On 28 September 2015, the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, known to some Shaw scholars for having opened the 2012 International Shaw Society conference in Dublin—as well as for occasional references to Shaw in his speeches—delivered a lecture at New York University School of Law titled “The European Union—Towards a Discourse of Reconnection, Renewal and Hope.” In his lecture, which focused on failures of the EU as well as posited ways forward to serve all Europeans, Higgins repeatedly expressed concern with “the threat to democracy that is posed by increasing global inequality.” He spoke of the trend since 1980 of the widening “gap in income and wealth” in both Europe and the United States, and saw that hard-won programs of the past, such as Britain's National Health Service, were under threat of eradication. It is, the President argued, resulting in “a growing inequality, an inequality that has implications for...
Introduction: Money Matters—Shaw's Interrogation of Society's Social Conscience
AUDREY MCNAMARA was awarded her PhD from University College Dublin and lectures there. She has published an essay on John Bull's Other Island in SHAW 32, “Conor McPherson's The Seafarer: ‘Male Pattern Blindness’” in The Theatre of Conor McPherson: Right Beside the Beyond (Carysfort Press, 2012), “Dead Men Talking: Stagnation and Entrapment in Enda Walsh's Penelope” in The Theatre of Enda Walsh (Carysfort Press 2015), and “Quirke, The 1950s and Leopold Bloom” in The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). She wrote the program note for the Abbey Theatre's production of Pygmalion (2014) and was a plenary speaker at the National Theatre of London's production of Man and Superman (2015).
NELSON O'CEALLAIGH RITSCHEL is professor and chair of Humanities at Massachusetts Maritime Academy, and holds a PhD from Brown University in theater history. He has published widely on Shaw, Synge, and Irish theater. His book Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and Socialist Provocation (University Press of Florida, 2012) has been recognized repeatedly by Michael D. Higgins, president of Ireland. He is co–series editor of Palgrave Macmillan's Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries and has completed his fifth book, Shaw, Stead, and Journalism: Whitechapel, Parnell, Titanic, and the Great War.
Audrey McNamara, Nelson O'C. Ritschel; Introduction: Money Matters—Shaw's Interrogation of Society's Social Conscience. Shaw 1 June 2016; 36 (1): 1–9. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/shaw.36.1.0001
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