Editors' Notes: Notai na nEagarthoiri

Though the ideals behind government policy and rhetoric of 1930s Ireland claimed to esteem traditional life, government policy in the years of the Economic War was often assaulted the old ways. The Public Dance Halls Act of 1935, for example, required that dancing occur only on licensed premises. Having consulted newly available government files, Dr. Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin shows here that the Act was never intended to destroy the communitarian traditions of the crossroads or country-house dance. Once enacted, the legislation that had been intended to stave off the "immoral" influence of jazz and other modern music was seized on by zealous Catholic clerics, and in short order, the intimate folk dance tradition withered before the regulated fare of the showband and the parish hall. A mainstay of the traditional music community in North America as both a performer on the concertina and lecturer, Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin's 1998 Pocket History of Traditional Irish Music is now in its third printing.

If, as the proverb goes, "the past is another country," then the past as experienced by those on the furthest reaches of society—the criminal and the insane—is surely even more distant. Yet some window on their world can be found in the archives of institutions like the Central Criminal Lunatic Asylum for Ireland at Dundrum, which opened in 1850. Dr. Pauline Prior's survey of the insanity defense in nineteenth-century Ireland finds that the Dundrum records show striking gender differences in the application of the insanity defense. For women, a plea of insanity was more readily believed if they had murdered a child, while women who had murdered men were likely to be treated as criminals. For men, insanity was more easily invoked if their victim had been female. Pauline Prior has published extensively on contemporary mental health policy in Ireland and the United Kingdom, and her articles on the history of Irish psychiatry have appeared in such journals as Éire-Ireland and History of Psychiatry.

The preoccupations of poet Michael Coady of Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, include the enigmas of human nature and of human destinies; so, too, do the themes of gratitude, and of the dignity of humble lives. In the selection of new poems presented here we encounter these humane themes in such poems as "Low Winter Sun," where Coady meditates on how an unkept graveyard nonetheless seems more dignified than a one that is well looked-after; in "Tender is the Rain," written at the grave of F. Scott Fitzgerald; and especially in "The Mysteries," where the poet reflects on two small-town women who, by the very dailiness of their lives, show an oddly noble gift for "dealing with the wondrous / imperfection of the world." Michael Coady is the author of four collections, including All Souls (1997) and One Another (2003). He received the Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry presented by the University of St. Thomas Center for Irish Studies in 2004.

Decades before The Godfather and its progeny, Hollywood had already created another ethnically informed tradition of gangster films, defined in the 1930s movies of Irish-American actor James Cagney. Here, Dr. Christopher Shannon considers two familiar Cagney vehicles, Public Enemy (1931) and Angels with Dirty Faces (1938). Superficially, these films display Irish America in their enduring images of the urban world of the immigrants and their children: a world of stock characters—politicians, cops, and saloon-keepers—as well as a parish-based Catholicism and a vibrant street life. At a deeper level, though, Shannon finds that the Cagney characters in these films also enact a foundational immigrant myth, that of "the gangster-as-urban-villager story, in which communal obligations trump individual glory." An often outspoken commentator on pluralism, ethnicity, and Catholic identity in American life, Christopher Shannon is the author of A World Made Safe for Differences: Cold War Intellectuals and the Politics of Identity (2001).

The streets of Belfast, of course, have been the site of some of the western world's most persistent violence, and the novelists of Ulster necessarily engage with this tragic fact. Prominent among contemporary writers who...