Sheraton Hotel, Athlone – 8.15pm, Wednesday, 8 March, 2017

Talk by Dr Aengus Finnegan

Map drawn by former Taoiseach, Garret Fitzgerald, detailing rates of pre-famine Irish speaking

Summary – The Irish language survived as a natively spoken language in the Athlone area as recently as the 1960s – something which will no doubt surprise many. And yet the story of the Irish language in Athlone, and the midlands in general, is very much a neglected one. This lecture will trace the changing fortunes of the Irish and English languages in and around Athlone from the early 17th century to the present day.

Speaker – Aengus Finnegan, a native of Glassan, is a lecturer in Irish at the University of Limerick. He completed a PhD on townland names in Co. Westmeath at the Department of Modern Irish, NUI Galway, in 2012. From 2013 to 2015 he was employed in Fiontar, the Irish-language unit of Dublin City University. While there, he worked as a Research Editor on a number of Irish-language digitisation projects, including over a year as Project Coordinator of Logainm.ie, The Placenames Database of Ireland. His interests include: Irish placenames, surnames, and personal names; Modern and Early Modern Irish-language literature; folklore; and the historical dialectology and sociolinguistic heritage of the Irish language in central Ireland.