Let us begin by picking up some threads from last year’s round up of Irish Studies and related news! The big popular culture news of 2024 in Ireland, apart from a somewhat low-key visit from then-US-President Joe Biden, was Ireland’s success in the Olympics, appearing in the top 20 medal count for several days – quite an achievement for a tiny country. A star athlete who received a great deal of attention after qualifying for the games was Dubliner Rhasidat Adeleke, mentioned here last year, who has broken several Irish and world records, and is considered the fastest woman ever to have come out of Ireland. Another recurring favourite mentioned here previously is the Irish-language rap group Kneecap, whose eponymous rap comedy / mockumentary won seven BAFTA awards (British Academy of Film and Television Awards) this January, which many thought positioned the film for Oscar consideration, but it was not nominated. The rappers had a better result when in November 2024 they won a discrimination case against the UK government, which had blocked arts funding they had been awarded. They caused a sensation when band members arrived at court in a Land Rover painted to look like a police vehicle, flying Irish and Palestinian flags, and blasting music. A more painful loss for the group was the death in December of Gearóid Ó Cairealláin, the father of one member of the trio, Naoise Ó Cairealláin (rap name Móglái Bap).

To continue with Irish entertainment awards news, the film Poor Things, produced and developed at Dublin-based Element Pictures, won four Academy Awards in 2024. Also at that ceremony, Cillian Murphy won best actor for Oppenheimer. There was an expectation that his more recent film, Small Things Like These, the critically acclaimed adaptation of Claire Keegan’s 2021 novel, which Murphy both directed and starred in, would be nominated in at least one category for the 2025 Oscars, but it was not to be. Murphy is taking time off from acting in 2025 and will be spending time refurbishing the Phoenix Cinema in Dingle that he and his wife, artist Yvonne McGuinness, bought in November of 2024. Another slender, but literary, Hollywood connection from 2024 was the appearance of Henry Winkler at the Dalkey Book Festival in June, where he was promoting his autobiography and charming the locals.

Other Irish artists who recently won major entertainment awards include Cartoon Saloon, the often-Oscar-nominated Irish animation studio, which won a Creative Emmy (Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation) for their episode of the Star Wars anthology Star Wars: Visions, and Colin Farrell, who won a best actor Golden Globe for his work in the television series, The Penguin, in which he plays the titular “Penguin”. That They May Face the Rising Sun, the film adaptation of John McGahern’s novel, won the Best Irish Film Award at the Dublin Film Festival in April. In November, the Belfast artist Jordan Adetunji received a Grammy nomination in the category of Best Melodic Rap Performance, while Fontaines D.C. received two nominations, Best Rock Album and Best Alternative Music Performance. Irish singer-songwriter Cian Ducrot did win an Emmy for songwriting, but alas, the Irish entry into Eurovision, “Doomsday Blue”, written and performed by non-binary singer Bambi Thug, was unsuccessful in the 2024 song contest.

Other updates from last year’s bulletin include the renaming of the former Berkeley Library in Trinity, which is now the Eavan Boland Library, making it the first building in the city-centre campus to be named for a woman. Last year I had to report the sad passing of two of Ireland’s great contemporary musicians, Sinéad O’Connor and Shane MacGowan. The anniversary of their deaths did not pass without commemoration. In January, Hot Press editor, Niall Stokes, curated an exhibit, “They Gave the Walls a Talking”, at Dublin’s Irish Emigration Museum, honouring The Pogues and MacGowan. In July, Kathryn Ferguson’s 2022 documentary about O’Connor, Nothing Compares, was screened outdoors in Merrion Square on the one-year anniversary of the singer’s death and continued to be streamed for the following week by Le Cinema Club. Last year’s report made passing reference to a controversial work by the artist Mála Spíosraí (Irish for the native culinary delight, Spice Bag), and, at the beginning of 2024, he was involved in repainting the Free Derry Corner as part of the annual commemoration of Bloody Sunday. I will return to this.

To continue looking at performance in 2024, there were a number of notable theatrical productions of Irish drama, beginning with Stephen Rae’s one-man performance of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, which premiered in January 2024 in Dublin’s Project Arts Centre, and which has travelled throughout Ireland and the UK, currently playing at the Barbican in London. Also from January 2024 was the premiere of a production of John B. Keane’s Sive at the Gaiety, notable for its non-traditional casting of Sade Malone in the title role. February saw the Irish premiere at the An Táin Arts Centre in Dundalk of Belfast Girls, by Louth writer Jaki McCarrick. The play has been performed in Chicago, Australia, Sweden, New York, and London. The Irish production was part of the Arts Centre’s tenth anniversary and travelled on to Belfast and Navan. A much-anticipated Irish theatre event in February was the appearance of a new Marina Carr play, Audrey or Sorrow, at the Abbey Theatre on the playwright’s 60^th birthday. Also at the Abbey early in 2024 was an Irish-language production of Persians by classic Greek playwright Aeschylus, the oldest play ever staged by the theatre.

April was a busy month for Irish theater, with Agreement, Owen McCafferty’s play about the Good Friday Agreement, appearing on stages in Dublin, Belfast, and New York. In April, the Galway Theatre Festival hosted the debut of Dead House, by Irish Traveller, Martin Beanz Ward, a writer and performer. Also in April, Sarah Snook, best known for her role as “Shiv” (Siobhán) in the TV series Succession, won an Olivier Award for her one-woman (musical!) performance of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, performed in London’s West End. Another stage adaptation of interest to Irish Studies scholars is the Gate Theatre production of The Pull of the Stars, based on the Emma Donoghue novel, which also appeared in April. “Beckett Unbound 2024” was a 4-day festival at the end of May, beginning of June, curated by Irish actor Adrian Dunbar and composer Nick Roth. The festival, a joint venture between University of Liverpool and the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at University of Notre Dame, staged Beckett’s work in both Liverpool and Paris. Also in June, Sugar Wife, a new play by Elizabeth Kuti, debuted at the Abbey. The play, set in nineteenth-century Dublin, considers issues of race and class in the context of slavery and the sugar trade.

July’s Galway Arts Festival featured a Druid production of Beckett’s Endgame as well as a new Mark O’Rowe play, Reunion. Other new plays of note performed in 2024 are Carmel Winters’ latest, The Maestro and the Mosquita, a one-man show starring Louis Lovett, which premiered at the Dublin Fringe Festival in September, and Safe House, a song-cycle memory play, a collaboration between Enda Walsh and Anna Mullarkey that debuted at the Dublin Theatre Festival in October, and which will be staged at the Abbey in 2025.

As usual, there is much to report about in the fields of Irish dance, music, and visual arts. To start on a lively note in highlighting just a few events, February saw the experimental drag HAUSPARTY hosted by the Haus of WIG, that is, the artists / performers Donna Fella, Naomi Diamond, and Shaquira Knightly. More traditional events from the month include the sold-out concert by the reunited Bothy Band as part of the Belfast Tradfest. The traditional singer, musician, and composer Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill won a Lifetime Achievement award at the RTÉ Radio One Folk Awards, also in February. In the same month, the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) opened an exhibit that ran through April and was the largest in their history, “Self-Determination: A Global Perspective”. February is St Brigid’s month and the Brigid 2024 festival, on the 1500^th anniversary of the saint’s death, featured Deirdre Brennan’s photographic and audio project “Looking for Brigid”, which toured the island for five months. Spring continued to offer exciting events, such as CoisCéim’s Dance Theatre’s premier of David Bolger’s Palimpsest premier at the St Patrick Festival and Ballet Ireland’s “Bold Moves 2024”, both in March. Also in March, in visual arts news, Deirdre O’Mahony’s urgently powerful sound and visual work, “The Quickening”, opened in the Hugh Lane Gallery, while the Na Cailleacha Art Collective staged an all-woman tableau vivant in Trinity, entitled the “School of Hibernia”, a distaff answer to Raphael’s School of Athens fresco. A more sobering exhibit from the month of March was Eddie Cahill’s solo painting exhibit in the Limerick City Gallery of Art “Searching in the Dark”, which takes as its subject the trauma of incarceration.

According to the Celtic calendar spring ends on the first of May, and the month kicked off summer cultural events, such as the “Riot Symphony: The Sun Still Shines”, by Conor Mitchell, inspired by Russia’s Pussy Riot protest. It was performed by the Belfast Ensemble and Ulster Symphony Orchestra. Also in May, in the Dublin Arts Centre, The Catherine Young Dance company mounted “Ciseach: An Embodied Manifesto”, which, like O’Mahony’s “The Quickening”, takes as its central theme the urgent need to remember our forgotten embeddedness in the natural world. The Galway Theatre Festival was held in May, and included an experimental Irish-language theatre piece, “Ní Liomsa an Teach Álainn Seo” (“This Is Not My Beautiful House”), which fused music, digital art, and performance. There were two important retrospective of Irish women artists, IMMA’s Hilary Heron show – the Modernist sculptor has not had an exhibit since the 1960s – and the Hugh Lane’s show of painter Sarah Purser, one of the founders of the Hugh Lane Gallery. Outside of Ireland, New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre staged “The Transatlantic Residency”, plays by four young playwrights, CN Smith, Felispeaks, Jade Jordan, and Kwaku Fortune, while The Hammersmith Irish Cultural Centre in London hosted Little John Nee’s show “Nettel Horse”, which also toured Ireland.

The Irish Studies summer calendar must of course observe Bloomsday. Some interesting events celebrating James Joyce’s Ulysses in 2024 include the reading conducted by Elevator Service Repair, a New York performance troupe, who drew on an eclectic range of performing styles for different sections of the novel, reflecting what their promotional material called Joyce’s “funhouse of style”.  An EU-wide celebration of the novel, the “ULYSSES European Odyssey”, which began in Dublin in 2020 and has been touring eighteen European cities since, had its final performance in 2024. Every city adopted one of the novel’s chapters, and “YES Festival”, an all-woman artist event based on the text’s final Penelope / Molly Bloom chapter, appeared in Derry and Donegal, 13-16 June.

Autumn saw a couple of interesting Irish literature-related events. In October, the Wexford Opera Company presented an opera, The Critic, by Charles Villiers Stanford and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, first staged in Drury Lane Theatre in 1779. Also in October, Brian Cleary discovered a lost Bram Stoker story, “Gibbet Hill”, in the National Library in Dublin, just in time for the Bram Stoker Festival, featuring the Stokerland Fun Park and Dracula’s Disco. Another light-hearted celebration of a literary figure is the annual Muldoon’s Picnic, which moved to the Irish Arts Center in New York in September, after touring Ireland over the course of the summer. Named for an 1880s vaudeville show, this was the event’s tenth year, and it features poetry, music, and prose readings from well-known artists in many genres.

The return of the academic year brought sadness for many in the Irish Studies community, as it would proceed without Eibhear Walshe, my colleague in UCC who died suddenly in late July. In addition to being a successful writer of fiction as well as a respected academic, Eibhear was a much beloved figure in Spanish Irish Studies, and everywhere he was known. His death nearly coincided with that of another towering figure in Irish Studies, Edna O’Brien. There are tributes to both unforgettable people elsewhere in this special issue of Estudios Irlandeses.

Academic Irish Studies around the world continues to be rich and active and impossible to capture in a few paragraphs. Boston College Irish Studies hosted two events with Paul Muldoon in March, as part of their St Patrick’s day celebrations, a poetry reading and a screening of Alan Gilsenan’s 2022 film, Paul Muldoon: Laoithe s’ Liricí / A Life in Lyrics.  Also at Boston College, in September, at the Burns Library, filmmaker Joe Comerford presented his Troubles-era film from 1988, Reefer and the Model. University of Galway’s Professor Chanté Mouton Kinyon presented her work on Irish culture in a national and global framework in April as part of the Chicago Newberry Library Irish Studies seminar series. In July, the new Centre for Irish Studies at Europa-Universität Flensburg hosted their new Irish Studies and Cultural Theory Summer School on the subject of “Irish Cultures in Contact”. Clair Wills’s newest book, the memoir Missing Persons, or My Grandmother’s Secrets, published in early 2024, led to a number of talks and debates about the continuing impacts of the regime of institutional abuse in Ireland. She appeared in Notre Dame University in September, delivering a talk on “The Family, the Church, and ‘the Home’ in Twentieth-Century Irish Society”, and, in October in Dublin’s Connolly House (Boston College) discussed “Making Sense of the Missing”. In November, Professor Eamon Duffy discussed his editing of The Letters of Seamus Heaney (2023) in Magdalene College, Cambridge.

The parlous state of things around the world can make academia feel impotent, if not irrelevant, but certainly in Ireland there is a serious commitment among academics to be politically engaged activists. With the new regime in Washington, maintaining Ireland’s so-far stalwart defence of the Palestinian people, its principled objection to the violence in Gaza and the realities of negotiating with one of the country’s biggest trade partners will put serious pressure on such ideological positions. In the meantime, Irish artists have worked hard to provide support for suffering Palestinian families. I referred earlier to the artist Mála Spíosraí (Spice Bag), who repainted the Free Derry Corner in January of 2024. He chose a simple image, the words by the late Palestinian poet, Dr Refaat Alareer, killed by the Israeli military: “If I must die / Let it bring hope”. In May the performance venue Vicar Street, Dublin, hosted “Irish Comics for Palestine”, featuring Ardal O’Hanlon, Deirdre O’Kane, Dylan Moran, and David McSavage. In September Stephen Rea headlined the fundraiser, “Gig for Gaza”, in Dublin’s Liberty Hall, organized by the Musicians Union of Ireland and the trade union SIPTU with proceeds going to the Middle East Children’s Alliance.

As always, I must thank the reviewers who contributed to this issue, despite what I know were many professional and personal challenges for several of them. There are various topics covered this year, including Northern Irish punk music, Irish women and the death penalty, Irish modernism, Irish-American history, digital culture in Northern Ireland, the Celtic Tiger and Irish fiction, and Irish LGBTQ history. It is never easy to say good-bye, but I am proud of this, my final issue, thanks to the contributors.