Cultural Links between Irish and Scottish Gaelic

The Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures cordially invites you to the workshop “Cultural Links between Irish and Scottish Gaelic”, organised as part of KREAS project.

Programme

9:30: Opening of the workshop

• Máire Ní Annracháin (University College Dublin)
• Alan Titley (University College Cork)
• Coffee break

Peter Mackay (University of St Andrews): “On Irish Poets Writing in Scotland”

Starting from the polyglot work of the Dublin-born and Skye-based Rody Gorman, who writes in Scottish and Irish Gaelic, English and his own invented deconstruction of English, Sweeney-ese, this will explore recent poetic connections between the two countries, including the diasporic Gaelic writing of Niall O’Gallagher, the Gaelic and Irish peregrinations of David Wheatley, and the ‘minoritized diasporic’ position of poets in English such as Alan Gillis, Miriam Gamble, Aoife Lyall and Rachel McCrum.

Christopher Whyte (independent scholar, Budapest): “What Horrors Could Be Worse Than These?”: Growing Up in Catholic Glasgow

Even at the start of the 1990s, prising the terms ‘Irish’ and ‘Catholic’ apart demanded a major effort in central Scotland. A difference in religion was synonymous with a fundamental difference in culture and in race. Who was allowed to claim that they were “Scottish”? And who was subjected to a relentless process of “foreignisation”? With the help of a poem and a piece of music, I will describe what “the seven horrors” were, with a particular focus on the last three – disidentification, amnesia and exclusion from cultural representation. Then, with reference to a Kenyan novelist’s analysis of the effects of British – English – colonialism in Ireland and in Africa, I hope to show how a predicament that had seemed exquisitely personal to begin with actually typified a whole community, and discuss the often paradoxical consequences of searching for strategies with which to overcome it, so as finally to emerge onto the stage of what is talked about and represented.

13:00–14:00 Lunch Break

• Caoimhe Nic Lochlainn (Dublin City University)
• Radvan Markus (Charles University)
• Coffee break

Gerard Cairns (independent scholar, Glasgow): “The Honourable Ruaraidh Erskine of Marr and the ‘Kings’ of Ireland”

My contention in this paper is to look at how Ruaraidh Erskine of Marr interacted with some key aspects of contemporary Irish culture by focusing on some imagined kings of that country. The paper will look at these points of contact and their impact on the ‘kings’ and their concerns, as well as on Erskine himself.

Contents:

• The Gaelic League orthodoxy : the impact of Irish organization and thinking on Erskine’s own cultural and political journey with a focus on the influence of Arthur Griffith and the Hungarian model of dual monarchy and how notions of kingship became more prevalent in Erskine’s thinking.
• Pearse’s little king: Patrick Pearse had written for Erskine’s Guth na Bliadhna in late 1905 on education in the west of Ireland. A theme that Pearse would develop in a series of lectures as well as an Irish language play, The King: A Morality Tale which would develop notions of foster ship, monarchy, faith and sacrifice.
• The literary ‘kings’: looks at the Anglo-Irish school as a challenge primarily to the Gaelic League orthodoxy and secondarily to Erskine’s thoughts on Gaelic drama. I will look at Erskine’s motivators for his position and his real level of awareness of the debates and conflicts unleashed by the success of Ireland’s National Theatre.
• The high-king of Ireland: this section will look at two pieces of literature that were so against the grain of contemporary thinking. These were William Ferris’ The Gaelic Commonwealth and Erskine’s Changing Scotland and I will look at their respective timing and their rootedness in the 1904 orthodoxy.
• Kingship as a motif: an idea that would Erskine would never abandon and explains his Gaelic enthusiasm, his own faith and his own future literary endeavours in a Scottish and English context.

Petra Johana Poncarová (Charles University)

17:00 – 18:00 Concluding Discussion

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This event is supported by the European Regional Development Fund project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (reg. no.: CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734).