NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Fomhar/Autumn 1997




Michael D. Higgins
Culture and Exile: The Global Irish
Andrew J. Wilson
From the Beltway to Belfast:
The Clinton Administration, Sinn Féin,
and the Northern Ireland Peace Process
Jacqueline McCurry
A Land “Not ‘Borrowed’ but ‘Purloined’”:
Paul Muldoon’s Indians
Micheal O’Siadhail
Filíocht Nua: New Poetry
Thomas B. O’Grady
Bowdlerizing the Bawdy: Translations
of Dáibhí Ó Bruadair’s “Seirbhíseach seirgthe”
Leslie Williams
“Rint” and “Repale”: Punch
and the Image of Daniel O’Connell, 1842–1847
Thomas E. Jordan
“A Great Statistical Operation”:
A Century of Irish Censuses, 1812–1911
Thomas McCarthy
Letter from Ireland: Litir ó Éirinn Celtic Tiger, Irish Climate
Richard F. Peterson
Visionary Gleam: Corkery and the O’Connor Generation
Frank Hall
Ceol Traidisíunta: Traditional Music
Your Mr. Joyce is a Fine Man,
But Have You Seen Riverdance?
Reviews: Léirmheasanna

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí     
Michael D. Higgins’s lecture “Culture and Exile: The Global Irish” marked with singular pertinence the publication of the first issue of New Hibernia Review in February, 1997. Speaking both in English and Irish to a packed auditorium on a chill Minnesota night, Minister Higgins developed the diasporic themes of native identity and intercontinental exile stressing not simply the pains of Ireland’s postcoloniality, but also the promise of Ireland’s precedent. Drawing both upon his collaboration with Prof. Declan Kiberd and upon his experience as both a sociologist and a Labour politician, Higgins touches here upon the present binaries in Irish culture pointing out its historical, geographically migrant character, as well as its internal emigré sensibility. It is, in his phrase, an “ecumenical definition of the Irish” that Higgins’s essay seeks. Maker of documentary films, scholar, poet, Higgins received the first the first Séan MacBride Peace Prize in Helsinki in 1993. Recently appointed Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College, Dublin, Dr. Declan Kiberd is the author of Inventing Ireland: The Literature of Modern Ireland (1995).

This summer’s British and Irish elections, not to mention those in France, altered the political tenor of Western Europe and, especially, the dynamics of the “peace process” in Northern Ireland, which Andrew Wilson analyzes here in a postscript to his recent Irish-America and the Ulster Conflict, 1968–1995. Prof. Wilson extends that political history by delineating the forces at play in the Clinton Administration’s much-lauded and, ultimately, frustrated attempts to provide a political resolution of the impasse in Northern Ireland. Readers of New Hibernia Review will find Dr. Wilson’s depiction of the roles of the Kennedys and Americans for a New Irish Agenda, and of Nancy Soderberg and the National Security Council, of particular interest. Both praised and stymied, the first Clinton Administration’s efforts to act as a catalyst for peace in the North seem now to have built a foundation for contemporary hopes.

While Patrick Kavanagh elevated the parish above the province, contemporary Irish poets illustrate the global in their exilic careers and art by writing from Europe, Australia, the Americas—and perhaps none more emphatically so than the Armagh poet Paul Muldoon. Now writing from Princeton, Muldoon has given us Madoc: A Mystery (1990) implicating Romantic Ireland and Native America. And it is Muldoon’s dystopian appropriation of the myths and realities of colonized and Native America that Prof. Jacqueline McCurry outlines here so as to suggest both Muldoon’s characteristically teasing acerbity and his detailed mistrust of the ideal and the reality of Irish America. Dr. McCurry’s essays on Ulster poets have appeared in, for example, The Colby Quarterly and Notes on Modern Irish Literature.

Here in “Variations,” his new decade of poems, Micheal O’Siadhail summons up the title motif and global muse of his selected poems Hail! Madam Jazz (1992), as the first poem “Madam” suggests. Listening to the jazz—sometimes the music of what happens, sometimes the historical Big Band sounds introduced to Ireland from American bases in the North, sometimes not jazz at all but the sonorities of, say, the Brahms clarinet quintet—is the central experience of these lines, the experience of living among friends, with the beloved, with one’s own discords. The poems framing O’Siadhail’s tercets and couplets, two bracing sonnets among them, come from The Fragile City (1995), O’Siadhail’s most recent collection from Bloodaxe Books. On a North American tour in October and November, 1997, O’Siadhail will read at the University of St. Thomas on October 21.

Something of the lingual density of seventeenth-century Gaelic poetry appears in O’Siadhail’s English line—and in Hartnett’s, Kinsella’s, and Clarke’s. Of the bardic poets presently informing Irish writing one of the the most influential has been Dáibhí Ó Bruadair (ca. 1627–1698), beginning with James Stephens’s 1917 version of “Seirbhíseach seirgthe” as “A Glass of Beer.” Not just the “Englishing,” but the suppressing of Ó Bruadair’s satire in the hands of Stephens and the Rev. John C. McErlean, S.J. concerns Thomas B. O’Grady here, for these versions of the poem display artistry and scholarship, as well as the censorious mores of the Free State and early Republic. Director of Irish Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, Prof. O’Grady has published many articles on Irish writing in such journals as The Colby Quarterly, Studies, James Joyce Quarterly, The Recorder, and Études Irlandaises.

Not the Act of Union, but its consequence, the Famine, debilitated the lingual culture of Gaelic Ireland. Championed by Daniel O’Connell, Catholic Emancipation did not result in Repeal of the Union, despite O’Connell’s best populist efforts in Ireland and Parliamentary efforts in Westminster in the 1840s—efforts repeatedly caricatured in the pages of London’s Punch. Here Prof. Leslie Williams surveys those political cartoons showing both the usual stereotyping of the Irish in them and also the graphic ridicule of O’Connell’s allies in Parliament and Punch’s consequent praise of Peel, Wellington, and Queen Victoria, as well as—most notably—Punch’s repeated feminization of O’Connell and his politics. Dr. Williams’s articles on art history have appeared in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy and in such collections as The Girl’s Own and Representing Ireland.

Ireland’s colonial position within the United Kingdom gave it global access to the British Empire and offered it up as the site of imperial experiment and administrative innovation—the Ordnance Survey, the National Schools, council flats in Dublin, and the decadal census. Here, Prof. Thomas Jordan surveys the features of the censuses accomplished in Ireland from 1811 through 1911 that display the century’s evolving Benthamite focus of British civil administration, as well as details of social, economic stress and recovery over the decades in Ireland’s townlands and counties. A frequently published specialist in child development and public policy, Prof. Jordan is the author of Victorian Childhood: Themes and Variations (1987), The Degeneracy Crisis and Victorian Youth (1993), Ireland and the Quality of Life: Famine Era (1997), and, forthcoming, Kathleen Mavourneen’s Children: Childhood in the Famine Era.

Currently at work on the last novel in his political Cappoquin trilogy, the poet Thomas McCarthy has taken time from his desk in the Cork City Library to send us the inaugural “Letter from Ireland: Litir ó Éirinn.” Ruminating not just upon Irish weather but also on the ramifications of the trendy term “Celtic Tiger” describing Ireland’s European economy, McCarthy ponders the social expense and cultural cost of the term—the cost to Cappoquin, Cork City, and even to London’s Camden-town or Boston’s Southside. Gleefully headlined in Ireland as a “cutting-edge” self-description, the term entails an unwelcome shift in social mores. A member of Aosdána, McCarthy has most recently published The Lost Province, a collection of poems that has won fine reviews. New Hibernia Review will make the “Letter from Ireland” a regular feature.

In contrast to James Joyce, Daniel Corkery portrayed revolutionary Irish nationalism as a font of political idealism in The Hounds of Banba. Yet, as Prof. Richard Peterson shows, Corkery’s artisitic and critical heirs—Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Faolain—portrayed that nationalism in their short stories as an incitement to an altruism that, in the course of the Irish Civil War modulated to the politics of endurance, narrow self-interest, Realpolitik or self-doubt. For O’Connor’s and O’Faolain’s generation, the practical exercise of political idealism seemed increasingly to lie outside Ireland and in a distant future. Whether such disillisionment may still till the soil of plain politics of an Ireland now knitted into the European Union remains a question. Dr. Peterson has published numerous articles on Irish writing and three Twayne studies: Mary Lavin (1978), William Butler Yeats (1982), and James Joyce Revisited (1992).

Though performed in the West End’s or Manhattan’s mass-market theatres, Riverdance—as well as Lord of the Dance, Michael Flatley’s overstatedly “creative” derivation from it—had its beginnings in television, in the mass media. In North America Riverdance has become an Irish-American “phenom.” For Prof. Frank Hall, a traditional musician and step dancer himself, Riverdance poses problems of identity and authenticity, yet the opportunities Riverdance has created for Irish traditional music and dance also signal a further evolution in the two art forms—an evolution governed more by innovations of showmanship in mass-performance than by those innovations slowly fostered by local and national competitions. A specialist in the study of human dance and movement, Dr. Hall helps edit the Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement.

Clúdach: Cover
From Basil Blackshaw’s crow omen in Riot Act (1984) we look back some three decades for the cover of this third issue of New Hibernia Review—to Man with Dog, a 1955 oil on canvas. In this Romantic scene, not quite squared off, everything but the horizon stands atilt, and Blackshaw’s emblematic blues and golds appear early on, but mediated by ochres and darker tones. Here we have Blackshaw’s early idiom of color and brushwork, and echoes of another northern painter, the Norwegian Edvard Munch. The moody humor of the painting derives from allegory proposed by Blackshaw’s obvious posing of the road’s disappearing point of perspective against the shadow of blues cast by the owner of the whippet, the curvy stance of the living whippet, and bowed shoulder and step of the owner facing away, but somehow outlined in the nimbus of the greyhound’s vitality. Throughout Blackshaw’s painting, from 4.30 p.m.—Sunday (1956) to Lame Dog (1985) to Yellow Dog (1990), this canine emblem recurs: the breed of the image differs, but all represent an ethical category: “hard” dogs. Basil Blackshaw—Painter (1995) illustrates several examples of this emblem. The Center for Irish Studies will sponsor the installation of the Basil Blackshaw Touring Exhibition in the galleries of the College of St. Catherine, St. Paul, Minnesota, during March, 1998. This painting is reproduced by kind permission of the artist and with the aid of Brian Ferran and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

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