Colin Murphy

Martin Lynch

Mary Raftery

Jimmy Murphy

Domingos Nunez

Grace Dyas

Contemporary Irish Documentary Theatre is the first anthology of Irish documentary drama. It features five challenging plays by Irish writers, and one by an international author, interrogating and commenting on crucial events of Irish history and of the diaspora, with introductory essays by established academics. Together these plays represent the most innovative development in contemporary Irish theatre and illuminate the social and political realities of contemporary Ireland. The first two plays, of 2010 and 2013, deal with scandals of clerical and institutional abuse, and use as source material the Ryan Report of 2009, and the documents from the 2008 Irish Bank Guarantee. The next two, of 2014 and 2013, concern interpretations of the most iconic moment of Irish history: the Easter Rising. The first of these is based on published statements of participants in the event and the second on the lived experiences of those in the contemporary Republic whose founding ideals have not been realized . The last two plays, of 2015 and 2016, widen the view to the history of the Irish in the diaspora: one retelling the history of emigration to England based on published research material; and the other tracing Roger Casement's experiences in the Amazon and his subsequent participation in the Easter Rising using extracts from his diaries and other writings. The plays included and discussed are: No Escape by Mary Raftery Guaranteed by Colin Murphy Of This Brave Time by Jimmy Murphy History by Grace Dyas My English Tongue, My Irish Heart by Martin Lynch The Two Deaths of Roger Casement by Domingos Nunez

Contemporary Irish Documentary Theatre

Eoin O'Sullivan

Up until the late sixties in Ireland, thousands of young children were sent to what were called industrial schools, financed by the Department of Education, and operated by various religious orders of the Catholic Church. Popular belief held that these schools were orphanages or detention centers, when in reality most of the children ended up at the schools because their parents were too poor to care for them. Mary Raftery's award-winning three-part TV series on the industrial schools, States of Fear, shocked Ireland when broadcast on RTE in 1999, prompting an unprecedented response in Ireland-hundreds of people phoned RTE, spoke on radio stations and wrote to newspapers to share their own memories of their local industrial schools. Pages of newsprint were devoted to the issues raised by the series, and on the 11th of May, the airdate of the final segment of the trilogy, the Taoiseach issued an historic apology on behalf of the state to the victims of child abuse within the system. Now, together with Dr. Eoin O'Sullivan, Raftery delves even further into this horrifying chapter of Irish life, revealing for the first time new information from official Department of Education files not accessible during the making of the documentaries. It contains much new material, including startling research showing a level of awareness of child sexual abuse going back over sixty years, particularly within the Christian Brothers. The dissection of these official records, detailing sexual abuse, starvation, physical abuse, and neglect, together with extensive testimony from those who grew up in industrial schools convey both the extraordinary levels of cruelty and suffering experienced by these children, and their tremendous courage and resilience in surviving the often savage

The Inside Story of Ireland's Industrial Schools

Suffer the Little Children

Mary Raftery

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