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Centre for Irish Studies Newsletter

 Nuachtlitir Ionad an Léinn Éireannaigh                          Issue 6                Summer 2008

| Cover Stories |  Summer Features | Back Issues |

FEATURES 

• The Maestro of Kilnadeema
• The Ghost of the ’other’ Sheehy Sister
• Meitheal
• Irish Life and Culture Programme
• Life in the West of Ireland
• Irish Studies Seminar Series
• Postgraduate Irish Studies Conference
• MA Fellowship Awards

The Maestro of Kilnadeema

Pictured at the official launch of the Joe Burke Archive Collection to NUI, Galway are from left:  Dr Louis de Paor, Centre for Irish Studies, Joe Burke, Méabh Ní Fhuartháin and an tOllamh Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh.

An extensive archive of the work of traditional musician Joe Burke was officially bestowed to the James Hardiman Library at NUI Galway on Monday 3 March 2008. Joe Burke, accompanied by his wife Anne Conroy, were guests of honour at a special celebration on campus to mark the occasion which was attended by a large gathering of friends, musicians, library and university staff, who had come along to pay homage to a man whose name is synonomous with the musical tradition of East Galway.

In his opening address to a highly appreciative audience, Professor Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, described Joe as ’The maestro of Kilnadeema, a man whose music brings people to their senses. Joe Burke is one of a generation of musicians who presided over dramatic changes in traditional Irish music as it shifted from the domestic to the public domain, in Ireland and overseas. In this regard, Joe Burke’s archive is of critical importance for future research into the transformation that has taken place in the performance and reception of Irish traditional music. The University is demonstrating its commitment to act as a regional repository for material of national and international significance’.

Professor Ó Tuathaigh’s address was followed by a colourful and informative conversation between the maestro himself and Méabh Ní Fhuartháin, co-ordinator and fieldworker on the Joe Burke Archive Project at the Centre for Irish Studies.  Méabh has worked closely with Joe over the past few years, conducting a series of interviews and coordinating the processing of the material.

Together, Méabh and Joe guided their audience through items from the collection which included rare recordings of the legendary Aggie White, photographs of Joe’s neighbours, the Downeys, who encouraged his early interest in music, receipts from various tours and recordings of the Leitrim Céilí Band and other material which provided insights into the social history of Ireland and its American diaspora and the central role that traditional music played in Irish social life on both sides of the Atlantic from the 1950s through to the late twentieth century.

Méabh explained that the bestowal of the Joe Burke Archive on NUI Galway had come about through a chance encounter at the Milwaukee Irish Music Festival some years ago where Seán Crosson and Cóilín Parsons were promoting the Centre for Irish Studies Online Programme.  The NUI Galway display caught Joe’s eye, who was a featured guest at the festival, and Joe explained that he was looking for a suitable home for his collection, where it would be made available to musicians and scholars alike.  The Centre for Irish Studies was delighted to pursue the possibility further and Méabh recalled when she first went to Kilnadeema to meet Joe and view the material, ’it was like entering an Aladdin’s cave of Irish music, all neatly filed away.  Joe knew exactly who was playing on every tape, and where they were when they played it.  He is an archivist’s dream’.

Born in Kilnadeema near Loughrea, Co. Galway, Joe Burke is widely known for his accordion playing and has been a key figure in traditional Irish music since the 1950s.  Throughout his musical life Joe has operated as a musical magpie, meticulously gathering, and making, a wide range of recordings.  As a result, as well as commercial recordings, the collection contains substantial field recordings made in Ireland, Britain and the US, featuring artists such as Paddy Fahy, Andy McGann and Seán Maguire, and a host of others.

Currently, there are over 300 hours of recordings already digitised from the reel-to-reel collection, with significantly more yet to convert from audio-cassette tape. The collection also contains over 1,300 paper items, including photographs, letters and promotional material. The library will house the collection under the official title The Joe Burke Archive Collection.

The evening concluded, fittingly, with Joe and his wife Anne, performing for the assembled guests, which included musicians John Carty, Charlie Lennon, Muiris Ó Rócháin from the Willie Clancy Summer School, singer Lillis Ó Laoire, and Micheál Ó Conghaile from Cló Iar-Chonnachta.  Joe finished up with a rousing rendition of his signature tune, ’The Bucks of Oranmore’, leaving the audience and  NUI Galway all the richer.

Pictured from left are:  John Carty, Joe Burke, Anne Conroy Burke and Dr Lillis Ó Laoire.

At the official launch of the Joe Burke Archive Collection are from left:  Méabh Ní Fhuartháin, Joe Burke, Anne Conroy Burke and an tOllamh Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh.

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The Ghost of the 'other' Sheehy Sister

Dr Dara Culhane

This semester the Centre for Irish Studies has had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Dara Culhane of the Department of Anthropology, Simon Fraser University, Canada. During her sabbatical at NUI Galway Dara conducted research on the life of Margaret Sheehy Culhane Casey (1879-1956), an amateur actress and theatrical producer who lived in Dublin, Ireland and Montreal. The working title of the research project is: ’Memories, Transgressions, Exiles and Returns: An Encore for the Ghost of Margaret Sheehy’.

Margaret Sheehy (1879-1956) was the second of six children born to Bessie McCoy Sheehy and David Sheehy, an Irish Parliamentary Party MP from 1885-1918. No doubt the most famous of the Sheehy sisters is the eldest: Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington. Hanna’s life long commitment to republican, feminist and socialist political struggles has been well documented. Other sisters were Mary Sheehy Kettle, a writer, feminist, politician, and widow of Tom Kettle; and Kathleen Sheehy Cruise O’Brien, an activist in the Gaelic language movement and mother of politician and writer, Conor Cruise O’Brien.   

Dara’s research focuses on Margaret Sheehy Culhane Casey, who was her paternal grandmother. An amateur playwright and actress, Margaret, by her own account, ’went into exile’ in 1922. As a 41-year-old widow and mother of four, she fell in love with Michael Casey, a poet 20 years her junior, and her godson, and became pregnant. Margaret and Casey subsequently married and emigrated to Montreal, Canada. When Casey died suddenly in 1938 Margaret returned to Ireland where she lived until her death in 1956.

Dr. Culhane has been attempting to reconstruct Margaret’s life history through memories and family stories, published scholarly studies, biographies and autobiographies, newspaper accounts, and writing by and about James Joyce who drew on members of the Sheehy family for characters in his fiction. Scholars and family memoirists make only passing reference to Margaret in published works. Hence Dara has come to conceptualise Margaret as a ’ghost’ in the sense that Gayatri Spivak describes the ghost as ’not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure.’  Spivak asks:  ’What happens when we admit the ghost…into the making of worldly relations and into the making of our accounts of the world? It is a case of the difference it makes to start with what we normally exclude or banish, or…with what we never even notice’.  

’Admitting’ Margaret’s ghost has led Dara to some minor corrections of the existing literature: she was more politically active than her characterisation as the ’most conventional Sheehy sister’ represents her. Moreover, if one expands the category of ’political’ to include sexuality, and domestic and everyday spaces as political sites, Margaret emerges as decidedly unconventional figure in this period of Irish history.

The most significant source Dara has been working with is the voluminous personal correspondence between Margaret and her sisters’ held in the National Library of Ireland Archives.  Reading this material, and focusing on Margaret, provides insights into the consequences of sexual transgression for a middle class Catholic woman and member of a prominent family; processes through which anti-colonial activists subjected to a public gaze negotiate public/private boundaries; descriptions of Montreal’s Irish Diaspora of the 1920s and 1930s; the work of memory, longing and sisterly solidarity; and perspectives on everyday life lived between an abundance of cultural capital and a scarcity of material wealth.

While all the Sheehy sisters had an interest in drama, Margaret made theatrical performance a career, and a way of being in the world.  Theatre was also central to the everyday, domestic life of the Sheehys, particularly during the period 1895-1910 when the Sheehy home was a space where young men and women could engage in socialising, political debate, and flirtation not permitted in public space or sex-segregated university classrooms. Organised and directed primarily by Margaret, plays written by themselves and others, charades, recitations, improvisations, songs and dances were a central activity of gatherings enthusiastically participated in by family and regular guests like Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, Tom Kettle, and James Joyce. The subject matter of these performances often included political controversies of the day. Conventionally trivialised as merely fun and games, Dr. Culhane is interested in considering these as a form of non-institutionalised theatre—as political practices—through which this remarkable cohort of young people ’rehearsed’ real and imagined possibilities

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Meitheal

The Irish Studies postgraduate reading group,  Meitheal, continued to provide an interdisciplinary forum for graduate students to present working papers and research throughout the early months of 2008. The range of research proved to be extremely diverse with students from Irish Studies and cognate disciplines presenting a variety of papers over the four month period. Leo Keohane’s provocatively entitled paper ’Anarchism for the Housewife’, attempted to demonstrate that the Anarchist outlook, is actually quite the opposite, with its customary connotations of bloodshed and chaos. The paper drew on a broad range of conceptual thought ranging from continental philosophy to cyber punk culture. In briefly examining the life of Captain Jack White, Leo provided a number of interesting perspectives on one of Ireland’s few self professed anarchists.

A particularly prominent theme in this session of Meitheal was Irish music and dance. Paul Maguire of the University of Ulster spoke about his ongoing project: ’Dancing to a different drum: the prevalence of non-traditional social dancing in Irish dancehalls in the 1950s and 60s’, while Tim Collins explored the contextualised realm of Irish traditional music in the Sliabh Aughty region of east Clare and southeast Galway.  Framing the region within theories of space/place from Human Geography and Phenomenology, this paper demonstrated how contemporary musicians of this regional music create a sense of place by identifying with earlier generations of musicians, their repertoires and associated store of place narratives.

This session of Meitheal also included a presentation from a visiting doctoral student from Nanjing University, China. Xuan Gong was the first ever recipient of a fellowship from the Chinese Scholarship Council to spend time at the Centre for Irish Studies.  Her paper ’Homeland: Nation-State as Narrative Space in Barrytown Trilogy’, examined ideas and images of home in the fiction of Roddy Doyle from a contemporary Marxist perspective.

Meitheal will continue its fortnightly meetings in the forthcoming academic year. For further details, contact Méabh Ní Fhuartháin at mnifhuarthaingmail.com

Click here to view the list of presentations delivered to Meitheal during the Academic Year 2007/2008

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Irish Life and Culture Programme

A Winter and Spring in Galway

You’d think Galway would seem less strange to someone from an English-speaking country, a fisherman, a rain connoisseur, birder, and an enthusiast for all literary and historical things Irish. I thought, I’ve never been to Ireland before but I’ve been there in my mind a hundred ways. It will be like going home.

My students and I came to Galway on 3 January, 2007 and woke to snow being driven horizontally off Galway Bay past our windows. The black-headed gulls were staying low and careful in the fierce winds, and I remember thinking the equivalent of Dorothy’s: ’We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto’.  The winter illumination immediately reminded me of an image from Emily Dickinson where she says the light ’has the heft of a cathedral tune’. I was reaching from Dorothy to Emily to find myself as Galway and Ireland washed their strangeness over me and my students.

Every other week of classes at the Centre for Irish Studies, NUI Galway, we travelled to a different part of Ireland beginning with an immersion into the Connemara countryside: Irish language, Irish dance, Irish beer and the banshee’s voice in a night storm wind. Brown sauce? The wait-time while Guinness bubbles settled for the final pour? Deep wells and harps and enchanted landscapes where the spirit world of departed ancestors and either malevolent or kind beings (hard to tell which was which) consorted and waited behind witch hazel and furze bushes?  Ireland concocted itself in our minds and hearts—Yeats’ ’deep heart’s core’.

After Connemara we had a weekend of learning in Dublin by the Liffey. Then Cork and the Lee.  Ireland’s rivers and people are its fortune we found out. Like lifting rocks off a field to make room for the grass to grow and not coincidentally, provide the fencing to keep stock in, Irish national pluck seemed to grow out of adversity. Whatever challenges the Irish faced—blood, famine, the Troubles—there was the corresponding sinew of the Irish character that grew stronger.  My students and I found ourselves in awe of the unfolding narrative of a people’s wit and endurance and courage. And while we soon got over the displacement of not finding ourselves at home or at least in some kind of familiar territory, we found we had traded instead for a journey into the very essence of ourselves by way of a study of things Irish.

We looked out over the cliffs of Moher, the passionate murals of the streets of Derry, the restored hope of Belfast, the exquisite beauty of Dingle, as well as Newgrange, Carrowmore, Aran Islands and began to see what we had come to Ireland for—the story of what it is to be human: FirBlog, Celt, Viking, Norman, English amalgam of aspirations and melancholies and delights. Finn McCool, Queen Maeve, Aengus, Cuchulainn, Deirdre have come to people our imaginations with their ardor and longing after life.  Thanks Ireland.

Michael Strelow
Willamette University, Salem, Oregon

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Life in the West of Ireland

In March 2008, Jenny McCarthy presented part of her research work on the artist Jack B. Yeats at the National Gallery of Ireland.  The Research Day at the National Gallery was organised by the National Gallery Education Department, convened by Dr. Marie Bourke and chaired by Professor Roger Stalley, Trinity College Dublin. The aim of this event  was to showcase and support emerging research scholars and to explore new directions in Irish Art History.

Jenny’s paper ’“An artist of Gaelic Ireland”: Jack B Yeats and Life in the West of Ireland’, which sought to examine and re-evaluate the artist’s book of drawings, prints and paintings, published in 1912. Previously a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Jenny outlined how Yeats came to be considered ’An artist of Gaelic Ireland’ (a title bestowed on him by George Russell). Life in the West of Ireland provided the viewer with a visual example of the nativist ideology propagated by literary revivalists up to the time of Independence in contrast to contemporary reviews and critiques of the collection which presented it as being a truthful and accurate view of the west.

The full programme can be viewed at the following link:

National Gallery of Ireland Research Day

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Irish Studies Seminar Series

The Irish Studies Seminar Series continued to be well attended in the first semester of 2008, with contributing speakers from a broad array of disciplines.

Charles Armstrong, Professor of English at the University of Bergen, presented a paper entitled ’The Poet at Breakfast: Readdressing W. B. Yeats' Identities’. Margot Backus, IACI Visiting Fellow and Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston, followed with a controversial and musical presentation entitled ’More Useful Washed and Dead: James Connolly, the 90s Clergy Scandals and the Sexual Politics of ’Easter 1916’. Margot’s description of the way in which Jamie O’Neill recontextualised the ideal of 1916 in At Swim Two Boys, through his depiction of the complex relationships among  men of different social classes provoked considerable discussion from those present.         Greg McLaughlin’s paper, ’Changing Hearts and Minds? The Media and Conflict Transformation in the North’ explored how participants from both sides in the Northern conflict were represented in the media during the Troubles, and how these very different representations impacted on audiences. Greg is Senior Lecturer in Media and Journalism at the University of Ulster.

Stiofan Ó Cadhla, from the Department of Folklore and Ethnology at University College Cork, presented a paper entitled ’Irish Ethnology and Cultural Critique in the Nineteenth-Century Ordnance Survey’.  Dr Ó Cadhla discussed the relationship between the English surveyors and their Irish counterparts, and the traces of colonial ideology that inflect the terminology used by early European and Irish folklore scholars.

The series concluded in April with an intriguing paper from Dara Culhane, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Professor Culhane explored the intersection between autobiography, memory, and personal history, on the one hand, and the protocols of academic discourse on the other, in her discussion of the hidden history of her paternal grandmother, Margaret Sheehy. While Margaret’s story has been overshadowed by the reputation of her sisters Hannah Sheehy Skeffington and Mary Sheehy Kettle, her life throws its own light on  aspects of Irish social history and the particular experience of educated middle-class women in the early decades of the twentieth century.

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Postgraduate Irish Studies Conference, Bath Spa University, England

MA in Irish Studies Postgraduate Students, Katie O’Driscoll and Grace Shalloo at the Postgraduate Irish Studies Conference, Bath Spa University. April 2008

In June 2004, the first joint Postgraduate Irish Studies Conference was held at Charles de Gaulle Université, Lille III in France. In June 2005, Bath Spa hosted a Postgraduate Conference with participants from universities at Lille, Bath and Galway, with NUI Galway acting as the host institution in June 2006. In June 2007, Lille once again hosted the Conference with Paris 3 (Sorbonne) participating for the first time.

As part of this annual Conference, Dr Mary Harris (Department of History, NUI Galway) along with three postgraduate students from the MA in Irish Studies programme, Ayla Zachary, Katie O’Driscoll and Grace Shalloo joined their colleagues from Bath Spa University, and the Charles de Gaulle Université - Lille III, France. This year the Conference was hosted by Bath Spa University and took place on 25 April. Papers were presented by postgraduate students from the three universities and from Galway, Ayla Zachary presented a paper on, ’J.W. Whitbread: An interrogation of late 19th-century popular theatre and imperialism’, while Katie O’Driscoll presented her research on ’The Land Question after the Famine in Nineteenth-Century Ireland’.

“I found the Bath Spa University Postgraduate Conference to be a great experience. It was my first time presenting at a conference, and in the days leading up to the trip I was quite nervous. However, the atmosphere of the Conference was very relaxed. The audience was small and attentive, and each speaker got the chance to lead a discussion with the group. I received some very useful feedback on my topic. Working so closely with something like MA thesis material, one runs the risk of focusing to the point of being narrow-minded. Having the chance to present some of the material to a receptive audience who can offer new perspectives from a broad range of backgrounds is very useful indeed! It was also very nice to meet people who are interested in Irish Studies from other universities. Our Galway delegation traded email addresses with some of the presenters from Bath and from Lille, making contacts that will doubtless prove useful. And, on a personal, touristy note, I had never been to England! It was exciting enough just to visit Bath for the weekend. Overall, the Conference was a wonderful experience”.

Ayla Zachary, Postgraduate Student, MA in Irish Studies, Centre for Irish Studies, NUI Galway, 2007-08.

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MA Fellowship Awards, MA in Irish Studies, 2007-08

This year the Centre for Irish Studies offered a new MA Fellowship in Irish Studies which was awarded for the first time this academic year, 2007-08. Two postgraduate students on the MA programme, Debora Biancheri and Meredith Kernan, were awarded the MA Fellowship in recognition of their outstanding academic performance in their coursework this year. The Fellowship will be awarded annually on a competitive basis and is based on academic excellence achieved across all MA modules by the end of the first semester of the programme.

’Having  studied European Literatures in Pisa, I realized that the best way to pursue my interest in Irish Literature was coming over to Ireland. I had already spent some time in Galway as an Erasmus student and I found out about the MA in Irish Studies. I was very attracted by the interdisciplinary approach, which for me it would have meant to gain a deeper insight into literature through the study of history and the Irish language, something you don't normally get from postgraduate courses in an English Department. So far my expectations were totally met. And being awarded the scholarship was an additional great gratification, both on an economical and especially on a personal level. Above all it helped me realizing that my being foreigner, beside entailing some natural disadvantages, could also bring a valuable contribution to the Centre.’

Debora Biancheri, Postgraduate Student, MA in Irish Studies, Centre for Irish Studies, NUI Galway, 2007-2008.

 

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