NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Fómhar/Autumn 2002

meghan nuttall sayres Conversations in Donegal: Mary McNelis and Con O'Gara gillian mcintosh CEMA and the National Anthem: The Arts and the State in Postwar Northern Ireland lethna mckiernan Filíocht Nua: New Poetry ljohn a. merchant The Impact of Irish-Ireland on Young Poland, 1890–1918 lcarolyn a. conley Homicide in Late-Victorian Ireland and Scotland lúna ní bhroiméil The Creation of an Irish Culture in the United States: The Gaelic Movement, 1870–1915 patrick hicks Brian Moore's The Feast of Lupercal and the Constriction of Masculinity lthomas f. shea Patrick McGinley's Appropriation of Cúchulainn: Revisions in The Trick of the Ga Bolga An Teanga Innui: The Irish Language Today james j. blake Present-day Irish-language Fiction Léirmheasanna: Reviews Nuacht Faoi Údair: News of Authors

Clúdach: Cover We continue our presentation on the covers of volume 5 of New Hibernia Review of scientific and descriptive works relating to natural history drawn from the Celtic Collection in the Department of Special Collections in O'Shaughnessy-Frey Library Center at the University of St. Thomas. The highly colored geological map of Ireland on this cover is taken from A Manual of the Geology of Ireland by George Henry Kinahan, published in London by C. Kegan Paul and Co. in 1878. Kinahan, a native of County Down worked closely with such notable nineteenth-century field mappers as Joseph Beete Jukes, George Victor Du Noyer, and Thomas Oldham in the Geological Survey of Ireland, a project that began in 1845 and was not fully completed until 1890. The geological mapping of Ireland built on the famous Ordnance Survey maps drawn at a scale of one inch to one mile. Its story is well told in the 1997 volume Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History, edited by John Wilson Foster. Three major donations have formed the core of the Celtic Collection. In 1917, the Ancient Order of Hibernians of Minnesota gave the library 500 titles on contemporary Irish politics and on nineteenth-century Irish history, evidently to commemorate 1916 Easter Rising of the previous year; in 1936, the library acquired the rare book collection of Peter O'Connor, a prominent businessman in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and San Francisco; and in 1956, the Celtic Collection obtained the scholarly library of Eamonn O'Toole, formerly professor of Irish at Trinity College, Dublin. The department also houses some 700 titles of rare and first editions of twentieth-century Irish poetry. These include the greater portion of the output of the Dolmen Press, acquired from the estate of the late Liam Miller, the press's founder; some 180 works by Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney and more than seventy titles by Nobel nominee Austin Clarke; and a collection of early-twentieth century nationalist poetry. We thank the University of St. Thomas, and especially Ann M. Kenne, head of the Department of Special Collections, for its generous cooperation.

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí

We open this issue of New Hibernia Review by pausing with the American weaver and writer Meghan Nuttall Sayres amid the hills of Donegal, to listen to the reflections of textile artists Mary McNelis and Con O'Gara. These quiet vignettes present McNelis and O'Gara as they ruminate on a lifetime of weaving—knitting together not only the fibers of their craft, but also their thoughts on continuity and change, on craft and the marketplace. Glencolmcille's Taipéis Gael artists group, which draws inspiration from such senior artisans, was founded in 1995 and has exhibited tapestries throughout the United States and Europe; more can be learned at the group's web site, http://www.taipeisgael.ie/ . A frequent contributor to Shuttle Spin & Dyepot magazine, Meghan Nuttall Sayres holds a graduate degree in rural development and is the author of two children's books.

Echoes of a persistent debate in the contemporary “culture wars”—the issue of state funding of the arts—resonate here in Gillian McIntosh's examination here of the controversies that dogged the Northern Ireland's Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), later the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, during the years following World War II. CEMA enjoyed considerable early success in promoting art, music, and drama. In 1944, the Stormont government—which controlled its funding—quite literally insisted on calling the tune by mandating that the British national anthem be played at all events. This policy played out with predictably discordant results for the rest of CEMA's history. Dr. Gillian McIntosh is the author of The Force of Culture: Unionist Identities in Twentieth-Century Ireland (1999), and currently holds a research fellowship in the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen's University, Belfast.

Readers of Irish literature in the United States will recognize the name of Ethna McKiernan from her work as director of the bookselling concern Irish Books and Media. McKiernan is also an accomplished poet, widely published in such journals as Poetry Ireland and anthologized in Unlacing: 10 Irish-American Women Poets (1987) and 33 Minnesota Poets (2000). Counterpoising themes of homelessness and refuge, loss and belonging, family and the wider world, the poems offered in this issue's New Poetry/Filíocht Nua section are anchored by a seven-part suite based on the poet's volunteer work at a shelter for street people. A number of these poems will appear in Ethna McKiernan's new collection, The One Who Swears She Can't Start Over, forthcoming this autumn from Ireland's Salmon Press and her first book since Caravan (1990).

Polish critic Adolf Nowaczy´nski, an outspoken admirer of the Irish Revival, declared in 1907 that Ireland “is making such powerful forward progress in its spiritual development that it is a double of our nation,” adding that Ireland had become one of the “Polands of the Western World.” In this issue, John Merchant opens a window on a rarely considered affinity between Irish-Ireland and Young Poland. Polish audiences and intellectuals warmed to the efforts of such writers and translators as Jan Kasprowicz and Jan Lorentowicz, who adapted many of the Irish writers' poems and peasant dramas. The sense of kinship between political and cultural climates of the two nations derived in part from each fledgling nation's need to cope with a recent history of failed revolts, and in part from their similar attempts to stake a claim on the European cultural fabric. John Merchant, who will soon take up a Fulbright research fellowship in Poland and Ireland, has most recently published on Polish-American fiction in The Sarmatian Review.

When we think of nineteenth-century stereotyping of the Irish, our minds usually turn to comic images in the popular press—the simian, superprognathic cartoons of Puck in England, or of Thomas Nast in America. But, as Dr. Carolyn Conley's detailed comparison of Irish and Scottish homicide records discloses here, stereotypical perceptions also exerted their force in the deadliest of arenas. By tabulating data from more than 2,000 homicide trials in the two Celtic lands, Conley finds that the raw numbers indicate that the Scots were, in fact, less likely to kill one another than were the Irish. Closer scrutiny, however, points to underlying cultural assumptions about civility, brawling, drunkenness, and violence that weighed heavily in the responses of the police and judicial systems of the two countries. Carolyn Conley is the author of The Unwritten Law: Criminal Justice in Victorian Kent (1991) and Melancholy Accidents: The Meaning of Violence in Post-Famine Ireland (1998).

The preservation and revival of the Irish language found a welcome corps of early supporters in the immigrant Irish communities of America. For instance, Galway-born Michael Logan established the Brooklyn Philo-Celtic Society in 1874, almost two decades before the founding of Conradh na Gaeilge in Dublin. Dr. Úna Ní Bhroiméil's study of American Gaelic societies from 1870 to 1915 finds, however, that while a heartfelt devotion to the language often crossed the Atlantic, the political pertinence of its restoration stayed at home. Drawing heavily on Irish-American newspaper accounts—at times solemn, naive, stern, or quirky, but always sincere—Ní Bhroiméil discovers that such early enthusiasts as Logan ran a continuing battle with those immigrant Irish who looked on the study of Irish as a mere cultural ornament or a social occasion. Úna Ní Bhroiméil's book on the Gaelic revival in America will appear from Four Courts Press in 2002; her current research focuses on Irish Americans and World War I.

The unexpected death of novelist Brian Moore in January, 1999, silenced one of the most ambitious novelists of the latter half of the twentieth century. Moore lived in North America during most of his literary career, and few of his later novels were set in Ireland. His assumption of an internationalist perspective, Patrick Hicks argues here, may be traced to the catharthis Moore underwent in writing his 1958 novel The Feast of Lupercal, which draws heavily his own secondary school education at St. Malachy's College in Belfast. In The Feast of Lupercal, Moore probed and put to rest the sexual repression and hidebound gender roles of the Belfast in which he was raised. Dr. Patrick Hicks has previously published articles on Brian Moore in Irish University Review and the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. He is currently working on a study of novelist Robert McLiam Wilson.

The comic use of myth is a recurring device in Irish fiction—most famously in Ulysses, and most uproariously in At Swim-Two-Birds. In this vein, Dr. Thomas Shea investigates here the development of Patrick McGinley's intertextual weaving of the Ulster cycle and the Cúchullain myth into his 1985 novel The Trick of the Ga Bolga. The novel's main character, Englishman George Rufus Coote, isolates himself in Donegal to escape World War II; there, he attempts to escape recognition by using, in Shea's words, a “kinetic verbal sparring.” Coote's shielding rhetoric eventually clashes with ancient mythology, and, as scrutiny of the typescript additions makes clear, McGinley's revisions comment on nationalistic reinvention and the living influence of mythic warfare against Ireland's deceptively calm wartime neutrality. The author of Flann O'Brien's Exorbitant Novels (1992), Thomas Shea's recent articles have appeared in such journals as Twentieth Century Literature, Nua, and the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies.

Scholar, teacher, and ardent Irish speaker—as well as the host of North America's most successful Irish-language radio show, “Míle Fáilte” at Fordham University's radio station WFUV, whose Arbitron ratings tally 13,000 weekly listeners—James J. Blake regularly reports on the state of the Irish language for the readers of New Hibernia Review. Here, he leads us through a genial overview of contemporary fiction in the Irish language—an overview that places novelist Alan Titley at the center of an energetic pantheon of writers. Though official and institutional support for creative writing in the language continues to fall short, as does the reliable support of a book-buying public, Dr. Blake's appraisal leaves no doubt that present-day Irish fiction is nonetheless alive and well.

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