A new digital archive capturing the works of artists living along the Border from 1921 until today, including the songs of Big Tom and a photographic collection of Orange Order lodges, has been launched.
Known as Ireland’s Border Culture, the project includes 170 examples of literary, visual and musical culture and is the result of a collaboration between Trinity College Dublin and the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast.
Funded by the Government’s Shared Island project, the archive ranges from songs such as Back to Castleblayney by Big Tom & the Mainliners and Lisa O’Neill’s No Train to Cavan to Spike Milligan’s comic novel Puckoon and Rita Duffy’s united Ireland tea towel.
“Ireland’s Border is not just a political or constitutional division, it is a region of distinct creativity,” said co-lead of the project Eve Patten, professor of English and director of the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute.
‘It’s about women North and South learning about each other, learning about the grassroots issues in their communities’
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The project, she said, documents “the richness and variety of references to the Border and [helps us] understand partition’s effect on a unique kind of cultural productivity”.
The borderculture.net website includes extracts from writers such as poets Louis MacNeice, Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon and Eiléan ni Chuilleanáin, and novelists Pat McCabe, Jennifer Johnston, John McGahern and Michelle Gallon.
Besides country and Irish favourite Big Tom and the Mainliners, it includes music from Dundalk punk poet Jinx Lennon and the 1964 Clones Fleadh Cheoil.
