Life
Edited Fr. Timothy Corcoran, Prof.
of Education, UCD.
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Commentary
R. F. Foster, ‘When the Newspapers Have
Forgotten Me ...’, in Yeats Annual 12 (1996), : quotes extensively [as infra] from the Bulletin’s several reactions to
obituary notices on Yeats, challenging his and Russell’s claim to
Irishness while castigating Horace Plunkett and ‘the promotors of
the Plunkett policy of self-help from the public pocket, of cash and the
seekers of social titles of honour, diverted into the Organisation coffers
by the crafty crew of calculating codgers’; p.175.)
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Quotations
Bye-bye WB [on obituary notices for W. B. Yeats]: ‘a completely false idea of the man and of his achievements was give by those newspapers which published enthusiastic praises of his work and said nothing at all about his quarrel with the nation and his quarrel with Christianity ... An account of him which said nothing whatsoever about his long war upon sacred things is not a portrait of the man at all.’ (‘The Freedom of the Press - Should Newspapers Be Controlled?’, in Catholic Bulletin, Mar. 1939; quotes in R. F. Foster, op. cit., pp.169-70 see also quotations on Horace Plunkett, et al. [supra.])
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References
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day Co. 1991), Vol. 2, 954-55: the dogmatic stance of
an editorial in The Catholic Bulletin in 1924 symptomatic of the
cultural introversion of nationalist ideology .. taking issue with the
suggestion that the Irish nation is an amalgam of several cultural traditions,
the writer states: ‘All other elements have no place in Irish national
life and tradition .. We are not a national conglomerate, not a national
patchwork specimen; the poetry of life of what Aodh de Blacam calls Belfast
can only be Irish by being assimilated to Gaelic literature’ (quoted
in Terence Brown, Ireland, Social and Cultural History, 1981) [ed.
Luke Gibbon].
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