Bernard Reilly is a phd student at Dundalk Institute of Technology, funded under the TUFT.  His current research is of border towns a cultural analysis, Newry 1898 to 1925.  He graduated with a BA in English Literature and Human Development, Higher diploma in Education, an MA in Public Cultures and Society at IADT 2016.  His principal areas of interest are theatre, performance, communities and politics.

In 1913 Newry Urban Council considered improvements to Newry’s Town Hall some members argued that it was a place in which people of all denominations can meet on neutral ground.  The term neutral ground suggests Newry was a divided place, therefore, it seems there was a need for place in-between where both sides of a divided community could meet in the hope of accommodating or suspending their differences. Newry was a place where two different political and religious ideologies, two different ways of living collided either symmetrically or asymmetrically. Newry was historically a contested space and remains in some way colonial outpost for Ulster Unionists. Newry also became a borderline struggle between Republicans fighting for Irish independence and Unionists desire to remain part of the British Empire.    

Therefore, the theatrical space in the town hall as intended by Newry Urban Council was a place for entertainments as a shared experience in a shared space.  It was a form of public-service transmitting a cultural product to the people of Newry.  Most of the entertainments that took place in Newry Town Hall were past productions from the London stage performed in Ireland by English touring companies. The most popular form of entertainment were light comedies operas, melodramas and regimental band concerts.  This paper will address the performance of Empire and its opposite acts of cultural nationalism in this culturally contested space at the beginning of the twentieth century and will consider how the concepts of space, place, politics and identity intersect in Newry at this time.