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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 (jane.mcgaughey@concordia.ca) and

Jérémy Tétrault-Farber (jeremytf@hotmail.com).

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:

faminestudies@irishheritagetrust.ie

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

14

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

15

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

16

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

17

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

20

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 hcc@fas.harvard.edu. 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): matthew.spangler@sjsu.edu.

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: catherine.conan@univ-brest.fr et flore.coulouma@gmail.com. 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: tmadigan@sjfc.edu

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

mark.mcgowan@utoronto.ca

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 jane.mcgaughey@concordia.ca

Secretary-Treasurer: Jérémy Tétrault-Farber Dawson College jeremytf@hotmail.com

Past-President: Michele Holmgren Mount Royal University MHolmgren@mtroyal.ca

Members at Large:

Patrick Mannion, Memorial University patrick.mannion@utoronto.ca

William Jenkins, York U wjenkins@yorku.ca Pamela McKane (pamela.mckane@gmail.com) Aileen Ruane

Aileen.Ruane@lli.ulaval.ca CJIS Editor: Rhona Richman Kenneally, Concordia University rrk@alcor.concordia.ca Communications Officer: Jean Talman jean.talman@utoronto.ca Newsletter Editor: Michael Quigley michaelquigley@sympatico.ca

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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

Three Year

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):

Name: _______________________________________________

______________________________________________________

______________________________________________________

City: ____________________Prov. /State: ___________________

Country: ___________________ Postal Code: _______________

Phone: (res.): _______________ (bus.): ____________________

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Amount Enclosed: $ ____________

Please make cheque payable to: The Canadian Association for Irish Studies

Please send your membership form and cheque to:

CAIS

c/o Jane McGaughey

School of Canadian Irish Studies, Concordia University

Henry F. Hall Building,

1455 De Maisonneuve W.

Montreal, Qc, H3G 1M8

Receipts will be sent ONLY by request.

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