William Thompson, the Cork-born socialist who influenced the early co-operative movement and the thinking of Connolly and Marx, was commemorated last year by an inaugural weekend school in his name. Next month the second William Thompson Weekend School will convene at the Firkin Crane Centre in Cork.
Thompson was a radical thinker, the son of John Thompson, a Protestant merchant and land-owner who was high sheriff and lord mayor of Cork in 1794. Having inherited the family estate of 1,400 acres near Rosscarbery in 1814, he devised a plan to convert the estate into a co-operative commune. His death in 1833 prevented the plan from being realised and when the estate was subsequently bequeathed to the co-operative movement, his family challenged the will and won.
Thompson wrote An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth (1824) and Labour Rewarded (1827), both of which were hugely influential in socialist and trade-union circles of his time. He was, says Mr Donal O Drisceoil, one of the organisers of the school, "a major intellectual of the early 19th century whose importance and influence have been shamefully neglected".
The theme of this year's school is "Making The Links", which will explore "activism and intellectualism, socialism, feminism and environmentalism, economy, society and culture".
Last year the Oxford academic, Terry Eagleton, described Thompson as "a great radical nationalist - indeed, after Edmund Burke, the greatest Irish political thinker of his time".
This year the William Thompson Lecture will be delivered by the historian Sheila Rowbotham, who will discuss "aspects of emancipation: self-determination and women's livelihood protests", tracing the various forms of women's protest since the French Revolution.
Three biographers, John Horgan (Noel Browne), Donal O Drisceoil (Peadar O'Donnell) and Rosemary Cullen-Owens (Louie Bennett) will speak. O Drisceoil's Peadar O'Donnell will be launched at the school at which its publisher, Cork University Press, will launch the Radical Irish Lives series.
Over the next few months the CUP is due to bring out the Cullen-Owens book as well as lives of James Larkin, Arthur O'Connor and Edward Despard.
Further information can be obtained from: www.homepage.eircom.net/ thompsonschool