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Dear KDHS members and friends

Kilrush and District Historical Society has organised two free events as part of National Heritage Week 2017.

In Kilbaha on Saturday 19 August, starting at 2pm at the Five Pilots memorial, which stands on the site of the Kilbaha Coast-guard boathouse, there will be a re-enactment of the Fenian rising which took place at the boathouse on Shrove Tuesday 1867, 150 years ago.  This will be followed by a walking tour of associated sites in the Kilbaha area.  The latest weather forecast is for "a good day on Saturday, with some good sunny spells", very different from the weather at the time of the rising in 1867 and on the actual anniversary in March!

Of the five Kilbaha Fenians Thomas McCarthy Fennell was transported to Australia, while the leader John Delohery and others escaped to America with the help of local priest Fr Patrick White.  The re-enactment of the attack and escape will be performed by Rob Hopkins' Full Moon Theatre Co. with the help of the Kilkee Currach Club.

On Frances Street in Kilrush on Tuesday 22 August at 7:30pm, film scholar Dr. Harvey O'Brien, of Moyne, Kilrush and University College Dublin, will unveil a plaque on the site of the Mars Cinema.  He will then deliver a lecture on the history of the cinema in the Teach Ceoil at 8pm.

The Mars Cinema closed its doors in 1991. The interior then fell into a state of decay as nature began to claim it, in stark contrast to the lively 'cinema paradiso' that it was when Dr. O'Brien spent much of his childhood there developing his love of film in the 1970s and 1980s.

The history of the Mars cinema was the subject of Dr. O'Brien's 1994 MA Thesis at UCD, where he now teaches Film Studies in the School of English, Drama and Film.  He is the author of Action Movies: The Cinema of Striking Back (Columbia University Press, 2012), The Real Ireland:
The Evolution of Ireland in Documentary Film (Manchester, 2004) and numerous other publications.

We return to our normal last-Tuesday-of-the-month schedule on 26 September, when our secretary Paul O'Brien will be the lecturer.
Instead of the topic originally advertised, he will talk about a Kilrush man who made a name for himself in Australia: 'The grand old man of the Australian Parliament': The Hon. John Meagher (1836-1920), M.L.C., K.C S.G

--
Paddy Waldron
PRO, KDHS.