The waiting ends 8 July. That’s when the National Library of Ireland says it will go live with free online access to some 400,000 microfilm images of Irish Catholic parish records from the 1740s to the 1880s.
The records release has been highly anticipated by genealogists and other history buffs since being announced late last year.
The New York Times has added to its coverage of the populist backlash against consumer water charges in Ireland. Under the headline “A New Irish Rebellion, This Time Against Water Fees,” the Times reports:
… some experts say that the protests are far from over, reflecting growing fatigue with austerity policies that have taken a toll on most families, even as the economy has recovered to the point that it is the fastest-growing in Europe. Many expect a widespread refusal to pay when the bills are sent out in April.
Some form of the word “protest” is used 11 times in the 1,200-word story. Despite the provocative headline, however, there is no mention of next year’s centennial of the 1916 Rising, or other Irish rebellions.
I was reminded of a Times editorial from April 1916, shortly after the Rising, which I found while researching my book about my immigrant grandfather. Remember, this is the generally anti-Irish, anti-Catholic, anti-Tammany Hall Times of the late 19th and early 20th century. While Tammany is gone, I’d argue the Times’ anti-Catholic bias remains.
Regardless, here’s what the newspaper said 99 years ago:
Ireland in a state of rebellion is Irish. Her history emerges from myths and legends of which the very theme was strife … a logical projection of her special feud with life. … Rebellion has been the chronic, almost to say the natural, condition of Ireland, being now and then only a little more acute than usual.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day. Here’s a round up of some of the best coverage and related material.
BONUS: While many drank the night away, Angie Drobnic Holan and I read to each other some of our favorite Irish poems, which can seen from the link on her name.
UPDATE:
The author followed up his story with a post about how Hillary Clinton joined Adams at the Irish American Hall of Fame event in New York on 16 March. He wonders if the presumed Democratic presidential nominee “felt any distaste at the prospect of sharing a table with Adams” and “whether you can bring enduring peace and security without some reckoning—by all parties in the conflict—with the crimes of the past.”
The post reads like a last ditch attempt to breath life into a piece that was DOA. For all the calculated timing to coincide with St. Patrick’s Day, it doesn’t appear this story will have much impact.
ORIGINAL POST:
I’ve just finished reading Patrick Radden Keefe’s 15,000-word piece in The New Yorker about Gerry Adams and the Jean McConville murder.
“Where the Bodies Are Buried” could be a good introductory piece for those who are unfamiliar with Adams and the Troubles. But if you’ve been following the story for decades, as I have, there’s nothing new here. It’s a big rehash of well-known events from 1970s Belfast to contemporary reporting of Adams’ Twitter habits and controversial comments at a Friends of Sinn Féin fundraiser in New York City last fall.
Chris Steele-Perkins photographed Divis Flats, a republican stronghold in Belfast, during the late 1970s. More images at The New Yorker.
Keefe’s story is generating a few headlines about Adams’ allegedly ordering McConville’s 1972 disappearance and murder, as well as a 1974 bombing campaign in London. The charges are primarily attributed to Dolours Price, a former IRA member who died in 2013. It’s all been previously reported and denied by Adams, who did not comment for this article.
The New Yorker‘s website also features a photo essay, “Life in Divis Flats,” by Magnum photographer Chris Steele-Perkins. It’s worth clicking through.
I want to get away from all the noise and nonsense that’s come to surround St. Patrick’s Day, the once reverent, if myth-filled, holy day turned raucous global celebration.
So here’s a reminder of a simpler St. Patrick’s Day, a 1953 letter from a sister in Kerry, Ireland to her brother in Pittsburgh, USA. It’s from a collection of letters I inherited from my aunt a few years ago. A few other letters from the 1950s also included sprigs of shamrock from the north Kerry countryside.
Keep in mind that 1953 was seven years before the election of John F. Kennedy as president (a decade before his return to Ireland and assassination later the same year), and nine years before Chicago began to dye its river green. While the first St. Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin dates to 1931, it was nothing like today’s massive multi-day festivals.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York has sparked outrage among some Irish republicans and their supporters for comparing the violent Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq to the late 20th century IRA in Northern Ireland.
“The IRA claimed to be Catholic,” Dolan said on CNN. “They were baptized. They had a Catholic identity. But what they were doing was a perversion of everything the church stood for.”
Cardinal Timothy Dolan in a 2013 “Today” show appearance. (Photo by: Peter Kramer/NBC/NBC NewsWire)
Dolan insisted that Islamic State extremists “do not represent genuine Islamic thought” but are “a particularly perverted form of Islam.”
IrishCentral published a roundup of harrumphs from republican sympathizers. Father Sean McManus, leader of the Irish National Caucus, which lobbies for the North in Congress, said Dolan’s remarks were “profoundly ignorant, totally irresponsible and lacking all credibility.”
As Religion News Service noted, “Some Catholic leaders [in Ireland, north and south] strongly denounced the IRA and sought to downplay the religious aspects of the violence, but the IRA also found support among many clergy and the faithful.”
So far no prominent Irish, Irish-American or Catholic leaders have come to Dolan’s defense. It will be interesting to see if this tempest in a teapot cools off before he leads the annual St. Patrick’s Day in New York later this month.
A new book explores the key role of Ireland’s national instrument, the harp.
Ireland’s Harp: The Shaping of Irish Identity c.1770 to 1880 by Mary Louise O’Donnell, herself a harpist, has been published by University College Dublin Press.
“The image of the harp – symbolic of the political and cultural landscape of Ireland for centuries – evokes strong sentiments in the collective Irish imagination,” the publisher says.
Here’s a review in The Irish Times. And here’s the author’s website.
Ireland has defeated England to remain unbeaten in the Six Nations rugby tournament. The New York Times reported:
Ireland took control of this year’s tournament Sunday, going 3-0 by beating England, also previously unbeaten, 19-9, in Dublin. In equaling their all-time record of 10 consecutive victories, the Irish were superbly controlled for the first two-thirds of the match.
How big is this win? A few days before the match The Irish Times opined:
Ireland against England has a resonance, a sense of history and occasion which surpasses all other Irish fixtures. Be it rugby or tiddlywinks, it’s the one which is the best to win and the worst to lose, although admittedly that is not a feeling unique to Irish supporters.
Next up for Ireland is Wales, in Cardiff, on 14 March. More information about the tournament at the Six Nations website.
“This year sees a worldwide series of creative and cultural events celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of William Butler Yeats,” Adrian Paterson begins an opinion piece in The Irish Times that serves as a good introduction to the sesquicentennial. He writes:
…Yeats was more than a poet. He was a cultural revolutionary who became a cultural entrepreneur. He began things, co-founding the Abbey Theatre, the Irish Literary Society and, with his talented family, the Cuala Press, producing designs and books from a single hand-press in Dublin. He was anything but a solitary dreamer: his collaborations with musicians, actors, dramatists, stage designers, folklorists, journalists, artists, dancers, printers, occultists, broadcasters and lovers are reflected in the vibrant range of celebratory events on offer.
There’s plenty to explore at Yeats 2015, official website for the celebration. And much more at the Yeats Society & Yeats International Summer School.
Here, from February 1915 (when he was 50) is Yeats’ “On being asked for a War Poem,” which was written less than a year into the conflict remembered today as World War I.
Here’s an 80-year-old travelogue of Ireland called “The Melody Isle.”
IrishCentral posted it the other day. It’s a 1934 James FitzPatrick travelogue.” The American producer, director, writer and narrator, was known from the early 1930s as “The Voice of the Globe.”
You might wince at some of the cliches, but there’s some good footage from the days of the Irish Free State, including the Lakes of Kilarney; Blarney Castle; digging, drying and loading turf on a donkey cart, the River Shannon hydroelectric plant; and Claddagh village near Galway.
Ireland is beautiful even in black and white. Enjoy!