Martyn Turner cartoon exhibition in University College Cork, Ireland.

'The Times We Live In: Martyn Turner's Satire'

I was delighted to see this exhibition of cartoons by Martyn Turner in University College Cork (UCC) recently. The exhibition was previously on display in the Epic Emigration Museum in Dublin. It shows drafts of cartoons by Turner, whose work has appeared in the Irish Times newspaper for the last 45 years.

You can get so much into a cartoon and say things more concisely than you ever could in an article. The real beauty of political (or editorial cartoons as they are sometimes called), is that you are not as restricted as you might be when using text to get your message across to your audience. 'You can draw implicitly what you cannot say explicitly', as someone once said.

Seeing these drafts is great because you can see where he made changes as the work progressed. You can see things rubbed out and redrawn or names or words changed. Below are some of Turner's cartoons that were on display in UCC. I have selected a small number of them, but as you can see, he covers a wide range of subjects from the environment and housing to politics, international relations and everything in between.

When thinking of contemporary political cartoonists, I like the work of Patrick Chappatte, whose cartoons appear in a number of magazines and newspapers including, Der Spiegel and Le Temps. Below is one of Chappatte's award-winning cartoons from the New York Times.

Cartoon by Patrick Chappatte. Source: New York Times.

I also like the French review Revue XXI, which is like a newspaper, except instead of giving you the news and telling you stories with text and images, it uses cartoons. Cartoonists present us with stories from around the world.

Reveu XXI is reminiscent of grand reportage articles that appeared and still appear in French newspapers, where a grand reporter journalist will travel to a country where a news story is developing and send back a colourful article full of the flavour and taste of what they find on the street.

In any one edition of the review, you could find wildly different styles of cartoon and stories from all over the planet. It's well worth checking it out, if you haven't already.

Image from a story in Revue XXI by Jeff Pourquié. Source: Revue XXI.

'Writing the Troubles' Blog - my post.

Photograph taken from the 'Writing the Troubles' blog.

The Northern Ireland 'Troubles' (1968-1998) claimed over 3,500 lives and left many more maimed or scarred for life. It grabbed headlines in Britain, Ireland and around the world because of the shear scale of the killings, bombings and attacks and the length of the conflict.

I have just written a blog post on the Writing the Troubles blog about foreign reporting of the Troubles. Read it here.

An Irishman's Diary on the Léon XIII

In October 1907, the village of Quilty in Co. Clare, Ireland was the scene of a dramatic maritime rescue. The three-masted Nantes registered ship, Léon XIII, was bringing grain from Portland, Oregon to Limerick, when tragedy struck. A violet storm caused the ship's rudder to break, for the ship to be blown off course and to run aground and breakup.

The twenty-two French crew on board were rescued by a combination of a British Navy ship and currachs. Local fishermen from Quilty braved the elements and rowed their open currachs into the storm to rescue the sailors who had taken refuge in the rigging of the ship. I have just written an Irishman's Diary in the Irish Times newspaper about the rescue and the story of the Léon XIII. Read it here.

The legacy of the rescue and the Léon XIII is visible in Quilty to this day. See below photographs of items on display in the local church Stella Maris (Star of the Sea), which was built with money raised after the rescue.

Lifebuoy from Léon XIII.

Bell from Léon XIII

In 2011, 100 years after the church was completed, 17 new stained glass windows were installed. Below, you can see some of the new windows, which tell the story of the rescue of the sailors of the Léon XIII by the local fishermen.