Editors’ Notes

EDITORS’ NOTES as some readers of ÉIRE-IRELAND may already know, this final issue of the journal’s thirtieth volume (1995) closes my tenure as the editor of what has come to be regarded as the leading journal of Irish Studies published outside Ireland. After a search for a new team of editors, ÉIRE-IRELAND has been entrusted to the stewardship four editors: James S. Donnelly, Jr. (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Philip O’Leary (Boston College), Nancy Curtin (Fordham University), and Vera Kreilkamp (Pine Manor College). This is a talented, energetic, and knowledgeable editorial team, and long-time members of the Irish-American Cultural Institute should discern no flagging in the high standards of their journal. Even so, my passing on of ÉIRE-IRELAND into new hands after some twenty years of work— since 1973, to my surprise—does bring to an end the last remaining connection between the Irish American Cultural Institute and the University of St. Thomas, where it was founded some thirty-four years ago by Eoin McKiernan. Throughout my association with ÉIRE-IRELAND I have been guided by the high standards of stewardship of Irish learning and culture set by Eoin McKiernan, the founder of the institute. My editorship has labored to sustain those standards of stewardship, and sometimes in trying circumstances. Certainly the new editors of Éire-Ireland will express that stewardship in ways different from my own, and perhaps—though one hopes not—in challenging circumstances of their own. ❧ “transatlantic” proves to be an overused adjective in describing the increasingly prominent sensibility of the “New Irish” in North America, amongst whom we may count Eamonn Wall. Once an habitué of Manhattan ’s lower East Side and now teaching in Omaha, Nebraska, Wall keeps in touch not only with the literary migrants from Ireland to the United States, but also with such other “commuters” as the creator of the Sin-É Cafe and Larry Kirwin of the band Black ’47. In this memoir, Wall begins to parse the ambitions and affiliations of the New Irish on the margins of the metropolis and the borders of the reservation. EDITOR’S NOTES 3 irish immigration to America’s rust-belt cities at the turn of the past century spurred on the creation of Roman Catholic parochial school systems, and these shaped the social and intellectual aspirations of the American Irish. Here Ron Ebest anatomizes the education of the novelist James T. Farrell at, especially, St. Cyril College in Chicago (1919–23). Farrell himself characterized his studies as “MIS-education,” but later in his concluded that the Carmelites had instilled him with a sense of tradition, a belief in the orderliness of ideas, and with a conception of the importance of truth. ❧ the inward history of Ireland during the “Great Emergency” of World War II has lately taken on, in the novels of Tóibín and McCarthy, renewed literary , and historical prominence. Of course, as Robert Cole delineates here in the career of the English poet John Betjeman, the cultural life of Éire, and of Dublin in particular, was influenced by the efforts of the British Ministry of Information for which Betjeman worked in Dublin from 1941 to 1943. A prolific scholar and researcher, Prof. Cole is the the author of some five books, including Britain and the ‘War of Words’ in Neutral Europe, 1939–45: The Art of the Possible (1990). ❧ readers who follow contemporary Irish poetry in EIRE-IRELAND should note that both Poetry magazine (October, 1995) and TheSouthernReview (Summer , 1995) have recently published special issues representing such poets as John Montague, Eamon Grennan, the late Seán Dunne, Michael Davitt, or Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill—all poets published in “Dánta Úra” over the past six years. Eamonn Wall’s name is a new one. Hailing from Enniscorthy, Wall lately published Dyckman—200th Street with Salmon Poetry in 1994. ❧ in Thomas Rowland’s examination of Irish-American responses to the sinking of the Lusitania in April, 1915, the issue is the strained neutrality advocated by Woodrow Wilson’s administration. In the United States, nationalist Irish-American opinion expressed by Clan-na-Gael, for example , saw England’s difficulty as Ireland’s opportunity. Other Irish-American organizations...