Alan McBride, Brian Kennedy and ex-UTV News head among Sinn Féin Summer School speakers

Panel discussions include . . • The Media and Politics in Ireland • Arts and Politics • Campaigning for a United Ireland • National Reconciliation – Uncomfortable Conversations: Dealing with the legacy of the conflict

ALAN McBRIDE, whose wife and father-in-law died in the IRA Shankill Road bombing in 1993, and Amanda Fullerton, whose father, Sinn Féin Councillor Eddie Fullerton, was assassinated by unionists in their family home in Donegal in 1991, will join Sinn Féin National Chairperson Declan Kearney in a Sinn Féin Summer School panel discussion on reconciliation.

Singer/songwriter Brian Kennedy and UTV former Head of News and Current Affairs Rob Morrison, Irish Examiner Political Editor Paul O’Brien and Catalan independence leader and Republican Left Member of Parliament Alfred Bosch are among other key speakers.

Member of Parliament Alfred Bosch (right) is a spokesperson for the Catalan independence campaign that organised an unofficial referendum in Barcelona last year in which 9 out of 10 voters in the region’s capital city gave backing to a separate state for Catalonia. He was elected in the 2011 general election as head of the coalition list of the Republican Left of Catalonia.

The Summer School will also hear from Brian O’Donohue, International Representative for the Labourers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA), which represents half a million workers across the US and Canada.

Other specialist speakers are Trish Lambe, Project Manager of the Temple Bar Gallery of Photography; Ray Yeates, Dublin City Arts Officer and former Artistic Director of the Axis Theatre in Ballymun; and Elaine Harrington, aka Temper-Mental MissElayneus, the outspoken Dublin rap artist.