We are delighted to launch Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies. The project emerges on the near anniversary of Hybrid Irelands, a conference held last year at the University of Notre Dame, which contributed to the project of locating Ireland in a global literary tradition. At that conference, with its nearly 150 participants, we discussed the possibility of a digital journal of Irish Studies being the gateway to a global and engaged conversation. A year later, Breac currently has over 500 subscribers from all over the world. These subscribers range from tenured university faculty to aspiring young academics, from non-academics with an interest in Irish Studies to the writers and artists whose work so often gives a journal like ours a reason to exist. Breac is the venue at which these diverse participants can converse and connect. And it hopes to nurture that conversation and to provide the platform for you to take part in it.

Our primary aspiration for Breac is thus to cultivate a new type of community, to take the academic conference, the classroom seminar, the Tuesday book club, the poetry reading, and the art exhibition, and to place them all in a digital crucible that can be accessed freely and globally. The potential upshot of the experiment we see as follows: narrowing the gap between the academic and the non-specialist;  reconsidering, as Margaret Kelleher suggests in the preface to this issue, what counts as academic property in light of intellectual collaboration; and designing digital tools that are not, by their intent and build, preconditioned to yield market data but which exist in support of, and because of, the community that uses them. In one sense, these aims seem inconceivable and out-of-reach—tantalizing even. On a smaller, more local level, though, they seem possible, achievable. So we build. We endeavor. We begin.

None of this would have been possible without the assistance and contribution of many people. Between families, friends, colleagues, peers, designers and mentors, the list of contributors, from the inception to the building of Breac, is as hybrid and multifarious as the methodologies and approaches we hope to promote here. For their original sponsorship of the Hybrid Irelands conference—the catalyst for this journal—and for the journal itself, we would like to thank the following programs at the University of Notre Dame: the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, the departments of English, Ph.D. in Literature, and Irish Language and Literature, the Graduate School, the College of ...

The launch of Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies marks a new departure for Irish Studies both in its range of subject and in its mode of transmission. It is fitting that its first issue should take as theme Migration and Diaspora, and with an especial close attention to the circulation of words, concepts, languages and policies, as well as the people through whom and about whom they are mobilized. To point to just some of the rich and varied examples that follow: David Lloyd’s compelling opening essay calls for the reinterrogation of a term “that for a brief time came to seem a natural way to address Ireland’s global migration,” namely “diaspora,” a word which Roddy Doyle in his interview suggests might have “exhausted its sentimental and intellectual potential.” A later essay, by Denis O’Hearn, uncovers the operations and material consequences of a “policy diaspora” with regard to the movement of prison practices from 1970s Ireland to locations in the United States and Turkey. The grammar of poetry is the subject of Kathy Heininge’s intricate and insightful piece, which traces how Eavan Boland’s distinctive use of the ablative conveys a language of “perpetual transition.”

The sudden, if predictable, transformation of Ireland from its brief moment as an island of immigrants back into what for so long it always was, a nation of emigrants, demands the re-interrogation of a term that for a brief time came to seem a natural way to address Ireland’s global migrations. The application of the term diaspora to people of Irish descent living outside Ireland is, after all, of relatively recent date and replaces a term that has been quite resonant in the Irish vocabulary, namely, emigration. What is the cost, and what are the possible gains, of displacing a term that has colloquial resonance and some political charge as well as...

When Eavan Boland establishes herself as the object in Object Lessons (1996), she is clearly invoking a multi-layered pun: beyond serving as a “striking practical example of a principle or ideal,” as an Irish woman, she has felt herself objectified in the national tradition; she has been the object of the male gaze; she objects to her status; she has been the object of the sentence, the noun to which things are done.[1] She invokes the many definitions of “object”: “a statement thrown in or introduced in opposition”; “something placed before the eye”; “something which on being seen excites a particular emotion, as admiration, horror, disdain, commiseration, amusement; a sight, spectacle, gazing-stock”; “that to which action, thought, or feeling is directed”; “the end to which effort is directed”; or “the fact of throwing itself or being thrown in the way.”[2] In the theoretical stance of subjectivity, she lists herself as object.

In the latest edition of The Irish Review on memoir, memory, and migration, editors Tina O’Toole and Jason King draw attention to a new dynamic in Irish Studies, and to a broadening of the critical discourse particularly in the area of migration and diaspora studies:

In the past twenty years a lively dynamic has emerged in Irish Studies that has broadened critical discourse beyond the somewhat static literary-historical categories of the past. As scholars have drawn on critical perspectives from postcolonial, feminist and queer theory, multidisciplinary approaches have been forged to create new understandings of Irish culture. This dynamic has been particularly evident in the area of migration and diaspora studies. At the same time, the fixed points on the map of Irish emigration have been unsettled in the context of the contemporary global environment and by what Diane Negra calls “transnationalized Irishness.”[1] This troubling of the canon and of the old certainties enables us to interrogate the connections and potential incompatibilities between received forms of national identity on the island and to locate these within a more complex nexus of Irish, European and translocational identities.[2]

This paper will examine how contemporary transnational Irish-language writing can be situated within this “more complex nexus,” and it will review the position of such writing within a multidisciplinary discourse on translocation.

came to me in stamps.

Magyar Posta ice-skaters, delicate

as Empire porcelain, a fish, an astronaut

and rocket, a silvery boy on 1960s skis.

I understood only difference.

Irish fiction between the 1920s and 1990s traces a growing interest in the lives and fates of “Travellers” in the “postcolonial” Free State. In particular, authors as diverse as Liam O’Flaherty and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne (whose writings neatly traverse this historical period) examine the myths and social policies that have sought to either exoticize these nomadic peoples as “tinkers” or categorize them in sociological terms as “itinerants.”[1] For both authors, the traveling life challenges identity defined by that which is rooted in the ownership and firm possession of the land and is bound by fixed notions of gender and sexuality. While Vivian Mercier is certainly correct in his assessment that O’Flaherty’s “true subject” is the “relationship between Man and Nature,” he fails to mention that the author interrogates both the universal category of “man” and the gendering of nature as female.[2] O’ Flaherty’s tinker, who possesses androgynous characteristics, defies the rigid male/female dichotomy, implying that the land is something to negotiate rather than tame or triumph over.[3] Ní Dhuibhne challenges this same Man/Nature conflict, characterizing traveling and adaptation as sensual activities not governed by strict affiliation (familial ties, for example) but rather by contingent alliances between different groups.

When we think of diaspora, we think of people. The Irish have been pushed or drawn across the world for centuries, and study of their diaspora is a near-industry.[1] But ideas and practices move, too, sometimes along with people, sometimes ahead of them.  In this article I examine how ideas, policies and practices about and in prisons have moved since the 1970s, when a social experiment began in Britain and Ireland to isolate prisoners who were considered to be the “worst of the worst.”[2] Since then, policies and models of isolation have spread around the world, especially to the United States and Turkey, where the strict isolation of prisoners is used to “solve” key political and social problems; so, too, have ideas and practices about how prisoners in isolation can defend themselves...

Desolation: A Story of the Irish Famine (1869) presents a forlorn Irish immigrant who has settled in Missouri and laments “[e]arth’s barriers […] and ocean’s billows” that have arisen between him and “all that once was home.” [1] Although this poem voices a strong desire to return to the “happy home of other days,” very few emigrants of the Famine generation were in the position to remigrate to their native country.[2] In contrast with these historical realities, homecoming emigrants are recurrent figures in Irish, Irish-American, and Irish-Canadian works of fiction written between 1860 and 1870 that recall the Great Hunger.

This essay will argue that these returning natives feature in three specific narrative templates, or “conventional schematic formats,” which “help us mentally string past events into coherent, culturally meaningful historical narratives.”[3] These templates can be analyzed as responses to the social upheaval caused by the Famine and as expressions of the nostalgia for a lost homeland that informed the transatlantic diaspora.

The article discusses a community study undertaken by a research team comprised of voluntary sector staff, academics, and community volunteers. The rationale for the project, the mixed methodology, multiple methods, and use of community researchers to collect data from a diverse and often “hard to reach” group afford lessons for academics and students. The data demonstrate the diversity of the Irish community in London, alongside a picture of continuity and change where newer migrants share many of the problems of the older generation, but whose backgrounds and experiences are different. The focus of the article is the research process, and in particular, the use of volunteer community researchers, the value of culturally sensitive research, and what this means for research with the Irish community. The findings and the practicalities of the research process are applicable to investigations outside the social sciences, and although the study was confined to the Irish community in London, it could also be applicable to other cities.   

1. Words

When I migrated to Montreal in 1970, the only words I knew to allow me to think of what was happening were emigrate and emigrant, but I didn’t allow myself to believe that I was joining the millions of Irishmen and Irishwomen who had left and settled elsewhere, who formed the “Irish diaspora.” I was young, and I was going to return after a year or two. I had had a good job in Dublin, permanent and pensionable, but I had made a choice: I left it to return to university, and then more studies followed in Montreal. Everything was open, everything was possible, and I left alone. In all these ways, I was not really comparable to those real emigrants who had to leave because of starvation and poverty, nor was I like the tens of millions around the world, refugees fleeing extermination, genocide, or war. Nor was I an “illegal.”

In late summer 2011 the buried remains of Australian bushranger Ned Kelly were exhumed from a mass grave at Pentridge Prison and identified by a forensic team.[1] This event refuelled a long-standing discussion surrounding Ned Kelly’s status as an Australian hero and national legend. Could a man who had murdered policemen and lived a life of crime be a fitting icon for the Australian nation? Those who argue in favor of his heroic status have repeatedly used Ned Kelly’s Irish background to support their argument: “Kelly, whose father was an Irish convict, is now seen by many Australians as a folk hero, a Robin Hood-like character who fought the British colonial authorities and championed the rural Irish underclass.”[2] Accordingly, the story of the Kelly outbreak has been interpreted both as “expressing the romantic revolt against respectability” and as a typically Australian manifestation of egalitarian anti-authoritarianism that was specifically fuelled by the Irish background of many of the oppressed and disadvantaged settlers.[3]

They grew up on an island,
looked to the big bones
of other countries, arteries of rivers,
the thousand-acred fields, pinnacled cities –
proof of a different history in museums
and echoing galleries.

Is mithid agus is maith an leabhar seo a bheith againn 35 bliana tar éis a bháis. Dá fheabhas is mar a bhí gach cnuasach ar leith ina chruth cúng abhlainne ceann ar cheann, tá ag dul do mhórfhile ar bith go gcnuasófaí a shaothar i dtoll a chéile go luath seachas go mall. Dá réir sin, is comóradh cuí an t-eagrán seo idir shlacht agus chló agus ealaín ó scuaib Sheáin Uí Fhlaithearta.

Ba dhóigh leat go bhfuil nach mór gach rud ráite faoi fhilíocht an Ríordánaigh go dtí seo, ach is ráiteas glé comair ar a shaol is ar a shaothar an réamhrá greanta atá mar bhrollach leis an leabhar ag Seán Ó Coileáin. Ba é an Coileánach, gan amhras, a thaighdigh is a scríobh an mhórbheathaisnéis, agus bhí de phribhléid aige bheith istigh a fháil ar dhialanna an fhile. Tá tugtha le fios aige in áiteanna eile nárbh iad na dialanna san ba chompordaí ar fad le léamh, agus pé duine feasta a rachadh...

It is only fitting that we have this book 35 years after his death. No matter how excellent each individual collection, offered as ceremonial wafers of sacramental bread, one after the other, every major poet deserves that his work be collected together sooner rather than later. As such, this edition—which includes artwork from the brush of Seán Ó Flaithearta—is an appropriate celebration in presentation and print.

You would think that almost everything has been said about Ó Ríordáin’s poetry by now, but Seán Ó Coileáin’s accomplished introduction, which prefaces the book, is a clear, concise statement regarding the poet’s work. It was Ó Coileáin who researched and wrote the preeminent biography of the poet, and he had the privilege of access to Ó Ríordáin’s diaries. He has let it be known elsewhere that those diaries did not always make for comfortable reading and that he did not desire to peer any further into their depths. If there is darkness in those diaries, they are nonetheless illuminating as regards the man and his poetry.

In the introduction, fair use is made of the diaries in order to intimate Ó Ríordáin’s thinking, particularly as regards his own poetry and how it was received by others. It is no surprise that precedence would be given to Máire Mhac an tSaoi's review of Eireaball Spideoige and the debate that followed. That debate is of great importance, not only because it wounded Ó Ríordáin deeply, but also because it is there we find condensed a large share of contemporary discourse on the value of poetry as well as judgements as to what constitutes acceptable diction in modern Irish language writing.

To revisit the debate here would be futile, but the affair marked a fundamental misunderstanding as to the capacity of the Irish language to expand and liberate itself. It was not true that Ó Ríordáin could not be understood without English, no more so than it was true of Máirtín Ó Cadhain, who twisted and inverted the syntax of the Irish language in his latter stories. It might be more true to say that Seán Ó Ríordáin could not be understood without imagination. There is no reason on earth why that fictional creature, the Irish person without English, would not comprehend compound words like “scillingsmaointe” and “sreangtheicheadh” and "scamallsparán" and "ár gcúrintinn éadrom" and dozens more besides. If Daithí Ó Bruadair, a man who forged many novel words and phrases and who stretched and bent the language on the rack, was understood in his time, then Seán Ó Ríordáin, a speaker as native as the next person—except, perhaps, the Ó Grianna brothers, and Ó Direáin and Ó Cadhain—posed no challenge either.

The major poems are here, because all the poems are...

Roddy Doyle has, you could say, a knack for timing. His work throughout his nearly three decade career as writer and more specifically novelist is often if not always parallel, indicative, or even predictive of the contemporary state of affairs. While the Abbey produced Doyle’s version of Gogol’s The Government Inspector, the International Monetary Fund arrived as if on time for the performance, and similarly, Doyle's novel The Van paralleled the thrill and excitement of the World Cup.  He knows what’s going on—on the ground. One of the advantages he says of writing for Metro Éireann is that it has forced him “to stay awake and not slip into some notion that I know what street life in Dublin is like without having to venture out onto the streets.” The other likely reason for his good timing is his involvement in a community, whether through the non-profit organization Fighting Words or the many circles of friends and fellow artists—in part a consequence of so many of his works being made into films, plays, and now musicals. He is a writer who works with people.

It is almost as if he is writing a cultural history in real time. No easy task by any means. And for this reason, his work over the last two decades, which parallels the boom and bust of Ireland’s economy as well as the waves of immigration and emigration that accompanied those economic changes, is invaluable in making any sense of contemporary migration and diaspora. As part of the Open Door Series, he has written short stories for adult literacy and language learners. He has been a regular contributor to the multicultural newspaper Metro Éireann, in which his serial, short stories have focused on cultural encounters.  And then there is Fighting Words, where primary and secondary students—some of whom were born in Ireland and others who have arrived from elsewhere—write creatively together. One payoff of his perspicuity is to make observations about migration that are as relevant now as they were for Henry Smart of Doyle’s The Last Roundup trilogy.

This interview was conducted on the morning of November 6th, 2012, in the top room of Roddy Doyle’s house in Clontarf. It was sunny and cool and dry.

John: The first thing I’d like to talk about is the Fighting Words program, which you cofounded. Dave Eggers, in his TED lecture on a similar, non-profit program, 826 ...