Notai na nEagarthoiri: Editors' Notes

Customarily, as our patient readers expect, the notes at the head of each issue of New Hibernia Review focus on the heart of the journal—the authors, their arguments, their insights. This note is an exception. In our tenth anniversary year, I am gratified to announce that this Summer, 2006, issue of New Hibernia Review is the last under my editorship. James Rogers, who has served as managing editor since 1996, will take charge of these pages as the journal heads into its second decade secure in its reputation. Helping make these pages a welcome home for all sorts of scholarly and critical enquiry into the topics and issues proper to Irish Studies has been our shared goal and our shared education. The true reward of helping the work of others to see print—both paper-and-ink print and digital print—is that the work is an education in itself: an education unattainable in the classroom or library carrel. Indeed, my own decades of service here—and before that, to Éire-Ireland (1973–1996)—broadened my own knowledge of Ireland beyond the bournes of that land's eloquent and cranky poetic traditions. During the past three decades of my editorial practice, I have been privileged to watch Irish Studies grow beyond its American beginnings to encompass attentive audiences and inventive scholars from Japan to Hungary, not to say Ireland and Great Britain. I owe thanks: to our patrons and the University of St. Thomas for their willing and gracious support; to my successor for being eager to bear the burden; and, most of all, to our readers and contributors for helping me constantly renew my own understanding of Ireland, North and South.

Thomas Dillon Redshaw

The folklorist Ray Cashman opens this issue with an account of wake and funeral customs in rural County Tyrone, occasioned by the death of John Mongan of Ballymongan. Mongan's death touched Cashman personally, as this account makes clear; as an ethnographer, the event also opened a window for him on the rituals of mourning and commemoration in the rural community. Starting from the functionalist approach of classic anthropology, he also stays alert to dimensions of the wake and funeral that cannot be assessed in terms of pure utility. Cashman records the nuanced meanings of each element in the post-death ritual, noting that "the sociability of the wake invokes community in a way that the funeral does not." The author of articles in such journals as Cultural Analysis and the Journal of Folklore Research, Dr. Cashman has recently complete a book manuscript titled Characters and Community: Storytelling on the Irish Border.

As anyone who watched the flag-waving fans of this summer's World Cup games will attest, the link between sport and national identity is powerful indeed. In Dr. David Hassan's study of sports ideology in the Irish border, he finds that sport can simultaneously create a common ground to be shared by a divided community, and also serve as a forceful statement of separateness for individual teams and their followers; the Crossmaglen Rangers of the GAA provide a vivid example of the latter. Drawing on Alan Klein's work on baseball along the Texas-Mexico boundary, Hassan shows that sport on the Irish border variously displays ideologies of autonationalism, binationalism, and transnationalism. David Hassan has published in such journals as Sport in Society and The Journal of Sport and Social Issues; he lately wrote on boxer Barry McGuigan in Sport in History (2005).

In 2005, Kerry Hardie received the ninth Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry presented by the Center for Irish Studies, and was praised on that occasion for having "consecrated with words the edge where we all encounter feeling and exhaustion, loss and passion." We see this well in the ten new poems that Hardie offers us here—poems arising out of her own experience of chronic illness, and out her own grateful appreciation of nature and landscape, as in these lines from "In Bed Again...