Today marks the debut of a brand-new online exhibition showcasing the variety of family life in Ireland. Five LGBTQ+ families’ stories are shared in the exhibition «ReCollecting the Irish Family».
An extensive range of families living and loving in Ireland today are excluded by a traditional, constrictive concept of family, according to researchers from the University of Hertfordshire and University College Cork. The show examines and celebrates what family means in Ireland through a vast diversity of unique perspectives through a series of interviews.
As part of the cross-border research consortium RIFNET, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK and the Irish Research Council in Ireland, the researchers conducted interviews and gathered artefacts under the joint leadership of Dr. Leanne Calvert at the University of Hertfordshire and Dr. Maeve O’Riordan at the University College Cork. The interviews and artefacts were gathered at a National Museum of Ireland event at Collins Barracks in order to integrate LGBTQ+ experiences into the repository of Irish history.
A Star Trek fanzine, a photograph of the AIDS Memorial Quilt Tour, which brought attention to the plight of young men suffering from and dying from AIDS in the 1990s, and civil partnership and wedding photos made possible by recent legislation are among the items featured in the exhibition that tell family stories.
Dr Leanne Calvert, UK project lead and senior lecturer in History at the University of Hertfordshire, said: «We wanted to capture the ‘messy realities’ of family life in Ireland. The idea of the ‘traditional’ being defined by a married heterosexual couple and their children hides the diverse range of experiences from step-families and blended families, to LGBTQ+ families and everything in between. The collection brings to light some of these rich and varied experiences».
Dr Maeve O’Riordan, Irish lead on the project and UCC lecturer in Women’s and Cultural History, said: «Despite the great diversity of families in our society, we often see the same traditional representation of what a “family” looks like on TV and film and in our communities. This exhibition is a timely reminder that families come in all shapes and sizes, and care and love can be practised in many ways. It is essential to record the history of LGBTQ+ families so that future generations will know that they too have a history, and that LGBTQ+ experiences are part of Irish history, and the history of the Irish family».
The full collection of artefacts and interview transcripts has been stored permanently in the Digitial Repository of Ireland.
Coral Black, head of the UCC Library, expressed her excitement for the opening of the online «Access to the Digital Repository of Ireland continues to be an important asset for our research community. We view the work involved in getting a dataset ready for ingest as FAIR and Open, and we are thrilled with the outcomes—a priceless, useable collection that has been conserved across time for future use. Best wishes to Maeve and the RIFNET initiative».
The exhibition «ReCollecting the Irish Family» can now be viewed online.
