Walking the Land of Irish Studies

Using the old rural Irish custom of walking the land, this essay locates the Irish presence in the old and new world and surveys the global territory of Irish studies. It considers shared themes of language and cultural, responses to colonialism and history and national identity, and it charts the development of Irish Studies from Ireland to North and South America, to the continent, to Africa, to Asia and the Pacific. Perhaps the most astonishing development is the new page in Irish Studies, the New Irish of the twenty-first century. In Ireland up until the 1930s, rural marriages among farming families were usually arranged by the parents, generally the fathers, sometimes with the help of an intermediary known as the matchmaker. The match involved a dowry on the part of the bride that was commensurate with the value of the land and stock of the groom. While the bride’s family often knew almost to the penny the groom’s family’s value, a ritual of the matchmaking was a formal visit to the groom’s family’s farm to see for themselves the amount of land, its quality and the stock. The walk was a demonstration of good faith that the land was as it had been represented. There was also the expectation of an appropriate amount of hospitality toward the intended bride’s party: her family and friend. The custom was known as “walking the land,” and I use it today in the sense of walking the territories of Irish Studies with an eye to new partnerships and collaborations. First, why Irish Studies? Why Irish Studies now? Why this Irish Studies initiative here in Brazil? Interest in Irish Studies has developed for a number of reasons. First, there is the Irish presence abroad. As early as the sixth century, Irish monks established their foundations across Europe; seventeenth century exiles distinguished themselves in the continental armies of Spain, France and even Russia; eighteenth and nineteenth century Irish emigrated to the Americas while others sailed to Australia in the holds of convict ships. In the twentieth century, Irish missionaries and lay workers have served as educators and health care providers particularly in the southern hemisphere where they encountered liberation theology. In his book Ireland and Latin America: Links and Lessons (2002), Peadar Kirby notes that many missionaries have returned to Ireland having absorbed the lessons of Liberation Theology; the Irish feminist theologian Mary Condron returned from Abei 09.pmd 15/9/2011, 10:26 171 172 Harvard announcing that liberation theology had “turned her around” and provided her with a spirituality that has reached women who have fallen away from the tradition of Irish Catholic Church to work among the dispossessed. While its influence on the Irish is often identified as coming from these Irish missionaries, in fact it was the great nineteenth-century parliamentarian Daniel O’Connell who created an awareness of the matter of justice for the dispossessed that led to the Irish taking to heart the cause of justice for the disenfranchised. While he is remembered most for Catholic Emancipation, the right of Catholics and indeed members of all religious groups to sit in the British parliament, O’Connell opposed slavery as vehemently. He had the reputation for never shaking the hand of a slave-owner. Kirby has also argued in his Poverty Amid Plenty: World and Irish Development Reconsidered (1977), that Ireland’s economic boom at the time flowed equitably through the society. Unfortunately, that is not so. There is a wide gap between rich and poor with the result that many young Irish who were/are not part of the Celtic Tiger economy have joined the tens of thousands of undocumented Irish in the United States. Irish clergy in South America have lived their commitment to human rights, and in some cases have died for it. During Argentina’s :”Dirty War” (1976-1983), that left as many as 30,000 dead or “disappeared,” three Irish/ Irish-Argentinian Palatine priests and a seminarian were murdered by the government on July 4, 1976 on the altar at their Church in the Belgrano section of Buenos Aires.(They are buried in the Palatine plot in the San Patricio parish cemetery outside of the town of Mercedes, the “Irish capital of Argentina.”) The city’s oldest Irish Catholic parish (1894) is the Irish Passionists’ Holy Cross, a church built with the wages of Irish servant girls. It offered meeting space and support to the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the mothers of those who disappeared and who gather with their supporters in the plaza across from the Casa Rosada, wearing white scarves and carrying photographs of family members to confront the government with the missing. In retaliation for their outreach, French nuns in the parish were kidnapped and they too disappeared. Their faces are painted on a mural on the wall across from Holy Cross and a bronze marker placed at the door of the church in 1997 formally honors all the victims of the terrorism of the 1970s. So the Irish presence has its place in the history of Argentine human rights. Ireland and Brazil share the history of colonized peoples and the failed rebellions to assert their own sovereignty. W.B. Yeats’s play “Cathleen ní Houlihan” rescued Ireland’s failed Rebellion (rebellions ) of 1798 from oblivion and placed it in the context of national myths of restoration. So far no one has considered the similarities between the Irish ’98 Rebellion and the April 1789 rebellion of the Inconfidência in Minas Gerais: their mutual silences and betrayals, but there are some striking similarities. In her Introduction to Romanceiro da Inconfidência, Cecilia Meireles describes going to Ouro Preto for Holy Week and feeling the presence of the Inconfidência merging with the figures in the religious procession. Surprised at first not to find a history of Abei 09.pmd 15/9/2011, 10:26 172 173 1789 by some eighteenth century writer, she later realized the reason: the trauma of the episode, the punishments and reprisals and the fact that the bloody conflict which transformed the world were in large part framed by secret institutions and invisible archives (Meireles 19). She expresses her sense of the silence in the last stanza of her introductory poem “Fala Inicial”: O silenciosas vertentes Por onde se precipitam Inexplicáveis torrentes Por eternal escuridão.(Meireles 37) O overflowing silences Hurling down In inexplicable torrents To eternal blackness Likewise, in Irish tradition, John Kells Ingram’s “The Memory of the Dead” interrogates the Irish Rebellion of 1798: Who fears to speak of Ninety-Eight? Who blushes at the name? When cowards mock the patriot’s fate. Who hangs his head for shame? He is a knave, or half a slave, Who slights his country thus; But a true man, like you, man Will fill your glass with us. The last stanza expresses the consolidation of the myth of the restoration of the rightful kingdom: Then here’s their memory – may it be For us a guiding light To cheer our strife for liberty, And teach us to unite – Through good and ill, be Ireland’s still, Though sad as theirs your fate, And true men, be you men, Like those of Ninety-Eight A central episode in the narrative of failed rebellions of colonial peoples is the betrayal, often by an informer from among the people. Meireles accused the betrayer of the Inconfidência with the words: Abei 09.pmd 15/9/2011, 10:26 173 174 Melhor negócio que Judas Fazes tu, Joaquim Silvério: Que ele traiu Jesus Christo Tu trais um simples Alferes (Meireles 134) There is a similar strand of informers in the 1798 tradition; their ghosts stalk the Cyclops chapter of Ulysses where Bloom fuses personal and national betrayal: Boylan betrays Bloom as Mulligan betrays Stephen and Castle spies betray the men of ’98 and Robert Emmet. In the earlier Siren chapter, Bloom broods about Boylan as he listens to Ben Dollard sing “The Croppy Boy,” the ballad that describes the betrayal of a ’98 rebel. In some versions of the song the informer betrays his family and his country simultaneously: As I was going up Wexford Street My own first cousin I chanced to meet My own first cousin did me betray And for one bare guinea swore my life away The version of “The Croppy Boy” that Joyce used in Ulysses , the version contributed by James McBurney of Belfast under the nom de plume Carol Malone to The Nation in 1845, describes a betrayal that Joyce would have found irresistible: the betrayal of a young rebel by a sham priest who hears the boy’s confession before the youth goes to Wexford to replace his father and brother, both of whom had died in the rebellion. When the boy finishes his confession, the priest reveals that he is in fact a yeoman captain and the boy is hanged as a rebel. 1 Post-Joycean Irish literature continues to explore the troubling theme of the informer. Liam O’Flaherty’s novel The Informer (1925), set in Dublin during the twenties, is probably better known as the film (1935) directed by John Ford staring Victor McLaughlin as Gypo Nolan who betrays Frankie McPhillip. (McLaughlin won an Academy Award for the role. Interested enough in O’Flaherty to write a biographical note about him (wrong in some details ), Borges reviewed the film criticizing an opening scene that “did not ring true” and Gypo’s excessive motivations for his action (Borges 147-8). Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (1996) unravels yet an autobiographical puzzle of family and community betrayals in Catholic Derry in the 1930s. What the young narrator discovers is that his maternal grandfather was responsible for his father’s brother’s murder. The informer who set up the murder married his mother’s sister and the two of them emigrated to Chicago. Burdened with this knowledge, the narrator chooses not to reveal what he knows to his parents though his decision comes at the price of emotional separation from both parents. Retrieving the past from the silence of history offers historians and writers the chance to transform events into 

In Ireland up until the 1930s, rural marriages among farming families were usually arranged by the parents, generally the fathers, sometimes with the help of an intermediary known as the matchmaker. The match involved a dowry on the part of the bride that was commensurate with the value of the land and stock of the groom. While the bride's family often knew almost to the penny the groom's family's value, a ritual of the matchmaking was a formal visit to the groom's family's farm to see for themselves the amount of land, its quality and the stock. The walk was a demonstration of good faith that the land was as it had been represented. There was also the expectation of an appropriate amount of hospitality toward the intended bride's party: her family and friend. The custom was known as "walking the land," and I use it today in the sense of walking the territories of Irish Studies with an eye to new partnerships and collaborations.
First, why Irish Studies? Why Irish Studies now? Why this Irish Studies initiative here in Brazil? Interest in Irish Studies has developed for a number of reasons. First, there is the Irish presence abroad. As early as the sixth century, Irish monks established their foundations across Europe; seventeenth century exiles distinguished themselves in the continental armies of Spain, France and even Russia; eighteenth and nineteenth century Irish emigrated to the Americas while others sailed to Australia in the holds of convict ships. In the twentieth century, Irish missionaries and lay workers have served as educators and health care providers particularly in the southern hemisphere where they encountered liberation theology.
In his book Ireland and Latin America: Links and Lessons (2002), Peadar Kirby notes that many missionaries have returned to Ireland having absorbed the lessons of Liberation Theology; the Irish feminist theologian Mary Condron returned from Harvard announcing that liberation theology had "turned her around" and provided her with a spirituality that has reached women who have fallen away from the tradition of Irish Catholic Church to work among the dispossessed. While its influence on the Irish is often identified as coming from these Irish missionaries, in fact it was the great nineteenth-century parliamentarian Daniel O'Connell who created an awareness of the matter of justice for the dispossessed that led to the Irish taking to heart the cause of justice for the disenfranchised. While he is remembered most for Catholic Emancipation, the right of Catholics and indeed members of all religious groups to sit in the British parliament, O'Connell opposed slavery as vehemently. He had the reputation for never shaking the hand of a slave-owner.
Kirby has also argued in his Poverty Amid Plenty: World and Irish Development Reconsidered (1977), that Ireland's economic boom at the time flowed equitably through the society. Unfortunately, that is not so. There is a wide gap between rich and poor with the result that many young Irish who were/are not part of the Celtic Tiger economy have joined the tens of thousands of undocumented Irish in the United States.
Irish clergy in South America have lived their commitment to human rights, and in some cases have died for it. During Argentina's :"Dirty War" (1976)(1977)(1978)(1979)(1980)(1981)(1982)(1983), that left as many as 30,000 dead or "disappeared," three Irish/ Irish-Argentinian Palatine priests and a seminarian were murdered by the government on July 4, 1976 on the altar at their Church in the Belgrano section of Buenos Aires.(They are buried in the Palatine plot in the San Patricio parish cemetery outside of the town of Mercedes, the "Irish capital of Argentina.") The city's oldest Irish Catholic parish (1894) is the Irish Passionists' Holy Cross, a church built with the wages of Irish servant girls. It offered meeting space and support to the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the mothers of those who disappeared and who gather with their supporters in the plaza across from the Casa Rosada, wearing white scarves and carrying photographs of family members to confront the government with the missing. In retaliation for their outreach, French nuns in the parish were kidnapped and they too disappeared. Their faces are painted on a mural on the wall across from Holy Cross and a bronze marker placed at the door of the church in 1997 formally honors all the victims of the terrorism of the 1970s. So the Irish presence has its place in the history of Argentine human rights.
Ireland and Brazil share the history of colonized peoples and the failed rebellions to assert their own sovereignty. W.B. Yeats's play "Cathleen ní Houlihan" rescued Ireland's failed Rebellion (rebellions ) of 1798 from oblivion and placed it in the context of national myths of restoration. So far no one has considered the similarities between the Irish '98 Rebellion and the April 1789 rebellion of the Inconfidência in Minas Gerais: their mutual silences and betrayals, but there are some striking similarities.
In her Introduction to Romanceiro da Inconfidência, Cecilia Meireles describes going to Ouro Preto for Holy Week and feeling the presence of the Inconfidência merging with the figures in the religious procession. Surprised at first not to find a history of 173 1789 by some eighteenth century writer, she later realized the reason: the trauma of the episode, the punishments and reprisals and the fact that the bloody conflict which transformed the world were in large part framed by secret institutions and invisible archives (Meireles 19 The last stanza expresses the consolidation of the myth of the restoration of the rightful kingdom: Then here's their memory -may it be For us a guiding light To cheer our strife for liberty, And teach us to unite -Through good and ill, be Ireland's still, Though sad as theirs your fate, And true men, be you men, Like those of Ninety-Eight A central episode in the narrative of failed rebellions of colonial peoples is the betrayal, often by an informer from among the people. Meireles accused the betrayer of the Inconfidência with the words: Melhor negócio que Judas Fazes tu, Joaquim Silvério: Que ele traiu Jesus Christo Tu trais um simples Alferes (Meireles 134) There is a similar strand of informers in the 1798 tradition; their ghosts stalk the Cyclops chapter of Ulysses where Bloom fuses personal and national betrayal: Boylan betrays Bloom as Mulligan betrays Stephen and Castle spies betray the men of '98 and Robert Emmet. In the earlier Siren chapter, Bloom broods about Boylan as he listens to Ben Dollard sing "The Croppy Boy," the ballad that describes the betrayal of a '98 rebel. In some versions of the song the informer betrays his family and his country simultaneously: As I was going up Wexford Street My own first cousin I chanced to meet My own first cousin did me betray And for one bare guinea swore my life away The version of "The Croppy Boy" that Joyce used in Ulysses , the version contributed by James McBurney of Belfast under the nom de plume Carol Malone to The Nation in 1845, describes a betrayal that Joyce would have found irresistible: the betrayal of a young rebel by a sham priest who hears the boy's confession before the youth goes to Wexford to replace his father and brother, both of whom had died in the rebellion. When the boy finishes his confession, the priest reveals that he is in fact a yeoman captain and the boy is hanged as a rebel. 1 Post-Joycean Irish literature continues to explore the troubling theme of the informer. Liam O'Flaherty's novel The Informer (1925), set in Dublin during the twenties, is probably better known as the film (1935) directed by John Ford staring Victor McLaughlin as Gypo Nolan who betrays Frankie McPhillip. (McLaughlin won an Academy Award for the role. Interested enough in O'Flaherty to write a biographical note about him (wrong in some details ), Borges reviewed the film criticizing an opening scene that "did not ring true" and Gypo's excessive motivations for his action .
Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark (1996) unravels yet an autobiographical puzzle of family and community betrayals in Catholic Derry in the 1930s. What the young narrator discovers is that his maternal grandfather was responsible for his father's brother's murder. The informer who set up the murder married his mother's sister and the two of them emigrated to Chicago. Burdened with this knowledge, the narrator chooses not to reveal what he knows to his parents though his decision comes at the price of emotional separation from both parents.
Retrieving the past from the silence of history offers historians and writers the chance to transform events into a new media. Meireles constructed her dramatic poem of the Inconfidência rising in a way that balanced recorded history with the emotional force of her poet's voice. In reinterpreting another failed Irish Rising, Robert Emmet's 1803 Rebellion, into the medium of film, director Pat Murphy negotiated the silences not only of the event itself but of the role of Emmet's servant Anne Devlin who chose silence and imprisonment rather than betray Emmet. Emmet himself chose a sort of silence. In his Speech from the Dock, a speech memorized by generations of Irish school Children, Emmet concluded, "When my country takes its place among the nations of the world, then and only then will my epitaph be written". The Irish film critic Luke Gibbons (156) has described the way the Irish cinema has addressed certain public or institutional silences.
Colonized peoples often have issues with languages when indigenous languages are suppressed by colonizers. The Young Irelander Thomas Davis (1814-1845) wrote in his essay "Our National Language" (1843), "To lose your native tongue, and learn that of an alien, is the worst badge of conquest -it is the chain on the soul." John Montague's poem "A Grafted Tongue," a poem about the imposition of English on the Irish-speaking countryside recalls the poet's own humiliations as a stuttering child. In its comic aspect in Flann O'Brien's An Béal Bocht, Irish-speakers dress up a dozen piglets in grey-woolen clothing who squeal and grunt when the language inspector comes to see how many English-speaking children reside in the house: "Twalf, sor", says the grandfather. The Irish language as an agent of subversions features in the widely-told legend of how Daniel O'Connell missed being poisoned when an Irish servant girl warns him about the tea he is about to drink.
Joyce had other issues with the language. In the firelighting scene in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Stephen Dedalus's uneasiness with the Irish language is tied to his association of Irish with provincialism; he rejected the location of the national literature in a cultural heartland untouched by urban progress, sophistication and economic prosperity, but when he speaks with the English Jesuit, Stephen realizes that while they both speak English, they speak different Englishes.
The little word seemed to have turned a rapier point of his sensitiveness against this courteous and vigilant foe. He felt with a smart of dejection that the man to whom he was speaking was a countryman of Ben Jonson. He thought: The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. (Joyce 189) The parallels mentioned above could generate research on different historical aspects. The issue of the language, for example, may become an important target in comparative studies. Seamus Heaney revisited the two language matter in "Traditions," a poem in his 1972 collection Wintering Out. He too speaks of the difference in English as it is spoken by natives and by settlers in Ireland, but Heaney's sense of community is broad enough to be comfortable with the two traditions.
Joyce exemplified the European aspect of Irish identity. International in his vision and impact, but always intellectually rooted in his native city of Dublin, Joyce could be said to represent the spirit of modern Ireland, confidently Irish, comfortably European, fearlessly global in outlook. "He is a metaphor for the globalization of Irish Studies". Colin McCabe experienced Brazil's European sensibility in a Joycean context when he visited Sao Paulo in January, 1982: It was in Brazil that I felt that vitality of spirit and the instinctive recognition of the human which European society had all but buried by 1914. Ulysses is nothing less than the effort by a European, who could identify with European culture only in the Dark Ages, to unwrite that equation between knowledge and mastery, an equation written in the symbols of masculine dominance and economic inequality. And that unwriting is never finished, the keys are given but every reader has to remake them haunt us.  Jorge Luis Borges, who claimed to have been the first Spanish-speaker to read Ulysses, turned to John Keats's "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" for the metaphor of the ancient explorers who described new lands to their nomadic amazement. 2 Borges recognized the linguistic virtuosity in the book: In James Joyce were are given a twofold work. We have those two vast andwhy not say it? -unreadable novels Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. But that is only half of his work….the fact is that he took on the almost infinite English language. That language -which is statistically larger than all the others and offers so many possibilities for the writer, particularly in its concrete verbswas not enough for him. He knew all the languages and he wrote in a language invented by himself, difficult to understand, but marked by a strange music. Joyce brought a new music to English. 3 Some later twentieth-century writers, who are currently not studied as much The study of the Irish language has been a major beneficiary of the technological revolution. Pedagogy has improved with interactive on-line instruction, on line resources and on-line opportunities to communicate with other learners have turned the international Irish language community into Thomas Friedman's "flat earth" environment . The 1996 inauguration of an Irish language channel on Radio Telefís Éireann ,the Irish national television service, reaches some 800,000 viewers daily who watch it not only for its soap opera Ros na Rún, but also for its features that have won international awards. The language achieved another landmark when it was accorded the status of an official European Union language in 2005.
There is institutional outreach to the community provided by some of the larger Irish Studies programs notably Boston College, Glucksman House at NYU, the Irish universities and here in Sao Paulo;. Some institutional Irish Studies program partner with Irish cultural and historical societies to provide outreach to members of the community. Some Irish cultural societies like the American Irish Historical Society (1896) and Irish American Cultural Institute offer publications and programs to students and faculty in local Irish Studies programs. Partnerships with the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs' Cultural Relations Committee.
Given the positive conditions for the development of Irish Studies, how did academic Irish Studies organizations develop? Let's start with the oldest of them, the American Conference for Irish Studies. The idea for Irish studies was actually articulated by President Theodore Roosevelt in June 1905 when he addressed the men of Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts. A friend of Lady Gregory's who read her Cuchulain of Muirthemne with enthusiasm, he spoke of his hopes that Irish literature would be studied at American colleges and universities prophesizing that there would be a growing "…awakening to the wealth of beauty contained in the Celtic sagas, and I wish to see American institutions take the lead in that awakening" Irish Studies in the United States." .
The beginning of an organized effort to found an association for Irish Studies would wait another half century till September, 1957, when Professor R. Dudley Edwards, co-editor with T.W. Moody of Irish Historical Studies, suggested to Lawrence J. McCaffrey, an American historian on leave in Dublin to study the Irish liberator Daniel O'Connell, that he organize a North American version of the Irish Historical Society. McCaffrey followed up the suggestion by contacting other historians with Irish research interests (December,1958). They worked out their plans for an organization at the meeting of the American Historical Society in 1959; however, instead of the North American Irish Historical Society envisaged by Edwards, the American broadened their brief to include other disciplines so that it became the American Committee for Irish Studies with a Prospectus that read "The American Committee for Irish Studies has been formed to stimulate and encourage significant research and writing in Irish studies by establishing means of communication between scholars interested in Irish folklore, history, language and literature. We hope to achieve our objectives through annual conferences, information bulletins and, if possible, a journal." McCaffrey describes the decision to become an inter-disciplinary organization as both idealistic and pragmatic. At the end of the 1950s (and still today) more Irish literary scholars than Irish historians were teaching Irish subjects and publishing. ACIS held its first annual conference at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana in 1963; its growth led to the 1976 decision to establish regional branches that hold short fall gatherings, gatherings that encourage graduate students and young scholars to present their work.
Over the years ACIS sponsored five different publications: an early reprint series of classics in Irish Studies long out of print and ground-breaking new work like John V. Kelleher's study of James Joyce's "The Dead" and the Old Irish saga "The Destruction of De Daga's Hostel." The quarterly ACIS Newletter was supplemented in 1977 when O'Casey scholar Robert G. Lowery took a leaf from the Times Literary Supplement and founded an Irish counterpart called The Irish Literary Supplement which is published twice-yearly. While officially affiliated with the Irish Studies program at Boston College, the ILS has been associated with ACIS from its beginning and members have a subscription to the ILS as part of their ACIS dues. In addition to the reviews, the ILS includes news, features, bibliographies and research report. (Its interview series has been reprinted separately.) (1979,1982,1987,1994) is probably best-known. Coming as it did, fairly early in the history of Irish Studies, the purpose of the Guide was to identify Irish Studies programs and courses taught in American colleges and universities for the purposes of information and of sharing resources. In its last print appearance in 1994: 454 colleges and universities or about 10% of America's some 4500 post-secondary institutions offered some kind of opportunity to study about Ireland. Literature topped every list with a number of courses devoted to the work of Joyce and Yeats. Over the years, we saw a growth in opportunities to study in Ireland and to study the Irish language as people became aware that it was essential to any full program of Irish Studies. The other development was an interest in Irish-American studies largely as the result of the pioneering studies of Hasia Dinar, Charles Fanning, Lawrence J. McCaffrey, Kirby Miller, Janet Nolan and the late Ambassador to Ireland William V. Shannon.

While I have been the long-serving features editor of the ILS , my work on the ACIS A Guide to Irish Studies in the United States
Given the ACIS welcome to everyone interested in Irish Studies, elementary and secondary school students became active members and brought Irish Studies to their own students. In 1997, leaders of the New York-based American Irish Teachers Association proposed that the Great Irish Famine be taught in the State's Human Rights curriculum and they went on to be instrumental in the passage of the NY State Education Bill that resulted in the development of that Curriculum, a curriculum that won the 2002 National Council for the Social Studies Award for Excellence.
Our surveys of Irish Studies in the United States gave us data about the health of Irish Studies and suggested what needs to be done to keep programs thriving. First, Irish Studies programs need to be institutionalized. If they are viewed as a faculty member's special subject, the courses will disappear when that individual retires or leaves. While most Irish Studies programs have started in departments of literature, they branched out into other disciplines: history, social sciences, cultural studies, film, Irish language, folklore, and the visual arts; they need to continue to develop these wider contexts. In its own efforts to institutionalize the organization, we have established an archive at the Burns Library at Boston College. We have also established annual AICS Books Prizes in the disciplines and for a first book. There is a dissertation prize in memory of Adele Dalsimer. We have been told that these designations have helped young scholars find jobs and stand successfully for re-appointment and for tenure.
Canadian Association of Irish Studies first appeared on the organization's letterhead in 1973, but the idea for a Canadian Association to the ambitious celebrations of Irish arts and culture in Toronto was organized by Robert O'Driscoll. 5 Founded to encourage study and research in all fields of Irish culture, CAIS, with generous funding from the Canadian, Irish and Northern Irish governments have featured Irish writers and artists at their annual conferences at Canadian universities. Having talked about Irish Studies programs around the world, let me come to Irish Studies in Brazil which began in Brazil in 1977 when Professor Munira Mutran completed a doctoral dissertation for the University of Sao Paulo titled "A Personagem nos Contos" de Sean O'Faoláin It was the first of thirty studies developed at the University of São Paulo (USP). In their first twenty-five years, besides dissertations and theses, there were productions of Irish plays in Brazil, the availability of translations, the visits of Irish writers, critics and scholars sponsored by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs. Irish Studies in Brazil provides a very useful list of productions, dates, venues and reviews that would inform a study of the reception of Irish literature in Brazil. 6 In this Beckett year, let me say that the plays of Samuel Beckett lead the list with Portuguese translations from English and French, such as Happy Days, End Game, Act without Words I, Act without Words II, La Derniere Bande, and the most frequent and widely produced Irish play in Brazil Waiting for Godot. At Bloomsday celebrations translations of two of Beckett plays, Vaivém and Ping, collaborations between the late Haroldo de Campos and Maria Helena Kopschitz, were presented. Irish Studies in Brazil began as a literature based discipline, but over the years it has moved into cultural studies and into Irish diaspora studies.
What needs to be done to help scholars and others who are interested in the Irish in South America? Immigration records, census and parish records are vital as are indices to newspapers such as Marshall Oliver's The English-Language Press in Latin America which includes The Irish Argentine and The Southern Cross newspapers can provide primary sources for a study of the social history of the Irish in Argentina. 7 I spoke earlier about Joyce and Borges. Borges's essays on Irish writers indicate his wide-ranging knowledge of modern Irish literature: Lord Dunsany, Oliver St. John Gogarty, George Moore, Flann O'Brien, Liam O'Flaherty and, his favorite, Oscar Wilde 8 .
Irish writers in turn have set their work in South America. Colm Tóibín set his third novel The Story of the Night (1996) in Argentina during the military dictatorship. The politics of the time is the background to Richard Garay's personal struggle with his sexuality, a struggle that involves his fears of exposure, a private anxiety within a public/ political anxiety. Paul Durcan's Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil. One Hundred Poems (1999) opens the title poem and a sequence of fifteen Brazilian poems and a coda: "The Mary Robinson Years," a poem celebrating the Robinson presidency and its 1997 farewell party at the Copacabana Palace Hotel in Rio which includes in the usual Durcan display of verbal pyrotechnics: fireworks over the beach, high talk, a meeting with a transvestite from Tipperary and a final gesture of humility, faith and hope, by kneeling on the sand to light a candle in a parody of the Candomblé's New Year's tradition .
Various disciplines offer opportunities for a comparative approach. Here are some ideas, some nothing more than questions or hunches, but there may be a graduate student who would be interested. There is the work of the American anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, who has done studies of family life (both controversial) in Ireland and Brazil and the degree to which she has been unsuccessful in her "attempt to reconcile her responsibility to honest ethnography and respect for the people who once shared their homes and their secrets with her." (Scheper-Hughes 117) She was a Peace Corpsman assigned to rural health programs in Timbaúba in [1964][1965][1966]. Her work in the sugar mill town of Bom Jesus da Mata was the beginning of a long term study of what she calls the "violence of hunger," but before she published her research, she produced Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics (1979), a study of rural bachelors in Ballybran (Brandon) Co. Kerry, which considered the possible cultural reasons for the high incidence of schizophrenia. She identified the low marriage rate, the high emigration which left the farm inheriting sons behind, the damaging family dynamics and the isolation of these men as precipitating causes. Eileen Kane, Professor of Anthropology at NUI Maynooth and other Irish anthropologists questioned her broad generalizations about rural Ireland but also for her methodology.
The Mayo-based Irish Times ecologist and journalist Michael Viney who visited Brandon after the publication of Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics criticized Scheper-Hughes for her writing in such a way as to make her informants recognizable. It left the community hurt and angry, so angry that when she returned to the village twenty years later in 1999, she was expelled. 9 In 1992, she published her Bom Jesus da Mata research in Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. She argued that an environment of poverty and chronic hunger where infant mortality is high can account for mothers' indifference to infant death. 10 Once again her conclusions were accepted with reservations. The essential question: does lack of emotion imply that affection is absent? (ibid.) The question invites a cross cultural examination.
Roger Casement's consular experience in South America has been studied mainly due to his notorious Black Diaries which reveal his homosexuality. They also raise the question whether they were authentic or forgeries designed to discredit a man knighted for his work for the Empire. Current scholarship has established that the Diaries are an authentic record of a man troubled by his sexuality. My question is: how did Casement mediate between his commitment to the cause of Irish nationalism which led to his execution for treason in 1916 and his life as a British colonial administrator in South America? Has anyone looked at his consular work in the context of British and the diplomatic histories of Brazil and Peru?
While colonialism oppressed native peoples, immigrant people suffered at the hands of American nativists. Did the Irish in South America experience similar prejudice from continental Europeans? Did they resist? If we extend the geographical brief of this organization to Central America, there is the example of the San Patricios. While the Irish served on both sides in the American Civil War, the discrimination they faced led them to follow John Riley across enemy lines to fight for Mexico in the Mexican War of 1846-48. Under their Battalion flag, a Celtic harp on a green field, they fought fiercely against the Americans inflicting high casualties. When the Mexicans were defeated, San Patricios were whipped, branded and hanged as traitors. 11 What about comparing music and social justice in Brazilian and Irish popular music? Caetano Veloso's autobiographical Tropical Truth. A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil (2002) suggests comparisons with U-2's Bono's music and advocacy for the dispossessed. 12 In his review of Tropical Truth , Gerald Marzorati spoke both of Caetano's generation and Bono's somewhat younger cohort: He has a following too, among the more with-it tenured types who participate in conferences devoted to postcolonial studies and such. In ways similar to, say. Salman Rushdie, Caetano, who turned 60 [in 2002] came of age in the developing world absorbed with questions of center (America and England in his line of work) and periphery (everywhere else) -of where "hereness" and "thereness" met or might meet. His music, or much of it, can be construed as an inventive response to such questions. (New York Times Book Review. 2002) Bono represents a younger musical generation of urban Dublin rock musicians who used music to promote global peace and justice. Bob Geldorf of the Boomtown Rats produced the Live Aid concert was first of Irish musicians in aid of World hunger, a gesture from a country with a nineteenth century history of famine to their twentieth century counterparts. Following Geldorf, Bono expanded the Live Aid concept to a broader mission. His international standing has given him entrée to heads of state to remind them of the promises they made at the Millenium G8 summit and such is his influence that his name is on the short list for the Nobel Peace Prize. U2's music, his website, his concert appearances and his own journeys to distressed areas of the world reinforce Bono's mission to engage everyone to become activists in the effort to end world hunger, racism, and AIDS. What informed their mission; how does their music advance their commitment to social justice and what, if any, are their shared values and how were they shaped?
I have saved the most intriguing topic to last, the newest dimension in Irish Studies in South America: the Brazilian diaspora to Ireland. Since 2001, the records show a net immigration of some six hundred Brazilian immigrants to Gort, County Galway (Lister 2006). A Local sausage manufacturer recruited butchers and slaughtermen from Anápolis (Goiás). Satisfied with the better wages, wives and girlfriends followed the men to Gort and that led to a chain migration from Goias to Galway. Brazilians have imported their own traditions to Ireland. This spring they staged an impromptu carnival in the Gort square. Other Brazilian settlers in Ireland have settled in Roscommon, in Meath and in the south Liffey inner city where Brazilian music provides immigrant pride and solidarity.
The Dublin Samba School MaSamba School (www.masamba.com ) has combined community services for Brazilian immigrants with a cultural exchange. They created a ten-day tour for youths and community workers to Rio and the northeast where they danced the samba, the batucada, samba reggae and maracatu. They met Brazilians from all parts of the community and talked with them about the history and social context for the dance and musical tradition. How did samba music evolve through slavery to become a national symbol? The experience gave tour members an opportunity to compare the issues of marginalization and multiculturalism in the two societies.
The Latin American Solidarity Center (www.lasc.ie ) and the North Dublin community radio station Near FM worked together with MaSamba to produce a threepart radio programs: encounters, relationships and resolutions that documents the MaSamba school tour; the series as funded by the Irish National Committee for Development of Education (now DCI) with the Broadcast Technical Services and Total Broadcast supplying technical assistance. (Copies of the programs are available from the Latin American Solidarity Centre or www.lasc.ie ) Brazilian immigration to Ireland is not without its difficulties. There have been cases of workers who have been exploited (the 2002 Neusa da Silva case) and there have been some who have been refused admission to the country, but for the most part Ireland has welcomed the new Irish from under the Southern Cross and from this "commodius vicus of recirculation," we will see a new Brazilian-Irish dimension to Irish society when we walk the land again later in the twenty-first century.
Notes 1 "The Croppy Boy" was a favorite song in Joyce's own repertoire. Richard Ellmann (1959, 53) described the song as one that Joyce sang during musical evenings at the Sheehys' because Joyce believed that the song showed his light tenor voice to advantage. 2 A Spanish translation of the novel did not appear until 1948. " El Ulises de Joyce," was published in Proa 6, Jan. 1925 and later included in Inquisiciones. Respectful of Ulysses, Borges was