NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Earrach/Spring 1999

Terence Winch
In the Band: Five Sessions
Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin
Amhrán an Ghorta: The Great Famine
and Irish Traditional Music
Lauren Onkey
"Not Quite White?" Black 47’s Funky Céili
Eamonn Wall
Filíocht Nua: New Poetry
James Naiden
Fathers: A Conversation with Thomas McCarthy, 1997
Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch
Revisionism, the Rising, and Representation
Joan Fitzpatrick Dean
Self-Dramatization in the Plays of Frank McGuinness
Paul Townend
Temperance, Father Mathew, and the Irish Clergy
Vivian Valvano Lynch
Daniel Quinn, Writer of William Kennedy’s Quinn’s Book
Celia de Fréine
Exhibitions: Taispeántais
A Soap for TnaG: Writing "Ros na Rún"
Reviews: Léirmheasanna
Clúdach: Cover
News of Authors: Nuacht faoi Údair

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
Though Irish traditional music has been made common cultural property of American and British life by the new media—compact discs and videos—it still is nurtured in church and Hibernia halls, as well as the usual pubs and and bars. Ciarán Carson’s Last Night’s Fun (1996) gives a recent record of that life in Ireland. Here Terence Winch, a practicing musician and founding member of the band Celtic Thunder, offers a fistful of memoirs from that life in the bars and halls in the neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Winch’s best-known song for the band is "When New York Was Irish." Readers will find his poems collected in Irish Musicians / American Friends (1986) and The Great Indoors (1995) and his stories collected in Contenders (1989). Terence Winch received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1992.

Irish traditional music came to the fore in Civil War America following upon the misfortunes of famine migration. As Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin sets out in detail here, the long-surviving musical traditions throughout Ireland, but especially in the West, were altered not so much by the Act of Union, the demise of the harpers, or Catholic Emancipation and the temperance campaigns, but by the Famine’s erasure of the social conditions that had preserved both Irish music and Irish life in the West. Even so, the Gaelic song tradition endured and itself recorded both the Famine and its silencing effects. Prof. Ó hAllmhuráin lectures on Irish immigration and cultural history and ethnomusicology at the University of San Francisco. He is the author of the Pocket History of Irish Traditional Music (1998). Also a fourth-generation Clare concertina player, Dr. Ó hAllmhuráin’s latest recording is The Green Cockade (1998).

Displacing the piano roll, shellac, and then vinyl, the compact disc has brought a digitally sanitized wealth of Irish traditional music and Irish-American popular music to more aficionados than ever before. Even a mass-market genre like urban hip-hop has room for an Irish-American band like Black 47. Following on her article "Celtic Soul-Brothers" (1993), here Prof. Lauren Onkey discusses not only the Famine memory latent in this band’s numbers—the "47" of the band’s name—but more importantly the "Black" of it. The assumed trope of blackness raises both the ambitions of Black 47 and its self-contradictions, for in employing American blackness to articulate the resentments of generations of the diasporic Irish, the band avoids acknowledging Irish America’s part in enforcing urban racism. An innovative commentator on contemporary Irish-American culture, Dr. Onkey has written recently on Brian Friel’s Translations and the poetry of Paula Meehan.

American country-and-western, rockabilly, the music playing out of the pickup’s speakers or the counterman’s greasy radio—that is what we hear behind the lines of half these new poems from Eamonn Wall. The other half echo the archival recordings and the Angelus on RTÉ, showband tunes and Ireland’s peculiar adaptation of country by thelikes of Big Tom and the Mainliners. Like his essay "The Black Hills, The Gorey Road" (Winter, 1998), these poems come from a binocular view of America and Ireland. Here, the present American background is the high West of Colorado on south; the past Irish background is the Wexford town of Enniscorthy north to Dublin. Now teaching at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, Eamonn Wall is the author of two collections of poems from Salmon Press: Dyckmann—200th Street (1994) and Iron Mountain Road (1997). His collected essays will soon be published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

Ever since the tours of Wilde and Yeats through the United States, Irish writers have lectured and taught in American halls and classrooms. Here James Naiden interviews the Cork poet Thomas McCarthy on the occasion of his return to the Twin Cities in 1997 and the publication of McCarthy’s fourth collection The Lost Province. Their conversation rehearses the Dreyfusard themes of that collection and mulls over the craft of writing and the art of teaching, but most importantly it reveals McCarthy’s reassessment of his familial and political themes in the long line of poems about life in the Party. McCarthy is presently finishing his Fianna Fáil trilogy of novels begun in Without Power and continued in and Asya and Christine. And independent pubisher, James Naiden continues to put out The North Stone Review and North Stone Editions, the first being George Wright’s Aimless Life: Pems 1961–1995.

Revisionist Irish history as practiced since the 1970s has offered a skeptically realist view of independent Ireland, unlike McCarthy’s Party romances. This skeptic view and the popular and artistic reaction to it are what the art historian Síghle Bhreathneach-Lynch analyzes by comparing the exhibitions of Irish art marking the 1966 and 1991 anniversaries of the Easter Rising. Taken together, the wit of Robert Ballagh’s art and the passion of his engagement with the unofficial Peoples’ Festival for the 1991 celebration provide Dr. Bhreathneach-Lynch with the touchstone by which to assess the revisionism of "official" Ireland’s response to the Southern republican temper. A frequent lecturer in North America, Dr. Bhreathneach-Lynch was recently appointed curator of Irish Paintings at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

The Northern playwright Frank McGuinness is known chiefly for two plays—Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985) and Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me (1992)—but here Prof. Joan FitzPatrick sets those two prominent dramas in the whole context of McGuinness’s accomplishment dwelling especially on the mixed dramaturgies of Innocence and Carthaginians (1987). A hallmark of McGuinness’s drama is the tendency of his characters to "perform" their way out of the constricting, often death-dealing moral embrace of local history and event. In those play-within-a-play moments of individual performance, McGuinness’s characters achieve their liberty. A regular contributor to Film West (Galway), Dr. Dean has written extensivelyon the English dramatists David Hare, Joe Orton, Peter Shaffer, and Tom Stoppard.

After Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and just before the dark years of the Famine, the Irish church’s efforts to establish its leadership in Ireland town’s and villages by building chapels, halls, and schools was unsettled by the revivalist reformer Father Mathew and his Cork Total Abstinence Society. Here, Paul Townend parses out both the shades of clerical opinion of Mathew’s movement and Mathew’s mistrust of the Irish clergy. A rousing and influential preacher, Father Mathew could be counted on to raise donations and tithes in any parish. On the other hand, many priests were disconmfited by his popularity, by the teetotaling example his society set, and by the "superstition" of its temperance ribbons and medals. A student of Prof. Emmet Larkin, Paul Townend teaches in Chicago.

Part of that prefamine world of Ireland’s West and South appears in what William Kennedy’s hero Daniel Quinn witnesses of the "the Irish circus" moving through upper New York state in Quinn’s Book. Quinn, the child of Irish immigrants, becomes a journalist, and William Kennedy lets him become the writer of his own book, chronicling both himself and his people in the New World. And this Prof. Vivian Valvano Lynch regards from many angles—historical, narratological—as the foundational quality of Quinn’s Book in relation to all of William Kennedy’s Albany novels. Dr. Lynch has published articles on James Joyce, William Kennedy, and on contemporary Irish drama and fiction in The James Joyce Literary Supplement, Working Papers in Irish Studies, and The Irish Literary Supplement.

Since the Famine, the world of the Gaelic West has revealed itself in the music and musicians it has sent out to the listening world, in story-telling and then novels, drama and then film. But now that contemporary world shows itself on Teilifís na Gaeilge in the Irish-language soap opera "Ros na Rún," now in its third season on Irish television. One of its script writers has been Celia de Fréine, whose poems appeared in the last issue of New Hibernia Review (December, 1998). Representing the Gaeltacht to itself is a business made more perilous by the fact that the world now can look on and listen in. Further, the choosing the content of those representations—satirical or melodramatic—risks being governed by the commercial concerns of the electronic medium—the Nielsen ratings. As Celia de Fréine also documents well, "Ros na Rún" must contend with other issues as well—contemporary ones like AIDS or divorce, on-going ones like the evolving use of the Irish language itself.

Clúdach: Cover
Courtesy of Director Peter Murray and his staff, the covers for the 1999 volume of New Hibernia Review will present four modern paintings from the 1998 McGrath Bequest to the Crawford Municipal Gallery in Cork. Announced last August and marked by an exhibition at the Crawford, the bequest consists of forty-five works collected over the past three decades by Father John McGrath, of Tipperary and Limerick. The collection features paintings by such eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish artists as William Sadler and James Arthur O’Connor, but the heart of the collection consists of works by contemporary artists like Barrie Cooke, Louis le Brocquy, and Robert Ballagh and, especially, by such midcentury painters as Seán Keating, Maurice McGonigal, Charles Lamb, and Gerard Dillon.

The cover of this first issue publishes for the first time Gerard Dillon’s West-of-Ireland oil painting Man with Keyboard (c. 1955). Born in 1916 and raised in Belfast, Dillon came to prominence in Dublin in during the Great Emergency, after which his career was interwtined with those of his fellow painters George Campbell and Dan O’Neill. Dillon remains best-known for his Connemara paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, of which The Yellow Bungalow (1954) is the best-known example. While Dillon’s later paintings of the 1960s seem to rehearse Picasso’s Harlequin motifs or the more decorative of Chagall’s folk imagery, they retain the naif spirit that distinguishes his earlier, yearning, Arcadian depictions of the Gaelic West. Vivid colorings, flattened and tilted perspectives, an autobiographical bent, and a vehement populism likewise characterize these paintings. Man with Keyboard displays most of those traits, but the coloring is muted, melancholic, that of the Blues. And in the listening room Dillon offers a caricature of himself (right). Readers of New Hibernia Review interested in learning more of Dillon’s work may wish to consult James White’s well-illustrated biography Gerard Dillon (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1994).

                                                                       Back to New Hibernia Review