The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) is pleased to share news of another collection published from our 2024 Legacy Data Preservation Pilot. The pilot scheme was designed to capture and preserve at-risk data of enduring cultural and social value from completed research projects. The last collection to be published in 2024 provides striking evidence of grassroots political activism in Ireland, documenting the Right2Water rally which took place 10 years ago now, on a chilly December day.
Read about some of the other legacy collections we’ve featured on the DRI blog such as the Teenpath COVID Project, the Dún Ailinne Excavation Archive, Irish language collections and Irish history collections, or view the collections in the Repository as they’re added.
Featured Collection
Right2Water Protest 10 December 2014
What kind of data is it? This collection presents a visual record of the Right2Water protest rally organised on Merrion Street Upper, opposite the Government Buildings and next to Merrion Square Park in Dublin City centre, on 10 December 2014. It was the second, national rally in the Right2Water movement, which began that same year as a tripartite trade union, political and community campaign in response to the establishment of Irish Water, a new statutory organisation set up with responsibility to manage Ireland’s public water supply. After years of grinding austerity Irish Water was beginning to charge the public for water, triggering a mass campaign of non-payment across the country.
There are 162 photographs of musicians, politicians, trade unionists, poets, historians, community activists and campaigners addressing the assembled crowds over the course of the day, alongside pictures of people holding placards and protest signs of various professional and handmade design, and wearing costumes paired with winter coats, hats and mittens to ward off the cold. The speeches, songs and performances on stage were also recorded and published as 2 audio files. A short, edited video from the event is available on Youtube.
Photographs © Paula Geraghty.
How is it preserved in DRI? The dataset includes photographs, audio and video recordings in widely used and accessible formats for sharing on the web. High-resolution JPEG files can be viewed in-browser or easily downloaded for closer study. The audio files were created as uncompressed WAV files which can also be played in browser using DRI’s embedded audio player or download as MP3 files. Each file is individually described with keywords and links to controlled vocabulary sources which uniquely identify the subjects recorded.
Who did the work? In 2014, Paula Geraghty photographed the rally assisted by Mike de Silva, and produced nearly 50GBs of video file formats (including MP4), and an additional 5GBs of photographs (in TIFF and JPEG formats). Some basic metadata was added using the software programme Photomechanic, which was part of the production workflow at the time. In 2024, Ms. Geraghty curated a selection of photos for DRI with the intent of acknowledging each of the speakers who took the stage at the event as well as showcasing the size and spirit of the crowd on the day. Additional descriptive metadata was carefully added to files using Adobe Photoshop to identify the subjects pictured. DRI’s Research Data Project Manager Beth Knazook then extracted the embedded metadata to populate the individual image descriptions in the Repository.
Paula Geraghty is a photographer and filmmaker. She has been documenting people fighting for better conditions and services for over 25 years. In 2009 she set up the pioneering Trade Union TV, documenting the fight against the impacts of austerity and, subsequently, the rise of progressive movements around abortion, LGBTQ+, asylum seekers, housing and workers’ rights, among many others.
She contributes footage to, and is a consultant for, documentaries and TV productions. She is currently working on a film about the women’s peace movement in Ireland in the 1980s.
