Conference: Memories of the Emergency - Waterford People and the Second World War
Date: Saturday, 8th November 2025
Time: 10.00am – 4.00pm
Location: Dr Mary Strangman Large Room, City Hall Waterford – entrance through the Medieval Museum, Waterford X91 K10E
Admission is free – however booking is essential.
In 2025 with support from Creative Waterford, Waterford Treasures undertook an oral history project to collect and preserve memories from the Second World War on the eightieth anniversary of its end. This November we are staging a free conference to celebrate the people of Waterford who lived through this period and some little known aspects of the time known in Ireland as ‘The Emergency’.
Conference Programme
10.00am Opening
Official opening by Councillor Séamus Ryan, Mayor of Waterford City and County
10.05am Diverse Waterford Oral History Project
Joanne Rothwell, Waterford City and County Archivist
10.15am Keynote Lecture
‘On the edge of this mighty struggle’: Ireland’s foreign and defence policies during the
Second World War’.
Dr Michael Kennedy, Executive Editor, Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, Royal Irish Academy
11.00am ‘Everything here is perfectly abnormal’: the Emergency in Ireland, 1939-45: An Overview
Dr Eugene Broderick
11.30am Coffee Break
12.00pm Defence through Delay: Military defence in Waterford during the Emergency Period
James Doherty
12.45pm Schools Essay Project
Mary Breen, Waterford Archaeological and Historical Society
Niamh Crowley, History Teachers’ Association of Ireland
1.00pm Lunch
2.00pm Maritime incidents in Waterford Harbour during the Second World War
Andrew Doherty
2.45pm A Waterford Man on D-Day: 6 June 1944
Peter Cunningham
3.15pm Sporting Life during Wartime, 1939-1945
Cian Manning
3.45pm Family Memories of Wartime
My Great granduncle Robert Sarsfield, Rose Lane Waterford and his Brush with Death in September 1939
Nora Tubritt
Pierced but Not Dead: My Uncle Tom Walsh of Glenmore, a POW’s Story of Survival
Bill Walsh
From Mayor’s Walk to Bavaria: Remembering Uncle Terry
Conor McEneaney