NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Geimhreadh/Winter 2003

richard ryan Ireland on the World Stage: At the United Nations and on the Security Council weldon thornton The Greatness of Ulysses gréagóir ó dúill Filíocht Nua: New Poetry brenda murphy Pure Genius: Guinness Consumption and Irish Identity paige reynolds Reading Publics, Theater Audiences, and the Little Magazines of the Abbey Theatre nelson ó ceallaigh ritschel In the Shadow of the Glen: Synge, Ostrovsky, and Marital Separation thomas mangione The Establishment of the Model School System in Ireland, 1834–1854 Fresh Questions: Ceisteanna Úra cheryl herr “Re-Imagining Ireland,” Rethinking Irish Studies Taispeántais: Exhibitions christy fox Galway Arts Festival, 2003: Focusing on Home, Still Delighting Reviews: Léirmheasanna Nuacht faoi Údair: News of Authors Clúdach: Cover

Clúdach: Cover The stark image on the cover of New Hibernia Review's last 2003 issue is one of Paul Seawright's photographs of the “nonspace”—the burned over “no-man's land”—lying in the boundaries between Catholic and Protestant communities in Belfast. After the 1997–98 cease-fire, Seawright began his Wall and Fire photographs. Titled Gate, this color print on 150 x 150 cm. sheet of aluminum is in the collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art. In Gate, Seawright offers the viewer a heat-scarred, welded emblem of “No Resistance” four-squarely framed so as to recall both a double-crossed target—“X marks the spot”—and the superimposed crosses on the Union Jack. Raised in a Protestant, working-class estate of Belfast, Seawright studied at the West Surrey College of Art and Design where Paul Graham introduced him to photography. His first solo exhibition was Sectarian Murder (1989, 1992–94), followed by The Orange Order (1991–93), Police Force (1995–97) and The Missing (1998). Now engaged in making similar photographs of the “Zone” or périphérique around Paris—the unvisited space around the European city—Seawright lectures at the University of Wales. His work is held in museum collections worldwide from Munich to San Francisco, from Ontario to Dublin, where he is represented by the Kerlin Gallery. For helping us bring Seawright's evocative and analytical art to the attention of our readers, we thank Catherine Marshall and Riann Coulter of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Royal Hospital, Kilmainham.

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
After the shock of 9/11, world events both military and political call to mind how necessary are the patient processes of world diplomacy in the United Nations, where a small nation like Ireland can exercise a guiding influence. Presiding over the Security Council for the third time in 2001, Ireland was represented by Ambassador Richard Ryan at the height of the Afghan crisis. Recalling analytically his long experience in Irish diplomacy and, particularly, his intense engagements with United Nations efforts regarding Angola, the “Great Lakes” region of Africa, and Iraq, Ryan eloquently argues both the practical and ideal effects of multilateralism on the world's peoples and their hopes. His remarks here were delivered at the University of St. Thomas, October 31, 2003, when he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree recognizing his contributions to world diplomacy. In 1970–71, Richard Ryan was poet-in residence at St. Thomas and taught in the university's Department of English. From the late 1960s through the mid-1970s Ryan was a well-noted Dublin literary figure, a Dolmen poet, and friend to such writers as John Montague and Francis Stuart.

The centennial of Bloomsday this coming June 16 will no doubt send hordes of new readers to Joyce's definitive, if daunting, novel—and as Dr. Weldon Thornton illuminates for us here, Ulysses will more than repay their efforts. Bloom's humanity and decency, Joyce's delight in the city of Dublin, and the sheer stylistic jouissance of the prose are among the attributes that render Ulysses a truly “great” novel. Joyce's pioneering use of stream of consciousness, and his telling of a tale that is at once both quotidian and mythic, likewise commend the novel to all readers—in spite of certain flaws in structure and tone that Prof.Thornton concedes. This article is a version of the plenary lecture Dr. Thornton delievered to the 2003, meeting of the Southern Regional American Conference for Irish Studies sponsored by Eastern Tennessee University in Chattanooga. The author of numerous books and articles on modernist authors—among them the essential Allusions in Ulysses (1968), still in print today—Weldon Thornton has lately worked closely with Jin Di, the Chinese translator of Joyce.

A guiding influence at The Poet's House, founded by the late James Simmons, Gréagoir Ó Dúill lives part of each year in County Donegal, which is the setting of many of these poems in New Hibernia Review. Ó Dúill has published eight collections with the Irish-language publisher Coiscéim from which his Rogha Dánta (2001) samples. Translated here by Bernie Kenny, Ó Dúill's poems invest both ordinary signs of rural progress with foreboding, as in”The Cruellest Month” and political mourning with hope, as in “Coinnle Samhna,” an elegy for the Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. In “A Young Man's Story” Ó Dúill sets out a whole biography in the circumstance of a one brief blessing: “Go mba hé dhuit.” Ó Dúill edited Filíocht Uladh 1960–1985 and wrote a literary biography of Samuel Ferguson, a forerunner of the Literary Revival. Bernie Kenny's first book is Poulnabrone (2002).

Coined by the social theorist Michael Billig, the term “banal nationalism” is a helpful concept that describes those markers of national identity found in the embodied habits of social life. Billig's theories are distinctly exemplified by the consumption of Guinness Stout, as Brenda Murphy found when she set out to explore the roots of that famous Irish beverage's extraordinary popularity. In addition to conducting on-site interviews with Guinness drinkers in pubs in Ireland and elsewhere, Murphy asked her subjects to view and comment on historic and contemporary advertisements for the product. Irish and immigrant consumers consistently construed the commercial texts as speaking about more than a mere beverage. The respondents created a “myth” around Guinness that included membership, imagined locales, and especially, an idea of home. Now working in Malta, Brenda Murphy has presented her research on the discourse surrounding Guinness advertising at conferences in Ireland, the United States, and England.

The early years of Ireland's Abbey Theatre were famously attended by controversy, ranging from artistic debates among its principals to the celebrated “riots” that greeted Synge's Playboy and O'Casey's Plough. In this issue, Dr. Paige Reynolds scrutinizes the “little magazines” Bealtaine, Samhain, and The Arrow published by the Abbey and finds that the familiar tension between idealism and pragmatism fills these magazines. The most pervasive conflict, though, was the disjunction between the high-minded reading public envisioned by Yeats and the Abbey leadership and the reality of the theater-going public. In, the end, Reynolds finds, the little magazines saw their mission as instructional: “It becomes clear,” she writes, “that the Abbey saw its project, both in print and on stage, and one of disseminating information about the Irish public to the Irish public.” Paige Reynolds's previous articles on modernist writers have appeared in such journals as Twentieth Century Literature and Modernism/Modernity.

Usually titled The Shadow of the Glen, Synge's one-act play excited much controversy and aspersion among Irish nationalists when it was first performed under the title In the Shadow of the Glen and published in the Abbey magazine Samhain in 1904. Here Nelson “O Ceallaigh Ritschel finds that the controversy surrounding Nora's leaving of Dan, her elderly husband, resonated against one strain of nationalism that ennobled the Irish woman in the home and with another, more libertarian strain, that engaged both suffrage and the right to divorce. Synge's play provides the converse of Yeats's Kathleen ni Houlihan, published in Samhain in 1902.Synge was not alone in his interest in marital separation. The issue arises in the Theatre of Ireland's 1911 production of Alexander Ostrovsky's Storm and, later, of Thomas MacDonagh's Pagans (1915). Now teaching at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, Prof. Ritschel has lately published Synge and Irish Nationalism: The Precursor to Revolution from Greenwood Press (2002).

Educational reform remains a hotly contested topic in public policy today, as many a municipal election in the United States attests. Political and financial realities often spill into the classroom and the curriculum. Early Victorian Ireland was no different. In this issue, Thomas Mangione charts the fortunes of the Model School system established in 1834 with the charge of training Irish primary teachers. Though the Model Schools were few in number, Mangione demonstrates that their ambitious scope and regimented curricular demands—centered on prescribed “Book-classes” that students needed to master before they could advance to the next level—were to prove the cornerstone of Ireland's much larger system of national schools. Nonetheless, disputes over funding and policy dogged the schools' history, and, in time, the Roman Catholic hierarchy strongly opposed the system. Thomas Mangione is pursuing doctoral studies in Irish history with Dr. Emmet Larkin.

Last May, an unprecedented assemblage of Irish intellectuals and artists converged on the University of Virginia to undertake the self-appointed task of “Re-imagining Ireland.” Among those who attended this well-funded and widely promoted gathering was Cheryl Herr, who arrived with high hopes. In this reflective essay Dr. Herr looks back at the Virginia conference and admits to some disappointment; for, despite such highlights as Luke Gibbons's call to turn away from the “rage of history,” the conference proved too amorphous and multidimensional to accomplish its ambitious goals. Considering that the Virginia conference avowedly aspired to inclusiveness, Herr points out several conspicuous omissions of content. More troubling, she also discerns a perceptible hauteur toward both Irish America and American scholars. Well-known for her many critical writings on Joyce, Cheryl Herr's most recent book is The Field (2002), a title in Cork University Press's “Ireland Into Film” series.

Come rain or shine, each July Galway becomes home to the indoor drama and outdoor theatrics of the Galway Arts Festival, often highlighted by a Macnas parade, the subject of Christie Fox's article in New Hibernia Review (Summer, 2003). Here Prof. Fox surveys all the events of the 2003 festival—from the installations of Bernard Pras and Nilks-Udo to the back-seat drama of Car Show and the athleticism of Hurl. The Barabbas company's production of the latter proved especially pertinent as it posed Ireland's new ethnicities against The old nationalism of the Gaelic Athletic Association. As Fox notes at the start, this year's festival featured fewer artists and performances from outside Ireland than before, in part owing to new rulings about the dreaded VAT. Audiences seeking traditional Irish drama were well rewarded by b*spoke Theatre Company's production of Tom Murphy's The Drunkard, but not quite by the Pittsburgh Irish and Classical Theater's production of Shaw's Major Barbara—a play that grows more relevant with each passing year.

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