LONDON — Irish Catholicism is hardly the first thing that comes to mind when considering the historic sweep of this great city of the world. But it holds a small corner of Soho.
I wanted to visit St. Patrick’s Catholic Church here, as I have in other cities. Now I have.
“St Patrick’s is the first Church in England, at least since the Reformation, dedicated to St Patrick,” according to this parish history. “It was also one of the first Catholic parish Churches established after the passing of the Catholic Relief Acts of 1778 and 1791, which brought freedom of teaching and worship.”
Catholic parish records held by the National Library of Ireland are finally available online. The Irish Times said:
These parish register records are considered the single most important source of information on Irish family history prior to the 1901 census. Dating from the 1740s to the 1880s, they cover 1,086 parishes throughout the island of Ireland, and consist primarily of baptismal and marriage records.
In a helpful blog post, Kay Caball at My Kerry Ancestors warns that because the records are not indexed researchers should have some idea of the parish, date and even month they are looking for. “You can’t just pop someone’s name in and hope that all will be revealed.”
It’s marching season in Northern Ireland, and this year there’s some extra attention on appearances of the Confederate battle flag, subject of much controversy in the American South.
Writing in National Catholic Reporter, Mary Ann McGivern notes the similarity of arguments between those who believe celebrating Protestant King William of Orange’s 1690 victory over Catholic King James II is a matter of heritage, and those who say it represents hate. She writes:
As far as I can see, most of the people who wield these symbols of supremacy and privilege don’t have the ugly history in the forefront of their minds. The flags and songs are an excuse for drinking and maybe for finding someone to beat up — in short, for exercising privilege today.
The U.S. has been focusing attention on the June murder of nine African-Americans inside their South Carolina church, and the alleged 21-year-old killer photographed with the battle flag on a website attributed to him and filled with racist rants. South Carolina political leaders are trying to remove the flag from the statehouse grounds. But Business Insider reported the “stars and bars” also flies in other nations around the world, for various reasons. In Northern Ireland, the dissident Red Hand Defenders have marched with the flag due to their links with Ulster-Scots who fought for the Confederacy.
Now, with marching season building to its 12 July climax, the Confederate flag has been erected outside the home of a black family in East Belfast. One local politician told the UK Independent: “The flying of this flag is closely intertwined with historical slavery and racist tension, as can be seen by its glorification during recent racially-motivated attacks in the US.”
And in Co. Antrim, the Belfast Telegraph reported Confederate and Nazi flags were flown along with the Union Jack and loyalist paramilitary flags near a Carrickfergus bonfire site. The BBC later reported the Nazi flags were removed.
Clerys, a landmark department store in Dublin that dates to 1853, was closed Friday after being sold to real estate and venture capital interests.
One hundred thirty store employees lost their jobs, as did another 330 employed by 50 concession holders who operated in the department store, according to The Irish Times.
The O’Connell Street store is located across from the General Post Office, epicenter of the 1916 Rising, when the wide boulevard was known as Sackville Street. At the time, the store was destroyed.
Clerys was placed in receivership in 1941, and again in 2012.
Through the decades the large clock that hangs over the front entrance of Clerys was a popular rendezvous point for Dubliners and visitors to the city. In that regard, it reminds me of the tradition of meeting under the Kaufman’s clock in my native Pittsburgh.
President Obama quoted Irish poet Patrick Kavanaugh in the eulogy he delivered for Beau Biden, son of Vice President Joe Biden, on 6 June. The president began:
“A man,” wrote an Irish poet, “is original when he speaks the truth that has always been known to all good men.” Beau Biden was an original. He was a good man. A man of character. A man who loved deeply, and was loved in return.
I got to know Joe’s mom, Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden, before she passed away. She was on stage with us when we were first elected. And I know she told Joe once that out of everything bad that happens to you, something good will come if you look hard enough. And I suppose she was channeling that same Irish poet with whom I began today, Patrick Kavanagh, when he wrote, “And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.”
Kavanagh was born in County Monaghan in 1904, 16 years before the political partition that carved Northern Ireland from Monaghan and five other counties in Ulster. He wrote poetry, fiction, autobiography and articles for Irish periodicals.
“Many critics and Irish literary figures have called him the nation’s best poet since William Butler Yeats, and one of his long poems, ‘The Great Hunger,’ is widely regarded as a work of major importance,” according to this biography from the Poetry Foundation. He died in 1967
The Dublin Metropolitan Police Detective Department began keeping reports about the movements and associations of pro-independence suspects in June 1915, nearly a year before the Easter Rising.
Now the Irish National Archives has digitized those reports, which are being uploaded to its website on a weekly basis through April 2016. INA says:
The reports detail intelligence gathered at a number of key city centre locations, including the shop of Thomas J Clarke at 75 Parnell Street, the Irish Volunteers Office at 2 Dawson Street, the Irish National Forester’s Hall at 41 Parnell Square, and the headquarters of the Gaelic League at 25 Parnell Square. … Major events which took place in 1915 and 1916 are recorded in the reports, including the funeral of the Fenian leader Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa (1 August 1915) and the Annual Convention of Irish Volunteers (31 October 1915).
The Irish Times noted, “Despite all the surveillance by the Dublin Metropolitan Police, the Rising, when it happened, was regarded as a massive failure of intelligence. As a result the long-serving chief secretary to Ireland Augustine Burrell resigned in the weeks after the Rising having been blamed for not foreseeing the rebellion.”
Access the records here. Warning, using the search function captures some words but not others. It’s best to read the files if you don’t want to miss anything. You might find the name of someone in your family’s past.
The Irish language remains an intrinsic part of Irish identity, former president Mary McAleese writes in a column for The Irish Times.
“The cúpla focal can go a long way to make an exile feel connected to both today’s and yesterday’s global Irish family.”
ORIGINAL POST:
Erosion of the Irish language “is now taking place at a faster rate than was predicted” by a 2007 study and “demands urgent intervention,” a government agency says in a follow up report.
The new report details how the Irish language has contracted within the Gaeltacht areas, primarily on Ireland’s western seaboard, where it remains the predominant means of written and spoken communication.
“The situation is so bad, the crisis is so pressing that a new strategy is needed and has to be implemented by those at the highest levels in the State,” report co-author Conchúr Ó Giollagáin told The Irish Times. “The 20-year strategy for the Irish language is not strong enough to address the situation in the Gaeltacht.”
Classic Modern Irish dates to the period 1200 to 1600, according to this history of the language. But Irish was diminished by the long English domination in administrative and legal affairs. “The status of Irish as a major language was lost.”
There have been language revivals, of course, including the founding of the Gaelic League in 1893. The League played a key role the nationalist movement leading to the creation of the Irish Free State. This story discusses the rocky relationship between the League and the state’s early governments in the 1920s and 1930s.
“However the biggest obstacle to the restoration of the language was arguably people’s apathy,” the story concludes. “Even in the Gaeltacht areas there was indifference to the language from native speakers who saw learning English as a route to prosperity. In some instances parents even requested that their children be taught in English.”
These and other factors, such as urbanization and immigration, set the stage for where the language finds itself nearly 100 years later.
John Dorney at The Irish Story blog has produced a three-part series about “the decade of the gun.” It explores the hardware of Ireland’s revolutionary period, now the subject of centennial reflections. Up to 5,000 people were killed in armed conflict during this stretch, which Dorney describes as “a number of discrete episodes with different combatants arrayed against each other.” He continues:
Partisan debate raged at the time about whether the ‘Trouble’ amounted to political violence or warfare. The point has been made that it was not so much the quantity or quality of weapons that caused deaths and injuries as the willingness to use them.
Less than a year remains until the next national election in Ireland, which must be called by 3 April 2016. It will be the first general election since 2011, when angry voters ousted the governing Fianna Fáil party from power following the bust of the Irish economy.
Lately, there’s been a wavelet of political analysis in Ireland and the U.S. about Fianna Fáil’s prospects for next spring. But before speculating about the future, a little about the past. Fianna Fáil was founded by Éamon de Valera in the split from Sinn Féin following Ireland’s bitter civil war. Fianna Fáil were the anti-Treaty crowd. The pro-Treaty side, represented by Michael Collins, evolved into Fine Gael, Ireland’s second largest party.
A recent opinion piece in the Irish Independent further explained:
Fianna Fáil was founded in 1926 and has been in government 61 of the 79 years since, 13 times as a minority government or in coalition. Throughout that period Ireland has moved from a poor and rural, deeply conservative Roman Catholic country to become urbanised, industrialised, hi-tech, one of the leading economies in Europe, and on the verge of voting for same-sex marriage. (We’ll see about that come 22 May.)
The Independent suggests Fianna Fáil get credit for what’s gone right as well as what’s gone wrong. It says some of the anger directed at the party is softening, “which should come as no surprise as the economy lifts and people return to their daily affairs with something more of a spring in their step and the promise of a few quid in their pocket. The great irony is that as the economy lifts under the stewardship of Fine Gael and Labour, on a plan drawn up by Fianna Fáil, so too will the fortunes of Fianna Fáil rise, just as the cause and effect of austerity has damned them all too.”
At Irish Central, John Spain takes the opposite view, writing “at the moment the party appears to be going nowhere, condemned to the political wilderness by a population still very angry at what Fianna Fáil did to the economy and the country. In spite of faint hopes of a revival due to widespread unhappiness at some of the things the government has been doing, the outlook for Fianna Fáil remains grim.”
Here’s more coverage:
At the Slugger O’Toole portal, founding editor Mike Fealty offers this analysis of Fianna Fáil.
Hugh Linehan at The Irish Times, joined by other political pundits, did a recent podcast on the party’s fate.
And below, a Late Late Show interview with Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin:
