Turtle Bunbury meets broadcaster and novelist Deirdre Purcell for an intimate interview about his work and life. The talk was the final event of the Kildare Readers Festival 2018, hosted by the Riverbank Arts Centre in Newbridge.

Deirdre Purcell meets Turtle Bunbury

In 2014, the Bushy Park Ironworks in Dublin was commissioned to design a memorial to the First World War for St Patrick's Cathedral. They conceived the Tree of Remembrance, a lonesome wrought iron tree, ensnared in barbed wire, onto which visitors to the Cathedral could pin paper leaves inscribed with messages of support and love for all those who suffer conflict, past and present. The novelist Jennifer Johnston wrote and 'barbed' the first leaf. 

Every evening all the leaves were removed, ahead of the coming day, and placed in a box. By the autumn of 2018, over 220,000 leaves had been added. By coincidence, this approximated to the number of Irish thought to have served in the war. 

To mark the Armistice on 11 November 2018, St Patrick's brilliantly selected 36,000 of these leaves - each one representing an Irish man or Irish woman who died in the Great War - and threaded them them through long strands of fishing line that now hang down from the Cathedral's roof.

The launch of 'Fallen' took place on Thursday 1 November 2018 with an introduction by Dr William Morton, the Dean of Saint Patrick's; a reading by Jennifer Johnston; poems by Jane Clarke (Refugee) and Jessica Traynor (Nocturne); a solo by Gabriel Fauré (Pie Jesu); an organ solo of Elgar's Nimrod; and a 20 minute talk by Turtle Bunbury. The evening was  compèred by Bryan Dobson, the presenter of RTÉ's Morning Ireland. Upwards of 400 people were present.

This is a recording of Turtle Bunbury's talk from the occasion.

The Fallen by Turtle Bunbury

Born in Ireland in 1821, "Lola Montez" reinvented herself as a Spanish flamenco dancer in her early 20s and fetched up being the courtesan of kings and composers across Europe. However, the manipulative man-eater overplayed her hand in Bavaria and brought about the downfall of the kingdom's venerable monarch. 

This talk took place in Munich on 25 November 2018. It was hosted by the Munich Irish Society at the Schloss Nymphenburg, the summer palace of the Bavarian royal family. Turtle was introduced by Michael Collins, the Irish ambassador to Germany.