NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Geimhreadh/Winter 2002

natasha casey Riverdance: The Importance of Being Irish American thomas e. hachey The Rhetoric and Reality of Irish Neutrality daniel tobin Filíocht Nua: New Poetry liam harte History, Text and Society in Colm Tóibín's The Heather Blazing gary murphy The Irish Government, the National Farmers Association, and the European Economic Community, 1955–1964 david graham haynes Unstable Tadgh in Sheridan's The Field (1990) earl g. ingersoll The Psychic Geography of Joyce's Dubliners adrian frazier Moore's Hail and Yeats's Farewell michelle sweeney and jack morgan Ancestral Voices: Padraic Colum and the Celtic Creature Poem ríona ní fhrighil Imní an Scáthaithe: Eavan Boland agus Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill Exhibitions: Taispeántais maureen e. mulvihill The Camera Does Not Lie: Revisiting Bloody Sunday (1972–2002) Reviews: Léirmheasanna Clúdach: Cover News of Authors: Nuacht faoi Údair

Clúdach: Cover Our tour of the museums of Limerick City museums returns to the Shannon quayside and to the Hunt Museum housed in the Georgian walls of the Old Custom House. In future issues we hope to rectify one omission from this tour: the very interesting collections of the new Limerick City Museum. As our readers will recall, the Hunt Museum chiefly features pre-Christian archeological artifacts and ecclesiastical goods dating from the seventeenth century. The taste of John and Gertrude Hunt admitted whimsy, as the Belleek candelabrum in the form of a stag's head on the cover of our Summer, 2002, issue (6:2) suggests. Our final cover presents another Ascendancy whimsy—a trompe l'oeuil rendition of a board of souvenirs. The background of this painting is grained so as to suggest a board of nearly clear, old-growth cedar from the grounds of a County Limerick Big House. The four-square center image reproduces a watercolor of the master of the house after a successful day's coursing for hares, his loyal hound behind him. Indeed, the images on this “story board” suggest a domestic plot as might have been composed by Maria Edgeworth. The letter tucked under the green ribbon is addressed to Mrs. Grady, of Elton House, County Limerick. The goose quill with its inky tip opposite is hers. Above that dangles a Regency necklace of pearls, and to its left a peacock's feather from, perhaps, a tryst in the garden. To the right are a lace scarf and a wristlet cameo carved, apparently, into moss agate. Posed between the letter and the wristlet is a single housefly. Could Kate O'Brien have construed a better plot? This image is reproduced © The Hunt Museum by kind permission of the trustees of the museum. We thank Fiona Davern, the museum's registrar, for her timely and expert help.

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
Among the many indices of twentieth-century assimilation of the Irish into America may be counted the various forms that the marketing of “Irishness” may take, and here Natasha Casey focuses an eagle eye on the decade of the 1990s and the Riverdance phenomenon. Ranging from Irish goods poised for export at Shannon to the actual performances of Riverdance, from videos of Lord of the Dance to televised parodies of it, Casey's entertaining analysis of Irishness on the broad stage of American popular culture ranges widely. Grounded in commentaries by such scholars as Noel Ignatiev and Perry Curtis, Casey's conclusion poses Irishness as the acceptable expression of minority European ethnicity grounded in an assertion of “folk” values, rendered inauthentic by commercialization and sentimental by repetition. Natasha Casey is the author of a number of smart conference papers on Irishness and popular culture and of two entries in the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Irish Culture forthcoming from Routledge.

Ireland's official stance as a European neutral may descend from the Rising of '98 and the nineteenth-century, republican dictum that England's difficulty was Ireland's opportunity. Certainly the Free State's stance as a noncombatant during World War II made possible the assertion of neutrality when Ireland became a republic in 1949. As Thomas E. Hachey delineates clearly here, since 1921 Ireland's neutral stance proved a flexible concept that successive Dublin governments articulated in different ways for domestic political purposes. Neutrality often helped to draw a distinction between Ireland's interests and Britain's, especially after World War II and during the Cold War in the United Nations. Neutrality helped to situate Ireland in the United Nations and aided Ireland's practical representation of democratic ideals in a decolonializing world. Dr. Hachey's synoptic analysis concludes by assessing the pressure to abandon neurality now exerted by the European Union and NATO. Well known to Irish Studies scholars throughout the world, Prof. Hachey now directs the Irish programs at Boston College.

Prof. Daniel Tobin's essay on Irish-American poetry in New Hibernia Review (Winter, 1999) provides a foretaste of his forthcoming and comprehensive anthology of Irish-American verse for Notre Dame University Press. Better yet, it provides a rich background for “The Narrows,” a poem central to Tobin's second collection after his award-winning Where the World Is Made (1999). A loose-limbed elegy to Tobin's mother, “The Narrows” deploys an open American poetic so as to reach back into a legend of immigration, a neighborhood album of family stories, and recollections of retracing the route of the family in Ireland. “The Narrows” eloquently extends a genre graced by John Montague's The Dead Kingdom (1984) and Michael Coady's Oven Lane (1987). Now chair the Department of English at Emerson College, Dr. Tobin is the author of Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (1999).

After the Troubles, the romance went out of Irish politics in the South, rendering political life a recalcitrant subject suited to satire, at best. Spurred on by the gravity of the “Troubles” in the North, however, younger Irish novelists began in the late 1990s to take note of the day-to-day political matter of electioneering, referenda, and constitutional issues, as novels by Eamonn Sweeney and Thomas McCarthy have demonstrated. Better known internationally is Colm Tóibín's The Heather Blazing (1992), which Dr. Harte anatomizes here. Now on the faculty of the new Academy of Irish Cultural Heritages on the Magee campus of the University of Ulster in Derry, Harte argues that, through the travails of his central character Eamon Redmond, Tóibín provides a revisionist view of the ways in which official nationalism encounters the fluid social realities of Ireland in the European Community. A lawyer, Eamon wrestles heroically with hard cases and hard ideas, and his agon is the act of interpretation pressed by the conflict of present realities and past ideas—those enshrined in the Bunreacht na hÉireann (Constitution of Ireland). Liam Harte recently coedited Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories (2000).

Postwar domestic ferment dating from the Great Emergency to just after the first Inter-Party Government encouraged Irish farmers to form regional associations with the aim of influencing the policies of the Dublin government. Starting with the formation of the National Farmers' Association in 1955, Prof. Gary Murphy recounts the ways in which the NFA attempted to shape the agricultural and trade policies of Sean Lemass's Fianna Fáil government in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Stung by what it saw as the technological and industrial emphasis of T. K. Whitaker's policies, the NFA pressed for Ireland's entry into the European Economic Community, believing the profits of Europe's markets superior to Ireland's traditional British ones. Taking on the history of Ireland's Common Market negotiations from this new angle, Dr. Murphy reveals the earnest liveliness of Irish politics in the 1950s and 1960s. Gary Murphy is the author of numerous articles concerning Ireland and the European Economic Community, including “A Wider Perspective: Ireland's View of Western Europe in the 1950s,” in Irish Foreign Policy, 1919—1969: From Independence to Internationalism, edited by Michael Kennedy and Joseph Skelly (2000).

Perhaps the most popular of Irish dramatists, the late Kerry playwright John B. Keane observed closely the devastating effects of land hunger on the Irish smallholder in the twentieth century in The Field. The Dubliner Jim Sheridan turned Keane's play into a powerful and glowering film in 1990. Here, David Graham Haynes explores in detail just how Sheridan reworked Keane's drama by altering the stage characters of Tadgh and his father Bull McCabe to suit the powers of the actors—Sean Bean and the late Richard Harris, respectively. In doing so, Sheridan reinterprets and darkens Keane's depictions of Tadgh's struggle for autonomy against the unyielding will of his father. Sheridan gives a Gothic treatment of Tadgh's struggles with his father in order to reveal how he is morally, emotionally, and then physically doomed by the inheritance secured for him at the cost of the life of Seamy, Bull McCabe's elder son—a character invented by Sheridan. Active in the field of writing pedagogy, David Graham Haynes has given papers on the ethics of “voice” and on writing centers in Ireland.

Joyce's fiction may not be overshadowed by land and land hunger, but, as any reader of Ulysses knows, the streetscape of Edwardian Dublin figures large in that author's imagination. Joyce's first full use of urban geography comes in the stories of Dubliners, where, as Earl G. Ingersoll shows, the geography of address matters far less than the geography of direction. From “Araby” to “The Dead,” Dr. Ingersoll reveals that Joyce faces his characters east or west—rather than north or south—and leads them toward sad hopes and great expectations thwarted. Along the way, Prof. Ingersoll's explication engages contemporary issues—ones of orientalism and gender, of class and nationality—and so provides a rich reading of the whole of Dubliners, a book much studied and commented upon. Dr. Ingersoll was recently made Distinguished Teaching Professor and Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the State University of New York College at Brockport. His publications include Engendered Trope in Joyce's Dubliners (1996) and D. H. Lawrence, Desire, and Narrative (2002).

One nugget of received wisdom of Irish Studies is that George Moore's genius was limited to mocking the “Greats” of the Revival—and especially Yeats—in Hail and Farewell (1911–14). Such a notion, of course, overlooks the hardiness of Moore's imagination in the stories of The Untilled Filled and the fiction of A Drama in Muslin. Indeed, as Prof. Adrian Frazier recounts here, the travesties of Yeats in Moore's memoir of the Revival pale in comparison to Yeats's management of gossip against Moore. Yeats's letters and his Autobiographies, and particularly Dramatis Personae (1936),all contain passages designed to do Moore down. Yeats's motives seem by turns mystifying or frivolous, and Dr. Frazier attributes them to Yeats's attempts to establish his own literary and psychosexual autonomy at Moore's expense. Director of the M. A. Programme in Drama and Theatre arts at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Dr. Frazier is the author of George Moore 1852–1933 (2000).

Like Austin Clarke, Padraic Colum was second-generation Revival poet, but unlike Clarke his verse was well known and revered in the United States among Irish Americans from the 1920s until his death in 1972. Colum's poetry is not much studied today, yet it was praised by Ezra Pound, the prophet of American Modernism. Here Jack Morgan and Michelle Sweeney examine one of Colum's favorite genres—the faunal or “animal” poem. In Colum's practice of that genre, they perceive links to the Moderns—especially to Elizabeth Bishop—and to medieval Celticism, to “Pangur Bán” and the Welsh lines of Dafydd ap Gwilym. Now teaching at Dominican College, Chicago, Prof. Michelle Sweeney is the author of Magic in Medieval Romance (2000). A frequent presenter at Irish Studies conferences and a prolific writer on Irish literary topics, Prof. Jack Morgan most recently published The Biology of Horror: Gothic Literature and the Film (2002).

We offer our readers skilled in Irish an essay in that language on the critical stances of two Irish poets—Eavan Boland and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Both are inventive and charismatic poets now well known to readers in the United States. Here, Dr. Rióna Ní Fhrighil employs classics of American criticism by Harold Bloom and Elaine Showalter together with criticism in Irish by Mairín Ní Dhonnchadha and Daithí Ó hÓgain to anatomize both poets' imní na húdarachta (“anxiety of authorship”). In this regard, what distinguishes one from the other is, in the end, a matter of language. For Boland more than Ní Dhomhnaill, it is the female voice that matters in a patriarchal literary tradition; for Ní Dhomhnaill far more than Boland, it is the glór or voice in Irish that matters far more than the voice in English. Dr. Ní Fhrighil teaches Irish language and literature at St. Patrick's College, Drumcondra.

We end the year with an account by Dr. Maureen Mulvihill of the last mounting in January, 2002, of an important exhibition of documentary photographs titled Hidden Truths: Bloody Sunday 1972 at Manhattan's International Center of Photography. Curated by Trisha Ziff, the exhibition was complemented by a Bloody Sunday Panel at New York University Law School. As both Dr. Mulvihill's interview with Ziff and her description of the show reveal, the multimedia effects of this exhibition were powerful, and powerfully revealing. Such photographs documenting Bloody Sunday as those famous ones taken by Fulvio Grimaldi underline the moral urgency of the Saville Inquiry now investigating the actions of British paratroopers thirty years ago.

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