Kate O’Brien’s Farewell Spain and Mairin Mitchell’s Storm over Spain were published in 1937 while the Spanish Civil War was still in progress. This essay considers these travel writings in their wider European and Irish context and in the context of the lives and times of their authors. Close contemporaries, Mitchell and O’Brien were first published in the years during which Ireland – or at least the greater part of the island – progressed from being a territory of the United Kingdom to a fully independent state. Throughout the lifetimes of both authors, Catholicism was a fundamental and defining aspect of Irish national identity alongside an official, secular culture based on language revivalism, traditional music and sport, literature and the visual arts. Both O’Brien and Mitchell were active in this culture, albeit critically so and without ever succumbing to insularity. On the contrary, both are European in focus, seeing in Europe a place where Irish people might, as in the past, come to express both their distinctiveness from Britain and the anglosphere, and their commonality with the mainly Catholic or post-Catholic national states of the continent – O’Brien urges that Ireland catch onto Europe, Mitchell suggests that Ireland was never more independent than when it was engaged with Europe. The recommendation is complicated by the fact that the Europe onto which they wish Ireland to catch was bitterly divided.
This article examines the ways Hubert Butler conceived of the link between respectability and the most baleful aspects of twentieth-century Croatian and Irish experiences. Butler maintained that nationalism and religion could provide ethical approaches to living in society, but only when they informed concrete actions in limited, local, contexts. However, since the nineteenth century, religion and nationalism have, to a considerable extent, been employed as instruments of respectability, as they increasingly became ideas that emanated and were organised from a centre and, more or less, uniformly diffused over large areas. For Butler, this was a pernicious development as it fractured established neighbourly bonds and replaced them with essentially abstract ways of living in society. Butler believed that smaller communities, like Ireland and Croatia, offered a defence against this sort of abstraction, even if his experiences in both countries showed how powerful the pull exerted by religious, cultural and imperial centres was on these more peripheral societies, and how metropolitan modes of respectability were copied there, often to disastrous effect. Respectability, therefore, lay at the heart of Butler’s ethical perspective on society, and functions as a lens through which the transnational linkages he worked to establish between Croatian and Irish experience become apparent.
Maurice Leitch was a Northern Irish writer whose fiction is marked by a distinctive exploration of identity, displacement and the psychological legacy of political conflict. His early novels The Liberty Lad (1965) and Poor Lazarus (1969), as well as the later Silver’s City (1981), are set in Ulster and portray life in a region shaped by frustrations, sectarian division and historical tension. Through understated yet powerful narratives, Leitch reflects on the enduring impact of Ireland’s troubled past, frequently exploring themes of exile, memory and silence. While his final novel, Gone to Earth (2019), departs geographically by setting its story in postwar Spain, it continues to resonate with the concerns of Leitch’s Irish fiction, subtly refracting themes of loss, violence, dislocation and historical reckoning through a foreign landscape. The novel’s Spanish setting becomes a mirror for the Irish experience, with its suppressed histories and unresolved legacies of violence. Drawing on concepts from trauma and memory studies, this article examines how Leitch constructs a narrative of transnational reflection, in which Ireland’s own conflicts and silences are reimagined through the remnants of Spain’s civil war and Franco’s regime.
This paper traces some of the connections between the canonical Samuel Beckett (1906-89) and the almost-forgotten Blanaid Salkeld (1880-1958). Both were involved with the Irish literary scene, had mutual friends, and moved in the same social and creative circles. During the 1930s, the second decade of the Irish Free State, while Beckett travelled between Ireland and other European countries, Salkeld remained living and immersed in Dublin’s artistic activities. In August 1934, under the pseudonym Andrew Belis,[1] Beckett’s opinion piece “Recent Irish Poetry” was published in The Bookman. Here, Beckett distinguishes between the “antiquarians”, poets invested in Ireland’s past and who then dominated the Irish poetry scene, and “others” who display more modern tendencies in their verse (1934: 235). Nestled within Beckett’s polemic, which is predominantly focused on male poets, is his views on Salkeld’s debut collection, Hello! Eternity (1933). Explored here are Beckett’s cross-generational friendships with the Salkeld family, his perspective on Blanaid Salkeld’s poetry as well as his intended contribution to her successful broadsheet series: Dublin Poets & Artists (circa. 1939–43). Intertwined in this examination are associations with three small, private presses: the Europa Press, which was founded by their mutual friend George Reavey, the Cuala Press, which was set up by Elizabeth “Lolly” Yeats and Susan “Lily” Yeats, and Salkeld’s Gayfield Press, which she co-founded with her son, Cecil, in 1937. Also informing this examination are new findings from this author’s discovery and ongoing analysis of Blanaid Salkeld’s private literary archive. Notes [1] Belis was the (slightly misspelled) surname of Beckett’s maternal grandmother, Anne (née Belas).
The convulsive European context of 1937 produced a variety of travel books related to the Spanish Civil War that were published simultaneously. Together with politically engaged works by authors such as Peadar O’Donnell, Kate O’Brien, or Arnold Lunn, two significant authors of Irish descent recorded retrospectively the prelude and beginning of the Spanish conflict, offering in their travelling accounts the perception of a Europe in crisis and their committed responses to international politics. This study explores the convergence of London-Irish journalist Mairin Mitchell’s Storm over Spain (1937) and Irish-American Ursuline Sister Monica Maginnis’ And Then the Storm (1937), and of their portraits of Spanish life before the Civil War started. The comparative analysis brings up two perceptions of the prelude within the European and international context, and proves the useful contribution of their travel books, as cultural and historical documents, in exposing features of the conflict. Mitchell and Maginnis, in their efforts to grasp Spain’s imminent tragedy, prove the transformation of the genre and their divergent Catholic perspectives of a conflict in Europe.
This article examines Irish women’s perceptions of, and contributions to, the Spanish Civil War. It seeks to showcase the range of Irish women’s opinions on the nature of the war, highlighting the political, social, religious and international terms in which they framed the conflict. The article then explores Irish women’s contributions to the war, focusing upon their efforts to organise fundraisers and public meetings at home or provide medical relief behind the frontlines in Spain. As it shows, whilst some Irish women took sides, providing support for either the Republican or Nationalist camp, others chose not to, opting instead to provide humanitarian aid on an impartial basis. In doing so, the article sheds light upon two underexplored dimensions of the Irish response to the Spanish Civil War: the contributions made by women and the provision of neutral humanitarian aid.
To say that Ireland has “imagined” Europe is to acknowledge a long history of looking outward in order to look inward. Across the twentieth century, Irish writers repeatedly used European scenes, debates, and crises as sounding boards for local anxieties about nationhood, faith and secularity, gender, class, and the ethics of belonging. Europe, in this sense, is not merely a map of proximate states but a repertoire of figures – Catholic and secular modernities, revolutionary and reactionary energies, borderlands and capitals – through which Irish authors tested their own aesthetic and political commitments, and these exchanges were anchored in uneven yet persistent cultural corridors. One of the aims of this special issue is literary: to trace how texts staged “Europe” as a scene of recognition and estrangement, a foil and a mirror, and to sketch some lines of continuity that make the special issue’s case studies legible as parts of a wider conversation.
By drawing on cookbooks, culinary pamphlets, women’s magazines, as well as semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted in the County Donegal and County Meath Gaeltachts, Marzena Keating explores the formulation of Irish culinary culture in the first five decades of Irish independence. Her book, entitled Continuity and Change in the Irish Culinary History and Culture, 1922–1973, incorporates both individual and collective experiences highlights the links connecting food with images of Irish identity, memory, and gender. Thus, the monograph addresses the complexity of twentieth-century Irish culinary experiences in an interdisciplinary framework, by utilising the sources and methods of historical archival research, food anthropology and the sociology of food.
This paper considers how the Irish elk and wolf, two species long extinct within Ireland, are imbued with symbolic national and cultural significance in Cartoon Saloon's feature film Wolfwalkers (Moore and Stewart 2020) and Brown Bag's short The Last Elk (Shannon 1998). Lauri Honko's concept of identity formation, built upon the key words "history", "myth" and "symbol", provides a methodological approach, allowing the viewer to explore how the wolf and Irish elk became symbolic of a naturalised "Irishness" within these animated fiction films. Analysis of character and environmental design decisions that directly define the physical form of the animated animal onscreen considers how these symbolically potent creatures are framed alongside motifs borrowed from Celtic art and iconography. Meanwhile, the use of sight and "gaze", as discussed in Berger's influential essay "Why Look at Animals?" (2022 [1977]), is essential to building a picture of the human and non-human connection within these narratives and poses questions surrounding the human-centric leanings these narratives take. Finally, the paper considers how the presence of extinction is a major theme that links the use of the animal in each film and potentially reflects late 20th and 21st century concerns for the environment borne out within 2d animation.
This paper considers how the Irish elk and wolf, two species long extinct within Ireland, are imbued with symbolic national and cultural significance in Cartoon Saloon’s feature film Wolfwalkers (Moore and Stewart 2020) and Brown Bag’s short The Last Elk (Shannon 1998). Lauri Honko’s concept of identity formation, built upon the key words “history”, “myth” and “symbol”, provides a methodological approach, allowing the viewer to explore how the wolf and Irish elk became symbolic of a naturalised “Irishness” within these animated fiction films. Analysis of character and environmental design decisions that directly define the physical form of the animated animal onscreen considers how these symbolically potent creatures are framed alongside motifs borrowed from Celtic art and iconography. Meanwhile, the use of sight and “gaze”, as discussed in Berger’s influential essay “Why Look at Animals?” (2022 [1977]), is essential to building a picture of the human and non-human connection within these narratives and poses questions surrounding the human-centric leanings these narratives take. Finally, the paper considers how the presence of extinction is a major theme that links the use of the animal in each film and potentially reflects late 20th and 21st century concerns for the environment borne out within 2d animation.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh is a remarkably perceptive Irish nature writer whose work, exploring ideas of emergency, interconnectedness and ecologies of care, is sharply truthful, courageous and compassionate. The following interview was conducted online in November 2024. She kindly talked about her two books, Thin Places (2021) and Cacophony of Bone (2023), and about herself as mother, writer and vegetable grower, covering issues such as violence in war, mental health and motherhood. Aspects of her work such as the human, the non-human, the COVID-19 pandemic and her ethics of ecology were discussed as well. The writer offers an array of insightful responses and shares her views on her motivations to write.
This article addresses the theme of fragmentation in Louise O’Neill’s Asking for It (2015) by means of a reading and interpretation that is informed by Jacques Lacan’s thinking. The article argues that Asking for It is an example of the recent trend towards representations of fragmentation in twenty-first-century Irish writing, especially in terms of the female body. The article provides an overview of Lacan’s thinking on the mirror-stage and offers an analysis of the workings of desire, shame and fragmentation in his thinking, before showing how these notions help to articulate the experiences that Emma O’Donovan – the central character – goes through in the course of novel. The article offers a reading of desire in the context of materialism and the imagined self in the opening stages of the novel as well as the fractured, fragmented body in the latter stages of the text.
Between 1939 and 1943, Patrick Kavanagh wrote a series of poems around the theme of Christmas that set forth the enabling role of nostalgia in the transmission of hope in times of trouble. Commonly experienced as a longing for the past, nostalgia appears as a natural emotional response to pain (algos) engendered by angst, insecurity, and displacement. In Kavanagh’s poems, the theme of nostalgia is mainly explored through the lens of a “lost home”, often associated with life in the countryside, childhood, and a deep sense of belonging. This inclination towards a return (nostos) is triggered on the one hand by the turmoil of a global historical context with the effects of “The Emergency” on Irish society, and on the other hand by the poet’s personal context while struggling to adapt to life in Dublin. Using Christmas as a symbol of transition and renewal, the poems thus bridge the personal and collective imaginary. The poetic devices used to transfigure reality reveal how nostalgia provides perspective and distance to foster a return to simplicity and acceptance of reality, beyond mere idealisation. It also ultimately contributes to the transmission of hope and appears as a key aspect in Kavanagh’s poetics of care and detachment.
In his novels Roddy Doyle has challenged stereotypes about women by creating strong female characters who are defined by their resilience and determination. In Smile he presents for the first time a beautiful, successful and moneyed woman. Rachel Carey is a TV celebrity and a feminist activist who marries Victor, an underdog. Rachel redeems him and helps him come to terms with the sexual abuse he suffered as a child. But at the end of the novel the reader discovers that this powerful and successful woman never entered into a relationship with Victor. The aim of this paper is to examine how this fictitious wife that Victor has created seems to possess all the best qualities of two of the most interesting female spouses created by Doyle: Miss O’Shea and Aoife Rabbitte.
