THE GREAT Aran Island writer Liam O’Flaherty will be commemorated, discussed, and celebrated at a summer school to be held in Galway in August.
This will be the second such summer schoole to take place, following last year’s successful event. It was decided to hold the 2014 event on Saturday August 30 and Sunday 31 at the recent AGM of the Liam & Tom O’Flaherty Society. The school will be held on Inis Mór, the birthplace of the two great writers.
The programme will include a session focusing on World War I. Liam O’Flaherty not only fought in that war but was also the first Irish author to write a novel about it - Return of the Brute, published in 1929.
Another talk will deal with Tom O’Flaherty’s Irish language articles in the radical 1930s newspaper An tÉireannach. Tom was a prolific journalist in Ireland and the USA.
The final session of the weekend will focus on Mícheál Ó Maoláin - ceardchumannach as Árainn and a genealogical study of the Ó Maoláin and O’Flaherty families. Ó Maoláin was a significant figure in the Dublin trade union movement, a contemporary of Liam O’Flaherty and Sean O’Casey. Both writers portrayed him in their work, the latter in his play Shadow of a Gunman.
The Summer School will also offer an opportunity to witness a dramatic reading of Liam O’Flaherty’s only play Dorchadas, where he explored the position and lack of rights of women in the Free State.
