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135-674: Brian Patrick Friel (c. 9 January 1929 – 2 October 2015) was an Irish dramatist, short story writer and founder of the Field Day Theatre Company . He had been considered one of the greatest living English-language dramatists. He has been likened to an "Irish Chekhov " and described as "the universally accented voice of Ireland". His plays have been compared favourably to those of contemporaries such as Samuel Beckett , Arthur Miller , Harold Pinter and Tennessee Williams . Recognised for early works such as Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Faith Healer , Friel had 24 plays published in

270-622: A devolved Irish parliament within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland . The first two Irish Home Rule Bills were put before the House of Commons of the United Kingdom in 1886 and 1893, but they were bitterly resisted and the second bill ultimately defeated in the Conservative's pro- Unionist majority controlled House of Lords . Following the fall and death of Parnell in 1891 after

405-555: A " Lough Derg " play for several years, and his Wonderful Tennessee (less of a critical success after its premiere in 1993 when compared to other plays from this time) portrays three couples in their failed attempt to return to a pilgrimage sit to a small island off the Ballybeg coast, though they intend to return not to revive the religious rite but to celebrate the birthday of one of their members with alcohol and culinary delicacies. Give Me Your Answer Do! premiered in 1997 and recounts

540-544: A " National Petition " for a referendum on repeal of the union; in 1861 Daniel O'Donoghue submitted the 423,026 signatures to no effect. The Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and Fenian Brotherhood were set up in Ireland and the United States, respectively, in 1858 by militant republicans, including Young Irelanders . The latter dissolved into factions after organising unsuccessful raids on Canada by Irish veterans of

675-504: A 1965 interview stating, "I don't concentrate on the theatre at all. I live on short stories." Friel then turned his attention to contemporary Irish political issues, writing The Mundy Scheme (1969) and Volunteers (1975). Both plays heavily satirised the government of Ireland . The latter depicted an archaeological excavation on the day before the site was turned over to a hotel developer, using Dublin's Wood Quay controversy as its contemporary point of reference. The play's title refers to

810-688: A Brechtian structural alienation and choric figures in Freedom of the City , metacharacters existing in a collective unconscious Limbo in Living Quarters . These experiments came to fruition in Faith Healer . Later in Friel's career, such experimental aspects became buried beneath the surface of more seemingly realist plays like Translations (1980) and Dancing at Lughnasa (1990); however, avant-garde techniques remain

945-600: A Special Issue to commemorate the occasion with seven articles devoted to the playwright. The Gate Theatre staged three plays ( Faith Healer, The Yalta Game, and Afterplay ) for several weeks in September. In the midst of the Gate's productions, the Abbey Theatre presented "A Birthday Celebration for Brian Friel," on 13 September 2009. Although not inclined to seek publicity, Friel attended the performance amid regular seating, received

1080-412: A birth name of Brian Patrick Ó'Friel and a birth date of 9 January. Elsewhere his birth name is given as Bernard Patrick Friel (allegedly on the grounds that "Brian" was not recognised by the registrar as an acceptable forename), and he had a second birth certificate which gave his birth date as 10 January. In life, he was known simply as Brian Friel and celebrated his birthday on 9 January. His father

1215-580: A cake while the audience sang "Happy Birthday," and mingled with well-wishers afterwards. The Abbey event was an evening of staged readings (excerpts from Philadelphia, Here I Come! , Translations, and Dancing at Lughnasa ), the performance of Friel-specific songs and nocturnes, and readings by Thomas Kilroy and Seamus Heaney. The National Library of Ireland houses the 160 boxes of The Brian Friel papers, containing notebooks, manuscripts, playbills, correspondence, contracts, unpublished manuscripts, programmes, production photos, articles, uncollected essays, and

1350-514: A career of more than a half-century. He was elected to the honorary position of Saoi of Aosdána . His plays were commonly produced on Broadway in New York City throughout this time, as well as in Ireland and the UK. In 1980 Friel co-founded Field Day Theatre Company and his play Translations was the company's first production. With Field Day, Friel collaborated with Seamus Heaney , 1995 recipient of

1485-482: A concerted campaign for self-government. Mass nationalist mobilisation began when Isaac Butt 's Home Rule League (which had been founded in 1873 but had little following) adopted social issues in the late 1870s – especially the question of land redistribution. Michael Davitt (an IRB member) founded the Irish Land League in 1879 during an agricultural depression to agitate for tenant's rights. Some would argue

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1620-512: A consciousness of dispossession and defeat at the hands of British and Protestant forces, became enduring features of Irish nationalism. However, the Irish Catholic movements of the 16th century were invariably led by a small landed and clerical elite. Professor Kevin Whelan has traced the emergence of the modern Catholic-nationalist identity that formed in 1760–1830. Irish historian Marc Caball , on

1755-666: A divorce crisis, which enabled the Irish Roman Catholic hierarchy to pressure MPs to drop Parnell as their leader, the Irish Party split into two factions, the INL and the INF , becoming practically ineffective from 1892 to 1898. Only after the passing of the Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898 which granted extensive power to previously non-existent county councils, allowing nationalists for

1890-513: A feature of Irish life since the 12th century, following the Norman invasion of Ireland . Protestantism in England introduced a religious element to the 16th-century Tudor conquest of Ireland , as many of the native Gaels and Hiberno-Normans remained Catholic. The Plantations of Ireland dispossessed many native Catholic landowners in favour of Protestant settlers from England and Scotland. In addition,

2025-699: A few of the Irish know English. Translations went on to be one of the most translated and staged of all plays in the latter 20th century, performed in Estonia, Iceland, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Norway, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, along with most of the world's English-speaking countries (including South Africa, Canada, the U.S. and Australia). It won the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize for 1985. Neil Jordan completed

2160-425: A formal mission statement, their intention was to create a space, a 'fifth province,' that transcended the crippling oppositions of Irish politics. The term 'fifth province' — Ireland now consists of four provinces, but the Irish term cúige signifies 'a fifth portion' and there were five historic provinces – was coined by the editors of an Irish Journal, The Crane Bag , to name an imaginary cultural space from which

2295-479: A fundamental aspect of Friel's work into his late career. Translations was premiered in 1980 at Guildhall , Derry by the Field Day Theatre Company, with Stephen Rea, Liam Neeson, and Ray MacAnally. Set in 1833, it is a play about language, the meeting of English and Irish cultures, the looming Great Famine , the coming of a free national school system that will eliminate the traditional hedge schools,

2430-475: A group of Irish Republican Army detainees who have been indefinitely interned by the Irish government, and the term Volunteer is both ironic, in that as prisoners they have no free will, and political, in that the IRA used the term to refer to its members. Using the site as a physical metaphor for the nation's history, the play's action examines how Irish history has been commodified, sanitized, and oversimplified to fit

2565-726: A guerilla war broke out between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) (as the Irish Volunteers were now calling themselves) and the British security forces (See Irish War of Independence ) . The campaign created tensions between the political and military sides of the nationalist movement. The IRA, nominally subject to the Dáil, in practice, often acted on its own initiative. At the top, the IRA leadership, of Michael Collins and Richard Mulcahy , operated with little reference to Cathal Brugha ,

2700-478: A manner that has attracted many comparisons to the work of Chekhov. Living Quarters (1977), a play that examines the suicide of a domineering father, is a retelling of the Theseus/Hippolytus myth in a contemporary Irish setting. This play, with its focus on several sisters and their ne'er-do-well brother, serves as a type of preparation for Friel's more successful Aristocrats (1979), a Chekhovian study of

2835-473: A means of putting pressure on parliament. Coinciding as it did with the extension of the franchise in British politics – and with it the opportunity for most Irish Catholics to vote – Parnell's party quickly became an important player in British politics. Home Rule was favoured by William Ewart Gladstone , but opposed by many in the British Liberal and Conservative parties. Home Rule would have meant

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2970-481: A new discourse of unity might emerge. In addition to being an enormous popular and critical success, Field Day's first production created just such a space. After the production of Translations , Seamus Heaney , Ireland's most prominent poet, recognised the importance of what they had accomplished and urged Brian Friel to continue with the project: "this was what theatre was supposed to do" (cited in Richtarik, 65). That

3105-483: A once-influential family's financial collapse and, perhaps, social liberation from the aristocratic myths that have constrained the children. Aristocrats was the first of three plays premiered over a period of eighteen months which would come to define Friel's career as a dramatist, the others being Faith Healer (1979) and Translations (1980). Faith Healer is a series of four conflicting monologues delivered by dead and living characters who struggle to understand

3240-418: A partition amendment. Redmond rejected their proposals. The amended Home Rule Act was passed and placed with Royal Assent on the statute books, but was suspended after the outbreak of World War I in 1914, until the end of the war. This led radical republican groups to argue that Irish independence could never be won peacefully and gave the northern question little thought at all. The Irish Volunteer movement

3375-462: A political tradition that favours an independent, united Ireland achieved by non-violent means. The more militant strand of nationalism, as espoused by Sinn Féin , is generally described as "republican" and was regarded as somewhat distinct, although the modern-day party is a constitutional party committed to exclusively peaceful and democratic means. 55.8% of voters in Northern Ireland voted for

3510-655: A purely defensive body, under Connolly's leadership, the ICA became a revolutionary body, dedicated to an independent Workers Republic in Ireland. After the outbreak of the First World War, Connolly became determined to launch an insurrection to this end. Home Rule was eventually won by John Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party and granted under the Third Home Rule Act 1914 . However, Irish self-government

3645-479: A result, more successfully confronted than it had been hitherto" (Ireland's Field Day viii). The first set of three pamphlets were written by directors of the Field Day Company – Tom Paulin, Seamus Heaney and Seamus Deane. The pamphlets were largely responsible for entering Field Day into the political debate whose calcified terms the project had originally wanted to explode. With Tom Paulin's Riot Act (1984)

3780-496: A screenplay for a film version of Translations that was never produced. Friel commented on Translations : "The play has to do with language and only language. And if it becomes overwhelmed by that political element, it is lost." Despite growing fame and success, the 1980s is considered Friel's artistic "Gap" as he published so few original works for the stage: Translations in 1980, The Communication Cord in 1982, and Making History in 1988. Privately, Friel complained both of

3915-425: A set of three lectures were delivered by Dr Bryan McMahon, Dr. Conor Kenny of Médecins sans Frontières , and by Seamus Deane himself. In 2022, lectures were delivered by Angus Mitchell and by Brendan O'Leary. Irish nationalism Irish nationalism is a nationalist political movement which, in its broadest sense, asserts that the people of Ireland should govern Ireland as a sovereign state . Since

4050-500: A symptom and a cause of the current situation. (Ireland's Field Day vii) Field Day became an artistic response to the violence, history and politics which divided Northern Ireland into a series of seemingly irresolvable dichotomies; Orange/Green, Unionist/Nationalist and Protestant/Catholic are only the most prominent. Every year saw a new production open in Derry and begin a tour of venues large and small throughout both Northern Ireland and

4185-598: A teacher at St. Joseph's Training College, Belfast in Belfast , 1949–1950. He married Anne Morrison in 1954; they had four daughters and one son. Between 1950 and 1960, he worked as a maths teacher in the Derry primary and intermediate school system, taking leave in 1960 to pursue a career as a writer, living off his savings. In the late 1960s, the Friels moved from Derry to Muff, County Donegal, before settling outside Greencastle , County Donegal. Friel supported Irish nationalism and

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4320-594: A vast collection of ephemera relating to Friel's career and creative process from 1959 through 2000. It does not contain his Irish Press articles, which can be found in the Dublin and Belfast newspaper libraries. In 2011, an additional set of Friel's papers were made available in the National Library of Ireland. These additional papers consist mainly of archival materials dating between 2000 and 2010. Field Day Theatre Company Although Field Day has never put forth

4455-631: Is his first play directly considering the Protestant experience. In this work, he considers the first hints of the waning of Ascendancy authority during the summer of 1878, the year before Charles Stuart Parnell became president of the Land League and initiated the Land Wars. After a sold-out season at the Gate Theatre in Dublin, it transferred to London's West End on 25 May 2005, making its American premiere at

4590-508: Is not an exaggeration to term it a social revolution, and it was the first large-scale rural public-housing scheme in the country, with up to a quarter of a million housed under the Labourers Acts up to 1921, the majority erected by 1916", changing the face of rural Ireland. The combination of land reform and devolved local government gave Irish nationalists an economic political base on which to base their demands for self-government. Some in

4725-648: The All-for-Ireland Party as well as Sinn Féin and other national bodies. It resulted in the Conscription Crisis of 1918 . In May at the height of the crisis 73 prominent Sinn Féiners were arrested on the grounds of an alleged German Plot . Both these events contributed to a widespread rise in support for Sinn Féin and the Volunteers. The Armistice ended the war in November, and was followed by elections. In

4860-577: The American Civil War , and the IRB launched Clan na Gael as a replacement. In Ireland itself, the IRB tried an armed revolt in 1867 but, as it was heavily infiltrated by police informers, the rising was a failure. In the late 19th century, Irish nationalism became the dominant ideology in Ireland, having a major Parliamentary party in the Parliament of the United Kingdom at Westminster that launched

4995-508: The Celtic Revival , grew up in the late 19th century. Though largely initiated by artists and writers of Protestant or Anglo-Irish background, the movement nonetheless captured the imaginations of idealists from native Irish and Catholic background. Periodicals such as United Ireland , Weekly News , Young Ireland , and Weekly National Press (1891–92), became influential in promoting Ireland's native cultural identity. A frequent contributor,

5130-700: The Curragh Camp indicated that they would be unwilling to act against the Ulster Volunteers should they be ordered to. In response, Nationalists formed their own paramilitary group, the Irish Volunteers , to ensure the implementation of Home Rule. It looked for several months in 1914 as if civil war was imminent between the two armed factions. Only the All-for-Ireland League party advocated granting every conceivable concession to Ulster to stave off

5265-549: The General election of 1918 , Sinn Féin won 73 seats, 25 of these unopposed, or statistically nearly 70% of Irish representation, under the British " First past the post " voting-system, but had a minority representation in Ulster. They achieved a total of 476,087 (46.9%) of votes polled for 48 seats, compared to 220,837 (21.7%) votes polled by the IPP for only six seats, who due to the "first past

5400-601: The Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689. The Jacobites demanded that Irish Catholics have a majority in an autonomous Irish Parliament, the restoration of confiscated Catholic land, and an Irish-born Lord Deputy of Ireland . Similarly to the Confederates of the 1640s, the Jacobites were conscious of representing the "Irish nation" but were not separatists and largely represented the interests of the landed class as opposed to all

5535-582: The Guthrie Theater in September 2007. In 1989, BBC Radio launched a "Brian Friel Season", a six-play series devoted to his work; he was the first living playwright to receive such an honour. In 1999 (April–August), Friel's 70th birthday was celebrated in Dublin with the Friel Festival, during which ten of his plays were staged or presented as dramatic readings throughout Dublin. A conference, National Library exhibition, film screenings, pre-show talks, and

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5670-575: The Home Rule League in 1873. Charles Stewart Parnell (somewhat paradoxically, a Protestant landowner) took over the Land League and used its popularity to launch the Irish National League in 1882 as a support basis for the newly formed Irish Parliamentary Party , to campaign for Home Rule . An important feature of Irish nationalism from the late 19th century onwards was a commitment to Gaelic Irish culture. A broad intellectual movement,

5805-609: The Irish Parliament , full rights for Catholics and an end to the confiscation of Catholic-owned land. However, the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland (1649–1653) destroyed the Confederate cause and resulted in the permanent dispossession of the old Catholic landowning class. A similar Irish Catholic monarchist movement emerged in the 1680s and 1690s, when Irish Catholic Jacobites supported James II after his deposition in England in

5940-496: The Irish Patriot Party , led by Henry Grattan , who achieved substantial legislative independence in 1782–83 . Grattan and radical elements of the 'Irish Whig' party campaigned in the 1790s for Catholic political equality and reform of electoral rights. He wanted useful links with Britain to remain, best understood by his comment: 'The channel [ the Irish sea ] forbids union; the ocean forbids separation'. Grattan's movement

6075-601: The Irish Socialist Republican Party in Dublin. Connolly's party was small and unsuccessful in elections, but his fusion of socialism and Irish republicanism was to have a sustained impact on republican thought. In 1913, during the general strike known as the Dublin Lockout , Connolly and James Larkin formed a workers militia, the Irish Citizen Army , to defend strikers from the police. While initially

6210-648: The Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play . It was also adapted into a film , starring Meryl Streep , directed by Pat O'Connor , script by Frank McGuinness . Friel was born in 1929 at Knockmoyle , Northern Ireland, before the family moved to nearby Killyclogher, both places close to Omagh in County Tyrone. His exact birth date and name are ambiguous. The parish register lists

6345-757: The National Volunteers , and were among the 180,000 Irishmen who served in Irish regiments of the Irish 10th and 16th Divisions of the New British Army formed for the War. A minority of the Irish Volunteers, mostly led by members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), refused to support the War and kept their arms to guarantee the passage of Home Rule. Within this grouping, another faction planned an insurrection against British rule in Ireland , while

6480-788: The Nobel Prize in Literature . Heaney and Friel first became friends after Friel sent the young poet a letter following publication of his book Death of a Naturalist . Friel was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters , the British Royal Society of Literature and the Irish Academy of Letters. He was appointed to Seanad Éireann in 1987 and served until 1989. In later years, Dancing at Lughnasa reinvigorated Friel's oeuvre, bringing him Tony Awards (including Best Play ),

6615-509: The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association against the policy of internment on 13 January 1972, an event that would become known as Bloody Sunday . During the march, British troops from the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment opened fire on the marchers, killing 14 people and wounding a further 26. His personal experience of being fired at by soldiers during the march greatly affected the drafting of The Freedom of

6750-446: The Plantation of Ulster , which began in 1609, "planted" a sizeable population of English and Scottish Protestant settlers into the north of Ireland. Irish aristocrats waged many campaigns against the English presence. A prime example is the rebellion of Hugh O'Neill which became known as the Nine Years' War of 1594–1603, which aimed to expel the English and make Ireland a Spanish protectorate . A more significant movement came in

6885-405: The UK general election saw more nationalist MPs elected in Northern Ireland than unionist ones for the first time ever (nine nationalists and eight unionists). Two months later, Sinn Féin won the most votes in the 2020 Irish general election , thus ending 100 years of dominance in the Republic by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil , but still finished one seat behind the latter in the Daíl. Finally, at

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7020-449: The culture of Ireland , especially the Irish language , literature, music, and sports. It grew more potent during the period in which all of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom , which led to most of the island gaining independence from the UK in 1922. Irish nationalists believe that foreign English and later British rule in Ireland from the 1169 English Norman Invasion of Ireland onwards has been detrimental to Irish interests. At

7155-437: The harp , and located its mass meetings in sites such as Tara and Clontarf which had a special resonance in Irish history. The Great Famine of 1845–1849 caused great bitterness among Irish people against the British government, which was perceived as having failed to avert the deaths of up to a million people. British support for the 1860 plebiscites on Italian unification prompted Alexander Martin Sullivan to launch

7290-416: The " Land War ", turned increasingly violent when Land Leaguers resisted attempts by the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) to evict tenant farmers by force. This upheaval eventually resulted in the British government subsidising the sale of landlords' estates to their tenants in the Irish Land Acts authored by William O'Brien . It also provided a mass base for constitutional Irish nationalists who had founded

7425-441: The 1640s, after the Irish Rebellion of 1641 , when a coalition of Gaelic Irish and Old English Catholics set up a de facto independent Irish state to fight in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms ( see Confederate Irelan d ). The Confederate Catholics of Ireland, also known as the Confederation of Kilkenny, emphasised the idea of Ireland as a Kingdom independent from England, albeit under the same monarch. They demanded autonomy for

7560-406: The 1790s with the founding of the Society of the United Irishmen . It sought to end discrimination against Catholics and Presbyterians and to found an independent Irish republic. Most of the United Irish leaders were Catholic and Presbyterian and inspired by the French Revolution , wanted a society without sectarian divisions, the continuation of which they attributed to the British domination over

7695-437: The 75th birthday of Friel's wife in County Donegal, suffered a stroke on the morning after the celebration. In November 2008, The Queen's University of Belfast announced its intention to build a new theatre complex and research centre, to be named The Brian Friel Theatre and Centre for Theatre Research . Friel attended its opening in 2009. Friel's 80th birthday fell in 2009. The journal Irish Theatre International published

7830-430: The British Parliament – particularly the repeal of Poynings' Law , which allowed the latter to legislate for Ireland. They were supported by popular sentiment that came from the various publications of William Molyneux about Irish constitutional independence; this was later reinforced by Jonathan Swift 's incorporation of these ideas into Drapier's Letters . Parliamentarians who wanted more self-government formed

7965-444: The British administration felt initially that paying for such a degree of land and housing reform amounted to an unofficial policy of "killing home rule by kindness", yet by 1914 some form of Home Rule for most of Ireland was guaranteed. This was shelved on the outbreak of World War I in August 1914. A new source of radical Irish nationalism developed in the same period in the cities outside Ulster . In 1896, James Connolly , founded

8100-437: The City as a heavily political play. In the interview, Friel recalled: "It was really a shattering experience that the British army , this disciplined instrument, would go in as they did that time and shoot thirteen people... to have to throw yourself on the ground because people are firing at you is really a terrifying experience." By the mid-1970s, Friel had moved away from overtly political plays to examine family dynamics in

8235-516: The Dáil's Minister for Defence or Éamon de Valera , the President of the Irish Republic – at best giving them a supervisory role. At local level, IRA commanders such as Dan Breen , Sean Moylan , Tom Barry , Sean MacEoin , Liam Lynch and others avoided contact with the IRA command, let alone the Dáil itself. This meant that the violence of the War of Independence rapidly escalated beyond what many in Sinn Féin and Dáil were happy with. Arthur Griffith , for example, favoured passive resistance over

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8370-411: The English expedition to convert all Irish place names into English, and the crossed love between an Irish woman who speaks no English and an English soldier who speaks no Irish. It was an instant success. The innovative conceit of the play is to stage two language communities (the Gaelic and the English), which have few and very limited ways to speak to each other, for the English know no Irish, while only

8505-429: The Fenians saw that they could use the groundswell of support for land reform to recruit nationalist support, this is the reason why the New Departure – a decision by the IRB to adopt social issues – occurred in 1879. Republicans from Clan na Gael (who were loath to recognise the British Parliament) saw this as an opportunity to recruit the masses to agitate for Irish self-government. This agitation, which became known as

8640-420: The Friel/Gate Festival in September 2009) and had its world premiere at the Gate Theatre in Dublin. The most innovative work of Friel's late period is Performances (2003). A graduate researching the impact of Leoš Janáček 's platonic love for Kamila Stosslova on his work playfully and passionately argues with the composer, who appears to host her at his artistic retreat more than 70 years after his death; all

8775-431: The IRB. In April 1916, just over a thousand dissident Volunteers and 250 members of the Citizen's Army launched the Easter Rising in the Dublin General Post Office and, in the Easter Proclamation , proclaimed the independence of the Irish Republic . The Rising was put down within a week, at a cost of about 500 killed, mainly unengaged civilians. Although the rising failed, Britain's General Maxwell executed fifteen of

8910-436: The Irish Baile Beag , meaning "Small Town"). There are fourteen such plays: Philadelphia, Here I Come! , Crystal and Fox , The Gentle Island , Living Quarters , Faith Healer , Aristocrats , Translations , The Communication Cord , Dancing at Lughnasa , Wonderful Tennessee , Molly Sweeney , Give Me Your Answer Do! and The Home Place , while the seminal event of Faith Healer takes place in

9045-442: The Irish Party was in due course eclipsed by Sinn Féin – a hitherto small party which the British had (mistakenly) blamed for the Rising and subsequently taken over as a vehicle for Irish Republicanism. Two further attempts to implement Home Rule in 1916 and 1917 also failed when John Redmond, leader of the Irish Party, refused to concede partition while accepting there could be no coercion of Ulster. An Irish Convention to resolve

9180-433: The Irish journalist Sean Ward even referred to him in an Irish Press article as one of the Abbey Theatre's "rejects". Friel's play, The Enemy Within (1962) enjoyed success, despite only being on the Abbey stage for 9 performances. Belfast's Lyric Theatre revived it in September 1963 and the BBC Northern Ireland Home Service and Radio Éireann both aired it in 1963. Although Friel later withdrew The Blind Mice (1963), it

9315-427: The Irish people. Also similarly to the Confederates they suffered defeat, in the Williamite War in Ireland (1689–1691). Thereafter, the largely English Protestant Ascendancy dominated Irish government and landholding. The Penal Laws discriminated against non- Anglicans . ( See also History of Ireland 1536–1691 .) This coupling of religious and ethnic identity – principally Roman Catholic and Gaelic – as well as

9450-479: The Irish speaking areas or Gaeltachta í, where the language has continued to decline (see article ). However, these organisations attracted large memberships and were the starting point for many radical Irish nationalists of the early twentieth century, especially the leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916 such as Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, and Joseph Plunkett. The main aim was to emphasise an area of difference between Ireland and Germanic England, but most of

9585-465: The Land League had its direct roots in tenant associations formed in the period of agricultural prosperity during the government of Lord Palmerston in the 1850s and 1860s, who were seeking to strengthen the economic gains they had already made. Following the depression of 1879 and the subsequent fall in prices (and hence profits), these farmers were threatened with rising rents and eviction for failure to pay rents. In addition, small farmers, especially in

9720-464: The Name for Blackstaff Press (1986), and Charles Macklin's play The London Vertigo in 1990. Friel's decision to premiere Dancing at Lughnasa at the Abbey Theatre rather than as a Field Day production initiated his evolution away from involvement with Field Day, and he formally resigned as a director in 1994. Friel returned to a position of Irish theatrical dominance during the 1990s, particularly with

9855-475: The Republic. While Field Day's artistic venture continued to fulfil its original mandate of bringing "professional theatre to people who might otherwise never see it" (Richtarik 11), in September 1983 they launched a project whose target audience was primarily the academic community. The Field Day Theatre Company began publishing a series of pamphlets "in which the nature of the Irish problem could be explored and, as

9990-495: The Rising's leaders, including Pearse, MacDonagh, Clarke and Connolly, and arrested some 3,000 political activists which led to widespread public sympathy for the rebel's cause. Following this example, physical force republicanism became increasingly powerful and, for the following seven years or so, became the dominant force in Ireland, securing substantial independence but at a cost of dividing Ireland . The Irish Parliamentary Party

10125-613: The Sea (1966). These were followed by A Doubtful Paradise , his first stage play, produced by the Ulster Group Theatre in late August 1960. Friel also wrote 59 articles for The Irish Press , a Dublin-based party-political newspaper, from April 1962 to August 1963; this series included short stories, political editorials on life in Northern Ireland and Donegal, his travels to Dublin and New York City, and his childhood memories of Derry, Omagh, Belfast, and Donegal. Early in Friel's career,

10260-524: The Tyrone Guthrie Theatre, Friel wrote Philadelphia Here I Come! (1964). The play made him instantly famous in Dublin, London, and New York. The Loves of Cass McGuire (1966), and Lovers (1967) were both successful in Ireland, with Lovers also popular in The United States. Despite Friel's successes in playwriting , Friel in the period saw himself as primarily a short story writer, in

10395-635: The Union, or Irish self-government under the Crown. Catholic Emancipation was achieved, but self-government was not. O'Connell's movement was more explicitly Catholic than its eighteenth-century predecessors. It enjoyed the support of the Catholic clergy, who had denounced the United Irishmen and reinforced the association between Irish identity and Catholicism. The Repeal Association used traditional Irish imagery, such as

10530-628: The United Kingdom to remain a part of the European Union in the 23 June 2016 referendum in which the country as a whole voted to leave the union. The results in Northern Ireland were influenced by fears of a strong border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland as well as by fears of a hard border breaking the Good Friday Agreement . Three significant events occurred in December 2019, February 2020 and May 2022, respectively. First,

10665-589: The United Kingdom. Irish nationalists support Irish reunification . Generally, Irish nationalism is regarded as having emerged following the Renaissance revival of the concept of the patria and the religious struggle between the ideology of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation . At this early stage in the 16th century, Irish nationalism represented an ideal of

10800-419: The War was going on. Critical in this regard were Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, and Thomas Clarke. These men were part of an inner circle that were operating in secret within the ranks of the IRB to plan this rising unknown to the rest of the volunteers. James Connolly, the labour leader, first intended to launch his own insurrection for an Irish Socialist Republic decided early in 1916 to combine forces with

10935-457: The bulk of his estate to his wife, he bequeathed a house or apartment to each of his living children, and shared his literary estate between them and the children of Patricia. His literary executors were his wife and a friend, the former director for literature at the Arts Council of England, Paul McKeone. A common setting for Friel's plays is in or around the fictional town of " Ballybeg " (from

11070-461: The categories of unionist and nationalist, and the space between them, created by the production of Translations, was closing fast. For some, Seamus Deane had become the de facto spokesman, and Field Day became increasingly associated with republican politics and post-colonial theory. By this time Field Day was no longer a novel experiment; it was part of the establishment: "That Field Day was attacked for being nationalist and for being anti-nationalist

11205-473: The company was established in Derry , Northern Ireland's "second city," is significant. Although Friel knew the city well (he had lived there until 1967), Derry, being close to the border, was a hot-spot in the north-south tensions during " The Troubles ". Furthermore, its western location and its relationship to Belfast , Northern Ireland's east coast capital, underline a second historically older division in Ireland –

11340-533: The company's first publication was Field Day Review 1 , an annual journal primarily concerned with Irish literary and political culture, but in an international context. To critical acclaim, Field Day Review has published essays and interviews by numerous eminent academics, including Benedict Anderson, Giovanni Arrighi, Maud Ellmann, Tariq Ali, Terry Eagleton, Pascale Casanova, Alan Ahearne, Kevin Whelan, David Lloyd, Brendan O'Leary, Luke Gibbons, Joe Cleary, Claire Connnolly and Catherine Gallagher. Field Day Review 10

11475-509: The conflict (compared to c. 400 until then). For the first hundred years of its existence, Northern Ireland had a unionist majority, but had a large nationalist minority who would prefer to be part of a united Ireland . In Northern Ireland, the term "nationalist" is used to refer either to the Catholic population in general or to the supporters of the moderate Social Democratic and Labour Party . "Nationalism" in this restricted meaning refers to

11610-425: The conviction that it is, above all, a colonial crisis" (Eagleton 6). In this essay Deane calls for a re-engagement with the concept of nationalism, and positions Field Day in a squarely antithetical position to those he refers to as revisionist historians and critics, whose chief aim is "to demolish the nationalist mythology" (6). The categories of revisionist and anti-revisionist were all too easily superimposed onto

11745-727: The country. They were sponsored by the French Republic , which was then the enemy of the Holy See . The United Irishmen led the Irish Rebellion of 1798 , which was repressed with great bloodshed. As a result, the Irish Parliament voted to abolish itself in the Act of Union of 1800 –01 and thereafter Irish Members of Parliament sat in London. Two forms of Irish nationalism arose from these events. One

11880-526: The deadlock was established in July 1917 by the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George , its members both nationalists and unionists tasked with finding a means of implementing Home Rule. However, Sinn Féin refused to take part in the convention as it refused to discuss the possibility of full Irish independence. The Ulster unionists led by Edward Carson insisted on the partition of six Ulster counties from

12015-400: The division between critic and artist began to crumble, the politics of the pamphlets were finding their way into the plays (Richtarik 242). In the 1990 introduction to Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature — a collection of three Field Day Pamphlets by Terry Eagleton , Fredric Jameson and Edward Said — Deane writes: "Field Day's analysis of the (Northern Irish) situation derives from

12150-517: The division between the cosmopolitan east and the rural, romantic west. What began with a desire to develop a local Northern Irish theatre and make it available to a popular audience, quickly grew into a much larger cultural and political project. Even before the company's opening performance, four prominent Northern Irish writers were invited to join the project — Seamus Deane , David Hammond , Seamus Heaney , and Tom Paulin ; they would eventually become Field Day's board of directors. ( Thomas Kilroy ,

12285-399: The existence of two "hard-core" pornographic novels based upon the writer's daughter forces all present to reassess. Entering his eighth decade, Friel found it difficult to maintain the writing pace that he returned to in the 1990s; indeed, between 1997 and 2003 he produced only the very short one-act plays "The Bear" (2002), "The Yalta Game" (2001), and "Afterplay" (2002), all published under

12420-511: The first three in length. Starting in early 2017, Field Day started to commission articles for every issue of Village Magazine , a leftist current affairs publication issued in Dublin. The Field Day Podcast appeared in January 2018. The annual Seamus Deane Lecture was inaugurated in 2015 with a lecture by Deane himself. The 2016 lecture was delivered by Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, and in 2017-18

12555-637: The first time through local elections to democratically run local affairs previously under the control of landlord dominated " Grand Juries ", and William O'Brien founding the United Irish League that year, did the Irish Parliamentary Party reunite under John Redmond in January 1900, returning to its former strength in the following September general election . The first decade of the twentieth century saw considerable advancement in economic and social development in rural Ireland, where 60% of

12690-631: The goal was not just to reach or represent an audience, but to create an audience. History, and Field Day's post-colonial sensibilities, determined that the construction of Irishness would often be worked out against notions of Britishness. In a pointed and humorous verse epistle, " An Open Letter ," Heaney responds to his inclusion in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry : The Field Day directors recognised that in order for Ireland to claim "Its proper name" Irish literature would need its own comprehensive anthology . In 1991 Field Day Published

12825-508: The gold Torc, Friel quipped: "I knew that being made a Saoi, really getting this award, is extreme unction; it is a final anointment—Aosdana's last rites." Only five members of Aosdána could hold this honour at the time, and Friel joined fellow Saoithe Louis le Brocquy , Benedict Kiely , Seamus Heaney and Anthony Cronin . In August 2006, Heaney (also a friend of the Friels) who had been in attendance at

12960-736: The government. By 1914, 75 per cent of occupiers were buying out their landlords' freehold interest through the Land Commission , mostly under the Land Acts of 1903 and 1909. O'Brien then pursued and won in alliance with the Irish Land and Labour Association and D.D. Sheehan , who followed in the footsteps of Michael Davitt, the landmark 1906 and 1911 Labourers (Ireland) Acts, where the Liberal government financed 40,000 rural labourers to become proprietors of their own cottage homes, each on an acre of land. "It

13095-581: The hierarchy of the Catholic Church were opposed to republican separatism on the grounds of its violent methods and secular ideology, while they usually supported non-violent reformist nationalism. Daniel O'Connell was the leader of the moderate tendency. O'Connell, head of the Catholic Association and Repeal Association in the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s, campaigned for Catholic Emancipation – full political rights for Catholics – and then Repeal of

13230-747: The isolated and backward town that Gar flees in the 1964 Philadelphia, Here I Come! to the prosperous and multicultural small city of Molly Sweeney (1994) and Give Me Your Answer Do! (1997), where the characters have health clubs, ethnic restaurants, and regular flights to the world's major cities. Friel's first radio plays were produced by Ronald Mason for the BBC Northern Ireland Home Service in 1958: A Sort of Freedom (16 January 1958) and To This Hard House (24 April 1958). Friel began writing short stories for The New Yorker in 1959 and subsequently published two well-received collections: The Saucer of Larks (1962) and The Gold in

13365-487: The land question had a nationalist resonance in Ireland as many Irish Catholics believed that land had been unjustly taken from their ancestors by Protestant English colonists in the 17th-century Plantations of Ireland . Indeed, the Irish landed class was still largely an Anglo-Irish Protestant group in the 19th century. Such perceptions were underlined in the Land league's language and literature. However, others would argue that

13500-414: The launching of a special issue of The Irish University Review devoted to the playwright ran in conjunction with the festival. Also in 1999, The Irish Times extended him the honour of a lifetime achievement award. On 22 February 2006, President Mary McAleese presented Friel with a gold torc in recognition of his election to the position of Saoi by his fellow members of Aosdána . On acceptance of

13635-492: The life and death of Frank Hardy, the play's itinerant healer who can neither understand nor command his unreliable powers, and the lives sacrificed to his destructive charismatic life. Many of Friel's earlier plays had incorporated assertively avant garde techniques: splitting the main character Gar into two actors in Philadelphia, Here I Come! , portraying dead characters in "Winners" of Lovers, Freedom , and Living Quarters ,

13770-403: The lives and careers of two novelists and friends who pursued different paths; one writing shallow, popular works, the other writing works that refuse to conform to popular tastes. After an American university pays a small fortune for the popular writer's papers, the same collector arrives to review the manuscripts of his friend. The collector prepares to announce his findings at a dinner party when

13905-587: The mid-19th century, Irish nationalism has largely taken the form of cultural nationalism based on the principles of national self-determination and popular sovereignty . Irish nationalists during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries such as the United Irishmen in the 1790s, Young Irelanders in the 1840s, the Fenian Brotherhood during the 1880s, Fianna Fáil in the 1920s, and Sinn Féin styled themselves in various ways after French left-wing radicalism and republicanism . Irish nationalism celebrates

14040-569: The native Gaelic Irish and the Old English banding together in common cause, under the banner of Catholicism and Irish civic identity ("faith and fatherland"), hoping to protect their land and interests from the New English Protestant forces sponsored by England . This vision sought to overcome the old ethnic divide between Gaeil (the native Irish) and Gaill (the Normans) which had been

14175-432: The official version of the true history, political and literary, of the island's past and present". The Anthology was immediately attacked by Field Day's critics as politically biased. The anthology's most conspicuous flaw, however, was the paucity of women writers. In response to the accusations that Field Day had elided the female voice, a new all-female board of editors issued two additional volumes (2002), which exceeded

14310-521: The only member born in the Republic , joined the board in 1988). All of the members of Field Day agreed that art and culture had a crucial role to play in the resolution of what had come to be known as "the Troubles": The directors believed that Field Day could and should contribute to the solution of the present crisis by producing analyses of the established opinions, myths and stereotypes which had become both

14445-584: The other hand, claims that "early modern Irish nationalism" began to be established after the Flight of the Earls (1607), based on the concepts of "the indivisibility of Gaelic cultural integrity, territorial sovereignty, and the interlinking of Gaelic identity with profession of the Roman Catholic faith". The exclusively Protestant Parliament of Ireland of the eighteenth century repeatedly called for more autonomy from

14580-681: The poet John McDonald 's stated aim was "to hasten, as far as in my power lay, Ireland's deliverance". Other organisations promoting the Irish language or the Gaelic Revival were the Gaelic League and later Conradh na Gaeilge . The Gaelic Athletic Association was also formed in this era to promote Gaelic football , hurling , and Gaelic handball ; it forbade its members to play English sports such as association football , rugby union , and cricket . Most cultural nationalists were English speakers, and their organisations had little impact in

14715-557: The political needs of society. By 1968, Friel was again living in Derry, a hotbed of the Northern Ireland civil rights movement , where incidents such as the Battle of the Bogside inspired Friel's choice to write a new play set in the city. The play Friel began drafting in Derry would eventually become The Freedom of the City (1973). Defying a government ban, Friel marched with members of

14850-447: The population continued to speak English. The cultural Gaelic aspect did not extend into actual politics; while nationalists were interested in the surviving Chiefs of the Name , the descendants of the former Gaelic clan leaders, the chiefs were not involved in politics, nor noticeably interested in the attempt to recreate a Gaelic state. Although Parnell and some other Home Rulers, such as Isaac Butt , were Protestants, Parnell's party

14985-462: The population lived. The introduction of local self-government in 1898 created a class of experienced politicians capable of later taking over national self-government in the 1920s. The Land Purchase (Ireland) Act 1903 (the Wyndham Act), passed largely through the efforts of William O'Brien, abolished landlordism , and made it easier for tenant farmers to purchase lands, financed and guaranteed by

15120-607: The post" voting system did not win a proportional share of seats. Unionists (including Unionist Labour) votes were 305,206 (30.2%) The Sinn Féin MPs refused to take their seats in Westminster, 27 of these (the rest were either still imprisoned or impaired) setting up their own Parliament called the Dáil Éireann in January 1919 and declared the Irish Republic to be in existence. Nationalists in

15255-691: The release of Dancing at Lughnasa at the turn of the decade. Partly modelled on The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams , it is set in the late summer of 1936 and loosely based on the lives of Friel's mother and aunts who lived in Glenties, on the west coast of Donegal. Probably Friel's most successful play, it premiered at the Abbey Theatre , transferred to London's West End , and went on to Broadway. On Broadway, it won three Tony Awards in 1992, including Best Play. A film version, starring Meryl Streep , soon followed. Friel had been thinking about writing

15390-532: The rest of Ireland, stating that the 1916 rebellion proved a parliament in Dublin could not be trusted. The convention's work was disrupted in March 1918 by Redmond's death and the fierce German spring offensive on the Western Front, causing Britain to attempt to contemplate extending conscription to Ireland. This was extremely unpopular, opposed both by the Irish Parliamentary Party under its new leader John Dillon ,

15525-399: The south of Ireland, impatient with the lack of progress on Irish self-government, tended to ignore the unresolved and volatile Ulster situation, generally arguing that unionists had no choice but to ultimately follow. On 11 September 1919, the British proscribed the Dáil, which had met nine times by then, declaring it an illegal assembly, Ireland being still part of the United Kingdom. In 1919,

15660-412: The three-volume Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing , edited by Seamus Deane. The project, according to Deane, was nothing less than an "act of definition", one which he hoped would be inclusive and representative of the plurality of Irish identity: "There is a story here, a meta-narrative, which is, we believe, hospitable to all the micro-narratives that, from time to time, have achieved prominence as

15795-458: The time of the partition of Ireland most of the island was Roman Catholic and largely indigenous, while a sizeable portion of the country, particularly in the north, was Protestant and chiefly descended from people of Great Britain who colonised the land as settlers during the reign of King James I in 1609. Partition was along these ethno-religious lines, with most of Ireland gaining independence, while six northern counties remained part of

15930-461: The title Three Plays After (2002). The latter two plays stage Friel's continued fascination with Chekhov's work. "The Yalta Game" is concerned with Chekhov's story "The Lady with the Lapdog," "Afterplay" is an imagining of a near-romantic meeting between Andrey Prozorov of Chekhov's Three Sisters and Sonya Serebriakova of his Uncle Vanya . It has been revived several times (including being part of

16065-400: The town. These plays present an extended history of this imagined community, with Translations and The Home Place set in the nineteenth century, and Dancing at Lughnasa in the 1930s. With the other plays set in "the present" but written throughout the playwright's career from the early 1960s through the late 1990s, the audience is presented with the evolution of rural Irish society, from

16200-486: The use of force, but he could do little to affect the cycle of violence between IRA guerrillas and Crown forces that emerged over 1919–1920. The military conflict produced only a handful of killings in 1919, but steadily escalated from the summer of 1920 onwards with the introduction of the paramilitary police forces, the Black and Tans and Auxiliary Division into Ireland. From November 1920 to July 1921, over 1000 people died in

16335-406: The west faced the prospect of another famine in the harsh winter of 1879. At first, the Land League campaigned for the " Three Fs " – fair rent, free sale and fixity of tenure. Then, as prices for agricultural products fell further and the weather worsened in the mid-1880s, tenants organised themselves by withholding rent during the 1886–1891 Plan of Campaign movement. Militant nationalists such as

16470-463: The while, the Alba String Quartet 's players intrude on the dialogue, warm up, then perform the first two movements of Janáček's Second String Quartet in a tableau that ends the play. The Home Place (2005), focusing on the ageing Christopher Gore and the last of Friel's plays set in Ballybeg, was also his final full-scale work. Although Friel had written plays about the Catholic gentry, this

16605-494: The work required managing Field Day (granting written and live interviews, casting, arranging tours, etc.) and of his fear that he was "trying to impose a 'Field Day' political atmosphere" on his work. However, this is also a period during which he worked on several minor projects that filled out the decade: a translation of Chekhov's Three Sisters (1981), an adaptation of Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons (1987), an edition of Charles McGlinchey's memoirs entitled The Last of

16740-532: Was Patrick Friel, a primary school teacher and later a councillor on Londonderry Corporation, the local city council in Derry . Friel's mother was Mary (née McLoone), postmistress of Glenties , County Donegal . The family moved to Derry when Friel was ten years old. There he attended St Columb's College (the same school attended by Seamus Heaney , John Hume , Seamus Deane , Phil Coulter , Eamonn McCann and Paul Brady ). Friel received his B.A. from St Patrick's College, Maynooth (1945–1948), and qualified as

16875-726: Was a member of the Nationalist Party . Taoiseach Charles Haughey nominated Friel to serve as a member of Seanad Éireann (the Irish Senate) in 1987, where he served until 1989. After a long illness, Friel died on 2 October 2015 in Greencastle and is buried in the cemetery in Glenties , also in Donegal. He was survived by his wife Anne and children Mary, Judy, Sally and David. Another daughter, Patricia ("Paddy"), predeceased him. While leaving

17010-586: Was a positive sign insofar as it proved that the company was raising questions generally, but the fact that the debate had narrowed so quickly to the old terms indicated that Field Day was losing the moral and artistic high ground" (Richtarik 249). In 2005, Field Day Publications was launched in association with the Dublin school of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. With Seamus Deane as General Editor,

17145-513: Was a radical movement, known as Irish republicanism . It believed the use of force was necessary to found a secular, egalitarian Irish republic, advocated by groups such as the Young Irelanders , some of whom launched a rebellion in 1848. The other nationalist tradition was more moderate, urging non-violent means to seek concessions from the British government. While both nationalist traditions were predominantly Catholic in their support base,

17280-729: Was allegedly sworn into the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood in May 1882. However, the fact that he chose to stay in Westminster following the expulsion of 29 Irish MPs (when those in the Clan expected an exodus of nationalist MPs from Westminster to set up a provisional government in Dublin) and his failure in 1886 to support the Plan of Campaign (an aggressive agrarian programme launched to counter agricultural distress), marked him as an essentially constitutional politician, though not averse to using agitational methods as

17415-551: Was by far the most successful play of his very early period, playing for 6 weeks at Dublin's Eblana Theatre, revived by the Lyric, and broadcast by Radio Éireann and the BBC Home Service almost ten times by 1967. Friel had a short stint as "observer" at Tyrone Guthrie's theater in early-1960s Minneapolis; he remarked on it as "enabling" in that it gave him "courage and daring to attempt things". Shortly after returning from his time at

17550-648: Was discredited after Home Rule had been suspended at the outbreak of World War I, in the belief that the war would be over by the end of 1915, then by the severe losses suffered by Irish battalions in Gallipoli at Cape Helles and on the Western Front . They were also damaged by the harsh British response to the Easter Rising, who treated the rebellion as treason in time of war when they declared martial law in Ireland. Moderate constitutional nationalism as represented by

17685-467: Was divided over the attitude of their leadership to Ireland's involvement in World War I. The majority followed John Redmond in support of the British and Allied war effort, seeing it as the only option to ensure the enactment of Home Rule after the war, Redmond saying "you will return as an armed army capable of confronting Ulster's opposition to Home Rule". They split off from the main movement and formed

17820-797: Was limited by the prospect of partition of Ireland between north and south. This idea had first been mooted under the Second Home Rule Bill in 1893. In 1912, following the entry of the Third Home Rule Bill through the House of Commons, unionists organised mass resistance to its implementation, organising around the " Ulster Covenant ". In 1912 they formed the Ulster Volunteers , an armed wing of Ulster Unionism who stated that they would resist Home Rule by force. British Conservatives supported this stance. In addition, in 1914 British officers based at

17955-542: Was notable for being both inclusive and nationalist as many of its members were descended from the Anglo/Irish minority. Many other nationalists such as Samuel Neilson , Theobald Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet were also descended from plantation families which had arrived in Ireland since 1600. From Grattan in the 1770s to Parnell up to 1890, nearly all the leaders of Irish separatism were Protestant nationalists . Modern Irish nationalism with democratic aspirations began in

18090-528: Was overwhelmingly Catholic. At local branch level, Catholic priests were an important part of its organisation. Home Rule was opposed by Unionists (those who supported the Union with Britain), mostly Protestant and from Ulster under the slogan, "Home Rule is Rome Rule ." At the time, some politicians and members of the British public would have seen this movement as radical and militant. Detractors quoted Charles Stewart Parnell's Cincinnati speech in which he claimed to be collecting money for "bread and lead". He

18225-651: Was published in October 2014. To date, Field Day Publications has published 24 titles in the fields of literary criticism, history, Irish art music, cultural studies, art history and 18th-century Irish poetry. From the beginning Field Day struggled to establish a cultural identity, not just for the North, but for the Irish. Much like the stated intentions of the Irish National Theatre established by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory almost one hundred years earlier (Harrington vii),

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