NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Samhradh/Summer 2000

Fred Miller Robinson
“The One Way Out”: 
Limerick and Angela’s Ashes
Brian Lynch
Steering Clear:
Broadcasting and the Church, 1926–1951
Thomas O’Grady
Filíocht Nua: New Poetry
Sophia Hillan King
On the Side of Life:
Edna O’Brien’s Trilogy of Contemporary Ireland
Kevin P. Cosgrove
Paul Muldoon’s Explorer Myth:
From Madoc to Raleigh
Ann Marie H. Plunkett
Wooing the Maiden City:
Justin McCarthy’s Campaigns in Derry, 1885 and 1886
Kurt Bullock
Possessing Wor(l)ds:
Brian Friel’s Translations and the Ordnance Survey
Brian ó Conchubhair
Liam Ó Flaithearta agus Scríobh na Gaeilge:
Ceist Airgid nó Cinneadh Chonradh na Gaeilge?
Traditional Music: Ceol Traidisiúnta
Fintan Vallely
The Making of a Lifelong Companion: 
An Editor’s Memoir
Reviews: Léirmheasanna
News of Authors: Nuacht faoi Údair

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
The phenomenal popularity and notoriety of Frank McCourt’s Limerick memoir Angela’s Ashes (1996) in the United States is remarkable for what it reveals, in particular, about the habitual ways in which second- and third-generation Irish Americans perceive themselves. McCourt’s writing immediately concerns, of course, his own family, his Limerick upbringing, and the civic and social character of Limerick city proper, which is Prof. Fred Miller Robinson’s theme here. Midcentury Limerick figures as large in McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes as turn-of-the-century Dublin figures in Joyce’s Dubliners. While Joyce characterizes his Dublin as static, a place of paralysis, McCourt characterizes his Limerick as changeable, impermanent, always with an eye to what Dr. Robinson calls the “Way Out” into the great twentieth-century scattering of the Irish across the English-speaking globe. The author of The Man in the Bowler Hat: His History and Iconography (1993), Dr. Robinson reviews frequently for The New York Times Book Review.

Owing both to the 1932 Eucharistic Conference and to the language of the 1937 Constitution concerning the “special position” of the Roman Catholic church in the Free State, most students of twentieth-century Irish popular culture might assume that radio broadcasting in Ireland directly served the interests of the church and the Irish hierarchy. That was not quite so, however, as Brian Lynch shows in his depiction of the relations between the Catholic Truth Society and church officials and the Department of Posts and Telegraph’s programmers for the Cork and Dublin radio stations. Working from documents in Radio Telefís Éireann archives, Lynch reveals frequent consultations with the British Broadcasting Corporation, de Valéra’s wariness about religious broadcasting schemes, and the tireless diplomacy of Directors T. J. Kiernan and Charles Kelly. Brian Lynch is the print archivist for Radio Telefís Éireann in Ballsbridge, Dublin.

Thomas O’Grady’s name as a discerning critic and imaginative scholar of modern Irish writing in English will prove well known to our readers. His accomplishments as a poet have equal value, as may be told from even a quick reading of What Really Matters (2000), his first collection just published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. The suite of O’Grady’s poems in this issue offers some titles from that collection, and some new ones. O’Grady’s lines are formal, full of tact, and rich in syntax and turns of diction. The sense of his crafty stanzas unfolds very human motives to do honor to language and family, art and ancestry, as well as a warm and careful humor. A native of Prince Edward Island, O’Grady serves as director of Irish Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is presently finishing a book on Carleton, Kavanagh, and Benedict Kiely.

In 1999 the writer Edna O’Brien published both Wild Decembers and a study of her fellow Irish novelist James Joyce. Like Joyce, O’Brien has long lived out of Ireland. Like Joyce’s, her fiction was once banned in Ireland. Here, Prof. Sophie Hillan King poses another resemblance: like Joyce’s, her fiction can claim a suprising fidelity to both the moral themes and and concrete details of Irish life, but at the close of the twentieth century. Posing House of Splendid Isolation (1994), Down by the River (1997), and Wild Decembers as a trilogy, Dr. King also poses the gravity of O’Brien’s topical themes: the “Troubles” in the North; sexual abuse and the public piety of Catholic Ireland; rural isolation and murder. In each novel, after the romance and melodrama or satire and suffering have passed, O’Brien’s reader understands vividly the many ways those themes have distorted the lives of her “country girls.” Dr. King is associate director of the Institute of Irish Studies of the Queen’s University, Belfast.

Since his move to Princeton University, Paul Muldoon’s poetry has been of consuming interest to American, British, and Irish critics. No single one of his titles has prompted more commentary than the long “American” sequence titled Madoc: A Mystery (1990). A work made difficult by its irony and aesthetic, Madoc is, nonetheless, founded on a few simplicities. As Kevin P. Cosgrove shows here, one of those is Muldoon’s interest in explorers, and in the myth of his namesake Máel Dúin. Tracing the echtrae and immrama that figure in so many of Muldoon’s poems up through The Annals of Chile (1994), Cosgrove not only parses the lore the of the “Red Indian” and the Welsh tale of Madoc, he unearths Raleigh and “croatoan” from Muldoon’s uncollected 1973 poem “Sir Walter.” Now living in London, Kevin Cosgrove has been editing a web magazine featuring poets and poetry from Northern Ireland since 1998.

By 1886, Parnell’s Home Rule movement had won seventeen of the thirty-three Ulster seats in Westminster. Representing Home Rule in an ameliorist and reformist vein, the Corkman Justin McCarthy (1830–1912) twice contested Derry against strong Unionist and Orange opposition. Here Anne Marie Plunkett recounts McCarthy’s two suspenseful Derry campaigns and shows that nationalists wound up adopting the siege rhetoric that had polarized Derry since 1689. Relying on McCarthy’s correspondence with Mrs. Campbell Praed, Prof. Plunkett enlarges on McCarthy’s own reticent account in An Irishman’s Story (1904). McCarthy’s good character survived his encounter with the iron verities of divided Ulster. A frequent presenter at meetings of the American Conference for Irish Studies and the Society for the Study of Nineteenth Century Ireland, Dr. Plunkett is finishing a biography of Justin McCarthy.

Brian Friel’s fictive Baile Beag, County Donegal, lies northwest of Doire, Londonderry, or Derry, the home of the now famous Field Day theater company. Here, Kurt Bullock analyzes Translations, the play that two decades ago shaped a cultural debate that still goes on. Friel poses the coming of the Ordnance Survey of the 1830s as the means by which Béarla supplanted Gaeilge, by which Baile Beag became Ballybeg or Littleton. Writing to correct Friel’s nationalist vision, Dr. Bullock reminds us that, however imperial in motive, the diaries, name books, and maps of the Ordnance Survey helped preserve Irish nomenclature and lore; gave employment to such scholars of the 1840s as O’Donovan, O’Curry, and Mangan; and provided a model for ethnographic research North and South. Prof. Bullock is currently working on a rhetorical study of short fiction, including stories by Frank, O’Connor, Anne Devlin, and Ciarán Folan.

Aranman and agitator, Liam O’Flaherty gained notoriety in the 1920s with such novels as The Informer (1925) and Mr. Gilhooley (1926) and two collections of stories and fables, many first written in Irish and later collected in Dúil (1953). Here, Brian Ó Conchubhair explores the probable reasons behind O’Flaherty’s decision to leave off writing in Irish for Fáinne an Lae, the Conradh na Gaeilge weekly in the late 1920s. Ever a controversialist, O’Flaherty responded heatedly to pious criticism of his language and work. Even so, his silence in Irish seems, ultimately, a sort of postcolonial self-censoring. Fittingly, Ó Conchubhair writes here in Irish. Ó Conchubhair’s article realizes New Hibernia Review’s intention to publish for North American readers of Irish one article a year in that language. Now in the School of Irish at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Brian Ó Conchubhair recently taught Irish at Boston College.

Irish traditional music is an art permeated with a wealth of political and personal lore, of sometimes mute historical and aesthetic learning, nearly all of which is represented in Fintan Vallely’s The Companion to Irish Traditional Music (1999). Taken separately, neither scholarly, ethnomusicological articles nor memoirs and interviews can do justice to three centuries of ceol traidisiúnta in Ireland. Here, Vallely—himself a well-known flute-player—recounts the origin of the Companion in 1996, the gathering of entries, and the formulation of the Companion’s historical views of the evolution of traditional music as a performance art. In some cases, prior linguistic and nationalist mystifications about the ethos of traditional music fell away. Two further books by Vallely will appear this year: a directory to the world of Irish traditional music titled The Irish Music Almanac and a study of Protestant views of Irish traditional music in the North, titled Jigging at the Crossroads.

Clúdach: Cover
In March, 1997, the Goldstein Gallery of the University of Minnesota hosted “Contemporary Irish Textile Art,” an exhibition of work by women working in patchwork and quilting at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, County Armagh. The cover of this summer issue of New Hibernia Review presents a piece from that exhibition by Bernadette Falvey, whose work is mentioned in Karen Holland’s article in the spring issue. An Irish speaker, Bernadette Falvey practices her art in County Galway and has given workshops on Inis Méain. Titled Before Kells, Falvey’s pieced, appliqued, embroidered, and beaded hanging is nearly a perfect square measuring 43.5 by 44.5 inches. In bold colors—gold on midnight blue, bordered in black—Falvey’s hanging translates into silk and gold thread a simplified, asymmetrical Greek key border around a circular aegis. That shield bears an ornamented boss at the center. On it are centered the four red circles just as the four gold circles bearing modified Maltese crosses center on the fifth circle bearing the boss. More plainly than Ann Fahy’s Mullaghmore Reflection, Falvey’s Before Kells offers a mandala based on Celtic Revival motifs. Falvey has derived these motifs from metalwork—a horse brass heroic in proportion if not size—dating from the dawn of Christianity in Ireland. Embroidered in each corner is the outline of a horse, each like a constellation in the midnight sky. We thank both Karen Holland and the artist Bernadette Falvey for permission to reproduce Before Kells, which is now held in a private collection in Thailand.

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