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As we approach the annual St Patrick’s Day celebration, the story of the Irish economy in the last five years is worthy of reflection. In late 2010, the Irish Government, following in the footsteps of Greece, was forced to request a deeply humiliating emergency financial bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union (EU). Against the background of the recent controversy over the latest “Greek crisis”, what can be said about Ireland’s experience? Here are five relevant issues

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By Kirsty Doole

With today being St Patrick’s Day, we’ve taken the opportunity to recommend a few classic works of Irish literature to dip into while you’re enjoying a pint (or two) of Guinness.

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

Joyce is one of the most famous figures in Irish literature, and Finnegans Wake is infamous for being one of the most formidable books in existence. It plays fantastic games with language and reinvents the very idea of the novel in the process of telling the story of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker and his wife Anna Livia, in whom the character of Ireland itself takes form. Around them and their dreams there swirls a vortex of world history, of ambition and failure, pride and shame, rivalry and conflict, gossip and mystery.

A Tale of a Tub and Other Works by Jonathan Swift

This was the first major work written by Jonathan Swift. The author explains in a preface that it is the practice of seamen when they meet a whale to throw out an empty tub to divert it from attacking the ship. Hence the title of the satire, which is intended to divert Hobbes’s Leviathan and the wits of the age from picking holes in the weak sides of religion and government. The author proceeds to tell the story of a father who leaves as a legacy to his three sons Peter, Martin, and Jack a coat apiece, with directions that on no account are the coats to be altered. Peter symbolizes the Roman Church, Martin (from Martin Luther) the Anglican, Jack (from John Calvin) the Dissenters. The sons gradually disobey the injunction. Finally Martin and Jack quarrel with the arrogant Peter, then with each other, and separate.

The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays by J. M. Synge

In The Playboy of the Western World, the action takes place in a public house, when a stranger enters and is persuaded to tell his story. Impressed, the admiring audience thinks he must be very brave indeed to have killed his father, and in turn the young tramp blossoms into the daring rollicking hero they believe him to be. But then his father, with a bandaged head, turns up seeking his worthless son. Disillusioned and angry at the loss of their hero, the crowd turns the stranger, who tries to prove that he is indeed capable of savage deeds, even attempting unsuccessfully to kill his father again. The play ends with father and son leaving together with the words “Shut yer yelling for if you’re after making a mighty man of me this day by the power of a lie, you’re setting me now to think if it’s a poor thing to be lonesome, it’s worse maybe to go mixing with the fools of earth.”

Dracula by Bram Stoker

One of the greatest horror stories ever written. This is the novel that introduced the character of Count Dracula to the world, spawning a whole host of vampire fictions in its wake. As well as being a pioneering text in horror fiction, it also has much to say about the nature of empire, with Dracula hell-bent on spreading his contagion into the very heart of the British empire. Fun fact: Bram Stoker’s wife, Florence Balcombe, had previously been courted by Oscar Wilde.

The Major Works by W. B. Yeats

W. B. Yeats was born in 1865 and died in 1939. His career crossed the 19th and 20th centuries, from the Romantic early poems of Crossways and the symbolist masterpiece The Wind Among the Reeds to his last poems. Myth and folk-tale influence all of his work, most notably in Cathleen ni Houlihan among others. The importance of the spirit world to his life and work is evident in his critical essays and occult writings, and he also wrote a whole host of political speeches, autobiographical writings, and letters.

The Wild Irish Girl by Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan)

This is the story of the son of an English lord, Horation, who is banished to his father’s Irish estate as punishment for gambling debts, he adopts the persona of knight errant and goes off in search of adventure. On the wild west coast of Connaught he finds remnants of a romantic Gaelic past a dilapidated castle, a Catholic priest, a deposed king and the king’s lovely and learned daughter, Glorvina. In the process he rediscovered a love for the life and culture of his country. Written after the Act of Union, The Wild Irish Girl (1806) is a passionately nationalistic novel and an essential novel in the discourse of Irish nationalism. The novel was so controversial in Ireland that the author, Lady Morgan, was put under surveillance by Dublin Castle. There is a bust of Lady Morgan in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the plaque mentions that Lady Morgan was “less than four feet tall.”

In a Glass Darkly by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

This dark collection of five stories was said by none other than Henry James to be “the ideal reading… for the hours after midnight”. Indeed, J. Sheridan Le Fanu himself had a reputation for being both reclusive and rarely seen in the daytime. His fascination with the occult led to his stories being truly spine-chilling, drawing on the Gothic tradition and elements of Irish folklore, as well as on the social and political anxieties of his Anglo-Irish contemporaries.

Kirsty Doole is Publicity Manager for Oxford World’s Classics.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter, Facebook, or here on the OUPblog. Subscribe to only Oxford World’s Classics articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

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Image credit: James Joyce. By Djuna Barnes. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Fairies, Luck, and Magic Charms

I hope you have a magical St. Patrick’s Day. You never know! Today might be the day you stumble upon a fairy ring, follow a will o’ the wisp to your fate, or catch a leprechaun!

— Sonja, STACKS Staffer Add a Comment

Today is a day of shamrocks and Guinness, leprechauns and rejoicing for Irish communities everywhere.  It is the day of St Patrick, Ireland's patron saint.  So let's take a little trip through the mists of Irish myth and legend.

Who was St Patrick?  There are a few 'facts' which are accepted as true by historians, since they come from two letters Patrick almost certainly wrote himself.  He was captured as a teenager and sent as a slave to Ireland, where he lived as a shepherd for six years before escaping and returning to his family. He was related to St Martin of Tours on his mother's side, and his parents were high-ranking Romans from either Gaul or Britain. Patrick returned to Ireland later in his life as an ordained bishop, and was given permission by the Ard-Righ (High King) to preach Christianity in the north and west of the island. Scholars think (but don't know absolutely) that he lived and worked sometime in the second half of the 5th century. 

So what has a Christian bishop to do with myth?  Of course, the most famous 'myth' about Patrick himself was that he banished the snakes from Ireland (possibly a reference to the serpent symbolism of his druid 'rivals', because there were no snakes in Ireland). I'm pretty sure he would have spoken the Celtic language of his captors (and later on, his flock).  He must also have heard all the great stories of the druidic Irish religion told around the fire when he was a young man in captivity--and probably in the Ard-Righ's great hall too.  Bards were honoured folk then, and those were the stories they told--Cuchulain, Finn MacCool, Maeve and the Tain Bo Cuailnge and so on. I would speculate that those mythical tales--and more importantly, the way in which they were told or sung, had an effect on Patrick the priest.

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5. 17 March and all that

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By: Kirsty, on 3/17/2011
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By S. J. Connolly

The approach of St Patrick’s day brings to mind once again the ambivalent relationship that historians have with festivals and anniversaries.  On the one hand they are our bread and butter.  Regular commemorations are what keep the past alive in the public mind.  And big anniversaries, like 1989 for historians of the French Revolution, or 2009 for historians of Darwinism, can provide the occasion of conferences, exhibitions, publishers’ contracts, and even invitations to appear on television. On the other hand, historians are trained to look behind supposed traditional observances for the discontinuities and inventions they conceal.  They also see it as an important part of their role to point up the gaps between myth, whether popular or official, and what actually happened.  All this tends to cast them in the role of spoilsport.  When the emphasis is on commemoration, who wants a curmudgeon in the corner pointing out that Britain’s Glorious Revolution was really an evasive compromise that evades the great issues of political principle that were at stake, or that William Wallace was not really Scottish?

Where Ireland is concerned, these issues are all the more familiar, because there anniversaries retain a political significance that elsewhere they have largely lost.  In 1991 the Irish government was attacked for its failure to celebrate the 75^th anniversary of the rising of 1916.  Later in the decade, with republican violence in Northern Ireland suspended and the economy booming, there was a greater willingness to embrace a frankly nationalist version of the Irish past.  Events to mark the sesquicentenary of the outbreak of the Great Famine of 1845-51 got stridently under way in 1995, with a renewed emphasis on the crisis, not as a natural disaster, but as a wrong done to the Irish people.  Next came the even more enthusiastic celebrations accorded to the rebellion of 1798, presented as a time when Catholic and Protestant supposedly united behind shared national and democratic goals, and hence as a blueprint for post-ceasefire Ireland. 

Since then, the urge to commemorate has abated somewhat.  The centenary of the act of union (2000) was a muted affair, while  the anniversary of Robert Emmett’s insurrection in 1803 was perhaps a victim of the overkill of 1998.  Today, however, we can see, looming ahead of us like icebergs out of the fog, a succession of further centenaries to which we will have to find an appropriate response:  1912, when Ulster Protestants, through the mobilization of the Ulster Volunteer Force, took command of their own destiny but also set Ireland on the road to civil war;  1916, the actual centenary (as opposed to the questionable seventy-fifth anniversary) of the Easter Rising;  1920 and 1922,  the foundation of two states within a divided Ireland.

Against this uninspiring background St Patrick’s day stands out as a more benign event.  Ireland’s patron saint, it is true, has not always been an uncontentious figure.  Over several centuries ecclesiastical historians engaged in a frankly partisan debate over whether what Patrick had established was a faithful part of papal Christianity or a proto-Protestant church independent of the authority and doctrinal errors of Rome. Today, in a more secular age, these controversies are largely forgotten.  Instead 17 March provides the occasion for a good natured round of parading, celebration and the flourishing of shamrocks and shillelaghs, whose observance extends well beyond Ireland itself.  Indeed it is one of the curious features of the event that it is in Washington, rather than Dublin, that senior members of the Irish government are generally to be found on their country’s national day.

Perhaps the most interesting recent developments in the history of St Patrick’s Day have taken place in Belfast. 17 March,

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