claimed the lives of 800 members of the Royal Munster Fusiliers, 75 of whom were from Limerick. Among those killed during the ill-fate campaign were eight natives of the village of Coonagh who died when their ship was torpedoed.
Conservative estimates suggest that one in four, or 1,000 of Limerick’s 4,000 listed men died in the First World War.
Re the growing public awareness in Ireland of the role played by Irish men in The Great War, Kevn Myers makes the observation: “If we owe any duty to these men of the Great War, and I emphatically believe that we do, it is simply that as a society we must never, ever hide this truth again.”
This Wednesday’s event at the cathedral will begin at 6.30pm with pipers playing laments and marching tunes. Patricia Haselbeck-Flynn, editor of ‘Franz S Haselbeck’s Ireland: Selected Photographs’ – many of which concern army and RAF postings here – will make the introduction. The Heritage Week talk runs as part of the Limerick Museum and Archives’ ‘Stand Up and Fight’ exhibition current at City Hall.
