On the Town: Lucy McDiarmid warned that the ghost of Roger Casement was beating on the door of the National Library. Suddenly a glass crashed to the floor, a nervous laugh echoed in the vaulted room and lonely Banna Strand seemed a lot closer.
McDiarmid, an American writer and academic, came to Dublin this week to celebrate publication of her book, The Irish Art of Controversy, dealing with the run-up to 1916. "I am trying to show that a controversy is an entity. It really is theatre, and when social changes happen, controversies happen spontaneously," she said. "The same controversies are happening today."
McDiarmid "has spent time trawling newspapers for that telling detail", said Angela Bourke, of UCD, who is just back from the Keough Institute for Irish Studies at Indiana's Notre Dame University. "Her book will make you burst out laughing again and again."
"A lot of controversies were about wounded local pride fighting against the big battalions. And also the row between officials and romantic sentiment," said Declan Kiberd, professor of Anglo-Irish literature at UCD.
McDiarmid provides the "genealogy, the matrix and the extraordinary afterlife" of that period, said Prof Nicholas Grene, head of TCD's English literature department. "The delight is in the detail."
Among those who attended the launch were poet Macdara Woods, whose CD (with composer Benjamin Dwyer), In the Ranelagh Gardens, was released recently, and his wife and fellow poet, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, dean of the arts faculty at TCD. Also present were Lawrence Taylor, professor of anthropology at NUI Maynooth, and Terence Brown, professor of Anglo-Irish literature at TCD, who was the master of ceremonies.
The Irish Art of Controversy, by Lucy McDiarmid, is published by Lilliput Press