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Essays
Are Irish schoolbooks antisemitic?
Niall Ó Ciosáin writes: Irish criticisms of the actions of Israel in recent years have led to repeated accusations in the Israeli press and elsewhere that antisemitism is widespread in Irish society. One element of this accusation is the perception that the Irish education system is socialising children and young people into antisemitism. This idea was given momentum and apparent credibility last year by the appearance of a report on Irish school textbooks, published by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (Impact-se), an Israeli-British agency which has taken as its mission to monitor the image of Judaism and Israel in schoolbooks internationally. While the agency mostly concentrates on Muslim countries in Asia and Africa, in the last year it has also published a series of studies of textbooks in European countries. Its report on Ireland found ‘a
troubling pattern of trivialisation and minimisation of the Holocaust’, along with misrepresentation of Judaism. These are strong claims. Do they stand up?
Poetry and Politics
Peter Sirr writes: What use is poetry? It’s a question that has echoed down the centuries. The more violent and disturbing the times, the more frequently it gets asked. Not that there were ever times when poetry could count on unquestioning acceptance. There were plenty of louts in the mead halls throwing their horns at the scops, and we all know what Plato thought. It’s over thirty years since Dana Gioia dissected the peripherality of poetry in US culture and things haven’t changed much since. Poetry, he argued then, has retreated into a noisy and diffuse sub-culture or series of sub-cultures.
Having a Reputation
Stefan Collini writes: James Bryce was born in Belfast in 1838 and spent the first eight years of his life in that city. His parents had been born and raised in Ulster, but, like so many of their neighbours in the nineteenth century, thought of themselves as Scots, Bryce’s paternal grandfather having crossed the Irish Sea from Lanark in 1805. The family moved to Glasgow in 1846. Bryce took a First in ‘Greats’ at Oxford in 1861, followed, remarkably, by a First in Law and History the following term. Thereafter, his life was largely spent in those quintessentially English institutions, Oxford University, the Inns of Court and parliament. Common usage at the time, both at home and abroad, spoke of ‘England’ where we might more accurately speak of ‘Britain’, and Bryce was generally regarded (and may even have regarded himself) as an Englishman of Scottish descent. In terms of the cod-racial
terms favoured at the time, it mattered that the Scots-Irish, whether from Ulster or lowland Scotland, were, unlike the ‘Irish’ and Highland Scots, of ‘Teutonic’ not ‘Celtic’ stock.
Ligatured to Contraction
Maurice Earls writes: In order to be widely accepted in the new Ireland the church was, among other things, required to support a popular politics increasingly concerned with land redistribution, oppose the interests of the landed gentry, accept the necessity of late marriage and legitimise a cult of sexual restraint (purity). These were all contrary to normal Catholic practice. In the process the church became a socially coercive institution, but it was a licensed coercion, approved by society. This ‘license’ was exploited politically by the church, which sought to dominate and lead society. Concerted efforts were made to undermine the Irish Enlightenment tradition in its liberal and democratic manifestations. The bishop of Meath, for example, engaged in active and ruthless campaigning against the liberal tradition. He declared the voice of that tradition, the Westmeath Examiner, to be
‘dangerous to the faith and morals of the people’. His priests claimed that a patriotism which denied the priests their historic role as moral and political leaders of the people was false patriotism.
Palestinians and Other Strangers
Lori Allen writes: In his latest book, ‘The Message’, Ta-Nehisi Coates records his conversion to a new understanding. It is the story of an epiphany of the type that Palestinian-British novelist Isabella Hammad discusses in her extended essay ‘Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative’, which was published a week after ‘The Message’. ‘Recognising the Stranger’ shows Hammad’s path to similar conclusions – albeit with more ambivalence – about the need to recognise ourselves in the other. Both writers analyse the ingredients of wilful ignorance and hold out hope in the possibility of acknowledgment and recognition. Neither offer much guidance on how to propel action towards justice after that recognition is achieved, but they insist that acknowledging the humanity in others, grasping the mutual responsibility entailed in that, is at the crux of humanity itself. We might call it
solidarity as moral principle.
Rereading: ‘On the Closing of the American Mind’
Richard Kraut writes: For Allan Bloom, the humanities alone – that is, philosophy and imaginative literature – can educate students, but they too, as they are currently taught, are failures. ‘The humanities are the specialty that now exclusively possesses the books that are not specialized, that insist upon asking the questions about the whole that are excluded from the rest of the university, which is dominated by real specialties, as resistant to self-examination as they were in Socrates’ day and now rid of the gadfly … The kinds of questions children ask: Is there a God? Is there freedom? Is there punishment for evil deeds? Is there certain knowledge? What is a good society? were once also the questions asked by science and philosophy. But now the grownups are too busy at work, and the children are left in a day-care center called the humanities.’
Nocturne
A new poem from Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Blogs
Evidence of Fullness
Ciarán O’Rourke writes: On the evidence of his work to date – his second poetry collection, ‘The Meek’, was published in 2025 – Martin Dyar might be thought of as an able, and often savagely funny, dramatist of the universal human parish. He listens carefully, and reports in verse on what he hears, while compulsively patrolling a zone known to all (and perhaps reminiscent of ‘Cré na Cille’), where latent hurts and rancours learn to speak. ‘You must be forceful / in your concentration’, he observes against the clamour, ‘Cold cartography must / define your heart.’
Party Time Over?
Michael Laver writes: Didi Kuo’s premise is set out clearly on the first page of her study: ‘Parties are integral to the functioning of democracy, because they give meaning to participation, to political conflict, and to the very purpose of government… Yet citizens around the world have become cynical about the role parties play in democratic governments. Parties are some of the most unpopular institutions in democracies.’ Targeting an engaged general reader, the author combines a synthesis of arguments by well-known specialists in (mostly) US politics with her own interpretation of recent (mostly) US political history.
Centenary of ‘The Plough and the Stars’
Bess Rowen writes: The Plough’s depiction of the realistic nihilism of average Dublin men and women caught up in the violence of Easter Week was shocking, as was the image of the plough and the stars itself being carried into a public house, and the presence of (and potential empathy for) Rosie Redmond. But Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington was clear in her messaging: her objections to the play were not moral. In fact, she claimed she did not want the play censored, instead insisting that it was too soon for the national theatre to stage a less than rosy picture of the events it depicted. Her newspaper exchanges with O’Casey about representation and the responsibility of the theatre lasted far beyond the play’s Abbey run; they revealed her strong political views while also showing her strong love and respect for her deceased husband.
Semantic Escalation
Charlie Ellis writes: The English lexicon is famously hospitable. Much to the chagrin of prescriptivist sticklers, it is a language that greets new arrivals with open arms. We are accustomed to technological neologisms like ‘doomscrolling’, ‘podcast’, and ‘vibe coding’ and track them with the obsessive energy of a birder spotting a rare migrant. Every December, the Collins or Oxford ‘Word of the Year’ generates a predictable flurry of headlines, offering a neat, if shallow, summary of the preceding twelve months.
A Political Exile
Thomas McCarthy writes: Theo Dorgan’s novel ‘Camarade’ carries us across the ocean of a young socialist’s mind, with his background of Cork radicalism and militant socialism in the immediate post-Spanish Civil War years. The spirit of youthful radicalism learned from a veteran Republican grandfather (in both the Spanish and the Irish sense) is what carries the main character of this novel, propelling his personal drama in a dreamlike manner from the attempted shooting of a Cork policeman to a life of flight and exile among radical political activists in Paris between the 1960s late de Gaulle era and the early dawn of the Mitterrand presidency.
