A summer look at books - history of Irish language, New York’s Catholic Irish, fiction from the west of Ireland

On an Irish Island
By Robert Kanigel

Toward the end of the 19th century the native Irish language was being exiled to all but the most remote parts of the island. In fact sometimes it was literally driven off the land entirely to island communities like the Great Blasket.

It’s one of the ironies of the Victorian century that soon the local residents found themselves being sought after for the unadulterated Irish they still spoke. In short order big city poets and scholars were rubbing shoulders with rustic fishermen and farmers as the Irish Literary Revival took flight and the world of the Industrial Revolution found itself stepping back into ancient time for the duration of a summer, stepping into a time they consistently found sweeter and more rewarding.

In Robert Kanigel’s immensely readable and passionate exploration of the inspiration the natives provided to the artists and thinkers who visited the island, he has crafted a love letter to a vanishing world as it is slowly engulfed by the siren call of modernity.

Lives like the ones described in this book are no longer possible; from the craftsmanship that built their boats and knitted their garments and mended their nets to the language they spoke and the spirit it expressed, all are lost to time if not to literature. For a brief moment in Kanigan’s masterful study they live again. This book is literally spell binding.

Knopf, $26.95.

Bishop John J. Hughes, His Church and the Coming Age of New York’s Catholic Irish
By Richard Daniel McCann

New York’s first Archbishop John J. Hughes ought to be as widely known and celebrated in the Irish community as John F. Kennedy’s. An early architect of the Irish century that saw the rise of the Kennedy clan themselves, he was utterly central to the lives and dignity of the tens of thousands of Irish fleeing the great hunger to arrive on these shores.

Thanks to McCann’s scholarly and thoughtful new study, Hughes’ life and legacy are in no danger of being a forgotten chapter of the story of New York City.

Born in Annaloghan in Co. Tyrone in 1797, Hughes grew up in a townland where his legal second-class citizenship made an enduring impression on him. Later moving to the U.S., Hughes’ lifelong quest was to see Irish Catholics take their place at the head of strong religious, political and social organizations, the keys to power and influence nationally. Along the way he defended his people from the nativist mobs who sought to marginalize and even kill them.

He had serious shortcomings. For someone so committed to social justice for the Irish, and to battling anti-Catholic sentiment and xenophobia wherever he found it, Hughes remained opposed to abolitionism, the movement to end slavery.  He opposed slavery, but not the massive social upheaval he argued it would cause were it to be ended.

A reactionary conservative, he also opposed the work of the Fenians, the Young Ireland Movement and every other organization that agitated for the removal of English rule in Ireland. They always failed in their efforts, he warned his flock. Besides, many of them were influenced by French revolutionary thinking, which included anti-clericalism and atheism.

But nonetheless Hughes’ stewardship of the Irish community in New York had national implications that rippled outward for decades after his death.

Hughes literally put the Irish on the map, laying the cornerstone of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1858, but his influence and legacy stretched even further and McCann explores it with particular emphasis on the man and his decades long ministry.

E.Booktime.com, $13.50.

Long Time, No See
By Dermot Healy

It's wonderful to witness what the west of Ireland can do to an unprepossessing English sentence. I’m tired becomes I’m destroyed, which is altogether more theatrical. There’s a storm raging outside becomes she’s windy, which is more economical and amusingly understated.

If you can make sense of the alternating Irish desire for flamboyance and economy, without getting whiplash, you’ll love Healey’s deeply felt and tender new novel about family and forgiveness, this time across generations.

Healy knows and writes about the west and Galway like no other Irish writer and his novel is a marvel from start to finish, an epic tale of love and contrition, but creaturely and homespun too, and sure to cast a spell.

Penguin, $18.

Reviews by Cahir O'Doherty, Irish Voice Arts Editor

Ciaran Collin’s debut novel “The Gamal” exposes the dark heart of the Irish small town

Ciaran Collins

As generations of Irish writers have warned us, nasty things can happen to you if you don’t fit the mold in small town Ireland. Ciaran Collins’ remarkable debut novel 'The Gamal' tells the story of one such misfit, exposing the dark heart of the Irish town he lives in along the way. Collins talks to Cahir O'Doherty about the critical hosannas that have greeted the book’s arrival and what inspired him to tell this dark tale.

Once in a while a novel from Ireland appears that has the power to make you reassess how you think and feel about the country. This year that head turning distinction belongs to Ciaran Collins, 35, the working school teacher whose debut novel 'The Gamal' has garnered more praise in six months that most authors hear in a lifetime.

Charlie, the 25-year-old gamal of the title (from the Irish word for fool) is a weird kid. He’s usually on his own, he’s awkward in public, he makes people feel uncomfortable. Even his parents think he’s a bit thick.

There’s more than a hint of The Catcher in the Rye at work in this absorbing tale, but Collins has the skill to make you welcome the comparison. The fact is 'The Gamal' describes Irish rural life and manners so evocatively that you’ll be spellbound from the first to last page.

Unlike most people in his Northern Irish village of Ballyronan, misfit Charlie genuinely doesn’t care if you don’t like him. But his attitude is a form of sacrilege in his rural community, where being liked or at least admired is usually central to a sense of self worth.

Not Charlie though. “You won’t like me,” he confidently tells the reader. “Mainly because you know I don't care whether you like me or not.”

But the thing is, for someone who spends so much time assuring us he doesn’t care, Charlie spends an awful lot of time trying to convince us he’s telling the truth.

People don’t rate Charlie, so they let their guard down around him, saying things they may later come to regret. Because they pay no attention to him they rarely ever notice how much attention he’s been paying to them, until it’s too late.

“I have always been attracted to literature that always has an element of the outsider in it,” Collins tells the Irish Voice. “From writers who try and develop a character who’s telling the story from the outsiders perspective, you know?”

Collins’ own Cork accent is strong and clear on the telephone line.

“I’m from a village called Inishshannon in West Cork.  It’s a typical rural village within half an hour of Cork City,” he says. “It’s the countryside really. I’m looking out the window of my back kitchen here at open fields.”

No wonder he can write about rural Ireland so convincingly. In person Collins looks like he’s played GAA games for most of his life because he actually has.

His to-the-point speaking voice sounds distinctly level headed and smart, and the impression he gives is of a modest, decent skin. That impression is further solidified by the realization that he doesn’t know another living Irish novelist on a first name basis.

“I don’t really know any writers except those I’ve come into contact with through my publisher Bloomsbury and the publishing world,” Collins explains.

“My father is a retired schoolmaster. There would have been books and music in my home growing up. My mother was very interested in music and my father was interested in books and sport. I’m one of eight children. I grew up reading, although I’ve always loved sports and the outdoors life as well.”

With a writing style that at times faintly echoes Roddy Doyle’s and Pat McCabe’s, Collins is still very much his own man, an immensely assured writer confident of his narrative gifts and in his ability to beguile the reader, making 'The Gamal' one of the best debuts I have read in a decade.

Collins studied English at University College Cork, where he also got his master’s. “That gave me the time to read up on stuff that I was interested in myself,” he says.

That included works by Eugene O’Neill, John McGahern and Cormac McCarthy, all of whom he lists as influences. But his own efforts found him an agent and a publisher – he simply sent out excerpts from the new book until he got a bite.

With determination like that it’s no wonder he was attracted to storylines about Irish outsiders and the challenges they face. In 'The Gamal' Charlie’s own little narrative pushes back aggressively against the bigger narrative of his tribe, and his imagination refuses to be constrained by the narrow claims of his community.

“I probably am guilty of dreaming big myself,” says Collins, considering if there’s any similarity between himself and Charlie.

“As a 16-year-old I assumed that I’d at least be a rock star. That said, I never felt to be an outsider, but as a writer and an artist you do step back from the social world.”

Collins admits he still has great friends from Inishshannon, most from the secondary school there.

“They’re probably amused to hear I’ve written a book. I wouldn’t have told them I was writing it, I just did it,” he says.

Like most compelling novels about small town Irish life, bullying, depression, suicide and erotic obsession make early and unforgettable appearances in 'The Gamal.' But it’s the depth of Charlie’s passion for emerging young singer Sinead that most impresses the reader. With its sincerity and heartache it’s the kind of adoration that’s rare in literature now, which makes it all the more memorable.

“It’s an unrequited love. Charlie has the pleasure of Sinead’s company, but he knows that he will always be the third wheel, the fly on the wall, as opposed to his friend James who Sinead does fall for.

“It was interesting to write about the jealousies that arise between them. Charlie’s obsessed with her in really unhealthy ways too, of course.”

Crucially, Collins writes about the intensity of teenage passions in 'The Gamal' without patronizing them. In fact, he believes they become central to our identities as adults later on.

“Our teenage experiences inform and shape us for our whole lives, regardless of where you were at the time,” Collins says.

“The jealousies and disappointments and coming to terms with the adult world. The way that you carve out your own corner. I think these things are universal.”

Along the way the book also lifts the lid on contemporary Irish life, particularly when it comes to teenagers in the post-Tiger era.

“I love the fact that it reflects a truth about small town Irish life,” says Collins. “The portrayal of hopelessness of Irish young people is something people have mentioned. This book was started before the recession came about. But there is a kind of hopelessness around now.”

As a schoolteacher and a novelist Collins writes and speaks about what he calls the disaffection of Irish youth, which he can experience first hand in his own class room.

With the collapse of the Irish financial industry and the exposure of the Catholic Church for the decades of abuse it covered up, it can be hard to see the silver lining some days he says.

“Irish teenagers live in total disappointment with what the adult world has provided for them. You hope that through sport and creative pastimes that they’ll go on to be fulfilled. Part of that disaffection is the normal teenage attitude to life but I think it’s prevalent,” he says.

“We’re hearing stories of young Irish people in Australia getting drunk from one week to another. It isn’t a happy drunk; it’s an angry kind of drinking. The insular nature of the Ireland of the past 60 years hasn’t helped us.”

A sign of the times for Collins, who is an avid sports fan, is that he found he could not field a Junior B hurling team for his local GAA club. Too many kids had emigrated to make the numbers work.

“That pervasive sense of crisis and collapse finds expression in lots of ways,” says Collins, not needing to add that they aren’t always positive.

“In small Irish towns you see humanity up close. Almost in a fishbowl in a village like that. That’s probably why they’re so attractive for writers. In big cities people aren’t really thrown together in the same way.”

A tragicomic awareness has shaped Collins’ hilarious and terrifying new novel, the first truly accomplished work of post-collapse Ireland. In 'The Gamal' he holds up a bright polished mirror and shows us our own faces.

London Irish Women’s Center is the focus of new documentary film - VIDEO

Still from "Breaking Ground: The Story of the London Irish Women's Centre"

On Friday, July 12 you’ll have a wonderful alternative to the watching the endless lines of bowler-hatted Orange men parading to a big drumbeat on the Internet and on satellite news.

If you’re in New York, why not pop down to the Irish Center in Long Island City, Queens to see a contrasting image of what’s possible when spirited Irish women decide to make a difference to their community.

Breaking Ground: The Story of the London Irish Women's Centre , directed by Dublin-born artist and editor Michelle Deignan, is the absorbing tale of what happened when droves of suddenly displaced young Irish women began arriving in London in the hopes of making a new life for themselves.

As the film shows, the biting recession of the eighties in Ireland compelled many of them to  emigrate, but there were deeper privations at work too.

The Catholic Church’s grip on the politics and culture of the nation, and in consequence on the daily lives and choices of Irish women, copper-fastened an oppression so pervasive it seemed impossible to dislodge.

For many women London seemed to offer an opportunity to live a life free of clerical interference.

It also offered a measure of economic independence from the often conservative and controlling expectations of Irish families.

Whatever the allure was, there’s no doubt that throughout the eighties Irish women emigrated to London in their droves, and towards the end of the decade they made up an astonishing 10 percent of the capital's female population. Whatever was driving them out was working.

In the past Irish county societies in London had offered new emigrants a necessary hand up.

But this new generation of arriving Irish women found that the welcome had strings attached.

In particular, they discovered that the attitudes and ways of life they had sought to escape were being faithfully replicated overseas.

So in the end the creation of London Irish Women's Centre, a self-described radical organization located in Stoke Newington, provided thousands of Irish women with the community they were actually seeking throughout its long life from 1983 until 2012.

But the center didn’t just exist to help the new arrivals. It also successfully sought to represent and support previous generations of Irish women in London.

It insisted on doing this on its own terms of course, without clerical or government interference shaping or attempting to influence its agenda.

By creating an alternative cultural and political space for women to be Irish, they found for the first time a place to discuss and make public the issues that were pertinent to both women in Ireland and Irish women in London.

They didn’t do all this in a vacuum, the film shows.

There was a strong and serious backdrop of anti-Irish racism to contend with from within the U.K. There was also pushback from the more conservative Irish community in London.

But the center persevered and it began to carve out a new space for discussions to occur where previously there had only been silence. Chief among the grievances was the fact that Irish women were among the most disadvantaged ethnic and gender groups in terms of housing and employment.

As the film shows, what the London Irish Women's Centre did was tackle all the inequalities and difficulties faced by Irish women in London, actively agitating for change and providing practical services to support Irish women to live daily lives along the way.

Last year Deignan was approached by Claire Barry, the director of the London Irish Women’s Centre, to make a film about it.

“She was actually in process of winding up the center,” Deignan tells the Irish Voice. “It wasn’t
sustainable in terms of maintaining its funding anymore. It was single ethnicity; single gender and it had been going for 29 years. So they were in the process of changing its mission but they were very keen to document what it had been.”

Deignan understood what a remarkable opportunity it represented and almost immediately said yes. Initially she planned to make a 30-minute film, but she discovered the source material, which included original videos of the conferences held by the group in the eighties and nineties, made it twice as long.

“What we have now is a document of a real Irish success story in London,” says Deignan.

“They weren’t just dealing with the legacy of oppressive ideas about femininity and womanhood in Ireland at the time. They confronted how difficult it was to be Irish in London.“

They also confronted their own community’s expectations about how women should behave.

The center became the place where they thrashed all that out. It worked.”

The film starts at 7:30 p.m. Visit www.newyorkirishcenter.org for information.

Here's a trailer for the movie: 

'Stop the Tempo' in New York - Romania’s failure through an Irish lens

Olivia Horton, Reuben Barsky, and Sarah Silk in Stop the Tempo

If anyone knows about the irreversible process of cultural colonialism it’s the Irish. That’s why Ireland’s most iconoclastic young Irish theater director Matt Torney is a perfect fit to direct Stop the Tempo, a ferocious new work about displacement and drifting written by Romanian-born playwright Gianina Carbunariu.

After the fall of communism in 1989 Romania -- until that point a second tier communist state in the grip of the ruthless dictator Nicolae Ceausescu -- saw itself transformed overnight, becoming a sort of free market Petri dish suddenly brimming with corporations, easy cash, chain stores and chattering media personalities.

For Carbunariu, 36, and for her generation Romania became completely unrecognizable. Born and raised in a failed state, she suddenly had to find her way in a flashy new landscape of mindless consumerism and rampant consumer culture.

Generations of the Irish have seen Ireland mapped and remapped in endless colonial and cultural expansions that have often led to a similar kind of displacement and fury, and so the play and the author are an ideal fit for Origin Theatre Company, the innovative company with a mission to produce new European works and the producers of the annual 1st Irish Theatre Festival.

There are many kinds of theft, but to see your culture and your history purloined in exchange for a bag of shiny baubles (a colonial rite of passage from Romania to Ireland to Manhattan) is particularly searing and results in the most enraged piece of playwriting I have seen this year.

Carbunariu isn’t claiming that life in the old communist Romania was better, but she’s full of contempt for what has come to replace it – a society that apparently knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. A nation numbed by the endless cycle of aspiration and fantasy that’s fed to it from its flickering TV screens. A soulless place, a massive supermarket.

Torney chose Arlene’s Grocery in the trendy Lower East Side to stage the show (which has just closed, but will open again later in the year). It’s an inspired choice for a production and three characters that flit from club to club in search of contact highs or self-escape.

Under Torney’s meticulous direction, actors Olivia Horton, Reuben Barsky and Sarah Silk have formed a perfectly coiled unit to present Carbunariu’s challenging play. In fact they function with more precision and mutual support than I have seen on a New York stage in years.

That awareness of and insistence on interdependency is a European theater commonplace, but it’s unusual to see in a New York production where it becomes as political as it is artistic.

Carbunariu’s work is, it must be said, quite self-consciously radical at times, trading a little too much on its desire to provoke or shock. There’s something more than a little adolescent about its punk rock nihilism and its thoughtless joy in anarchy.

But God knows there’s no doubting its anguish. Behind all its theatrics, its alienation and its last stands is something that disarms you -- its sincerity.

Romania once had citizens, and now it has consumers, the playwright informs us. To make his point about how the new capitalistic Romania over-stimulates and hoodwinks consumers with a non-stop barrage of products and services they’re told they’ll almost die without, Torney has crafted a shifting mercurial production that flouts complacency.

The three characters in the play, adrift in their personal lives until they find each other, protest their disillusionment with a series of public pranks that quickly escalate into out and out terrorism. But it’s a measure of their inability to affect positive change that they become consumed by their protest whilst forgetting its message.

There’s a special poignancy in being part of a transitional generation, as Carbunariu, who cannot return to the Romania she grew up in or find peace in the gaudy new nation she lives in now, well knows.

Stop the Tempo laments this fact and is set in the no-mans-land between the two nations. The play offers no solutions because, as Carbunariu points out, it’s already too late for them.

Things are as they are now. You make your peace with them or you’re fated to drift, haunting your own life, since you’re literally neither here nor there.

By Cahir O'Doherty, Irish Voice Arts Editor

Review: Learning to live with the past - “That’s That” by Colin Broderick

History, just like geography, has a way of always getting in front of you. It can help shape your perspectives, your character and even your accent long before you get wise to the fact.

In Northern Ireland this is especially true. If ever there was a place where history keeps playing out on a loop tape over and over, it’s there.

So the most challenging thing you can do, in a place that’s reflexively repressive, is try to write your own story or step outside the one you’ve been handed at birth. Mold breakers more often find it’s themselves who are being broken there.

Like a lot of young people growing up in the North in the 1980s, writer Colin Broderick found the imprisoning claims of his community (and his family) increasingly suffocating. Their expectations were laid out early and it was made clear there would be no exceptions. The game had been rigged before he was even aware he was a participant.

In his new memoir 'That’s That' (Random House), a reference to the phrase his mother used constantly to discourage his teenage self from asking increasingly awkward questions, Broderick paints a portrait of a community in crisis.

What’s interesting is that the people he writes about in 'That’s That' try to live as though they’re not in crisis. They may be poor, they may be surrounded by trigger happy police and soldiers, they may be tied to a wider conflict they didn’t start and can’t end -- but they have immense pride and they live, or try to live, as if none of it is happening.

It was happening though, and it was increasingly inescapable. In fact in 'That’s That' the demands of history are actually so consequential that Broderick actually opens the book by meditating on the history that created the conflict in Ireland in the first place.

It’s not such a grandiose move. To Irish people The Troubles and their legacy are as familiar as their national flag, but to most people born outside of the island it can look like an atavistic bloodbath with no real purpose and no end. We see a centuries old facedown between Gael and Planter, but the world sees pasty white people killing other pasty white people, and they just scratch their heads.

To make sense of his present Broderick mines his past. There are so many telling episodes from his childhood and adolescence to choose from in 'That’s That' it’s a wonder how he survived at all.

The first stirrings of desire are accompanied by bone deep religious panic and mortifying shame. Childhood innocence is discarded too soon, as though it didn’t matter, and throughout it all there’s the ever mounting pressure of his own spirit pressing back against the straight jacket his society wants to put him in.

When you grow up in a place that is making it increasingly clear it has no place for you, when you’re surrounded by choices that aren’t really choices at all, there’s only two things you can do. You can accept your lot and wrap your community around you like a blanket, or you can turn tail and run away as fast as you can.

Wisely, Broderick chose to run. But as 'Orangutan,' his first memoir made clear, it was no easy task.
In the North they often talk about the peace process, but they rarely ever talk about the peace you have to make with your own past. 'That's That' makes a point of it. The political cost of the conflict is visible to all, but its emotional cost has hardly appeared in print until now.

In fact Broderick’s reactionary tailspin lasted almost two decades until he finally surfaced and found his new life. To dull the pain and to outrun the demons he did what generations of the Irish did before him -- he kept moving, and when that didn’t work he turned to drink, the Irish anti-depressant.

'That’s That' is Broderick’s apotheosis. It’s the hard won testament he brought back from his broken past. 

It turned out that it was love and not war that shaped him, but it can take half a lifetime to figure that out if the world you grew up in was daily rocked by bombs and barbarism.

In 'That’s That' Broderick does something that takes remarkable courage, he tells the truth. It’s the ultimate revolutionary act.

It isn’t his parent’s truth or his community’s truth. It’s his own, and it’s unassailable.

New York Irish Craic Fest is back for benefit night - Film festival brings Mundy, Julie Feeny and more

Julie Feeney

For a decade and a half now New York has had it’s own Irish film festival in the Craic Fest. Alongside introducing Irish and Irish American audiences here to the latest films from Ireland (frequently introduced the director and stars) it’s also been a successful showcase for emerging and established Irish rock acts like Mundy and harder to classify singers like Julie Feeney.

On June 5 the unmissable summer bash that is the Craic Fest’s benefit night will unfold between 6 and 9 p.m. at the upscale (and Irish run) beer garden at Tuttles on 735 Second Avenue.

“We got a lot of feedback about our previous rooftop parties which have been pretty wild and fun,” Craic festival director Terence Mulligan told the Irish Voice.

“We have been known for some rock and roll events but our audiences is changing over time. We get more young Irish professionals coming now so we wanted to move this year’s venue to Tuttles. It really caters to the crowd that we have been developing with our film, music and comedy events.”

To support the arts is always a worthy cause, and this year’s ticket buys you an open bar featuring appetizers and beer and spirits from Tullamore Dew and Budweiser. Performance wise, Jimmy Lopez will play on the congos and DJ Joe Balance will spin on the decks. If that sounds like a chill summer evening, well, it is.

“It’ll be a festive atmosphere,” explains Mulligan, a Brooklyn native who knows from festivals. “For the 30 bucks you’re getting a sweetheart deal and supporting the work we do year round.”

Surprise guests at the annual bash have included Cillian Murphy, Aidan Quinn, Liam Neeson and other Hollywood heavyweights.

“Our events have always been about the people who come to the Craic events. It’s never been about celebrities, although it’s always fun no matter who turns up. We’ve been running this festival successfully for 15 years and we know how to throw events by now,” Mulligan says.

To give you some idea of how comprehensive the Craic Fest actually is in its portrayal and reflection of modern Ireland, next up on the festival annual list of keynote events is the Craic’s now annual LGBT summer festival held at the Irish Arts Center in New York.

“We have become a venue to show the works of new Irish gay and lesbian filmmakers. We have partnered with the GAZE Dublin International Film Festival to present the most accomplished films from the festival,” explains Mulligan.

In September the Wee Craic Fest, a one night blitz of music, comedy and film will be followed by the Craic Comedy Fest in November (which has hosted headline Irish comedians like Des Bishop and internationally beloved Father Ted alum Ardal O’Hanlon.

What marks the Craic Fest out is its longevity (there isn’t another signature Irish arts event to touch it) and the fact that it’s uniquely embedded in the Irish American scene here, with a devoted and in-the-know audience, that’s unlike any other festival of its kind in the city.

“Our sponsors like Tullamore and Budweiser have really helped to keep the festival running from year to year,” Mulligan reveals.

Another shot in the arm to the Craic Fest’s ongoing relevance is Mulligan’s ambitious plan for the festival’s future, involving a Craic Fest summer festival with the much bigger scope of the much-missed Guinness Fleadh.

“We already have the network to make a major Irish fleadh a reality, since we have built up the relationships and have the proven success to date to make it work,” says Mulligan.

“If a major player sees the potential and wants to underwrite it we can certainly make it happen. Like I said, we have the talent and the contacts. We have been doing this for over 15 years and we know the Irish community here better than anyone. So this could well be the next logical step for us.

“In the meantime we have the benefit night on June 5 at Tuttles and we’re featuring a lineup of talent to make it interesting. And the open bar to make it fun.”

For tickets to the Craic Fest night at Tuttles, visit www.thecraicfest.com.

Silent night in the country - Conor McPherson’s “The Weir” at the Irish Rep

John Keating, Sean Gormley, Billy Carter, Dan Butler and Tessa Klein in 'The Weir.'

Ireland wrong foots you. Its signposts lead in the wrong directions, its timetables are always notional, and its loquacious inhabitants actually tell you little about themselves.

To be Irish is to navigate contradictions. We’re Irish but we speak English, we’re European but we live on an island, we’re insular but we’re globetrotters, we’re individually retiring but collectively we’ll raise your roof.

We’re here, we’re ambiguous, get used to it.

The Irish, said Yeats, have a preference for a swift current. But that doesn’t imply an effective one.
In Ireland high speed Internet works most of the time, but not all of the time, and diverse locations produce diverse results. You’ll just have to get used to the unpredictability.

If you can’t get used to the unpredictability you’re not ready for Ireland. Other more prosaic cultures can find us exhausting.

Blow-ins notice the contradictions much more than the locals. The ring forts next to the ring roads and Cairns next to the Spars and the ruined castles that are becoming hotels often hypnotize them.
Ancient time and the 21st century exist side by side there like few places on earth. If you can live with the contradictions without blinking you’re on your way to becoming a local.

In Conor McPherson’s most accomplished play 'The Weir,' now playing at the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York, the writer examines the persistence of the supernatural in the burgeoning Celtic Tiger era, which is represented by Finbar (Sean Gormley) the local boy with the going concerns who has already bought up half his own village.

McPherson sets his play in a sterile world of lonely bachelors who break up the monotony and isolation of their daily lives by meeting up for a jar at their local far out in the country. Their nights are spent in teasing and rivalry and sometimes in blistering recriminations. But there’s clearly a rhythm to it they find reassuring, which is why they keep coming back.

Their world is shaken up by the arrival one evening of an attractive young woman named Valerie
(Tessa Klein). Introduced to the single lads by the married Finbar, who may be hoping to become more than just her tour guide, she’s a source of unexpected delight, and sometimes of resentment, that throws their evening off its usual groove.

Valerie, we learn, has come down from Dublin to rent old Maura Neelon’s place, a house that was built on a fairy road. What this means, I suppose, is that the real world has come into conflict with the psychic one, and when that happens hauntings can result.

Thanks to Valerie’s curiosity about her new home the lads tell her the story of the fairy road, which leads to a night of each of them telling ghost stories, describing real events that happened that they could not explain but have not forgotten. 

As the evening goes on Jack (Dan Butler) emerges as the most fully drawn character. His rage as an older man recalls his callousness as a youth, when he missed the greatest romantic chance of his life out of sheer obstinacy. Butler gives us a much more antic performance that the signature one given by Jim Norton in the play’s original cast.

Jack is clearly in search of absolution, and it emerges that in her own way Valerie is too, and the author makes what happens to them as unsettling as the consequences. McPherson’s play takes increasingly disturbing turns as it amps up the terror that his characters experience.

In fact, the tales become increasingly distressing until Valerie, long silent, unexpectedly tells the most shocking one of all.

In tone and content, these tales – some of them are horrible – strain at edges of the play’s bucolic setting and introduce a shocking level of menace and upset, both for the characters and the audience.
Watching the play now, 16 years after its debut, it’s become common in some circles to hear it described as a classic.

It certainly qualifies as a meticulously observed and crafted tale, but the ghost stories told in The Weir are so distressing that they strain at the confines of the play. In fact, each character unloads so much growing psychic terror that the low-key conclusion, when it eventually arrives, looks a little unconvincing.

McPherson skillfully nudges us toward an encounter with the unseen world, but then he over eggs the horror. Not every ghost story need make your knees knock.

But the supernatural in 'The Weir' is experienced as increasingly hostile -- even the stillness and silence of the country is presented as a growing threat.

Taken individually, each ghost story delivers a riveting tale. But what it all amounts to is, even for the Irish, is just a little too ambiguous by the play’s end.

(The Weir is playing at the Irish Repertory Theatre until July 7. For tickets and showtimes visit www.irishrep.org).

Review by Irish Voice Arts Editor Cahir O'Doherty