A new website focusing on the Irish experience in Gallipoli hopes to bring the story of the Irish Division’s oft-overlooked contribution to the fore.
Irish in Gallipoli will aim to document, explain and analyse the Irish experience by drawing on a rich collection of resources, personal stories, images and more.
From the Irish in Gallipoli Press Release:
“The fighting in Gallipoli between April 1915 and January 1916 is estimated to have cost over 130,000 lives on all sides, including 4,000 Irishmen fighting in Irish regiments, as well as in other British regiments and those from the various empire nations. While well remembered in the national stories of Australia, New Zealand and Turkey especially, the Irish role in the Gallipoli campaign was rarely recalled.
“Gallipoli, and the Irish losses there had a powerful effect on Irish attitudes to the War and, after the tumultuous events of Easter 1916 and the years following, the Irish national narrative was one that forgot the Irish who had died in Gallipoli or, as Canon Charles O’Neill summed up when he penned The Foggy Dew, ‘twas better to die neath an Irish sky than at Sulva or Sud-El-Bar’.
“The aim of this website, alongside other projects, exhibitions and performances around the country is to shine a light on the Irish experience of Gallipoli. Put simply, what happened there and what are the stories of those who served and in many cases died?
“The site features:
– A series of guides explaining the background to the campaign and the Irish involvement.
– A daily news tracker detailing events on the peninsula as they happened.
– Daily eyewitness accounts from 8 Irish people who took part in the campaign.
– Daily reports from the regimental diaries of the 4 Irish regiments that fought.
– A daily death notice of an Irishman who died at Gallipoli.
– A series of films, radio broadcasts and podcasts made by ourselves or RTE which focus on different aspects of the campaign.
– A series of galleries containing over 500 images from Gallipoli in 1915.
– Education packs for use across the various age groups in schools.”
The Irish in Gallipoli website is part of a larger Decade of Centenaries programme in Ireland. The main Century Ireland website, another collaboration between RTÉ and Boston College, launched in Mat 2013 and will run for the duration of the centenary decade.
Century Ireland is a realtime historic newspaper, providing day to day updates, news and events accompanied by video and audios clips, and image galleries.
Visit the Irish in Gallipoli website, launched today.
For more information on Century Ireland, visit their website. Or keep up to date on their Facebook or Twitter pages.
Read the Centenary News article on the Irish Government’s plans for the Decade of Centenaries here.
Source: Century Ireland
Images: Century Ireland
Posted by: Éadaoin Hegarty, Centenary News