1 Man, 100,000 items - The Jackie Clarke Collection.

While on holidays in County Mayo during summer 2013, I visited the Jackie Clarke Collection in Ballina. The collection is located in a beautifully restored old bank building on Pearse Street in Ballina. I was really amazed at the clever displays of objects of rich cultural history in this treasure trove.

Jackie Clarke was a collector of all things Irish who worked in Ballina. Over the years he amassed a varied collection of approximately 100,000 items including newspapers, books, maps, prints and posters. The Irish state broadcaster RTE has recently devoted some programmes to the Jackie Clarke collection. This one is from the Today programme and this one is from the History Show.

During my visit, I noticed that they have Ernie O'Malley's papers. O'Malley was an IRA leader during the Irish War of Independence. They also have Louis N. Le Roux's papers. Le Roux was a Breton nationalist who wrote a biography of the Irish nationalist leader Patrick Pearse. The Jackie Clarke Collection is well worth a visit because of the wide variety of its collection and the way the material is displayed.

ADEFFI Postgraduate Symposium 2013

As the organisation's postgraduate representative, I helped to organise the 2013 ADEFFI Postgraduate Symposium, which took place in St. Patrick's College, Drumcondra on Saturday, 9 March 2013. It is meant to be a relatively relaxed occasion where postgraduate students working in French or Francophone studies gather to give a presentation on their area of research and discuss it with their peers.

This year we had a wide range of topics from students based in Higher Education institutes in Ireland, the UK, France and Italy. A report on the symposium was published in the French Studies Bulletin [Fr Stud Bull (SUMMER 2013) 34 (127): 44-48].

I would like to thank the Head of the Department of French in St. Patrick's College, Dr Alan English for hosting the symposium and providing refreshments.