Eibhear Walshe. Kate O´Brien. A Writing Life

Eibhear Walshe. Kate O´Brien. A Writing Life. Dublin: Irish Academic Press,2006,194 pages

Ways of Remembering: Musical Reveries Over Childhood and Youth

In this paper we aim to analyze three different works – The Dead,The Butcher Boy and The Speckled People – and to show the capacity ofmusic to activate memory and to act as a catalyst for nostalgia. Ballads and songs create in these works a landscape of its own, functioning both as a barrier and as a link between different characters and different worlds. An instrument or a song can become an objective correlative to the characters‘broken dreams or truncated hopes, synchronizing with their life’s rhythm, their emotional shades and accurately echoing their passions and frustrations, since the music that interweaves in the text is by no means accidental. Quite the opposite, it emanates from a carefully selected repertoire that sounds at the crucial moments and that operates as a sort of musical variation on a threefold theme: a failed love experience, a truncated sentimental journey and an intense feeling of otherness

Friel, Brian: Traducciones. Translated and edited by Mª Yolanda Fernández Suárez.

Friel, Brian: Traducciones. Translated and edited by Mª Yolanda FernándezSuárez. Madrid: Publicaciones de la Asociación de Directores de Escena deEspaña, 2016

Atrasentan and renal events in patients with type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease (SONAR): a double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trial

Background: Short-term treatment for people with type 2 diabetes using a low dose of the selective endothelin A receptor antagonist atrasentan reduces albuminuria without causing significant sodium retention. We report the long-term effects of treatment with atrasentan on major renal outcomes. Methods: We did this double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trial at 689 sites in 41 countries. We enrolled adults aged 18–85 years with type 2 diabetes, estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR)25–75 mL/min per 1·73 m 2 of body surface area, and a urine albumin-to-creatinine ratio (UACR)of 300–5000 mg/g who had received maximum labelled or tolerated renin–angiotensin system inhibition for at least 4 weeks. Participants were given atrasentan 0·75 mg orally daily during an enrichment period before random group assignment. Those with a UACR decrease of at least 30% with no substantial fluid retention during the enrichment period (responders)were included in the double-blind treatment period. Responders were randomly assigned to receive either atrasentan 0·75 mg orally daily or placebo. All patients and investigators were masked to treatment assignment. The primary endpoint was a composite of doubling of serum creatinine (sustained for ≥30 days)or end-stage kidney disease (eGFR <15 mL/min per 1·73 m 2 sustained for ≥90 days, chronic dialysis for ≥90 days, kidney transplantation, or death from kidney failure)in the intention-to-treat population of all responders. Safety was assessed in all patients who received at least one dose of their assigned study treatment. The study is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCT01858532. Findings: Between May 17, 2013, and July 13, 2017, 11 087 patients were screened; 5117 entered the enrichment period, and 4711 completed the enrichment period. Of these, 2648 patients were responders and were randomly assigned to the atrasentan group (n=1325)or placebo group (n=1323). Median follow-up was 2·2 years (IQR 1·4–2·9). 79 (6·0%)of 1325 patients in the atrasentan group and 105 (7·9%)of 1323 in the placebo group had a primary composite renal endpoint event (hazard ratio [HR]0·65 [95% CI 0·49–0·88]; p=0·0047). Fluid retention and anaemia adverse events, which have been previously attributed to endothelin receptor antagonists, were more frequent in the atrasentan group than in the placebo group. Hospital admission for heart failure occurred in 47 (3·5%)of 1325 patients in the atrasentan group and 34 (2·6%)of 1323 patients in the placebo group (HR 1·33 [95% CI 0·85–2·07]; p=0·208). 58 (4·4%)patients in the atrasentan group and 52 (3·9%)in the placebo group died (HR 1·09 [95% CI 0·75–1·59]; p=0·65). Interpretation: Atrasentan reduced the risk of renal events in patients with diabetes and chronic kidney disease who were selected to optimise efficacy and safety. These data support a potential role for selective endothelin receptor antagonists in protecting renal function in patients with type 2 diabetes at high risk of developing end-stage kidney disease. Funding: AbbVie

A voice of their own?: the role of women in contemporary Irish poetry

This paper is an attempt to describe and evaluate the distinctively female voice in contemporary Irish poetry, concentrating on the works of Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin, Eavan Boland, Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Both the private and the public dimension of their poetic output are analysed, with special reference to their attentiveness to ordinary life, their self-conscious femaleness, their concern for the past and their involvement in social and political affairs

Poetry and Satire in Comtemporary Ireland: an approach to Paul Durcan's poetry

The aim of this paper is to approach Paul Durcan (Dublin, 1944) from a double viewpoint: first of all, to value him as the true heir of the Irish satirical tradition of the present century embodied by James Joyce, Austin Clarke and Patrick Kavanagh. Secondly, to define him as the poet of the "sense of non- place" , the poet of the feeling of dislocation that exists today in Irish society and Irish poetry .Durcan's irreverent and iconoclastic poems depict both institutions and individuals and denounce the violence of the former upon the latter, the Catholic Church being his commmonest target. But at the same time he voices perfectly the world of the dispossesed and the outcast, combining a shocking sense of humour with a great amount of tenderness

"Those Five Glenties Women": Echoes of Lorca in "Dancing at Lughnasa"

This essay will attempt to show the numerous points that Lorca's La casa de Bernarda Alba and Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa have in common. Both plays create an intense rural atmosphere in their respective countries -Ireland and Spain- with echoes of the tragic days of 1936; and both introduce us to the rarefied community of five single women dominated by sexual repression and enclosed in the narrow confines of domestic space. The role of women at home was strongly emphasized by the papal encyclicals Castii Connubbi (1930) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931), highly influential in both countries. Interrogations and redefinitions of the female domestic space have been a central issue in gender studies, and so from this perspective we approach both plays as evidence of feminine oppression and its representation in the house, which stands for the five women's honour. The strict law of space will prove an obstacle for their sexuality, marriage and motherhood and its transgression will be severely punished. The sexual morality imposed by the Catholic Church will make the five women lifelong prisoners and will preside over the claustrophobic society they belong to