Dublin today.-truth and reconciliation

I was down in Dublin today at a conference about truth and reconciliation from a feminist perspective, it was excellent really excellent a number of the speakers were totally world class. A funny thing happened on arrival at Connolly station there were a group of girls down from the north on a school trip, we were waiting on the LUAS trying to figure out how to get from A to B when we got on the tram in the doors the writing is all in Irish, totally confused I tried to work out where I was going, I eventually found the legend in English , just to over hear one of the girls say " do you know any Irish" to which the other one said" no I'm not a catholic, oops did I say that" and all the girls giggled................

I retold the story at the conference to a women and she stopped dead in silence, later on she came up to me and said she had told loads of people because she was quite shocked I had said it but I said but it's normal if you go to a Protestant school you don't get taught Irish that just how it is in the North. Until anyone now knows otherwise...................


Dawn Pervis was speaking about her concept of truth, she broke down crying at different points in her talk and of particular poinence was her memory of going to visit her friend who's mother had been shot dead in the local UDA club...............................but really was the truth. IN the book lost lives it read -acidential killing and the man was fined £50 but what was the truth???

I had a great day at the hannas house conferance it was held in the Guiness hop store, interesting to have a conferance inside a pint of Guiness, free pint included.

Hannas house is have a summer school at the end of August and It would be well worth visiting it what I really liked about the audiance was it was intergenerational, lots of women from different backgrounds and different expereinces of feminism sharing a space to talk about interesting things. Wonderful. I think the conclusions were that it was only the beginning of the discussion. Strong