1] ‘Life shows itself as being a concrete and actual reality in its ability to transform its very self by means of what we call translation. / In certain culture, Irish amongst them, translation is a crucial activity. There are obvious reasons for this, in that before the nineteenth century to speak of Irish culture is to speak of a different language and entirely different way of seeing. Irish culture, for two hundred years, has, in this very obvious sense, been in the business of translating itself to itself and to the outside world. It has, of course, been remarkably successful in accomplishing this act of communication. But also, in Ireland, historical narratives, stories, legends, the past, have a tendency to become objects of Castenada’s “obsessive concern”; so that translation, in the broader sense of freeing those narratives from the lock of fixed idea and petrifications of ego, becomes necessary, not just from time to time, but continually. Ireland, like some other countries, is continually in need of transformation precisely because it is so traditional. Irish people, it may be said, are amongst those who are, at one and the same time, deeply archaic and immediately contemporary. (Preface; p.xi [end].)

2] ‘All legitimate intellectual enquiry is translation of one kind or another: it takes a text, a phase of history, an event, an instant of recognition, and proceeds to understand it by reliving it in the process of re-creating it. In so doing it renews the unpredictability of the event or text by subjecting it once again to the challenges and opportunities of contingency. The thing is lived again, and it re-enacts its completeness in a new context. There is a state of change, but the thing in the course of the re-enactment, reveals itself more completely than before.’ (Quoted in Michael Cronin, Translating Ireland: Translations, Languages, Cultures, Cork UP 1996, p.168.)

3] ‘We may sum it up and say that the preoccupation with continuity in Irish culture and literature is linked to a desire for stasis and negation, a human desire, by no means confined to Ireland . Against this, in Irish culture, in culture generally and continually begot and begetting its opposite, there is a desire for variation and ceaseless change. A tension of this kind probably underlies all creativity activity [...]. (Quoted in Ray Ryan, ed., Writing and the Irish Republic: Literature, Culture, Politics 1949-1999, Macmillan 2000, p.45; cited in Callum Boyle, ‘Tradition and Transgression in the Poetry of Michael Hartnett’, MA Diss., UUC, 2005, p.46.)

4] ‘From Kinsale to the end of the nineteenth century one cannot say that there was such a thing as “Irish life and thought”: there was English life and thought which sometimes accommodated an Irish accent for added vitality. Ireland, cut off from Europe, mastered by Britain, was not in a position to evolve modern forms of life which would develop from the pre-existent forms, patterns, social organisations and emotional predispositions that were there in Gaelic Ireland.’ (p.2; quoted in Una Kealy, “George Fitzmaurice” [PhD] UU 2004, p.68; also [verbatim] in Susan Parlour, ‘Vixens and Virgins in the Nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish Novel’: MA Diss., UUC 2008.)

5] ‘For [Nuala] Ní Dhomhnaill and [Michael] Hartnett the loss of the Irish language was a cataclysmic blow to the psyche of the Irish people in that it ripped out and tore asunder all the secret interiors that sponsor the manifold activities that go to make up a culture. […] On the other side of the coin are the linguistic or cultural behaviourists. They say: language is merely a set of counters; and those mysteries to which the cultural nationalists lay claim are romanticism, mantra-seeking, bog-digging for treasure troves of words. [..] Why trouble ourselves over traumas that may or many not have taken place a century ago? This view, in its robust common sense, has certain attractions.’ Further: ‘[…] It may be that the way we pose the question is part of the problem’ (Ibid., p.4.).

6] ‘[I]f Irish culture has survived, and a good deal of evidence tends to suggest that it has, then it will have done so by preserving itself through change’ (ibid., p.5). Welch cites concept of ‘creative evolution’ in Shaw’s preface to Back to Methusalah, and continues: ‘My proposition is very simple: the validity of any culture, its strength, will depend on how thoroughly it remains attentive to the interaction between change and stasis. […] If this is true then the actual language itself in which literature is [7] made at any time matters less than that the interaction which we have been speaking of should take place. But the interaction may not take place if one of the poles, of change or stasis, is at any time too dominant. (... &c.; ibid., pp.7-8.)

7] ‘By the end of the century those interiors to which literature and its culture turn and without which any culture is incomplete,were ready to break from the stasis and voyage forth again in variance, difference and change. This is what we call the Irish Literary Revival.’ (p.8; quoted in Neil Campbell, ‘The Abbey Theatre: The Plays and Politics’ (UG Diss., UUC, [2001]) ‘There is such a thing as Irish culture, and it realises itself deeply (something cultures need to do, otherwise they disappear) when it can activate and be attentive to basic patterns of being. One of these is the interplay betweeen stasis and change, something to which Irish culture has been and is highly attuned.’ [Concludes by quoting Yeats’s phrase, ‘still the indomitable Irishry.’ (p.10.)

8] ‘There was no Irish way of being, apart from that in the Irish countryside, which they were prepared to sentimentalise, but hardly to live out’ (ibid., p.33.)

8.] ‘In the nineteenth century there were good Irish poets, but none with the sheer downright force of personality to establish his or her own traditions. Ferguson, Hardiman, Callanan, Mangan and others looked for a tradition and what was before them was Burke, the British/Irish constitutionalist.’ (ibid., p.33.).

9] ‘Coda: Seers and Dancers’ (pp.285-89): ‘[…] When I saw Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa in the Phoenix Theatre in London in the summer of 1990, I came out during the interval to the bar almost unable to control my feelings. Tears were in my eyes. Something magnificent was taking place, had taken place, in the [flour] dance of the women in the first Act. [...] In spite of all difficulties – uncertainty about income, an illegitimate child, a retarded girl, a priest returned from the missions who has gone native and become deranged – the women dance. They are not, all the time, victims of their culture. Something exists whereby people can get outside their history, their given, fated narratives. […&c.]’ Ends by remarking on the swapping of hats between Gerry and Jack: ‘They have changed places.’ (p.289.)