March Activity

Monday March 13 at 19:30 — Irish Heritage Quebec will hold an activity in McMahon Hall, 1145 De Salaberry, Quebec City.Members and friends are invited. Refreshments will be served and parking stubs for Îlot St-Patrick will be validated. All members who have renewed for 2017 will be eligible to win a 2017 calendar published by the Société historique de Québec. 

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MARY AUGUSTA WILSON

Mary Wilson’s travels to Québec took years and covered a wide territory ranging from Limerick across the broad Atlantic and through Chicago and Vero Beach.  War in Afghanistan, Green/Orange riots in Ireland, racial conflicts in the USA – she was close to all of these events and more. Her descendant, Wilson Price, tells her story with the aid of old photographs, documents, public records and the odd history book.  The presentation covers Mary Wilson’s quiet life, some would say luxury, in Ireland, immigration to the United States, new world discrimination against the Irish, a family alone on a deserted island and the move north to a new life

Wilson Price graduated from St Patrick’s High School in 1959.  St. Pat’s gave him the knowledge and work habits needed to obtain a B.ScA. in Engineering Physics at Université Laval as well as MSc and PhD degrees in industrial engineering at the University of Birmingham, England.

February Activity

Monday February 13 at 19:30 — Brad Kent will give a presentation entitled Sean O’Faolain, the Irish Public Intellectual, and European Culture. Sean O’Faolain remains one of the most contentious figures in modern Irish history. Despite having been a bomb-maker and propagandist for the IRA, a Commonwealth fellow at Harvard University and an internationally respected short story writer, novelist and biographer, his reputation has come to be defined by his role as the leading public intellectual and polemicist of the post-independence period. This lecture will introduce people to this fascinating and sometimes paradoxical figure, with a particular focus on his attempts to ensure that Ireland, at the time dominated by an isolationist ethos, recognized its historical links to European culture, a timely consideration in the wake of Brexit and populist movements against the EU.

Brad Kent is associate professor of British and Irish literatures at Université Laval. In 2013-14 he was visiting professor at Trinity College Dublin. Most recently, he has published George Bernard Shaw in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2015), The Selected Essays of Sean O’Faolain (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016), and a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre (Oxford University Press, 2016). He is currently working on an eight-volume series of the writings of Bernard Shaw for Oxford’s World Classics.  Click here is a link to a review on Brad Kent’s  anthology of O’Faolain’s essays.