A gathering of some former Vita Cortex workers was held at the recent Spirit of Mother Jones Summer School under moderator Anne Piggott, member of the Cork Mother Jones Committee.
Left to Right: Greg Marshall, Jim Power, Sean Kelleher, Denis Ryan, Tom Ronan, Darren O’Keefe (supporter), Helen Crowley. Also present were Connie Griffin and Henry O’Reilly.
The discussion which took place among the former workers was both engaging and inspiring and often very humorous as they discussed events during the 161 day sit-in at the Vita Cortex factory, which manufactured foam for the furniture industry on the Kinsale Road in Cork.
Just before Christmas 2012 on the 16th December, while planning for their Christmas Party, the workers were told the shocking news that the factory was being closed and they were being made redundant and would not receive their pay.
Instead of meekly accepting their lot, the twenty three workers began a sit-in at the factory which continued for 161 day until May 2013 when after negotiations under the Labour Relations Commission between the union and the owners they were paid their full outstanding redundancy payments by the owners of the company.
Anne Taylor, President of the Cork Council of Trade Unions speaking at the Festival. Greg Marshall looks on.
The sit-in which captured the imagination of the country and gained massive support from the local people of Ballyphehane and Cork as well as messages of support from all over Ireland and the wider world, finally ended on 24th May. They appeared on national television and spoke on all the major radio stations as well as obtaining extensive newspaper coverage. Some of their supporters were highly skilled on social media and the story of the Vita Cortex workers basically went viral.
Huge marches of support organised by the Trade Union movement were held in Cork City and attracted great support from the ordinary people of Cork. The Vita Cortex workers were invited to Aras an Uachtarain to meet President Michael D. Higgins, where they had a fantastic day out.
The workers gathered at the Summer School to tell their inspiring story of the one hundred and sixty one day sit-in at the factory during the Spirit Of Mother Jones Festival. They received a standing ovation from the large crowd present. Mother Jones would have been proud of these brave workers.
Events at the Spirit of Mother Jones Festival and Summer School for Saturday 25th July 2026. All events at the Maldron Hotel, Shandon except where stated.
9:30 a.m. Peter Foynes: A Heritage stroll. Meet at the Maldron
11:00 a.m. “Remembering the Asbestos War in County Cork 1975-1980” Speakers: Gertie O’Driscoll, Tom MacSweeney, Derry Chambers & John Twomey.
1:15 p.m. Memories of departed friends.
2:15 p.m. Naomi Masheti. Cork Migrant Centre. “Activism through Story Telling: Raising the Voices of Migrants’
3:30 p.m. John Donoghue. “The Battle of Irish Town: Mother Jones, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Catholic Working Class Resistance 1919-1923.”
5:00 p.m. Celebrating the Vita Cortex Struggle. Speakers: Ex-Workers and Supporters tell their story
6:30 p.m. Plaque events with singer and songwriter Martin Leahy. Singers and musicians welcome. Followed by a traditional whiskey toast to Mother Jones. Plaque is located on John Redmond Street.
The Cork Mother Jones Committee is delighted to announce the recipient of the 2026 Spirit of Mother Jones Award.
It has been awarded to Irish trade union leader Phil Ní Sheaghdha, general secretary of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) and currently President of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU).
Phil NÍ Sheaghdha.
The award will be presented to Ms. Ní Sheaghdha at the Maldron Hotel Shandon on Thursday afternoon 23rd July at 3.30 pm by James Nolan on behalf of the Cork Mother Jones Committee after her contribution at the festival on the topic
“Democratic Trade Unions matter because they strengthen Democracy”
James Nolan spokesperson for the Cork Mother Jones Committee stated
“The Cork Mother Jones Committee is pleased to present the 2026 Spirit of Mother Jones Award to Ms Phil Ní Sheaghdha.
Phil has served as the INMO’s Director of Industrial Relations from 2008 to 2018 before being appointed General Secretary in 2018. In 2019, she led the nurses first national strike in almost 20 years, securing significant improvements in pay and staffing for nurses and midwives.
Her steadfast defence of her members who perform their duties magnificently in spite of often working in difficult conditions in overcrowded hospitals and her regular exposures of the serious shortcomings in the Irish Health system has ensured that it remains in the public narrative and forces various governments to reform and invest in the service. Phil Ní Sheaghdha follows in the footsteps of Mother Jones as a formidable trade union leader who “fights for the living.”
The citation for Phil Ní Sheaghdha from the Cork Mother Jones Committee reads as follows.
The Spirit of Mother Jones Award 2026 will be presented to Phil Ni Sheaghdha • For Phil’s active role and leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic as nurses became front-line workers and continued to report for work in spite of personal dangers and all the inadequacies of the health service, including inadequate protection.
• For her consistent highlighting of the deficiencies in the hospitals throughout the Health Service Executive (HSE) system in Ireland and for exposing the sometimes appalling conditions and delays being experienced by patients on waiting lists and on trolleys
• For repeatedly drawing public attention to the day-to-day conditions under which nurses have to work due to the existing state of the health service and for drawing attention to solutions to improve the system.
• For her long standing commitment to nursing, to a decent health service for all, to the rights and safety of workers and for her fearless advocacy for her members at all times.
The Cork Mother Jones Committee congratulates Phil Ní Sheaghdha on this award.
The Kalyna Ukrainian Choir with the then Lord Mayor of Cork, Cllr. Fergal Dennehy.
We are very proud of the fact that this choir has appeared in every festival since 2023 and has become a firm favourite across Cork in recent years. It comprises women and men who are now living in Cork following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing attacks on their country. In spite of the ongoing war and the personal toll on members the Choir represents Ukraine with pride and distinction. Winners of the Lord Mayors top community prize at Cork City Hall in 2024, this choir perform traditional songs from the Ukraine and their wonderful renderings of the Irish National Anthem “Amhrán Na bhFiann” and “You Raised Me Up” are inspiring.
Kalyna Ukrainian Community Choir should not be missed and their harmonious performances against a background of the war on their people and homeland provide an example of hope for the human spirit to overcome adversity. We look forward to welcoming them back to perform for the fourth time at the opening of the Spirit of Mother Jones Festival, on Thursday 23rd July at 1:00 pm at the Maldron Hotel. All are welcome.
Svitlava Deikun & Victoria Tymoshehuk with the Lord Mayor of Cork, Cllr Dan Boyle.
The Cork Singers’ Club.
Thursday 23rd July 2026 at 9.30 p.m.
Established in 1993, the Cork Singers’ Club has uniquely featured in every Mother Jones festival since the opening night on 31st July 2012. Eagerly awaited each year, the Cork Singers’ Club will present an evening of songs. It has ensured that the tradition of singing remains alive in Cork, no instruments are allowed. For locals and visitors this is an opportunity to hear songs being sung in a pure manner in front of an attentive audience and an opportunity to sing a song themselves. Club members also gather each Sunday night at An Spailpín Fánach to hone their remarkable art.
Cork Singers Club on Tour. Photo courtesy of William Hammond.
Under the Fear An Tí Jim Walsh, the Cork Singers’ Club represents the unique singing heritage of the people of Cork. Their efforts at this festival to sing songs influenced by Mother Jones is deeply appreciated and songs of trade unions, of working class people and social justice, the well springs of folk and traditional songs are celebrated. Come along and sing your song!
Friday 24th July at 1:00 p.m.
Club Ceoil Ballyphehane Ballad Group
Club Ceoil Ballyphehane, a volunteer-run, non-profit traditional Irish music organization in Cork. Founded in 2008 by Maurice Dineen, the club welcomes participants of all ages and abilities, offering affordable classes on various instruments and group singing. The Club Ceoil Ballad Group consists of local singers and instrumentalists playing guitar, banjo, bodhrán, fiddle, and tin whistle.
Club Ceoil Ballyphehane
Notable highlights from the group include performing “The Hegartys of The Laurels” at Cork City Hall alongside composer John Murphy, as well as frequent performances for local charities like Feed Cork and community gatherings. Club Ceoil runs classes on a Monday night in Coláiste Éamann Rís and on a Tuesday evening in Presentation Secondary School, Ballyphehane. Their performance should not be missed and their first visit to the festival since 2019 is bound to be a memorable one.
Friday 24th July at 9.30 p.m.
John Nyhan and friendsand introducing David King and friends
What can one say about the legendary John Nyhan…? John is a highly versatile musician and singer who has been associated with the Spirit of Mother Jones festival since its beginning.
His contributions to the folk revival, country music and bluegrass music in Ireland has been immense over the years and he is a familiar sight at festivals in the north Cork area. He attends the Willie Clancy Summer School each year. His knowledge of music and those who play and sing is almost encyclopedic. His renderings of ‘Universal Soldier’ andWhere HaveAll the Flowers Gone’ are without parallel in the genre of anti-war songs and John sings them with a rare passion. He is very much at home with folk and protest songs from the 60s and 70s and as this year’s theme is ‘Songs of Struggle, Songs of Hope’ John will be at his best.
John Nyhan. Photo: Claire Stack.
John will introduce a relatively new band from the south side of the city led by American exile David King and his Irish Friends present an uplifting collection of songs of labour and wider struggles, inspired by the likes of Pete Seeger, Luke Kelly, Joan Baez and Woody Guthrie. This largely acoustic set includes some recent works and a fresh take on familiar standards. And maybe a few jigs, and a cowboy song or two. Perfect for celebrating the life and legacy of Mother Jones., the band will perform a wide selection of the songs of protest and struggle. A great evening’s music is assured.
Dave King and Friends.
Saturday 25th July at 6.30p.m. Approx. (At the Mother Jones Plaque on John Redmond Street)
Martin Leahy will again perform his song about homelessness “Everyone Should Have a Home” at the Plaque. He has performed this each Thursday outside Dail Eireann for the past two years and recently declared that he felt he had made his point. His dedication in travelling each week to perform outside the Dail highlighted the great failure of many recent Irish governments. Last year we were honoured that Martin released his new song called ‘Mother Jones’ at the festival. It is available online.
Martin Leahy at the plaque with the late Joan Goggin.
His song “Where We Lay our Bodies Down” remains a fitting tribute to the late Ann Lovett while “Snowflakes“relates to the online attacks on people. Martin sings and plays in the tradition of Woody Guthrie and like woody abhors injustice. He writes his songs with that theme central to words and music. Martin has been very active in exposing the genocide in Gaza and regularly sings also on Saturdays at the Palestinian marches in Cork City.
This year we miss Jimmy Crowley from the Spirit of Mother Jones Festival line up. Jimmy was delighted to play at the Spirit of Mother Jones festival in the early days and has played at all of the Festivals to date. He made the festival Friday lunchtime concert all his own as he returned year after year to play his favourite songs of Cork before appreciative audiences. Many eagerly looked forward to Jimmy’s appearances, year after year.
This year he is recovering back home in Cobh from a very serious illness. On behalf of everyone at the festival, we wish him well and hope to see himself and Eve Telford back at the festival again.
Jimmy Crowley with his book, Songs from the Beautiful City.
Tom Boland lectures in Sociology at University College Cork. He has two principal research interests:
Tom Boland. Lecturer in Sociology in University College Cork.
Firstly, the sociology of unemployment and welfare policy. For over a decade, he has conducted interviews with unemployed people on their experience of redundancy, being out of work and job seeking. Simultaneously, he conducts national and comparative research on welfare policy, particularly around activation, that is, the mixture of supports and pressure exerted by the state – and private companies – on unemployed citizens. Reflecting this research, he has produced three books, each with Dr. Ray Griffin (SETU); The Sociology of Unemployment (2015), The Reformation of Welfare (2021) and Workocracy (Forthcoming). He has given evidence to multiple parliamentary committees and featured frequently in newspapers and radio.
Secondly, the sociology of culture and critique. Since becoming involved with Occupy and anti-Austerity protests during the Great Financial Crash, he has been researching how critique is used in public disputes. At present, he is researching how critique is ‘co-opted’ by the right-wing; that is, how rhetorical moves, like ‘revealing the truth’ or ‘unmasking ideology’ are borrowed from the left and used for anti-left purposes. This research is the basis of a forthcoming book Taking Criticism, which builds on a more theoretical precursor The Spectacle of Critique (2019).
Tom will speak on the topic of ‘This Land is Our Land; Confronting Extremism and Reclaiming Democracy.’ as a member of a panel discussion with Gema Kloppe- Santamaria and John Donoghue.
Moderator. John Barimo
Friday evening 24th july at 7.30 pm at the Maldron Hotel, Shandon.
afilm by Frameworks Films and the Cork Mother Jones Committee.
Release Date: July 2014.
Runtime: 52 min.
Ger Omah
8:00 AM (39 minutes ago)
to me
“Mother Jones and her Children”
afilm by Frameworks Films and the Cork Mother Jones Committee.
Release Date: July 2014.
Runtime: 52 min.
Mother Jones and her children by Frameworks Films. 2014.
Mother Jones and Her Children tells the story of Mary Harris (1837 – 1930) from Cork who went on to become “the most dangerous woman in America”.
Starting with her early years in Cork, this documentary goes on to detail her life in America following the famine where she trained as a teacher and a seamstress, her marriage to a union man George Jones and the birth of her four children in Memphis.
It tells of the tragedies which befell her. The loss of her four children and her husband to Yellow Fever in 1867 would have broken most people, yet as a 30 year old widow on her own, she kept on working and living. Even after her clothes business was burned in the Chicago Fire of 1871 she survived and began to immerse herself in the growing labour movement in America.
She joined the “Knights of Labour”, and became active in that organisation which preceded the growth of the actual trade union movement. Many Irish joined trade unions and became active in the trade union structures, their vast contribution to the story of labour and its positive impact on the conditions of working people and on the quality of their lives remains largely untold and unrecognised in Ireland.
Plaque by Mick Wilkins erected in Shandon in 2012 by the Cork Mother Jones Committee.
Mary Jones was unique in that she was one of the first female trade union organisers and her involvement in the struggles of the miners has become the stuff of Legend. She defended the rights of children and workers and this is detailed in the documentary. Her organisation of the March of the Mill Children in 1903 contributed to the eventual banning of child labour from the mines, mills and factories of America.
Mother Jones became a national figure, a woman who was fearless, but was feared in the gorgeous mahogany furnished boardrooms of America. After decades of activism, she died on 30th November 1930 at the age of 93 and is buried in Mt Olive Union Cemetery in Illinois.
Through interviews with leading experts on Mother Jones, we learn of her fearless and tireless campaign to organise workers at a time of severe labour strife and her international legacy today.
This documentary will be shown at the Maldron Hotel, Shandon on Thursday 23rd July 2026 at 11:00 am.
It will be followed by a presentation by Dr. Ed Lahiff on the life of Mother Jones as based on the book published by Professor Elliott J. Gorn in 2001 entitled Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman In America. There will be time for a discussion afterwards.
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.
A film by Garry Keane and Andrew McConnell. 90 mins long. Released 2019.
This powerful film shows a world which was seldom seen and which following the genocide does not exist now, it is a place of rubble. Gaza is a coastal strip along the Mediterranean which measures twenty five miles long by 6/7 miles wide. In 2019 it was home to nearly two million people.
Gaza
Following the attack by Hamas in October 2023, in which 1200 Israelis and foreign workers were killed, the subsequent relentless and brutal Israeli government attacks on Gazan civilians has claimed the lives of at least 75,000 of its children, women and men who have been killed amidst the silence from many politicians in Europe, who look the other way in spite of the objections of their own people and in spite of the Israeli attacks being described as genocide by the United Nations.
Directors, Keane and McConnell and their team have bequeathed the world a portrait of a unique place, everyday scenes with a vibrant community and people which has been largely obliterated. In spite of ongoing Israeli bombs landing in the busy streets, background images of Hamas and mass attacks on the border fences, the everyday “normal” lives of normal people continue to play out with their hopes and dreams. Their resilience, their humour, courage and compassion in attempting to survive the violence and do normal things has been captured for posterity in GAZA.
As one Gazan says “We simply want to live”.
The film allows Karma Khaial, a young 19 year old student, to tell us about her dreams of playing the cello and studying for a Masters in International Law in an uncertain world. Or Ahmed Abu Alqoraan who has a dream to own a big fishing boat and crew it with his many brothers and sisters to provide an income from his “catch” for his very large family. The reality he faced was the petty three mile fishing restriction imposed by the Israelis.
Gazan children.
GAZA allows the people to speak openly for themselves as they live day to day. By observing and listening to the mundane living of life, the viewer develops an empathy and appreciation for the decent people surviving in a land steeped in tragedy, bound by history and plagued by conflict over which they have no control. Yet one remembers the smiles, the banter, the brief everyday joys, the hopes and dream of the people and wonder how Karma and Ahmed and their neighbours, families and friends are today. This GAZA documentary remains as visual evidence of the genocide which is taking place.
GAZA will be shown on Friday evening 24th July at 5:00 pm.
Gema Kloppe-Santamaria is a Nicaraguan-born sociologist and historian whose work deals with questions of violence, gender, religion and the state in modern and contemporary Latin America.
She is currently a permanent Lecturer of Sociology at the University College Cork (UCC) and an Associate Research Professor of Latin American History at the George Washington University (GW).
Gema Kloppe-Santamaria
Prior to joining UCC and George Washington University, she was an Assistant Professor at Loyola University Chicago and at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). In 2017-2018, Gema was a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Gema holds a PhD in Sociology and Historical Studies from the New School for Social Research.
Her book In the Vortex of Violence: Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and the State in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (University of California Press, 2020) examines the uncharted history of lynching during the formative decades of the post-revolutionary period (1930-1960). Based on an array of previously untapped historical sources, the book contributes to globalize the history of lynching beyond the United States, while offering key insights into the cultural, historical, and political reasons behind the continuing presence of lynching in Latin America today.
Over the last decade, I have authored several specialized reports for the Wilson Center, the Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Center, the United Nations Development Program, and the International Peace Institute. I am also a collaborator and member of Noria Research’s Mexico & Central America Program.
Gema will contribute to a panel discussion entitled
“This Land is Our Land: Confronting Extremism and Reclaiming Democracy”
on Friday evening 24th July at 7.30 at the Maldron Hotel, Shandon.
8:00 AM (39 minutes ago)
