Revival In Ireland Research Articles

Birdman, Fly: A Reconsideration of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds and the Pre-Christian Cloak of the Sweeney Tales

Abstract: The first section of this article provides context for Brian O'Nolan's At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), situating original, early textual tensions within the history of ascetic revival in Ireland in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. The second section offers a comparative look at O'Nolan's translation alongside J. G. O'Keeffe's 1913 touchstone text and Seamus Heaney's 1982 rendition of it. The final section examines two contemporary reconceptual film settings of the Sweeney tale to consider how the tale is reimagined in post-state, gendered, and secular contexts. Fragmented elements of ascetism endure via this endlessly changing tale for Celtic Christianity's contested center.

Religion Pays: The Business of Art Industry Entrepreneurs and Splendour in the Spaces of Nineteenth-Century Irish Catholicism

Abstract During the nineteenth century legislative reforms and religious revival in Ireland brought about significant change in the practice and position of Catholicism. This fostered a consumer revolution in religious art and architecture as architects, religious figures and a Catholic bourgeoisie aspired to recreate the architectural magnificence and status associated with Catholic churches of the medieval period in Ireland and Europe. The characteristic splendour of these interiors owes much to commercial producers of religious art from Britain and Europe. Makers of stained glass and decorative mosaics, in particular, dominated the Irish market even after the establishment of an Irish Arts and Crafts movement from the early 1890s and continued to thrive well into the twentieth century, even as Irish artist-designed church art grew more popular with patrons. This essay takes a fresh approach to analysing the spaces of Irish Catholicism by exploring the ‘backstage’ of religion from the perspective of commercial church art business history. It draws out two themes central to this Roundtable: the ways in which local sacred spaces and landscapes were impacted by transnational exchanges and processes, and the relationship between physical space and imaginative space in architectural production.

Schooling, the Gaelic League, and the Irish language revival in Ireland 1831–1922

ABSTRACTIn the two decades preceding Irish independence the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge, founded 1893), an organisation dedicated to the revival of the Irish language, campaigned to persuade both national and intermediate commissioners of education to reposition the language within the curriculum to reflect what the League believed was both its cultural significance and educational value. The campaign represented a fundamental principle in the rising wave of cultural and political nationalism that preceded the Easter Rising (1916) and its champion, Patrick Pearse, was until 1908 editor of the League’s periodical An Claidheamh Soluis (hereafter ACS). Pearse founded two Dublin schools, St Enda’s and St Ita’s, and, in 1916, was executed for his part in the rebellion. This article analyses that campaign in relation, not to its wider political or linguistic implications, indeed, as O’Rourke and Walsh note, “a definitive critical analysis of the revival of Irish in the late 19th Century has yet to be written”, but in terms of: the position of the language in Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century, its success at national (primary) and intermediate (secondary) level, the expectations placed upon the teaching body, and the demands made of teacher training colleges, and reviews the success of the campaign in terms of the afterlife of the language in an independent Ireland.

Austerity’s Model Pupil: The Ideological Uses of Ireland during the Eurozone Crisis

During the Eurozone crisis, Ireland would come to be regarded widely as a ‘poster child’ for the remedial powers of the austerity agenda and as a ‘role model’ for the other heavily indebted states. In this article, we offer a critical reading of the narrative of an Irish ‘recovery’ that has gained currency over recent years. Tracing the genealogy of terms such as ‘poster child’ and ‘role model’ reveals that they predate the recent apparent revival in Ireland’s economic fortunes. The specific point of origin of these metaphors suggests that the often euphoric discourse that has come to attend the Irish economy articulates a very specific political enterprise. In their efforts to cast the country as the harbinger of economic ‘recovery’, powerful political players have sought to make ideological use of Ireland to ensure that repayments would continue to flow from those European countries in which private bank debts were socialized after the crash. The success of this endeavour has meant that the crisis in the Eurozone has been resolved in the interests of those powerful forces that sparked it in the first place.

What’s in a Name? Reading the Character of Mary/Moira in Jane Urquhart’s Away

Introduction Jane Urquhart's Away (1993) is centred on the character of Mary, who is thought to be with the fairies, in a context of Famine and emigration. The novel, starting on Rathlin Island in the north of Ireland, ends in Ontario, and thus highlights the double meaning of its title. As a young woman on the island, Mary finds a dying sailor washed ashore after a shipwreck. Believing that he comes from another world, falls in love with him and decides that her name has changed: she recognized, immediately, that he came from an other world island, assumed that he had emerged from the water to look for her, and knew that her name had changed, in an instant, from Mary to Moira (Urquhart 2002: 8). From then on, is considered away by the rest of the community, that is, with the fairies, gone to the Otherworld. In the islanders' minds, the being who wanders on the shore and speaks to no one but the sea is not Mary but a changeling, a substitute for the stolen woman. She later marries a schoolteacher, Brian O'Malley, to whom bears a child, Liam. During the Great Famine, the family is forced to emigrate to Canada, where a daughter, Eileen, is born. The narration focuses alternatively on Mary, Eileen and the latter's granddaughter, Esther, spanning four generations of women who have, one way or another, been away. The Canadian writer plays on the meanings of the word itself to raise issues of belonging and identity in her fourth book. The very fact that the protagonist of the novel changes her name at the start of the narrative prompts the reader to wonder what the significance of this name is. In the same fashion that plays on the various meanings of the term away for the title of her novel, it seems that the numerous connotations of the name Mary/Moira are used by the author to develop a postcolonialist stance. Postcolonialism is a political, social and cultural movement which aspires to look back on the colonial years with a new focus, not on the coloniser and dominant power any more, but on the oppressed and repressed peoples and cultures. Postcolonialism has thus seen a renewed interest in local cultures, languages, folklore, etc., which is also a feature of nationalist movements. The postcolonial current is characterised by a focus on the disempowered minorities, and on the effects of colonialism. wrote Away from a perspective which criticises the colonial takeovers of Canada and (Sugars 2003: 5), though admittedly rather problematically (Goldman 2010: 133), looking for a way of reconciling the various heritages brought together by colonisation. According to Libby Birch, Urquhart draws on themes of muted cultures who can know a rebirth and thus emulates Lady Gregory and Yeats who play a vital role in effecting the Celtic revival in Ireland (Birch 1997: 118). The novel indeed focuses on the Irish immigrants to Canada and their interaction with indigenous peoples, rather than with the dominant powers in place in the Dominion at the time. diverges from the canonical models and shifts the focus to the unspoken stories of colonialism, of which Mary's and her Native friend Exodus's are thought of as archetypes. As an emigrant forced out of her country by colonialism and as a woman, Mary doubly personifies such a figure. The fact that subverts the codes of traditional writing by being an unconventional mother partakes of postcolonialism as well (Loomba 2010: 215-6). As has been noted previously, while Away deconstructs the imperial representations of the colonised and the coloniser, the individual is rendered visible (Branach-Kallas 2003: 140). Mary is the model of the postcolonial character in the narrative and this is expressed through the very choice of her double name of Mary/Moira in the novel. This article will first study the classical influence of the name before looking at the geographical elements. It will then focus on the ship imagery, to finish with the linguistic and religious connotations of Mary/Moira, in order to analyse how uses the name of her character to convey a sense of postcolonialism throughout the book. …

A Note on Joyce and the Irish Language

This article argues that, while Joyce was not a supporter of language revival in Ireland, he recognized a kinship with the utopian longings and modernist energies that subconsciously subtended the language movement. The essay makes conjectures about the extent to which Irish as a native vernacular was a psychological presence in Edwardian Dublin, speculating that many Dubliners, including people close to Joyce, must have had at least lingering memories of native Irish-speaking relatives or servants, a kind of Irish in contrast to some extent with the nationalist emblem being taught and learnt in Gaelic League classes across the city. The central claim of the essay is that certain strains of thought and feeling in the Gaelic revival movement — a longing for a more authentic language in which the soul might express itself, the ideal of a lost, more perfect language which might be recreated — chimed closely with many of Joyce’s own modernist ideas. The Irish language revival movement was thus not a conservative and provincial counter-current to metropolitan European modernism, but one expression of impulses and yearnings held in common with avant-garde writers in the early twentieth century.

Public intellectuals, language revival and cultural nationalism in Ireland and Wales: a comparison of Douglas Hyde and Saunders Lewis

This article compares the content and impact of two iconic lectures concerned with language revival in Ireland and Wales. The lectures are Douglas Hyde's ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’ of 1892 and Saunders Lewis's Tynged yr Iaith (Fate of the Language) of 1962. It explores the different types of ‘public’ addressed by these lecturers and contrasts the languages used to address those publics, as well as assessing the significance of the media of communication for how the two lectures were received. This diachronic comparison raises questions about how public intellectuals have, at different times, sought to defend and enhance the position of non-state languages in the United Kingdom and illuminates the role of cultural nationalism in different parts of that state. In addition, it argues that a diachronic comparison enjoins a clearer evaluation of historical context, a feature of the analysis that can be both problematic and illuminating.

The Gothic Revival in Ireland: St Colman’s Cathedral, Cobh (1868–1916)

The Gothic Revival in Ireland: St Colman’s Cathedral, Cobh (1868–1916)

Catholic Churchmen and the Celtic Revival in Ireland, 1848-1916 (review)

Reviewed by: Catholic Churchmen and the Celtic Revival in Ireland, 1848–1916 Frank A. Biletz Catholic Churchmen and the Celtic Revival in Ireland, 1848–1916. By Kevin Collins. (Dublin: Four Courts Press. Distributed in the United States by ISBS, Portland, Oregon.2002. Pp. 203. $50.00.) Historical accounts of the Celtic, or Gaelic, cultural revival in Ireland, which occurred during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have generally emphasized the significance of secular organizations, such as the Gaelic Athletic Association (founded in 1884) and the Gaelic League (1893), while suggesting that the Roman Catholic Church was, despite the participation of many priests in the movement, largely indifferent and, at times, even hostile to the cause of preserving traditional Gaelic culture and reviving the Irish language. Such narratives tend to locate the origins of Irish cultural nationalism in Thomas Davis, who as one of the leaders of the non-sectarian Young Ireland movement of the 1840's coupled advocacy of Irish political independence with calls for preserving the Irish language. Kevin Collins's useful and lucidly written study convincingly establishes a central and ongoing role in all phases of the Celtic revival for the Catholic clergy, including many prominent bishops, and argues that an unbreakable bond between Gaelic culture and the Catholic faith began to emerge in the writings of the historian Geoffrey Keating and other post-Reformation Irish Catholics as early as the seventeenth century. Despite continuing differences about political tactics, the Irish Catholic clergy and revolutionary nationalists had come, by the time of the Easter Rising in 1916, to conceive the Irish nation as being necessarily rooted in Gaelic cultural traditions and also inherently Catholic. Collins argues convincingly that clerical involvement in the Celtic revival was decisive and that, ultimately, the activities of Catholic bishops and priests were far more influential in instilling a sense of pride in the national cultural heritage among the masses of Irish people than such elite movements as the Anglo-Irish literary revival. Rather than following the familiar line of descent for the ideal of an "Irish Ireland," which runs from Davis through Douglas Hyde and D. P. Moran and culminates in Padraic Pearse, one of the martyrs of 1916, Collins details contributions of equal or even greater significance made by such Catholic priests as Father John Lanigan (1758-1828), Canon Ulick Bourke (1829-1887), Father Peter O'Leary (1839-1920), Father Patrick Dinneen (1860-1934), Father Michael O'Hickey (1861-1917), and Father Eugene O'Growney (1863-1899). While Lanigan was an antiquarian and church historian of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the others were all active in the Irish language movement during the Celtic revival. Collins also highlights the strong support given the Irish language and Gaelic culture by Archbishop John MacHale (1791-1881) of Tuam, who translated much of The Iliad into Irish, Archbishop Thomas William Croke (1823-1902) of Cashel, who served as a patron of the Gaelic Athletic Association, and other bishops. Especially revealing is Collins's treatment of Paul Cardinal Cullen (1802-1878), commonly regarded as an enemy of the national cause because of his firm opposition to the revolutionary Fenians. Collins points out, however, that Cullen strongly supported an Irish identity that was both Catholic and Gaelic, and regarded the "golden age" of "saints and scholars" in early medieval Ireland as the foundation of a continuous national historical tradition, the strength of which had allowed the Irish people to endure such subsequent traumas [End Page 331] as the Penal Laws of the eighteenth century and the Great Famine of the 1840's without sacrificing either their national identity or their faith. Although their mutual participation in the Celtic revival provided clerical and lay cultural nationalists in Ireland a common perspective on the nature of Irish identity, they still had very significant differences about particular issues. A controversy erupted in 1909, for instance, over the status of the Irish language at the new National University. Contrary to Gaelic League demands, the Catholicbishops opposed making it mandatory for matriculation. Father Michael O'Hickey, professor of Irish at the seminary at Maynooth, was dismissed because of his outspoken support of the League. Although Collins rightly balances this...

Catholic churchmen and the Celtic revival in Ireland, 1848-1916. By Kevin Collins. Pp 203. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2002. €50.

Catholic churchmen and the Celtic revival in Ireland, 1848-1916. By Kevin Collins. Pp 203. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2002. €50.

WARLORDS, HOLY MEN AND MATRILINEAL SUCCESSION

The author of Scandinavian Kings in the British Isles and of Celtic Leinstet1 has acquired a formidable reputation for scholarship and controversy and his incursion into Scottish history has been eagerly awaited. Expectations have not been disappointed. In Warlords and Holy Men Dr. Smyth has produced a splendid and spirited book. He has used his knowledge of Irish and also of Anglo-Saxon history to point apt and often novel comparisons and, as in Celtic Leinster, he makes the reader conscious of the influence of landscape and geography on the shaping of history. The book is written throughout with great verve and freshness of style, always readable and frequently compelling, a remarkable achievement given the difficult and intractable nature of the raw material. There are, however, no half measures with Dr Smyth: his point of view is always pressed strongly and often provocatively. In his first chapter 'Britons in the Shadow of the Roman Wall' he emphasises that neither the Antonine Wall nor Hadrian's Wall is to be seen as a limit, as a clearly defined physical frontier marking the boundary of the Roman Empire. Rather they are to be seen as a means of monitoring and patrolling a frontier area which extended from the Peak District to the Forth. 'Part of the reason why chaos reigns in Romano-British studies as to the correct chronology and sequence of occupations of the Antonine and Hadrianic Walls in the period AD 150-207,' he writes, 'is the insistence of historians in assuming that either one wall or the other must have marked the absolute limits of empire at any given time.' (pp 9-12) Another theme of the chapter is the fifth-century British revival in the North, which is compared to the fourteenth-century Gaelic revival in Ireland. Smyth portrays the Gwyr y Gogledd, the Britons of the North, as they re-emerge on the historical record in the fifth century, as little affected by the centuries of Roman occupation, their archaic culture continuing almost unchanged into the seventh century until shattered by the kings of Northumbria, and particularly by Ecgfrith. It is a mistake to view the north British rulers of this period as sub-Roman successors of client kings, says Smyth; rather they were 'a full-blooded barbarian Celtic aristocracy accoutred in Iron Age tores', apparently 'untouched by even the thinnest veneer of Romanization' (p. 18). This emphasis on continuity does provide valuable insights, not least on relations between Britons and Picts, but the argument here is surely overdone. Like many before him Dr Smyth urges caution about the use of the name 'Pict': the name is essentially a historical one, a loose description of people living north of the Antonine Wall. It is a mistake to associate the term 'Pict' too closely with one set of material remains or place-name elements to the exclusion of others. On the other