Irish Roots Research Articles

P. B. Shelley, George William Tighe, and the Irish Roots of ‘The Sensitive-Plant’

This essay investigates the literary exchanges between the Irish poet and agronomist George William Tighe and Percy Bysshe Shelley in Pisa, where the former lived with Margaret King Mount Cashell, alias ‘Mrs Mason’, a radical Irish writer and former pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft. After moving to Pisa in 1820, Shelley began daily visits to the Mason-Tighe household, sourcing from Tighe's library a wealth of reading material on agricultural chemistry and botany, alongside Irish political and historical titles. Tighe's previously unexamined papers showcase his interests in Irish and Italian literature, republicanism, botany, and agriculture and reveal his links with the Lunar Society of Birmingham. Taking as a case study the first poem Shelley composed in Pisa, I argue that Tighe's agricultural pursuits shaped Shelley's political and botanical imagination in ‘The Sensitive-Plant’ and exerted a significant influence on Shelley's later poetry as a whole.

The Shortest Way Home? A Geo-critical Return to C.S. Lewis's Prince Caspian

This paper revisits C.S. Lewis's relationship with his Irish roots and offers a geo-critical reading of his 1951 novel Prince Caspian. An excavation of Irish elements latent in this text yields important insights into Lewis's preoccupations, including colonialism and conflict, and ecological crisis. The paper situates these concerns in an Irish cultural context but concludes that Lewis's thinking is of contemporary relevance and worthy of renewed focus, not only in Ireland but globally.

Irish Roots in Graciela Gabal's Story "Gualicho"

Graciela Cabal (1939-2004) was an Argentine children’s writer and an important and active figure in the consolidation of a youth literature in Argentina in the 1980s. She descended from two large Irish families who settled in Suipacha (Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina). Cabal lends her marvelous literary voice to those sheep raisers in the short story “Gualicho”, about a failed wedding and a bewitched groom in the Irish community around 1850, in which even Father Fahey is present to bless the ceremony. What at first sight appears as a beautiful children's story turns into a narrative of migration with intertexts from Jorge Luis Borges and from Argentina's national poem Martín Fierro. Cabal’s “Irishness” (also present in Secretos de Familia, her autobiographical novel) has never been studied and her texts are probably the only ones in Argentine children's fiction which make reference to the early Irish community

Edward Ernest Cockayne

Edward Ernest Cockayne (“Ted”) was born in Broken Cross near Macclesfield, a mill town in Cheshire, as the only child of Ernest and Sarah Cockayne on 29 February 1940. Sarah...

Ecology in Paul Muldoon’s Postcolonial Poetry

This paper considers the place of ecology and environmentalist thought in Paul Muldoon’s postcolonial poetry. Employing the principles of postcolonial ecocriticism, the study throws light upon Muldoon’s poetical works where the Irish-American poet tries to preserve his native agricultural identity and tradition in face of the global Anglo-American culture. In most of his verse volumes, Muldoon mentions agrarian and green aspects as well as native rustic jargon, which helps enliven and strengthen his native Irish roots, and shield the Gaelic region’s distinct cultural and linguistic heritage. The poet’s portrayal of local landscape phenomena entails intellectual and emotional intimacy. He is personally attached to Irish ecological spots, and they are venues in which he finds a considerably remarkable meaning ,i.e., solid ground on which the anti-conquest’s cultural-lingual resistance stands. The private ( and public) worth of this georgic atmosphere helps foster both the poet’s and his natives’ stance against a plotted process of naturalization. Muldoon’s poems, too, show how postcolonial corporeal and cultural effect endeavours to boom throughout human and environmental worlds.

Irish Roots in Graciela Gabal's Story "Gualicho"

Graciela Cabal (1939-2004) was an Argentine children’s writer and an important and active figure in the consolidation of a youth literature in Argentina in the 1980s. She descended from two large Irish families who settled in Suipacha (Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina). Cabal lends her marvelous literary voice to those sheep raisers in the short story “Gualicho”, about a failed wedding and a bewitched groom in the Irish community around 1850, in which even Father Fahey is present to bless the ceremony. What at first sight appears as a beautiful children's story turns into a narrative of migration with intertexts from Jorge Luis Borges and from Argentina's national poem Martin Fierro. Cabal’s “Irishness” (also present in Secretos de Familia, her autobiographical novel) has never been studied and her texts are probably the only ones in Argentine children's fiction which make reference to the early Irish community

Yeatsian Modernism: Romantic Nationalism, Hero Worship, and the “Celtic Element” in Tender Is the Night and The Love of the Last Tycoon

Abstract Most scholars have overlooked F. Scott Fitzgerald's relationship to his Irish roots and the role that his “Irishness” plays in his writing. This article explores how the “Celtic Element” in literature, popularized by writers like Matthew Arnold and W. B. Yeats in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, influenced Fitzgerald's response to the crisis of modernity. By examining Fitzgerald's artistic and aesthetic relationship to his Irish heritage—tied to the debate between Arnold and Yeats on the characteristics and value of Celtic Literature—and by drawing textual comparisons between the work of Yeats and Fitzgerald, this article shows how, like Yeats, Fitzgerald employs the use of tragic heroes to promote premodern characteristics as a response to the materialism he saw tainting modern American society. Examining specifically Yeats's On Baile's Strand in relation to Tender Is the Night and The Love of the Last Tycoon, this article argues that Fitzgerald employs the same type of “romantic nationalism” as the great Irish poet and dramatist. Both authors' protagonists represent ancestral ideals and values that have been lost to the rise of modernity.

Pornography and ethics: an interview with porn performer Blath

Blath is a UK-based porn performer and photographer with Irish roots and experience in alternative/feminist porn production. She makes films for Foxclore Films, a self-described artisanal pornograp...

An Irish-American in Paris: Swan Hennessy (1866–1929)

(Edward) Swan Hennessy (1866–1929) was an Irish-American composer resident in Paris from c1903, where he developed a reputation as a ‘Celtic’ composer, drawing mainly on his Irish heritage. Although the majority of his known works (numbering more than 80) are still in print and occasionally performed, especially by chamber musicians, his life and career have hitherto remained largely unknown. Condensing aspects of the author’s forthcoming life-and-works monograph on the composer, this article is the first academic study to trace Hennessy’s biography and to provide a critical assessment of his music. It draws on genealogical information, archive material in the Hennessy family’s possession and other sources for establishing the composer’s Irish roots, the circumstances of his education, early career and travels in Europe. His network of contacts and influences in France and his reception on the musical scene and in the press are also examined, with extensive use of sources from England, Ireland and Germany as well as France, including reviews of concerts and his published music. While the focus of the article is on the nature of and reasons for Hennessy’s musical celticism, the assessment of his music also encompasses the non-celticist works that reveal an impressionist voice influenced by Debussy and Ravel. The article concludes with a comprehensive catalogue of Hennessy’s compositions.

Book Review: The Sons of Molly Maguire: The Irish Roots of America’s First Labor War by Mark Bulik

Mark Bulik The Sons of Molly Maguire: The Irish Roots of America's First Labor War, New York: Fordham University Press, 2015; 384 pp.: ISBN 97808232O2236, $39.95 On 2 January 1863, five assassins killed James Bergen, a disabled Union Army veteran. A week later, two of his friends were shot and wounded. These events, iMark Bulik writes, marked the start of the first labour war in the United States. The assassins were Molly Maguires, members of a secret society noted for resorting to violence. From 1877 to 1878, 20 Mollies were tried and executed. Plenty of ink has been spilled about the Molly Maguires. Some contemporaries derided them as primitive terrorists. Marxists and Socialists considered the executed Mollies martyrs. Much of what we know about the Mollies, the author argues, is either problematic or badly interpreted. Therefore, this book strips away some of the gray mist of myth, misinformation, and propaganda that has long shrouded the origins of the Molly Maguires' (p. 9). One of Bulik's principal objectives is to contextualize the Mollies by placing them in a transatlantic context. He contends that the lack of consensus about the Molly Maguires is partly because many writers tended to view the violence in a primarily American context, rather than an Irish one' (p. 7). To counter this trend, he spends nearly a third of the book hunting for the Irish roots of the Mollies. To his credit, he unearths fascinating information. For instance, he highlights the relationship between the Mollies and mummery, or, an ancient play performed by amateur troopers who visited nearby homes during the Christmas season' (p. 28). Mummers and the Mollies were different sides of the same coin. The mummers were the 'benevolent face of an alternative social order' (p. 43). The Mollies, the darker side, utilized violence to terrorize landlords in Ireland and mine owners in the United States. Thus, in addition to finding that the Molly Maguires and the mummers were of a piece, Bulik offers a social history of Ireland. He focusses on the fierce conflicts between tenants and landlords. In his analysis of organized agrarian violence, he discusses two broad groups. The Whiteboys were a loose-knit, largely apolitical southern Ireland organization concerned with 'issues related to the land and rural life' (p. 46). The Defenders and the Ribbonmen, on the other hand, concentrated in Ulster and 'busied themselves in sectarian battles, labor activity, nationalist politics, and tenant rights' (p. 46). The Defenders, the earlier organization, were suppressed and reborn as the Ribbonmen. The Molly Maguires debuted on 10 December 1844 and were quickly revealed to be Ribbonmen 'who had adopted a new name, a new agenda, and a new set of symbols, whole keeping their old organizational structure' (p. 87). The Mollies maintained a militant focus on access to land and food and 'showed a remarkable willingness to move beyond mere threats by taking on the authorities with aggressive shows of force' (p. 93). Throughout the rest of the book, Bulik discusses the consequences of transplanting this alternative social order to the United States. Irish immigrants carried their own legacy from the deadly competition for land in the north of Ireland--a tradition of collective action that soon became evident, in two related forms. …

An Irish Sovereignty Motif in Laxdæla saga

While overall extent of Irish influence on Old Norse literature is still debated, (2) there is critical agreement on importance of Irish material to Laxdola sagai' because this text offers a sustained focus on Celtic presence in Iceland. Not only does begin in Seotland, but Melkorka, daughter of King Myrkjartan of Ireland, plays a prominent role: she had been carried off in a slave raid at age 15 and eventually becomes mother of Olafr pai. These features suggest that Laxdola is the family which approaches question of Irish blood in Iceland most squarely (Sayers 1988, 97). Building off foundational comparative work of Rosemary Power and William Sayers, this article adduces a previously unnoticed Irish motif in Laxdola saga: sovereignty test for kingship, best illustrated by Old Irish Echtra Mac n Echach Muigmedoin (The Adventures of Sons of Eochaid Mugmedon), (4) earliest surviving example of a genre of medieval Irish tales that focus on sovereignty. (5) Olafr pai and his Irish counterpart, Niall Noigiallach, are both illegitimate and youngest sons who gain their fathers' inheritances at expense of their older, legitimate brothers, yet by time this motif appears in Laxdola saga, outcome and significance of sovereignty test have shifted. Awareness of these changes sheds new light on both Olafr's status in Laxdola and values at stake in his rejection of Irish kingship. In finding points of contact between Olafr and heroic biographies of Irish kings, Sayers has argued for an appreciation of Irish concept of kingship and interest in manipulating this information for thematic ends in Laxdola saga (Sayers 1989, 92), noting ways in which Olafr fails to fulfill tripartite functions of a successful sovereign (legal justice, military success, agricultural prosperity) in Irish model of kingship. Recognizing Irish roots of sovereignty test in Laxdola further aids our understanding of this work's use of Celtic motifs, as depicts Olafr successfully passing a series of sovereignty tests, yet ultimately rejecting that sovereignty itself. In what follows, I will explore parallels between Laxdola and Irish trope of sovereignty test and discuss how its themes of inheritance, leadership, and kingship have been reshaped and reframed in Icelandic milieu in saga. As Laxdola itself indicates, there were numerous avenues for oral transmission of cultural material from Celtic British Isles to ears of early medieval Icelanders. Historical and literary accounts of Iceland's foundation make clear that a significant proportion of its population, particularly its female population, came from slave raids on British Isles, (6) and recent genetic studies have confirmed that roughly 60 percent of Icelandic female settlers and 20 percent of Icelandic male settlers were of Celtic origin (Agnar Helgason, Sigrtm Siguroardottir, Gulcher, et al. 2000; Agnar Helgason, Sigrun Siguroardottir, Nicholson, et al. 2000; Agnar Helgason et al. 2001). The Viking Age Norse settlements in Ireland and rest of British Isles offer another avenue by which medieval Icelanders would have become familiar with Celtic cultural material. (7) As recent studies by Rosemary Power (1985; 2013), John D. Niles (2006), and Matthias Egeler (2013) have demonstrated, Norse (and Anglo-Saxon) texts incorporated a great deal of Celtic material that was transmitted orally before surviving manuscripts in either language were written. As Power notes, the oldest area of contact between Norse and Gaelic worlds, involving transmission of stories of kind now regarded as literature or folktale, seems to have occurred almost exclusively in Viking Age, though possibility that traditional stories that had circulated orally might have been open to supplementation by travellers' accounts in later times (i. …

Book Review: The Sons of Molly Maguire: The Irish Roots of America’s First Labor War, by Mark Bulik

Book Review: <i>The Sons of Molly Maguire: The Irish Roots of America’s First Labor War</i>, by Mark Bulik

Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South by Bryan Giemza (review)

Reviewed by: Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South by Bryan Giemza Kieran Quinlan Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South. By Bryan Giemza. [Southern Literary Studies.] (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2013. Pp. xiv, 361. $49.95 clothbound, ISBN 978-0-8071-5090-0; $39.95 paperback, ISBN 978-0-8071-59091-7.) Our understanding of the Irish Catholic presence in the American South has substantially changed over the last couple of decades due to scholarly investigations in a number of areas. The presumption of a solid “Scotch-Irish”—the usual term—hegemony has been modified by awareness that Catholic and Protestant identities in the north of Ireland and in Scotland were often fluid in the eighteenth century, that over the decades many nominal Irish Catholics morphed into Scotch-Irish Protestants because of the unavailability of churches of their own denomination in the Southern states, and that there were hosts of other migratory forgettings and anomalies. Of course, one should always have been a little suspicious of a solid South thesis in a world shaped by Father Abraham Ryan, the region’s hugely popular poet laureate in the nineteenth century; Kate O’Flaherty Chopin, disruptive feminist and unconventional Catholic; Scarlett O’Hara, iconic Southern belle; and Flannery O’Connor (a distant relation of Margaret Mitchell, as it turns out), a writer who dominated the genre of the Southern short story. In the past, an American Catholicism that was both defensive and triumphalist occasionally drew attention to some of these matters, whereas the idea of a “Celtic South” enjoyed surprising (and disturbing) popularity in the 1980s. Albert S. Foley’s challenging 1950s study of the biracial Healys of Georgia—one of them the “second founder” of Georgetown University—introduced a complication in the received narrative of minimal Irish Catholic Southern presence but without changing the overall understanding of the matter. What is new now is the emergence of a more mature and less belligerent examination of tangled histories. Brian Giemza is one of the most active scholars in this area with a previous study of Ryan (Poet of the Lost Cause [Knoxville, 2008], with Donald Robert Beagle) and an edited collection (Rethinking the Irish in the American South [Jackson, MS, 2013]). His present study recapitulates and greatly extends this theme with a wealth of material both secondary and archival on writers of Catholic Irish background in the South over the last two centuries. Some of these names will be unfamiliar even to those engaged with the subject; others are more canonical but here presented in a new light or with a reinvigorated analysis. In particular, Giemza’s sections on Lafcadio Hearn, Joel Chandler Harris, Flannery O’Connor, John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces, Baton Rouge, 1980), Cormac McCarthy (based on extensive archival work), Pat Conroy, and Anne Rice (an interview) offer new material. Again and again, Giemza presses his argument in engaging ways—not, for example, too readily accepting O’Connor’s dismissal of her Irish roots but teasing out her many evasions, omissions, and contradictions on the subject. Giemza’s book also acknowledges the changing context of Catholicism in the modern world and is by no means a pious reiteration of orthodoxy, even if his own religious position seems to vacillate at times. His overall argument, then, is not that persons of Irish Catholic background invented the American South but [End Page 641] rather that they have contributed more to its formation than has been acknowledged and, in closing, that the Catholic element at least will continue as the Hispanic population of the region grows. If the book has a problem, it is because the author has so much to present that the narrative occasionally becomes overwhelming. Indeed, as Giemza acknowledges, “Space constraints have left more than one hundred pages of this manuscript on the cutting-room floor” (p. 273). We can expect to hear more from this investigative author. Kieran Quinlan University of Alabama at Birmingham Copyright © 2014 The Catholic University of America Press

Rethinking the Irish in the American South: Beyond Rounders and Reelers ed. by Bryan Albin Giemza (review)

Reviewed by: Rethinking the Irish in the American South: Beyond Rounders and Reelers ed. by Bryan Albin Giemza Peter D. O’Neill (bio) Rethinking the Irish in the American South: Beyond Rounders and Reelers. Edited by Bryan Albin Giemza. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. Pp. 223. $60.00 cloth) Studies of Irish migration to the United States recently have placed renewed focus on the experiences of the Irish in the American South. In Rethinking the Irish in the American South: Beyond Rounders and Reelers, an interdisciplinary collection of essays, editor Bryan Albin Giemza has produced a worthy addition to this literature. Contributors to the volume include two persons particularly responsible for the resurgent interest in this area, Kieran Quinlan and David Gleeson. Quinlan’s “After Strange Kin: Further Reflections on the Relations between Ireland and the American South,” is found in “Questions of Historical Definition,” the first of three sections in the collection. As its title suggests, the essay reflects upon the impact of Strange Kin: Ireland and the American South (2007), Quinlan’s influential challenge both to facile, religion-based categorizations of Irish migrants to the South and to frequently ill-informed comparisons between the geographic entities of Ireland and the South. Completing the opening section of this volume are William Ferris’s “‘A Lengthening Chain in the Shape of Memories’: The Irish and Southern Culture” and Patrick Griffin’s “Irish Migration to the Colonial South: A Plea for a Forgotten Topic,” both of which offer a nuanced view of Irish migration to the southern states. The second section, “Manipulating Culture: Influence, Reconsidered,” will resonate with persons interested in literary and cultural studies. Geraldine Higgins’s superb “Tara, the O’Haras, and the Irish Gone With the Wind,” investigates the element of Irishness in the racialist chemistry of Margaret Mitchell’s famous text. Next is Kathryn Stelmach Artuso’s “Transatlantic Rites of Passage in the Friendship and Fiction of Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen,” an insightful, if [End Page 518] at times repetitive, exposé of the relationship between two celebrated writers: Welty, a Mississippian, and Bowen, a Dublin-born Anglo-Irishwoman. Rounding off the section are two illuminating essays, “Shared Traditions: Irish and Appalachian Ballads and Whiskey Songs” by Emily Kader and “Black and Celts on the Riverine Frontiers: The Roots of American Popular Music” by Christopher Smith. It is to the final section on “Ideology and Ambivalence” that Gleeson contributes his chapter, “Another ‘Lost Cause’: The Irish in the South Remember the Confederacy.” In this essay, Gleeson, author of the seminal work The Irish in the South, 1815–1877 (2001), describes how the Irish in the South engaged in Lost Cause rituals, so that they “and their offspring overcame a mixed war record and suspicions of their foreignness, becoming part of what it meant to be southern in the New South” (p. 179). He sets the stage nicely for Giemza’s “On the Uses of Slavery: The Irish in the South and Civil War Rhetoric.” This absorbing and groundbreaking essay uncovers the previously obscured Irish roots of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, author of the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 Dred Scott ruling. The essay examines the significance of Taney’s Roman Catholicism with regard to the slavery issue, and presents a fascinating account of observations by Irish who visited the United States during the Civil War. Giemza observes that “invented rhetorical parallels between Ireland and the American South . . . deployed by the likes of Irish revolutionary John Mitchel . . . had real traction among the Southern Irish ascendant” (p. 189). Ironically, Conor O’Callaghan, whose “Smoke ‘n’ Guns: A Preface to a Poem about Marginal Souths, and Then the Poem” concludes the collection, indulges in similarly misguided invention. In equating the Irish Republican Army with the Ku Klux Klan, O’Callaghan displays a historical revisionism just as blinkered as that in which Mitchel engaged more than 150 years earlier. This chapter seems an incongruous choice for the collection’s “Coda.” Yet it does not despoil what precedes it; to the contrary, O’Callaghan’s conflation underlines the need for the clarity and the precision amply provided by the rest of the contributors to this fine collection. [End...

Laments in Transition: The Irish-Australian songs of Sally Sloane (1894–1982)

Irish music in Australia has a strong tradition though it is less thoroughly documented and less frequently the subject of scholarly inquiry than in Ireland, the British Isles and North America. From the earliest days of white settlement in Australia, the Irish represented a significant proportion of total immigrants. One in three convicts transported to Australia from Great Britain after 1798 was Irish. About 20 per cent of these were connected with political and agrarian unrest in England and Ireland and many who survived transportation and incarceration continued rebellious activities directed at the ruling class in Australia. Irish immigration continued to increase in the nineteenth century as a result not only of the famine of the 1840s, but also because of growing persecution from English landlords who raised rents to levels resulting in mass evictions. After 1840, emigration became a vast, relentless national phenomenon. Between 1789 and 1921 about half a million Irish people set sail for Australia.1 Those leaving Ireland turned towards an unknown future half a world away beyond perilous oceans, not expecting to see their homeland again. Oliver MacDonagh, in his book Sharing the Green: A modern Irish history for Australians, asks:How was it to know that 'home' was much too distant to be seen again, or that one now lived in an expanse into which more than a thousand Irelands could be fitted, or to find the legendary rhythm of the seasons on which so many of the European patterns rested no longer formed the framework of the year?2The answer to McDonagh's question can be found in the music that developed in Australia, sung by colonial singers within the Irish diaspora, dating from the songs brought by the convicts and sailors who travelled to Australia on the First Fleet. Transportation ballads, which were often published as broadsides (printed on unfolded sheets of paper that could be pasted upon walls or carried easily), were the earliest of these songs, with titles such as 'The Convict Maid', 'The Transport's Lament' and 'The Black Velvet Band'. These were laments with lyrics protesting the innocence of the narrator against the vicissitudes of cruel fate. With so much left behind in the shape of family and the homeland itself, music was the portable, intangible, infinitely expandable mesh in which immigrants carried memories of their cultural identity.As MacDonagh asserts, the concept of diaspora encompasses more than one homeland and this duality facilitates the development of new songs grafted onto old musical rootstock. Longing for family and 'home' in Ireland is a sentiment regularly voiced today by Australian musicians for sympathetic audiences who are four or more generations removed from their Irish roots, so enduring is the residual dislocation from the mother culture. Songs of protest that travelled with Irish political prisoners transported to Australia were adapted and lived on in the new country, sung as songs of complaint about injustices perpetrated by the colonial government and wealthy landowners. They are still sung, sometimes with modernised lyrics, to equate a contemporary situation with that of the past.This essay examines laments in transition through the case study of Sally Sloane (1894-1982), a traditional Australian singer whose performance style and repertoire were strongly influenced by the songs she learned, by ear, passed down by her Irish grandmother and mother. These original Irish ballads remained in her repertoire as well as English and Scottish traditional songs, bush ballads and popular music-hall songs learned from the musicians she met throughout her life. Sloane was interviewed and recorded by a number of folkmusic collectors-John Meredith, Edgar Waters and Peter Hamilton, Warren Fahey and Graham Seal, Emily Lyle and Chris Sullivan-from the 1950s until the late 1970s.The case study of Sally Sloane is derived from my doctoral dissertation, titled 'Redefining the tradition: the role of women in the evolution and transmission of Australian folk music'. …

“Like the tombs of nameless kings”: Louis MacNeice’s Western Anti-Pastoral

Throughout his career as a poet, Louis MacNeice, born in Belfast but schooled and resident in England, looks at the western counties of Ireland, and indeed the island itself, as a repository of historical memory, including the western Irish roots of his own family. While the east – that is, continental Europe – is embroiled in the Spanish Civil War and the coming Second World War and is thus seen as a site of significant contemporary action in MacNeice’s work, what action takes place in western Ireland tends to be in the past; both celebratory poems like the “Sligo and Mayo” and “Galway” parts of “The Closing Album”, parts 06 and more ambivalent pieces like “Valediction” and “Neutrality” stress an attachment to the past bred by insularity. Ireland’s concerns, to the expatriate MacNeice, are exclusively local and rooted in ancient history. The Irish Sea separates the island from the broader currents of European history, and it becomes an attraction for tourists from across the water, as noted in “Valediction”. Ireland – particularly the cultural nationalist ideal promoted by the Revival – is a kind of archive, but it is one which has become obscure, as indicated by “the tombs of nameless kings” (CP 181) in “Sligo and Mayo”. The holiday visitors who come to look into the past can no longer comprehend it, as the rest of the world has moved on. The pastoral modes that Yeats and his immediate successors applied to the west of Ireland obscure the violence of the present in favor of an idealized past that MacNeice cannot endorse.

Tara, the M3, and the Celtic Tiger

This article explores the intersubjectivities of person and place, present and past, imagination and memory, heritage and identity, in the context of a decade-long dispute over the Irish government’s decision to build a motorway through the iconic landscape of Tara in County Meath. Tara has performed as a mnemonic for innumerable cultural narratives from the Neolithic to the twentieth century—stories materialized in the archaeological monuments and sedimented in the landscape. The state’s backing of the motorway signaled a departure from the traditional, state-encouraged yoking of Tara with Irish roots, identity, and nationalism and pointed to a major reconfiguration of the state’s relationship with its cultural heritage at the height of the economic boom called the Celtic Tiger. Public debate became entangled with bitterly contesting views about the republic’s economic and political direction. The paper argues that the campaign to “save Tara” was a fight as much for intangible heritage as for tangible heritage.

The Irish Connection: Tyrone Guthrie and Regional Theater

The Irish Connection:Tyrone Guthrie and Regional Theater Patrick O'Donnell On June 27, 2006, the North American premiere of DruidSynge by Galway's Druid Theatre Company took place in the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the first production in a $125 million, three-stage structure on a new site that included thrust, proscenium, and black box stages. The premiere and the dazzling building bespoke newness and originality; but the occasion also reminded attendees of an extraordinary continuity in the Minneapolis company's history. The most conspicuous continuity was the fact that two Irishmen had played central parts in the Guthrie's history. Sir Tyrone Guthrie had founded the theater as a classics-based thrust stage theater and served as its first artistic director from 1963 to 1966. Joe Dowling had become the seventh artistic director in 1995, and it was under his leadership that the Guthrie had been reinvented in this new location. As a local journalist noted, The new Guthrie Theater is the manifest vision of one man—Joe Dowling, a fighter and a visionary, a wit and an emissary of American theatre. But who is he really? When the curtain rises on the new Guthrie, the playhouse will still bear the name of Tyrone Guthrie, the Irish director who ignited America's regional performing arts movement when he opened a theatre in Minneapolis in 1963. But the marquee credit for the $125 million riverfront megastructure that debuts in June belongs to another Irishman. Joe Dowling, artistic director since 1995, has led the Guthrie through a long and sometimes bruising quest for a bold new building designed by French architect Jean Nouvel—and into a new era.1 Dowling was acutely aware of the links; he had, in fact, employed his connection to the Irish roots of Sir Tyrone Guthrie to shape an inspiring and enabling narrative that led to moving, expanding, and re-inventing the theater. In his first press conference at the Guthrie Theater after his appointment, Dowling had declared, "I have all my life been inspired by the life and work of Tyrone Guthrie. People often think that because Guthrie was knighted, he was English. I am here to correct that misconception."2 Dowling brought a comprehensive [End Page 127] sense of Guthrie's Irish connections to his appointment. Guthrie (1900-1971) was very much a living presence among Dowling's theatrical colleagues. Dowling had joined the Abbey Theatre as a student in 1967, was accepted into the company in 1968, and began ascending the rungs of authority at the Irish National Theatre after 1970. Both Dowling's mentors, the playwright Brian Friel and Tomás Mac Anna, artistic director at the Abbey from 1973 to 1978, were deeply influenced by Guthrie. Friel attended the inaugural rehearsals of the Guthrie Theater from April to June, 1963, and completed his masterly evisceration of small-town emotional paralysis, Philadelphia, Here I Come! on returning to Ireland from his Minneapolis sojourn. Mac Anna credited Guthrie's visually stylish 1950 Gate Hamlet with influencing his inventive Irish language pantomimes and invited Guthrie to present both George Shiels's McCook's Corner and Eugene McCabe's Swift at the Abbey in 1968-69.3 Mac Anna would direct Juno and the Paycock at the Guthrie Theater in 1973 at the invitation of Guthrie's protégé, Michael Langham, before returning to Dublin to helm the Abbey and allow his own protégé, Joe Dowling to run the Peacock, the Abbey's second experimental stage. Many of Dowling's other colleagues had been imprinted by Guthrie's passion for theater. For instance Hugh Hunt, the Abbey's artistic director from 1969-70 had encouraged Dowling to set up the Young Abbey, Ireland's first theatre-in-education group, and had served as Guthrie's assistant at the Old Vic from 1951 to 1952. The web of connection can be extended through almost the whole of the Irish theatrical community.4 [End Page 128] Joseph Zeigler, in Regional Theatre: The Revolutionary Stage (1973) categorizes the development and evolution of the regional theater movement in three images: "acorn" theatres, which were small theaters before 1960; "sapling" or intermediary and middle-sized theaters after...

Scotland's Sectarianism Problem: Irish Answers?

A series of developments during the 2010–11 football season has led to an intense public debate over the question of the nature and extent of religious sectarianism in Scotland. The Scottish National Party (SNP) government has responded with a new piece of legislation which has been widely criticised and has prompted some commentators to speculate about a political ‘own goal’. This article provides a guide to the debate around sectarianism and its historical and political dimensions. It also suggests that the Irish roots of the problem in Scotland should be properly acknowledged, and that a possible way forward could involve cooperation between Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland within the structures and procedures of the British–Irish Council (BIC).

The Curse of the Chameleon: A Comparison between Brutus Jones and James Tyrone

The Curse of the Chameleon: A Comparison between Brutus Jones and James Tyrone