Nótaí na nEagarthóirí: Editors' Notes

One of the consequences of the definition and redefinition of the memoir in our "age of autobiography" has been a reconfiguring of how we think of memory itself: do we think of our past sequentially, or do we inductively, haltingly make sense of the jumble of experience? Poet and editor Pat Boran's work-in-progress concerning his childhood in Portlaoise, "The Invisible Prison"—from which we present five self-contained excerpts to open this issue—takes the latter tack. With a poet's eye for the apposite detail and the irreducible image, Boran evokes a young man's growing consciousness that comes not in thunderclaps, but in family stories and small moments of recognition. Formerly director of the Dublin Writers Festival, Pat Boran now shepherds the Dedalus Press. His New and Selected Poems appeared in the Salt Modern Poets series in 2005.

In numerous articles and in such books as The Force of Culture: Unionist Identities in Twentieth Century Ireland (1999) and the recent Belfast City Hall: One Hundred Years (2006), Dr. Gillian McIntosh's scholarship often probes the potency of symbolism, ritual, and identity in the history of the North. Here, she examines the public controversy and internal politicking that attended the fiftieth anniversary of the Stormont parliament in 1971. When planning began, Unionist triumphalism still reigned, and early organizers expected a royal visit as the centerpiece of their celebrations. As political and sectarian conflict worsened, the organizers came to see how inflammatory the jubilee might be; Stormont's anniversary was soon deliberately, and unconvincingly, soft-pedaled as the observances morphed into a touristic "Ulster '71" exhibition. Still, as McIntosh shows, the province's divisions were easily discerned in the event, and its supposed forward-looking tone was undercut by the introduction of internment.

Dolores Stewart imagines, thinks, and writes in the two tongues of Ireland, as amply attested to by In Out of the Rain (1999) and Presence of Mind (2005), her two collections from Dedalus Press, and 'Sé Sin le Rá (2001) and An Cosán Derg (2003), her other two collections from Coiscéim. The poems paired may share titles, but neither poem is the translation of the other. Each is its own independent demesne of line and locution. In both modes of language, Stewart invests the hallmarks of the European imagination—the immured science of Gallileo's daughter, Dvoˇrák's operatic riff on the silkie legend, Italo Calvino's modern fables—with personal and contemporary pertinence. Most tellingly for her Irish readers and for us, Stewart carries from Old English into modern Irish and English the intensities of "The Dream of the Rood," a touchstone of European Christianity.

The unexpected 1996 bestseller Are You Somebody? by the Dublin journalist Nuala O'Faolain was, as Dr. Jane Elizabeth Dougherty notes, all the more surprising for having been launched into a near-vacuum. Whereas Frank McCourt's blockbuster of the same year stepped into long tradition of Irish literary boyhoods, few renderings of the Irish girlhood have ever been published; historically, she notes, "the Irish literary girlhood is unindividuated and the Irish girlhood presented as largely inaccessible." Surveying memoirs as well as fictionalized Irish girlhoods, Dougherty discerns a perception that girlhood is unconnected to adulthood; a concern for authenticity that troubles women more than men; and a pervasive failure of individuation. She finds also that Irish women more frequently write of their parents than of themselves, and of their schooldays rather than their families. Dougherty is currently researching the literature of the Anglo-Irish Union; her articles have appeared in such journals as Victorian Literature and Culture and the Irish Literary Supplement.

One could get the impression from contemporary journalism, memoir, films like The Magdelene Sisters, and sometimes, from historiography, that Free State Ireland operated under a sort of geis that forbade any discussion of sexuality. An often-cited incident is the suppression of the 1931 Carrigan Committee's report to the Irish minister of justice on "sexual immorality," particularly the abuse of children. Here, Dr. Moira Maguire recounts the circumstances surrounding the committees' inquiry, and finds that the courts, government officials, and individual...