Centre for Irish Studies Newsletter

Centre for Irish Studies Newsletter

Nuachtlitir Ionad an Léinn Éireannaigh 

Issue 4 Autumn 06

| Autumn Features | Back Issues |

COVER STORIES

• Message form the Director
• Joe Burke Archive
• IACI Visiting Fellow and New PhD. Students at the Centre

Message from the Director Focal ón Stiúrthóir

Sa nuachtlitir dheireanach bhí ábhar mór ceiliúrtha againn: bhí John McGahern, duine de mhórscríbhneoirí na hÉireann agus Ollamh Oinigh le Léann na hÉireann in Ollscoil na hÉireann, Gaillimh tar éis Ionad an Léinn Éireannaigh a sheoladh go hoifigiúil tamall roimhe sin. Bhí sé chomh gealgháireach, flaithiúil an lá san linn is a bhí gach aon uair roimhe sin go raibh sé inár measc, lán de scéalta greannmhara agus gach seans á thapú aige chun poll beag a chur sa mhór-is-fiú a shamhlaigh sé i gcónaí leis an róshollúntacht agus an ródháiríre. Tháinig a bhás i mí na Márta aniar aduaidh orainn. Ní hamháin gur scríbhneoir den gcéad scoth a bhí ann, ach fear cúirtéiseach, seanaimseartha nach mór, fear cuileachtúil a raibh gean thar an ngnáth ag daoine air, fear íseal uasal, mar adeirtear fós sa Ghaeilge. Mar chomóradh ar John McGahern, cuirimid ar fáil anso taifead a dheineamar ar léamh a thug sé ag an Scoil Shamhraidh cúpla bliain ó shin, taifead a thaispeánann arís an scríbhneoir ionraic, a bhí ina mháistir ar a cheird, agus an duine ciúin sibhialta i dteannta a chéile. Braithimid uainn é.

Click to view John McGahern video

This edition of the newsletter also contains a report on the First Galway Conference of Irish Studies which attracted more than 60 scholars from Ireland, Britain, Norway, America, and South Africa. Among the many highlights of the conference were the opening roundtable discussion with by Henry Glassie, Angela Bourke, and Gearóid Ó Crualaoich, chaired by Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh and the workshops conducted each of the three invited speakers in which they demonstrated their own working methods.

We also have a report on a new course in Irish Culture Studies offered to refugees and asylum-seeker resident at the Eglinton Hotel in Salthill and taught by Méabh Ní Fhuartháin. At the end of the course, each of the students gave a presentation in which they compared aspects of Irish music with their own musical traditions. Among the material presented to them during the course, students were very taken with a talk on the Irish Famine given by Professor Jim Donnelly in which he explained the concept of the ’deserving’ and ’undeserving’ poor which informed English government responses to the Famine.

Cuirimid fáilte ó chroí roimh na micléinn ó Choláistí Hobart agus William Smith agus ó Choláiste Union a bheidh anso ar feadh an téarma agus roimh na micléinn nua atá díreach tosnaithe ar an MA sa Léann Éireannach. Cuirimid fáilte chomh maith roimh an Ollamh Clare Carroll ó Ollscoil na Banríona, CUNY, a bhfuil comhaltacht taighde aici ón Irish American Cultural Institute agus atá i mbun staidéir faoi láthair ar imircigh as Éirinn sa Róimh sa séú agus sa seachtú haois déag.

We welcome a number of PhD students who have just begun their research at the Centre: David Doyle who is working on aspects of Irish popular culture in the 1920s and early 30s, Leo Keohane, who is looking at the history of anarchy as a political philosophy in Irish history, and Méabh Ní Fhuartháin who is studying the history of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann. We congratulate Méabh on the award of a Government of Ireland Fellowship from the Irish Research Council of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Méabh is also involved with the Joe Burke Archive, a hugely significant initiative for the Centre for Irish Studies and for the University. We also extend congratulations to Jenny McCarthy who was awarded a research scholarship to spend time at the University of Berkeley, California, where she will continue here research on the relationship between Jack B Yeats and the American artist John Sloan.

Mar fhocal scoir, fágaimid slán leis an Ollamh Chunyan Lu ó Ollscoil Hebei sa tSín a bheidh ag filleadh abhaile go gairid tar éis bliain a chaitheamh linn i mbun taighde.

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The Joe Burke Archive, Centre for Irish Studies, NUI Galway

Deeply embedded in the musical landscape of his native Kilnadeema, County Galway, Joe Burke, the reknowned button accordion player, has amassed an enviable collection of music recordings, in addition to keeping meticulous records of correspondance, newspaper clippings, photographs and promotional documents.  Joe was searching for a suitable home for this collection, which would recognise the local, national and indeed international importance of the material.  In 2004, he found an eager and appropriate recipient for the donation in the Centre for Irish Studies, at the National University of Ireland, Galway. The daunting task of processing Joe’s extensive collection has been ongoing since that time, and the first phase of the digitisation project is now complete. 

Joe is of a generation of musicians who presided over and witnessed dramatic changes to the traditional arts during the second half of the 20th century, particularly the years c.1945-1970. Scholarship in traditional music and dance has up to recently focused on the earlier part of the century—the golden era of recording Irish music in both the US and Britain. By the mid-1940s, the larger international recording companies had discontinued their recording of Irish Music. In Ireland, other bodies such as Radio Eireann (or 2RN, as it was then known), Gael Linn and the Folklore Department, UCD (initially the Folklore Commission), were to fill the vacuum of documenting and promoting Irish music and dance.

The transition of music and dance from a predominantly domestic to predominantly  public domain was actively being navigated, against the backdrop of delayed modernity in Ireland. This was a challenge to traditional art forms.  Though it would be disingenuous to suggest that traditional cultural expressions  had not always been in constant flux, this period signaled an accellerated rate of change.  It is at exactly this juncture that Joe began recording and gathering documentation and dialogue surrounding music. His motivation initially was to expand his own repetoire and develop style, but quickly realised the incidental importance of his endeavours. The collection will be housed at the archives of the Centre for Irish Studies, but ultimately, it is hoped, will be available on-line for wider access.  This collection will provide an extraordinary resource for musicians and scholars alike, and represents the Centre’s commitment to Irish Music Studies as an integral part of Irish Studies.

Méabh Ní Fhuartháin,(Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences) Co-ordinator, Joe Burke Archive Project, Centre for Irish Studies, NUIG.

Joe Burke at Gort Feis, 1955

Click to view a further sample of the Burke Archive

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IACI Visiting Fellow and PhD. Students at the Centre

Clare Carroll - IACI Visiting Fellow

We are delighted to welcome Professor Clare Carroll to the Centre for Irish Studies for this academic year, as she is the IACI/NUIG Fellow in Irish Studies, 2006-07.

This autumn in Galway I’ll be working on a book about the Irish in Rome in the 17th century. The book begins in 1609 with the journey of O’Neill to Rome, and it ends with the dissolution of the friars in 1751. Some of my research will be presented in public lectures. The first of these, sponsored by the Seminar on Religion in Civil Society, is, "Ecclesiastical Politics: the Irish in 17 ^th Century Rome", and will take place on Wednesday, 18 ^th October. While in Ireland, I’ll also be participating in the Micheál Ó Cléirigh seminar at UCD; on 17 ^th November, I am presenting a paper on the first printed grammar of Irish, Francisco O’Molloy’s Grammatica Latino-Hibernica (Rome, 1677).  At the Centre for Irish Studies, NUI, Galway, I am presenting a paper on the Flight of the Earls to the M.A. students in Irish Studies on 4 ^th December. I am hoping that Dr. Nollaig Ó Muraíle will join us for that since he is working on a new edition of Tadhg Ó Cianáin's travel narrative. Finally, on 8 ^th December, I will give a lecture on "The Irish College in Rome", as part of the annual Irish Studies Seminar Series. 

The library at NUI, Galway, is ideal for my research since it is so strong in Irish and Hiberno-Latin material.  While here, I want to discuss my work with scholars such as Mícheál Mac Craith, Nollaig Ó Muraíle, Allison Forrestal, and Nicholas Canny who are major experts on early modern Irish history and literature. Another NUI, Galway, scholar whose work greatly interests me is Elizabeth Fitzpatrick (Department of Archaeology), who is now writing a book on the graves of the Irish earls in San Pietro in Montorio. There’s also the added advantage of attending the Irish Studies Seminar Series which this autumn will be featuring, amongst others, the ground-breaking work of Michelle O Riordan. Thanks to Louis de Paor, Nessa Cronin, John Eastlake, and Samantha Williams for helping me get settled here at the Centre.

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PhD. Students

Méabh Ní Fhuartháin

Méabh Ní Fhuartháin (IRCHSS), begins her PhD at the Centre for Irish Studies exploring Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann as a literal and powerfully symbolic agent of culture; an organization that has largely been ignored in academic discourse.  The rationale for this research project is based on two distinct goals: firstly, to document the genesis and development of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Eireann, and secondly, to further develop an epistemology of Irish music within the field of Irish Studies, using Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann as the ethnographic sample by which this can be achieved. Méabh sees an opportunity to examine Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann from within Irish Studies, applying established theoretical frames from post-colonial theory, cultural history, cultural studies and ethnomusicology in an original way.

The situating of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann in the wider folk music revival of the USA and Britain, while taking the particular nationalist circumstances in to account will be one of the main objectives of this project.  On the instigation of members of the Dublin Pipers Club and others, Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann was formed in 1951.  By its own constitutional remit Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann is a revival organisation, but with an overarching cultural nationalist concern. What political and social conditions, both nationally and internationally, made it possible for Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann to begin and flourish within such a relatively short period of time?  To what musical, and therefore cultural, need was Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann responding?  How was Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann used as a means of defining identity for participants and observers alike?  In responding to these questions, Méabh hopes to demonstrate the dynamism of music in identity formation in post-colonial/new-nation Ireland.

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David Doyle

David Doyle’s work argues that in Ireland, in general, the history of popular culture remains unwritten and like all worthwhile history, research in the history of popular culture is not without its imposing challenges (Rouse, 1997). It is anticipated that the outcome of this research will be a doctoral thesis that will, in effect, supply the first comprehensive history of popular culture in any period of twentieth-century Ireland.  True, there is a vast amount of historical literature on high culture in Irish society, but, what has been written about popular culture in Britain suggests that it is likely that the great mass of Irish people were unmoved by the culture of the intellectual and political elite. Therefore, this project seeks to use insights derived from the substantial body of published work now available on British society and popular culture to inform a study of Irish popular culture in the first decade after the achievement of independence.

The Catholic Church, in particular, will be a key methodological influence in this respect, not least in helping to define the areas of Irish popular culture on which to focus.  In the same way that Republicans had traditionally insisted that moral corruption was a result of English influences; the Catholic Church decided that this was also the case with popular recreation and herein lies the genesis of this thesis (Ferriter, 2005). The object of this research is to focus on the five main components of popular culture which the Catholic Church deemed worthy of especial attack: cinema, sport, music and dance, temperance and sexuality. It will determine to what extent the teachings and declarations of the Catholic Church succeeded in transforming the social lives of the flock and the degree to which the pleasures of popular recreation continued to override the strictures and patterns of Catholic life. In doing so, the study will be primarily concerned with documenting and analysing the social lives of the masses, a study that provides an insight into the lives of ordinary people, not just the lives of extraordinary people. In short, the historical value of this study is entwined with the idea that popular culture is not the ’preserve of the few’, but the ’passion of the many’ (Rouse, 1997).

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Leo Keohane

Leo Keohane completed a Masters in Culture and Colonialism, at NUI, Galway, 2005-06. This September he commenced his doctoral research at the Centre for Irish Studies, where he proposes to carry out an examination of Anarchism, both as a political philosophy and as a kind of mentalité, in Irish culture and history.

It is suggested that the paucity of evidence of anarchic behaviour arises from its having being subsumed into the more general historical narrative of nationalism, and that the bête noir of colonisation obfuscated alternative reasons for unrest. The intention of this work is to inquire into the possibility of a relationship between the philosophy of anarchism and the record of rebelliousness in Ireland.

For this purpose it is proposed to take a very broad and even simplistic definition of anarchism. It is basically a belief that sees the best type of governance as none at all. Derived from the Greek, without a ruler, it does not suggest chaos but rather that there is in man a potential for a self regulatory mechanism when dealing with other members of a collective – this, politically, would manifest itself in a loose federation of communes with pragmatism dictating a peaceful co-existence. What the anarchist generally opposes is central authority, it is anti-statist, but just as importantly it is the standard bearer of a mindset which resists control of any type: ’It would be misleading to offer a neat definition of anarchism, since by its very nature it is anti-dogmatic’, says Peter Marshall in, Demanding the Impossible (London: Fontana, 1993).

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This online newsletter is published by the Centre for Irish Studies.  Any views, comments, or suggestions are welcome and should be forwarded to Nessa Cronin, Editor at n.croninnuigalway.ie or to Samantha Williams, Technical Editor at irishstudiesnuigalway.ie

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