Patrick Kavanagh’s walk to Dublin to meet AE, or George William Russell, in December 1931 is occasionally mentioned in Kavanagh criticism. The journey on foot is usually regarded as Kavanagh’s gesture to enhance his peasant quality to impress city-dwelling literati. However, the narrator of The Green Fool, Kavanagh’s fictionalized autobiography published in 1938 that features the long walk, explains otherwise: the main purpose of the travel is to go on the road, rather than to visit AE in Dublin, and to be a tramp, not a peasant. This paper re-examines the meaning of this on-foot journey, and other walks, in The Green Fool, and also finds connection between these walks and the poetics of Kavanagh. By doing so, the paper aims to offer a new way of reading this relatively unexplored text, and to shed new light to Kavanagh’s idea of poetry. Scrutiny of the text finds recurrent figures of itinerant workers and vagrants often called ‘journeymen’, ‘tramps’, and ‘beggars’. To the eye of the narrator, their oral culture, their knowledge of the world, and their craftsmanship that even includes their shrewd ways of business, are idealized. Their way of life is romanticized as that of wandering poets. The narrator’s travel to Dublin in the winter of 1931 described in Chapter 29 of The Green Fool, ‘A Visit to Dublin’, and the journey to the west for about two months in the following spring related in Chapter 30,‘Tramping’, are experiments of fashioning himself into one of those wandering poets. The experiments turn out to be a failure in the sense that he finds his trampings far from poetic. The dominant tone of the narration in ‘A Visit to Dublin’ is close to that of a slapstick comedy, and the one in ‘Tramping’, a drab disillusion. The experiments fail to become poems, too. On the other hand, however, it is a success in the sense that he freshly recognizes the value of the wanderings at home, on the country roads and in the fields of Inniskeen, which generate poetic moments. In the light of this reading of The Green Fool, some of his early poems, included in his first collection of poems, Ploughman and Other Poems, published in 1936, take on new meanings. ‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’ in particular can be read as an example of crystallization of poetics of lone walking.

View full abstract

The outcome of the 2020 Irish general election suggested the end of nearly 100 years of civil war politics when Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael – hitherto dominant and always opposed – formed a three-way coalition government with the Green Party. The 2020 election saw the significant rise of Sinn Féin, which won the highest number of votes and became the second largest party in terms of seats. In light of this, this paper attempts to explore what lies behind Sinn Féin’s breakthrough in Irish party politics, employing ‘challenger party theory’ developed by De Vries and Hobolt which offers theoretical aids to understand the political battle between a dominant and challenger party. This paper finds that the Sinn Féin inroads first appeared in their victories in the 2014 Local Election and European Parliament Election. Beginning then, Sinn Féin policies focused on ‘everyday life’ issues, e.g. water charges and housing, that impacted more directly on voters. By contrast, the dominant government party (Fine Gael) focused more on macro-level performance, e.g., exit of EU/IMF Financial Programme, No.1 GDP growth in EU, and successes in ensuring no hard border in Northern Ireland due to Brexit. Despite seat losses in the 2016 general election, Fine Gael continued to misjudge voter preferences - only 1% of voters said that Brexit was important - allowing Sinn Féin to garner votes not only from young people but from broader age cohorts too. This paper concludes that while Sinn Féin’s rise happened due to it being the challenger party, it is unclear whether they can succeed as a catch-all party, given that it will force them to review their electoral strategies.

View full abstract