Events at the Spirit of Mother Jones Festival and Summer School on Friday 24th July 2026.

All events take place today at the Maldron Hotel, Shandon.

10:00 a.m. The Big Meeting. A documentary about the annual Durham Miners’ Gala, the largest trade union and community gathering in the UK. Directed by Daniel Draper.

11:30 a.m. Bernardo Guanche Hernandez, Ambassador of the Republic of Cuba to Ireland. Life in Cuba

1: 00 p.m. Club Ceoil Ballyphehane Ballad Group.

2:15 p.m. Grace O’ Sullivan. “Taking Action for the Planet: Life on the High Seas”. In memory of Fernando Pereira (1950-1985)


3:45 p.m. Tadhg Hickey: Writer, film maker, comedian and political activist.

5: 00 p.m. GAZA (2019):

A film by Garry Keane and Andrew McConnell.
Portrait of a people and a place prior to the Genocide.

7:30 p.m. “This Land is Our Land: Confronting Extremism and Reclaiming Democracy”
Panel discussion: speakers,
John Donoghue, Associate Professor of History, Loyola University, Chicago
Gema Kloppe-Santamaria, Lecturer, School of Society, Politics and Ethics, UCC.
Tom Boland, Lecturer in Sociology in UCC.
Moderator: John Barimo.

9:30 p.m. John Nyhan and Friends
David King and Friends: Songs of Struggle, Songs of Hope.

The Battle of Irish Town: Mother Jones, the Ku Klux Klan and Catholic Working Class Resistance 1919-1923.

Professor John Donoghue of Loyola University, Chicago will speak on the above topic on Saturday 25th July at 3:30 pm.

John Donoghue.

John Donoghue is an Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago. His earlier work focused on English colonialism in early modern Ireland and the Atlantic World and resulted in the publication of three books, “Fire under the Ashes”: An Atlantic History of the English Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2013); Building the Atlantic Empires: Unfree Labor and Imperial States in the Political Economy of Capitalism, 1500-1914 (Brill, 2016) [co-edited with Evelyn Jennings]; and The History of Rum (Audible Books, 2021). He has won numerous grants, awards and fellowships for his teaching and research and has lectured throughout Europe, Latin America, and the United States.

He is working on a new book entitled, American Insurrections: An Unruly History of White Christian Nationalism, 1600-2021. His talk for the Mother Jones Fest entitled, “The Battle of Irish Town: Mother Jones, the Ku Klux Klan, and Catholic Working-Class Resistance, 1919-1923,” is drawn from his new book project. An antifascist activist, he lives in Pittsburgh and Chicago with his wife Laura and is the father of two daughters, Meredith and Norah, who are now studying for their B.A. degrees at Loyola University Chicago.

All are welcome to attend the presentation and discussion.