La Touche Legacy Seminar 2025 – 19th & 20th September

Mary Daly MRIA is professor emeritus of Irish history at University College Dublin. She has held teaching positions at Harvard and Boston College, and in 2014 became the first woman president of the Royal Irish Academy. Her many publications include Dublin, the Deposed Capital (1984), Women and Work in Ireland (1997) and The Slow Failure: Population Decline and Independent Ireland, 1920-1973 (2006). Her current project is a study of an Irish provincial town in the 1930s.Eamon Delaney

 

 

Eamon Delaney is an author and commentator. A former editor of Magill magazine, he is currently a columnist on The Times Irish edition. His publications include An Accidental Diplomat: my Years in the Irish Foreign Service (2001) and Breaking the Mould: a Story of Art and Ireland (2009). He is director of The Lion and the Shamrock project, which is focused on history in the community and adult education and offers talks, tours and research.

 

17.15pm: Dr. Sorcha O’Brien (Institute of Art, Design and Technology) ‘

Chairperson: Cllr. Erica Doyle 

Dr O’Brien’s research focusses on the critical analysis of design and technology history in Ireland. She curated the 2019-2020 ‘Kitchen Power’ exhibition in the National Museum of Ireland, which examined the impact on women of rural electrification. Her publications include  Powering the Nation: Images of the Shannon Scheme and the Electrification of Ireland (2017) and Kitchen Power: Women’s Experiences of Rural Electrification (forthcoming).

10am: Welcome by Councillor Melanie Corrigan, Cathaoirleach of Wicklow County Council

10.10 Dr. Cormac Moore –   ‘The 1974 Dublin / Monaghan Bombings’
Chairperson: Councillor Mark Barry

Cormac Moor,  resident of Greystones is an historian-in-residence with Dublin City Council and a columnist with the Irish News. His publications include The GAA v Douglas Hyde (2012), The Irish Soccer Split (2015), Birth of the Border (2019), and most recently The Irish Boundary Commission (2025) The Root of All Evil recently launched by An Taoiseach and The Irish Revolution: Laois (2025). He is currently chairperson of Greystones Archaeological and Historical Society.

10.45am – Coffee

11.00am Julie Parsons : ‘From Portland Road to the Pacific Ocean; the life and tragic death of Dr. Andy Parsons’.                Chairperson: Councillor Graham Richmond

Julie Parsons was a radio and television producer with RTE before becoming a best-selling author. Her first novel, Mary, Mary, appeared in 1998. A critical and commercial success, it was translated into seventeen languages, and was followed by a number of other successful novels, among them The Guilty Heart, The Hourglass and The Therapy House, which won the Crime Fiction Book of the Year at the 2017 Irish Book Awards. Julie has ancestral links to Greystones – the Parsons family lived at ‘Dromore’ on Portland Road,  and her father, Dr Andy Parsons (1914-1955), grew up in the town, and she has recently been delving into his story and the history of her Parsons family.