Ancient Irish Research Articles

Irish Poets: Keepers of National Lore

This paper discusses three noteable Irish poets: Augustine Joseph Clarke (1896-1974), Richard Murphy (1927- ), and Patrick Kavanagh (1904–1967), who are considered as keepers of national lore of Irland. It explains these poets’ contribution to world literature through the renewal of Irish myths, history, and culture. Irish poets tackle the problems of Irish people in the present in a realistic way by criticising the restrictions imposed on the Irish people in their society.Augustine Joseph Clarke’s poems present a deep invocation of Irish past and landscape. While Richard Murphy offers recurring images of islands and the sea. He explores the personal and communal legacies of history, as many of his poems reveal his attempts to reconcile his Anglo-Irish background and education with his boyhood desire to be, in his words, “truly Irish”. Patrick Kavanagh was not interested in the Irish Literary Renaissance Movement that appeared and continued to influence many Irish writers during the twentieth century which called for the revival of ancient Irish culture, language, literature, and art. He, unlike the Irish revivalists who tried to revive the Gaelic language as the mother tongue of the Irish people like Dillon Johnston and Guinn Batten, uses a poetic language based on the day-to-day speech of the poet and his community rather than on an ideal of compensation for the fractures in his country’s linguistic heritage. The paper conculdes with the importance of the role of the Irish poet as a keeper and a gurdian of his national lore and tradition

Not-the-Troubles: Disinterring the Marginalised Stories of the Ordinary and the Everyday

ABSTRACTUrban studies of Belfast, Northern Ireland, thoroughly explore the contested or post-conflict city. However, these ‘grand narratives’ do not necessarily accord with people’s day-to-day experiences. Although the ordinary and the everyday are the lifeblood of anthropological inquiry, the mundane in Belfast dwells on the narratorial margin, as academic and political loci predominantly align to the Troubles: to the protagonists, the causes or the peace-building aftermath. Ten by Nine (Tenx9) is a monthly, public storytelling night showcasing ordinary people and their true, personal, everyday stories, juxtaposing the funny, poignant and educational, and celebrating the quotidian. Retelling Belfast at Tenx9 challenges hegemonic discourse by moving the mundane from the margin to the centre, opening up a space for small ‘t’ troubles to be shared. The communitas at Tenx9 promotes a sense of belonging in the city outwith Troubled narratives and storytelling, an ancient Irish oral culture, becomes a new form of symbolic practice.

Book Review: Modern Retelling of Ancient Irish and Welsh Tales: Philip Freeman, Celtic Mythology: Tales of Gods, Goddesses and Heroes

Book Review: Modern Retelling of Ancient Irish and Welsh Tales: Philip Freeman, <i>Celtic Mythology: Tales of Gods, Goddesses and Heroes</i>

The Irish DNA Atlas: Revealing Fine-Scale Population Structure and History within Ireland

The extent of population structure within Ireland is largely unknown, as is the impact of historical migrations. Here we illustrate fine-scale genetic structure across Ireland that follows geographic boundaries and present evidence of admixture events into Ireland. Utilising the ‘Irish DNA Atlas’, a cohort (n = 194) of Irish individuals with four generations of ancestry linked to specific regions in Ireland, in combination with 2,039 individuals from the Peoples of the British Isles dataset, we show that the Irish population can be divided in 10 distinct geographically stratified genetic clusters; seven of ‘Gaelic’ Irish ancestry, and three of shared Irish-British ancestry. In addition we observe a major genetic barrier to the north of Ireland in Ulster. Using a reference of 6,760 European individuals and two ancient Irish genomes, we demonstrate high levels of North-West French-like and West Norwegian-like ancestry within Ireland. We show that that our ‘Gaelic’ Irish clusters present homogenous levels of ancient Irish ancestries. We additionally detect admixture events that provide evidence of Norse-Viking gene flow into Ireland, and reflect the Ulster Plantations. Our work informs both on Irish history, as well as the study of Mendelian and complex disease genetics involving populations of Irish ancestry.

Can you teach an old dog new tricks? Institution-wide pedagogical reform at an elite university in Ireland

Institution-wide pedagogical reforms are common across higher education institutions. Such reforms may be driven by rationalisation as well as recognition of the need to provide students with interdisciplinary learning experiences that equip them with the “social and analytic competencies needed in contemporary careers outside the academy” (British Academy, 2016, p.5). This paper reports on an institution-wide pedagogical reform initiative, the Trinity Education Project (TEP), at Trinity College Dublin, an elite and ancient Irish university. We describe the development of the TEP and the implementation of its Assessment Framework, which aims to bring diversity into teaching, learning and assessment through the assessment of graduate attributes in a system strongly focused on assessment of learning, examinations and lectures. Reflections on challenges are presented. Discussion centres on the extent to which it is possible, and the best approach, to achieve consensus in an educational system where autonomous disciplinary structures and traditions prevail.

From Ireland with letters

Intertwining Irish history and generations of Irish American family histories in a work of polyphonic electronic literature based on the rhythms of ancient Irish Poetry, the imagined lost Irish Sonata, streams and fountains, and Irish and Irish American song, From Ireland with Letters (2010 - 2016) is an epic electronic manuscript told in the public space of the Internet. Situating the work in the contexts of Irish public literature and of public electronic literature, this paper explores both the work itself and issues of public electronic literature and in the process both divulges little known Irish American histories and suggests the potential for the public literature telling of narrative and poetry on the Internet.

Begrudgery &amp; Brehon Law: A Literary Examination of the Roots of Resentment in Pre-Modern Ireland

&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This essay traces the published roots of the components of Irish begrudgery in early Irish literature (&lt;/em&gt;&lt;em&gt;Táin Bó Cúailnge and other ancient Irish myths) and &lt;/em&gt;&lt;em&gt;Brehon legal tracts (such as the Senchus Mór and The Book of Aicill)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;em&gt;. First, the power of language in a predominantly oral culture is explored through examples like cursing and the peculiarly Irish type of satirist. A brief explanation of the functioning and history of Brehon law is provided, and the connections between Brehon law, literature and begrudgery are considered. &lt;/em&gt;&lt;em&gt;Begrudgery is then tied to Nietzsche’s theory of ressentiment as both are distinguished primarily by a concern and involvement with power. While the elimination of Brehon law cannot be linked directly to the rise in begrudgery, the two events emerged from the same historical conditions. It was British colonialism that removed Brehon law from Irish society, just as the long colonial period offered a perfect environment for a sentiment like begrudgery to flourish as a widespread social phenomenon. So, while the apparatuses of begrudgery existed well before the English invasion, and although examples of early begrudgers can be found in ancient Irish literature, it was the colonial period that gave birth to modern Irish begrudgery.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

Yeats and Zen and a Horseman Passing By: A Buddhist Source for Yeats’s Epitaph

Yeats and Zen and a Horseman Passing By:A Buddhist Source for Yeats’s Epitaph David O’Grady The eleven words “Cast a cold Eye /On Life, on Death. / Horseman, pass by” are famously inscribed on W. B. Yeats’s tombstone. Pulsing fitfully along their three short lines, these words have come to be regarded in the popular imagination as among his most memorable and moving achievements.1 Readers with even a scant knowledge of his great body of work will immediately recognize the text and have the magnificent closing line by heart. Many more will associate the text with his tombstone in Drumcliff Churchyard, and with “Under Ben Bulben,” his valediction to “the indomitable Irishry.”2 He completed the poem on September 4, 1938, a brief six months before his death in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. Yeats had first revealed the lines that were to become his epitaph some three weeks earlier, on August 15.3 He claimed that his composition was spontaneous.4 Supposedly, it formed a cathartic riposte engendered by the rage he felt on reading an essay on the poet Rilke, which had caused him to feel “repelled by the brooding on death and the importance given to it.”5 One week later, he expressed [End Page 125] his desire to have the cryptic commands inscribed on his tombstone, and went on to use the epitaph to conclude “Under Ben Bulben.”6 Biographers and critics have offered a wide variety of interpretations of the epitaph. We know that Yeats greatly admired and would have wished to emulate what he deemed “the greatest epitaph in history,” that of Jonathan Swift.7 Moreover he had strong spiritual convictions on the divine and eternal nature of the self (otherwise the spirit or soul), which he outlined in A Vision (1937, though privately published in 1926), and he strove to impart these beliefs to his readers. His epitaph has proved enigmatic and obscure, but the conclusion of some commentators that Yeats has provided us with a hieratic soliloquy excluding the greater portion of his readership fails to reflect adequately what we understand of his beliefs and ambitions in the late 1930s. It seems more reasonable to infer that he intended the lines to provide a moral lesson or injunction of direct relevance and consequence to posterity. Such a reading is also more consistent with the powerfully didactic elements throughout “Under Ben Bulben.” Yeats, of course, was as a rule reluctant to explain his meaning, stating on one occasion that “If an author interprets a poem of his own, he limits its suggestibility.”8 We cannot know for certain what inspired these haunting lines. But we can draw inferences from a close scrutiny of what he was reading and writing in the years leading up to the time of the epitaph’s composition. The opening two lines appear to advocate a degree of asceticism or non-attachment in how we should live our lives, and an attitude of disdain or even defiance in confronting our own deaths. This inference provokes little contention across the commentaries, and is consistent with ideas expressed in many of Yeats’s own poems and essays. The words would seem to address a general audience, whether readers of “Under Ben Bulben” or visitors to the graveside. The Horseman however, presents a difficulty. Attempts to identify the figure’s antecedents generally reference Yeats’s iconography, in which both horses and horsemen occupy a significant station. Most critics associate the image with any one of a number of figures: Yeats’s Anglo-Irish kin and ancestors; the faery riders of the Sidhe (who for Yeats included the living spirits of ancient Irish gods and heroes); horses and riders from either Gaelic folklore or from classical mythology; the Apocalyptic Horseman inaugurating a new polytheistic era of [End Page 126] heroic life; and the poet continuing on his personal quest, in control of his soul’s destiny.9 And how are we to interpret the command “pass by”? Some critics detect in the dismissive gesture an echo of the elitist (even misanthropic) tone of Yeats’s own description of his ideal audience “of a few cultivated people who understand the literary and...

Letters of Kuno Meyer to Douglas Hyde, 1896–1919

No single individual did more to ‘make Irish respectable’ in the decades before and after 1900 than the great German scholar Kuno Meyer. But while Meyer’s tireless activities as an editor and translator of Irish texts and as a populariser of ancient Irish literature has long been documented, less is known about his activities ‘behind the scenes’. A newly discovered cache of letters and postcards that Meyer sent to Douglas Hyde during the years 1898–1919 now reveals the full extent of that background activity and the extraordinary level of encouragement and support that he gave to the movement to establish a ‘native school’ of Irish scholars, culminating in the establishment (in 1903) of the School of Irish Learning in Dublin.

Traditional Music and Irish Society: Historical Perspectives by Martin Dowling

Reviewed by: Traditional Music and Irish Society: Historical Perspectives by Martin Dowling Katherine O'Callaghan (bio) TRADITIONAL MUSIC AND IRISH SOCIETY: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES, by Martin Dowling. Farnham, Surrey, and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishers, 2014. xvii + 350 pp. $119.96 cloth, $47.96 paper. James Joyce's interest in the history of Irish music is evident in his "Early Commonplace Book," a notebook in which he collected information and quotations between 1903 and 1912.1 Under the four categories of verse, biography and history, fiction, and speeches, Joyce lists hundreds of texts relating to Ireland and Irish culture. Evidently he was gathering information on traditional Irish music, since there are references to many sources including Patrick Weston Joyce's Ancient Irish Music and Song: A Collection of Songs in the Irish Language Set to Music, Alfred Perceval Graves's The Irish Songbook, With Original Irish Airs, and George Sigerson's Bards of the Gael and Gall.2 From the evocation of "the old Irish tonality" in his short story, "The Dead," to the "native Doric" of Ulysses to the cyclical form and thematic concerns of Finnegans Wake, the imprint of his knowledge of traditional Irish music is apparent throughout Joyce's writing (D 210, U 11.991). While his many allusions to Irish song, and to the melodies that Thomas Moore created by penning English words to old Irish airs, are well known, the overall art form of traditional Irish music has been something of an absent presence in Joyce criticism. It has received considerably less attention than classical, opera, vocal, and music-hall traditions. This disparity stems in part from the critical lens of the early responders to Joyce, who placed his work, in particular, the extraordinarily innovative writing of Finnegans Wake, in the context of the European avant garde, often at the expense of recognizing the influence of an Irish cultural heritage on his linguistic and formal experimentations. The lack of critical attention to the topic may also reflect the gap that developed between the fields of traditional music and the study of literature in Ireland. Contextualizing Joyce's work in a truly comprehensive Irish cultural [End Page 456] framework, including a broad musical overview, in fact, remains a task to be undertaken. For this reason alone, a book promising to place Joyce within the historical and cultural framework of Ireland is welcomed. The scope of Martin Dowling's Traditional Music and Irish Society: Historical Perspectives is extremely ambitious; he traces the historical and socioeconomic events that influenced the development of traditional Irish music from the eighteenth century to the peace process in the North of Ireland in the last decades of the twentieth. Dowling brings the perspective of both a practicing musician and a historian to the field, which distinguishes his book from existing work on traditional music; in it, he sets out to demonstrate that "[t]raditional music is not the survival of some ancient and timeless manifestation of the essence of Irishness or the Celtic spirit, but rather a modern pursuit that kept time with the dramatic and sometimes violent modernisation of Irish society in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries" (12). Despite the chronological span of the book's remit, one of the five chapters is devoted to "James Joyce and Traditional Song," while the preceding chapter discusses music at the time of the Irish literary revival, another context that has been inadequately explored in Joyce studies. Given its front-cover image of Joyce playing a guitar, Dowling's book promises more in this area than it can be expected to deliver. The discussion of Joyce is limited to two stories from Dubliners, "The Dead" and "A Mother," and to the "Sirens" episode of Ulysses. This is not to suggest that some of the issues raised in the Joyce chapter do not have value in the wider debate on the role of traditional Irish music in Joyce's works. For example, Dowling weighs in on the issue concerning the absence of a "highly developed" art music in Ireland (179). The process whereby an indigenous musical tradition was quarried so as to provide the bones of inspiration for a new art music in the European classical...

A Chastened Communion: Modern Irish Poetry and Catholicism by Andrew J. Auge (review)

Reviewed by: A Chastened Communion: Modern Irish Poetry and Catholicism by Andrew J. Auge Kieran Quinlan A Chastened Communion: Modern Irish Poetry and Catholicism, by Andrew J. Auge, pp. 283. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2013. $39.95. Although Andrew J. Auge’s new book was partly composed while he held the O’Connor Chair for Catholic Thought at Loras College in Iowa, it is not an exercise in literary or religious apologetics of any orthodox kind. It is, rather, a defense of the existence of the numinous, a dimension of experience that he would see as irreducible and of which—though he never says so explicitly—Catholicism is but one expression. Auge explores the work of seven modern Irish poets—Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Paul Durcan, and Paula Meehan—each of whom found compensatory riches in a tradition that had initially brought them much discomfort, both mental and emotional. He makes a convincing distinction between poets who grew up at a time when Catholicism dominated all aspects of Irish life and culture and those who came after them even when the latter—Dennis O’Driscoll and Seán Dunne are his examples—had serious religious interests. “This process of critical scrutiny,” he writes, “of separating the dross from the usable, the regressive from the revivifying, necessitates an attention to the particularities of the inherited Catholic material that is absent in the work of those who assimilate it in an already congenial form.” Auge conducts his inquiry in a theoretically sophisticated manner, but his use of theory is unobtrusive. Charles Taylor’s critiques of secular modernity are invoked; Richard Kearney’s “anatheism”—a kind of Irish alternative to generic unbelief—is called upon; referencing Michel Foucault helps elucidate the confessional experiences of Clarke; and Nietzsche is deftly used to illuminate Heaney’s trajectory. Likewise, Irish history, recent and ancient, is present to the extent that it needs to be, and he included helpful explanations of the reigning theology and canonical practices of the different periods. Auge’s work is enhanced, too, by the fact that memories of his own early piety remotely prompt his scrutiny of the lives of others who have experienced similar entrancements. [End Page 138] In the introduction, Auge sets out a thesis that runs through all of the book: “Through this dialectical engagement with Irish Catholicism, these poets engender new forms of spiritual vision and praxis that blur the sharp lines of demarcation interposed by institutionalized religion between belief and unbelief, secular and sacred.” That is not to say that the same thing is going on with every poet. Auge is hyperalert to nuance; “redress” being appropriate in one case, less so in another. Thus, Clarke found relief for the mental anguish that his early encounters with an overly interrogative confessional practice had caused him—a pain that led to his being institutionalized for an extended period and a failed marriage—in a “radical revision of the Catholic sacrament of confession.” Kavanagh, suffering from some of the same strictures, was more concerned with the Church’s co-opting and regularizing of ancient sacred space. Heaney worked his way from excessive concern with sacrifice—even in his art—to an acceptance of givenness and gratuity that received its authority “not just from the poet’s individual imagination but from the residue of traditional beliefs that still clings to them.” Montague, Ní Chuilleanáin, and Durcan became celebrants of unrecognized aspects of nuns and priests while reshaping the received perception of them and later, coping with the unexpected revelations of abuse and cover-up. Meehan rediscovered an ancient Irish goddess in modern Mariology while also becoming aware of its inherent dangers. Auge approaches each writer in a different way, selecting a particular aspect of his or her engagement with Catholicism—and thus, sometimes neglecting others—to explore the aspect of the theme relevant to his larger inquiry. When he is in what might appear to be familiar territory, Auge is careful to point out how his interpretation differs from what has gone before—for instance, in his comment that previous scholars failed to appreciate the “specific strategic function” that Clarke...

Introduction Irish Aestheticism

Introduction Irish Aestheticism Joseph Bristow (bio) The topic of Irish aestheticism is by no means as familiar in literary history as that of the Irish revival, the movement whose origins scholars frequently trace to Standish O’Grady, whose Early Bardic Literature of Ireland (1879) stands among the first of his long line of publications on Irish legend. O’Grady’s subsequent romances about ancient Ireland followed in the style of eighteenth-century Scottish scholar James Macpherson’s eloquent prose adaptations of the oral poetry from the Highlands and Hebrides that preserved the gallant stories of warrior Fingal, his blind poet son Ossian, and his valiant grandchild Oscar. O’Grady’s cousin, Standish Hayes O’Grady, was a founding member of the Ossianic Society of Dublin (1853–63), which took its name from Macpherson’s popular Works of Ossian (1765). After Charlotte Brooke published her fine anthology Reliques of Irish Poetry, Consisting of Heroic Poems, Odes, Elegies, and Songs, Translated into English Verse (1789), the Ossianic Society was the first group to dedicate influential amounts of research to recovering the rich heritage of Irish poetry, folklore, and tradition, especially the Irish versions of the Celtic histories that Macpherson had unearthed in their Caledonian forms. This reclamation of ancient Irish culture and its impact on the revival and its nationalist aims is familiar to students of modernism. The revival had its origins in the ethnographic turn that E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture precipitated in 1871, and its main progenitors included Charles Gavan Duffy, George Sigerson, and Douglas Hyde. As Gregory Castle has observed, these intellectuals—who “disseminated an ideology of ‘racial’ self-improvement and national education” aiming to “restore a belief in the essential [End Page 781] piety and nobility of the Irish people”—provided the framework for much of W. B. Yeats’s poetry from The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889) onward, Augusta Gregory’s collections of Irish myths, John Millington Synge’s The Aran Islands (1898), and some of the early productions at the Abbey Theatre.1 Yet critics of Yeats also know well that his involvement with the Rhymers’ Club in London during the fin de siácle also brought him into contact with several poets whose works are associated with aestheticism and decadence. The attendees at the club, which met at the Cheshire Cheese public house, Fleet Street, included Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and Arthur Symons, whose work appeared in the famous Book of the Rhymers Club (1892) and the Second Book of the Rhymers Club (1892). Another of the writers on the edges of this circle was Oscar Wilde: the increasingly respected writer who had earlier enjoyed much celebrity—if not a large measure of notoriety—as a self-appointed “professor of aesthetics” who began to make his stylish presence and memorable pronouncements on art at several fashionable gatherings in the late 1870s. No other figure besides Wilde could stake a stronger claim as a champion of l’art pour l’art during this period. He was the quintessential aesthete of his time. Wilde was also, though there should be little need to note this fact, an Irishman. More to the point, he was raised in a household that in principle gave him everything he needed to become (had he wished) a figurehead in the revival. His mother, Jane Francesca Elgee—who established her career with polemical nationalist poems issued during the late 1840s under the name “Speranza”—expressed great pride in taking her youngest son’s given names from Macpherson’s Ossian; as she told a friend in a letter: “He is to be called Oscar Fingal Wilde. Is not that grand, misty, and Ossianic?”2 In 1857 Wilde’s father—the prominent ear surgeon and archeologist Sir William Wilde—participated in the British Association and Royal Irish Academy’s ethnological excursion to the Aran Islands. He was also a member of the Ossianic Society. Besides his scientific papers, Sir William’s numerous publications included A Descriptive Catalogue of the Antiquities of Stone, Earthen, and Vegetable Materials in the Royal Irish Academy (1857). Many years after her spouse had died, Lady Wilde published Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (1887). This...

Reflexões sobre o Policentrismo Jurídico

O autor argumenta que um dos fatores que permitem aos governos praticar atos que privam os cidadãos de suas liberdades é o senso de legitimidade desses atos, aceitos pelo público. O cidadão médio crê que o governo é seu soberano legítimo, e que seria errado se recusar a obedecer a seus comandos. Este senso de legitimidade – que é um mito para o autor – foi nutrido pelos intelectuais do Estado ao longo dos tempos. O importante argumento retórico dos exemplos históricos de sociedades anárquicas que funcionaram e a evidência contemporânea de elementos operativamente anárquicos nas sociedades estatais mostram que nem sempre foi assim, que não é assim em todos os lugares e sob todos os aspectos, mesmo agora, e que não tem que ser assim. Casey ilustra sua argumentação em favor de sociedades anárquicas com o exemplo da antiga sociedade irlandesa, até o século XVII e mostra que suas semelhanças com o policentrismo jurídico de Tom Bell. Por fim, discute a justiça restaurativa.

Lady Morgan's Beavoin O'Flaherty: Ancient Irish Goddess and Enlightenment Cosmopolitan

Lady Morgan's Beavoin O'Flaherty:Ancient Irish Goddess and Enlightenment Cosmopolitan Mary Helen Thuente Lady Morgan's The O'Briens and the O'Flahertys: A National Tale (1827), which extols Enlightenment ideas about reason, progress, and toleration in a plot filled with mystery, ancient superstitions, and sectarianism, embodies the complexities of the "Irish Enlightenment." The central character Beavoin O'Flaherty evokes ancient Irish sovereignty goddesses, but nonetheless epitomizes Enlightenment ideas about religious and political sovereignty. The novel challenges the stereotype of Lady Morgan as a romantic nationalist—a stereotype based largely on The Wild Irish Girl (1806) and her performance of its iconic character Glorvina—and the perception that there was no Irish Enlightenment. The novel brilliantly recreates late eighteenth-century urban and rural Ireland and transcends the romantic nationalism and binary postcolonial dimensions of her more famous Wild Irish Girl, in which the marriage of Glorvina, the "Princess of Inishmore," to the English Mortimer symbolized a union between native and colonist that preserved Ireland's ancient traditions. By contrast, the marriage of Murrough O'Brien and Beavoin O'Flaherty, whose intertwined family histories make up The O'Briens and the O'Flahertys, takes place in Europe where—as liberal cosmopolitans who reject continuing the battles over land and religion that their mutual family history epitomized in Ireland—they embody Enlightenment values and work for a new world order based on reason and toleration. Beavoin O'Flaherty's dual identity as ancient Irish sovereignty goddess and an Enlightenment cosmopolitan embodies the rich materials and international context that Lady Morgan inherited and made her own. The novel's encyclopedic richness and intellectual range is apparent when compared to other fictional portraits of Anglo-Irish society, such as Belmont Castle or Suffering Sensibility (1790) by the iconic Irish revolutionary Wolfe Tone. Both novels satirize the inanity and venality in love and politics of Dublin's ruling class, and both have central characters based on the O'Brien Earls of Inchiquin. Tone's readers easily identified Tone's Earl of Belmont and his son Mortimer as William and Murrough O'Brien, the 4th and 5th earls of Inchiquin, and their Belmont Castle was obviously modeled on Lord Charlemont's house [End Page 33] and estate at Marino, Dublin.1 Although the editor of the modern edition of Belmont Castle notes that its French flavor survived in Lady Morgan's portraits of Irish society, any comparison underscores Lady Morgan's achievement in creating a panoramic portrait of Irish society that encompassed centuries of Irish history, contemporary Ireland and Europe, rural and urban Ireland, and decades of Enlightenment learning. Lady Morgan satirizes both rural and urban modern Irish society, but The O'Briens and the O'Flahertys does not celebrate the antiquity and value of an indigenous Irish culture as The Wild Irish Girl did. Instead, it promotes more liberal, limited nationalism and devalues and even mocks the idealization of the Irish past.2 In the later novel, Catholicism and antiquarianism are represented by Murrough O'Brien's father Terrence, a secret Jesuit whose obsession with Irish antiquities and history drives him mad, and by the decadence and venality of several past and present O'Flaherty and O'Brien clerical figures. When the mystery of Beavoin O'Flaherty's various disguises and appearances is finally given a rational explanation, she is revealed to have been a sham abbess actually intent on reforming the corruption and bigotry of religious orders through modern principles of toleration and social justice. Lady Morgan used her extensive knowledge of Irish antiquarian materials, Connacht's legendary lore, and European and classical culture to create a mythological and legendary subtext and framework for The O'Briens and the O'Flahertys that is at once Irish and transnational. She worked in an Enlightenment intellectual context in which antiquarianism was a scholarly and literary—and not just a nationalist—endeavor. The two central female characters, Beavoin O'Flaherty and Mor-ny-Brien, resemble the sovereignty goddesses from Irish mythology and the fairy women in Irish legends, such as the banshee who protected and prophesied about old Irish families, and cailleacha like the Hag of Beare whose youthful beauty, sexuality, and longevity indicate their...

The Sin-Eater: A Breviary (review)

Reviewed by: The Sin-Eater: A Breviary Elinor Benedict (bio) Thomas Lynch . The Sin-Eater: A Breviary. Paraclete Press. With photographs by Michael Lynch, art by Sean Lynch. Readers of Thomas Lynch's fifth book of poetry, The Sin-Eater, need not be undertakers, Catholics, or even descendants of Irish immigrants to America, as Lynch himself is, to appreciate this artful collection of twenty-four poems and twenty-six black-and-white photographs of western Ireland, incomparably prefaced by an essay the author calls "Introit." This beginning prose piece reveals how the poet-undertaker became who he is—and in the richness of telling almost makes the reader become him too. Who is the sin-eater? Not the poet but his primitive creation, Argyle, who has appeared in Lynch's earlier collections from time to time, drawn from a haunting figure in Irish folkways. Lynch tells how he "met" this strange man once while his sons were watching an old swashbuckler on television. The boys' father, half dozing in his chair, woke to a startling scene in which an odd and tattered fellow, "part pirate, part panhandler," stood over a laid-out corpse, then "swilled beer from a wooden bowl and tore at a heel of bread with his teeth." For this act, which "ate" the heavy sins of the dead, the man was given a sixpence for saving the deceased from burdened wandering. Now Argyle is the one who wanders, walking from funeral to funeral, meal to meal. Lynch tells how he learned more about this figure in a classic history of funeral directing, and how as reader he developed a kind of haunted kinship and sympathy for the scruffy pilgrim "trying to find his way home." The book's striking cover photograph of a dark tower-house perched above the sea seems to bid readers to come into the poems if they dare, to listen to the inner voice of Argyle as rendered by his re-creator. The first poem of the twenty-four, all of which speak with an easy iambic lilt and lovely plainness, introduces the sin-eater at work in his calling after a death in the town. He is "a narrow, hungry man whose laughter / and the wicked upturn of his one eyebrow / put the local folks in mind of trouble." The poems that follow reveal Argyle variously "vaporous and sore at heart . . . a spectacle of shortfall and desire," balanced by dreams of both youthful lust and future death. He is a friendless wanderer in the poem "Argyle's Retreat," taking a much-needed rest by the sea where "Great hosts of basking sharks and shoals of mackerel" swim together like brethren, not like predator and prey. Argyle sees "signs and wonders everywhere," and in another poem beseeches the ancient Irish saint-in-exile Columba to "intercede with God to send a Sign that I might know my bilious ministry / serves both the sinner and The Sinned Against!" Inevitably, Argyle represents superstition to jealous priests. He is even [End Page 169] "inquisitioned," according to Lynch's playful diction, until the sin-eater talks back, grinning, with a couplet: "You keep your pope and robes and host and chalice. / Leave me my loaf and bowl and taste for malice." But in truth, Argyle suffers from "God hunger," asking himself, "What makes this aching in the soul?" He gets no answer except an unexpected baptism by what he calls a "churchdove" flying out of fog. After a journey to the Holy Isle of Iona in Scotland, he wears one of its green stones around his neck as ballast, as anchor, to calm his inner storms as he roams the "outposts and edges, . . . much scorned by men, put upon by weather." The sin-eater plods on in "Argyle at Loop Head," mulling over his task: The bodies of the dead he dined overnever troubled Argyle but stilltheir souls went with him into exileand, reincarnate as gulls and plovers,dove from high headlands over the oceanin fits of hopeful flight, much as heavenwas said to require a leap of faithinto the fathomless and unbeknownst. Perhaps the central poem in this collection is...

Phylogeographic, ancient DNA, fossil and morphometric analyses reveal ancient and modern introductions of a large mammal: the complex case of red deer (Cervus elaphus) in Ireland

The problem of how and when the island of Ireland attained its contemporary fauna has remained a key question in understanding Quaternary faunal assemblages. We assessed the complex history and origins of the red deer (Cervus elaphus) in Ireland using a multi-disciplinary approach. Mitochondrial sequences of contemporary and ancient red deer (dating from c 30,000 to 1700 cal. yr BP) were compared to decipher possible source populations of red deer in Ireland, in addition to craniometric analyses of skulls from candidate regions to distinguish between different colonization scenarios. Radiocarbon dating was undertaken on all bone fragments that were previously undated. Finally, a comprehensive review of the scientific literature, unpublished reports and other sources of data were also searched for red deer remains within Irish palaeontological and archaeological contexts. Despite being present in Ireland prior to the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), there is a notable scarcity of red deer from the Younger Dryas stadial period until the Neolithic. The presence of red deer in Irish archaeological sites then occurs more frequently relative to other species. One population in the southwest of Ireland (Co. Kerry) shared haplotypes with the ancient Irish specimens and molecular dating and craniometric analysis suggests its persistence in Ireland since the Neolithic period. The synthesis of the results from this multi-disciplinary study all indicate that red deer were introduced by humans during the Irish Neolithic period and that one of these populations persists today. In conjunction with recent results from other species, Neolithic people from Ireland's nearest landmass, Britain, played a vital role in establishing its contemporary fauna and flora.

Settling Down or Moving On?: The Settlement of the Irish Neolithic Landscape

The Irish Neolithic spanned some 1,600 years from approximately 4,000 to 2,400 bc. At the beginning of this period, Ireland was a frontier land at the remote edge of Europe. The first farmers arriving from Britain or the continent found a heavily forested land teeming with wildlife, which was already home to scattered groups of hunter-gatherers who had coexisted with this world for centuries. As these farmers set about clearing the woodland to lay out their farms and construct the first robust rectangular (and, later, circular) houses, they would give rise to a society which in time would build a range of megalithic tombs, various earthen monuments such as henges and mounds, great ritual complexes spread over many acres like Bru na Boinne in County Meath, large ordered settlements, and massive fieldwall systems. The history of excavating Neolithic settlements dates back to the 1890s, when such pioneers as William J. Knowles began uncovering prehistoric coastal settlements. Over the following decades, the number of known sites slowly increased until Sean P. O Riordain’s landmark 1954 publication of the major Lough Gur settlement in County Limerick. During the remainder of the century, trained researchers excavated a small but steady number of house sites. The affluence of the 1990s triggered a surge in the number of sites excavated; this ended with the financial crisis of 2008. Nonetheless, the archaeological literature now includes hundreds of published house excavations. And yet, the Neolithic, one of the most researched periods in ancient Irish history, remains the subject of ongoing debate in Irish archaeology. The debate stems from many causes: the sheer wealth of sites; the realization that the Irish Neolithic differed radically from the Neolithic experience in neighboring Britain; and a changing emphasis in the research. Empirical data-driven analysis of sites has been succeeded by a greater desire to understand how people of the time actually lived and interacted with their world. A key issue in the debates—

Politics and literature in the age of Swift: English and Irish perspectives

Preface Claude Rawson Part I. The Political Swift 1 (England): 1. Jonathan Swift's political confession Ian Higgins 2. Situating Swift's politics in 1701 Mark Goldie 3. Swift and Walpole Paul Langford Part II. The Writer and His World: 4. Burying the fanatic partridge: Swift's Holy Week hoax Valerie Rumbold 5. Swift and the art of political publication: hints and title pages, 1711-14 James McLaverty 6. Swift's poetics of friendship Helen Deutsch 7. 'Now deaf 1740': entrapment, foreboding, and exorcism in late Swift David Womersley 8. Savage indignation revisited: Swift, Yeats, and the 'cry' of liberty Claude Rawson Part III. The Political Swift 2 (Ireland): 9. 'Paltry Underlings of State'? The character and aspirations of the 'Castle' Party, 1715-32 D. W. Hayton 10. Old English, New English and Ancient Irish: Swift and the Irish past Sean Connolly 11. Jonathan Swift and the Irish Colonial Project Robert Mahony Index.

Ecocriticism and Irish Poetry A Preliminary Outline

Kuno Meyer claims, in Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry, that an intense love of nature “in its tiniest phenomena as in its grandest, was given to no people so early and so fully as to the Celt” (Meyer 1959: xii). Seamus Heaney strikes much the same pose as Meyer when he writes that Ireland’s ancient nature

Irish Corned Beef: A Culinary History

This article proposes that a better knowledge of culinary history enriches all culinary stakeholders. The article will discuss the origins and history of corned beef in Irish cuisine and culture. It outlines how cattle have been central to the ancient Irish way of life for centuries but were cherished more for their milk than their meat. In the early modern period, with the decline in the power of the Gaelic lords, cattle became an economic commodity that was exported to England. The Cattle Acts of 1663 and 1667 affected the export trade of live cattle and led to a growing trade in salted Irish beef, centred principally on the city of Cork. Irish corned beef provisioned the British navy fleets for over two centuries. It was also shipped to the English and French colonies. The articcle discusses the growth of the corned beef industry and how Irish immigrants popularized corned beef and cabbage in America. It also presents evidence of corned beef consumption in Ireland as a festive food. Changing meat consumption patterns in modern Ireland are discussed and the negative influence of canned South American “bully beef” on traditional Irish corned beef is highlighted. The influence of war on changing dietary habits and on accelerating food innovation is also discussed.