Daniel Corkery

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Daniel Corkery (14 February 1878–31 December 1964) was an Irish politician, writer and teacher.

He was born in the city of Cork and educated at the Presentation Brothers and St. Patrick's College of Education, Dublin where he trained as a teacher. He taught at schools in Cork but resigned from St Patrick's School there in 1921 when he was refused the headmastership. He then taught art for the local technical education committee, before becoming inspector of Irish in 1925, and later Professor of English at University College Cork in 1930. Among his students were Frank O'Connor and Seán Ó Faoláin.

In his late twenties he learnt Irish and this brought him into contact with leading members of the Irish Language revival movement, including Terence MacSwiney, T. C. Murray and Con O'Leary, with whom he founded the Cork Dramatic Society in 1908. His plays Embers and The Hermit and the King were performed by the society. Later plays were staged at the famous Abbey Theatre, including The Labour Leader (1919) and The Yellow Bittern (1920).

He was also a writer of short stories, including the collections A Munster Twilight (1916), The Hounds of Banba (1920), The Stormy Hills (1929), and Earth Out of Earth (1939), and a novel, The Threshold of Quiet (1917).

He also wrote non-fiction works, including The Hidden Ireland (1924), a highly influential work about the riches of Eighteenth Century Irish poetry. In this he attempted to reconstruct a worldview preserved by Gaelic poets amongst the poor and oppressed Catholic peasantry of the Penal Law era, virtually invisible in the Anglo-Irish tradition that had dominated the writing of Irish history. 'An instant, influential classic,' wrote Patrick Walsh, 'its version of the past provided powerful cultural underpinning to the traditional nationalist history that became, in the 1930s, the educational orthodoxy of the new state.'

In 1921 he was elected to the Dáil for Sinn Féin in the Cork Mid, North, South, South East and West. An anti-Treaty member, he did not take his seat but joined the newly created Fianna Fáil party in 1926 and took his seat in 1927. He continued as a member until 1937, when he was defeated. In 1938 he was elected to the Senate. He continued to be an elected member until 1947, after which he was one of the additional members nominated by the Taoiseach. He did not seek re-election in 1954.

Daniel Corkery's papers are held in the Boole Library of University College Cork.

[edit] Works

A Munster Twilight, Talbot Press, Dublin, 1917.
The Threshold of Quiet, Talbot Press, Dublin; T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1917.
The Yellow Bittern, and other plays, Talbot Press: Dublin; T. Fisher Unwin: London, 1920.
The Hounds of Banba, Talbot Press, Dublin, T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1921.
I Bhreasail. A book of lyrics, Elkin Mathews, London, 1921.
The Hidden Ireland, M. H. Gill & Son, Dublin, 1924.
The Stormy Hills, Jonathan Cape: London (printed Dublin), 1929.
Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature: A study Cork University Press, 1931.
Earth out of Earth, Talbot Press, Dublin & Cork, 1939.
Resurrection, Talbot Press: Dublin, 1942.
What's this about the Gaelic League?, Conradh na Gaeilge, Dublin, 1942.
The Fortunes of the Irish Language, C. J. Fallon, Dublin, 1954.

[edit] References

Henry Boylan, A Dictionary of Irish Biography, Gill and Macmillan, Dublin 1978.
Oireachtas.ie members database
Walsh, Patrick "Daniel Corkery's The Hidden Ireland (1924) and Revisionism", New Hibernia Review - Volume 5, Number 2, Summer 2001, pp. 27-44
O'Connor, Frank, "An Only Child", New York 1961