Irish Cultural Studies

The unprecedented economic growth and immigration that Ireland experienced between 1995 and 2007 did not only challenge national but also ethnic, social, and gender identities. The contributions to this volume explore how films tackle these challenges and help to make sense of Ireland’s altered position in a globalised world. Among the films discussed are some of the most critically acclaimed Irish films of recent years, including Once (2006), Adam & Paul (2004), Garage (2007), and The Secret of Kells (2009), as well as the work of Oscar-winning director and writer Neil Jordan. The volume is completed by an extensive interview with award-winning director Lenny Abrahamson, and his collaborator, screenwriter and actor Mark O’Halloran.

"In the following article, some films produced with the support of Bord Scannán na hÉireann (The Irish Film Board) since its reconstitution in 1993 are examined in light of the work of global anthropologist Arjun Appadurai and his theory of global cultural flows. The article suggests that cinema, primarily of Hollywood origin, has had a notable influence on the development of Irish society and Irish film. Contemporary Irish film itself also reflects the failure of Irish history to excite the imagination of Ireland's youth as effectively as the seductive depictions of America's past as mediated through the Western and gangster films. Indeed, films made in Ireland today reflect the influence of both these genres. However, as the key to the Hollywood continuity style of film-making is its own self-effacement, this has sometimes been reflected in the effacement of people, politics and place in contemporary Irish film as film-makers endeavor to attract a global audience for their work. Films considered include The Boy From Mercury (Martin Duffy, 1996), Nora (Pat Murphy, 1999), Circle of Friends (Pat O'Connor, 1993), Dancing at Lughnasa (Pat O'Connor, 1998), Saltwater (Conor McPherson, 1999), Ailsa (Paddy Breathnach, 1993), I Went Down (Paddy Breathnach, 1997), The Disappearance of Finbar (Sue Clayton, 1994/95), When Brendan Met Trudy (Kieron Walsh, 2000), High Boot Benny (Joe Comerford, 1993), Broken Harvest (Maurice O’Callaghan, 1993), The Boxer (Jim Sheridan, 1998), Some Mother’s Son (Terry George, 1996), Nothing Personal (Thaddeus
O’Sullivan, 1994/95), and Sweety Barrett (Stephen Bradley, 1998)."

Sport annually mobilizes millions of people across Europe: as practitioners in a wide variety of competitive, educational, or recreational contexts, and as spectators, who are physically present or following events through the mass media. This book presents original research into modern sport funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Its aim is to examine the distinctive contribution made by this complex phenomenon to the construction of European identities. Attention is focused on sport's social significance, as a set of mass-mediated practices and spectacles giving rise to a network of images, symbols, and discourses. The book seeks to explore, and ultimately to explain, the processes of representation and mediation involved in the sporting construction, and subsequent renegotiation, of local, national, and, increasingly, global identities. It offers a survey of key developments in sporting Europe - from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, and from the Atlantic to the Urals - presenting findings by acknowledged international experts and emerging scholars at the level of individuals, communities, regions, nation-states, and Europe as a whole, in both its geographical and political incarnations. Its focus on representation offers a broadly conceived, and consciously inclusive, approach to issues of 'Europeanness' in modern and contemporary sport.

Closing the "Dubliners" and the representation of the Irish capital and community setting at the turn of the century, "The Dead" is the longest piece, concluding the set of stories with a distinct message about life and intellectual fulfilment. From manuscript to print, the collection went through a seven-year saga of trial and error with various publishers, being finally published in 1914, after the entire first print-run was burned before it could reach the public, on 11 September 1912 (Fargnoli and Patrick 1995: 145). Charles Levin and Charles Shattuck looked at it as a series of 15 vignettes (1944: 30), linking the series to Joyce’s own confession in May 1906 to his publisher about the “paralysis” covering the whole collection and, then, explaining the stories as a journey focused on four main stages: “childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life” (Ellmann 1975: 83). While inspecting such contributions, this paper attempts to employ resources provided by psychoanalytic criticism and offer a wider interpretation about identity, love and death as illuminating topics in the Joycean universe. Earlier criticism focused on exploring links between Joyce’s life and his vision (Magalaner, Kain, 1956; Gilbert, Ellmann 1966; Tindall, 1959; Bowen, Carens, 1984; Bollettieri Bosinelli, Mosher 1998, Bloom 1999), his place in the twentieth-century Irish writing (Garrett 1986; Torchiana, 1986; Beja 1989; Henke 1990), while recent studies provide topical insights (Schwaber 2000, Fargnoli, Gillespie 2006; Sakr 2008, McArdle 2010; Oatley, Djikic et alii 2016, Olivares Merino 2016). As Patrick Parrinder notes in his study, in the years Joyce wrote and waited for Dubliners to come into print, symbolism “was a topical and widely discussed literary technique” (Parrinder1984: 51), yet Parrinder rejects the idea launched by Levin and Shattuck about the parallelism to the Odyssey. The final story of "Dubliners"  can be nevertheless discussed in the light of concepts such as Eros and Thanatos, dream and the use of symbols and metaphors. The main questions I address are: is the party described in the story a genuine communal gathering, or is it meant to foresee mental isolation and annihilation, placing the key protagonists at a huge distance from each other, despite their apparent love? And is snow, the final symbolic element covering the city, working as a hint to purification or merely suggesting a world reduced to silence by its own death? This paper employs psychoanalytic criticism for a close reading of the story, inspecting the construct in terms of primary drives, as well as the questionable actions and thoughts of the key protagonists.

In 1996, The Quiet Man topped an Irish Times poll for the best Irish film of all time. Almost ten years later, with many more Irish (and Irish-themed) films made, The Quiet Man still occupied number four in a poll of 10,000 people across Ireland. John Ford's greatest commercial success, the film also set a template for Ireland's representation, and promotion, for over half a century.

This book, The Quiet Man ... and Beyond, involves both critical analysis of aspects of The Quiet Man as myth, commodity and fetish and the celebration of a film that has sustained considerable academic attention and popular appreciation since its release in 1952. Among the topics considered are the complexity of the film's relation to Ireland, to Irish literature and to John Ford's other films; its perceived place with regard to indigenous Irish cinema; and the phenomenon of its circulation and reception as a cult film over the years.

Contributors include Ruth Barton, James P. Byrne, Sean Crosson, Fidelma Farley, Roddy Flynn, Adrian Frazier, Luke Gibbons, Michael Patrick Gillespie, Conor Groome, John Hill, Des MacHale, Barry Monahan, Brian O'Conchubhair, Diog O'Connell, Caitriona O'Torna, Tom Paulus, Sean Ryder, Eamonn Slater and Rod Stoneman.

In “Silver of Silver,” the poet Aogán Ó Rathaille was visited by a beautiful maiden named Ireland. The lady has been captured and forced to wed a false, monstrous king.  Composed in the eighteenth century, Ó Rathaille’s vision  poems or aislingí allegorized Ireland’s plight at the height of English colonization.  Under Hanoverian rule, Catholic  Irish could not inherit land, ordain priests, or teach/speak Gaelic. People with traditional roles in Gaelic society found themselves displaced, especially poets whose livelihoods were contingent on the patronage of Gaelic-speaking lords. The only hope for a free Ireland was that a Catholic would rise to the throne, but such hopes proved futile. This paper discusses how, by allegorizing Ireland as a maiden, Ó Rathaille conflates a population with a person who has a body and a gender, and how this is complicated by the maiden’s unfulfilled hope for the savior king. The king is absent, and the male poet is
powerless. The masculine players cannot enact their roles. Thus, Ó Rathaille matches a crisis of individual masculinity with a crisis of national identity, a conflation that may have bearings on our own country, in the language we, our politicians, and media use as another presidential race comes to fruition.

Music and song are both important influences on, and themes in, the poetry of Thomas Kinsella. His poetry also features several individuals associated with music, none more frequently than his close friend, the composer Seán Ó Riada, a central figure in the revival in popularity of Irish traditional music since the 1950s. This paper charts some significant developments in Kinsella's work from the late 1950s, and indeed, intriguing parallels, and shared emphases, apparent in the comments and work of both Kinsella and Ó Riada. For Kinsella, his experience of traditional song - described in his poem 'The Shoals Returning' - preceded the incorporation of Gaelic literature into his poetry while his recurring emphasis on the audience's role in the act of communication echoes his own identification of a central characteristic of the performance of traditional song, or sean-nós, in Irish.

Clann Chruitín were among the most notable learned kindreds in Co. Clare in the late medieval period. They featured among the aos dána, the Gaelic learned class who specialised in, as the annals assert, ‘senchas agus le seinm’. Holding hereditary lands in west Co. Clare on the margins of the Atlantic coast, they attained the status of ollamhnacht in history (seanchas) and music (seinm) from the fourteenth century. Remarkably, learned members of Clann Chuitín continued to be associated with literary activity of he native tradition until the mid-nineteenth century when Séamas Mac Cruitín, self-described as ‘the last relic of the hereditary bards of Thomond’, died.

NYU’s Department of Cinema Studies and Glucksman Ireland House invite you to enjoy a lunchtime discussion of contemporary Irish television.

LAUNCH EVENT Tuesday, December 1 at 12:30 pm ET

This special issue of Television and New Media examines Irish television at the current political, economic and cultural conjuncture in Ireland, and against the backdrop of two major crises since the 1990s: the first deriving from the Catholic Church’s institutional abuse scandals, which progressively weakened its power and influence; the second from the 2008 collapse of the Celtic Tiger economic boom, following which years of austerity have deepened social inequality. Focusing primarily on Ireland’s public service broadcaster RTÉ, the articles consider how national television in Ireland has represented and negotiated the resultant tensions and divides within Irish society. They examine the endurance and evolution of a daily Catholic ritual on national television; the weaknesses of a transnational drama in addressing the legacy of institutional abuse; varieties of progressive post-2015 Marriage Equality referendum “queer” television; “property television” and the current housing crisis; and intergenerationally themed reality television in the context of growing generational inequality.

Kevin Kenny, Professor of History and Director of Glucksman Ireland House, New York University
Diane Negra, University College Dublin, Editor, Television and New Media
Marcus Free, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, special issue editor. Anna McCarthy, New York University (contributor)
Ruth Barton, Trinity College Dublin (contributor)
Páraic Kerrigan, University College Dublin (contributor) Anthony P. McIntyre, University College Dublin (contributor) Eleanor O’Leary, Carlow Institute of Technology (contributor) Gerardine Meaney, University College Dublin (Respondent)

The late Peter Hart, who died at a tragically young age in July 2010, asserted in his 1993 Trinity College Dublin (TCD) PhD thesis, and in the 1998 Oxford University Press book based on the thesis, that republican forces fought a sectarian war against Protestants during the 1919–21 Irish War of Independence and afterwards. It culminated in a ‘massacre of Protestants’ in late April 1922, that is after Anglo-Irish hostilities ceased in July 1921, prior to the start of the Irish Civil War in June 1922. Equally controversially, Hart asserted that Irish Republican Army (IRA) Flying Column leader Tom Barry covered up an earlier ‘massacre’, of British Auxiliary prisoners after the 28 November 1920 Kilmichael Ambush. In his thesis and book Hart linked these events and portrayed them as emblematic of ethnically charged sectarian hatreds that drove ‘the nationalist revolution’.

In his professional role as historian, Peter Hart was perfectly entitled to explore and to present evidence leading to such conclusions. However, there are concerns that his evidence presentation breached ethical standards. In order to explore and to explain why I share this opinion, I will deal first with the November 1920 Kilmichael Ambush and then with the 1922 April killings. I will at that stage discuss the intellectual climate within which Hart’s research was accepted, largely uncritically.

A chapter from the Earth Writings book by Cathy Fitzgerald and Nessa Cronin: "The Little Wood that Could", pp. 30-39.

Earth Writings: Bogs, Fields, Forests, Gardens (2020) received the Geographical Society of Ireland Book of the Year Award at the 53rd annual Conference of Irish Geographers held in Limerick in May 2022.  The book, which focuses on community-engaged arts and geography practices in Ireland, was supported by the Maynooth University Department of Geography Research Incentive Fund, Kildare County Council, and Creative Ireland. Edited by Karen E. Till Professor of Cultural Geography at Maynooth University, the volume was designed by Pure Designs and features writings by artists, curators, and academics: Patrick Bresnihan, Nessa Cronin, Monica de Bath, Cathy Fitzgerald, Gerry Kearns, Pauline O’Connell, Seoidín O’Sullivan, Lucina Russell,  and Karen Till.  The award was in the edited collection category and decided by an international awards committee.

The criteria for consideration were that the works: had been published for the first time (in Irish or English) between 1st January 2018 and 31st December 2021; were of clear relevance to a theme related to the geographies of Ireland and/or were authored by a geographer employed in Ireland at the time of publication; and were comprised substantially of previously unpublished work. Books are available for purchase at the Temple Bar Arts Book store Dublin https://shop.templebargallery.com/collections/books-publications/products/karen-till-earth-writings-bogs-forests-fields-gardens or online at https://haumea.ie

Dr Cathy Fitzgerald was interviewed by Dr Nessa Cronin, Irish Studies, NUIG about her ongoing ecological art practice: The Hollywood Forest Story, begun 2008 - " the little wood that could". See the Earth Writings podcasts page for a conversation between Cathy and Nessa.

See more about the evolving Irish Earthwritings.ie programme in association with Cork University Press at https://earthwritings.ie

Update:

In 2022-3, Dr Cathy Fitzgerald is providing ecoliteracy training via her Haumea Ecoversity https://haumea.ie for a 3-county Irish Arts Council Invitation Award, led by County Carlow Arts Services, for Carlow, Kildare and Meath. Gnáthóga Nádúrtha (Natural Habitats) is an arts-led community engagement programme centred on wetland restoration https://drumminbog.com/2022/02/07/3047/  Cathy will again work with Earth Writings collaborators Monica de Bath and Lucina Russell.

Michael Collins is the most important leader of the Anglo-Irish War and the peace negotiations that culminated in the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Despite the fact that the Treaty ended British domination in the twenty-six southern counties, radical members of the IRA under the leadership of Eamon de Valera objected to the peace process negotiated by Collins. Accordingly, Collins's memory is subject to a fierce debate between the nationalists and unionists in Northern Ireland. Neil Jordan's film Michael Collins (1996) provides an account of the Irish leader's role starting from the Easter Rising in 1916 to the Civil War in 1922. Due the contested memory of Collins, the film's release resulted in a public debate over the way in which the events of the Easter Rising and the Anglo-Irish War should be understood. Contrary to other articles on Michael Collins, this article shows that films or historiophoty represent an alternative source of public historical narrative which deepens our understanding of the importance of the past in the Irish collective memory. Moreover, the article shows that filmic representations not only reconstruct the past events in an appealing manner to the Irish public but also contribute to the debate on how the past should be understood.

The thesis explores the construction of Kevin Barry as a ‘hero’ within the Irish ballad tradition, its relationship to accepted historical narratives, and the importance of vernacular song in maintaining the social memory of historically neglected figures. The rationale for this research project is based upon three distinct goals: firstly, to examine the narrative of
one particular ballad, as well as related historical accounts, in order to determine if there are concurring representations of Kevin Barry as a ‘hero’ with the spheres of Folklore and History; secondly, to demonstrate the legitimacy of approaching the ballad as an historical resource; and, thirdly, to investigate the role of the Irish ballad in maintaining the social
memory of ‘heroic’ individuals such as Kevin Barry. The thesis addresses the following questions: How are ‘heroes’ constructed within folkloric and historical frameworks? Is there an agreement between the portrayals of the ‘Kevin Barry’ of History and the ‘Kevin Barry’ of the Irish ballad? Is valuable source material being lost when historians overlook
the information contained in items of so-called ‘popular culture’ such as song? How important is the ballad tradition in maintaining the folk ‘memory’ of historically neglected figures? What is the relationship between History, the Irish ballad, and social memory? It is through a close reading of one particular case study, the ‘In Mountjoy Jail’ ballad, that the thesis demonstrates the relevance of the Irish ballad to historical research and its importance to present-day social memory.

In Ireland, generic international cinematic forms have provided an important means through which filmmakers have attempted to tell Irish stories while engaging international audiences. However, in general Irish filmmakers have been less inclined until recent years to turn to that most overused and familiar of film genres, the horror. Indeed, its over familiarity may well have been a contributory factor in directors' hesitancy to adopt the horror form for their films until the mid-1990s. Since then, and particularly from the early 2000s, Irish filmmakers have increasingly turned to horror as a form through which to explore aspects of Irish society, culture, history and, indeed, their representation. While reflecting providing an overview of these films, this article focuses in particular on a feature film sometimes credited kicking off the most recent series of Irish horror films, Conor McMahon's Dead Meat (2004), a film preceded by his 2001 award-winning short The Braineater. While Dead Meat and The Braineater are heavily indebted to previous international horror work, including films by Sam Rami, Peter Jackson, George A. Romero and Lucio Fulci, a striking feature in both is the use of elements and motifs associated with indigenous Irish culture and sport, in particular the Gaelic game of hurling, within their narratives. These films also, in common with other recent horror works, reject and critique previous touristic depictions of Ireland (an important determinant of representations of Ireland in international productions throughout the 20th century) while providing an 'allegorical moment' both for the exploration of trauma in Ireland's distant and more recent past and a critique of Celtic Tiger Ireland itself.

Online version of entire article available here: http://www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/article.php?id=513&feature

This artii-lc-explores the cultural impact of critical and popular biographies ahout Maud Gonno. By I'ocu.sing on Gonnc as primarily an object of Yeats s desire this hioyraphical chscourse, I aryue, serves political and economic, rather than 'purely' hterary, purposes: these biographies roniantici/.e Gonnc's considerable pohtical contributions and capitalize on a Nourishing Yeats industry that reinforces the representation ot Gonne as an interest-intJ hut minor titrure in twentieth-century Irish culture.

This paper draws on the history of the reception of evolutionary theory in Protestant Ireland to situate the innocent but paradoxically bohemian islander of J.M. Synge’s prose masterpiece, The Aran Islands. It suggests that Synge desired to construct Aran as an Eastern, pre-Celtic space outside the capitalist and evolutionary nexus. For Synge to acknowledge that this West of Ireland island group was anything less than a tabula rasa was to admit his fear of the menace posed to the Orientalised “primitive” native islanders by Darwinian theory and the forces of Western modernity.

Despite the experimental and subversive work of Irish feminist filmmakers such as Pat Murphy and Margo Harkin in the 1980s, as Gerardine Meaney has contended, "the image of woman as Ireland, Ireland as woman, remains powerful and pervasive in the new Irish cinema" (1998: 250). The cinematic convention of representing Ireland through female characters becomes particularly relevant in two recent Irish historical films: Michael Collins (1996), directed and written by Irish Neil Jordan, and The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006), written by Scottish Paul Laverty and directed by English Ken Loach. In their dealing with themes such as military occupation, colonisation and the heated debate about the Treaty, both films maintain the nationalist rhetoric that represents Ireland as a woman/mother in a direct manner. Over the course of this essay, I shall try to chart the implications of both films' representations of women, with a view to demonstrating how, even at present, the trope of Mother Ireland continues to be deep in the national unconscious. Key Words. Cinematic representations of Ireland; Michael Collins; The Wind that Shakes the Barley; trope of Mother Ireland; female republican activism. Resumen. A pesar del trabajo experimental y subversivo llevado a cabo en los años 80 por cineastas feministas de la talla de Pat Murphy y Margo Harkin, la asociación simbólica de Irlanda con el mito de la Madre Tierra (Mother Ireland) sigue estando vigente en el cine irlandés del siglo XX, tal y como subraya Gerardine Meaney (1998: 250). Dicha representación del papel de la mujer como madre y símbolo del país adquiere especial relevancia en dos películas recientes sobre la historia de Irlanda: Michael Collins (1996), dirigida y escrita por el irlandés Neil Jordan, y El Viento que Mece la Cebada (2006), escrita por el escocés Paul Laverty y dirigida por el inglés Ken Loach. Al abordar temas tales como la ocupación militar, la colonización inglesa, y el acalorado debate sobre el Tratado Anglo-irlandés, ambas películas mantienen de forma directa la simbiosis entre madre, mujer y nación. Tras analizar el papel que ejercen los personajes femeninos en ambas películas, este artículo pretende demostrar la gran influencia que el mito de Mother Ireland continua ejerciendo en el subconsciente nacional. Palabras clave. representaciones cinematográficas de Irlanda; Michael Collins; El Viento que Mece la Cebada; representación simbólica de la mujer en la cultura irlandesa; el mito de Mother Ireland; mujeres militantes en la Guerra de la Independencia y la Guerra Civil irlandesa.

While Ulysses is an incontestable juggernaut of modernist literature, critical analysis of the text has too often been contained by impenetrable academic discourse, dismissing Joyce's fundamental desire that the text be widely accessible. Indeed, the exclusive imprisonment of the text clashes profoundly with the novel's prevailing argument for the vitality of the pedestrian struggles of the everyman. Leopold Bloom, a poorly educated but intellectually curious member of Dublin's middle-class bourgeois, demonstrates the perils of navigating mass-produced channels of information and the consequent liability of misinterpretation. The novel is foremost a text concerned with text, and Joyce examines the effects of mass-produced popular literature on collective subjectivity and the cultivation of individual identity in Bloom and others like Stephen Dedalus and Gerty MacDowell. By introducing the astronomical concept of parallax, Joyce considers the complications that arise from the frequently distorted intake of information, particularly in Bloom's struggle to assert himself. Ultimately, Ulysses considers intellectual populism, the culture of reading, and the imperial agenda at work in the dissemination of information through colonized Ireland.

From the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, and over the next two decades, arose great efforts in Ireland to augment political independence from Britain with enhanced cultural separation. During this period the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) enjoyed a boom in numbers of players and supporters, thus confirming hurling and Gaelic football as the definitively Irish national games and the association itself as the most popular mass movement for the expression of independent Irish identity. Yet paradoxically, given the popular association of Gaelic games with Irish independence, nearly all footage of these games from that time was produced by foreign companies with a strong British bias. This article will focus primarily on the coverage of Pathé, a leading newsreel company in this period, through an examination of the content of relevant films in the online digital archive of British Pathé, and will explore the conditions of their production and reception in Ireland, including by the GAA, which was usually wary of portrayals in the British media.

In May 1921, Ireland was partitioned under British law by the Government of Ireland Act, which created Northern Ireland. Both sides agreed to a ceasefire on 11 July 1921 and the Irish War of Independence (Cogadh na Saoirse) came to an end. The post-ceasefire talks led to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty on 6 December 1921, as a result of which the Irish Free State was created. Our conference will celebrate the centenary and re-invigorate Celtic Studies at Leipzig University (conducted in the Department of Sorbian Studies) after the Corona crisis.

GUEST ACCESS:
https://academic.oup.com/jdh/article/31/4/364/5038204?guestAccessKey=fa251a22-fe65-461f-a3b5-b0e8bbb471f6

ABSTRACT: In the 1950s, Irish fashion exports that combined native lace, linen, and wool with fashionable cuts or palettes were marketed to Americans as a continuation of vaguely defined 'old traditions'. In the case of woman designer-dominated Irish couture, the transformation of 'peasant'-made textiles into luxury offerings was harmonized with an image of an entwined 'plebeian'-'patrician' heritage. This effaced the origins in Famine-relief projects for poor females of the craft industries upon which mid-century Irish fashion relied. The promotion of Irish labels at American department-store level often occurred with the aid of Irish government agencies and state entities such as the national airline, whose improved flight-times in the 1950s aided in making the Irish fashion season a trade pit-stop. In addition, a symbiotic relationship developed between female celebrities with Irish links such as Grace Kelly and Jacqueline Kennedy and quality Irish garments in which the cachet of one reinforced that of the other. If one also considers the role played by tourism authority Bord Fáilte Éireann and the Irish Export Board, then the era's fashion export trade was of a continuum with the same decade's state-encouraged quality tourist goods market. Ultimately, such 'traditional' offerings actually functioned as a shop window for a government eager to advertise Ireland's economic modernization. Indeed, the industries of aviation, tourism, brewing, crystal manufacture, advertising, film, couture, crafts, and textiles worked with state bodies to symbiotically cement an international image of Ireland that centred on the making, selling, and marketing of heritage and designer goods. Despite dizzying seesaws between signifiers of 'tradition' and 'modernity', mid-century Ireland was neither fully 'traditional' in the way promised to tourists nor evenly modernized. Thus, the female-dominated workforce for Irish couture, clothing manufacture, and home knitting was simultaneously exploited and a harbinger of Irishwomen's growing autonomy.

Based on the results of a study carried out in 1998 of over 70 IRA-themed films produced between the 1930s and 1990s, this is an analysis of the IRA figure as a cinematic archetype, similar to the gangster or the spy.  It argues against the idea that cinematic representations of the IRA can simply be regarded as symptomatic of a colonialist approach, treating the Irish as an irredeemable and violent Other, as claimed by film researchers such as Brian McIlroy (1987), John Hill (1988) and Marcia Landy (1991).

Torn between traditions, the sense of belonging to local communities and the urge to find a better living, young adult migrants are in John McGahern's prose both heroes and victims. The purpose of this paper is to explore the connections and layers of their family environment and past, and of a fragile route to individual success and failure. Both male and female characters feel rather confined when placed in urban sites, and their education limits employment opportunities, while the degraded and degrading human topoi are bitterly scrutinized in a blend of tragic and comedy. Examples taken from the collections of short stories and novels attest that protagonists oscillate between physical and mental departures and arrivals, easy gain and shallow feelings that imprint characters a perceptible change and low self-confidence, despite a vibrant and apparently friendly urban fabric.

The history of Irish Travellers is not analogous to that of the 'tinker', a Europe-wide underworld fantasy created by sixteenth-century British and continental Rogue Literature that came to be seen as an Irish character alone as English became dominant in Ireland. By the Revival, the tinker represented bohemian, pre-Celtic aboriginality, functioning as the cultural nationalist counter to the Victorian Gypsy mania. Long misunderstood as a portrayal of actual Travellers, J.M. Synge's influential The Tinker's Wedding was pivotal to this 'Irishing' of the tinker, even as it acknowledged that figure's cosmopolitan textual roots. Synge's empathetic depiction is closely examined, as are the many subsequent representations that looked to him as a model to subvert or emulate. In contrast to their Revival-era romanticization, post-independence writing portrayed tinkers as alien interlopers, while contemporaneous Unionists labeled them a contaminant from the hostile South. However, after Travellers politicized in the 1960s, more even-handed depictions heralded a querying of the 'tinker' fantasy that has shaped contemporary screen and literary representations of Travellers and has prompted Traveller writers to transubstantiate Otherness into the empowering rhetoric of ethnic difference. Though its Irish equivalent has oscillated between idealization and demonization, US racial history facilitates the cinematic figuring of the Irish-American Traveler as lovable 'white trash' rogue. This process is informed by the mythology of a population with whom Travelers are allied in the white American imagination, the Scots-Irish (Ulster-Scots). In short, the 'tinker' is much more central to Irish, Northern Irish and even Irish-American identity than is currently recognised.

This article examines Evelyn Conlon’s short story “What Happens at Night,” published in Lines of Vision: Irish Writers on Art (2014), a beautifully illustrated anthology of new poems, essays, and short stories by a wide range of Irish writers – 56 in total, including John Banville, Roddy Doyle, Seamus Heaney, and Jennifer Johnston. The anthology was inspired by pieces in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, on the occasion of its 150th anniversary. Novelist, short story writer, and essayist Conlon is the only contributor in the collection to engage with two works: Edwin Hayes’ An Emigrant Ship, Dublin Bay, Sunset (1853) and Sarah Purser’s A Lady Holding a Doll’s Rattle (1885). Conlon uses these two paintings as starting points to explore ideas about art, loss, women’s voices, dreams, change and memory. In engaging with two very different pieces of art, which Conlon nevertheless brings together, her literary response is wonderfully diverse in subject matter and tone. The purpose of this essay is to highlight her mediating role as writer, not only to explore multiple notions about what women have thought and may still think, but also to pay tribute to their mobilization of lives and memory through art.

The Hibernian Catch Club was the leading Irish club of its kind, setting the standard in terms of performance. It gained status as Dublin’s longest-standing music society, and must be credited with pioneering catch and glee culture in Ireland. Its existence appears to pre-date the foundation of the most renowned London catch and glee clubs, emphasizing its significance within the wider context of catch and glee culture. This article examines the contribution that the Hibernian Catch Club made to musical life in Georgian and Victorian Dublin, contextualizing how the Club’s activities and membership reflect aspects of Dublin’s wider social, political and cultural life during this period.  The extent to which the Club reflects the traditions associated with the culture as established in England is evaluated, before the discussion turns to an exploration of the repertoire. The Hibernian Catch Club was part of a wide performing network, its singers possessing established connections with...

"Disremembrance": Joyce and Irish Protestant Institutions- Mary Burke
Éire-Ireland 55, 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2020 pp. 201-222- DOI: 10.1353/eir.2020.0008

ABSTRACT This 2020 article is included in a landmark issue of the journal Éire-Ireland that emerged from Towards Transitional Justice, an International conference on Irish institutional abuse co-sponsored by Ireland’s Consulate General, the Department of Children of Ireland, and Boston College on November 2, 2018.

In the chaos of the Night of the Big Wind on January 6-7 of 1839, a conflagration at Bethesda (f. 1794), a Protestant-run “asylum” for “fallen women,” lit up the night sky in Dublin’s north inner city, and was possibly ignited by inmates. The troubled sky that greets the Conroys in “The Dead” as they leave Usher’s Island in the early hours and look northeast suggests the ghost of the long-ago fire at that exact time. The merely bad weather of January 6-7, 1904 in “The Dead” is a ghostly echo of the storm of 1839, just as the repeated stress on the vulnerability of children and women throughout Dubliners and Maria’s silence in “Clay” regarding the true nature of her Protestant asylum workplace summon the ghost fire of Bethesda and its silenced inmates on the anniversary of their mutiny. Bethesda’s haunting of Dubliners suggests that occult knowledge of shady Protestant institutions had quietly circulated in the capital for generations. In this century, activists, academics and journalists such as Niall Meehan, Derek Leinster, Victoria White and Carol Coulter have repeatedly drawn attention to the issue of abuse in Protestant institutions such Bethany Home and Westbank Orphanage, but the issue remains equally absent from public discourse. The silence that Joyce audited in the Dublins of 1839 and 1904 persists, in part because of positive stereotypes of Protestants, which efface ethnic, class and denominational differences. Such are crucial to understanding why abuse in Protestant Homes remains unassimilable into standard narratives regarding Ireland’s institutionalization regime, which assumes an intrinsic connection between Catholicism and child abuse. Furthermore, the silence at state level is also a legacy of colonialism: the perception in the post-1922 state that Protestants really belonged in Britain or in Protestant Northern Ireland aligns suggestively with the fact that children from Protestant homes were repeatedly trafficked to Britain and to Protestant families across the border. The old suspicion that Protestants cannot fully be Irish citizens feeds the state’s apparent contemporary stance that Protestants cannot be fully recognized as victims of institutions that were, ultimately, the state’s responsibility. This paper further argues that not only sectarianism but racism and a view of illegitimacy as conferring chattel status on non-marital or “mixed” (Protestant-Catholic) births structured the experience of institutionalized children. Australia’s recent recognition of “orphanage trafficking” as a form of modern-day slavery organized for economic gain illuminates the profit motive of mid-twentieth-century Irish institutions that passed off “illegitimate” children as orphans for export to a lucrative American adoption marketplace. In the post-World War II Irish case, the most “valuable” children for the American adoption marketplace were fair-haired, blue-eyed, and Catholic— the combined result of the racism of the target market (the United States) and the ongoing sectarianism of the country of production (Ireland).

Title panel of major exhibition on modernist poet Máirtín Ó Direáin held in NUI Galway March-July 2018. For more information on exhibition, see: http://www.nuigalway.ie/odireain/
Exhibition currently on tour, with dates in Autumn 2018 set for Aran Islands, Dublin and Galway.
Exhibition to be launched online in the coming months.

(Forthcoming - October 2016)
Raymond Deane's "Seachanges (with Danse Macabre)", part of his "Macabre Trilogy", refers to death in several different ways. This brief essay outlines how the work's title, motivic and structural elements and its instrumentation support this notion before linking it to the state of Irish art music in general.
Among the other over seventy topics treated in this anthology are the following: the Galway girl who was buried with her horse in the fifth or sixth century; the account of the curious death of a little-known Irish saint in medieval Norway; the Black Death in Kilkenny; death and sexual transgression in medieval Ireland; grisly deaths from the Irish annals; the funerary monuments of clerical wives in early modern Ireland; the forgotten Connacht massacre of 1647; a seventeenth-century Belfast ghost story; an Irish story of cannibalism on the high seas; the records of an Offaly coroner during the Great Famine; the Derry ghost who imparted information on the missing Franklin expedition in the Arctic in 1849; Jewish burial customs in nineteenth-century Ireland; death and Irish freemasonry; the Irishman whose body was shipped back to Ireland from Italy in an upright piano; death in Irish folklore; the history of children’s burial grounds in Ireland; the ritual of tobacco use at Irish wakes; memorial cards and Irish funerary culture; death in Irish sermons; funeral rites among the Irish Travelling community; death and dying in contemporary Irish pagan belief; the link between commemoration of the dead and humour; deathbed visions; attitudes towards death and dying in modern Ireland, including the impact of social media on the culture of commemorating the dead.

In 2010, two temporary exhibitions of replicated Irish medievalia appeared in Dublin and Chicago.1 In Ireland, a show devoted exclusively to plaster-of-Paris reproductions of high crosses ran concurrently with one in Chicago, where Edmond Johnson’s copies of medieval metalwork appeared in Mid-Century: “Good Design” in Europe and America, 1850— 1950. In each venue, the design process took center stage, and the replicas were treated as works of art in-and-of themselves. Copies or not, their recognizable Celto-medieval imagery answered George Petrie’s pleas to salvage Irish antiquity for posterity. Rather than being disdained as simulacra, they were celebrated as spectral manifestations of Irishness in the modern world.

‘Oideas Ardeaspaig’

An Linn Bhuí 18 (2014)

Proinsias Ó Drisceoil

This essay edits the ‘reamh la bhart’ (sic) or introduction to Short Instructions and Prayers for Sick and Dying Persons, with other Acts of Devotion in English and Irish by D.B. Arp. C. Oideas Athchoimir agus Urnaighthe do dhaoine eugcruadh agus do’n mhuintear bhios ag Dul d’Eag Maille re gniomhartha caoinduthrachta eile, A n-Gaoidheilg agus a m-Bearla re deagh-mholadh an ollamhain D.R. Ardeaspog Chaisil. This seventy-two page bilingual work of religious devotion was was ‘Ar na chur a gcló’ or printed ‘Re Seamus O’HEALAIGHTHE Leavar-reicnoir Ag Sighin Armuis an Righ, ag an Malairt theach a gCorca San mBliaghain 1807 d’Aois ar Tighearna Cork: Printed by James Haly, Bookseller, Kings-Arms Exchange’ in Cork.    1806, not 1807, is given as the date of publication on the title-page.

The book was compiled by Thomas Bray, born in Fethard, Co. Tipperary in 1749 and archbishop of Cashel 1792-1820, probably with considerable assistance from Patrick Lynch (1754 or 1857-1818), the well-known scholar from Clare who set up school in Carrick-on-Suir at the end of the 1780s.

The introduction is written in a phonetic script and was intended for the Irish-speaking rural proletariat and those administering to their spiritual needs.  It is a valuable source for the characteristics of spoken Irish in Tipperary, for episcopal attitudes towards popular culture and towards the Irish Language, for literacy in Irish and for the strength of Irish in the diocese of Cashel among ‘na mintire na tigean, agus na louran bearla go mah’ (na muintire ná tuigeann, agus ná labhrann Béarla go maith/those who do not understand or speak Irish well).

This chapter provides a critical reading of the ways in which minorities are construed and framed in The Crane Bag (1977–1985) special issue, ‘Minorities in Ireland’ (1981, 5.1). Distinguished by its philosophical and international perspectives on Ireland, The Crane Bag’s articulations of spaces in which art and society might develop fruitful dialogues played an important role in the evolution of Irish Studies. However, the limits of the journal’s artistic and religious emphases are evident in the special issue, where they contribute to ultimately disabling renderings of minorities. Probing these tensions, it is contended that this number’s conception of minorities furnishes an insight into the restricted expressions of liberalism in Ireland before the 1998 Belfast Agreement and the collapse of the Catholic Church’s unquestioned authority.

Published in the context of the legal reformations and the public debates about the separation between Church and State in the early 1990s Ireland, Colm Tóibín's The Heather Blazing (1992) centers round the personal and professional life of Eamon Redmond, a conservative judge in a changing society. This essay will focus on an episode where a pregnant schoolgirl denounces her Catholic school authorities for their decision to expel her. My analysis will also draw on the unpublished version of the same episode, which features the actual case of Eileen Flynn, a teacher who was dismissed because she was an unmarried mother living with her baby's father, a married man himself. Significantly, whereas in the earlier version Tóibín engages with the issue of divorce, in the published text he further develops his criticism over society's punitive treatment of unmarried mothers. As will be argued, while exploring the tensions between the personal and the political, Tóibín offers in The Heather Blazing a subversive rewriting of the centrality of the Catholic family as a unit of social cohesion and control in Ireland. This essay will also situate Tóibín's novel through his journalism, as well as through an account of the shifting sexual, social and religious realities and pressures of twentieth century Ireland.

A personal and anthropological reaction to 'Hades' from Joyce's Ulysses.

From: The Book About Everything: Eighteen Artists, Writers and Thinkers on James Joyce's Ulysses.
Editors: Declan Kiberd, Enrico Terrinoni, and Catherine Wilsdon.
London: Head of Zeus Press