NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Geimhreadh/Winter 2001

joan fitzpatrick dean The Riot in Westport: George A. Birmingham at Home chrystel hug Moral Order and the Liberal Agenda in the Republic of Ireland 42lmoya cannon Filíocht Nua: New Poetry ljoseph kelly Bishop John England and the American Slavery Debate lkate cochran “The Plain Round Tale of Faithful Thady”: Castle Rackrent as Slave Narrative ljoseph p. o'grady Forcing the Question of Northern Ireland: The Brooke-Mayhew Talks, 1990–1992 jack morgan “Old Sleepy Hollow Calls Over the World”: Washington Irving's Presence in “The Dead” lwilliam h. mulligan Irish Immigrants in Michigan's Copper Country: Assimilation on a Northern Frontier ldavid wheatley The Aistriúchán Cloak: Paul Muldoon and the Irish Language patrick o'donnell “Whither the Abbey?” Renovating Ireland's National Theater Radharc ar gCúl: A Backward Glance bernadette cunningham Keating's Foras Feasa ar Éirinn and the Historical Origins of Irish Identity ray cashman Ethnohistorical Preservation and Persuasion in Geoffrey Keating's Foras Feasa ar Éirinn henry glassie Keating Hero

Clúdach: Cover We close this fifth volume of New Hibernia Review by presenting the last of four illustrations from works of Irish natural history in the varied holdings of the Celtic Collection in the Department of Special Collections in O'Shaughnessy-Frey Library Center at our home campus, the University of St. Thomas. Nearly a third of the collection's holdings are in Irish. Many of these came from the library of the Celtic scholar Eamonn O'Toole (1883–1956), who held the chair of Irish at Trinity College, Dublin, until his death. Roughly half of his scholarly library was purchased by the College of St. Thomas after his death. The vividly purple lobster shown on this issue's cover comes from a plate in Cladaigh Chonamara (1938) by Séamus Mac con Iomaire (Mac an Iomaire). Describing in idiomatic Connemara Irish the fishes, shellfish, and other maritime flora and fauna of the beaches of the West, Cladaigh Chonamara was published in Dublin in 1938. Mac an Iomaire introduces us to the natural history of the western shore, and to the Gaelic names and lore of the fauna flora there. His extensive reportage on the folkways and practices of the fishing communities scattered through the Connemara Gaeltacht begins with a warm meditation on his home island of Máinis or Muínis. The first edition contains numerous photographs and drawings dating from the 1920s. A paperback edition, which sadly omitted the colorful plates that highlighted the original, was issued in 1985 by An Gúm, the publications branch of the Irish Department of Education and Science. Readers of Irish will find Mac an Iomaire's original paragraphs a rewarding challenge. An English-language version of Cladaí Chonmara has been made by Padraic de Bhaldraithe, who has added extensive ethnographic and scientific notes, as well as new and detailed drawings and photographs, some in color. The Galway publishing house Tír Eolas issued this elegantly produced book under the title The Shores of Connemara in homage to the Connemara Environmental Education Centre. We thank the Department of Special Collections of the O'Shaughnessy-Frey Library Center of the University of St. Thomas—and especially its director, Ann Kenne—for its generous contribution of the material for the four covers of the 2001 volume of New Hibernia Review. Our readers may discover more about the rich resources of the Celtic Collection at St. Thomas going to the Internet: http://www.lib.stthomas.edu/special/celtic.htm .

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí

The riot that broke out at a February, 1914, production of George A. Birmingham's General John Regan in Westport, County Mayo, was a startling event that John FitzPatrick Dean describes here as "the most violent and isolated outbreak of theatrical disorder in twentieth-century Ireland." Ireland's school for "children of color." Alerted, England led Charleston's Irish Volunteers down to protect the school. Yet soon after this when all schools for "free blacks" were closed in , England acquiesced--thus divorcing Catholicism in Irving's The Sketch Book (1820) both play a role in Joyce's portrayal of turn-of-the-century Dublin. Jack Morgan treats the themes of "The Dead" by taking particular note of Gabriel Conroy's recapitulation of Ichabod Crane's character and echoes of "The Christmas Dinner" in Joyce's deployment of the Bakhtinian banquet motif as a talisman against memories of the Famine. Jack Morgan's Mortal Coils: Physicality and the Rhetoric of Horror will soon appear from Southern Illinois University Press.

One overlooked Irish immigrant community in the United States was located on Michigan's Upper Peninsula in the towns of Hancock, Portage Lake, and Rockland. These were copper mining towns, and their civic life is William H. Mulligan's subject here. These miners emigrated from the Puxley estates in County Cork to Michigan just before the Civil War. Particularly important in Dr. Mulligan's narrative of their assimilation are local newspaper stories of their St. Patrick's Day celebrations--especially a campaign against Father James Sweeny. A historian of the Irish in the United States, Prof. Mulligan is the author of Northborough: The Town and Its People, 1638--1975 and he directs the Forrest C. Pogue Public History Institute at Murray State University.

The considerable achievement of Paul Muldoon--ten critically acclaimed books, numerous honors, and professorships at Oxford and Princeton--dates from the day when, at age seventeen, he first wrote poetry in the Irish language while still as student in his native Armagh. Although Muldoon soon came to prefer English for his linguistically playful verse, Irish colors many of Muldoon's lines and stanzas, as David Wheatley reveals here. Irish-language models have helped shape a number of Muldoon's poems, notably "Immram." Muldoon has translated Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Michael Davitt in imaginative ways, and he continues to employ Irish in his own work. An editor of the journal Metre, David Wheatley has published widely on Samuel Beckett and on contemporary Irish poetry.

Dublin's Abbey Theatre, on the corner of Lower Abbey and Marlborough Streets, is a cradle of Ireland's national culture and of its twentieth-century liberties. Our readers will recall the legendary Abbey protests focused on productions of Synge's Playboy and O'Casey's Plough. And the Abbey idea survived the absence of the Abbey stage between 1951, when the theater burned, and 1966 when, after the fiftieth anniversary of the Rising, the new Abbey stage opened to the international public. Now, as Patrick O'Donnell documents here, fervent public debate has arisen about the "fate" of the Abbey. The Celtic Tiger redevelopment of central Dublin may lure Ireland's national theater away from its historic site to new and lavishly funded premises in the recently cleared Dublin docklands across the Liffey, but not without objection --not the least from Taoiseach Bertie Ahearn. Patrick O'Donnell is now researching the influence of Irish dramatist Brian Friel and Irish director Tomás Mac Ana on the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.

If nationality begins in the act of imagining a community, then This issue's "backward look" closes with Henry Glassie's evocation of the Keating's place in the ructions of seventeenth-century Ireland. Glassie's title, "Keating Hero" recalls that of James Joyce's Stephen Hero, the "first draft" of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And Keating's "history" of Ireland--literally the Foundation of Knowledge about Ireland--constitutes a portrait of the island as a young nation. Our readers will know Prof. Glassie renowned works, All Silver and No Brass: An Irish Christmas Mumming (1976), Passing the Time in Ballymenone: Culture and History of an Ulster Community (1982), and most recently Vernacular Architecture (2000).

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