Editors' Notes: Notai na nEagarthoiri

From George Moore's "Home Sickness" to John Ford's Quiet Man, the "returned Yank" has long been a familiar figure in the Irish national reckoning with emigration. This archetypal story has taken new forms in Celtic Tiger Ireland, as Maureen O'Connor depicts here in a memoir of her father's return to County Roscommon. His midcentury departure for America, his widening understanding of just how varied his adopted country was, and his success in the United States are all tropes replicated by other immigrants, with variations, literally millions of times. Then, in the 1990s, the family returned to Ireland—discovering there an uneasy mix of both continuities and disruptions, and a psychic restlessness that followed her father across the ocean. Maureen O'Connor is a Government of Ireland Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Human Settlement and Historical Change at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and she writes frequently on Wilde, Edna O'Brien, and Irish feminism.

Ireland's infrastructure of transport, accommodations, and attractions that greets more than six million visitors a year reflects decades of planning by the government and private sector alike, the history of which is only beginning to be written. Here, Dr. Eric Zuelow charts an extraordinary aspect of the Irish tourism industry's history—the long tradition of cross-border cooperation between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Despite constitutional and ideological antagonisms, indirect contacts between such groups as the Irish Tourist Association and the Ulster Tourism Development Association began just after Partition. Tourism played an especially prominent role in the historic Lemass-O'Neill meeting of 1965, for, as Zuelow shows, the industry had proven its capacity to trump political differences. Its model of cooperation has found a contemporary expression in the efforts of Tourism Brand Ireland, launched in 1996. Eric Zuelow's publications in such journals as Éire-Ireland are complemented by his stewardship of the on-line "Nationalism Project" at www.nationalismproject.org/.

One of the progenitors of Irish Studies in the United States in the 1960s, David Krause remains a prolific scholar of Irish literature. Among his recent titles may be counted, for instance, William Carleton the Novelist (2000). Of course, Krause's name is forever linked with the story of Irish drama and, particularly, with the achievement of Sean O'Casey. For decades past Krause has spent his summers on the coast of County Wexford, and from those summers comes this selection of short-limbed, casual sonnets memorializing the scenes and characters of an Ireland now obscured from view by European prosperity. Back in 1986, David Krause published Finnegan Unbound—sixty of Fenian nine-liners—with the Dolmen Press. That was followed too soon after by Prof. Krause's elegant memorial to the late Liam Miller in the Irish Literary Supplement.

In her highly honored Anglo-Irish Autobiography: Class, Gender, and the Forms of Narrative (2004), Elizabeth Grubgeld inventively parsed dozens of long-neglected texts in order to resurrect an entire tradition of Irish life-writing from dusty bookshelves. In this issue, Dr. Grubgeld turns her attentions to a contemporary development of this form: the web site created by the Leslie family of County Monaghan, which has, with the help of governmental and European Union funding, now turned the family home into a luxury hotel. Vigorous autobiographers in earlier generations—at least six Leslies published their memoirs between 1916 and 1983—the family now uses cyberspace to display its penchant for presenting itself as eccentric and self-mocking, as well as to show itself as inseparable from Irish history, guided by higher purposes, and devoted to place. Grubgeld calls our attention to the ways in which the content of Castleleslie.com raises questions about the ownership of memory in contemporary Ireland.

No political figure could be more synonymous with twentieth-century Ireland than Eamon de Valéra, who rose from being an obscure mathematics teacher to the leader of a national movement. As Dr. Troy Davis notes here, de Valéra's rise to power was all the more remarkable because it occurred largely without controversy. That honeymoon ended abruptly when "the Chief...