Celebrating 10 years of Féile na Carraige

Féile na Carraige 2022 signifies the welcome return to a full festival of face to face events whilst also marking the tenth anniversary of Féile na Carraige which was launched in the windowless Base building at the top of the Whiterock Road way back in 2012. The West Belfast language community has undergone an unprecedented transformation in the past decade whilst the activists and energetic young leaders from the Glór na Móna community revolution have played a central role in these inspirational endeavours.

Since we opened our own centre, Gaelionad Mhic Goill in 2016, the language movement has gone from strength to strength; with Sportlann na hÉireann opening as part of the multi-million development of Coláiste Feirste and housing the newly established standalone Irish speaking GAA club, CLG Laochra Loch Lao whose senior ladies team have just been crowned Antrim Junior B champions. Of course, a special mention must be reserved for inspirational and historic campaign spearheading by the An Dream Dearg movement over the past five years which has mobilised and politicised an entire generation of young people on the politics of community organising, grassroots campaigning which ultimately led to the enactment of Irish language legislation for the first time in the history of this state.

The Glór na Móna community has been embroiled in this campaign from the outset having had our youth funding callously removed in 2017 when an Dream Dearg was established. We were reminded of the dangers of complacency in January of this year when EA informed us that all our youth funding would discontinue at the end of March. We reluctantly returned to the tried and tested pedagogy of youth-led campaigning which mobilised the West Belfast community and our elected political representatives to challenge this exclusion.

Our young people led public meetings and public protests. This engineered a successful resolution and a one-year reprieve for our youth service. While this has temporarily papered over the cracks, the outdated structures of discrimination and exclusion remain embedded in neo-colonial state systems and structures so powerfully described in Dr Robbie McVeigh recent research report on Irish Medium Education and the Department of Education’s Statutory Duty under the Good Friday Agreement. Testimony after testimony assert the fact that those with power and responsibility continually fail to understand, include, accommodate and/or integrate the pressing rights and needs of the Irish language community in the north of Ireland.

Féile na Carriage 2022 aims to create space for us to think about how we can radically overhaul these broken systems rather than tinkering around the edges and constantly having to re-explain ourselves to self-serving bureaucrats and civil servants.

This decolonisation process, according to Tuhawai Smith explains ‘long-term process involving the bureaucratic, cultural, linguistic and psychological divesting of colonial power’ which includes ‘coming to know the past’ as ‘a critical pedagogy of decolonisation’. This could never be more relevant as the recent uncritical hagiography displayed by the mass

Our packed programme of events including historical tours, lectures and discussions, film-showings, project and research launches all aim to provide critical space for reflection, renewal and transformation. At a glance, this will include:

• cemetery tours with Seán Fennell and a GAA blitz;
• the official launch of ground-breaking new four-year Sólas na nÓg youth project for young people with additional learning needs;
• launch of local republican ex-prisoner and Gaeilgeoir Jake Mac Siacais’ new autobiography;
• a fantastic panel discussion on the self-help history of Coláiste Feirste to coincide with the school’s 30 anniversary;
• a talk on the father Des Wilson people’s history archive;
• a workshop on Irish language place names and a panel discussion on An Dream Dearg movement and much more.

This year’s Féile is being organised at a time of great hope that is matched by equal doses of fear and trepidation. Epoch shattering momentum for constitutional debate and change in Ireland is paralleled with a cost of living crisis being orchestrated by the shocking disaster capitalist economic policies of Liz Truss and the criminal cabal of Tory Elites and who committing ‘social murder’ on a mass scale to elevate the profits of their corporate partners.

As we face into this uncertain context, our Féile wishes to draw on the words of Naom Chomsky to strengthen our resolve: ‘If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world. That’s your choice.’

You can view this year’s programme here.