This St Patrick’s Day, Irish broadcaster RTÉ, in conjunction with Trailblazery, will broadcast an event worldwide highlighting Ireland’s biggest innovators across all fields.
To be broadcast at 9pm (UTC) on 17 March on the RTÉ Player and on The Washington Post website, We Need to Talk About Ireland will challenge some of Ireland’s brightest innovators, thinkers, artists and creative entrepreneurs to explore what it means to be Irish in 2014. The programme will also feature TED-style talks, interspersed with music, comedy, poetry, film and a large-scale choral spectacle.
Over the 90 minutes of the programme, the speakers and performers like Colm O’Gorman (director, Amnesty International Ireland), Martin Hayes (traditional musician) and Noeline Kavanagh (artistic director, Macnas) will tell the story of Ireland, from its ancient past to its potential future.
The vision of the project is to evoke a new cultural storyline about social, political, cultural and spiritual evolution in Ireland.
The programme has been planned and organised by The Trailblazery, an Irish production company that has previously worked on similar initiatives. In September 2013, The Trailblazery curated and produced a large-scale spoken word and music cycle called ‘Rites of Passage’ in Dublin, involving more than 50 participants and performers from Ireland, Iceland, Greece, Canada, the US, Britain, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
