'The Irish at the Somme and Ypres: Piet Chielens in conversation with Dermot Bolger'

As part of the 2016 Decade of Centenaries Public Engagement Programme, novelist, playwright and poet, Dermot Bolger, will be Writer in Residence at the National Museum of Ireland - Decorative Arts and History. The residency, which is a collaborative project between the National Museum of Ireland and Poetry Ireland,will extend from March to August 2016 and will take inspiration from the Museum’s Easter Week Collections.Expanding on the themes and object histories that form the core of theProclaiming a Republicexhibition,Other Voicesaims to reach out to a wide range of audiences. In doing this we invite you to reflect on and explore the narratives of 1916 one hundred years on. The programme will be comprised of four distinct strands: a schools workshop programme; a local community workshop programme, an Online Mentoring Clinic and the ‘In-conversation with Dermot Bolger’ series of talks.More information on the entire programme and on theProclaiming a Republicexhibition is avaliable is avaliable atwww.museum.ieandwww.poetryireland.ieContact Moira Cardiff, Poetry Ireland +353 1 678 9815 or Eimir O'Brien, National Museum of Ireland +353 1 8816 515 with any queries.

National Museum of Ireland in partnership with Poetry Ireland

Collins Barracks was the starting point of a journey made by numerous young Irishmen who joined the British Army during World War One and marched out of its gates to be confronted by the slaughter at the Battle of the Somme or by the nightmare conditions during the long series of battles fought for control of Ypres.
Piet Chielens was born, and lived for the first fifty-three years of his life in Reningelst, in West-Flanders (Belgium), in the area of the infamous Ypres Salient, one of the major battlefields of the First World War. In his home village he grew up with the cemeteries and stories of that war. Since 1996 he has been co-director of the award winning In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres (Ieper), where he is director of exhibitions and public programming. From 1992 to 2007 he was artistic director of Peace Concerts Passchendaele. He instigated the construction of a monument to mark the spot where the Irish poet Francis Ledwidge was killed by a shell in 1917: a monument jointly unveiled in 1998 by the poet Dermot Bolger and the poet’s nephew, Joseph Ledwidge.
This unique public conversation reunites Piet Chielens and Dermot Bolger in front of a mixed Flemish and Irish audience as they discuss the journeys of those men which started in Collins Barracks and ended at the Somme or in the mud of Ypres and how they men are remembered today, both in the land they left and in the lands where they are now buried. Part of Chielens’ work with the In Flanders Fields Museum is to try and identify the bodies of anonymous soldiers from all nationalities that are still unearthed when construction work occurs around Ieper: stark reminders of a war that continues to resonate a century on.