Regionalism and culture

The centre of cultural and intellectual activity was of course Dublin, but it did not possess a monopoly. Cork, in particular, had a flourishing intellectual life and Radio ireann maintained a separate studio there which was widely listened to in the South. The short-story school of OConnor and Faolin was essentially a Cork phenomenonfollowing in the footsteps of their mentor, the writer and academic Daniel Corkeryand proved a valuable counter-thrust to Dublin intellectual egocentricity. While both men were cosmopolitan in outlook and influenced by Russian and French models, they were also strongly regional in their subject matter and social thinking. Cork always possessed a small but committed cultural elite, who included personalities such as the sculptor Seamus Murphy, the scholar/poet/academic Sean Tuama, and the important Gaelic poet Sen Riordin. University life, too, had plenty of vitality and Cork produced its own respected newspaper, the Cork Examiner. Cork, in fact, proved to be in fact what it had always claimed to bethe capital of the South, independent of Dublin or even London. Without this regional vitality, Ireland would have much the poorer in almost every respect. Though the contribution of Galway and Limerick has been largely ignored, the former produced two outstanding Gaelic writers in the poet Mirtin Direin and the fiction-writer Mirtin Cadhin, as well as various distinguished scholars and academics. Limerick, however, did not acquire university status until much later and its intellectual life probably suffered from its intermediate position between Cork and Galway.