‘Paddy Trench: Galwegian, activist and artist’: ICHLC seminar

‘Paddy Trench: Galwegian, activist and artist’: 

ICHLC seminar followed by drinks reception to mark donation of significant archival material.

14 September, 4 pm, The Bridge, Hardiman Building, NUI Galway.

The first seminar of the Irish Centre for the Histories of the Labour and Class (Moore Institute) for the 2017-18 academic year takes place next Thursday, 14 September, at 4 pm in The Bridge (Room 1001), Hardiman Research Building, NUI Galway. The subject is Paddy Trench, and the speaker is his nephew, Brian Trench (School of Communications, DCU).

Paddy Trench was born in Galway, the son of Wilbraham Trench, Professor of History, English and Mental Science, at QCG. Though the family moved to Dublin while he was still quite young, Paddy always identified as a Galwegian. A talented artist, a poet, and an engaged journalist, he was a prominent figure in bohemian Dublin in the late 1920s. Socially and politically conscious, he was in Spain in the early stages of the Spanish Civil War but chronic ill-health obliged him to leave. Back in Ireland, he was the driving force behind the first Trotskyist movement in the country, while simultaneously active in the Dublin Labour Party. When he died in a Swiss sanatorium in 1948, he was only 43 years of age.

The seminar is followed immediately by a reception to mark the donation to NUI Galway and the ICHLC of significant archival material relating to socialist and kindred movements in Ireland and Scotland. Tom Sherry’s donation is of his father’s collection of Labour, Anarchist, Communist, and Trotskyist periodicals from the late 1930s and 1940s (to some of which Paddy Trench contributed articles). Brian Trench’s donation relates to the Socialist Workers’ Movement in Ireland in the 1970s. Mary Glynn’s donation relates to the Militant Tendency In Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s.