The Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Catherine Martin T.D., today announced a new initiative under the Creative Imagination Strand of the Decade of Centenaries Programme 2012-2023– ‘Poetry as Commemoration’. 

The project is led by the UCD Library’s Irish Poetry Reading Archive and supported by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, with a funding allocation of up to €370,000 over the remainder of the Decade of Centenaries Programme.

The Irish Poetry Reading Archive will work in partnership with Poetry Ireland and will collaborate with a diverse range of poets, institutions, groups, and individuals across the island of Ireland to deliver innovative and imaginative outputs. Collaborators will include the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the Local Government Management Agency, county archivists, arts officers, heritage officers, public libraries, schools, universities, museums, and arts organisations, such as the Museum of Literature Ireland.

Ten new poems will be commissioned, in English and Irish, on topics, themes and events relating to the War of Independence and the Civil War, documented by these primary sources. The commissioned poems will be recorded and preserved in the Irish Poetry Reading Archive, and made freely available to everyone.