Transgressing Contemporary Boundaries:The Narrator as True Custodian of Cultural Knowledge in Ulster Society

Historically in Gaelic culture, the bard was greatly valued and admired as an important and integral part of society. Travelled, schooled and specifically trained in their art, the bard helped ensure identity and reassurance for Gaelic families by grounding them both temporarily and spatially into their landscape. Entrusted with the duty and responsibility of recording place and event, the bards worked without writing and by transgressing man-made boundaries, travelled throughout the land weaving their histories into the very fabric of society.

Now no longer with us, we find ourselves without the distinguished chronicler to undertake this duty. Yet the responsibility of the Gaelic bard is one still shared by all artists today; to facilitate memory and identity, whether good or bad. Many Ulster writers, by happenstance and geography have found themselves located in a place of painful histories. An immediate difficulty for those local writers becomes manifest by being intrinsically implicated into those histories – whilst having first-hand knowledge and comprehension beyond that of the outsider, the local writer is automatically damned by association and relationship, thereby tarnishing their voice in comparison to the perceived impartiality of others.
Some writers however have successfully sought ways to escape this limitation and have worked in ways that can transgress the restrictions of prejudgement. John Hewitt, by purposely becoming a self-imposed tourist was able to distance himself to write impartially about the past, recognising that ’the place without its ghosts is a barren place.’1 In ‘The Colony’,2 tradition, peoples and mapping of the land are all narrated by Hewitt in a similar way to the Gaelic bardic topographic poems of Sean O'Dubhagain and Giolla Na Naomh O'Huidhrin3 in compiling a rich cultural atlas.

Similarly the Belfast poet and novelist Ciaran Carson also writes and records the city from an intermediary position; that of translator. Mediating between reader and aisling,4 Carson himself takes the reader on a journey into name, meaning, time and place, focusing primarily on the city of Belfast, familiar in name but impenetrable in depth to most.

Furthermore, this once-forgotten tradition to chronicle is now being continued by the new breed of Irish crime writers where the likes of Brian McGilloway, Stuart Neville and Adrian McKinty can, by way of the crime novel, accurately record contemporary society. Thus, ghost estates, listed buildings, archaeological digs, street and city have all provided setting and subject matter for recent novels. Moreover by choosing the ‘outsider from within’ as their chief protagonist, whether detective or criminal, each author is able to transgress the boundaries of prejudice and preconception that hinder genuine understanding and knowledge.

Looking in turn at the Gaelic bard, the twentieth century Ulster poet and the new breed of Irish crime writer, the authors will outline the real value of the narrator, by being able to act as cultural transgressor beyond the seeming and alleged as the true chronicler in society, and then with specific reference to city and countryside in Ireland, as a valuable custodian of knowledge in architecture and place.

Keywords
Architecture, Crime Fiction, Cultural Atlas, Place, Poetry.

1 From ‘The Bloody Brae’, a one act play written by John Hewitt in the 1930’s.
2 Hewitt, J. (1968) published in Collected Poems 1932-67. London:McGibbon & Kee.
3 Lengthy and detailed medieval Gaelic poems composed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries first edited by John O'Donovan in 1862 for the Irish Archaeological and Celtic Society in Dublin.
4 The aisling is the Irish song or poem genre when the poet is visited by their muse in a daydream or dream-vision state.

“Do You Want to See My Hornpipe?”: The Traditional Irish Dancing Body at Play in the Work of Jean Butler and Colin Dunne.

This chapter considers the radical re-imaginings of traditional Irish step dance in the recent works of Jean Butler and Colin Dunne. In Butler's Does She Take Sugar (2007) and Dunne's Out of Time (2008), the Irish step dancing body is separated from its historical roots in nationalism, from the exhibitionism required by the competitive form, and from the spectacularization of the commercialized theatrical format. In these works, which are both solo pieces performed by the choreographers themselves, the traditional form undergoes a critical interrogation in which the dancers attempt to depart from the determinacy of the traditional technique, while acknowledging its formation of their corporealities; the Irish step dance technique becomes a springboard for creative experimentation. In order to consider the importance of the creative potential revealed by these works, this chapter will contextualize them within the dance background from which they emerged, outlining the history of competitive step dancing in Ireland, the "modernization" of traditional Irish dance with the emergence of Riverdance (1994), and the experiments of Ireland's national folk theatre, Siamsa Tíre.

No evidence that runs of homozygosity are associated with schizophrenia in an Irish genome-wide association dataset

Runs of homozygosity (ROH), regions of the genome containing many consecutive homozygous SNPs, may represent two copies of a haplotype inherited from a common ancestor. A rare variant on this haplotype could thus be present in a homozygous and potentially recessive state. To detect rare risk variants for schizophrenia, we performed an ROH analysis in a homogeneous Irish genome wide association study (GWAS) dataset consisting of 1606 cases and 1794 controls. There was no genome-wide excess of ROH in cases compared to controls (p=0.7986). No consensus ROH at individual loci showed association with schizophrenia after genome-wide correction.

The Potency of Pastoral in Hispanic Baroque poetry

This monograph demonstrates that aesthetic and ontological anxieties continue to find diverse expression within the contrived textual artifice of the bucolic space. Drawing upon expansive definitions of the Hispanic literary Baroque, (Beverley, 1980, 2008, Echevarría 1993, Ross 1993, Chemris 2008 , Egido 2009 ) the study analyses the pastoral verse of representative poets of the period to demonstrate that they re-enter an Arcadia that has been defamiliarized but is nonetheless inexorably connected to the classical origins of the mode. Pastoral, in common with other literary forms, is subject to a process of re-evaluation which was latent in its classical legacy. Within the intricacies of this literary construct, surface artistry sustains an effect of artless innocence that is vibrantly contested across the secular, sacred, parodic and colonial text.

Dimensions of religious and national identity among Irish adolescents growing up in two jurisdictions

This poster explores the impact of growing up in different socio-political environments in the border areas of the Republic of Ireland (RoI) and Northern Ireland (NI) on adolescents’ evaluations of their religious and national identities. The vast majority of the population of the Republic of Ireland are Catholic and Irish whereas in Northern Ireland, the majority are Protestant and British. 713 adolescents (NI= 415; RoI=298), who categorised their religious identity as Catholic and their nationality as Irish completed the Collective Self – Esteem (CSE) scale (Crocker & Luhtanen, 1990) with reference to either their religious (N=350) or national identity (n=363). The overall rating of CSE for the Irish identity was significantly higher than the rating of CSE for the Catholic Identity. This result was modified by a significant interaction - adolescents in the Republic of Ireland rated the CSE of their Irish nationality higher than those in Northern Ireland (20.99 vs. 19.95), whereas adolescents in Northern Ireland rated the CSE of their Catholic religious identity higher than their peers in the Republic of Ireland (19.97 vs 18.87). Further analysis of the CSE subscales revealed differing patterns of relationships according to the scale. The evaluation of the Public Collective Self-Esteem of national and religious identities were significantly higher in the Republic of Ireland than in Northern Ireland, however Private Collective Self-esteem did not differ according to jurisdiction. These findings are discussed in relation to the social context and current theoretical accounts of collective identification processes.

Exporting Poor Health: The Irish in England

In the twentieth century, the Irish-born population in England has typically been in worse health than both the native population and the Irish population in Ireland, a reversal of the commonly observed healthy migrant effect. Recent birth cohorts living in England and born in Ireland, however, are healthier than the English population. The substantial Irish migrant health penalty arises principally for cohorts born between 1920 and 1960. In this article, we attempt to understand the processes that generated these changing migrant health patterns for Irish migrants to England. Our results suggest a strong role for economic selection in driving the dynamics of health differences between Irish-born migrants and white English populations.

Hydroclimatic changes during the 8.2 ka event inferred from Irish subfossil pines

A significant cold event, derived from the Greenland ice cores, took place between 8200 and 8000 cal. BP. Modeling of the event suggests that higher northern latitudes would have experienced considerable decreases in precipitation and that Ireland would have witnessed one of the greatest depressions. However, no well-dated proxy record exists from the British Isles to test the model results. Here we present independent evidence for a phase of major pine recruitment on Irish bogs at around 8150 cal. BP. Dendrochronological dating of subfossil trees from three sites reveal synchronicity in germination across the region, indicative of a regional forcing, and allows for high-precision radiocarbon based dates. The inner-rings of 40% of all samples from the north of Ireland dating to the period 8,500-7,500 cal. BP fall within a 25-year window. The concurrent colonization of pine on peatland is interpreted as drier conditions in the region and provide the first substantive proxy data in support of a significant hydrological change in the north of Ireland accompanying the 8.2 ka event. Our results also indicate that the apparent temporal asynchrony between anomalies in proxy records at the time could be a result of differences in dating methods.

Hydroclimatic changes during the 8.2 ka event revealed by Irish pines

A pivotal cold event, deduced from the Greenland ice cores, took place between 8200 and 8000 cal. BP. Modelling of this climatic episode suggests that higher northern latitudes would have also experienced substantial reduction in rainfall and that Ireland would have observed a notable decline. No well-dated proxy record exists from the British Isles to test the model results. We present significant independent data for a phase of increased Scots pine initiation on Irish bogs at around 8150 cal. BP. Dendrochronological dating of sub-fossil Scots pine trees from three locations reveals synchronicity in germination across the area, indicative of a regional forcing, and allows for high-precision radiocarbon based dates. The starting rings of 40% of all samples from the north of Ireland dating to the period 8500-7500 cal. BP fall within a period of 25 years. The present colonisation model of Scots pine on peatland is interpreted as increasing drier conditions in the region and provides the first meaningful proxy data in support of a significant hydrological change in the north of Ireland accompanying the 8.2 ka event. The dating uncertainties associated with the Irish Scots pine record and the Greenland Ice Core Chronology 2005 (GICC05) do not allow for any overlap between the two. The results indicate that the discrepancy could be a result of dating inaccuracy that could have affected analysis of prior proxy alignments.

Prevalence of potentially inappropriate prescribing and prescribing omissions in Irish adults: findings from the Irish LongituDinal Study on Ageing (TILDA)

Purpose: We sought to estimate the prevalence of potentially inappropriate prescriptions (PIP) and potential prescribing omissions (PPOs) using a subset of the STOPP/START criteria in a population based sample of Irish adults aged ≥65 years using data from The Irish LongituDinal Study on Ageing (TILDA).

Methods: A subset of 26 PIP indicators and 10 PPO indicators from the STOPP/START criteria were applied to the TILDA dataset. PIP/PPO prevalence according to individual STOPP/START criteria and the overall prevalence of PIP/PPO were estimated. The relationship between PIP and PPOs and polypharmacy, age, gender and multimorbidity was examined using logistic regression.

Results: The overall prevalence of PIP in the study population (n = 3,454) was 14.6 %. The most common examples of PIP identified were NSAID with moderate-severe hypertension (200 participants; 5.8 %) and aspirin with no history of coronary, cerebral, or peripheral vascular symptoms or occlusive event (112 participants; 3.2 %). The overall prevalence of PPOs was 30 % (n = 1,035). The most frequent PPO was antihypertensive therapy where systolic blood pressure consistently >160 mmHg (n = 341, 9.9 %), There was a significant association between PIP and PPO and polypharmacy when adjusting for age, sex and multimorbidity (adjusted OR 2.62, 95 % CI 2.05–3.33 for PIP and adjusted OR 1.46, 95 % CI 1.23–1.75 for prescribing omissions).

Conclusion: Our findings indicate prescribing omissions are twice as prevalent as PIP in the elderly using a subset of the STOPP/START criteria as an explicit process measure of potentially inappropriate prescribing and prescribing omissions. Polypharmacy was independently associated with both PPO and PIP. Application of such screening tools to prescribing decisions may reduce unnecessary medication, related adverse events, healthcare utilisation and cost.