Paul Delaney

Depth profiling of PLGA copolymer in a novel biomedical bilayer using confocal Raman spectroscopy.

Confocal Raman spectroscopy was undertaken to identify separate layers of PLGA and gentamicin sulfate (GS) coatings on a titanium alloy substrate for a novel drug-delivery system. Additionally, it was found that it was possible to measure the layer thickness and uniformity of the PLGA accurately by detecting intensity and wavelength changes in the vibrational bands of the copolymer bonds. Further analysis of the materials was done using FIB, SEM/EDX, and profilometry; these techniques were used to confirm the findings of the Raman data. It was determined that the substrate was extremely rough and therefore the coating was not uniform in thickness but the materials were uniformly dispersed. Most importantly, two distinct GS and PLGA layers were present.

Nobody Now Knows Which...: Transition and Piety in Daniel Corkery's Short Fiction

In the opening chapter of Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (1931), Daniel Corkery notoriously dismissed the entire tradition of Anglo-Irish literature as neither national nor natural, remarking that “Ireland has not yet learned how to express its own life through the medium of the English language.”1 Unless writers are absorbed in the forces of religion, nationalism, and the land, Corkery argued, their work should not be considered Irish. Not surprisingly, this argument has proved contentious. More often than not, Corkery’s pronouncements have led to his being depicted as a doctrinaire cultural commissar. His criticism is usually interpreted as an exclusivist argument that set the limits for literary expression in the fledgling Free State.2 While this is the dominant manner in which Corkery has come to be remembered, a few scholars have suggested that his legacy is more complex and significant. Emmet Larkin, Seán Ó Tuama, and Patrick Maume, for instance, have all provided portraits of a more complicated and less assured individual.3 Patrick Walsh has also responded to the received way of reading Corkery.4 In recent years, some suggestive rereadings of Corkery have been conducted through a postcolonial lens, and these have touched on a range of preoccupations in his work: his concern over the place of hybrid and diasporic identities in the nation; his critique of imperialist historiography; his interest in questions

'A Marginal Footnote': O'Faola'in, the Subaltern, and the Travellers

In his classic study of the short story form, The Lonely Voice (1963), Frank O’Connor argued that the form and the ideological factors underpinning the short story are such that they allow for the representation of characters who are traditionally repressed or ‘submerged’ from view [1]. That is to say, short stories provide an imaginative space for the inclusion of characters who are typically written off as marginal or minor. Theorists of Irish culture have regularly referenced O’Connor’s findings when attempting to account for the wealth of short stories which were written during the postindependence period. Picking up on O’Connor’s claim that the short story flourishes best in a disturbed and uncertain environment, many critics have remarked that its application was ‘particularly appropriate’ for representations of Irish society during the transitional 1930s and 1940s [2]. Critics have drawn an affinity between O’Connor’s ‘submerged population group’ and the Free State’s newly risen populace, for instance, and have argued that the short story should be considered the provenance of Ireland’s emerging bourgeoisie and tenant farmer class [3]. Moreover, critics have suggested that its practitioners provided a prosaic counter to the contrasting ideals of the Literary Revival and the official nationalist movement [4]. Within this context, short-story writers have been thought to supply a note of ‘corrective deconstruction’ to romantic representations of Ireland and what it might mean to be Irish—many stories of the post-independence period revolve around issues of conventionality, repression, guilt, and censorship, for instance, and draw attention to the inhibitions, the hypocrisies, and silences of life in a Puritanical and provincial environment [5]. However, by figuring the voices of those who remain just beyond the borders of the permissible, many of these stories are also inscribed with a potentially subversive edge, and hint at the presence of those who were routinely ignored by alienating social and psychological structures in the early Free State. In the pages that follow, I propose to suggest a strategic analogy between O’Connor’s classic theory of submergence and contemporary theories of the subaltern, and to explore this through reference to a specific ‘submerged population group’, the Travellers. Applications of subaltern theory to Irish Studies have opened up fresh lines of inquiry in recent years, and the pages that follow are intended as a continuance of this inquiry [6]. For the purposes of clarity, this essay is roughly divided into two sections: the first attempts to sketch an analogy between the subaltern and the submerged, and the second section relates this analogy to a close reading of several short stories by Seán O’Faoláin. The choice of O’Faoláin is suggestive, since he has long been remembered as a leading exponent of the short story form and as the foremost liberal spokesperson of his day [7]. It is a critical commonplace to note that representations of the Travellers have largely been effected from without. Disproportionate levels of non-literacy, and a shared