Cover: Clúdach

Even today, summer visitors to rural Ireland make note of the freshly painted,concrete shrines to the Virgin found outside churches and in small towns. Many of these were constructed in observance of the 1953–1954 Marian Year proclaimed by Pope Pius XII, which was extensively celebrated in Catholic Ireland. Eamon de Valéra's Fianna Fáil government marked the year by issuing the "Mother and Child" stamp in 1954 in two denominations, of which one appears on the cover of this issue of New Hibernia Review. The stamp presents an instance of political and cultural synchronicity entirely characteristic of 1950s Ireland, as it was issued after the passage in the Dáil of an amended "Mother and Child" health scheme designed to mollify Archbishop McQuaid's hierarchy and the Irish Medical Association. De Valéra's contemporary, the poet and satirist Austin Clarke (1896–1974) savagely noticed this and other ironies in his almost-sonnet "Mother and Child": "Before you damp it with your spit, / Respect our newest postage stamp." Note the half-rhyming puns on "spit" and "spite" and on "damp it" and "damn it."

Given the spirit of Celtic Tiger Ireland, the "back story" to the stamp itself and to Clarke's gleefully bitter poem bears repeating. In 1948, following the close of the Emergency, neutral Ireland turned out de Valéra's thirteen-year-old government and elected the nation's first Inter-Party government led by Fine Gael's John A. Costello who, prompted by Clann na Poblachta's Seán McBride, declared Ireland a republic. The energy and optimism of this postwar government found a voice also in the charismatic figure of Dr. Noel Browne (1915–1997), a physician and TD who had led the successful effort to eradicate tuberculosis in Ireland. In 1950, Dr. Browne brought forward a scheme for the state support of maternity and infant care based on a 1947 proposal that Fianna Fáil had put on the long finger. Browne's intense advocacy of what the Catholic hierarchy and the Irish Medical Association termed "socialized medicine" came to alienate him from Costello and McBride. Browne published the scheme in March, 1951, but, in the controversy that followed, lost the support of his colleagues and his own party and resigned. The first Inter-Party government collapsed in June, 1951, and in the following election Fianna Fáil came back into power.

In selecting this example of Irish philately, we are grateful for the kind assistance of James H. Marriman of St. Paul, an appraiser and specialist in Irish stamps and numismatics. This image appears here by kind permission of An Post ©.