Tag Archives: human rights

Human Rights Under Threat: The Arts Respond

October 14, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm IST

Venue: Pearse Street Library Conference Centre

Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann is delighted to host this event in partnership with Smashing Times, International Centre for the Arts and Equality for the annual Dublin International Arts and Human Rights festival. The event is supported by Dublin UNESCO City of Literature, in association with Dublin City Council.

George Szirtes, award-winning Hungarian writer primarily in the field of poetry, translation and memoir, will be interviewed by Mary Moynihan, writer, director, theatre and filmmaker and Artistic Director of Smashing Times International Centre for the Arts and Equality. He will discuss migration, human rights and freedom of expression, and the role of poetry in these challenging times. He will also give a short reading from his work. Csilla Toldy, also Hungarian and also an award winning poet, novelist, translator and film-maker will join the discussion and read from her work.

Tickets are for free but booking is essential here.

Speaker Biographies:

George Szirtes was born in Hungary and emigrated to England with his parents — her mother a survivor of concentration and labor camps—after the 1956 Budapest uprising.

Szirtes studied painting at Harrow School of Art and Leeds College of Art and Design. At Leeds he studied with Martin Bell, who encouraged Szirtes as he began to develop his poetic themes: an engaging mix of British individualism and European fluency in myth, fairy tale, and legend. Szirtes’s attention to shape and sound, cultivated through his background in visual art and his bilingual upbringing, quickly led to his successful embrace of formal verse. In an essay in Poetry magazine defending form, Szirtes argues that “rhyme can be unexpected salvation, the paper nurse that somehow, against all the odds, helps us stick the world together while all the time drawing attention to its own fabricated nature.”

His first book, The Slant Door (1979), won the Faber Memorial Prize. Bridge Passages (1991) was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize. Reel (2004) won the T.S. Eliot Prize, and his New and Collected Poems was published by Bloodaxe in 2008.

Szirtes did not return to Hungary until 1984, when he visited on the first of several Arts Council travelling scholarships. He has since translated, edited, and anthologized numerous collections of Hungarian poetry. For his translation work Szirtes has won several awards, including the Déry Prize for Imre Madach’s The Tragedy of Man (1989) and the European Poetry Translation Prize for Zsuzsa Rakovsky’s New Life (1994). His own work has been translated into numerous languages and widely anthologised, including in Penguin’s British Poetry Since 1945.

He is the author of Exercise of Power (2001), a critical study of the artist Ana Maria Pacheco. He co-edited, with Penelope Lively, New Writing 10 (2001). Szirtes has written extensively for radio and is the author of more than a dozen plays, musicals, opera libretti, and oratorios.

Szirtes lives in England with his wife, the painter Clarissa Upchurch, with whom he ran the Starwheel Press. They collaborated on Budapest: Image, Poem, Film (2006). He is a member of the Advisory Panel of the British Center for Literary Translation, and is on the Advisory Board of the Poetry Book Society. He has been a member of the Royal Society of Literature since 1982.  www.georgeszirtes.blogspot.com


Csilla Toldy is a writer and translator from Hungary, living in Rostrevor, Co Down. Her publications include various literary magazines in the UK and Ireland, as well as three poetry pamphlets: Red Roots – Orange Sky (2013), The Emigrant Womans Tale (2015) and Vertical Montage (2018, Lapwing), and the short story collection, Angel Fur and other stories (Stupor Mundi, 2019). Her novel Bed Table Door, long listed for the Bath Novel award, and winner of the Desmond Elliot Residency explores the idea of political and personal freedom against the backdrop of the Cold War and Thatcher’s England. (Wrecking Ball Press, 2023). Csilla creates film poems as a visual artist. Her award-winning work has been screened at international festivals. In 2020 she was commissioned by the Executive Office of Northern Ireland to create a public artwork, a film poem for Holocaust Memorial Day. Csilla is a Creative Writing tutor with the Open University and a mentor with the Irish Writer’s Centre.

Her film scripts won the Katapult Prize and the Special Prize of the Motion Pictures Association of America as the Hungarian entry to the Hartley-Merrill Prize and they were placed as Drama (Foreign Film) Genre Finalist in the APMFF Screenplay Competition 2015 in New Jersey. The Bloom Mystery her documentary based on Joyce’s Ulysses was screened internationally. Her narrative non-fiction was short listed for the Kingston University Biography Prize and the Fish Memoir Prize. Csilla’s first novel, Bed Table Door  was long listed for the Bath Novel Award and is recently with The Wrecking Ball Press.

In 2023 she was the recipient of the Desmond Elliot Residency awarded by the National Centre for Writing.

 www.csillatoldy.co.uk

Mary Moynihan, Writer, Director, Theatre and Film-Maker and Artistic Director, Smashing Times International Centre for the Arts and Equality

Mary Moynihan, (she/her), MA, is an award-winning writer, director, theatre and film-maker, an interdisciplinary artist and one of Ireland’s most innovative arts and human rights artists creating work to promote the arts, human rights, climate justice, gender equality, diversity and peace. 

‘Nothing Bad Has Ever Happened: Stories and Poems from Ukraine’: Reading and discussion with Victoria Amelina (Ukraine).

Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann, supported by Dublin UNESCO City of Literature, presents the Ukrainian writer and Human Rights activist, Victoria Amelina. Victoria has accepted our invitation to present two literary events in Dublin in October 2022, as part of the Dublin Arts and Human Rights Festival. Victoria Amelina occasionally writes in English and her powerful essay on genocide and cultural memory, “Nothing Bad Has Ever Happened: a Tale of Two Genocides” was republished in the Irish Times earlier this year. “Homo Oblivious” was republished in the Dublin Review of Books in July.

On Thursday 20th October at 19:00, at the Smock Alley Theatre, Ms. Amelina, who is based in Kyiv, will discuss the role of artists and writers who chose to remain in Ukraine after the full-scale Russian invasion of February 24th of this year. She will also focus on the importance of preserving Ukrainian literature and culture, and will read from her own work. Her new project is entitled War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War.

Booking via the Smock Alley Theatre website: https://smockalley.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/873629957

Victoria Amelina also writes for children. Her second  Dublin Arts and Human Rights Festival event is for Ukrainian children aged 4-10 and is held (in Ukrainian) in Pearse Street Library on the 22nd October at 14:00.

During this event, she tells stories from a writer’s life and teaches the children to draw characters from her latest book, Ten Ways for an Excavator to Save the World (Ееесторії екскаватора Еки).

Booking via Pearse Street Library Link to DAHRF programme: https://smashingtimes.ie/festivals/dublin-arts-and-human-rights-festival-2022/

Urgent Need for Irish Constitutional Referendum on Blasphemy

Urgent Need for Irish Constitutional Referendum on Blasphemy

The Executive Committee of Irish PEN, the Irish Centre for PEN International, is campaigning for a constitutional referendum to be held on blasphemy in the Republic of Ireland by the end of 2011.

Why do we need a constitutional referendum?

Article 40.6.1.i of the Irish Constitution requires that blasphemy be banned and hence abolishing the offence requires a constitutional referendum.

Why is the move towards “defamation of religions” bad?

Human rights attach to individuals, not to states, organised groups or ideas. When governments seek to limit the rights of individuals to criticise, they are not seeking, as they claim, to protect faith or belief. Rather, they are seeking increased power over their citizens. Religions are capable of good and evil. To ensure that the good dominates, it is essential to maintain freedom of expression, ensuring writers are free to criticise them.

What’s the urgency?

The issue is of immediate importance, as it occurs against the backdrop of a sustained push by a number of nations within the UN to promulgate new international restrictions on speech considered defamatory to religions. PEN opposes such restrictions, believing that they do little to promote mutual respect and understanding and knowing from long experience that laws devised to guard institutions against defamation are frequently used to deny individuals the right to freedom of expression; indeed, several countries have jailed writers under blasphemy laws in clear violation of their right to freedom of expression. PEN’s efforts to prevent these new, rights-threatening restrictions have been gaining ground in recent years, and Ireland itself has voted against these resolutions at the United Nations.

Passing the Defamation Act 2009 has undercut these international efforts to ensure the protection of freedom of expression. Pakistan, which has been leading the coalition of 57 Islamic states that has been pressing to ban religious defamation internationally, has cited verbatim the Irish legislation to justify the group’s continuing efforts to expand blasphemy laws internationally. To its shame, Ireland is now being held up as a model for restricting freedom of expression internationally.

What needs to happen?

At a time when Ireland needs to restore its reputation in the world, Irish PEN calls upon the Government to include an amendment removing blasphemy from the Irish Constitution at the earliest opportunity and before the end of 2011.

Wouldn’t that be expensive?

No. The new Irish Government has already indicated that the long-awaited referendum on children may be held before the end of 2011. The amendment removing blasphemy from the Constitution could be run at the same time for no extra cost.

What do the legal people think?

In 1991 the Law Reform Commission said that there was “no place for the offence of blasphemous libel in a society which respects free speech”. In 1996 the Oireachtas Constitution Review Group said: “The retention of the present constitutional offence of blasphemy is not appropriate.” The Bar Council has noted that blasphemy and treason are the only crimes explicitly mentioned in the Constitution. In 2008, the Joint Committee on the Constitution said that “in a modern Constitution, blasphemy is not a phenomenon against which there should be an express constitutional prohibition”.

Why hasn’t it been removed yet?

Instead of removing it from the Constitution, the former Fianna Fail Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern introduced blasphemy as an amendment to the 2009 Defamation Bill. In March 2010, Mr Ahern’s press office indicated that there might be a constitutional referendum on the matter in the autumn of 2010. On 25 March 2010, Mr Ahern said that he had “clearly stated that I hoped that the matter could be addressed by referendum at a suitable opportunity in the near future”. He said a referendum as a “stand alone” amendment would involve “considerable expense” and was not of “immediate importance”. He concluded: “I remain of the view that on grounds of cost, a referendum on its own on blasphemy should not be held and that it should instead be run together with one or more other referendums.”

What’s in Ireland’s Defamation Act 2009?

Section 36 of the Act defines the new offence of “publication or utterance of blasphemous matter”. It concerns matter deemed “grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion” resulting in “outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion”. Those found guilty of the offence face a fine of up to €25,000. Moreover, courts are empowered to issue a warrant authorising the police to forcibly enter and search any suspected premises, including a dwelling, for copies of “blasphemous” statements. The new Act came into effect on 1 January 2010.

Now it is of immediate importance

Given the moves at the UN, it is now of immediate importance that the Irish Constitution be changed, with the amendment on blasphemy held, at no extra cost, in conjunction with the amendment on children mooted for later in 2011.

Irish PEN calls upon the new Government to restore our reputation for free speech without delay.