Irish Republican Army

The popular cliché sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me has bothered me since kindergarten. Words can never hurt me? Words have hurt me will hurt me will change me will make me better and are impactful. During Ireland’s revolutionary period of ideas and nationalism it makes sense that poets and writers flourished. In class this semester we had a working definition of Nationalism meaning a devotion to the interests and culture of a particular nation; a striving force…

Ireland of its identity and use it for economic gain the Irish and…

Somber, cheerless, regressive; typical personalities of rural Irish. In“Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics”, Nancy Scheper- Hughes, discovered a great amount of revelations. From questioning mental illness to making connections in human behavior, Scheper- Hughes’ discoveries of rural Irish were controversial to say the least. While some of her discoveries were easy to fathom, others such as the similarities in personalities were not. Due to the fact that I was raised in a diverse and…

W.B. Yeats’ Opinion of War W.B. Yeats was an Irish poet during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. He wrote following the belief of “spiritus mundi”, the spirit of the universe and the collective unconscious or memory, which influences him to write around different mythologies, despite being a Christian. “Spiritus Mundi” leads to two of the works that reflect his opinion regarding war and conquest. Through these two works, “Leda and the Swan” and “The Second Coming,” Yeats’ opinion of war as a…

wander the streets of the Irish capital today, they would witness signs of urban decay, homelessness, drug abuse and uneducated, impoverished youths floating aimlessly around the inner city, left to fend for themselves by the Irish state. In relating to such, it is still incomprehensible that one of the greatest pieces of satire ever composed, Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’ is still as relevant today in society as it was 285 years ago. Written in 1729, in an era of Irish history where…

Throughout his short story “A Little Cloud,” James Joyce considers the ramifications of remaining sedentary in Dublin through his characters Little Chandler and Ignatius Gallaher. That Little Chandler and Gallaher seem so antithetical, despite their proximity and similar upbringings, invites the reader to question whether Joyce intends to insinuate that success is only possible outside of Dublin, and that ambition and Celtic nationalism are incongruous. Having left Ireland at twenty years old,…

How does Fitz present the moral corruption of the 1920s? Fitzgerald criticizes the moral corruption of 1920s society in in the text ‘The Great Gatsby’, as one of materialism, frivolity, and hedonism. The theme of moral corruption is reflected in numerous ways, which Fitzgerald is inherently criticising through his portrayal of materialism and frivolity in upper class characters of the novel, and the symbolism of location. This links directly to the themes of the American Dream, mass consumerism…

Seamus Heaney was a man who was born April 13, 1939 in Castledawson, a village in County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Heaney was most well-known for being a great poet, but Heaney was more than just a poet. Heaney was also a translator, educator, and a critic. Heaney was a school teacher in Northern Ireland while in his mid-twenties. He had taught at universities like Oxford University and Harvard University. In addition to teaching at these highly respected universities, Heaney had also spent…

James Joyce’s Dubliners, a collection of short stories, examines Irish life in the late nineteeth century and early twentieth century through the use of complex characters and multifacteted plots. Three of these stories, “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” “A Mother,” and “Grace,” focuse exclusively on public life. In Joyce’s eyes, public life in Dublin was run by politics, art, and religion. While each of these stories takes on a different subtopic of public life, they share an overarching theme.…

‘Clashed’ with Protestant American values. These stereotypes were highlighted to put down the Irish immigrant community and were created out of fear because these Irish immigrants challenged for job openings. The Irish immigrants were stereotyped as barbaric, unskilled, impoverished and unpolished. Anti-Irish cartoons for magazines such as Harper's Weekly featured cartoons by Thomas Nast and depicted Irish immigrants as ape-like barbarians prone to lawlessness, laziness and drunkenness. 4 The…