St George's Channel (Welsh: Sianel San Siôr, Irish Muir Bhreatan) is a channel connecting the Irish Sea to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the southwest. Historically, the name encompassed all the waters between Ireland in the west, and Wales and the West Country in the east; thus the Bristol Channel opened into Saint George's Channel. The name is now usually applied only to the waters near the narrowest part of the channel, between Carnsore Point in Wexford and Saint David's Head in Pembrokeshire. The sea to the north is now simply considered the South Irish Sea; the sea to the south is considered part of the Celtic Sea. However, it remains common in Ireland to talk about a cross-channel trip, cross-channel soccer, etc., where "cross-channel" means "to/from Great Britain".
The River Shannon (Irish: Sionainn altenatively Sionna), Ireland's longest river, divides the West of Ireland (mostly the province of Connacht) from the east and south (Leinster and most of Munster). The river has been an important waterway since antiquity. First mapped by Ptolemy, the river is 386 km (240 mi) long, and thus it exceeds the length of all other rivers in Ireland. The river flows generally south from the Shannon Pot in County Cavan before turning west and emptying into the Atlantic Ocean through the 113 km (70 mi) long Shannon Estuary. Limerick city stands watch at the point where the river water meets the sea water of the estuary. Only east of Limerick is the river no longer affected by the tides.
The Fleadh Cheoil (lit. Festival of Music in English) is an Irish music competition run by Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann (CCÉ).
There are various stages to the competition. In England there are regionals, then nationals and then qualifications for the All-Ireland and in Ireland there are counties, provinces then the All-Ireland. One can compete in just about any instrument and there are various age categories. It is considered very competitive.
The first national festival of Irish traditional music was held in Mullingar in 1951. At its inaugural meeting in September 1951, CCÉ came up with the title of Fleadh Cheoil, aiming to make this a great national festival.
The Hunt Museum is a museum in the city of Limerick, Ireland. Holding a personal collection donated by the Hunt family, it was originally situated in the University of Limerick, before being moved to its present location. It can now be visited in the old custom house, an historic 18th century building by the River Shannon. Limerick's bustling quays began at this area of the river, recently made home to a marina.
The Hunt Museum holds about 2000 different artifacts, both from Ireland and abroad. The oldest pieces are from stone-age Ireland and ancient Egypt. The collection includes the Antrim Cross (a 9th century bronze and enamel cross), a small sketch by Picasso and a bronze horse from a design by Leonardo da Vinci for a large monument.
Created by an act of parliament in 1958, the Folk Museum was created to preserve a rural way of life in danger of disappearing forever due to increasing urbanisation and industrialisation in Northern Ireland. The site the museum occupies was formally the Estate of Sir Robert Kennedy, and was acquired in 1961, with the museum opening to the public for the first time three years later in 1964. In 1967, the Folk Museum merged with the Belfast Transport Museum, to form the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum. The museum's Rail and Road Galleries were opened in 1993 to much acclaim, and subsequently expanded in 1996.
The Ulster Museum is located in the Botanical Gardens in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and has around 8,000 square metres of public display space, featuring material from the collections of Fine and Applied Art, Archaeology, Ethnography, Treasures from the Spanish Armada, Local History, Numismatics, Industrial Archaeology, Botany, Zoology and Geology. The Museum was founded as the Belfast Natural History Society in 1821 and began exhibiting in 1833. It has included an art gallery since 1890. In 1929, the museum moved to its present location, the new building was designed by James Cumming Wynne. A major extension by Francis Pym was begun in 1962 and opened in 1964. It is in the Brutalist Style,praised by David Evans for the “almost barbaric power of its great cubic projections and cantilevers brooding over the conifers of the botanic gardens like a mastodon”.
Since the 1940s the Ulster Museum has built up very good collection of art by modern Irish, and particularly Northern Irish, artists.
In 1998, the Ulster Museum, which includes Armagh County Museum, merged with the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum and the Ulster-American Folk Park to form the National Museums and Galleries of Northern Ireland, MAGNI.
In July 2005, a £12m refurbishment of the museum was announced, with funding coming from the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure. In October 2006 the museum closed its doors until 2009, to allow for the refurbishment work.
The Ulster American Folk Park is an open-air museum in Castletown, just outside Omagh, in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland.
Central to the Folk Park is the boyhood home of Thomas Mellon, judge and founder of the Pittsburgh banking dynasty. Contained within the park are some thirty buildings — some recreations and some are painstakingly restored originals. Some of the two-up, two-downSandy Row, off the Donegall Road in Belfast, and other buildings have been transported from elsewhere in the province. houses in one of the reconstructed streets were transported in their entirety from
Elsewhere in the site there are agricultural displays and animals, and visitors are offered samples of various local, food such as smoked salmon and bread, freshly-cooked in the cottages they pass through.
The park is open throughout the year, excluding some public holidays.
The Point Theatre (originally dubbed The Point Depot, and often referred to simply as The Point) is a concert and events venue in Dublin, Ireland. It is located on the North Wall Quay of the River Liffey, amongst the Dublin Docklands. It is one of Ireland's largest indoor concert arenas, having a seating capacity of up to 8,500. As such it is larger than any other fully-equipped indoor venue in the country and now it can be described as one of Ireland's premier music venues.
The Point has been noted for its flexible seating configurations - over the years it has not only served as a venue for many different varieties of music concerts, but has also been turned into an ice rink, a boxing arena, a conference hall, an exhibition centre, a wrestling ring, a theatre, an opera house and a three ring circus.
The Helix is a building on the Dublin City University campus between Glasnevin and Whitehall on Dublin's Northside, originally planned to be called the Aula Maxima. Recently completed, in 2002, it is described as a "performance space" and holds concerts, university conferring ceremonies and national arts shows. In fact the Helix has three areas for live performances:
- The Mahony Hall (1260 seats),
- The Theatre (450 seats), and
- The Space (150 seats).
The Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland is a learned society based in Ireland, whose aims are 'to preserve, examine and illustrate all ancient monuments and memorials of the arts, manners and customs of the past, as connected with the antiquities, language, literature and history of Ireland'. Founded in 1849, it has a countrywide membership from all four provinces of Ireland. The affairs of the Society are conducted by the President, Officers and Council, whose services are entirely voluntary. Anyone subscribing to the aims of the Society, subject to approval by Council, may be elected to membership. Current and past members have included historians, archaeologists and linguists, but the Society firmly believes in the importance of encouraging an informed general public, and many members are non-professionals.
After the Society's move to Dublin in the 1890s, it came eventually to occupy the premises on Merrion Square, where it is still to be found. It now fulfills its original aims through the maintenance of its library and provision of lectures and excursions, as well as the continued publication of its Journal, which is one of the most respected publications in the field of Irish archaeology and history.
The Royal Irish Academy (RIA) is one of Ireland's premier learned societies and cultural institutions. Founded in 1785, its current and former members include artists, scientists and writers from around Ireland. Membership is by election, usually after the proposed member has published a noted scientific or scholarly work. Those elected are permitted to use the letters MRIA after their names. In addition, international scholars can be selected as honorary members if they have contributed to academia and have a connection to Ireland.
Since 1951 the academy has been located at 19, Dawson Street in the center of Dublin. Built in c.1750, the building has some fine decorative plasterwork and a handsome meeting room designed in 1854 by Fredrick Villiers Clarendon and now used for conferences, exhibitions and public talks. The academy library holds some important early Irish manuscripts and, in fact, the academy once held many Celtic treasures now in the National Museum of Ireland.
Its aim was to promote the development of arts, agriculture, industry and science in Ireland. The society acquired its current premises at Ballsbridge in 1879, and since then has increased from the original fifteen to forty acres (60,000 to 160,000 m²). The premises consist of a number of exhibition halls, a stadium, meeting rooms, bars, restaurants. The RDS (Royal Dublin Showground) is a major centre for exhibitions, concerts and other cultural events. The Royal prefix was adopted in 1820 when George IV became patron of the Society. The RDS hosts the Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition each January. The first solely Society-run Horse Show was held in 1868 and was one of the earliest "leaping" competitions ever held. Over time it has become a high profile International show jumping competition, national showing competition and major entertainment event in Ireland. In 1982 the RDS hosted the Show Jumping World Championships and incorporated it into the Dublin Horse Show of that year. From September 1990 until April 1996, football club Shamrock Rovers played their home games at the RDS stadium. On the 19th of February 1992 the Republic of Ireland played Wales there. In recent years, the stadium has also been used for the Heineken Cup games of the Leinster Rugby team.
The National Museum of Ireland (NMI), or Ard-Mhúsaem na hÉireann in Irish, is the national museum in Ireland. It has three centres in Dublin and one in County Mayo, with a strong emphasis on Irish art, culture and natural history.
The Archaeology and History section on Kildare Street has displays on prehistoric Ireland, including early work in gold, church treasures, the Viking and medieval periods, and more modern times. There are special displays of items from Egypt, Cyprus and the Roman world, and special exhibitions are regularly mounted.
This section includes such pieces as the Ardagh Chalice and the Tara Brooch, as well as the Broighter Hoard and the Derrynaflan Hoard, all famous examples of early medieval metalwork in Ireland, as well as prehistoric ornaments from the Bronze Age in Ireland. Many of these pieces were found in the nineteenth century by peasants or agricultural labourers, when population expansion led to cultivation of land which had not been touched since the middle ages. Indeed, only for the intervention of George Petrie of the Royal Irish Academy, and likeminded individuals from the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, most of the metalwork would have been melted down for the intrinsic value of its materials, as did frequently happen despite their efforts. Contemporary Irish are more tuned to their heritage, as can be seen in the example of the Irish Bog Psalter, which was discovered and reported by an alert machine operator in July 2006.
The National Gallery of Ireland (Irish: Ghailearaí Náisiúnta na hÉireann) houses the Irish national collection of Irish and European art. It is located in the centre of Dublin with one entrance on Merrion Square, beside Leinster House, and another on Clare Street. It was founded in 1854 and opened its doors ten years later. The Gallery has an extensive, representative collection of Irish painting and is also notable for its Italian Baroque and Dutch masters painting. The current director of the gallery is Raymond Keaveney. Entry to the gallery is free.
Although its facade is quite impressive, the venue's acoustics have been criticized. It is also unsuited for large-scale opera stagings. Calls for a purpose-built venue are consequently made from time to time. In 2005 it was announced that UCD is to relocate all of its faculties to Belfield in the short term, allowing the NCH to develop a major expansion plan on the entire site, bringing it in line with its peers in Europe and the rest of the world.
The State Paper Office (founded 1702) was originally based in Dublin Castle. The Public Record Office of Ireland was established under the Public Records (Ireland) Act, 1867 to acquire administrative, court and probate records over twenty years old. During the Civil War, the Four Courts, where it was based, was seized and the repository building destroyed by fire in June 1922, along with most of the records, some dating back to the thirteenth century.
The Irish Museum of Modern Art (Irish: Músaem Nua-Ealaíne na hÉireann), also known as IMMA, opened in May 1991 and is Ireland's leading national institution exhibiting and collecting modern and contemporary art. It is located in the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, a 17th-century building near Heuston Station to the west of Dublin's city centre. The current director is Enrique Juncosa, he was previously Deputy Director of the Reina Sofia National Museum Arts Centre (MNCARS) in Madrid. Juncosa is only the second director of the IMMA, the first was Declan McGonagle.
The Museum concentrates on acquiring contemporary art by living artist and buys only from primary markets: studios and galleries. It also accepts donations of art dating from 1940 onwards and through some generous gifts has made progress towards a representative collection of art of that period. Given its youth the museum has a reasonable collection and it mounts selective exhibitions of its own collection. It concentrates on hosting exhibitions and has a very active exhibition programme as demonstrated by the example of the exhibition programme for 2003 given below. It is hoped that in the future the Museum will be provided with more space, allowing its current activity to be complimented by an encyclopedic permanent display of contemporary art, something Ireland lacks.
While the society has been successful in achieving its goals in some cases, it has encountered criticism from the Irish public in others. This has especially been the case when objecting to the height of proposed buildings in the city of Dublin.
A recent case also saw the IGS denigrated for objecting to the proposed provision of wheelchair access at the front of a Georgian house on Merrion Square when such a provision already existed for the building to the rear via a dark lane.
The society was founded in 1958 by Desmond Guinness. The current president (October 1991) is Desmond FitzGerald, who often styles himself the Knight of Glin.
Previously called the "Municipal Gallery of Modern Art", it has been renamed the "Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane", but is still often simply known as "The Hugh Lane". The gallery was founded by Hugh Lane on Harcourt Street in 1908, and is the first known public gallery of modern art in the world.
The Gate Theatre, in Dublin, was founded in 1928 by Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammoir, initially using the Abbey Theatre's Peacock studio theatre space to stage important works by European and American dramatists. The theatre later moved to 1 Cavendish Row (part of the Rotunda hospital complex) where leading Irish Architect Michael Scott undertook the revisions necessary to the room to convert it into a theatre.
Edwards/McLiammoir Productions presented European plays in sharp contrast to the county kitchen fare available at the Abbey Theatre bringing the Irish Premieres of Ibsen and other such dramatists to the Irish public.
