This video is the culmination of months of work carried out by residents in Dolphin House in collaboration with DCTV. The partnership started with a training process where residents were given camera classes in order to record interviews of testaments from residents about the state of their flats. A video edited by the residents themselves came out of this and was screened at an event that brought the campaign more attention from various media outlets, human rights experts and hopefully Dublin City Council. This video, again with a paper edit carried out by the group, contains speeches from this meeting and charts the work carried out to this point in the ongoing campaign in Dolphins Barn.
Crew TV is finally online for your viewing pleasure. This show was completely put together by a group of young people working in the DCTV studio last summer. Read more about it here.
In this episode Anne Leahy from Age and Opportunity joined Ellen Reddin to talk about age and social exclusion. A dictionary definition tells us that social exclusion means not having enough social contacts in the course of your day or life, it also means not being able to participate fully in the things that make life worth living. In episode two of Never Too Late we look at this, and other big issues facing older people in Ireland Today.
There’s a new episode of Looking Left available on Vimeo today. Looking Left is proving to be one of our more popular shows, with a decent online following on the left wing blogosphere. Check out Irish Left Review, where one of the group involved in producing the show has uploaded copies of Graton and Z Mag, both magazines that arose from the struggles of the early eighties.
As usual we stick all new content on our front page, it also gets sucked into our video section via a Vimeo plug in. We will eventually get around to bringing you a better way of viewing our online content. The sudden upsurge in content surprises us as much as you.
Dublin is full of neighbourhoods, each with its own unique history and identity. Nowadays the pace of change is so fast and we often feel disconnected from the streets and areas that form our locality. In some ways it was simpler in the past – our families stayed in the same neighbourhoods and we could learn our history and receive our identity from our elders.
Here at DCTV we’re always willing to explore new ways of connecting with the history of our city and when we were discussing and pursuing the idea as part of The Dublin City Community Forum Work Plan for 2008, the presence of 60 Dublin City Council Sheltered Housing Centres across the city seemed to provide an excellent way of documenting the city’s history as seen through the eyes of its residents..
As part of a pilot project, we visited two Sheltered Housing Complexes in two of the most historic neighbourhoods of Dublin – Inchicore on the south side and Ballybough on the North side. Here we were welcomed with tea and plenty of chat and we heard a wealth of stories about many different facets of life including the shops that used to, and sometimes still, serve the residents of these neighbourhoods, the games and entertainments of long ago, and people’s jobs an the places they used to work. Here the memories were of the momentous events and the great traditions in our neighbourhoods – the floods of 1954, which hit so many homes in Ballybough, the workers streaming into the CIE works through the Khyber pass from Ballyfermot.
Listening to these stories you are struck by how much the residents of this city have to learn from our older neighbours – whether our families have been in Dublin for 5 or 500 years. In order to understand both ourselves and our city, we need to be aware of and understand its history.
DCTV would like to thank both the Community Media Focus Group and the Dublin City Community Forum for funding this project, the Bulfin Court and Ballybough Court Sheltered Housing Centres for hosting us, Dublin City Council for its support and co-operation and, above all, our interviewees, for sharing their memories of our city with us. We hope to extend these programmes to all neighbourhoods across Dublin – please get in touch if you’d like to help out with input / information on your neighbourhood.
“Da Gist is a pilot TV series made for young people by young people, developed through a project partnership between The Digital Hub and Bradóg Regional Youth Services (Co-founder of Reel Youth Film Festival and active member of European youth organisation, Empower Media Network).
Prior to production, the first phase of the project engaged the group of would-be young TV producers in training in TV Production at The Digital Hub.
Other partners in this project were DC TV, Broadcasting Commission of Ireland and LYCS Community Training Centre.”
“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out”
Over the next while, DCTV will carry a series of programmes profiling life at the Interfaces in Belfast. The series was initiated with the Belfast Interface Project and was carried by Northern Visions a sister community station up north, in the summer of 2007. Research and consultation began in early August to discover the key issues which interface groups felt should be highlighted. Filmed over two months, Northern Visions interviewed 48 people from a wide range of community groups, representatives from all the main political parties, statutory agencies and several historians and academics, both local and international. All of the participants gave their personal experiences of interfaces, as well as their views on the way forward for the peace lines in Belfast.
The four documentaries give a general introduction followed by an in depth look at the issue of youth and violence at interfaces, the role of ex-combatants in peace building and investment and regeneration. In this schedule we’ll broadcast the first two, with the sequels to be added to our next schedule.
When corporate giants like Tesco and other super markets monopolise food distribution in large urban areas, serious questions have to be asked about how alternatives can survive or even be created. The Dublin Food Co-op is one option. It stands as a means to building a more enriched life in urban environments. It was set up to provide organic food and other products to its owner-members. It was established in 1983 by a group of friends who found buying in bulk made financial sense. They run a weekly food market on Saturdays, where stalls provide fresh local and artisan produce, mainly organic, and other products for sustainable living. The Co-op sells its own wide range of organic dry foods and other processed organic products. As more and more things get enclosed by corporate gaints and the profit model, Dublin Food Co-op stands as an alternative to commercial profit-oriented business. Surplus funds are used to benefit the members Co-op and to reduce prices.
e–>
Over 200 people packed into the Royal Dublin Hotel on Dublin’s O’Connell Street in early December for a public meeting on the topic ‘Democracy and Policing: How accountable are the Gardaí* to the Irish people?’ The meeting was addressed by: Larry Wheelock whose brother Terence died in suspicious circumstances in Store Street Garda Station in Dublin over two years ago (see Something rotten in Store Street in Workers Solidarity 99). John Monaghan from Rossport in Mayo whose community has been under constant Garda siege as a result of their resistance to Shell’s attempts to force an unsafe pipeline and refinery on them (a story which has been well documented in Workers Solidarity). John Maloney from Crumlin, Dublin whose son John died in suspicious circumstances after his arrest by Gardaí from Rathfarnham Garda Station in Dublin The meeting heard speaker after speaker from the floor recount their stories of Garda brutality and unaccountability. In giving people the forum in which to begin to address these questions the meeting served a very useful purpose. As part of DCTV’s “The Document” we bring that meeting and its pivotal questions around Garda treatment of particular communities into your home for some sharp relief.
DCTV’s crew were present for a screening of Community Response’s Hidden Voices 2, a drama dealing with Hep C sufferers in Dublin’s inner-city. The film received a good response and we were there to capture the discussion on the topic that followed. The footage has been captured and one of our members is volunteering his time to cut the footage this week.
