Editors' Notes: Notai na nEagarthoiri

In 1892, Douglas Hyde gave his seminal address on the "Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland," and over the next century the discussion of Ireland's linguistic identity was inevitably framed in terms of Gaeilge versus English. Today, asylum seekers and economic immigrants from Asia, Africa, and the former Eastern bloc—as well as from immigrants from within the European Union—have begun to restructure the Irish demographic, and in the process, have created a language environment that Hyde could never have envisioned. The Irish radio airwaves now carry broadcasts in Bosnian, Mandarin, and other languages; the needs of an ever-more-polyglot Ireland are reshaping the health, social service, and judicial systems—and these changes also spill into the familiar social laboratory of the classroom. As Dr. Cronin notes, a multilingual Ireland will necessarily invite a rethinking of the state's official bilingualism. The director of Dublin City University's Centre for Translation and Textual Studies, Michael Cronin's many books include The Languages of Ireland (2003).

Familiar to students of post-Revival Irish drama for his biographical study T. C. Murray: Dramatist of Rural Ireland (2003), Albert De Giacomo (along with Jonas Friddle, an actor, theatrical technician, and student of drama) calls our attention in this issue to still another playwright deserving of renewed attention. That person is Frank J. Hugh O'Donnell (1894-1976), whose scripts were mainstays of the Irish amateur repertoire during his lifetime, and whose 1919 play The Dawn Mist gained special notoriety for attracting political censorship. In the first of a two-part article, De Giacomo and Friddle examine O'Donnell's dramatic apprenticeship, a period in which his ambitions ran somewhat ahead of his talents. Even so, O'Donnell caught the attention of Yeats, Lennox Robinson, and other theatrical luminaries, and the memory of their encouragements may lie behind O'Donnell's practical efforts in later life to assist young Irish writers and artists.

Irish-American poetry can claim a long heritage in American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Daniel Tobin reveals in New Hibernia Review (Winter, 1999). Irish Americans have been newspaper poets and balladeers in the Victorian mode, and radicals and experimenters in the Modernist mode. Now the Ruth Little Professor of Poetry at Indiana University, Maura Stanton became a Yale Younger Poet in 1975 with her first collection Snow on Snow. Three collections followed: Tales of the Supernatural (1988), Cries of Swimmers (1991), and Life among the Trolls (1998). In this issue, she shows her range and subtlety in monologues that affectingly capture both nuances of individual voice and character and the regrets and elations of Irish Americans in the Midwest at midcentury. Plainly worded, simply lined out, these poems display a complex moral imagination. Maura Stanton's other titles are The Country ICome From (1988), a set of short stories, and a novel, Molly Companion (1977).

For a full century after his execution, the memory of the youthful patriot Robert Emmet wove its way into the imaginations of Irish America, where—in oratory and verse, in lithography and melodrama—a veritable Emmet industry kept the hero's memory alive. In this issue, Dr. Charles Fanning tracks the development of the Emmet cult in the United States, a story that Fanning tells with characteristic sensitivity to the overflowing range of Irish-American creativity. At times, this cult could be brazenly commercial, used to sell cigars and tourist trinkets; other times, particularly on stage, it played fast and loose with historical fact. Overall, though, the invocation of Emmet was positive: by providing both personal and community links to an heroic, thrilling figure, the patriot's memory proved deeply ennobling. The preeminent scholar of Irish-American literature, Charles Fanning is the author of The Irish Voice in America: Irish-American Fiction From the 1760s to the 1980s (1999).

A leading figure of the Irish Revival, George Russell (Æ) claimed the distinction of being not only a poet and a painter, a polymath and a spiritualist, but also a commentator on social and economic practicalities. As Leeann Lane reminds us here, for more than forty years he wrote tirelessly...