Back Issues / 1999
Ireland - Challenges and Strains
The arrival of the Euro on January 1st marked an important stage in the European project begun in 1948. It heralded a new phase of European integration and interdependence. It has brought European economic unity closer and many hope that political and cultural unity will follow. It is hoped that European unity will put to rest the horrors that Europeans experienced in the first half of this century: depression, wars, fascism and genocide. We may well be on the threshold of fulfilling the hopes of those who launched the European project and that a united Europe will make another European war impossible. Peace and economic prosperity are goals worth striving for but these alone are unlikely to bind the people continent together.
A Criminal System - The Causes and Treatment of Crime
This issue of Studies is a joint enterprise involving the Anglo-Irish Encounter, the Irish Penal Reform Trust and Studies. We are delighted to publish five of the contributions to the Anglo-Irish Encounter conference in Limerick last September. We are happy to acknowledge the important part that the Trust played in the planning of the issue. We have seen in Ireland, as Paul O’Mahony points out, not only a rapid and steep growth in the quantity of crimes but also the emergence of crimes almost unknown until recently. The changes in the quantity and quality of crimes suggest that barriers to depraved and cruel behaviour have collapsed. Furthermore, the recent Irish Tribunals and trials of clerics for sexual abuse have revealed the crimes of the powerful and the privileged indicating a high level of criminal activity in the highest echelons of Irish society.
Across the Pond
Over the last decade or so, scholarship in the field of Irish Studies has increased dramatically on both sides of the pond. Though many of us reside in America, Ireland represents our sense of place. Our ancestors were the emigrants, exiles, and expatriates of yesterday. We carry with us their burdens and their memories. And we do not easily forget, nor readily forfeit, our Irish sensibilities. In "Yeats and Brian Coffey: Poems for their Daughters," Jack Morgan argues that Coffey "was part of that generation of Irish writers . . . who were suspicious of a glib and too easily exploited Celticism and uncomfortable in a literary context bearing everywhere the mark of Yeats." Morgan insists that in opposition to Yeats’ "excessively influential literary/cultural politics" Coffey’s work was representative of those "Irish expatriates who disavowed the Revival and its Irish-cultural preoccupations."
Streams of Faith In a Postmodern Landscape
Can streams of faith survive in a postmodern landscape? At first sight it seems unlikely. As Maria O’Loughlin puts it in her article in this issue of Studies: ‘The postmodern dynamic is concerned with the unravelling of Grand Narratives, those stories or versions of the truth which place themselves above all others........Yet with a centralised God, a bureaucratic organisation and its claims to universal truth, Christianity is a Grand Narrative itself’. Furthermore, the postmodern elevation of the subjective and its denigration of objective truth, has relativised all systems of thought, making Christianity one of many commodities in the market place of ideas. It, therefore, creates a climate of thought that undermines the universal claims of Christianity.
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