A national commemorative event has been held in Dublin by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) and the Health and Safety Authority (HSA) to mark Workers’ Memorial Day, an international day of remembrance for those who have been killed or seriously injured in work-related incidents.
In Ireland, 481 people were killed in such incidents over a 10-year period from 2012 to 2021, and so far seven people have died in incidents at work this year.
Workers’ Memorial Day, also known as International Workers’ Memorial Day or International Commemoration Day for Dead and Injured, takes place annually around the world on April 28, an international day of remembrance and action for workers killed, disabled, injured, or made unwell by their work. In Canada, it is commemorated as the National Day of Mourning.
Workers’ Memorial Day is an opportunity to highlight the preventable nature of most workplace incidents and ill health and to promote campaigns and union organisation in the fight for improvements in workplace safety. The slogan for the day is Remember the dead – Fight for the living.
Although April 28 is used as the focal point for remembrance and a day of international solidarity, campaigning and other related activities continue throughout the year right around the world.
ROTUNDA RINK MEMORIAL AT PARNELL SQUARE NEAR THE GATE THEATRE
Google Maps describes this as “1916 Site Of Rotund Rink” but on the copper plaque the date is 1913.
Unfortunately there is a lot of lens flare my photographs of this memorial because I used a very wide-angle lens and the sunlight was somewhat overpowering.
Oglaigh na hÉireann was founded in the Rotunda Rink and the neighbouring garden on 25th November 1913. The Rotunda Rink, was a temporary building in the Rotunda Gardens capable of holding 4,000.
25 November – The pro-Home Rule Irish Volunteers are formed at a meeting attended by 4,000 men in Dublin’s Rotunda Rink.
On 19th November 1913, James Larkin and James Connolly established the Irish Citizen Army as a force to protect workers from the excesses of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. It had a membership of about 350, the majority being members of Unions.
The Irish Volunteers, Óglaigh na hÉireann, was founded on 25th November 1913 at a public meeting held in the Rotunda Rink in Dublin. It emerged in response to an article, ‘The North Began’ written by Eoin MacNeill in the Gaelic League paper ‘An Claidheamh Soluis’. The Volunteers included members of the Gaelic League, Ancient Order of Hibernians and Sinn Féin, and, secretly, the IRB and its ranks numbered up to 100,000 at one point.
At the time of WW1 the Irish Volunteers broke into two distinct bodies. The National Volunteers, under the direction of John Redmond, went to fight in the Great War; the Irish Volunteers, under the direction of men such as Patrick Pearse and Eoin McNeill, stayed in Ireland and went on to join forces with The Irish Citizens Army in the 1916 Uprising.
ABBEY PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OR FINDLATER’S CHURCH AS SEEN FROM THE GARDEN OF REMEMBRANCE
Abbey Presbyterian Church is a church located at Parnell Square, Dublin. Designed by architect Andrew Heiton of Perth, Scotland, it is a decorated Gothic building, with a spire 180 feet (54.9 m) high. The church was erected in 1864 with funding from Alexander Findlater, a Dublin merchant, and is known colloquially as “Findlater’s church”.
One of the first preachers was John Hall (1829–1898).
Alexander Findlater, the founder of the business in Dublin, was born in Glasgow, on 9 March 1797, the second son of John Findlater, Supervisor of Excise at Greenock. In Dublin, the Findlaters prospered. By 1906, the company had expanded into groceries, tea and provisions, with 14 shops. They built Findlater’s Church on Parnell Square, as well as the Todd Burns department store on Mary Street. Their Mountjoy Brewery, established in 1852, was Dublin’s second-largest exporter of stout by 1866. They also operated hotels in Howth and Bray.
THE CHILDREN OF LIR AT THE GARDEN OF REMEMBRANCE PARNELL SQUARE DUBLIN
The Children of Lir is a legend from Irish mythology. It is a tale from the post-Christianisation period that mixes magical elements such as druidic wands and spells with a Christian message of faith bringing freedom from suffering.
Oisín Kelly was born as Austin Kelly in Dublin, the son of William Kelly, principal of the James Street National School, and his wife, Elizabeth (née McLean). He studied languages at Trinity College, Dublin. Until he became an artist in residence at the Kilkenny Design Centre in 1966, he worked as a teacher of Art, English, Irish and French from 1943 to 1964 at St Columba’s College, Dublin. He initially attended night class at the National College of Art and Design and studied briefly in 1948–1949 under Henry Moore.
He originally concentrated on small wood carvings and his early commissions were mostly for Roman Catholic churches. He became well known after he was commissioned to do a sculpture, The Children of Lir (1964), for Dublin’s Garden of Remembrance, opened in 1966 on the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising. More public commissions followed, including the statue of James Larkin on Dublin’s O’Connell Street.
He figures in five lines of Seamus Heaney’s second “Glanmore Sonnet”:
“‘These things are not secrets but mysteries’,/Oisin Kelly told me years ago/In Belfast, hankering after stone/That connived with the chisel, as if the grain/Remembered what the mallet tapped to know.”
It was somewhat depressing to see the place empty of people, expect for a park official, but by the same token I would not have visited if there had been more than a few visitors.
The iPhone 12 Pro Max very much underexposed some images today, I don’t know why, some of the images may appear a bit odd.
The Garden of Remembrance is a very popular memorial garden in Dublin and it is dedicated to the memory of “all those who gave their lives in the cause of Irish Freedom”. It is located in the northern fifth of the former Rotunda Gardens in Parnell Square, a Georgian square at the northern end of O’Connell Street.
The Garden was designed by Dáithí Hanly. It is in the form of a sunken cruciform water-feature. Its focal point is a statue of the Children of Lir by Oisín Kelly, symbolising rebirth and resurrection, added in 1971, cast in the Ferdinando Marinelli Artistic Foundry of Florence, Italy.
In 1976, a contest was held to find a poem which could express the appreciation and inspiration of this struggle for freedom. The winner was Dublin born author Liam Mac Uistín, whose poem “We Saw a Vision”, an aisling style poem, is written in Irish, French, and English on the stone wall of the monument. The aisling form was used in eighteenth-century poems longing for an end to Ireland’s miserable condition.
“We Saw A Vision”
In the darkness of despair we saw a vision,
We lit the light of hope and it was not extinguished.
In the desert of discouragement we saw a vision.
We planted the tree of valour and it blossomed.
In the winter of bondage we saw a vision.
We melted the snow of lethargy and the river of resurrection flowed from it.
We sent our vision aswim like a swan on the river. The vision became a reality.
Winter became summer. Bondage became freedom and this we left to you as your inheritance.
O generations of freedom remember us, the generations of the vision.[1]
Saoirse (freedom in the Irish language) in the aisling in the Garden of Remembrance. In Irish the poem reads:
“An Aisling”
I ndorchacht an éadóchais rinneadh aisling dúinn.
Lasamar solas an dóchais agus níor múchadh é.
I bhfásach an lagmhisnigh rinneadh aisling dúinn.
Chuireamar crann na crógachta agus tháinig bláth air.
I ngeimhreadh na daoirse rinneadh aisling dúinn.
Mheileamar sneachta na táimhe agus rith abhainn na hathbheochana as.
Chuireamar ár n-aisling ag snámh mar eala ar an abhainn. Rinneadh fírinne den aisling.
Rinneadh samhradh den gheimhreadh. Rinneadh saoirse den daoirse agus d’fhágamar agaibhse mar oidhreacht í.
A ghlúnta na saoirse cuimhnígí orainne, glúnta na haislinge.
In 2004, it was suggested that as part of the redesign of the square the Garden of Remembrance itself might be redesigned. This led to the construction of a new entrance on the garden’s northern side in 2007.
Queen Elizabeth II laid a wreath in the Garden of Remembrance during her state visit in May 2011, a gesture that was much praised in the Irish media, and which was also attended, upon invitation, by the widow and the daughter of the garden’s designer Dáithí Hanly.
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