We have lots of great listens, watches and reads for this post ranging across the island of Ireland.

RTE Brainstorm looked at bilingual street signage, with an article by Tom Spalding - according to him the earliest street sign is from 1730 and can be found in Cork (Francis Street, in case you didn't know and the sign also includes the name of the developer of the area, a Quaker named Samuel Pike).

Also focusing on Cork, the London-based Society of Antiquaries featured its collection of street ballads from the city, possibly produced by a female printer in Cork in the 1860s. They were donated to the Society by Cork-born Richard Caulfield. One of the collection is included below.

From Cork to Belfast - the Maritime Belfast Trust (of which Festival co-founder Victoria Kingston is a Trustee) commissioned this film from Glenn Patterson, poet, broadcaster and contributor to our 2023 Festival. Patterson reflects on the origin of the city and the rivers that flow through, and under, it.

Staying in Northern Ireland, the Ulster Museum has some good posts on its Stories blog, including one on Derry-born fashion artist Anna Lowe (1895-1975) Her illustrations were included in magazines like Vogue and Harper's Bazaar as well as papers and shop windows in Northern Ireland. The image below is by Lowe.

From fashion illustration to the great English painter Joseph Turner. Every January in the National Gallery, a group of Turners are put on display - here Festival contributor and National Gallery director Caroline Campbell talks about the Turners and how they came to be in Dublin.

The always excellent Irish Story website featured an article by John Dorney on two working class Protestant families in 19th century Dublin (it was published a while back but we only just found it!) with an amazing amount of research and connecting many different strands of Irish and international history together.

Also encompassing an extraordinary range of research for each programme is In Our Time on BBC Radio 4, which recently featured an excellent episode on poet, novelist and playwright Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774). Very much hoping we can still access BBC Sounds for many years to come.....

Finally, always accessible is the weekly RTE Radio 1 History show presented by Myles Dungan - it recently featured Claudia Kinmonth talking about butter making in the home. After you've listened to this, we can highly recommend a visit to the Butter Museum in Cork. The images featured at the top are from the Museum's collection of butter wrappers, featured on their website.