Guest Lecture: Éamonn Ó Ciardha (Visiting Professor, University of the Saarland), "Father Ted, the Irish Fawlty Towers: A Snapshot of a Rapidly Changing Society"

Father Ted, the 1990s award-winning, iconic, Irish-made comedy is an at once exaggerated but remarkably perceptive snapshot of a rapidly-changing society in which many of the Irish Republic’s long-standing institutions would rapidly collapse or be utterly transformed in the space of one decade. Quintessentially Irish, but also in the best tradition of British Comedy, Father Ted drew on some of Ireland’s finest actors and comedians for its dead-pan, dark humour and hangman’s wit to ruthlessly slay sacred cows, parody the Catholic Clergy, Irish politics, the media, and Irish society generally. However, this humour came with a sharp bite, which skirted clerical celibacy, the Catholic Church’s harrowing paedophile scandals, and the church’s ham-fisted attempts to deal with these, while attempting to transform and remain relevant. Of course, the speaker experienced this rapidly-changing Ireland from the vantage-points of a Catholic boarding-school and Cardinal Newman and James Joyce’s University College Dublin so, hopefully, he can inject a personal perspective into proceedings.

Éamonn Ó Ciardha is Reader in History and Irish at Ulster University. He has taught History, English and Irish at the University of Toronto, the Keough Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame, Trinity College Dublin, the University of the Saarland, the University of Vienna, Framingham State University MA and Ulster University. His research is primarily focused on Irish Jacobitism (Irish support for the exiled House of Stuart), the Irish outlaw, Irish military history, Irish popular politics and culture, language and literature and Irish book history. In 2002, Four Courts Press published Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685-1766. A Fatal Attachment (repr., 2004), a 500pp monograph based on his Cambridge PhD. Other outputs include (with Billy Kelly and Micheál Ó Siochrú) two Commemorative volumes of History Ireland (2007, 2009) to mark the 400th anniversary of the Flight of the Earls and the Plantation of Ulster; (with David Finnegan and Marie-Claire Peters), The Flight of the Earls: Imeacht na nIarlaí (Derry, 2010); (with Micheál Ó Siochrú), The plantation of Ulster: Ideology and practice (Manchester, 2012); (with Gabriela Vojvoda), The politics of identity in post-conflict states (Routledge, 2015 ); (with Patrick Duffy, Monaghan: History and Society (Dublin, 2017) and (with Frankie Sewell and Alan Titley) The Irish Book in Irish since 1567 (forthcoming, Oxford 2024). He is the Government of Ireland Visiting Professor of Irish Studies at the University of the Saarland, 2024-5.

Registration 

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Contact
Irish Studies Würzburg (ISWÜ)
Prof. Dr. Ina Bergmann & Prof. Dr. Maria Eisenmann
ina.bergmann@uni-wuerzburg.de,  maria.eisenmann@uni-wuerzburg.de