I am so at home in Dublin, more than any other city, that I feel it has always been familiar to me. It took me years to see through its soft charm to its bitter prickly kernel - which I quite like too.

FICTION

My Name Is James …

James, by Percival Everett, Doubleday, 320 pp, $28, ISBN: 978-0385550369 In a scene from the film American Fiction, Monk Ellison, a frustrated writer who can’t find a publisher for his next novel because it isn’t ‘black enough’, is told by his agent that his dashed-off pseudonymous satire My Pafology – deliberately written to mock the stereotypes white publishers expect from black authors – has attracted a huge offer from a major imprint. Before getting on the phone to the publisher, the agent says, ‘This thing scares me.’ Monk asks why. ‘Because white people think they want the truth,’ he says....
Twain’s novel has always been controversial. It was long considered vulgar and crass by self-appointed guardians of public taste. Lifted to classic status in the twentieth century by among others Eliot and Hemingway, it has nevertheless been under renewed censorial scrutiny since 1957, when the NAACP charged that it contained racial slurs and ‘belittling racial designations’. Yet, though consistently on the list of books most frequently banned in American schools and libraries, its literary merit is rarely disputed.

DRAMA

Failing Better

Anthony Roche
Brian Friel: Beginnings, by Kelly Matthews, Four Courts Press, 216 pp, €26.95, ISBN: 978-1801511407 The decade after the death of an acclaimed dramatist generally sees a rise or fall in their fortunes, and the deciding of a reputation. Brian Friel would seem to be an exception to this rule. He died in 2015, not quite ten years ago, and in that time his progress would appear to have continued unabated. There are still regular productions of his plays in both the Irish and English national theatres. As Kelly Matthews puts it, ‘Friel’s plays still resonate. Translations played to sold-out crowds... Friel’s father was headmaster of a three-room school near Omagh in Co Tyrone, which Brian attended until he was ten. A new teaching post brought the family to Derry. Brian, like his two sisters, later also became a teacher. Interestingly enough, his subject was maths rather than English or languages. Derry during the war years was crammed with American soldiers: ‘the troops […] reached 40,000, a number equal to the city’s entire pre-war population’. His lifelong interest in America may well have begun at this point.

Dublin Review of Books

ROUTES TO DEVELOPMENT

Keynes in Dublin

Sam Enright
John Maynard Keynes said that he had been brought up to regard Free Trade not just as an economic doctrine but almost as part of the moral law. When he started to publicly doubt its universal applicability in all circumstances, Virginia Woolf and his close friends were horrified. ‘Maynard has become a Protectionist,’ she wrote to a friend, ‘which horrified me so that I promptly fainted.’

TALKING PEACE

The Gunman’s Shadow

Catriona Crowe
Winston Churchill famously said that negotiation – ‘meeting jaw to jaw’ – was better than war. Two recently performed Irish plays recreate pivotal moments in Irish history when an attempt was made to shift politics from the gun to the ballot paper. The first, the Dáil debate on the Anglo-Irish Treaty, broke down and led to civil war, while the second, the negotiation of the Belfast Agreement, was ultimately successful.

BIOGRAPHY

A Progressive Abroad

Barra Ó Seaghdha
In keeping with his generally progressive positions, Francis Hackett actively supported women’s rights and suffrage, as testified by ‘Where Women Disagree: The battle for the female vote’, an article he wrote for ‘The New Republic’ in 1915. His marriage to Signe Toksvig, a strongly feminist Danish-American writer also on the magazine staff, meant that the issue would remain at the centre of the couple’s lives.

LITERARY LIVES

Getting Away

Patricia Craig
Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann, by Harriet Baker, Allen Lane, 384 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0241540510 ‘This place is exquisite,’ Sylvia Townsend Warner exclaimed in a letter to David Garnett in June 1932. The place was East Chaldon in Dorset, and ‘the fields, hay-cutting has only just begun, are so full of flowers that in the evening they smell exactly like the breath of cows’. And a bit later, ‘I have never lived with trees before.’ At the same time, Virginia Woolf at Monk’s House, Rodmell in Sussex, was playing bowls with visitors... Lehmann had envisaged a life at the cottage for herself and the writer Goronwy Rees. The two had met at Bowen’s Court when Elizabeth Bowen had earmarked Rees for herself, but he made off with the younger and more attractive Lehmann. When she learned of her lover’s forthcoming marriage to someone else, there followed an episode of emotional unrestraint: ‘beating of head, lying senseless on the floor, calling for brandy, screams and cries’. But she pulled herself together, having no alternative.

PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING

Toy Story

In the course of 2023, RTÉ was plunged into an existential crisis that appeared to be largely of its own making. It seemed that one scandal after another was being revealed in the press or in sessions of Oireachtas committees. The feeble and evasive attempts by some of the station’s senior management to offer explanations for this crisis only served to add fuel to the flames. The initial controversy had been started – like so many things in Ireland - by The Late Late Show. It was triggered by disclosures concerning financial arrangements that had been made between RTÉ...
The need for the continued existence of trusted public service broadcasters is greater than ever. However, RTÉ cannot claim to hold those in power to account if it appears to exempt itself from similar accountability. Considerable respect and affection still exist in the minds of many Irish people for the national broadcaster. In many respects, that is its most precious asset. It would be deeply unfortunate if it were to be put at any further risk.

FEMINISM

Rational Creatures

Bluestockings: The First Women’s Movement, by Susannah Gibson, John Murray, 320 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-1529369991 In mid-eighteenth-century England, a group of literary women emerged who presented the society of their time with the possibility of the existence of something new – ‘a socially acceptable intelligent woman’. Susannah Gibson’s engaging new work, Bluestockings, The First Women’s Movement, celebrates the achievements of these women both as individuals and as part of a collective moment. It showcases the Bluestockings’ writings and celebrates their contributions to cultural life while also exploring the particulars of these women’s lived experiences in Georgian Britain. The word ‘Bluestocking’ was first introduced in 1756 to describe those present at a London literary gathering after one of the guests absent-mindedly wore blue woollen stockings rather than the formal white silk to the hostess Elizabeth Montagu’s Hill Street salon. By the late 1770s it had come to be associated solely with those women in attendance, and eventually to refer to intellectual women in general. While the proto-feminism of the Bluestockings is signalled in the work’s title, Gibson is clear to acknowledge its limits and to place these women’s ideas firmly within their lifetime, explaining from the beginning, ‘she could not overturn the patriarchy – indeed such a thought never crossed her mind’. Building on previous work by scholars such as Elizabeth Eger, Emma Major and Gary Kelly, Gibson succeeds in letting her readers know why these women matter. She makes clear how their arguments for women’s ability to be rational creatures, specifically the possibility of being as rational as men, led ultimately to contemporary British women’s right to education, to earn money, to vote, and to make decisions for themselves regarding their...
From her magnificent house on Usher’s Island, Lady Moira promoted aspiring authors including Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson, later Lady Morgan. Thomas Dermody and Thomas Moore were also associated with the salon, whose hostess was particularly concerned with promoting the Irish language and the customs and cultures of ancient Ireland, and antiquarians and translators were invited to contribute to the gatherings’ discussions.

PHILOSOPHY

Am I an illusion?

Every day we hear the use of the vocabulary of the ‘ego’ or ‘self’ without investigating what is meant by the term. For example, we might enjoy the compliment ‘love yourself’. Or we may well undergo embarrassment if a friend says ‘take responsibility for yourself’. Sometimes it is said by way of affront, ‘don’t take yourself so seriously’. And, under duress, we might receive the counsel, ‘be your best self’. These bromides and others invoke the idiom of self over and again. Yet I cannot help but ask: what is such a thing as an ego or self? Crucially, I pause to note at the outset and in advance that my language glides between ego and self. For the sake of this essay, the self and ego refer to one and the same phenomenon: the sense of subjectivity in which I know I am me in an ongoing and stable manner. This concept of the self requires historical context. Four hundred years ago, the father of modern philosophy asked the very same question when he wrote ‘I know that I exist; the question is, what is this “I” that I know?’ In response, Descartes suggested I am a ‘thinking thing’, in Latin a res cogitans. We now know we do much more than think. We are embodied feelers who tell stories by which to live. The conception of the ‘ego’ or ‘self’ is admittedly complicated. I am complicated. You are complicated. True, but shall we simply declare that it is too slippery a term and thus ignore its many reservations, provocations, and ambiguities? Shall we discard it as an overly complex muddle, ultimately as an illusion? Or, as some in...
Eilís Ward attacks the late modern self that she says capitalism has created for us: one that is ‘competitive, autonomous, resilient, responsibilised, perfectible, and positive’, qualities which when aggregated render us ‘human capital’. There is a point here, but many world religions and existential philosophies also ask us to turn to our better angels and cultivate being resilient and positive, even sometimes competitive.

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ECONOMICS

The Tale of a Tiger

  Ireland’s Long Economic Boom: The Celtic Tiger Economy, 1986-2007, by Eoin O'Malley, Palgrave Macmillan, 264 pp, €53.49 and Open Access, ISBN: 978-3031530692 This book by economist Eoin O’Malley is an excellent, analytical study of the reasons why Ireland, one of the poorest economies in Europe, was transformed within a relatively short period into one of the best-performing economies. Both living standards and, most importantly, the numbers at work doubled in just two decades. O’Malley, formerly of the Economic and Social Research Institute, whose detailed work on Irish industrial economics is well-recognised, brings new insights into the reasons for our Celtic Tiger breakthrough, on the factors behind each reason for the growth and on the different periods of differing types of growth, in each sector. O'Malley undertakes a particularly deep analysis of the contribution to growth, exports and employment of foreign direct investment (FDI) and of the indigenous industrial sector. The Irish government and some in the media are somewhat obsessed with the role of foreign direct investment (FDI) but O’Malley shows that the indigenous sector also played an important role, particularly in the take-off in this twenty-year period. He also shows that, even during the bubble period of the boom in the noughties, there was sustained actual growth in the manufacturing and services export sector for a few years. O’Malley sticks strictly to the economics: there is no political economy in his book. If you want to see which parties were responsible for the boom and were responsible for the crash in 2008 you will have to refer to a political calendar of who was in power in the various years of these two decades. It is recognised that Ireland’s crash in 2008...
The 2008 crash was exacerbated by neoliberal policies: no regulation of finance, privatisation, tax-cutting, boosting demand during a boom, a push for ever-lower taxation and the downgrading of the public sphere. All parties had contributed to the earlier growth period, with investment in education and skills and active state intervention in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI), particularly in choosing growth sectors.

POLITICAL IDEAS

Saving the Enlightenment

Maurice Earls
Like it or not we are stuck with the Enlightenment. That much spoken of phenomenon and reactions to it comprise the greater part of our active political and intellectual heritage. Personally, I never much cared for the term. It has a grandiose and born-again evangelical tone, which strikes me as excessively self-important and fundamentally ahistorical. And yet the work of Enlightenment philosophers, Descartes, Locke, Smith, Rousseau, Hobbes, Diderot, Kant, Voltaire and others, undoubtedly constituted a significant shift in philosophical and political thought. The general view, as one historian put it, is that ‘The Enlightenment and its aftermath saw the... If some of the valuable heritage of the Enlightenment is to be salvaged this would surely involve jettisoning the notion of progress as an irresistible force. It would also require an understanding of personal freedom which recognised that virtually all personal enterprise is dependent on society, whose interests should predominate. Finally, we need a more modest approach to the power of reason, a healthy scepticism towards overarching explanations of life, an acceptance that ignorance remains our dominant condition and that we are but one life form among many.

REVOLUTION

From Romance to Regret

The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History, by Mateo Jarquin, The University of North Carolina Press, 336 pp, $29.95, ISBN: 978-1469678498 Nicaragua Must Survive: Sandinista Revolutionary Diplomacy in the Global Cold War, by Eline Van Ommen, University of California Press, 312 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0520390768 Sandinistas: A Moral History, by Robert J Sierakowski, University of Notre Dame Press, 338 pp, $35, ISBN: 978-0268106898 Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, by Jonathan Blitzer, Picador, 544 pp, £22, ISBN: ‎978-1529039313 After a few years of near misses when I lived in Nicaragua, working...
Over the following decades, the Somozas acquired dozens of the biggest farms, the meat factories where the cattle were slaughtered and the dairies where milk was pasteurised, the sugar mills, mines, the national airline and cement factories. They controlled all the illegal businesses too – brothels, gambling dens and home-distilled liquor. The elder Somoza, assassinated in 1956, had once described Nicaragua as his personal ranch.

NEUTRALITY

Whatever you say, say nothing

Micheál Martin has accused the anti-NATO lobby of consistently claiming that Ireland faces the threat of membership of a military alliance, conscription into a European army, and even the presence of ‘NATO tanks in O’Connell Street’. In the Dáil, Bríd Smith asked Martin did he want to send the sons and daughters of ‘mostly working class people’ to be cannon fodder for the world’s ‘colonial powers’. She wanted to know whether the government was ‘falling in line’ with those who warn that Europe is in a ‘pre-war era’. Martin told her that in every debate on Europe since 1972...
Few states, Joe Lee observed, have made such a heavy emotional investment as Ireland in the rhetoric of neutrality while paying so little attention to it as policy. For many, particularly on the left, it has become a sacred cow. Successive governments have rejected what they see as ‘scaremongering’ over possible NATO membership but steadfastly refuse to define or even debate what our neutrality consists of.

GERMANY

It’s My Party

Derek Scally
On the wall near my home in Berlin, someone has sprayed a thoughtful observation: ‘Machen ist wie wollen, nur krasser’ – Doing is like wanting, just crazier. That could be the new political motto of Sahra Wagenknecht, Germany’s most polarising politician of the left. Wagenknecht entered politics in 1990 and now, at fifty-five, is German democracy’s longest-serving matron of honour. For more than three decades, long before telemedicine was a thing, Dr Wagenknecht has diagnosed modern Germany’s ills from the safe distance of the Bundestag opposition bench and talk show studios. But now it seems that she wants more: actively... As the party that one-time communist Sahra Wagenknecht has named after herself puts down roots in German politics, its rivals are unsettled. How do you tackle an opaque, populist rival with generous – but unclear – sources of funding? ‘If the despots of this world understand that you can build a papier-mâché party in the largest EU member state with a few million,’ Kevin Kühnert, the social democrats’ general secretary warns, ‘then we are facing a development that could put our liberal democracy under great pressure.’