Vincent Buckley: Shaping the Book

The basic shape of a biography is given by the facts of the life of its subject. The biographer’s task is to make sense of these facts: to provide a map that will show the significance of the facts, their relationship to each other and to their historical context. This map will show the features of the subject’s journey through life, but it is also the result of the biographer’s own journey through the subject’s life. The interactions between these two journeys give the book its shape, map its patterns. This paper will show some of the paths the author attempted and try to explain the directions the author eventually took

Paula Meehan’s Cell: The Imprisoned Dialogue of Female Discourses

The paper discusses Paula Mehan’s play Cell with focus on the female discourses present in the context of this literary work and the multifold metaphorisation that both the title of the work and the contents invite. The discourses are analysed against the relevant social background and critical literature. The focal types of discourses under discussion involve imagery from maternal and familiar discourse, the “biological” discourse related to hygiene, the sexual discourse, the mock feminist discourse, the discourse of the military and the propaganda of the common good, and the discourse related to the animal world

Memory and Performance in Dublin’s Art Scenario: Brian O’Doherty and Sebastian Barry

In 2008 Brian O’Doherty buried his alter ego, Patrick Ireland, in Dublin, as a consequence of peace having been restored in Northern Ireland. “We are burying hate”, said the New York artist of Irish origin, “it’s not often you get the chance to do that”. With Patrick’s masked effigy lain in a coffin the memory of past tragic times was spectacularized, and paved the way to a more luminous future. In the previous summer the staging of Sebastian Barry’s The Pride of Parnell Street focuses on a episode of domestic violence by a Dublin fellow on the occasion of “Italia ’90” world cup. By staging the anxieties and confronting the fears of the two protagonists, man and wife, who have since then lived separately, in a one-to-one dialogue disguised as a monologue, both the woman and the man end up recovering one’s freedom and one’s pride, respectively. Through the analysis of O’Doherty’s and Barry’s performance, the essay shows how the contemporary artistic and multicultural global ferments, and the new ethnic dimension since the rising of the Celtic Tiger have brought changes to the social texture of a nation marred by forced emigration. Also, a 2007 film directed by John Carney, Once, proposes, through the story of an Irish Guy and a Czech migrant Girl, a social cross section that could work in Dublin as well as, thanks to the new global cultural flows, in any other of today’s ethnoscapes and ideoscapes

Diversity in the Irish workplace - lesbian women's experience as nurses

Work is an area which represents an important part of people’s lives where they encounter the Other. It provides an individual with a sense of who they are in society, through their membership of communities. Through work, a lesbian woman’s identity has to be negotiated as private lives and public lives can overlap. For lesbian women, work and identity intersect, providing a coherent sense of accomplishment. Research has shown that lesbian women are aware of the attitudes that prevail about lesbian women in the health care environment as they encounter them in their working lives: homophobia; lack of social support and understanding leading to non-disclosure of their own sexuality. Lesbian nurses work within the institution of medicine that reflects societal heterosexual norms. The methodology derived from the qualitative tradition employing hermeneutic phenomenology. It presents an original conceptualisation and consistent application of theoretical frameworks of Heidegger and Sartre. Interviews were conducted between March 2006 and April 2007 with seven lesbian nurses. Lesbian nurses in Ireland remain in the “closet” leading some lesbian nurses to experience social isolation. This paper argues that being oneself is difficult for lesbian nurses who work in the heteronormative culture of Irish hospitals