Rarely Pure and Never Simple: The World of Irish Children's Literature

The world of Irish children’s literature is a strange, complex, and fascinating place. Those who enter it are immediately caught in a tangle of complexities, most of them deriving from questions of definition and origin. What, in fact, is Irish children’s literature and, should we wish to approach the phenomenon in chronological terms, where should we start? It may, at first, seem that these are questions to which there should be reasonably straightforward answers, but on closer examination they are seen to elude anything approaching easy or unanimous resolution. Part of the explanation for this is certainly that the history and politics of Ireland have been such that nothing prefixed by the adjective “Irish” allows for easy definition: this consideration applies to “Irish children’s literature” as much as to most other things. When the authoritative history of the subject comes to be written it is going to be a very lengthy and wide-ranging work.

When such a volume eventually appears, it will show an Irish tradition of children’s writing which stretches back some three hundred years. That tradition—and this is one of the reasons for the complications mentioned above—includes writing in both the Irish language and English. This article deals almost exclusively with the latter but it is important to remember that writing in the Irish language has long been a significant element of Irish children’s literature and has seen a remarkable development in recent years, during which it has become linked with wider political, educational, and ideological discussions about the place of the Irish language in today’s Ireland.

In the midst of the various complications of the subject there is, however, one clear fact about Irish children’s literature: namely, that the last twenty years have seen a notable increase in the quantity of writing and publishing in Ireland for the young, to the extent that there are currently some ten Irish publishers (including three publishing exclusively in Irish) issuing children’s books. But this fact brings with it yet another complication, for while most Irish children’s writers and illustrators publish with these native companies, a number publish in Britain, as many of the Irish “adult” writers choose to do. Their reasons, usually, are similar to those of their adult counterparts, namely that their work is likely to be more widely marketed and distributed and that the financial rewards are greater.

This may, however, be less true than it was in, say, 1985, when Pat Donlon was able to write that “[Irish] writers of international caliber . . . reach larger audiences by publishing under an English imprint” (13). Eleven years later, Emer O’Sullivan could quote publisher Michael O’Brien as saying that “we are now in a position to offer authors a world market” (196). The growing popularity of coproductions between Irish and foreign publishers has certainly given rise to the possibility of increased international exposure for Irish children’s books, a possibility enhanced by a tendency for foreign publishers to acquire the rights to a growing number of Irish titles. In return, Irish publishers now frequently acquire Irish rights to books published elsewhere, a policy which, while adding to the diversity of “Irish children’s literature,” does nothing to ease problems of definition and sometimes results in curious consequences of inclusion and omission. Thus, The Big Guide to Irish Children’s Books, edited by Valerie Coghlan and Celia Keenan, because of being locked into Irish children’s publishing, cannot include most of the picture book titles by Martin Waddell or any of the teenage fiction of his alter ego, Catherine Sefton; it can, however, include the American picture books of Rosemary Wells and the Australian teenage novels of Judith Clarke, simply because both have been acquired for the purposes of Irish rights by Irish publishers.

For anyone outside Ireland interested in Irish children’s literature this question of place of publication may not seem particularly important. In Ireland itself, however, it becomes a central element in discussing of the topic and at times threatens to relegate other elements, especially the literary...