NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Fómhar/Autumn  2002

don meade Kitty O'Neil and Her “Champion Jig”: An Irish Dancer on the New York Stage gearóid denvir The Linguistic Implications of Mass Tourism in Gaeltacht Areas mary o'malley Filíocht Nua: New Poetry george cusack A Cold Eye Cast Inward: Seamus Heaney's Field Work elizabeth malcolm Investigating the “Machinery of Murder”: Irish Detectives and Agrarian Outrages 1847–70 julie henigan “The Power of a Lie”: Irish Storytelling Tradition in The Playboy of the Western World thomas finan Prophecies of the Expected Deliverer in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Irish Bardic Poetry paule salerno-o'shea Diversity and the Irish Workplace: Myths and Reflections from the Gateway Logo Ceisteanna Úra: Fresh Questions ruth barrington Terrible Beauty or Celtic Mouse: The Research Agenda in Ireland Reviews: Léirmheasanna Clúdach: Cover News of Authors: Nuacht Faoi Údair

Clúdach: Cover Our necessarily too-brief tour of the art collections of Ireland's third-largest city, Limerick, on the covers of the 2002 volume of New Hibernia Review returns in this issue to the Limerick City Gallery of Art. There, we encounter a boldly composed work by Seán Keating (1889–1977), whose work drew often on the West of Ireland scenes that he absorbed during a childhood in Limerick and his youthful years on the Aran Islands. In his maturity, Keating was one of midcentury Ireland's most prominent and widely exhibited artists. Elected to the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1923, he served as its president from 1949 to 1962, and held a long-time professorship at the National College of Art and Design. The scene depicted in Country Dance (1948), a gouache on paper on board that measures 82 cm. by 70 cm., represents well Keating's inclination to idealize the West. Executed only five years after de Valéra's famous St. Patrick's Day radio address, Keating's painting evokes an understated triptych in which the central figure of the young woman is flanked by a buoyantly dancing suitor on the left and the watchful, but approving, gaze of her still youthful mother on the right. The series of ruined walls in the background—rendered in lavender tones against an unexpectedly turquoise sky—may be seen as a subtle quotation from Keating's famous painting, Night's Candles are Burnt Out (1929), with their parallel planes bringing to mind the spillways of a hydroelectric dam on the Shannon. At the same time, the vanished arches of the ruins are faintly suggested in the more elemental lower half of the painting, by the forms of the central figure's red petticoat and the dancer's bowed legs. Indeed, the coloring and poses of the three figures recall the stylizations of one of Keating's contemporaries, the Ulster painter John Luke (1906–1975). Thus, Country Dance proposes an Ireland that engages with both continuity and change—though strongly inclined toward tradition. The permanent collection of the Limerick City Gallery of Art, begun in 1948, includes works that trace the development of modern Irish art in painting, sculpture and drawing. The gallery also hosts contemporary exhibitions by Irish and international artists including the widely known ev+a exhibition. We thank the LCGA and its director Michael Fitzpatrick, for permission to reproduce Keating's painting for the readers of New Hibernia Review.

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
Sometimes antic, frequently orphic, the titles of traditional Irish melodies often seem plucked from the air. But only sometimes: in the case of “Kitty O'Neil's Champion Jig,” a two-part melody that was collected in tunebooks as early as 1867, the name bespeaks a pedigree that runs through the vaudeville and variety stage and back to the blackface minstrel shows of the nineteenth century. In 1982, a recording by the County Donegal fiddler Tommy Peoples reintroduced the tune to the modern repertoire, albeit under a mistaken title. Here, Don Meade not only tracks the circuitous history of this irresistible tune, but also charts the life of the once-celebrated beauty for whom it is named. Known in her day as “the idol of the newsboys,” Kitty O'Neil made a sophisticated “sand jig” her specialty, and her show business career is linked with such renowned figures as Tony Pastor and Ned Harrigan. An All-Ireland harmonica champion himself, for ten years Don Meade wrote the influential “On the Fiddle” newspaper column in the Irish Voice.

Even more than the rest of the country, Ireland's Gaeltachtaí have experienced the mixed blessings of mass tourism; for, as Dr. Gearóid Denvir describes here with some alarm, the distinctive cultural and linguistic environment of the Irish-speaking regions is every bit as vulnerable as any bogland or rare butterfly in the physical environment. A frequent commentator on the state of the Irish language in New Hibernia Review and elsewhere, Denvir draws on the work of such theorists of tourism as Raphael Samuel and Dean MacConnell, the often blithe projections of tourism planners, his own experiences as a resident of the Connemara Gaeltacht, and the insights of poets to describe the cultural fragility and high psychic costs of pursuing, or being pursued by, the (usually English-speaking) tourist dollar. Rather than surrender to the homogenizing effects of mass tourism, Denvir proposes a number of practical steps to protect the linguistic integrity of such regions.

Now living in the Moycullen Gaeltacht, Mary O'Malley has contributed an energetic presence to Irish poetry in recent decades—as a member of the Cúirt Poetry Festival organizing committee and of the board of Éigse Éireann/Poetry Ireland, and, of course, as the author of four widely admired collections from Salmon Press: A Consideration of Silk (1990), Where the Rocks Float (1993), The Knife in the Wave (1997), and Asylum Road (2001). In this issue, we present a selection from The Boning Hall: New and Selected Poems, her fifth collection forthcoming from Carcanet Press in October of this year. O'Malley writes poems that dig deep, anchored in place, in personal loss, and in the experience of women: poems that fulfill the opening lines of “The Boning Hall”: “No one goes diving in coffin ships but if they did/ with the desire for pearls quelled they'd see wonders. . . .” Yet, she also crafts poems that crackle with allusion, invoking classical and esoteric myths to place the poet and her readers, as in “The Wineapple,” inside “the oldest story of all.”

Seamus Heaney's critics and biographers agree that the 1975 volume Field Work was a linchpin in the evolution of his poetic career—a shift bound up with his physical move from Belfast of the “Troubles” to a pastoral setting in the mountains of County Wicklow, but also stemming from the mature poet's self-interrogation of his role in public life. As George Cusack notes, sectarian strife is never far from the surface in these poems; but overall, this volume traces a course that moves from the poet's recognition of his own powerlessness before the dark forces of violence and irreversible history into a deliberate, if less-than-satisfying, withdrawal. The poetic craft of such poems as “Casualty,” “The Strand at Lough Beg,” and the ten “Glanmore Sonnets” is beyond dispute—but in the end, Cusack charges, Heaney's pivotal collection moves beyond retreat and into narcissisism. A regular presenter on Irish topics at ACIS and other conferences, George Cusack is currently researching the early years of the Abbey Theatre.

Ever since its turbulent premiere in 1907, readers, scholars, actors, and directors have pored over John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, and have found in it seemingly inexhaustible levels of art and meaning. Only two years ago, for instance, the pages of this journal included a discussion of The Playboy vis-à-vis quantum physics. In this issue, Julie Henigan calls our attention to the ways in which Synge's play is grounded in the Irish storytelling tradition and in particular, in the genre of the tall tale that necessarily blurs the lines between truth and reality. She finds that Synge's masterpiece is inseparable from its origins in Irish folklore, and that “In his use of the Irish storytelling tradition, Synge revealed an understanding of his idiom as fluent and remarkable as that of Christy himself.” Julie Henigan has worked as, among other things, a free-lance oral historian, an archivist, and a touring musician, and contributed articles to the Companion to Irish Traditional Music (1999).

Racy novels and television thrillers would have us believe that detective work is the most glamorous of professions—but, as Dr. Elizabeth Malcolm shows here, the rural Irish detective of the nineteenth century held a decidedly unattractive job. Called into being in the wake of the Great Famine, the Royal Irish Constabulary's detective force was given the daunting task of gathering evidence in the Irish countryside, often with only grudging compliance from the local authorities and, almost inevitably, in the midst of deeply suspicious locals. And though police and magistrates were convinced that the rise in rural homicides and agrarian outages stemmed from a conspiracy of “Ribbonmen,” most of the crimes they investigated were actually the result of local disputes and feuds. Dr. Malcolm's articles on Irish social history have appeared in Irish Historical Studies and Irish Economic and Social History. Her study of the origins of the Irish pub appeared in Miller and Donnelly's edited collection Irish Popular Culture, 1650–1850 (1998).

Praise of their patrons—both living and dead—was one of the principal concerns of the bardic poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and in this issue, Dr. Thomas Finan introduces us to the highly metrical verse that has survived from these ages by looking closely at a frequent variation on that theme. These poets often composed verses which asserted that such patrons as generations of the O'Connor dynasty in Ireland, held their rank and power because they were fulfilling an earlier prophecy—sometimes a prophecy ascribed to no less an authority than Saints Patrick or Colm Cille, but in fact composed to legitimate the current ruler. Bardic poetry of prophecy and deliverance, thus, might best be understood as a sort of “reverse history,” in which the present was employed to create a legitimating past. Thomas Finan is now engaged in studying the history and settlement of the medieval parishes of the Diocese of Elphin in Connaught.

Advertising and commercial identities may well form the lingua franca of our age: there must be few of us, indeed, who would not recognize the Nike “swoosh” or the Spencerian script on a Coca-Cola® can. The “cow spots” of Gateway Computers may also be on their way to becoming one of those instantly recognizable logos, and, under the scrutiny of Dr. Paule Salerno-O'Shea, those simple spots prove to have much to say to contemporary Ireland. Gateway's North Dublin plant was, of course, a conspicuous presence in the Irish software industry before its closure last year. On a deeper level, though, the “cow spots” introduced by the computer giant in 1998 are informed by new and evolving ideologies of management, nationhood, and globalization—developments of immense relevance to Ireland's newly diverse workforce. Paule Salerno-O'Shea has taught in business schools in both France and Ireland, and has lately begun comparative research on medical charities in those countries.

It is one of the anomalies of the Irish intellectual tradition that, until recently, science and research into the physical world has not been embraced with the same ardor as have Irish arts and letters. From her vantage point as chief executive of the Health Research Board in Dublin and as the author of Health Medicine and Politics in Ireland 1900–70 (1987), Dr. Ruth Barrington is well placed to note the burgeoning of the sciences in contemporary Ireland. In a far-ranging article here, she outlines the challenges and opportunities that Ireland faces as it becomes a truly knowledge-based society. These challenges include the balance between basic research and applied R&D; the adaptation of research ethics; and the ever-familiar worries of funding. But preceding all of these concerns, argues Barrington, there is a more fundamental challenge: that of creating a climate that values scientific research for what it is—a creative activity.

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