Sir - The litter along the Dodder is caused partly by refuse dumps in the Bohernabreena/Old Bawn area being breached by floods. Local authorities and landowners must be made answerable.A friendly worker for the local authority chopping trees along the river in spring has indicated that his instructions from his employers are to cut down any branch or bush that would catch the rubbish as it passes by. What an abdication!What price, then, some cover for the nervous trout, a resting place for the kingfisher, the nesting season for birds in general, or indeed a clean Dublin Bay? - Yours, etc., Paddy Conneff.Angling representative board member,Eastern RegionalFisheries Board,Thorncliffe Park,TEMPLE BAR MUSIC CENTRESir, - I refer to the letter from Nuala Hayes and Ellen Cranitch (April 8th) about their visit here on St Patrick's night. The Music Centre is a purpose-built venue allowing live performance and video/audio recordings. There is theatre-type seating which retracts into the wall. The height required for TV lighting and the retractable seating account for the "barn"like appearance. Some people love it, some people don't.The Music Centre's programming covers many genres. We offer the same stage to experienced and emerging artists. The common denominator is our respect for musicians and our desire to put on a good show. This differentiates the Music Centre from establishments whose sole purpose is the sale of drink.Consequently, we are fortunate enough to have superb acts such as Cooney and Begley playing here regularly.
Our bar's purpose is to subsidise the staging of shows for emerging talent which otherwise would not have a platform of such quality.We are sorry Nuala and Ellen did not enjoy the evening because they were admitted late and the crowd were noisy. Unfortunately,the artists were still sound-checking at opening time. Rather than keep patrons outside in the cold, we admitted them to the foyer and bar. Regarding the noisy crowd, we still have not found a way of controlling how much enthusiasm a full house on St Patrick's night exudes.This is very definitely a "music" centre with rehearsal facilities for bands, a training school for sound technicians and a decent performance space where music and performers can be respected, celebrated and enjoyed - with equal emphasis on all three. - Yours, etc.,PADDY DUNNING,Managing Director,Temple Bar Music Centre,Curved Street,Dublin 2.PEIG SAYERS AND FEMINISM Sir, - I have three brief final points to make about Peig Sayers and how we read her work. Rev Pat Moore (April 21st) cites a passage about Peig's response to the match made for her in "the account of her life", in which he approvingly emphasises Peig's willing obedience to her fate in being married off to someone she had never seen before the match was made. I feel I must enlighten Fr Moore as to the existence of another and totally different account of the matter, also given by Peig. There are, of course, three volumes of her life-story, not one. In the third, Beatha Pheig Sayers, Peig tells at length in Chapters 1618 how she had several times seen her future husband Peatsai "Flint" O Gaoithin on his visits to the mainland. She mentions being told of his interest in her by another island woman, and stresses how they had felt a strong mutual attraction. Finally she describes with much circumstantial detailhow their match was made, according to contemporary custom, in a Dingle pub, by their relatives and friends and in their own presence. I for one would not feel secure in privileging one of these accounts over the other. Perhaps Fr Moore does so feel, or perhaps he was simply unaware of the existence of the second. If so, I would point out that, to borrow a phrase of his own, it is "a cardinal principle in literary criticism", as indeed in all other forms of intellectual inquiry, to be aware of all the relevant data.My second point is in the form of a question, and arises out of the first. Fr Moore writes in the tone of one blithely confident of his own freedom from "ideological reading[s]". But is it not precisely an "ideological reading", and one which in effect endorses the subjection of women in past times to the dispensations made by patriarchal communities on their behalf, which leads him so to cherish the romantic first account of Peig's made match to a total stranger? Finally, as for what Fr Moore calls "inappropriate" readings, I can only reiterate that tact and sympathetic imagination are required in approaching the writing of other times and places.
But to withhold one's own responses to a work, in all their difference from it, is to enshrine it in a glass case like a dead specimen (a process, alas, carried out over the generations by the deployment of an edited version of Peig to adolescents as an ideal of Irish womanhood). Thus I claim my right and that of others to make a feminist reading of all and any work, as distinct from labelling it as itself "feminist", which in the case of Peig's work I have never done. This distinction seems to have been lost upon Fr Moore. - Yours, etc.,PATRICIA COUGHLAN,Department of English,University College Cork.LITTER ALONG THE DODDERSir - The litter along the Dodder is caused partly by refuse dumps in the Bohernabreena/Old Bawn area being breached by floods. Local authorities and landowners must be made answerable.A friendly worker for the local authority chopping trees along the river in spring has indicated that his instructions from his employers are to cut down any branch or bush that would catch the rubbish as it passes by. What an abdication!What price, then, some cover for the nervous trout, a resting place for the kingfisher, the nesting season for birds in general, or indeed a clean Dublin Bay? - Yours, etc.,PADDY CONNEFF,Angling representativeboard member,Eastern RegionalFisheries Board,Thorncliffe Park,TEMPLE BAR MUSIC CENTRESir, - I refer to the letter from Nuala Hayes and Ellen Cranitch (April 8th) about their visit here on St Patrick's night. The Music Centre is a purpose-built venue allowing live performance and video/audio recordings. There is theatre-type seating which retracts into the wall. The height required for TV lighting and the retractable seating account for the "barn"like appearance. Some people love it, some people don't.The Music Centre's programming covers many genres. We offer the same stage to experienced and emerging artists. The common denominator is our respect for musicians and our desire to put on a good show. This differentiates the Music Centre from establishments whose sole purpose is the sale of drink.Consequently, we are fortunate enough to have superb acts such as Cooney and Begley playing here regularly.
Our bar's purpose is to subsidise the staging of shows for emerging talent which otherwise would not have a platform of such quality.We are sorry Nuala and Ellen did not enjoy the evening because they were admitted late and the crowd were noisy. Unfortunately,the artists were still sound-checking at opening time. Rather than keep patrons outside in the cold, we admitted them to the foyer and bar. Regarding the noisy crowd, we still have not found a way of controlling how much enthusiasm a full house on St Patrick's night exudes.This is very definitely a "music" centre with rehearsal facilities for bands, a training school for sound technicians and a decent performance space where music and performers can be respected, celebrated and enjoyed - with equal emphasis on all three. - Yours, etc.,PADDY DUNNING,Managing Director,Temple Bar Music Centre,Curved Street,Dublin 2.Dublin 14. PEIG SAYERS AND FEMINISM Sir, - I have three brief final points to make about Peig Sayers and how we read her work. Rev Pat Moore (April 21st) cites a passage about Peig's response to the match made for her in "the account of her life", in which he approvingly emphasises Peig's willing obedience to her fate in being married off to someone she had never seen before the match was made. I feel I must enlighten Fr Moore as to the existence of another and totally different account of the matter, also given by Peig. There are, of course, three volumes of her life-story, not one. In the third, Beatha Pheig Sayers, Peig tells at length in Chapters 1618 how she had several times seen her future husband Peatsai "Flint" O Gaoithin on his visits to the mainland. She mentions being told of his interest in her by another island woman, and stresses how they had felt a strong mutual attraction. Finally she describes with much circumstantial detailhow their match was made, according to contemporary custom, in a Dingle pub, by their relatives and friends and in their own presence. I for one would not feel secure in privileging one of these accounts over the other. Perhaps Fr Moore does so feel, or perhaps he was simply unaware of the existence of the second. If so, I would point out that, to borrow a phrase of his own, it is "a cardinal principle in literary criticism", as indeed in all other forms of intellectual inquiry, to be aware of all the relevant data.My second point is in the form of a question, and arises out of the first. Fr Moore writes in the tone of one blithely confident of his own freedom from "ideological reading[s]". But is it not precisely an "ideological reading", and one which in effect endorses the subjection of women in past times to the dispensations made by patriarchal communities on their behalf, which leads him so to cherish the romantic first account of Peig's made match to a total stranger? Finally, as for what Fr Moore calls "inappropriate" readings, I can only reiterate that tact and sympathetic imagination are required in approaching the writing of other times and places.
But to withhold one's own responses to a work, in all their difference from it, is to enshrine it in a glass case like a dead specimen (a process, alas, carried out over the generations by the deployment of an edited version of Peig to adolescents as an ideal of Irish womanhood). Thus I claim my right and that of others to make a feminist reading of all and any work, as distinct from labelling it as itself "feminist", which in the case of Peig's work I have never done. This distinction seems to have been lost upon Fr Moore. - Yours, etc.,PATRICIA COUGHLAN,Department of English,University College Cork.LITTER ALONG THE DODDERSir - The litter along the Dodder is caused partly by refuse dumps in the Bohernabreena/Old Bawn area being breached by floods. Local authorities and landowners must be made answerable.A friendly worker for the local authority chopping trees along the river in spring has indicated that his instructions from his employers are to cut down any branch or bush that would catch the rubbish as it passes by. What an abdication!What price, then, some cover for the nervous trout, a resting place for the kingfisher, the nesting season for birds in general, or indeed a clean Dublin Bay? - Yours, etc.,PADDY CONNEFF,Angling representativeboard member,Eastern RegionalFisheries Board,Thorncliffe Park,Dublin 14.