Michael Davitt Gaelic Athletic Club offered as a coronavirus field hospital.
Michael Davitt (1950-2005) was a key figure in the literary movement associated with the poetry magazine Innti, which he established as a student broadsheet with his fellow students Gabriel Rosenstock and Con Ó Drisceoil at University College Cork in 1970. Important influences during his UCC years were the creative trio of Seán Ó Ríordáin (see the entry in this series for 1971), Seán Ó Tuama, poet and professor of Irish, and the composer Seán Ó Riada, all of whom were exploring and experimenting with inherited art forms. Davitt, born and raised in Cork city, was himself a charismatic man, and he took the Irish language and Irish poetry out of classrooms and lecture halls and into the pubs and clubs of youth culture. For Davitt and many of his peers from urban English-speaking backgrounds, commitment to Irish was a conscious countercultural move, in tune with youth movements and civil-rights politics.