NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Fomhar/Autumn 2000

Chris Agee
Weather Report: Good Friday Week, 1998
Michael Cavanagh
Tower and Boat: Yeats and Seamus Heaney
David Wheatley
Filíocht Nua: New Poetry
Nicholas Allen
A Revolutionary Cooperation:
George Russell and James Connolly
Chris Mounsey
Thomas Sheridan and the Second Smock Alley Theatre Riot, 1754
Brendan Lynn
Revising Northern Nationalism, 1960–1965:
The Nationalist Party’s Response
Donna I. Wong
Following the Law of the Letter:
Myles na gCopaleen’s An Béal Bocht
John F. Healy
Dancing Cranes and Frozen Birds:
The Fleeting Resurrections of Colum McCann
Taispeántais: Exhibitions
Lawrence J. McCaffrey
Going My Way and Irish-American Catholicism:
Myth and Reality
The Irish Language Today: An Teanga Inniu
James J. Blake
Irish Gaelic and Scottish Gaelic Today
Reviews: Léirmheasanna
Nuacht faoi Údair: News of Authors

 Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
Perhaps once in a generation the headlines of the day so alter the world that the circumstances in which the news is heard become, for all who witness it, a vivid autobiographical moment. For Americans, events like the bombing of Pearl Harbor or, a generation later, the death of JFK, exist in such heightened memory. For those living in the North of Ireland —as the American-born poet Chris Agee has since 1979— the week of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 was equally transformative at both the personal and the global level. Here, in a memoir of that extraordinary week, Agee chronicles momentous events as observed by the ordinary citizen—a time so charged with historic significance that even the weather itself seemed to offer a parable for Ireland’s reinvented future. Chris Agee’s next  collection of poetry is First Light, shortlisted this year for the National Poetry Series in the United States, and he has recently guest-edited an American special issue of the Irish poetry journal Metre.

In 1896, a County Derry farmer accidentally discovered the Broighter Hoard of gold and metalwork from Ireland’s first century b.c., now on display in the National Museum of Ireland. Nearly a century later, the Derry-born poet Seamus Heaney – long preoccupied with digging and excavation—selected the image of a gold boat from the hoard for the cover of his 1991 collection Seeing Things. Michael Cavanagh argues here that the Gold Boat provides a symbol of Heaney’s literary aesthetic as compelling and suggestive of meanings as the  tower was for Yeats.  In the contrasting associations of tower and boat – the former stern and intimidating, the latter nimble and expansive—Cavanagh charts the complex relationship that Heaney has crafted with his titanic forbear, and finds that “Yeats has never been an inhibiting father to Heaney, but an enabling older brother.” Professor Cavanagh’s 1998 essay “Seamus Heaney Returning” appeared in The Journal of Modern Literature.

Suggestions of inheritance and bygone stability—old orchards, gravestones, and family stories passed between generations—fill many of the finely crafted poems by David Wheatley presented in this issue of New Hibernia Review. Yet, alongside the richly remembered details of such poems as “An Apple Pip,” in which the poet recalls a boyhood at his grandparents’ home, or “Chronicle,” which summons up memories of a family long-established in the mountains of Wicklow, there lurks an inescapable sense that the poet is calling forth emblems of a world not his own. In counterpoint, other poems in this selection, particularly “The Tone” and “The Door,” evoke a surreal and dream-like condition, while the short poem “Writer in Residence” shows us a poet among schoolchildren, delighting in their discovery of their own poetic voices. David Wheatley is a lecturer in English at the University of Hull and a regular reviewer for the TLS, Poetry Review, and other journals.  His second book of poems, Misery Hill, has just been published by Gallery Press.

George Russell, “Æ.” (1867–1935), was a cultural nationalist deeply involved in political organization. Russell was a major influence on Irish literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  But as editor of the Irish Homestead, Russell was also the preeminent theorist of the Irish cooperative movement.  Russell’s interest in economics combined with his evangelical belief in Ireland’s cultural peculiarity to provoke his interest in Irish radicalism after the 1913 Lock-Out.  Here, Nicholas Allen looks closely at Russell’s editorship of the Irish Homestead to track the intellectual evolution of his relationship with the socialist labor organizer James Connolly, later executed for his leadership of the Easter Rising. Allen finds that Russell’s little-known 1919 elegy in the Irish Times, “To the Memory of Some I Knew . . . ,” creates Connolly as the icon of a socially committed nationalism. Now at Trinity College, Dublin, Nicholas Allen is completing a study of Russell’s writings in their Irish and European contexts.

The intrigue-filled world of eighteenth-century Dublin theater may well have reached an apex of sorts in 1754, when the popular Smock Alley Theatre was the scene of a six-hour riot. The ostensible cause of the riot was the refusal by manager Thomas Sheridan to allow an encore, during a production of Voltaire’s Mahomet the Imposter, of an inflammatory speech that could easily be understood as an allegory of Irish subjection to English rule. Here, Dr. Chris Mounsey surveys the various conflicting accounts of the Smock Alley Riot that compelled Sheridan, Dublin’s most prominent theater manager, to give up the Irish stage and leave Ireland. Though we may not finally be able to ascertain Sheridan’s politics, there is no doubt of the high political stakes involved—as evidenced by the grisly murder of publisher and gadfly James Eyre Weeks, who had praised the offending play.  Chris Mounsey is a senior lecturer in the School of Cultural Studies at King Alfred’s College, Winchester.

The fictional inventions of Brian O’Nolan (1911–1966) have rightly earned the author of At Swim-Two-Birds and the “Cruiskeen Lawn” columns in the Irish Times a place in the pantheon of 20th-century comic geniuses. Yet, as Dr. Donna Wong notes here, in O’Nolan’s work —as in all great comedy – profoundly serious concerns lurk just behind the hilarity. Wong takes a close look at the 1941 masterpiece An Béal Bocht, later translated by Patrick Power as The Poor Mouth, and finds that narrator Bónapárt Ó Cúnasa and his Gaeltacht village are the victims of literary condescension run amok. Compelled to live up to a ridiculous image foisted on the reading public by romanticizing authors, Wong argues that the characters of  An Béal Bocht resemble those in another O’Nolan tour de force, The Third Policeman.  “For no crime of their own,” she writes, “Bonapart and his neighbors are damned to personify literary stereotypes in a Hell of authorial misconceptions.” Donna Wong currently teaches Irish language and literature at Boston College.

The signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 was, as numerous commentators have remarked, an extraordinary achievement of politics. Here, in a survey of the Nationalist Party’s ideological evolution in the early 1960s, Dr. Brendan Lynn reminds us that confidence in politics came hard to Northern Ireland. After decades of isolation and near-stasis, this period saw the nationalist community of the North rethinking its tactics. Though the Unionist Party and power establishment remained firmly entrenched in the province, the electoral successes of the Nationalist Party placed it in a position to assume the role of “Her Majesty’s Official Opposition” at the Stormont parliamen—a step that many within the community feared would be tantamount to admitting to the legitimacy of Partition. Brendan Lynn, of the University of Ulster, is the author of Holding the Ground: The Nationalist Party in Northern Ireland 1945–1972 (1997).

Colum McCann’s 1998 novel This Side of Brightness has won wide praise for its Irish author, who has described his quite literally dark work of fiction—a story set among the homeless in subterranean New York—as a “consciously non-Irish work.” The principal characters may indeed be African Americans, but Professor John F. Healy takes quiet issue with the author’s denial of an Irish context for the book , as he tracks the many Irish allusions that fill McCann’s novel. Even more significant than the Irish subtexts, though, is the recurring imagery of birds, particularly the oddly graceful dance of the archetypal crane. Just as birds in their flight call to mind moments of transcendence, Healy finds that this novel is filled with small resurrections that suggest an inextinguishable hope, even in misery. John Healy’s most recent work on Seamus Heaney will appear in a forthcoming IASIL collection.

Regular readers of New Hibernia Review look to the “Taispeántais: Exhibitions” section for considerations of a wide range of displays of Irish culture and identity. In this issue, a cinema classic comes under fresh scrutiny as Dr. Lawrence McCaffrey considers Leo McCarey’s redoubtable 1944 film Going My Way. Though the Bing Crosby vehicle is often dismissed as simplistic and sentimental, McCaffrey notes that it can also be viewed as a document of assimilation. Prior to Going My Way, Irish-American moviegoers had rarely seen a convincing screen portrayal of the nurturing aspects of their Catholicism, and they instantly warmed to Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald’s interpretation of the workaday world of priests—including the familiar problem of parish debt.  Non-Irish, “established” Americans likewise found reassurance in McCarey’s film and the cinema portraits of decent, compassionate, and not-so-strange-after-all Irish Americans.  A founder of the American Conference for Irish Studies, Lawrence McCaffrey is currently at work on a book-length study of the image of the Irish and Irish-American priest in popular culture.

Gaeilge (Irish) and Gàidhlig (Scottish Gaelic), along with the Manx language, form the Goidelic branch of the Celtic language family. As Professor James Blake notes in this issue’s “An Teanga Innui: The Irish Language Today,” the two languages share more than a linguistic family tree; they also claim similar histories of persecution, displacement, and neglect by governments and educational institutions.  And, recently, the two languages have shared in ventures to promote cultural and instructional exchanges. The most prominent of these is Iomairt Colm Cille, founded in 1997 on Scotland’s Isle of Skye. In its first three years, Iomairt Colm Cille has already an impressive list of achievements, including residential colleges, dramatic productions, and joint tours by artists and musicians in both languages. James Blake is the senior bibliographer for Celtic Studies for the International MLA Bibliography and regularly reports on the state of the Irish language for New Hibernia Review.

Clúdach: Cover
With this issue of New Hibernia Review we continue our presentation of contemporary textile art by Irish women artists with a recent (1997) untitled work by Hazel Bruce of Belfast. Born in Yorkshire in 1967, Hazel Bruce received her postgraduate art training at the University of Ulster (Belfast), and has lived in Northern Ireland for the past eight years. Her work has been collected by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the Whitworth Art Gallery of Manchester, the University of Ulster, the Irish Presidential Collection, and Northern Ireland Railways.

As the textile collective Group 62, of which she is a member, notes on its web site, “Bruce’s work is inspired by her environment, the urban landscape. The bold marks, geometric shapes, repeated patterns and strong horizontal and vertical lines that constantly appear within it give her the strong, simple shapes on which she bases her work, Bruce aims to create images which have the mysterious quality of objects only half materialized, faded and decayed, contrasting with the bright sharp newness of regeneration echoing the constant changes around us.” These qualities are clearly evident in the work presented here, in which autumnal tones evocative of time-worn tile floors or rusted tin siding lie alongside a vibrantly green bar. Measuring approximately 1.5 x 2 meters, the piece is executed silk and velvet, and is both hand- and machine-stitched. The materials are hand dyed and discharge printed. The quilt is held in a private collection.

We thank Hazel Bruce, currently a craft worker at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, for her kind permission to reproduce this work.

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