Madeline O’ Neill - Heritage Experts | Heritage in Schools

Madeline O’ Neill

Madeline O Neill2
Subject(s):
History, Civic, Social, Political Education (including CSPE and Politics and Society), Social Personal and Health Education (SPHE)
Counties catered for:
Cavan, Donegal, Dublin, Galway, Leitrim, Limerick, Mayo, Monaghan, Sligo
Classes catered for:
All year groups (post-primary)

My workshops bring original archival research into the classroom through biographical case studies and personal family history. Students examine real primary sources, letters, photographs, government documents, military records, newspaper reports, to explore how major historical events shaped individual lives and whose stories heritage chooses to remember.

A case study connecting nationalist politics, imperial military service and a family history as sympathetic landlords who saved their tenants during the famine years. This case study intersects with the Junior Cycle and leaving Cert. history curriculum, covering land and class, the revolutionary period and the new Irish state. Students can view these events through the lens of a lesser-known figure who was, nevertheless, active in a number of national, military and transnational contexts. Students will be encouraged to think critically about the effects that larger historical processes have on individual lives, the conflicted loyalties and covert dissent of people who found themselves at odds with their cultural and historical contexts. This workshop also affirms the value of biography in history as a means to examine the impact of 1916, the 1918 election, the War of Independence, state building, and the foundation of the Free State in the experience of a landed gentry figure who fought in the second Anglo-Boer War and acted later De Valera’s Irish envoy to the South African government. This study reveals some lesser known aspects of the path to independence.

This workshop looks at the experience of those who usually escape a mention in historical archives. By using my own 2011 visit to an Australian Museum as a pedagogical device, I explore family history as my parents made their way as Scots and Irish immigrants to 1950s Adelaide, Australia. Working as domestic servants in Government House and Carrick Hill, the Jacobean styled mansion of an Adelaide elite, donated to the South Australian state in the 1980s, their story illuminates issues of economic migration, colonial and commonwealth connections, class and religion. It also provides an opportunity to study memory and identity within family history. Students will learn how to examine their own family history and consequently their own identity within this framework. Oral history, primary resources, memoir and family archives can all be utilised in a personal way to encourage students to reflect on their family’s place in history. It affirms the significance of every life experience and its intersection with the political, cultural, social and national processes it is embedded in. It would be possible to arrange visits to Country Houses that have restored or preserved the areas occupied by domestic servants in the past.

This is a case study based on the personal account of a localised clash in 1812 Alicante between an Irish Catholic merchant and a British military commander. Occupied by Spanish and English military during the peninsular wars, Alicante was preoccupied with issues of army billeting, economic crisis, and ideological conflict. These themes are studied through the actions of a successful Irish merchant from a newly landed family in Mayo. His conflict with an officer who would become honoured after Waterloo, provides an opportunity to examine an underexplored Irish immigrant experience in a location where the Irish were privileged due to their Catholic status and often called upon to intercede for British merchants. Religious tension between the occupying British army and the political tensions between monarchists and constitutionalists make up the themes that intersect in this case study. Introducing students to a less known narrative in the history of the Irish abroad, this topic looks at the Irish merchants in Spain against the backdrop of Napoleonic Europe. Students will be encouraged to look at the reliability of personal testimony and to explore a family history over time

Additional Information

  • Post-Primary school visits
  • Provides practical/hands-on activities

Contact Details

Mobile:
086 887 1611
Email:
madeline.oneill@gmail.com