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Canadian Association for Irish Studies
Association canadienne d’études irlandaises
Newsletter Vol. 32, No. 1 Spring 2018
FROM THE PRESIDENT’S DESK
Welcome everyone to CAIS in 2018!
We are all looking forward to our annual
conference, not only because it’s a sign that
spring has arrived and summer is only a
breath away, but also since it always proves to
be such a wonderful reunion for the CAIS
membership. This year we will be hosted by
Brad Kent’s fantastic team at Université
Laval in the phenomenally beautiful Quebec
City from June 13th-16th. This promises to
be a wonderful time for CAIS veterans and
new members alike, along with our ever-
growing stable of impressive graduate
students.
Drawing inspiration from the history of
Grosse Île and Quebec City as the first points
of contact with North America for hundreds
of thousands of Irish immigrants, this year’s
conference theme is “Connections and Contacts.”
The topics covered by this year’s roster of
panelists reflect the various interpretations of the
connections and contacts theme, while also
highlighting the ever-increasing breadth of Irish
Studies around the world. Our keynote speakers
at Laval will be Professor Chris Morash and
Professor Eve Patten from Trinity College
Dublin. Registration is now open, so please make
sure that you can join us mid-June in la belle
province for what promises to be one of our best
get-togethers in recent years!
Please also note that we are being extremely
vigilant this year that presenters and participants
at the conference are paid-up members of CAIS.
This is standard practice across academic
associations and is an extremely vital aspect in
financing our conference each year. Therefore
(*I’m drawing a deep breath and squaring my shoulders as I write this in yet another opening to the newsletter*), please make sure that your
membership is up-to-date. If you are unsure of
your status, please get in touch and we can either
assure you of your well-being or point you in the
direction of the CAIS website so that you can
renew for another year. www.irishstudies.ca
On an entirely different note, we have an
important anniversary to mark this year. April 7
2018 is the sesquicentennial of Thomas D’Arcy
McGee’s assassination in Ottawa. Our Irish
Father of Confederation continues to be one of
the most well-known figures in Canadian history.
The anniversary of his death will be marked by
various Irish societies and scholars. While there
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are no doubt many things about our
contemporary world that might befuddle or
even appal him, I personally think that he
would be extremely pleased and gratified by
the strength of Irish Studies across this
country, based in no small part on his own
legacy of cultural tolerance and his
unshakeable belief in Canada’s potential as a
nation.
As this academic year winds down, it’s
hard to believe that it has already been nearly
three years since I became the president of
CAIS. Jérémy Tétrault-Farber and I began
our positions together at the 2015 conference
in Halifax and I’d like to thank Jérémy for his
dedication over the past three years in the
midst of an extremely busy teaching schedule
and his doctoral studies. He has been a
brilliant secretary-treasurer for the association
and we wish him the very best of luck as he
finishes his thesis.
It’s been an absolute pleasure to have been
this association’s president for the past few
years. Life has changed immensely for
Tommy and myself during that time – as you
can track from the various photos of our son
that have appeared in the newsletter since his
arrival in 2016 – but seeing CAIS double in
size since I began my tenure has been very
rewarding. My deepest thanks to Jean
Talman, Michael Quigley, Michele
Holmgren, Rhona Richman Kenneally,
Pamela McKane, the rest of the CAIS
Executive, and Michael Kenneally for their
guidance and help since that mad day in 2015
when I decided to put my name forward. I
wouldn’t have missed it for anything.
See you in Québec!
Call For Nominations
Nominations are now open for the positions
of President and Secretary-Treasurer on the
CAIS Executive. Nominations should be
submitted in writing and include both the written
consent of the nominee and a brief curriculum
vitae. Both the Nominator and the Nominee
should be members of CAIS in good standing for
at least one year prior to the date of nomination.
If only one nomination is received for a position,
that nominee shall be considered elected by
acclamation.
The Nominations Committee is made up of Jane
McGaughey ([email protected]) and
Jérémy Tétrault-Farber ([email protected]).
Please send your nominations to both members of
the Nominations Committee no later than 30
April 2018.
Memberships
As always, your membership will elapse on July
1 of this year. If you have not yet renewed,
please do so, either on the CAIS website
(www.irishstudies.ca) or through the membership
form at the back of the newsletter. Reminder
letters will be sent out over the next few weeks to
those who might not be aware of their current
membership status. Once again, I urge people to
opt for the three-year membership, as it is a very
convenient way of joining and then not having to
worry about nagging reminders for the next 36
months. Membership for each year includes two
issues of the CJIS/RCÉI, as well as bi-annual
newsletters and electronic updates about
forthcoming publications, book launches,
conferences, and Irish-themed events around the
country.
Also, please recommend CAIS to friends, family,
and anyone you know who has an interest in
Irish-related research, but who might not yet be
part of our organization. While our social media
accounts on Facebook and Twitter are very
popular (thank you, Pamela McKane!!!), word of
mouth recommendations are invaluable for
increasing our membership, which facilitates the
running of our annual conference and publication
of the CJIS/RCÉI. We strongly welcome students
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and interested members of the public to join
us, as well as musicians, actors, novelists,
poets, dancers, athletes, academics, and
anyone else I might have forgotten to mention
here. We need your support, so please
renew, recommend, and then come have a bit
of craic with us in Quebec City!
Quebec City 13 - 16 June 2018
Laval University
Conference Organizer: Brad Kent Brad Kent is Professor of British and Irish
Literatures at Université Laval in Quebec
City. In 2013-14 he was Visiting Professor at
Trinity College Dublin in the School of
English, and in the spring of 2018 he will be
the C.P. Snow Fellow at the University of
Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center,
where he was the Hobby Fellow in the spring
of 2009. His recent publications include
George Bernard Shaw in Context (Cambridge
University Press, 2015) and The Selected
Essays of Sean O'Faolain (McGill-Queen's
University Press, 2016). He is currently
general editor of an eight-volume series of
Shaw’s writings that will be published by
Oxford World’s Classics in 2021. At present
he is working on a monograph entitled
‘Literature, Censorship, and the Cultural
Politics of Affect in Ireland,’ which is
supported with a major grant from the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada.
Situated in Quebec City, Université Laval will
host the 2018 conference of the Canadian
Association for Irish Studies. Often regarded as
one of North America’s most beautiful urban
areas, Quebec City has twice received distinctions
by UNESCO: in 1985 it was added to the World
Heritage List for the preservation of its ramparts
and historical city centre and on 31 October 2017
it was the first francophone municipality to be
designated a City of Literature. Established as a
seminary in 1663, Université Laval is the cradle
of higher-level education in Canada and for
Francophones in North America.
CONNECTIONS AND CONTACTS
For over a century, Grosse Île, located just
down the St Lawrence River from Quebec City,
was the first point of contact with North America
for hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants. It
then served as a quarantine station and today it is
the site of a National Historic Park and the largest
Famine cemetery outside of Ireland. For many of
those cleared to continue their journey, Quebec
City became a home; for others, it was only the
first of many stops as they migrated further west
to Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto, east to the
Atlantic provinces, and south to the United States.
The movement and settlement of these people
created a series of connections with local and
other immigrant communities.
Taking the history of Grosse Île and Quebec
City into account, the 2018 conference of the
Canadian Association for Irish Studies will
explore the notions of connections and contacts.
Diaspora studies, the most evidently relevant
discipline to this subject, has done much to make
connections between Irish and other national
histories. Researchers working in other fields
have investigated the innumerable artistic, social,
philosophical, and political networks to which
Irish people have belonged throughout the ages.
Similarly, scholars have studied issues relevant to
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Ireland through the comparison of people,
ideas, politics, and religion in other polities
and in the process have established
connections that were not otherwise apparent.
The conference of the Canadian
Association for Irish Studies seeks to explore
such connections and contacts. To begin, we
could ask ourselves what does it mean to
come into contact with another person or
culture? What are the effects of this contact?
What is the difference between making
contact and establishing a connection? How
are and are not connections maintained? At
what point do contacts and connections form
a broader network? Is there a distinction to be
made between the subject under study making
contacts and connections and that of the
researcher making them? Certainly, our
coming together at a conference suggests that
the latter has considerable importance for our
greater understanding of the former.
Chris Morash and Eve Patten will be
the keynote speakers.
Chris Morash became the inaugural
Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing on
January 1, 2014. Born in Nova Scotia, his
first degree is from Dalhousie University,
after which he moved to Ireland to join the
first cohort of
students in the
M.Phil. in Anglo-
Irish Literature in
Trinity in 1985;
his Ph.D. on Irish
Famine literature
is also from
Trinity, carried out
under the
supervision of
Professor Terence
Brown. Prior to
his appointment to Trinity, Chris Morash worked
happily for twenty-three years in NUI Maynooth,
where he had been Professor of English since
2007, and founded the Centre for Media Studies
in 2003.
Chris Morash’s research interests range across a
number of areas in the wider field of Irish
Studies. His most recent book, co-authored with
Shaun Richards, is Mapping Irish Theatre:
Theories of Space and Place (Cambridge, 2013),
which uses Irish theatre over the past century as a
ground on which to think spatially about
performance. Prior to that, his previous major
publication was A History of the Media in Ireland
(Cambridge, 2009), the first book to trace the
media in Ireland from the earliest printed book to
the present. This followed A History of Irish
Theatre, 1601-2000 (Cambridge, 2002), which
became the first Irish book to win the Theatre
Book Prize in 2003, and has become a standard
history of Irish theatre. In 1995, he published
Writing the Irish Famine (Oxford, 1995), which
was part of a wider re-assessment of the Famine
that accompanied the 150th anniversary of the
event.
Edited works include Teresa Deevy Reclaimed:
Volume I (with Jonathan Banks and John
Harrington; Mint Theatre, 2011; Volume II of
this complete edition is forthcoming); The
Hungry Voice: Poetry of the Irish Famine (Irish
Academic Press, 1989; rev. ed. 2009); Shifting
Scenes: Irish Theatre-Going 1955-1985 (with
Nicholas Grene; Carysfort, 2008); Irish Theatre
on Tour (with Nicholas Grene; Carysfort, 2005),
and Fearful Realities: New Perspectives on the
Irish Famine (with Richard Hayes; Irish
Academic Press, 1996).
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Eve Patten writes: I joined the School of
English in 1996, after spending several years
working for the British Council in university
education in Eastern Europe. At Trinity I
cover a range of teaching areas, with
particular interests in nineteenth and
twentieth-century Irish Studies, twentieth-
century British fiction and the literature of
war. I am currently co-director of the MPhil
in Irish Writing in Trinity, Vice Chair of the
Royal Irish Academy Committee for Irish
Literatures in English, and a member of the
editorial board of the Irish University Review.
My primary
research interests
are in nineteenth-
century Irish
literature and
culture. In 2004 I
published Samuel
Ferguson and the
Culture of
Nineteenth-
Century Ireland
(Dublin: Four
Courts) and I
have since
developed this
work in several research papers on civic
institutions and the middle class in Victorian
Dublin. With the support of the Centre for
Irish, Scottish and Comparative Studies in
Trinity, I co-ordinated the project ''Ireland and
the Print Culture of Empire, 1780-1940,''
which evolved into a new research venture on
the subject of Irish journalists in the imperial
world, 1850 to 1945, and a connected
conference series on nineteenth-century Irish
travel writing.
My other research connections are to
twentieth-century British and Irish writing,
particularly the fiction of the two world wars.
In 2008 I co-edited Literatures of War, the
proceedings of the 2007 conference of the
Lawrence Durrell School, and my monograph
Imperial Refugee: Olivia Manning’s Fictions of
War was published by Cork University Press in
2011. I am particularly interested in Irish literary
connections across Europe and have begun work
on a series of essays on the English literati and
Ireland from 1920 to 1945.
Peter Behrens in Calgary:
Families, Histories, Novels
On February 2, many people braved a small blizzard
to attend a talk by Governor-General’s Award-
winning author, Peter Behrens at the Irish Cultural
Centre in Bowness. Mr. Behrens’ presentation,
entitled “Families, Histories, Novels,” reminded us
how alive and close to us the past can be: the writer
suggested there can be merely “a handclasp” between
generations when memories of the 1847 Famine
survive through the oral history of our parents and
grandparents. Through images shared from his own
family life (including a picture of his son taking his first
steps in Dublin, clad in Cree-made moccasins from
Manitoba), and readings from his novels, Mr. Behrens
explored how his interest in both his relatives’ stories
and their silences borne of trauma influenced many of
his novels about the Irish-Canadian community where
he grew up in Montreal. The imagined lives of the
Irish emigrants fleeing famine, and his families’
experience of World War II inspired novels such as
The Law of Dreams (which won the Governor’s
General’s Best Novel Award in 2006), and The
O’Briens. His own family’s experience also made him
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aware of the connections that Canadians share
with other emigrant communities, whose stories
he tells in his latest novel, Carry Me. His interest
in the intersection between individual destiny and
history gives his books their richness: a review in
Vogue called his latest novel “another meditation
on history and destiny . . . that make[s] the past
feel stunningly close at hand…”.
A native of Montreal, Peter Behrens held a
Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University
and was a Fellow of Harvard University's Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study. He lives in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has given this talk
to the Concordia University Canadian School of
Irish Studies, and the ICS was fortunate to have
the opportunity to host him in Calgary while he
was leading workshops at the Banff Centre.
After the talk, Mr. Behrens stayed to chat, share
memories with other Irish-Canadians who grew
up in his community and in Calgary, and to sign
books. Maryanne Bredin from the Mount Royal
University Bookstore kindly provided copies of
the novels for sale; Irish Cultural Society
members provided tea, coffee, and snacks.
CAIS members in Alberta might like to check out
other Irish cultural events at the Irish Cultural
Centre at www.calgaryics.org
Michele Holmgren
Once more on Derry When I was growing up there in the 1960s, there were two local newspapers in Derry, the Derry Journal, which came into our house every Tuesday and Friday, and the Londonderry Sentinel, which didn’t. As most people are probably aware, there has been considerable antagonism over the correct name of the city, and to a lesser degree there still is. If you are driving from Dublin to Derry you will notice that around the mostly Catholic town of Strabane, fourteen miles from your destination, outraged elements of the nationally-minded population have gone out with black paint to blot out the hated prefix “London” on road signs. Every village between there and the equally majority-Catholic town of Derry – Ballymagorry, Bready, Magheramason, Newbuildings – loudly boasts its
unionism and Protestantism with flags, bunting and painted kerbs.
Londonderry has been the official name of the city since the early seventeenth century, though the relevant local government body has been Derry City Council since 1984. The key to the origins of the official name can be found inscribed on a tablet in the grounds of St Columb’s Cathedral, inside the city walls: “If stones could speak, then London’s praise should sound, / Who built this church and city from the ground.” This is no more than the plain truth. The
building of the splendid walled city, still intact, was financed by the London livery companies and carried out between 1613 and 1619. Nationalists may, and do, object that there was a previously existing monastic settlement, Doire or Doire Colmcille (doire is an oak grove). There was, but this was a quite separate, and more small-scale, affair than the city.
Catholics, probably not a huge factor in Derry’s history until the Famine and the industrial revolution drew in numbers of the poor of adjacent Donegal (in particular Inishowen), became a majority in the city in
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the course of the twentieth century. Yet they were denied the political power their numbers justified by a kind of electoral fraud known as gerrymandering until political reforms were introduced in response to pressure from the civil rights movement in the 1960s and ’70s.
It is my clear memory that in my childhood and youth both Catholics and Protestants who lived there routinely called their city “Derry”, though on more official occasions Protestants, and more particularly unionist politicians, might call it “Londonderry”. (The main fraternal Protestant organisation associated with the city’s history is, however, the Apprentice Boys of Derry.) The Troubles exacerbated sectarian differences, increased mutual suspicion and led to a flight of Protestants from the west bank of the city, where they no longer felt safe. In this atmosphere, and with the emergence of some “we are the masters now” sentiments in the now empowered Catholic majority, the name was to become, to a much greater extent than ever before, a shibboleth: if you were a Catholic it was Derry, if a Protestant Londonderry, and Derry/Londonderry (or Stroke City as the broadcaster Gerry Anderson had it) if you felt that everyone should rub along together.
Most newspapers have a style book: it’s where the rules are set out that establish a conformity of usage, enforced by sub-editors, across the paper and among the many people who write for it. Neither the Irish Times or the Irish Press would have been in any doubt about the name of Ireland’s fifth city, though getting it wrong might have been more severely viewed in the Press.
According to a no doubt apocryphal tale, the paper’s able and formidable deputy editor, the late John Garvey, a Newry man, once had to discipline a sub-editor over this very matter. The story goes that the employee in question was greeted on arriving in work one afternoon with the grim news “Garvey said he wants to see you in his office as soon as you come in.” On knocking gingerly on the door he was told to come in and sit down while JG finished the piece of work he’d been engaged in. Then the dialogue started:
You subbed that story on page seven?
Mmm, which one is that?
The one about the civil rights march.
I think so. Was there a problem with it?
There certainly was (tossing the paper, open at the
relevant page, across the desk).
(Quickly scans the story) I’m sorry, I don’t see it.
Third sentence.
(Pause) Sorry, I still don’t see it.
Fifth word. I’ll spell it out for you: (loudly) L-O-N-D-O-
N-D-E-R-R-Y.
Oh, should it have a hyphen?
Great Famine Voices
Roadshow
The Great Famine Voices Roadshow will be
launched in New York on 9th April at the
American Irish Historical Society. The Great
Famine Voices Roadshow is a series of open
house events in the United States and Canada that
bring together Irish emigrants, their descendants,
and members of their communities to share
family memories and stories of coming from
Ireland to North America, especially during the
period of the Great Hunger and afterwards.
“We are excited about meeting people during
the Great Famine Voices Roadshow and hearing
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their family stories about how their ancestors
came from Ireland to start new lives in the
United States,” declared Christine Kinealy,
Director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at
Quinnipiac University, Connecticut. “We
hope that people of Irish heritage in Canada
will come to the Roadshow to share their
family memories,” added Professor Mark
McGowan from the University of Toronto.
“This Roadshow will provide a unique
opportunity for Irish-Americans and Irish-
Canadians to share their stories, strengthen
their sense of ancestry, and historical and
current Irish connections. All are welcome to
these events”, said Caroilin Callery, a
Director of the National Famine Museum in
Strokestown Park, Ireland. “Over the past few
years, we have been in search of stories from
‘the next Parish’ in North America, where so
many of those who survived the Great Hunger
– the biggest catastrophe of 19th century
Europe – made new lives. We need to hear
these stories,” she continued.
A selection of these family memories and
stories will be made freely available on the
Great Famine Voices online
archive. www.greatfaminevoices.ie
The Great Famine Voices Roadshow in the
USA and Canada will be hosted by the
National Famine Museum at Strokestown
Park, Ireland, and the Irish Heritage Trust, an
independent charity. The Roadshow will be
held in partnership with Ireland’s Great
Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University, the
American Irish Historical Society, and the
University of Toronto. It is funded by the
Government of Ireland Emigrant Support
Programme.
May 22nd, 5-9pm: Madden Hall, St. Michael’s
College, 81 St. Mary Street, University of
Toronto.
May 27th, 10am-5pm: St. Gabriel’s
Church, 2157 Centre Street (and Walk to the
Stone), Montreal.
For queries, or if you would like to contribute a
family memory or story online, contact Dr Jason
King at the Irish Heritage Trust:
Irish Famine Summer School 20-24 June 2018
Irish Journeys: Famine Legacies and Reconnecting Communities.
The 2018 Irish Famine Summer School will take place at Strokestown Park House from 20th-24th June. The theme is Irish Journeys: Famine Legacies and Reconnecting Communities. Strokestown Park House and the Irish National Famine Museum provide a hub for visitors and scholars to experience a uniquely preserved historic house and explore the lives of rich and poor in their original setting. The 2018 Irish Famine Summer School will consider the Great Irish Famine and its legacies of dispersing communities between Ireland, Great Britain, North America, and Australia. Particular emphasis will be placed on the theme of Irish journeys at home and abroad, including the experiences of Irish emigrants and their descendants in building communities and becoming integrated into their host societies. The topics of homecoming, revisiting Ireland, and reconnecting communities between Irish and diasporic locations will also be central themes.
• Keynote Speakers: Professor Christine Kinealy (Quinnipiac University) Professor Mark McGowan (University of Toronto)
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Professor Mike Cronin (Boston College) Professor Ian Kuijt (University of Notre Dame) Professor Maureen Murphy (Hofstra University)
[This brief biographical note, by Michele Holmgren, was drafted for the “Irish in Canada” exhibit co-ordinated by the Embassy of Ireland in Ottawa last year.]
Nicholas Flood Davin (January 13, 1840 – October 18, 1901) Born in Kilfinane, Co. Limerick, Nicholas
Flood Davin was a lawyer, journalist, poet
and dramatist, literary critic, and politician. A
flamboyant figure in Regina who insisted on
dressing in top hat and cape, his personality
and life matched his style. He came to
Canada in 1872, gaining a reputation as a
brilliant public speaker, confirmed by his
eloquent but unsuccessful defence in the
murder trial of the man who shot Father of
Confederation George Brown. He then
entered politics as a Conservative.
As editor of the Leader, which he founded in
1883, he obtained what was likely the scoop
of the decade when he reported on the state
trial of Louis Riel, and, later, disguised as a
priest, obtained an interview with Riel on the
eve of his execution. He became the first MP
for Assiniboia West (1887-1900) and became
an untiring advocate for his adopted region.
In spite of his active political life, Davin was a
prolific and influential supporter of Canadian
poets and literature: his own poetry collection
began, “I am a North-West man, and I think the
cultivation of taste and imagination as important
as the raising of grain.” Today he is better known
for his celebration of Irish emigrants, The
Irishman in Canada (1877), in which he
portrayed Canada as a place free of the turmoil
and recent famines in Ireland and where “land
can be no apple of discord…. in a country where
we open up provinces as men in the old country
would open up a paddock.”
What Davin did not say was that in opening the
North West for immigrants, the government
pressured Aboriginal peoples to cede their land
rights in exchange for reserves, education, and
assistance in taking up agriculture. Aboriginal
leaders had the right to request schools on the
reserves, but in an 1879 government report,
Davin proposed something much different:
industrial residential schools modelled on ones
Davin had inspected in the United States. Davin
asserted that Aboriginal people needed to be
assimilated into mainstream European culture,
and to do so, the government must separate
children from “the influence of the wigwam.”
Breaking the connection between children and
their parents and elders destroyed “the security
and survival of these societies [that] depended on
passing this cultural legacy from one generation
to the next” in the words of the Truth and
Reconciliation commission.
Davin celebrated Canada as a place of freedom
and hope for the Irish emigrant: “Here, all that his
fathers ever struggled for he has. He is a
controlling part of the present; he is one of the
architects of the future, and he has nothing to do
with the disasters of the past, only so far as they
teach him lessons for the present.”
Unfortunately, with the Davin report, this gifted
and energetic immigrant nevertheless bequeathed
a darker legacy than what he had hoped for, as
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part architect of one disaster of the past that
has become a lesson for the present.
Bibliography:
Canada’s Residential Schools: The Final
Report of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission of Canada. Montreal, Kingston:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015.
Davin, Nicholas Flood. Eos: An Epic of the
Dawn and Other Poems. Regina: Leader and
Co., 1889.
---. The Irishman in Canada. Toronto:
McClear and Co., 1877.
Koester, C.B. Mr. Davin, M.P: A Biography
of Nicholas Flood Davin. Saskatoon:
Western Producer Prairie Books, 1980.
Report on Industrial Schools For Indians and
Half-Breeds. Ottawa: 1879.
UPDATE
MAJOR NEW DIGITAL ARCHIVE
LAUNCHING JANUARY 2018
Since 1968 the Linen Hall Library has been
collecting material relating to the conflict in
Northern Ireland. Over the years the Library has
become the repository for a vast amount of
material relating to the subject and the subsequent
Peace Process. The collection now consists of
over 350,000 items including books, pamphlets,
leaflets, posters, manifestos, press releases,
newspapers, objects and many thousands of
periodicals. It is a completely unique collection
that is unrivalled throughout the world.
Much of this material is currently being digitised
and catalogued for the ‘Divided Society’ digital
archive. The resource will be extremely valuable
to individuals interested in Irish and British
history, post-conflict studies, and peace and
reconciliation. It also gives unique exposure to a
historically significant period in Northern Ireland.
From January 2018 the resource will be
available by subscription but the fee, for
unaffiliated individuals outside Ireland or
Britain is £300 per annum. (Seems a bit stiff,
said the Brother. Ed.)
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Ireland’s Alcatraz:
Spike Island in Cork
Philip Watson, The Guardian
We disembarked at the long pier and walked
to the star-shaped fort along a steep, twisting
path. The smooth slopes rising up to the
formidable ramparts and entrance gate, says
our guide, form a glacis, a feat of military
engineering that leaves attackers exposed and
makes defence far easier. The enormity of this
construction in Cork harbour – and the dark
reality of Spike Island fort and prison itself –
lie in the truth that the vast banks surrounding
the 24-acre fort were actually built in the
1850s by the inmates themselves.
Irish convicts awaiting transportation, mostly
to Australia, were tied together by ball and
chain and put to work on the land with
shovels and pickaxes. The earth and stones
they collected in wooden carts were so heavy
that it took 18 men to pull them. It sounded more
like a tale of American slavery than colonial
Ireland.
Life was infinitely worse inside, however, for
those guilty of misconduct or branded dangerous
offenders – often political prisoners, murderers,
rapists and violent thieves. These inmates were
held in solitary confinement within a purpose-
built punishment block. They were heavily
chained, often to the wall of their cells; slept on
cold, damp stone floors; and clothed in black
from head to toe – including a hood with only
narrow slits for eyeholes.
It is the vivid combination of a penal history to
rival Alcatraz (the prison at Spike Island is said to
be 10 times larger in size) and a long political
history to match Robben Island (there is evidence
that Cromwell’s troops held Royalist prisoners on
Spike as early as the 1650s) – and its reopening
as a visitor attraction in the summer of 2016 –
that has sparked renewed interest in the place and
its violent history.
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There is a lot to see on the island, from six-
inch guns secreted away at the end of deep
bastion tunnels, to the imposing central
parade ground, an artillery “gun park”,
striking rampart outlooks south to the mouth
of the harbour, and modern cells that echo and
clank. Then there’s the fascinating, if dark,
history.
“In the mid-19th century, Spike was not only
the largest prison in the world, with 2,300
inmates, but also a place of severe
punishment – of hard labour, strict discipline
and religious instruction,” said John Flynn,
Spike Island’s lead tour guide. “That’s why it
quickly became known as ‘Ireland’s Hell’ and
‘Hell on Earth’.”
Prisoners not held in solitary confinement
were crammed 12 to a cell; overcrowding,
malnutrition and poor sanitation meant fatal
diseases and mental illness were rife. “The
prisoners are like a menagerie of wild animals
that snarl and fight in defiance of their
keepers,” wrote prison chaplain Charles
Bernard Gibson in 1863. There is evidence
that at least 1,200 men died on the island.
A children’s prison held up to 100 young
offenders aged 12 to 16. Many boys, and
adult men, were sent to Spike as a direct
consequence of the Great Famine of 1845-49,
often for such petty crimes as vagrancy and
stealing bread or chickens. Nationalists,
Fenians, rebels and revolutionaries were also
part of the prison population; in 1921, during
the War of Independence, more than 600
republicans were held on the island – a few
even escaped.
This vivid history is told through exhibitions,
videos and museum displays; walking trails
also lead around the fort and island, offering
spectacular views, both of one of the largest
natural harbours in the world and back a mile
across the water to Cobh, from where boats to the
island depart and return.
Spike Island stands as a fascinating microcosm of
Irish history over the past 1,500 years. We learnt
about the 6th-century monastic settlement,
Cromwellian campaigns, 18th-century smugglers,
British military fortification, the infamous convict
depot, and Irish republicans incarcerated
following the Easter Rising and during the War of
Independence.
More recent times have seen a British sovereign
military presence up to 1938 as part of the Treaty
Ports settlement (Churchill described Spike Island
as “the sentinel tower of the approaches to
Western Europe”); subsequent use by the Irish
Army and Navy; conversion to a notorious
civilian prison in 1985, mostly for young men
convicted of minor offences such as joyriding,
which led to a riot that destroyed many buildings;
and, finally, a modern tourist facility.
Its history, much of it difficult and disturbing, is a
palpable physical presence. There is graffiti on
the mattresses, written by inmates, in the modern
prison; the stark cells in the Victorian punishment
block still seep damp.
“We try to give visitors the richest experience we
can but, to be honest, we’re still developing and
still learning about the island,” says John Flynn.
“Spike is a sleeping giant.” Ireland’s Alcatraz
seems wide awake now.
13
News from Concordia’s School of Irish Studies
TWO SPECIAL SUMMER 2018 COURSES IN IRISH STUDIES Contemporary Irish fiction and the Irish landscape, June 4 to July 25
Eve Patten, professor, School of English,
Trinity College, Dublin; and director, MPhil in Irish Writing. Patten’s recent publications include Imperial Refugee: Olivia Manning’s Fictions of War (2012) and Ireland, West to East: Irish Cultural Connections with Central and Eastern Europe (2014). She is currently editing volume five of the Irish Literature in Transition series for Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2018.
The representation of land and landscape has always been central to Irish writing. In modern Irish fiction the representation of Ireland’s physical appearance — both rural and urban — continues to be an important means of exploring the national condition. Students will
read from a range of modern and contemporary Irish writers to see how their work addresses topics such as the changing image of Ireland’s western and coastal regions, the depiction of the Irish border area and the
reimagining of the Irish city. The course will include visual material and will cover short stories and novel extracts from writers such as Anne Enright, John McGahern, Colm Toibin, Paula Meehan and Kevin Barry. Introduction to Irish visual, material and design culture, July 3 to August 2
Linda King, Co-Programme Chair, BA
(Hons.) in Visual Communication Design, Institute of Art, Design + Technology, Dún Laoghaire, Dublin
This course expands consideration of what constitutes Irish culture in a general sense by focusing on such previously underexplored fields as graphic, fashion, textile, craft, product and industrial design, as well as architecture and
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advertising. In so doing it demonstrates how “ordinary” objects and images have been — and remain — powerful conduits for political, social and economic discourse, due to their ubiquity and mass appeal. Subjects to be engaged will include nation-building, travel and tourism, individual and national identity, historiography, design professionalization, religiosity, museology and popular music.
IRISH STUDIES COURSES - 2018/19
SUMMER 2018 Contemporary Irish Fiction and the Irish Landscape Introduction to Irish Visual, Material, and Design Culture The Irish Economy and the European Union
FALL 2018 Introduction to Irish Studies The Irish in Montreal Highlights of Irish Literature History of Ireland Irish Traditional Music: A Global Soundscape The Irish Revolution, 1913-23 Classics of Irish Theatre Contemporary Irish Literature James Joyce
FALL/WINTER 2018/19 The Irish Language and its Culture I The Irish Language and its Culture II
WINTER 2019 The Irish in Canada Celtic Christianity History of Early and Medieval Ireland Independent Ireland from the Civil War to the Celtic Tiger Irish Children’s and Young Adult Literature
The Irish Literary Revival Irish Film Studies Intercultural Ireland: Film, Theatre and TV The Politics of Northern Ireland History and Memory in Ireland UPCOMING PETER O’BRIEN VISITING SCHOLAR The 2018 Peter O’Brien Visiting Scholar is Clíona Ó Gallchoir (UCC) who will teach two courses in Irish Literature during the Fall semester. GRADUATE SCHOLARSHIP RECIPIENTS Kyle McCreanor, Fr. Thomas Daniel McEntee Scholarship
Kyle McCreanor (l) & Inigo Urkullu, Lehendakari
(President) of the Basque country
Originally coming from a small town on the west coast (Squamish, B.C.), I completed my BA at the University of Victoria in history and linguistics. For years I intensively studied the history of the Basque Country, a region familiar to many Irish people. I travelled there in 2015 to attend an euskaltegi, a Basque-language immersion school — an experience not unlike that of the many students who travel to the Gaeltacht to learn Irish. I quickly became interested in the parallels drawn by many scholars between the Basque Country and Ireland, and I began to focus increasingly on Irish history.
For graduate studies, I was determined to explore the early history of the relationship between Irish and Basque nationalists, from the late
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19th century to the Spanish Civil War. The profile of the School of Irish Studies made Concordia a clear choice for graduate school.
I have received a warm welcome here and I could not be happier with my choice. My research will take me to several archives in Ireland this summer, which would not be possible without the support of this fantastic community. I want to express my most heartfelt thanks to the Canadian Irish Studies Foundation and the generous donors of the McEntee Scholarship for making my studies here possible. Go raibh maith agat! Hélène Jane Groarke, Irene Mulroney Scholarship
During my undergraduate degree and the
beginning of my master’s degree studies, my involvement in the School of Irish Studies and the St. Patrick’s Day parade as a princess led me to understand the importance of St. Patrick’s Day in defining Irish identity in Montreal and establishing the place of the Irish in Canada. My research focus is on the Montreal and Toronto parades, comparing and contrasting the changes in Irish identity over time and analyzing how the Irish express their Irishness.
The Irene Mulroney Scholarship permits me to concentrate on completing my master’s thesis by spring 2018 without having to worry about my finances. More importantly, this
scholarship reminds me of the significant support I have as a member of the School of Irish Studies and as a member of the Irish community in Montreal. It is truly a privilege to receive the Irene Mulroney Scholarship and I thank all the donors who have made this possible.
Kate Bevan-Baker, St. Patrick’s Society Scholarship
I am so grateful to be the recipient of this year’s
Saint Patrick’s Society Graduate Scholarship. Thank you very much for your continued generosity to the School of Irish Studies in promoting research and continued education to graduate students like me. I feel very honoured to be chosen as this year’s recipient, as this is my final year as a graduate student at Concordia.
In 2012, I met Professor Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin, Concordia’s School of Irish Studies Johnson Chair in Quebec and Canadian Irish Studies, who became my primary thesis supervisor and a musical colleague as well. My PhD research focuses on Irish music on Prince Edward Island. In addition to researching traditional Irish music, I am also an active fiddle player with various musical groups in Montreal. I have been lucky enough to perform at the annual St. Patrick’s Society
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luncheons and annual charity balls with my trio, Solstice, for the past five years. Getting to know members of the St. Patrick’s Society through events such as the luncheons and annual balls makes this scholarship even more meaningful to me.
This funding will allow me to focus on the final writing stages of my PhD this academic year. I plan on defending my thesis in mid-March, just in time for St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. Upon graduation, I plan on teaching in Montreal, ideally at the university or CEGEP level. Having taught at the Siamsa Montreal School of Irish Music, I have established a wide network of students and colleagues within the local Irish community.
I look forward to seeing members of the St. Patrick’s Society throughout this coming year and in the years ahead. Thank you once again for this generous scholarship.
BOOK REVIEW
Expunged
Seamus Deane
The End of Outrage: Post-Famine Adjustment in
Rural Ireland, by Breandán Mac Suibhne, Oxford
University Press, 352 pp, £20, ISBN: 978-
0198738619
It is generally agreed that The End of Outrage is a
remarkable book. It tells the story of a west
Donegal community, Beagh, in the years after the
Famine, when the Ribbon Society was making its
feeble attempts to modify some of the worst
excesses of the land and landlord system that had
and would always have the exterminations of the
Great Hunger as its most notable and
characteristic achievement. We look here at the
aftermath, at the shattered community, or the
fragment of it, that tried and failed to survive or
seriously to contest the brutalities of the colonial
regime, its police, magistrates and courts,
hangings, virtual burial alive in prisons and
workhouses, continuous radical hunger, the death
of the Irish language, the unceasing haemorrhages
of exile or of its first cousin, mon semblable,
criminal transportation. That community died of
its injuries. What had been its vivid internal life
withered and hardened into a rabid Catholicism
(of a reactionary, baroque kitsch form imported
from anti-revolutionary France) and,
simultaneously, dissolved into the Anglophone
capitalist modernity that continues its wild
Atlantic ways to the present.
Two slimy figures dominate. One is an informer
and the other is, to turn a phrase, one of the hard-
faced men who did well out of the Famine.
Together they help ruin the community and
transform it into a world stripped of people and of
communal ethics. The informer, Patrick
McGlynn, turned on the Molly Maguires, aka the
Ribbon Society, of which he was a member, in
early April 1856, when he wrote his first letter to
the local magistrate and thereafter sustained his
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calculated treachery with success until mid-
August 1857 when he and his family
embarked from Dublin to Liverpool en route
for Australia, on a witness protection
programme, passage and expenses paid by the
government. The hard-faced man was James
Gallagher, whom McGlynn claimed he was
anxious to protect from the Ribbonmen.
Gallagher allowed his father to enter the
poorhouse, exploited the distress of his
neighbours, swallowed their land, cleared his
subtenants, became, in his iron coldness, the
paradigm figure of the economic world in
which possession was nine points of the law
and dispossession the fate of those beyond it,
the out-laws. Ribbonism fades, corrupts,
Irish-America, itself a harsh environment,
becomes part of Irish political reality, a refuge
for some, lethal for others. At least, in the
eyes of some contemporaries, like Cardinal
Newman, busy with his Catholic University
foundation in Dublin, these unfortunates had
answered the question if the Irish were fit for
modernity. Indeed they were, he averred, as
their labours in contributing to it in the USA
showed (he was less aware of the historic role
of Irish Famine labour in Britain and knew
nothing of the Pennsylvania coalfields and the
Molly Maguires). Newman’s enemy Cardinal
Cullen agreed, although with a different
inflection. In Newman’s (and later, in the
twentieth century, in Fernand Braudel’s
view), the Catholic Irish in the USA showed
by their contribution that the racial prejudice
about Irish unfitness for modernity was
unfounded; in Cardinal Cullen’s emergent
version of later revisionist apologias for the
Famine, the catastrophe was providential
because it spread Catholicism throughout the
Protestant empire and countered the
heathenish and atheistic dimensions of the
modern world. His notion of providential
design endorses the disaster, as do all the
subsequent “historical” accounts which claim
that, without the Famine, we would never in
Ireland have reached the promised land of
imperial modernity.
Was there ever an alternative? Either an
alternative modernity or an alternative to
modernity? In one answer, Mac Suibhne says no,
there never was, in either case. In the inexorable
processes of historical change, the need for
survival decreed that, in this area and in this
instance, greed and cruel deeds had to be allowed
fade into oblivion. “It was hard to remember and
best to forget.” For the first generation raised in
English from the 1880s, that sinister modern
nostrum “Move on” seems to have become
internalised as a species of communal wisdom,
enforced by the astonishing velocity of the
changes that left sixty people remaining in Beagh
by 1901, and about twenty-five in the 1960s,
before a slow turn of the tide began. In west
Donegal by the 60s, Mac Suibhne tells us, “the
living had been walking away from their dead
since the time of the Famine. They had been
doing so literally through mass migration, and
they had been doing so figuratively through
cultural change.”
The two villains of the piece, McGlynn and
James Gallagher, become not merely contingent
indicators of these impersonal forces, they
become central types of a wholesale sell-out to
them. Neither Gallagher nor his descendants had
much luck, but there’s little sense of nemesis, no
more than there is any active awareness generally
of how well the present beneficiaries of ancestral
criminal behaviour have fared. Amnesia is a great
friend of atrocity. By the middle decades of the
twentieth century, it seems, the great betrayal was
all but complete, and the sense of outrage had
long since expired. Yet, the question hangs icily
in the air. Is that itself a good thing, a relief, a
sign of what the standard Irish commentariat calls
‘maturity’? Or is it a symptom of the depths of
betrayal, still unfathomed, even by this book, of
what will always make us foreign, especially to
ourselves and to a past that is ours but to which
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we only weakly belong, since it asks more
questions of us than we do of it.
The reader of this book is from the outset
captured and captivated by its bivalve nature
as both a local and personal memoir, as an
historical record and a meditation on
generational change. Mac Suibhne’s earlier
work, his editions of Hugh Dorian: The Outer
Edge of Ulster, (2000) and of John Gamble
(2011), gave fair warning of what we might
expect. We once again meet with the
empirical, saturating detail of a lived world
that has yet to be captured as “history” but,
just by virtue of being written and of being
read, already is history; the recovery of lost
time that has lostness as the enabling
condition of its existence. This is where the
novel, the memoir, the history meet as
familiar strangers and where the most tragic
features of their crossroad encounters emerge
- that first, the extinction of so much and so
many is what has made modernity possible
and then, second, as its necessary companion,
the eventual extinction of outrage at that fact
and then, third, the extinction of even that
extinction. It is also typical of the cynicism of
official discourse that any act of violence
against the prevailing system of government
is dubbed an “outrage”, the word that is itself
most appropriate for the system. But Mac
Suibhne’s title beats its own triple tattoo on
that key term; it reverberates throughout the
text, minatory, here a solitary drum strike,
there a steel brush on its skin.
Mac Suibhne’s book brilliantly exploits the
paradox that consistently threatens to
undermine it. It may be that, in his own words
in the last section of the book,
Making a history of the homeplace was never
an exercise in casting up the doings of the
long dead to the living, and, indeed, the
history that has been made only underscores
the absurdity of calling anybody to account for
their ancestors.
True enough, especially when we study the
examples of the “trivial little story nobody in the
parish remembers”, as Owen puts it in Brian
Friel’s Translations. But, conceding all, a couple
of pages earlier, we had read: “But it is betrayal
that transfixes. And by the middle decades of the
twentieth century, the great betrayal was near
complete, and outrage had long since ended.” Is
this a resolution, a general overview? Or do the
trivial little stories come back to haunt the
conclusion? Is this a history or a memoir, or is it
possible to inhabit a space in which both are true?
Insofar as this study is exemplary of a general
condition that is the product of the irreversible
progress of long-term structural change, it is
compellingly persuasive; insofar as it is,
simultaneously, a local, familial history of the
loss of the capacity for outrage at the result, it lies
athwart that history. To paraphrase Walter
Benjamin, when he was addressing those who,
like himself, wondered how fascism could be
possible in the twentieth century: “The tradition
of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of
exception’ in which we live is the rule.”
© Dublin Review of Books
Seamus Deane, formerly of UCD and now
emeritus professor of Irish Studies at Notre
Dame, USA, has published widely on Irish and
French themes of the post-Enlightenment era.
19
Obituaries
Richard Murphy
1927-2018
With the death of Richard Murphy on January
30th, 2018, Ireland lost one of its greatest
poets. Best known for his four major
collections, Sailing to an Island (1963), The
Battle of Aughrim (1968), High Island (1974)
and The Price of Stone (1985), his poetic
achievements can be judged most fully in The
Pleasure Ground: Poems 1952-2012 (Lilliput
Press/Bloodaxe, 2013), a volume described by
Peter Sirr in Poetry Ireland Review as
exhibiting an “unforgettable music”. In the
preface, Richard Murphy remembers “with
gratitude all the friends, fellow poets,
relations, editors, publishers and readers ...
who have helped and inspired me to write”.
Always a poet of other people, in later years
Richard Murphy was able to keep in touch
with friends across the world from his home
near Kandy, Sri Lanka by means of email and
text message and he was heartened by the
reception of his two final books, The Kick: A
Memoir of the Poet Richard Murphy (Cork
University Press, 2017) – a new edition of his
classic memoir of 2002 – and In Search of
Poetry (Clutag Press, 2017).
Richard Murphy’s long and eventful life is
related with self-deprecating humour in The
Kick, a volume which opens with the three-
year-old poet administering a kick to his
somewhat austere Aunt Bella at the Royal
Hibernian Hotel by way of thanking her for
afternoon tea. Murphy’s later decision to become
a poet, the first intimations of which occurred to
him at Wellington College during wartime (“no
one had ever suggested I was born to be a poet”)
cast him as the rebellious son of an Ascendancy
family whose origins would inspire some of his
finest poetry. He would later say that The Battle
of Aughrim was an attempt to “look inward at the
divisions and devastations in myself as well as in
the country”.
Murphy’s endeavours to overcome the “borders
and bigotries” inherent in his own class
background were to inform not only this
remarkable historical poem, since it was
published alongside another long poem, “The
God Who Eats Corn”, which demonstrates the
analogous relevance of “colonial war and its
consequences” in Africa (where Murphy’s
parents had retired), as well as in Ireland, while
poems written in Sri Lanka in the 1980s and
1990s also examine (post-)colonial violence on
that “teardrop” island.
Murphy’s background as a child of the British
empire gave him a unique insight into the deeper
structures of historical grievance. He never forgot
the displacements of his childhood and
adolescence which would continue to condition
his sense of foreignness, even on home ground,
captured eloquently in the sonnet “Liner” from
The Price of Stone:
Child, when you’ve sailed half way around the
world
And found that home is like a foreign country,
Think how I’ve had to keep an ironclad hold
On your belongings, not to lose heart at sea.
Indeed, one senses that the ultimate harbour of
Richard Murphy’s peripatetic youth was his
decision to live in the west of Ireland from 1959
as an integral part of the communities of Cleggan,
Inishbofin and Claddaghduff, where he sailed his
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Galway hookers, the Ave Maria and the True
Light, and also embarked on some noteworthy
building projects.
Indeed, the signal achievements of his poems
“Sailing to an Island”, “The Cleggan
Disaster” and “The Last Galway Hooker” are
testimony to his deep affinity with the
Connemara coast and the seafaring traditions
he found there. In 2015, the inaugural INISH
festival on Inishbofin island, organised by
Peadar King and attended by President
Michael D Higgins, paid tribute to Richard
Murphy’s contribution to this beautiful part of
Ireland. The poet had humorously described
himself as a “sunshine fisherman” in his essay
“Photographs of Inishbofin – May 1960”, but
he nevertheless played no small part in
“putting Inishbofin on the map”, at least in
literary terms, and in opening up what literary
scholars have since termed the literature of
the archipelago.
Equally important, Richard Murphy will be
remembered for his magnificent meditations
on solitude, on nature and on love in the 1974
volume High Island, which records the poet’s
regular sojourns in the early 1970s on
Ardoileán, site of an early medieval
monastery founded by St Fechin in the
seventh century. In these magnificent poems,
set amid “rock, sea and star”, we perceive the
charting of “an older calm” which the poetry
of Richard Murphy has bequeathed to us.
© Dublin Review of Books
Benjamin Keatinge is a Visiting Research
Fellow at the School of English, Trinity
College Dublin. He has co-edited France and
Ireland in the Public Imagination with Mary
Pierse (Peter Lang, 2014) and Other Edens:
The Life and Work of Brian Coffey with
Aengus Woods (Irish Academic Press, 2010)
and he has published on different aspects of
Richard Murphy’s poetry, most recently in the
Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets edited by
Gerald Dawe (2017). He is editor of Making
Integral: Critical Essays on Richard Murphy
forthcoming from Cork University Press.
Liam O’Flynn 1945-2018
Speaking in March, Sheila Pratschke, Chair of the
Arts Council said,
“Liam O’Flynn has left behind him an incredible
legacy of music through his recordings, his
careful support of other musicians and artists and
his dedication to transmission of the great
heritage of Irish music to future generations. As a
member of Planxty, which he co-founded in
1972, and also as a solo artist, he had a huge
influence on the artistic life of Ireland. He worked
with a great range of prominent Irish artists, such
as Christy Moore, Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin, Rita
Connolly and Shaun Davey. He was also well
known for his artistic collaborations with artists
from other traditions and practices, such as poet
Séamus Heaney and guitarist Mark Knopfler.”
Liam O'Flynn was born in Kildare in 1945 to a
musical family. He gravitated towards the
uilleann pipes and by 11 he was taking classes
with the renowned Leo Rowsome.
He formed Planxty alongside Moore, Lunny
and Irvine and they became an influential and
innovative group. They toured extensively and
O'Flynn was able to bring his skill with the
uilleann pipes to a worldwide audience.
21
Nicola Gordon Bowe
1948-2018 The pioneering art historian Nicola Gordon
Bowe, who has died of meningitis aged 69,
wrote magisterial studies of two of the
greatest figures of the Irish Celtic revival,
Harry Clarke and Wilhelmina Geddes, both artists
in stained glass.
She was born in Stafford, the youngest
daughter of Richard Gordon who, at the London
county council, was committed to the
introduction of comprehensive education. Her
mother, Elizabeth Smedley, came from a family
of suffragette women and was a niece of the artist
Maxwell Armfield, whose work Nikki was later
to research. Her secondary education at St Albans
high school for girls was followed by A-levels at
the English School in Rome, and undergraduate
studies in French and Italian at Trinity College,
Dublin.
The late 1960s was a glorious time to be a
student, characterised by political and artistic
activism. Nikki explored Dublin, met its
eccentrics, painted, illustrated and made prints,
researched Sicilian baroque on Italian
government scholarships, and exercised her
remarkable gift for friendship.
She co-founded the Irish Victorian Society in
1973 and, after seeing a window made by
Clarke’s assistants on a visit to Killarney
Harry Clarke's Eve of St Agnes window, which Bowe found dismantled under a bed!
22
Cathedral, began exploring his stained glass
and graphic art. She came to know the
inspirational Trinity art historian Anne
Crookshank, and returned there to take an
MA in art history in 1975, embarking on a
doctorate on Clarke’s work under
Crookshank’s supervision, completed in
1982.
This was published as The Life and Work
of Harry Clarke in 1989, a year after her
Gazetteer of Stained Glass by Irish Artists
1900-1955, written with Michael Wynne and
David Caron. She first published on Geddes
in 1980, her brilliant study Wilhelmina
Geddes: Life and Work appearing in 2015.
The crucial reason for her expansiveness
was that she had to tell modern readers about
how to find, look at and research stained
glass. Her Geddes book took her three
decades to write but given her subject could
hardly have been achieved in less. A lecturer
in the history of design at the National
College of Art and Design in Dublin, where
she founded and directed the master’s course
in Design History and Applied Arts, Bowe
found the time to travel the world; to village
churches from Dingle to Belfast’s Malone
Road in Ireland, to war memorial windows in
remote corners of England, Scotland and
Wales, Canada, New Zealand and continental
Europe to see the windows in the original.
The point doesn’t end there. To know stained
glass windows properly you have to wait for
the right light conditions – you can’t see them
on relentlessly grey days in Loughrea or
Ottawa or in a little oratory in Wales.
Furthermore, you have to clamber up and
down ladders to view them head on - not
easy, given the height of Geddes’ vast,
triumphant West Window in Ypres Cathedral
as just one example - but essential if you are
to write as Bowe did about minute details of
symbolism, narrative or facial expression. In
addition, of course, you need to know about
traditional techniques and modern
innovations, not easy in a world where your
subject is dismissed as “mere craft”, too linked to
religion in a post-Christian world or too much
trouble for other writers.
She began to teach at NCAD in 1979 and in
2000 founded an influential MA there in the
history of design and the applied arts. In effect
she became an ambassador for late 19th and early
20th century Irish and romantic nationalist art,
advising on seminal shows such as John
Christian’s The Last Romantics at the Barbican
Art Gallery in 1989, lecturing all over the world,
from Toronto to Ahmedabad to Krakow, and
working as visiting scholar at the National
Gallery of Art, Washington, and at the Getty
Research Centre, Los Angeles.
At the time of her death she was writing
Visualising the Celtic Revival, drawing together
years of research, as well as embarking on a study
of another great 20th century Irish woman artist,
Evie Hone.
She is survived by her husband, the architect
and garden historian Patrick Bowe, whom she
married in 1974, and their daughter, Venetia.
[Source: The Guardian & Dublin Review of Books]
CFPs Thirty-Eighth Annual Harvard Celtic
Colloquium, 5-7 October 2018
Harvard University, Cambridge,
Massachusetts
23
The Harvard Department of Celtic Languages & Literatures cordially invites proposals for papers on topics which relate directly to Celtic Studies or Celtic languages and literatures in any phase; and papers on relevant cultural, historical or social science topics, theoretical perspectives, etc. for the 38th annual Harvard Celtic Colloquium. Papers concerning interdisciplinary research with a Celtic focus are also invited. The Colloquium will take place at Harvard University on October 5-7, 2018. Attendance is free. Presentations should be no longer than twenty minutes, with a short discussion period after each paper. Papers given at the Colloquium may later be submitted for consideration by the editorial committee for publication in the Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium. Potential presenters should submit an abstract of 200-250 words and a brief biographical sketch. Submissions should be sent by e-mail to [email protected]. Please send submissions in the body of the email or as an attached Word Document. Abstracts due May 1, 2018. Further information available at our website: http://www.hcc.fas.harvard.edu We’re pleased to announce that this year’s John V. Kelleher Lecture will be delivered by:
William Gillies University of Edinburgh
Thursday, October 4th, 2018, 5:00 pm Harvard Faculty Club, 20 Quincy Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Proposals for papers (20 minutes) are welcome on
any aspect of Ireland during the Tudor and Stuart
periods.
Abstracts of 250 words can be submitted through
the conference website:
www.tudorstuartireland.com
The call for papers will close on Wednesday 25
April 2018.
The Human, the Non-Human, and the Posthuman in Irish
Studies ACIS-West 2018
October 12-13, Wort Hotel, Jackson
Hole, Wyoming
The 34th annual meeting of the American
Conference for Irish Studies-Western Regional
(ACIS-West), sponsored by the University of
Wyoming, will be held October 12-13, 2018 at
the Wort Hotel in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
Jackson is nestled at the foot of the Teton
Mountains and is the gateway to both Grand
Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. This
beautiful town—its gorgeous fall colors are on
display in early October—is a hub of Wyoming
cowboy culture.
The Western-themed Wort Hotel, a National
Register of Historic Places property, is one
of the state’s finest hotels. Conference events
begin the morning of the 12th and conclude
with a banquet dinner on October 13th.
ACIS-West is an interdisciplinary conference
that welcomes papers from all disciplines,
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including literature, history, politics, law,
music, religion, language, culture, theatre,
film, dance, visual arts, sociology,
economics, diaspora studies, peace and
conflict studies, and comparative studies.
We invite papers on any topic and are
especially interested this year in those
related to our conference theme: The
Human, the Non-Human, and the
Posthuman in Irish Studies. This theme
encompasses a wide variety of issues, such
as ecocriticism, animal studies, affect,
science and technology, human rights, and
social movements.
The conference will feature keynote
addresses from Kathryn Conrad (English,
University of Kansas), Myles Dungan
(History, RTÉ Dublin), Charlotte
Headrick (Theater, Oregon State
University), and a plenary panel with Noah
Novogrodsky (College of Law, University
of Wyoming) on “Tuam and the Search for
Historic Justice.”
Please submit your proposal by July 1,
2018 to
https://acisweb.org/regionals/western/submis
sions/. Individual paper and panel
submissions (3-4 participants) are welcome,
as are proposals for live performances,
dramatic readings, poster presentations, or
exhibits. Individual proposals should be 250-
500 words in length and should include a
brief biographical statement for the
submitter (50 words). In the case of panel
proposals, live performances, dramatic
readings, posters, or exhibits, please submit
a rationale (250-500 words), as well as
biographical statements for each of the
presenters. In addition to faculty, graduate
students, and independent scholars, we also
encourage exceptional undergraduate students
to submit paper proposals. Please direct
queries to: Matthew Spangler (Professor of
Performance Studies, San José State
University): [email protected].
ETUDES IRLANDAISES French Journal of Irish Studies
Nature, environment and
environmentalism in Ireland
Spring 2019 issue of Etudes Irlandaises
Identifying Ireland with nature has been a
commonplace for so long that their complex
relationship has become obscured and now calls
for renewed examination. Essentialist tropes
positing Ireland as a refuge of authenticity and
wilderness in the Western world have endured
from the colonizer’s naturalizing discourse to
British conservationism and now strive in the
Irish tourism industry. The Celtic Tiger years
successfully relied on, and reflected, a dual
picture of global business attractiveness and
unspoiled nature, promoting the pure waters of
Green Erin—together with its fiscal leniency—as
the ideal setting for pharmaceutical and IT
companies and a unique location for salmon
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fishing. Only after the fall of the Celtic Tiger
did another landscape begin to emerge: that of
a dilapidated, polluted environment,
symbolized with striking effect by the
mushrooming “ghost estates” that now scar
the Irish countryside and suburban areas.
Such visions of the New Ireland reflect the
concrete, geographic impact of post-industrial
late capitalism, thus placing Ireland onto a
global map of environmental crises and
largely debunking a myth that is still
desperately advertised by the national tourism
industry today.
All consumers of the Irish landscape and its
natural resources—foreign tourists and
nationals alike—share an ambivalent attitude
towards Irish nature, which can be traced
back to the colonizing process. The colonizer
went through a symbolic process of
dehumanization in order to reduce natives to
mere parts of the landscape—a landscape
whose ownership by the colonizer was
posited as a natural process of history. For the
colonized Irishman, symbolic humiliation was
a prelude to the confiscation of natural and
agricultural resources and the alienation of
cultural heritage, epitomized by the brutal
overhaul of toponymy and subsequent
destruction of the symbiotic link between
place and language. In such a context, it is no
surprise that, according to Hilary Tovey, the
early ecological activism of 1970s Ireland
largely considered environmental
degradations in terms of damages inflicted by
outsiders and denounced the globalized
avatars of British capitalist imperialism rather
than homegrown policies.
Please send your articles by 30 June 2018 to: [email protected] et [email protected]. Articles should be submitted with an abstract and a list of key words.
http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/2729
ANNOUNCEMENTS
“Remembering the Great Irish Famine”
Seventh Annual Irish Studies Conference at
St. John Fisher College, Rochester, NY, on
Friday, April 13.
It is free and open to the public.
Speakers will include Tim Madigan on Frederick
Douglass and the Famine, Maureen Murphy on
teaching the Famine, Mary Kelly on the Famine
& Irish-America, Ryan Mahoney (Quinnipiac) &
Angela Kelly Rochester IT) on the Famine in the
arts.
CONTACT: Dr. Timothy J. Madigan, Chair of
the Irish Studies Program, St. John Fisher
College, Rochester, NY
E-mail: [email protected]
The Quebec Family History Society
(QFHS) is celebrating their 40th
anniversary with Roots 2018
International Conference on
Family History at McGill University in Montreal on May
18-20, 2018.
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As QFHS is the major English language
genealogical Society in Quebec all
presentations will be in English. Speakers
from Canada, United States and Ireland will
be presenting over this 3 day period. Full
information on the conference will appear on
the Quebec Family History Society website in
January www.qfhs.ca.
There is a strong Irish theme to the
conference. We have Tom Quinlan, Keeper of
the National Archives in Dublin speaking as
well as historian Steven Cameron discussing
the pre-famine Irish in rural Quebec. An
exhibition of artifacts from the Grey Nuns and
a replica of the Irish Rock will be on display.
22nd Annual Ulster
American Heritage
Symposium
The 22nd meeting of the Ulster American
Symposium will be held for the first time in
Canada, at the University of Toronto, 13-15
June 2018.
Since 1976 the Ulster-American Heritage
Symposium has met every two years,
alternating between co-sponsoring
universities and museums in Ulster and North
America. Its purpose is to encourage scholarly
study and public awareness of the historical
connections between Ulster and North America
including what is commonly called the Scotch-
Irish or Ulster-Scots heritage.
KEYNOTE ADDRESSES:
Professor William Jenkins (York University),
Professor Christine Kinealy (Quinnipac
University),
Professor William Smyth (President Emeritus,
Maynooth, Ireland)
Tentative ProgramUAHS2018.pdf
Contact: Professor Mark G. McGowan,
Department of History, University of Toronto
Location: Carr Hall 405, St. Michael's College,
81 St. Mary Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S1J4
Full info: http://history.utoronto.ca/events/22nd-annual-ulster-american-heritage-symposium
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Book Notices Rhona Richman Kenneally’s co-edited
volume with Lucy McDiarmid, The Vibrant
House: Irish Writing and Domestic
Space, was officially launched by Professor
Margaret Kelleher, Chair of Anglo-Irish
Literature and Drama, University College
Dublin, on Saturday, December 9.
This collection of short memoirs and critical
essays explores the relation between home as
metaphor and symbol, and home as a
physical, material and spatial entity. In the
first section, ‘Our house’, Colette Bryce,
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Theo Dorgan, Mary
Morrissy and Macdara Woods remember
houses from their childhoods and show, in Ní
Chuilleanáin’s words, how the house is a
‘way of understanding the world, its differences
and boundaries’. In the second section, entitled
‘Their house’, Angela Bourke, Nicholas Grene,
Adam Hanna, Howard Keeley, Lucy McDiarmid,
Maureen O’Connor and Tony Tracy look at
domestic sites as various as Maeve Brennan’s
childhood home in Ranelagh, Dublin, and
Synge’s stage spaces. An essay by Rhona
Richman Kenneally serves as
a conceptual introduction to the collection, and
framing poems by Vona Groarke suggest a poet’s
version of ‘How to read a building’. A stand-
alone visual essay of images and discursive
captions featuring domestic spaces addressed in
the contributions supports this book’s emphasis
on the Irish home as a vibrant space of personal
and national identity formation.
Rhona Richman Kenneally is a professor of
Design and Computation Arts and co-founder of
the School of Irish Studies at Concordia
University in Montreal. She is editor of The
Canadian Journal of Irish Studies.
Lucy McDiarmid is Marie Frazee-Baldassarre
Professor of English at Montclair State University
and former president of the American Conference
for Irish Studies. Her most recent book is At
Home in the revolution: what women said and did
in 1916.
Cover design: Pata Macedo, part-time faculty
member, Dept. of Design and Computation Arts,
Concordia University.
The Routledge History of Disability explores the shifting attitudes towards and
representations of disabled people from the age of
antiquity to the twenty-first century. Taking an
international view of the subject, this wide-
ranging collection shows that the history of
disability cuts across racial, ethnic, religious,
cultural, gender and class divides, highlighting
the commonalities and differences between the
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experiences of disabled persons in global
historical context.
The book is arranged in four parts, covering
histories of disabilities across various time
periods and cultures, histories of national
disability policies, programs and services,
histories of education and training and the
ways in which disabled people have been seen
and treated in the last few decades. Within
this, the twenty-eight chapters discuss topics
such as developments in disability issues
during the late Ottoman period, the history of
disability in Belgian Congo in the early
twentieth century, blind asylums in
nineteenth-century Scotland and the
systematic killing of disabled children in Nazi
Germany.
Co-edited by CAIS member Nancy E Hansen,
University of Manitoba.
Food Rioting in Ireland in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries The 'Moral Economy' and the Irish Crowd
By James Kelly
Food rioting, one of the most studied
manifestations of purposeful protest
internationally, was practised in Ireland for a
century and a half between the early eighteenth
century and 1860. This book provides a fully
documented account of this phenomenon and
seeks to lay the foundations for a more structured
analysis of popular protest during a period when
riotous behaviour was normative. Though the
study challenges E.P. Thompson's influential
contention that there was no 'moral economy' in
Ireland because Ireland did not provide the
populace with the 'political space' in which they
could bring pressure to bear on the elite, its
primary achievement is, by demonstrating the
enduring character of food rioting, to move the
crowd from the periphery to the centre. In the
process, it offers a rereading of eighteenth- and
early nineteenth-century Irish history, and of the
public response to the Great Famine.
Four Courts Press, $65.00
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January 1 2018 was the 250th anniversary of
Maria Edgeworth’s birth. Valerie Pakenham’s
sparkling new selection of over four hundred
letters, many hitherto unpublished, will help
to celebrate her memory. Born in England,
she was brought to live in Ireland at the age of
fourteen and spent most of the rest of her life
at the family home at Edgeworthstown, Co.
Longford. Encouraged by her remarkable
father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, whose
memoirs she edited, she became, in turn,
famous for her children’s stories, her practical
guides to education and her novels – or, as
she preferred to call them, ‘Moral Tales’. By
1813, when visiting London, she was, as
Byron testified, as great a literary lion as he
had been the season before, and she was
hugely admired by fellow novelists Sir Walter
Scott and Jane Austen.
Maria Edgeworth’s posthumous fame has
dwindled and only her first novel, Castle
Rackrent (1800), a brilliant burlesque account
of the Irish squirearchy, is still widely read.
She was, however, a prolific and fascinating
letter writer. She insisted that her letters were
for private consumption only, but after her
death, her stepmother and half-sisters
produced a private memoir for friends using
carefully selected extracts.
Maria’s letters reflect sixty years of Irish history,
from the heady days of Grattan’s Parliament,
through the perils of the 1798 Rebellion to the
rise of O’Connell and the struggle for Catholic
Emancipation. In old age, she worked actively to
alleviate the Great Famine and wrote her last
story to raise money aged 82. A treasure trove of
stories, humour, local and high-level gossip, her
letters show the extraordinary range of her
interests: history, politics, literature and science.
A History of Irish Working-Class Writing provides a wide-ranging and authoritative chronicle of the writing of Irish working-class experience. Ground-breaking in scholarship and comprehensive in scope, it is a major
intervention in Irish Studies scholarship, charting representations of Irish working-class life from eighteenth century rhymes and songs to the novels, plays and poetry of working-class experience in contemporary Ireland. There are few narrative accounts of Irish radicalism, and even fewer that engage ‘history from below’. This book provides original insights in these relatively untilled fields. Exploring workers’ experiences in various literary forms, from early to late capitalism, the twenty-two chapters make this book an authoritative and substantial contribution to Irish studies and English literary studies generally.
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Edited by Michael Pierse, who is a lecturer in Irish Literature at Queen’s University Belfast. His research mainly explores the writing and cultural production of Irish working-class life. Michael has contributed to a range of national and international publications and is the author of Writing Ireland’s Working-Class: Dublin After O’Casey (2011).
The Needle in the Beast from the East
CAIS-ACEI Executive Contacts
President: Jane McGaughey Concordia University [email protected]
Secretary-Treasurer: Jérémy Tétrault-Farber Dawson College [email protected]
Past-President: Michele Holmgren Mount Royal University [email protected]
Members at Large:
Patrick Mannion, Memorial University [email protected]
William Jenkins, York U [email protected] Pamela McKane ([email protected]) Aileen Ruane
[email protected] CJIS Editor: Rhona Richman Kenneally, Concordia University [email protected] Communications Officer: Jean Talman [email protected] Newsletter Editor: Michael Quigley [email protected]
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Canadian Association for Irish Studies Association Canadienne d’études irlandaises
Mailed Membership Form
Yearly membership in the Canadian Association for Irish Studies includes two issues of The
Canadian Journal of Irish Studies and the CAIS Newsletter.
Memberships expire July 1st.
Membership Type One Year
Membership
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Membership
Regular $75 $200
Family (two or more at
the same address) $110 $300
Students $35 $90
Address (Please use your institutional address if you have one):
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Please make cheque payable to: The Canadian Association for Irish Studies
Please send your membership form and cheque to:
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Receipts will be sent ONLY by request.
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