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Afterword: Irish literature in English in the new millennium

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Fintan O’Toole
Edited by
Margaret Kelleher  and
Philip O'Leary
Margaret Kelleher
Affiliation:
National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Philip O'Leary
Affiliation:
Boston College, Massachusetts
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Summary

Over a hundred years ago, in May 1897, an Irish fair was held at the Grand Central Palace on Lexington Avenue, New York, to raise funds for an Irish Palace Building, intended to contain a library, a shooting range and a riding school. The most popular exhibit was a giant topographical map of Ireland. In a long, rectangular room, surmounted by a huge green shamrock and surrounded by five columned archways, the map was spread across the floor. It was divided into thirty-two parts, each representing the exact contours of a county. But the special attraction of the map was that each of these ‘counties’ had been filled with ‘the veritable Irish soil of the county … duly attested as truly genuine’. For ten cents, the visitor to the fair could walk the length and breadth of the island. The Irish immigrant could feel underfoot the land itself, the literal ould sod.

As the New York Irish World reported, ‘many a pathetic scene is witnessed daily’. One day, an eighty-year-old Fermanagh woman called Kate Murphy paid her ten cents and stepped across the coastline and made for her native county. She knelt down and kissed the soil,

then, crossing herself, proceeded to say her prayers, unmindful of the crowd around her. While thus kneeling, a photographer took a flashlight picture of her. The flash was a revelation to the simple hearted creature, who seemed to think it a light from heaven, and was awed into a reverential silence. When she finally stepped off the Irish soil, she sighed sadly and clung to the fence, still gazing at ’old Ireland’. she kept looking backwards as she walked away, as if bidding a long farewell.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Irish Literature , pp. 628 - 642
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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