The Cork Women’s Weekend is about to celebrate its 40th anniversary this May Bank Holiday weekend, and it’s going to be fabulous! Founder of the Cork LGBT Archive, Orla Egan, and members of the Cork Women’s Weekend Committee, fill us in on what to expect. Images courtesy of Cork LGBT Archive.

Feature Celebration - Cork - Anniversary

Beginning as the Cork Women’s Fun Weekend, the celebration was a weekend organised by women in the lesbian community in Cork for the lesbian community in Ireland. It was planned as a fun, social event to counteract the very serious, heavy duty, feminist political organising and campaigning that was being undertaken at the time by these women.

The first Cork Women’s Fun Weekend was held on the weekend of April 13-15, 1984, and was organised by the women in The Women’s Place - operating at the time out of the Quay Co-Op in Cork city centre. An article on the tenth Fun Weekend in the March 1994 edition of Munster GCN described it as “the time for fun, friends, and fancy to come together”.

A report on the tenth Weekend discussed its early beginnings: “That was an era of serious politics. Questions about contraception, abortion, divorce, and the most elementary rights for lesbians and gays were the focus of virtually every meeting then. The Fun Weekend aimed to provide a space to recognise and celebrate the identity, culture, and community that women were creating. A measure of its success has been the emergence of similar events in other places.”