Hidden Ireland

The End of Hidden Ireland

Many thousands of Irish peasants fled from the country in the terrible famine winter of 1847-48, following the road to the ports and the Liverpool ferries to make the dangerous passage across the Atlantic. The human toll of "Black '47," the worst year of the famine, is notorious, but the lives of the emigrants themselves have remained largely hidden, untold because of their previous obscurity and deep poverty. In The End of Hidden Ireland, Scally brings their lives to light. Focusing on the townland of Ballykilcline in Roscommon, Scally offers a richly detailed portrait of Irish rural life on the eve of the catastrophe. From their internal lives and values, to their violent conflict with the English Crown, from rent strikes to the potato blight, he takes the emigrants on each stage of their journey out of Ireland to New York. Along the way, he offers rare insights into the character and mentality of the immigrants as they arrived in America in their millions during the famine years. Hailed as a distinguished work of social history, this book also is a tale of adventure and human survival, one that does justice to a tragic generation with sympathy but without sentiment.

The Hidden Ireland – A Study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth Century

Daniel Corkery's classic book The Hidden Ireland is a study of Irish language poetry and culture in eighteenth-century Munster. The 'Hidden Ireland' of the title is literary Ireland: Corkery's famous book is an attempt to reclaim Munster's Irish language poets from the hands of grammarians who read them only for their preposition and participle use and to restore them to their rightful place as vibrant and vital lyricists and visionaries.The Hidden Ireland, an instant classic when first published in 1924, was listed as one of the top 50 most influential Irish books in The Books That Define Ireland by Tom Garvin and Bryan Fanning. The Hidden Ireland was revolutionary in its recognition of the contribution of Irish language poets to Irish culture, a contribution that had previously been minimised or even erased in the Anglo-Irish versions of history that preceded it. Corkery's groundbreaking study of Irish poetry and culture in eighteenth century Munster is widely acknowledged as having had a profound influence on the shaping of modern Anglo-Irish literature in its foregrounding of the role of the Irish language in literature as a repository of Irishness and a specifically Irish worldview .Daniel Corkery's The Hidden Ireland (1924), arguing for an Irish cultural revival based on the Gaelic tradition of Munster in the eighteenth century, became almost official dogma after 1924, and led to impassioned debate among Irish writers and academics for decades afterwards, including Sean O'Faolain and Frank O'Connor, Corkery's rebellious students.Tom Garvin and Bryan Fanning, The Books That Define Ireland (2014)

The Hidden Ireland