Daniel Corkery: 'A leading figure in crafting the way we view ourselves as Irish people'
Daniel Corkery at Cork City Library in 1953. Picture: Irish Examiner Archive
One of the organisers of a conference on Daniel Corkery’s seminal book, The Hidden Ireland, says she hopes it will rejuvenate discussion on national identity and the place of the Irish language, a hundred years on. Victoria Anne Pearson, a PhD student at Ulster University’s School of Arts and Humanities who is involved in the conference at Cork’s Imperial Hotel on April 20, says Irish people have always been fascinated with identity and what it means to be Irish.
Cork-born Corkery’s book is a 1924 study of the riches of the poetry of the 18th-century Irish language poets in Munster. In the era surrounding the emergence of the state, Corkery’s observations on the history of the Irish people, divided between the ‘Big House’ and the ‘Bothán’, provoked a debate on the nature of the Irish soul that still rages today, say the organisers of the event being run by UCC and Ulster University.
