Nótaí na nEagarthóirí: Editors' Notes

Ever since Montaigne, it has been a favorite strategy of personal essayists to take a simple object and use it as the point de départ for a much larger consideration. We open this issue with just such an offering from Chris Arthur, "Sleepers"—a patchwork rumination that begins with Arthur recalling the old railroad ties that, when he was a child in Antrim, his father would use for starting fires. Arthur comes to realize that there was "a lot more tied up in our fire than just providing warmth"—for, "along with the basic practicalities of fire-making I was imbibing a set of values that had nothing to do with chopping wood and arranging paper, sticks, and coal together." With his characteristic open-endedness, Arthur's reflections unpack the full range of associations linked with the humble domestic chore of lighting the stove. Chris Arthur's many Irish essay collections are well introduced at http://www.chrisarthur.org/.

In her survey of women documentary filmmakers in Ireland, Dr. Ruth Barton notes that women—though underrepresented in the role of director in fiction films—are somewhat more in evidence among documentarians. However, as she shows in her examination of the complicated systems of funding and the production environment, it seems that women directors of nonfiction cinema are subtly steered toward chronicling, rather than challenging or interrogating, Irish society. Not that women-directed documentaries have been exempt from controversy: Neasa Ní Chianáin's 2008 film Fairytale of Kathmandu was quite literally headline news owing to its "exposé" of poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh. Ruth Barton has published extensively on cinema and television, in both Irish Studies and Film Studies journals, and contributed chapters to numerous volumes. She is the author of several books, including Rex Ingram: Visionary Director of the Silent Screen (2014) and Acting Irish in Hollywood: From Fitzgerald to Farrell (2006).

After Fianna Fáil took power in 1932, republicans and militants found themselves at odds with the "slightly constitutional" party that now controlled the government. Dr. Timothy M. O'Neil here considers the Boycott British Campaign, an early salvo in the Economic War with Britain, as a means of exploring Fianna Fáil's relationship to the IRA after the watershed election. Bass Ale from England was a particular target of the IRA; when, in August 1933, armed Volunteers smashed all the Bass bottles in Killarney's pubs and destroyed a shipment of the ale on a train in Dundalk, the government responded by jailing the IRA men as civil rather than political prisoners. O'Neil finds that the IRA's militant gestures may have had their appeal—but in the long run, the practical gains that Fianna Fáil could accomplish while in power had even more. Timothy O'Neil's research focuses on the links between socialism and nationalism in Ireland; he previously appeared in these pages in 2008, with his study of the land annuities controversy of the 1930s.

Last year, the Irish Times awarded its poetry prize to Doireann Ní Ghríofa for Clasp, her fourth collection and her first in English. With that reward, readers were again reminded of the extraordinary degree to which contemporary poetry in Ireland draws upon the living, real presence of Irish. Ní Ghríofa's poems are noted for their fearlessness of observation and expression, stemming in part from the humors of the poet's distinctive candor. It also comes from the shifting superposition—lens over lens—of Irish and English in her lines. This is not a matter of versification or grammar, or even of diction and local idiom, but of the everyday second sight afforded by the conjunction of two languages: a child sent to school becomes a ghost shirt tumbling in an electric dryer, or the twist of a radiator key becomes the run of a key in a family clock. Born in Galway and raised in rural Clare, Ní Ghríofa now lives and writes near Cork City.

The story of the Titanic stands as the twentieth century's definitive parable of technological hubris. Dr. Eleanor Speer Owicki reminds us that the story belongs...