St. Patrick's Day Illustrations

It's rare to find illustrations from early in the 1900s, but St. Patrick's Day illustrations recently came to light that were created by Ellen Clapsaddle, an illustrator and commercial artist from Columbia, New York.

During her time Clapsaddle's style was greatly admired, and to this day she is recognized as the most prolific souvenir and postcard article creator of her time. During her career she created over 3,000 designs.

Some St. Patrick's Day postcards by Clapsaddle have been reproduced here for display. The St. Patrick's Day cards feature traditional greetings, quotes from poems and songs and sayings such as 'Erin Go Bragh' along with illustrations, some cute and some a little stereotypical.

All in all a fascinating historical look back at St. Patrick's Day.



See full article on www.irishcentral.com

Dublin Alum named Midwest Division Player of the Week

BRIDGEPORT, Pa. -- Maisie O'Malley (Jr., Chicago, Ill./St. Ignatius) of the
University of Notre Dame "A" team tallied 13 goals in three games to lead
the Fighting Irish to a 4-0 record and earn the February 14 Midwest Division
Player of the Week award.

She posted four goals versus Ohio University (15-3 W) and Miami University
of Ohio (11-6 W) while netting game highs in both goals (five) and steals
(three) versus No. 12-nationally ranked Grand Valley State University (10-8
W) to help the No. 6-ranked Irish clinch the No. 1 seed for the upcoming
Midwest Division Championship tournament.

Notre Dame "A", which will seek the program's fifth consecutive Midwest
Division title on April 16-17 at Ohio University, also defeated the Notre
Dame "B" team 5-0 last week via forfeit with no statistics from the game
counting towards individual marks.

Awake My Soul…

by Anne Kelliher

Awake my soul…

To the beauty of God’s world around me.

Lord, it is often I who am lacking.

Give me the grace to take frequent stock

Not only of the value of my actions,

But above all, of the value of my motives

In doing them.

Awake my soul…

To the gifts of inspiration, inventiveness

And imaginative thinking.

For truly, I believe that the point of creativity is

To challenge oneself,

To find meaning

And to enhance one’s life.

My existence is already a factor in world history;

Now, what factor can it be is the question?!

In small ways or large,

My life will change the world.

And in small ways or large,

The world will change me.  

Awake my soul…

To the thrill of realising our wildest dreams,

And once realised,

Grant me the grace to continue to blossom and grow.

Awake my soul…

To the wisdom of ancient scholars and seers,

For there is more to the universe and to us,

Than you and I know.

Awake my soul…

To your boundless love for each of us.

The fusion of compassion and caring

Both delights and consoles me.

Awake my soul…

To the ingenuity of the people

We share our lives with.

All means of poverty are manifest in our world

Yet, people find inventive ways to rise above it.

Grace us with the capacity

To give generously and selflessly,

In service of others.

Awake my soul…

To all the miracles in my life;

The good health of family and friends;

The joys-and frustrations- of raising my children

And the ability to help shape young lives each day.

I give thanks for these priceless treasures

Which are confided to my lifelong keeping.

Awake my soul…

To be open to changed perspectives.

Even sad and unpleasant events

Play a role in shaping my character,

But spare me too many such events,

please Lord!

For I am but human after all. 

Keep me mindful

That every loss will lead me to a gain

And every No  takes me that much closer to a

Yes.

Awake my soul…

To the freedom of choice

And to discovering a different way to serve and protect .

Let me look anew at day-to-day life

And foster within me, the desire to know more.

Awake my soul…

To the stresses,traumas and emotional shutting down

Taking place in society today.

Bestow upon those of us in the caring professions,

The grace to approach our work and responsibilities,

Not with anger and cynicism,

But with love and fierce compassion.

Awake my soul…

To the worth of collaboration .

While we each have our own presence and energy,

The art of collaboration forces me to think differently.

It is a way to make the act of creating new again.

Awake my soul…

To the power of self acceptance.

That I may greet each new day

and the experience it offers, with confidence and joy.

Help me forge my identity in your image and likeness.

Let me be the face of Christ

In my daily encounters with all those who meet me.

Awake my soul…

To the value of asking questions.

Perhaps by doing so, they can re-direct my life.

Answering them every day will transform it.

Nudge me to ask “Where am I wrong?”

As Socrates believed,

We gain our first measure of intelligence

When we first admit our own ignorance .

And Lord, as the end of day draws near,

Awake my soul

To the gift of the night.

What a blessing to have few distractions.

There are no more … long to-do lists

Weighing on our minds .

We can just sit back, relax,

and envision all the possibilities of tomorrow.

The sky is the limit!

Awake my soul…

Anne Kelleher, Feabhra 2011

The New Third World?

by Kevin Whelan

Michael Lewis, celebrity columnist with Vanity Fair, has announced that in his book Travels in the New Third World, Ireland will be one of the main exhibits. A recent visitor exposed to the apocalyptic reporting of the Irish economic crisis in the USA, told me that he was surprised not to find tumbleweed on Grafton Street.  In an incredibly short span, world opinion has banished us from the rich man’s table and consigned us to the Third World. Should we respond to this schadenfreude with agreement? rage? squirming? silence? What is happening to us when the Tiger turned out to be a Cheshire cat which disappeared with an enigmatically cynical grin? We all know the story too well now: a torrid property affair that ended in bitter tears and recriminations, banks as serial abusers that ended up in the protective custody of the state, the advent of the past exonerative - ‘Mistakes were made’ as a new tense in Irish politics, ghost estates haunted not by a blighted past but by a lost future, a manic-depressive national mood - as if we had been too high in the boom years, and have now collapsed into a horrifying depression.

The historian’s response can only be the long-standing one: The owl of Minerva flies at dusk, and we can only assess what has happened when it is over. In retrospect, as we pore over the entrails, it is clearer that there were in fact two Celtic Tigers: the first real one ended in 2003. The second was a bubble, blown up by cheap money and even cheaper politics. Senior Fianna Fáil politicians, Charlie McCreevy and Bertie Ahern, were the main abusers. They encouraged private interests to trample over the public good. On their watch, greed, collusion and corruption made a mockery of planning, as robber bandits sang ‘feck your planning system, I’ve my Merc outside’. Fianna Fáil disable the national alarm systems, leaving the country open to the predations of crony capitalism. The profits of doom were stored up, as get-rich-quick schemes for the insiders became get-poor-quick schemes for the country. A compliant media were ear-splitting advocates for the property sector - a media who have utterly failed to acknowledge their complicity in creating the fiasco - at least we can hold our politicians to account.

While an angry and repetitive ‘debate’ furiously assigns blame, it is clear that in a democracy, a country gets the politicians and the policies that it votes for. A state operates the political system that its citizens permit it to operate: wider objectives cannot be attained unless the citizens support them. Our Civil Service tradition, founded on its highly centralised, authoritarian and rigid British predecessor, oozes hostility to necessary change. But politicians and Civil Servants can only function with the will of the people: Blame the politicians, yes: Blame the Civil Servants, yes: but don’t stop there; blame the citizens too.

When we are done with the blame game, consider what actually happened here in the areas that we controlled. The PDs – with their inside man McCreevy, restructured the tax system in an American direction - low taxation, low public spending, ‘light’ [for which read no] regulation. The inevitable consequence, long ago pointed out by J. K. Galbraith, is private affluence and public squalor. The line of argument here is that poverty is entirely a personal issue: structural reasons do not ‘explain’ poverty – it’s just that you are a loser, a drunkard, personally irresponsible, lazy, a cheat   ... Implicit - and often explicit - in this analysis is that the can-do wealth-creating classes have no fiscal, political or ethical responsibility (especially redistributive taxation) to help the disadvantaged. By 2005, the Republic’s ratio of taxes to GDP, at 32%, was 9% below the euro zone average of 41%.

And yet with an internationally low level of personal taxation, Irish citizens demand a Scandinavian level of public service provision, including education to health care. Total tax-to-GDP ratios are highest in the Nordic countries, topping 50% in both Sweden and Denmark.

In Ireland, low taxes and low public expenditure on education, health and welfare result in inequality, relative poverty and weakening national cohesion. A large proportion – one–third - of our society was left behind in the boom years, creating a two-tier society – and few politicians, or Irish people in general seemed to care all that much. Those we might expect to act as their voice had issues of their own: the Catholic church mired in a swamp of its own making, the trade union leaders eager to get their snouts in the trough of social partnership. Those stuck in the poverty trap include older people (especially older women), early school leavers, the long-term unemployed, the chronically ill, the disabled, the single mother, ex-prisoners. These are the groups with least media access, political participation, or involvement in civil society. In the Tiger years, they drifted deeper into relative poverty, into lives lacking in dignity, and are more detached than ever from mainstream society.

The most striking feature of the Tiger is that it was marked by social rigidity. Social mobility has been remarkable muffled, given the astonishing scale of economic transformation. While the number of people in the higher social classes increased, this happened by expansion of the numbers, not by any redistribution or movement between classes. The fattening national cake allowed a huge number to eat their fill, rather than scrap over the distribution of the slices. The education system was critical here. In Dublin especially, the school system functions as a social conveyor belt, reliably delivering Tiger cubs into the middle classes.

It is now clear that the Tiger model was an unsustainable hybrid of American neo-liberalism (minimal state, privatisation of public services, public-private partnerships, relaxed regulatory regimes, low corporate and individual taxation, clientelism) and European social welfarism (developmental state, social partnership, welfare safety net, high indirect tax, EU directives and obligations). It is equally clear that the Irish political system bet the bank (literally) on this model - the greatest fiction that we produced in this country in the last two decades, way beyond the imaginative capacity of our writers. How did this happen?

Irish politics moved decisively to the right in the Tiger years. The advent of the Progressive Democrats at the extreme right encouraged an all-too-willing Fianna Fáil to follow them slavishly in that direction. Labour then moved from left of centre to try to capture the vacated Fianna Fáil space. The net result was a gravitational flow to the right across the entire Irish political spectrum. Fianna Fáil, after eight decades of behaving like a natural party of Government, lost its way, as its political values hollowed out, and fell among thieves in pin-stripe suits. It projected itself and behaved as a party of power and access to power, and nothing else, and it jettisoned even the vestige of vision. In pursuit of power but with no idea of how to use it responsibly, it abandoned politics as a realm of ideas and can have no complaints when voters now abandon them. They became policy-takers not policy-makers – policies imported from Britain and America when they were well past their sell-by date.

The strengthening of the Right undermined national cohesion, and Ireland now has one of the sharpest internal social divides anywhere in Europe. The Tiger years deepened and entrenched the social divide. The privatisation and individualisation of its market model tore gaping holes in the social fabric, increasing the pressure on the state to plug all the gaps.

And yet when all is this is said, done and acknowledged, are we really in the Third World? Economically, a wider and longer-term perspective might suggest that our problems were not entirely home-grown. We became the most globalised economy in the world: when the global economy boomed, so did we. When it tanked, so did we. When it improves, so will we. We are a rich country judged by any international standards. It is an insult to countries immersed in genuine poverty to suggest that our problems equate with theirs. Our third-level educational participation rates are impressive by global standards; 63% of females and 48% of males aged twenty are in full-time education. There are more mobile phones than people in Ireland. 73% of our households had a computer, 54% have a broadband connection. In 2010, we have higher penetration of broadband services than the USA, Britain and Germany.

Back in 1902, faced with an earlier crisis of the Irish state, W. B. Yeats suggested that great cultural and political leaps forward emanated not so much from progressive ideas as from despair: ‘The first flying fish leaped, not because it sought ‘adaptation’ to the air, but out of horror of the sea’. Tumbleweed on Grafton Street, no, Abercrombie & Fitch, uggs and Louis Vuitton, yes. Flying fish anybody?

Day trip to Bray

by Alice Harada

On Saturday, Adriana, Clare, Siomha, Mike, Mary, Josh and I took the train to Bray, a small seaside town just outside Dublin.  The train ride, which went right along the coast, was beautiful and definitely worth a break from the bus.  We'd intended to walk to the nearby town of Greystones, but as we started down the path surrounding one of the steep hills overlooking the ocean, we saw a very faint path leading up the hill.  

  

Atop the hill we'd seen a cross and it seemed to be a great chance for an unobstructed view of the coast, so we decided to make the climb.  It turned out to be a bit more work than the leisurely hike we'd intended at the beginning of the day--at several points along the steep trail we had to use our hands for stability--but it was definitely worth it for the amazing views of the ocean and the feeling of accomplishment when we made it to the top.  To cap it all off, we got a great picture of the whole group in front of the cross (which seemed very appropriate for a group of Notre Dame students) and could see the entire expanse of the surrounding villages below from the top.  After we'd finished enjoying the breathtaking view, we took a muddy but less treacherous route down the hill and enjoyed a relaxing train ride back to Dublin. 

The IRISH SEMINAR 2011: Irish Modernisms
20 June – 8 July 2011 


THEME

Modernism, marked by a strongly self-conscious rupture with tradition and a formal and conceptual inventiveness, is often understood as a vigorous reaction against established religious, social and political views. Informed on one hand by the horrors of the Great War (1914-18) and governed on the other by a belief that our world is created in the very act of perceiving it, no absolute truth existed to provide guidance or solace. Dominated by a relativistic aesthetic, Modernists turned inward to examine the sub-conscious, advocating individuality and celebrating interiority. The crisis of representation, the rise of the cosmopolitan, cultural dislocation, the subconscious, memory and sexuality all found expression in European modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Modernism exerted, and still exerts, a profound pressure on contemporary culture, literature, cinema, art and scholarship.


The Irish Seminar 2011 convenes a stellar cast of international scholars to examine Irish Modernism in its varied manifestations, as well as their interrelationships with Western and global Modernism. The contribution of Ireland’s English-language authors to Modernism is unparalleled: Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Bowen, and O’Brien. Recent criticism has engaged with issues of national, regional and local origin to construct a ‘Modernism of the Margins’. A three-week series of seminars, lectures and events probes the paradoxical and opposed trends of revolution and reaction (1916, War of Independence, Civil War), the struggles of nascent political parties in their clashes with established forces and older vested interests, the attrition of traditional elites and the emergence of new states north and south.


Yet Modernism, no less than Ireland itself, cannot be reduced to a caricature or stereotype. A key concern of the Irish Seminar 2011 is the interrogation of the standard account. In addition to exploring Modernism of the margins, the Seminar examines minority languages, vernacular culture, the local and the national, and gendered identities in the Irish Modernist experience.


As well as concentrating on historical and theoretical issues, the Seminar will focus on modernism as a mode of creativity that emphasizes disruption and fracture, questioning expressiveness, originality, tradition, revolution, gender, sexuality, language and identity. Exploring the constant tension between nihilism and enthusiasm, energy and ennui that emerged in Ireland between 1880 and 1940, and which sparked this efflorescence of modernist works, the Irish Seminar 2011 will provide challenging perspectives on Irish modernism in its multi-faceted dimensions.

Full Information available at
http:// irishseminar.nd.edu


2011 FACULTY 

Executive Director: Brian Ó Conchubhair (Notre Dame)

The 2011 IRISH SEMINAR faculty includes: Joe Cleary (Yale), Seamus Deane (Notre Dame), Wes Hamrick (Notre Dame), John Kelly (Oxford), Declan Kiberd (Notre Dame), José Lanters (Wisconsin-Milwaukee), Joseph Lennon (Villanova), David Lloyd (Southern California), Barry McCrea (Yale), Bríona Nic Dhiarmada (Notre Dame), Emer Nolan (NUI Maynooth), Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh (NUI Galway), Kevin Whelan (Notre Dame).


ACCOMMODATION 

Participants will stay at UCD Summer Residence, Roebuck Hall, located close to Dublin’s city centre and within easy reach of the city’s many amenities. UCD is just a short 10 minute bus ride to the city centre via a direct route. Its superb location, just on the edge of town on an attractive green-field campus, provides easy access to an abundance of restaurants, as well as Dublin’s attractive coastline and the Wicklow mountains. Onsite facilities include a pharmacy, medical centre, banks, post office, delicatessens, newsagent, gym, launderette and mini-markets. The apartments are spacious and fully furnished to a high standard. There are 6 single en-suite bedrooms in each apartment. All accommodation has self-catering facilities, including kitchen, laundry and a living room. Guests have the option of being totally self-sufficient during their stay, although it is comforting to know that there are extensive catering facilities on campus and close-by. The residences at UCD are carefully integrated into their setting. Maintained to a high standard, they are an ideal home away from home. Features include: modern furnished apartments with en-suite toilet and shower in each bedroom – generous sized living area, including a fitted kitchen/dining area – free wifi – secure controlled access to each apartment.


FURTHER INFORMATION AND PROGRAMME UPDATES

Website: http://irishseminar.nd.edu

E-mail: eclowry@nd.edu

Telphone: + 353 1 611 0611

Fax. + 353 1 611 0606


IRISH SEMINAR Directors: Joe Cleary, Seamus Deane, Christopher Fox, Declan Kiberd, Bríona Nic Dhiarmada, Brian Ó Conchúbhair and Kevin Whelan.