Tinteán

Controversial Irish language once again!

I’ve been introduced to a new (to me) Irish singer through https://extrag.ie/2025/07/27/nuacht/gaeilge/lirici-gaeilge-cmat-agus-bbc/

Her name is CMAT and she is currently in the news because the BBC cut out the first verse of her song ‘Euro-Country’ because it is in the Irish language. The BBC has denied this but is unable to show how the cutting happened and has since righted the problem, and the whole episode has created publicity for an Irish indie pop country rock singer who has had two number one albums in Ireland in the last three years.

Extrag.ie provides a link to the version that includes the lyrics. I was surprised by a couple of things : I liked the song as a song, and the Irish language lyrics are impossible to understand without seeing them because this Dublin singer sings in an American accent. Nevertheless, I will be using the article for my Irish class here in Adelaide. Thanks CMAT and thanks the BBC!

Four Letters of Love: the movie

The movie is not rating well on Rotten Tomatoes, and I can understand the critics’ reservations. Niall Williams’ lyrical prose can be transported to the silver screen through landscape and narration, but the spell is broken by those cringy ‘Oirish’ scenes, including those Joycean ones, and a Hollywood ending.

Williams wrote the screenplay. He has added more Irish language dialogue than was in the novel in keeping with the current trend of that language serving to elevate Irish culture. But the movie is trying to please two audiences at once and not confident enough to leave out such clichés as the pub scene, the white-headed old crone, the tight-lipped nuns, and the staged finale that did not match the novel’s conclusion. Not that the movie should have been faithful to the novel: I secretly enjoyed the little vignette of the postmistress being bested by Helena Bonham Carter even if it did not happen that way in the novel.

Go see the movie for the breathtaking landscape and the solid acting of Gabriel Byrne and the young stars Anne Skelly, Fionn O’Shea, and Ferdia Walshe Peelo, and if you haven’t read him yet, read NIall Williams. His novel Four Letters of Love was first published in 1997. I heard about it some years later and so sent for it, and I’ve been entranced by his writing ever since.

Art Gallery Of South Australia

Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940 Art Gallery of South Australia. An unexpected Irish connection is the story of an art studio in Bunmahon, County Waterford in 1914/1915 founded by Margaret Preston and Edith Collier where they were not permitted to paint the Irish coastline.

The exhibition is on until 7 September. If you can, take the free guided tour where you will hear such interesting snippets as the one above about Bunmahon.

Dymphna Lonergan

Mix Tape

The mini-series Mix Tape is the result of a collaboration between Screen Australia and Screen Ireland. Set in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England and Sydney, Australia, filming took place in Dublin and County Wicklow and in Sydney. This is the story of Dan and Alison, who started a teenage romance in Sheffield in the late 80’s and who bond via the exchange of mix tapes. They reconnect 20 or so years later in Sydney, where Alison has a family of her own and has penned a successful novel. She has also acquired an Australian accent which is unlikely given she emigrated as a teenager.

As the story of Dan and Alison unravels, there are many puzzling moments which are underpinned by Alison’s secretiveness. Sliding door moments open up what ifs, but as the secrets are revealed, the doors start to close and the way is steered forward to where some resolution is reachable.

In one scene, teenage Dan has tickets to see ‘The Jesus and Mary Chain’ who were playing locally in Sheffield. With a sense of retrospective envy, I asked our resident channel surfer (who went to uni and lived in Sheffield in the early 80’s) if that was representative of the music scene in Sheffield. He responded with anecdotes about Human League and ABC (‘The look of love’), so I guess that is a ‘yes’. Mix Tape thrives on nostalgia through music and I happily took the opportunity to skip down memory lane.

Linda Rooney

I’ve been enjoying dipping into Michael Sharkey’s Anthology of Victorian women poets of World War One, Many Such as She (2018), not because the poems are necessarily to my taste, though some of them are smashing; and not because many of them are famous – most are not, though I’m familiar with Nettie Palmer, a key figure in the emergence of Australian Literature as a ‘thing’, and bisexual, liberated Lesbia Harford who graduated in Law in the same year as Robert Menzies and was a non-Marxist Shavian Socialist. Most of all what I’m enjoying are Michael Sharkey’s excellent introductions to each woman. Of the 24 poets collected, seven (Marion Bray, Violet B. Kramer, ‘E’ (Mary E. Fullerton), Lesbia Harford, Marion Miller Knowles, Nettie Palmer and Marie E.J. Pitt), are either Irish, Anglo-Irish, or of Irish descent.

What I’m enjoying most are Sharkey’s carefully documented introductory essays. He has given himself a very narrow brief: women poets on the subject of WWI, and who are substantially connected to the state of Victoria. It is astonishing to learn how many of them are radical socialists, among them of course, Nettie Palmer (nee Higgins), editing a journal that opposed Fascism for women, supporting international refugees, and becoming the breadwinner in the family to support her husband Vance, while keeping up a prodigious writing and networking career of her own. Some of the poets bend to Imperial imperatives, but many speak as women and lovers and very much in the spirit of protest against the War, sometimes precipitated by a close encounter with the death of a loved one. Sharkey notes that radicals like Lesbia Harford, Nettie Palmer and Marie E.J. Pitt wrote very much against the prevailing censorship, understanding the pressure on men to enlist even as they opposed conscription. Some of them were poets when schoolgirls, and Sharkey’s prefatory bibliographies indicate they wrote for a wide variety of publications, often country newspapers. ‘E’ (Mary Fullerton) was the author of four books of poetry, two with Angus & Robertson, and Marion Miller Knowles with 13 volumes of poetry (not to mention several novels) to attest to her prodigious output.

This is serious and impressive literary archaeology which opens one’s eyes to the variety of ways in which women were politically and poetically activists, and the wide range of publication organs available during the war years. It’s also a useful counterbalance to male writing on the subject of war.

Let me leave you with a heartbreakingly simple poem by Lesbia Harford:

Ours was a friendship in secret, my dear,
Stolen from fate.
I must be secret still, show myself calm
Early and late.

‘Isn’t it sad he was killed’, I must hear
With a smooth face.
‘Yes, it is sad.’ O my darling, my own,
My heart of grace.

Frances Devlin-Glass