Date & Time: Wednesday afternoon July 31st at 3pm.
Séan Ó Tuathaigh is an activist and the author of Outlanders – Stories of the Displaced, his first book. He wants to use this book to highlight the plight of those often anonymous people who make the dangerous journey from their war ravaged countries to seek new lives and homes and peace in other countries.
“Ask yourself what would you do to survive? Would you cross an ocean, would you cross an armed border, walk across a desert?” Séan asks those questions of people who did just that and has published their stories.
Seán Ó Tuathaigh
“Outlanders is a collection of refugee stories, compiled from some of the people who author met while working in the US. There are stories of old people and young, recently arrived and well established, originating from Laos, Burma (2), Afghanistan (2), South Africa, Somalia, Palestine, Bosnia and Kurdistan.
The first of its kind to explore the subject from a creative perspective, this book builds on the journalistic work available on the subject. The stories are presented in a style that immerses the reader into the experiences of the refugee, to see what they saw, smell what they smelt and feel what they felt.”
Listen to Séan and you will meet ordinary people thrust into extraordinary situations, you will hear the stories of Zarhawar, Saadia, Mar Mar, Chue Vang, Hawraz, Nolwandle, Bojana, Nasruddin, Tuqa, and Azhar. No longer statistics or objects of mistrust…..these ordinary human beings tell their stories in Outlanders and humanity needs to empathise with their fear, their hopes and their courage.
Séan’s book serves as a timely echo from the seanscéal of millions of our very own Irish ancestors who fled this country to begin new lives in other places. Young Mary Harris and her family did in Famine times!
Outlanders: book cover
Seán Ó Tuathaigh was born and raised in Sligo and is a graduate of the M.Phil in Creative Writing at TCD. Before that course, he taught English in Hanoi, Vietnam. After graduation, in 2016, he moved to the USA for 18 months, where he worked as a refugee biographer in a resettlement agency and following that he wrote Outlanders.Published by Mercier Press, copies of Outlanders: Stories of the Displaced will be available at the talk at the Cathedral Visitors Centre.
Mary Manning, one of the Dunnes Stores Strikers will speak at the Spirit of Mother Jones Summer School on Friday evening 3rd August at the Firkin Theatre in Shandon at 7.30.
Dunnes Stores strikers Karen Gearon and Mary Manning with the late Nimrod Sejake of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and ANC.
On July 19th 1984, Mary Manning went to work as usual on the cash registers at the Dunnes Stores, Henry Street branch in Dublin. Her union IDATU (Irish Distributive Administrative Trade Union, now Mandate Trade Union) led by Cork born John Mitchell had earlier instructed its union members not to handle South African products.
She describes what happened…
“My palms started sweating as I opened up my cash register. Everything after this happened very quickly. I spotted a middle-aged woman in the distance with two large yellow grapefruits in her basket. My heartbeat increased at the sight of them. I avoided eye-contact and popped my head down straight away. ‘Please don’t come to me, please go to any other till’ I thought to myself but the woman plonked her basket at my till, completely oblivious to the internal crisis unfolding within me.”
That morning, Ms. Manning refused to register the sale of those South African products. She was immediately suspended and another nine of her colleagues joined her on the picket line.
In her recent book with Sinéad O’Brien “Striking Back – the untold story of an Anti-ApartheidStriker”, published by Collins Press, Mary describes the long months during which she and her union colleagues spent on the picket lines, even as the strike began to generate worldwide publicity.
She describes the ups and downs of the protest and gives a vivid account of the dark days of the protest when the young Dublin women and their colleague Tommy Davis felt very alone. Mary tells of her growing personal commitment to the strike and her increasing political awareness and independence unfolds as the daily grind of the strike continued for almost three years.
However the spirits, morale and determination of the strikers remained high in spite of the failure of some fellow workers to support them, personal sacrifices in the midst of a recession and being let down by some of those who should have provided support. Yet as the national support for the strike and widespread opposition to apartheid grew, it led to people such as Seamus Heaney, Christy Moore, Sean McBride Donal Lunny, the incredible Nimrod Sejake and thousands of people joining the strikers on the picket line in Henry Street and other protests in Dublin and elsewhere around the country. The resolve of the strikers began to make international headlines.
Bishop Desmond Tutu
In July 1985, the strikers attempted to visit South Africa to meet Bishop Desmond Tutu, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, at his invitation, but they were arrested at Jan Smuts Airport, refused entry and banned from the country. On their eventual return to Dublin, the strikers were introduced to the world’s media as “the ten deadliest shop workers in the world” by their union official, the late Brendan Archbold. It proved to be a huge international PR disaster for the apartheid system and the South African government.
As a result of the support for the strike, by April 1987, the Irish government had banned the importation of South African products and later Mary and some of her colleagues finally returned to work. However as she and Karen Gearon were being treated within Dunnes Stores as the ringleaders of the strike she felt they were being singled out and all aspects of their work questioned and so finally Mary left the company. On the 5th November 1988, she emigrated to Australia, where she spent five years.
Less than six months after his release from prison after 27 years, on 2nd July 1990, Nelson Mandela arrived in Ireland and met the Dunnes Stores Strikers. He praised how the “ young shop workers on Henry Street in Dublin, who in 1984, refused to handle the fruits of apartheid, provided me with great hope during my years of imprisonment and inspiration to millions of South Africans that ordinary people, far away from the crucible of apartheid , cared for our freedom.” Mary was unable to afford the flight to come back from Australia to meet Nelson Mandela.
On 18th May 2015 a plaque was unveiled on Henry Street, Dublin which commemorates the actions of Mary Manning and her colleagues….. brave and inspiring actions which had a worldwide impact.
Mary Manning now (Photo courtesy of Collins PressP
The Dunnes Stores Strikers were Cathryn O’Reilly, Sandra Griffin, Alma Russell, Theresa Mooney, Vonnie Malone, Karen Gearon, Tommy Davis, Michelle Glavin, Liz Deasy and Mary Manning. Brendan Barron was suspended in October 1985 in Crumlin by Dunnes Stores for refusing to handle South African products.
Mary Manning accompanied by Sinéad O’Brien will tell the story of the historic Dunnes Stores Strike at the Firkin Theatre on Friday evening 3rd August. All are welcome.
Author and journalist Alannah Hopkin will present the story of a remarkable Cork woman Ethel Boole otherwise known as Ethel Lilian Voynich or E.L.V. at the Maldron Hotel on Thursday 30th July at 2pm.
Ethel Lilian Boole was born at Lichfield Cottage in Ballintemple, Cork on 11th May 1864 and baptised on 31st May at the nearby St Michael’s Church on Church Road. Just over six months later her father the renowned mathematician George Boole died in Lichfield on December 8th of that year. Her mother Mary Everest took her and her four sisters to London where she grew up, but came and went to Ireland. She lived for a time in Lancashire, England with her uncle Charles Boole who managed a coal mine.
In 1879, she spent a summer with her great uncle John Ryall (former Vice President of University College Cork) and developed an interest in the Italian political activist Giuseppe Mazzini from a book which she had read. She later studied music at the Berlin Hochschule fűr Musik.
Dimitri Shostakovich’s musical score for the Gadfly
Europe was in a ferment at the time and she became interested in the growing revolutionary movements in Russia. Lily spent two years traveling widely in Russia and witnessed the famine conditions of the peasants and workers. Deeply influenced by what she had seen she threw herself into the radical movements seeking to overthrow the Czar. She met up with Peter Kropotkin and Sergei Kravchinski (Stepniak) who had fled Russia where the later had assassinated Mezenter, the Tsarist Chief of Police.
Returning to London in 1889, along with Stepniak, she published a monthly magazine entitled Free Russia. Later she becoming active in the revolutionary socialist émigré milieu in London at the time, where she met Friedrich Engels, George Bernard Shaw, William Morris, Eleanor Marx, Edward Aveling and her own future husband Wilfred Michail Voynich who had earlier been imprisoned in the Warsaw Citadel. By an extraordinary coincidence, Voynich had actually seen Lily through the bars of his cell standing in the square outside on Easter Sunday 1887 during her trip to Warsaw.
Lily learned Russian with Stepniak and became a fluent speaker, she also had fluent Polish and worked as a translator in both languages. Her translation of Chopin’s letter from Polish remains the standard edition.
Deeply immersed in Russian politics, she returned clandestinely there in 1894. Stepniak died in 1895 in a train accident and she seems to have drifted away from politics, possibly disillusioned with the revolutionary movement.
It is claimed she had a brief and passionate love affair with Sydney Reilly (Sigmund Rosenblum) whose incredible life story is described in Ace of Spies, written by Robin Bruce Lockhart in 1967. Following her return from Florence to London she wrote her famous novel The Gadfly. The more existing adventures of the Gadfly seem however to be based on Stepniak’s autobiographical novel Andrei Kozhukhov.
Author Alannah Hopkin
The Gadfly tells the story of Arthur Burton and Gemma Warren and their exploits in revolutionary Italy. Named after an insect, the gadfly, which burrows under an animal’s skin and has a vicious bite, it was published to mixed reviews in New York in 1897. The book later became a publishing phenomenon in Russia and China with millions of copies being sold and translations into many languages. Widely read throughout Europe, its love interest, revolutionary setting, anti-clerical vein and espionage mystery thriller characteristics ensured its appeal. Even today, almost 120 years later it remains a somewhat fresh and vibrant if violent story.
Ethel wrote several other books and eventually joined her husband in New York in 1920. She lived quietly, teaching and composing music in New York after Wilfred died in 1930.
Ethel Boole in the 1950s.
She enjoyed some late fame when Pravda ran a story in the mid-50s about her presence in New York. She passed away there on the 27th July 1960 at the age of 96.
The simple headstone of Ethel’s father, George Boole in St. Michael’s church yard, Blackrock.
For further information see The Life and Work of George Boole, A Prelude to the Digital Age by Professor Desmond MacHale. Republished by Cork University Press 2014.
Alannah Hopkin will tell the story of Lily Boole “From Lily Boole to E. L. Voynich, the making of the author of The Gadfly” at the Maldron Hotel during this year’s Spirit of Mother Jones Festival.
Ms Hopkin has published two novels A Joke Goes a Long Way in the Country and The Out-Haul. Her non-fiction books include Eating Scenery: West Cork, the People & Place as well as Inside Cork. She is a tutor on Poetry Ireland’s, Writers in Schools Scheme, and has led writing workshops for adults up to MA level. She is currently working on a new novel set in West Cork, The Ballydevlin Hauntings.
On Monday January 5th 2026, Denis Staunton in the Irish Times reported from Beijing during a visit by Irish Taoiseach, Cork native Micheál Martin to China, that the President of China Xi Jinping had mentioned how the novel “The Gadfly” written by Cork born author Ethel Boole Voynich had sustained him and his family when they were exiled to rural China during the Cultural Revolution purges of the 60s.
In an extraordinary coincidence, Micheál Martin also announced that he had read the same book as a teenager and had been presented with a first edition of “The Gadfly” by an uncle of his and claimed that “it had also made a profound Impression on him”.
Set in revolutionary Italy in the early 19th century, “The Gadfly” with its violent story of anti-clericalism, its love affair between Emma and Arthur, its personal sacrifice for the sake of the revolution which includes the betrayal by Cardinal Montanelli of his son and hero of the novel Arthur Burton. The latter was tortured and executed as a result of the betrayal. The novel espoused revolutionary communist fervour, revenge and promoted ideas of the blood sacrifice for the sake of the cause.
The Gadfly has reached huge audiences in the Soviet Union and in China in the 130 years since first publication. While literary critics and activists are divided on the merits of the book, it is clear that it has been widely read elsewhere, if largely ignored in the city of the author’s birth. Indeed the author herself, although a rebel in her youth, has been virtually forgotten in the “Rebel City”.
Upwards of 10 million copies have been published (no one knows for sure as Lily Boole received no royalties up to the late 50s and then only a token payment from the Soviet Union), it most certainly makes her the largest published female author in this country.
Gadfly, an early book cover.
The Gadfly inhabits a revolutionary world of tiny secret societies such as the Knifers and Red Girdles, regular assassinations, violence, the prolonged drama of gruesome executions and violent death. It details iconic Catholic Church ceremonies and the “dead world of priests and idols”, and becomes meshed with passionate political activities, potential love affairs and human loss.
A further irony is that the main inspiration for the novel was the spymaster Sydney Reilly, a lover of Ethel whom she met in London and eloped with to Italy. As stated earlier, some argue that violent elements of the revolutionary life of Sergei Stepniak, radical Russian of Ukrainian descent and then a member of the Hampstead discussion groups were also included by Ethel in the character Arthur Burton.
The Gadfly hero, Arthur Burton is known to millions and a hero to many communists and revolutionaries. Even in Ireland during the War of Independence, the book was discovered in the prison cell of Liam Mellows after he was executed during the Irish Civil War.
Strangely, it appears that Sydney Reilly with whom Ethel had a brief romantic fling in Italy was apparently a fervent anti communist who operated as a British spy to seek to undermine the Russian Revolution and even plotted with others at one stage to kill Lenin. Various writers have suggested that Reilly may have been the original spy inspiration for James Bond. Did a British spy carry out the ultimate deception on communists through the Gadfly? Following an eventful life, Reilly died in 1925.
Voynich herself confirmed that Gemma, the book’s heroine, was based on the life of Charlotte Mary Martin, lover of Prince Peter Kropotkin. Charlotte Mary Martin became a founder and an editor of an Anarchist newspaper Freedom in London and a prominent member of the Fabian Society. She married Arthur Wilson, a stockbroker. Charlotte was active in London’s socialist and anarchist circles in Hampstead of the 1890s. Among those who attended the meetings were Wilfrid Voynich, Ethel Boole and Sergei Stepniak.
While the north London Fabians based at Hampstead and later at rural Wildwood on Hampstead Heath were mainly a socialist and anarchist discussion group, they attracted many emigres from Russia and elsewhere. Their world view of revolution embraced wider European, Russian and even American revolutionary activism.
Following the Haymarket Incident in Chicago in May 1886 in which a number of policemen died following a bomb explosion at an anarchist meeting, the London Fabians sent a plea to release the four innocent anarchists afterwards hanged. This incident also had a huge impact on a young union activist Mary Jones, which she later recounted in her autobiography of Mother Jones.
The following year, Ethel Boole, also by now under the strong influence of Stepniak and hearing the stories of revolutionary events elsewhere, set off for St Petersburg at the age of twenty three, a journey which would change the course of her young life and lead to the publication of ‘The Gadfly’, a decade later.
The renewed publicity from the recent discussions in China where the leaders of China and Ireland discovered that they had read the same revolutionary novel, while they were teenagers, has once again resurrected interest in the amazing life of Ethel Lilian Boole. The fifth and youngest daughter of Mary Everest and George Boole, born on the Blackrock Road, close to the ancient village of Ballintemple in Cork City continues to inspire curiosity in unusual places and settings.
Modern day Ballintemple Village, close to where Lily Boole, author of the Gadfly was born in 1864.
This recent story from China was covered extensively in Ireland and elsewhere by The Examiner, Evening Echo, Irish Times and many other social media outlets.
The editorial on the Irish Times January 10th 2026 entitled “The forgotten best seller” concluded,
” Literary fame is unpredictable and fickle, but this week’s encounter in Beijing offers a timely reminder that Ireland’s cultural influence has sometimes reached further than we know“
Alannah Hopkin during a talk on Sunday Miscellany on RTE Radio (Irish Radio) on 5 October, 2014 explained how the Chinese-born writer Yiyun Li, winner of the inaugural winner of the Frank O’Connor Award, attended the Cork International Short Story Festival. Yiyun Li, while in Cork insisted on visiting the birthplace of Lily Boole in Ballintemple to pay her respects. Ethel Boole’s personal items and correspondence are held in the UCC Library archives in Cork.
While many criticise the Gadfly as a literary novel it certainly has had many advocates such as Bertrand Russell, D H Lawrence, Frederick Engels, Danny Morrison and George Bernard Shaw. Xi Jinping and Micheál Martin are just the latest to publicly admit that they have been attracted by the extraordinary lure of the Gadfly.
The five daughters of George Boole and Mary Everest, Mary Ellen Boole (1856-1908), Margaret Boole (1858-1935), Alicia Boole (1860-1940) Lucy Boole (1862-1904) and Ethel (Lily) Boole (1864-1960) and their amazing achievements were detailed in “The Booles & the Hintons- two dynasties that helped shape the modern world” by Gerry Kennedy, published by the Atrium, an imprint of the Cork University Press 2016. Mr Kennedy is related to the Boole family and his publication with its photographs and accounts of the Booles is essential reading to appreciate the contribution of these five Cork women to society.
newly published – Prof. Jim Green’s book on the West Virginia Coal miners and their struggles
“The Devil is here in these Hills”
From before the dawn of the twentieth century until the arrival of the New Deal, one of the most protracted and deadly labor struggles in American history was waged in West Virginia. On one side were powerful corporations whose millions bought mercenary armed guards and political influence. On the other side were fifty thousand mine workers, the nation’s largest labor union, and the legendary “miners’ angel,” Mother Jones. The fight for unionization and civil rights sparked a political crisis that verged on civil war, stretching from the creeks and hollows to the courts and the U.S. Senate. In The Devil Is Here in These Hills, historian James Green tells the story of West Virginia and coal like never before.
When rail arrived in Appalachia in the 1870s, the country’s wealthiest industrialists pushed fast into the wilderness, digging mines and building company towns where they wielded vast control over everyday life—from hiring minsters to issuing their own money. The state’s high-quality coal drove America’s expansion and industrialization, but for the tens of thousands of miners, incl8uding boys as young as ten, the mining life showed the bitter irony of West Virginia’s motto, “Mountaineers Are Always Free.” Attempts to unionize were met with stiff resistance. Fundamental rights were bent, then broken, and the violence evolved from guerrilla warfare to open armed conflicts. Eventually thousands of miners marched to an explosive showdown on the slopes of Blair Mountain.
Prof. James Green
Green’s fascinating book traces this decades-long story that has been all but lost to American memory. Based on extensive research and told in vibrant detail, The Devil Is Here in These Hills is the definitive book on an essential chapter in the history of American freedom.
James Green was one of the main speakers at the Spirit of Mother Jones Festival 2014.
Professor Elliott J. Gorn – will speak at Cork event about the life and legacy of Mother Jones
As we come nearer to the date for the Cork Mother Jones Festival we would like to take an opportunity to introduce you to some of our guest contributors, starting with Professor Elliot J. Gorn.
Elliott Gorn is Professor of American Civilisation and History at Brown University. He specializes in the social and cultural history of the United States in the 19th and 20th century.
His books include Mother Jones, the Most Dangerous Woman in America, Dillinger’s Wild Ride, Muhammad Ali, the People’s Champ and a Brief History of American Sports.
Elliot Gorn’s book, “Mother Jones, the Most Dangerous Woman in America”
He has contributed to numerous articles and publications and has received several awards and research fellowships for his work.
Elliott has very kindly agreed to come along to the very first Mother Jones festival in Shandon and will speak at the Firkin Crane at 3pm on Wednesday 1st August 2012, along with Marat Moore. Elliott’s biography of Mother Jones, identifies her Cork connections, details the actual contributions of Mother Jones to the labour movement in all their complexity. This classic book gives a comprehensive account of the very complex, fascinating and authentic human being, that was Mother Jones.
He concludes about Mother Jones:-
“A common woman whose early years yielded toil and tragedy and whose old age promised nothing but obscurity. She was expected to go silently through life, for she was a mere worker in a country that worshipped success, an immigrant in a nativist land, a woman in a male dominated society and an elderly person in a nation that cherished youth. Hers was the voice that Americans were not supposed to hear. That was her final legacy- out of nothing, but courage, passion, and commitment; she created a unique voice, a prophetic voice, and raised it in the cause of renewing America’s democratic promise.”
