The olden days.
If the church didn’t get you, the Department of Education would:
“Augustine Martin seems to have less to do with choosing these stories then he did the poems [in ‘Soundings‘]. He provided the notes and exercises, but the stories were chosen by a syllabus committee of the Department of Education. They had an agenda – committees always do – which was less disinterested than Martin’s agenda for Soundings, or at least less based on the innate and tested excellence of the work.
Two-thirds of the stories are Irish (the reverse proportion to Soundings). The Irish are famous for short stories, but still, that doesn’t leave much space for the rest of the world. And there’s no Joyce, Chekhov, or Maupassant , so Exploring is less a canon than Soundings.
It says a lot about the preoccupations of the Department of Education: five stories by Liam O’Flaherty about the Aran Islands? Brilliant stories but the number of them suggests Gaelic League preoccupations, the old nostalgie de la boue.”
Bridget Hourican, reviewing Exploring English 1, Short Stories We Did For Our Inter Cert (Gill & Macmillan) in the Dubliner, with tomorrow’s Evening Herald.