Posted 27 March 2012
New anthology captures a century of debate and analysis in Ireland
After the Irish War of Independence and Civil War, the Jesuit journal Studies hosted the mainstream social, economic, constitutional and political debates that shaped the new state.
A new volume: An Irish Century: Studies 1912 – 2012 (UCD Press) edited by Professor Bryan Fanning, UCD School of Applied Social Science, University College Dublin, draws from some 400 issues of Studies containing more than 3,000 essays to exemplify and reflect a century of debate and analysis of Irish social and political change.
Book cover photograph: O’Connell Street during the Eucharistic Congress (1932). After Mass in the Phoenix Park, the crowds converged on O’Connell Bridge where Solemn Benediction was given by the Papal Legate, Cardinal Lauri. The photograph was taken at 5:30pm by Fr Frank Browne SJ.
“In selecting the essays that make up this anthology a number of aims collided,” says Professor Fanning. “These included a desire to include some of the best, best-known and most influential essays, to represent key debates and recurring themes, and to capture a century of social, political, cultural and economic change.”
The collection focuses on nine decades of Irish independence and the crucial decade beforehand that witnessed seismic change, addressing the key events, crises and challenges that have shaped Irish society – the 1916 Rising, the First World War, sectarian conflict, child abuse and immigration.
An Irish Century: Studies 1912 – 2012 includes some landmark ‘Studies’ pieces by AE, John Maynard Keynes, Daniel Binchy, Donal Barrington, Patrick Lynch, Sean O’Faolain and Augustine Martin.
In March 1933, Daniel Binchy, who had been the Irish Minister to Germany from 1929 to 1932, published an astute ‘Studies’ article on Adolf Hitler which is included in the anthology. It was penned before the March 1933 elections which cemented Hitler’s political domination over Germany. Binchy had first heard Hitler speak in Munich in 1921. At the time he described Hitler to a friend as ‘a harmless lunatic with a gift for oratory’. His friend retorted: ‘No lunatic with the gift of oratory is harmless’.
The anthology also contains ‘Studies’ writings by and about some of the key figures who have fashioned the political, cultural, and economic life of modern Ireland such as John Redmond, Patrick Pearse, Sean Lemass, T.K. Whitaker, John McGahern, Tony Fahey, Mary Kenny, Finola Kennedy, and Dermot Keogh.
Michael Tierney who was appointed Professor of Greek at UCD in 1922, and became President of UCD in 1947, contributed some 47 articles to Studies, more than any other contributor. His article ‘Daniel O’Connell and the Gaelic Past’, published in Studies in 1938 is included in the anthology.
“Studies cannot compete with the mainstream media in all its glittering twenty-first century forms, although it now has a state-of–the-art website,” says Professor Fanning.
“Yet, for decades it has functioned as a kind of metablog on Irish affairs where instead of throwaway comments the long essay form has prevailed.”
An Irish Century: Studies 1912 – 2012 (UCD Press) edited by Professor Bryan Fanning was officially launched by former Taoiseach (1994 - 1997) John Bruton (Fine Gael Party) in UCD’s Newman House, St Stephen’s Green on 20 March 2012.
“The wonderful thing about this volume is that it enables us to read what authors thought, at the time, without the opportunity for selective reinterpretation in the light of subsequent events,” said John Bruton.(Produced by UCD University Relations)
