Editors’ Notes

EDITORS’ NOTES of the Irish poets first nurtured by Liam Miller’s Dolmen Press in the late 1950s and early 1960s—Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Richard Murphy —James Liddy was the youngest. Liddy had won his place in the early Dolmen canon through his aYliation with Joyce and Kavanagh and, more importantly, through his sponsorship and editing of Arena. Short-lived like Nonplus and Dolmen’s own Miscellany, Arena was an essential venue for a new generation of Irish writers. The span of Liddy’s own poetry entails some nine collections published since 1964 and several generous and Bohemian aYliations over the decades, as suggested by his titles—Baudelaire’s Bar Flowers (1975) or Corca Bascinn (1977). In this issue of Éire-Ireland we have vintage Liddy in two parts. In the first, Liddy provides a memoir of Patrick Kavanagh, Liam Miller, and Anthony Kerrigan careering through the haunts of Dublin’s near southside in the 1960s. In the second, for Dánta Úra, Liddy oVers a suite of new poems. Amongst those titles nestle a very few we have selected from Liddy’s Collected Poems (1994), edited by Brian Arkins and generously published by Omaha’s Creighton University Press. ❧ commercially structured tourism has, since Edwardian times, become an important economic resource throughout Ireland. Providing both income and employment in the North as well as the Republic, tourism gradually has assumed a cultural force—a sensibility or mentalité—to be distinguished from the limits of traditional Irish hospitality largely through, as Spurgeon Thompson reveals in the case of W. B. Yeats, the deformation of literary discourse into the commercial, and, ultimately, with European Union investment , the metamorphosis of historically invested locales into heritage centers, if not literal theme parks. Readers of Éire-Ireland interested in other and further dimensions of Thompson’s new-fashioned critique of tourism in Ireland should seek out “Intellectual Tourism: Irish Studies in America” in the recent issue of the Irish Studies Review and the essay “Surveillance and the Production of Tourist Space in Dublin” forthcoming in Imaginary Boundaries (1996). EDITOR’S NOTES 3 everyyear,An Foras Riaracháin in Dublin publishes an Administration Yearbook describing the institutions and their chief services and personnel in the Republic and Northern Ireland. This annual Yearbook descends from The Saorstat Eireann/Irish Free State Official Handbook of 1932, which William Harrison anatomizes here so as to reveal in it the elements and signs of Irish postcoloniality. In the Handbook’s descriptive articles, for instance, is displayed a marked tendency to site Ireland in Europe—to mark the island’s connections with and contributions to Catholic Europe in particular— without attending to the Free State’s various and manifold British heritage. A former editor of The D. H. Lawrence Review, William Harrison is currently writing a study of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press. ❧ a landmark of Dublin’s near northside at the end of O’Connell Street is the Rotunda—more properly, the Dublin Hospital for Poor Lying-in Women. Founded in George’s Lane in 1745, the hospital moved to new Georgian premises in 1758, and for two-hundred-and-fifty years has served the child-bearing needs of largely Catholic poor and middle-class mothers. Here, Prof. Cormac Ó Gráda has searched the records both historical and statistical kept in various ways by the hospital so as to reveal not only changes in the medical technology of maternity care in Dublin, but also the moral, social, and environmental settling of life in central Dublin. Indeed, the Rotunda’s record of services clarify aspects of Ireland’s population history —and the patterns of name-giving in Dublin. A prolific contributor to journals, Prof. Ó Gráda is the author of, most recently, Ireland Before and After the Famine (1993) and Ireland: A New Economic History, 1780–1939 (1994). ❧ the title of Maria Edgeworth’s fiction most central to the current canon of Irish writing remains Castle Rackrent. Published at the time of the Act of Union, yet composed in years immediately preceding, Edgeworth’s generically various fiction has proven central to recent debates concerning the character of Ireland in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Here, Dr...