Lectures, Film, a Play:

Ireland Comes to CUA

 

By Warren Duffie

 

To Christina Mahony, Irish studies are central to Catholic University’s history and future. After all, many of the students are Irish-Americans, CUA is the only university in the nation that offers an interdisciplinary master’s degree in Irish studies, and in 1896 CUA was among the first American universities to establish an endowed chair for a professor of Celtic studies (renamed Irish studies in 1983).

 

This year’s brochure advertising the Irish Studies Speakers Series

 “We have a long tradition of Irish studies,” says Mahony, director of CUA’s Center for Irish Studies, originally founded by her husband, Professor Robert Mahony. “And Ireland’s connection to the Catholic Church makes CUA a logical place for the center.”

 

To celebrate CUA’s Irish connections, the Irish studies center is offering an assortment of seminars and lectures celebrating the history and culture of the Emerald Isle.

 

Lecture Series

The main attraction is the Center for Irish Studies’ 19th annual Irish Studies Speakers Series, in which academic and public figures (including a former Irish prime minister) discuss Irish history, literature and politics. This year’s lectures, which take place in the Life Cycle Institute, include:

 

  • “Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye — Irish Sovereignty and Alienation from Irish-American Agendas,” by Tom Hachey, executive director of Boston College’s Center for Irish Programs, who will discuss the shift of Ireland’s cultural allegiances from the United States to Europe. Nov. 20 at 7 p.m.

 

  • “The Literary Fenianism of A Portrait of the Artist,” by Coilin Owens, associate professor of English at George Mason University, who will offer an interpretation of James Joyce’s The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man as a Celtic romance. Fenianism pertains to literature that follows the ideals of the Fenians, a 19th-century secret society that promoted Irish independence from Great Britain.

 

  • “Irish/British Relations in Northern Ireland, 1969-2003,” by former Irish Prime Minister Garret Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald, currently chancellor of the National University of Ireland, negotiated the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement with then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. April 1 at 7 p.m. (On April 2 from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., Fitzgerald also will teach a graduate seminar titled “Ireland, the European Union and the United States — A View to the Future.”)

 

“We’re very excited about this year’s series,” Mahony says. “We have a loyal following in the area and, depending on the speaker, can draw up to 100 people to a lecture. The Center for Irish Studies has a growing reputation in Ireland as being a significant venue for Irish academics and artists when they are on American speaking tours, and is committed to working cooperatively with Irish institutions.”

 

At the Black Pig’s Dyke

In October, the Department of Drama will present At the Black Pig’s Dyke by Irish playwright Vincent Woods, a play that caused a furor in Ireland when it premiered there in 1993. The CUA performances will be held at Hartke Theatre on Oct. 16–18 and 23–25 at 7:30 p.m. and on Oct. 19 at 2 p.m.

 

Black Pig’s Dyke is set on the border dividing Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland and chronicles how three generations of a family are suddenly devastated by anger and hatred. They are unleashed by the arrival of a group of Irish mummers, masked actors — fusing ancient Irish, Scottish and English performance traditions — who roam the countryside at Christmas.

 

In the play, the mummers act out skits that mirror the conflict between nationalists (those who favor Northern Ireland’s separation from England) and unionists (those who favor the region staying a part of the United Kingdom). The play initially opened to controversy in Ireland because it was perceived to have strong unionist overtones. At a performance in Derry — site of 1972’s “Bloody Sunday” massacre in which 13 people died when the British army fired on demonstrators — protestors jumped on the theater’s stage to voice their displeasure.

 

Christina Mahony and Michael Brannan are working together on the upcoming Irish Film Series.

But, says Patrick Tuite, a CUA assistant professor of drama, the controversy diminished since the signing of the 1998 Good Friday Peace Accord, and the play is now seen as an important addition to Irish dramatic literature. Tuite is serving as a “dramaturge” for this play — the one who ensures that it is being presented in a theatrically and historically correct way.

 

“I had read the script many times,” he says. “I’ve always been fascinated by mummers because they show that there was a dramatic tradition in Ireland before the 17th century, when the British began establishing large plantations in Ireland. So when I first came to CUA last year, I thought it would be nice to bring the production here.”

 

The CUA production of Black Pig’s Dyke is significant for being one of only a handful of performances in the United States, says Tuite. It’s also being held in conjunction with the regional gathering of the American Conference for Irish Studies at the University of Maryland (where Tuite will present a paper about mummers). On Oct. 25, CUA will transport about 70 conference attendees to campus to see the play. Afterward, representatives from the Irish Embassy in Washington, D.C., will host a reception at Hartke Theatre to celebrate Black Pig’s Dyke and the ACIS event.

 

“We have such a powerful drama department, an important Irish studies center and a strong Irish Catholic presence here,” Tuite says. “It only makes sense that we would have a play of this magnitude here.”

 

Readings and Film

For the first time, the Center for Irish Studies will host a campus Irish Film Series (whose dates and location have yet to be determined) and sponsor an evening of literary readings in Ireland itself.

 

The film series — co-organized by Michael Brannan, M.A. 1998, a teaching assistant in English literature and composition — will feature film adaptations of James Joyce’s work (including John Huston’s rendering of the short story “The Dead”) and Neil Jordan’s “Michael Collins.” Discussions will follow each screening. The series is open to the CUA community and students of Washington-area universities.

 

The readings in Ireland will take place in February at the Irish Writer’s Centre, part of the Dublin Writer’s Museum in the Irish capital. The museum honors Ireland’s literary giants — the nation, with a population of approximately 4 million people, has produced four Nobel Prize winners in literature (William Butler Yeats, Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney). Mahony plans to invite several prominent Irish authors to share their work at the Irish Writer’s Centre. The public readings will coincide with CUA’s Dublin internship, through which master’s students in Irish Studies spend a semester serving in Ireland’s Parliament.

 

“The readings will expose the Center for Irish Studies to a broader overseas audience and, hopefully, help us find future speakers for our lecture series,” says Mahony, whose book, Contemporary Irish Literature: Transforming Tradition (St. Martin’s Press, 1999), won a 2000 American Library Association award.

 

Famine and Migration

CUA will also have a presence in Ireland next summer. For the second time, University Archivist and Associate Professor of History Timothy Meagher will take a group of elementary and secondary school teachers to that country to track the migrations of immigrants who left Ireland for the United States after the crippling Irish Potato Famine of 1845 to 1850.

 

In the mid-19th century, many poor Irish families were dependent on the potato crop, often their only food source. In 1845, the potato blight destroyed 40 percent of the crop, and in the following year, almost 100 percent of the crop. The successive crop failures led to “Black ’47,” a year of famine, emigration and disease. An estimated 1 million people who could not leave Ireland starved or died of disease. Many more — 1.5 million people during the 1840s and 1850s — fled to the United States. During that time, Ireland’s population fell from an estimated 8 million to 5 million.

 

Meagher’s five-week trip is funded through an $82,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which also publicized the excursion. (Meagher received 400 inquiries and 74 applications for his 2002 trip.)

 

Professor Meagher (center) and four teachers stand in front of the Famine Museum in Strokestown, County Roscommon, Ireland, during the 2002 trip.
 

The teachers last time came from California, North Carolina and New Mexico, as well as the Irish-American bastions of New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey, says Meagher, who specializes in the study of Irish immigration and ethnicity in America. “We had teachers who deal mostly with other large immigrant groups, like Mexican-Americans, and one who teaches at a Navajo reservation.” This year’s participants have yet to be chosen.

 

The professor — whose book, Inventing Irish America (University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), won the American Conference for Irish Studies’ James Donnelly Prize for the year’s best book about Irish and Irish-American history — will help 15 teachers translate famine and emigration statistics into poignant, living tales through the use of primary sources: census data, ship manifests, letters and news clippings. To access these, the group will travel to the National University of Ireland at Maynooth, 25 miles outside of Dublin, where the teachers can review the university’s archives and talk to experts. CUA’s Department of History has an informal relationship with the university, occasionally exchanging professors and students.

 

The group will also visit various localities that were hardest hit by the migration, where they can pore over town records, study newspaper accounts and visit cemeteries and old 19th-century homes now converted into museums.

 

After three weeks in Ireland, the travelers will spend two weeks in Washington, D.C., where they’ll visit the National Archives and the Smithsonian Institution; they may also tour the neighborhood of West Baltimore, where — not too far from Camden Yards — two tenements that housed Irish immigrants in the 1840s have been preserved. The trip will feature lectures from Irish and American professors on immigration, archaeology, and comparisons between the experiences of Irish-Americans and other ethnic groups such as Mexican-Americans.