SOURCE: "A Demographer Looks at Cúirt an Mheán Oíche," in Éire-Ireland, Vol. XIX, No. 2, Summer, 1984, pp. 135-43.

In the following essay, O'Neill uses "The Midnight Court" to show that Irish marriage patterns associated with the post-Famine era actually arose in the late eighteenth century.

During the turbulent years of revolution and national consolidation, Daniel Corkery, novelist, literary critic and cultural historian, issued a call of central importance to the development of independent Irish intellectual life. Writing early in this century, under the influence of the Gaelic revival movement, Corkery urged a radical revaluation of intellectual perspectives. He argued that, as carried out by English-speaking, urban intellectuals, conventional academic study of Irish culture, society, and literature failed to pay adequate attention to Gaelic sources and subjects. Indeed, as the title of his foremost critical work, The Hidden Ireland, implies, Corkery believed an entire world lay beyond...