The Linen Hall was grateful to have received support from the Irish Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Reconciliation Fund and the Northern Ireland Community Relations Council to develop a project reflecting on the legacies of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland. After scoping our extensive archives, a series of engagement workshops with local community groups led to the creation of an exhibition and a podcast series made in partnership with historian Jason Burke. Alongside the exhibition, the library hosted a range of talks and panel discussions featuring historians, activists and prominent civil rights campaigners.
The Linen Hall also received an Archives Revealed Grant from The National Archives to sort, catalogue and make accessible the archive of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), its Chairperson P.J. McClean, and ephemera collected contemporaneously over several decades.
The physical exhibition, titled ‘At the Crossroads: The Campaign for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland’, was held at The Linen Hall in 2025. The exhibition was later displayed at EastSide Visitor Centre in Belfast and will now tour the following LibrariesNI venues throughout 2026:
The Linen Hall also created an online version of the exhibition, which showcases additional material from the NICRA Archive, such as a letter sent from NICRA to actress Vanessa Redgrave and a poster from the Los Angeles chapter of NICRA.
You can find details here of the six-episode podcast series hosted by Jason Burke of the Historical Belfast Podcast, exploring the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland from the establishment of the state to its impact on contemporary society.
As part of the project, we were delighted to showcase items from the archive to community groups and schools through tours of the Northern Ireland Political Collection.
Photo credit: Civil rights march in Belfast. Image courtesy of the Trustees of the Buzz Logan Photographic Archive at The Linen Hall.
