Speaking at the Microphone: Material and Cultural Conditions for Early Irish Radio

What did wireless look (or sound) like, theoretically, to O’Nolan’s generation? To conceptualize O’Nolan’s ‘wireless imagination’ beyond the avant-garde and modernist engagements with radio privileged in the field of literary radio studies, one must turn to the material supports for a radio consciousness. Archival traces shed light on the early years of Irish radio, but scholars must frequently rely on Radio Telefís Éireann (RTÉ)’s summary of its own history. And as Eileen Morgan-Zayachek has noted, that means relying on RTÉ publications:

Radio Telefís Éireann has a longstanding tradition of marking the milestones in broadcasting history through retrospective programs and publications. In addition to the organization’s primary obligation of providing quality radio and television broadcasts to the Irish public, Ireland’s national broadcasting service has labored to publicize and preserve its own history.²²

These official accounts include memoirs about Irish Radio like Gorham’s study, and Louis McRedmond’s anthology, Written on the Wind. Both are examples of a kind of commemorational radio history, but extensive discussion of radio in Irish memoirs is not limited to official histories. In Over the Bar and An Nollaig Thiar, the broadcaster Breandán Ó hEithir paints a vivid picture of the importance of radio on Inis Mór where it provided a wireless connection to the non-Gaeltacht world.²³ By comparison, more recent studies by former radio workers such as Richard Pine and Iarfhlaith Wilson are examples of scholarship that makes fuller use of RTÉ’s archive.²⁴ In this vein, John Bowman’s Window and Mirror: RTÉ Television, 1961–2011 is a pictorial survey of RTÉ’s history,²⁵ whereas Maelsheachlainn Ó Caollaí’s Tiarnas Cultúir: Craolachán in Éirinn (‘Cultural Domination: Broadcasting in Ireland’) is an ironically titled Irish language polemic that explores the influence of widely available Anglo-American mass media on Irish broadcasting.²⁶

What, then, can be said about the specifically Irish form of the ‘Wireless Imagination’? Marinetti characterised the first stage of radio as the point at which the medium represented both a theatre for (often unsuccessful) avant-garde experiments and the cutting edge of high culture. This view accords with O’Nolan’s perception. As Myles na gCopaleen he tied the radio imaginative to live performance. His 15 December 1944 Cruiskeen Lawn column responds to an orchestra performance given by Radio Éireann at the Capitol Theatre. Radio broadcasting has an invigorating effect on the quality of Dublin concerts: ‘An orchestra which formerly shambled through its pieces is now a highly disciplined combination, very alert and resourceful, fully and properly sensitive to the influence of its admirable conductor.’²⁷ And when, in the same column, Myles discerns ‘a sneer at Radio Eireann’ in Now magazine, he lays out his argument for of the humble development of radio in Ireland:

Radio Eireann, it is suggested, is so mean, so niggling, that at the beginning they would not hear of the full scale: there was, forsooth, a minute in triplicate from Dept. of Finance saying that “owing to growing demands on the Exchequer and having regard to the necessity for retrenchment in the public service, the full major scale cannot be conceded and musical officers in the orchestra should be instructed not to proceed beyond D sharp; where, however, the key is minor, no objection will be raised to officers proceeding to E flat.” Now this is simply untrue. The full scale was allowed right from the beginning (would you call Radio Eireann “2 R.N, (retd.)?” and moreover, married violinists were permitted to play differentiated scales. If there is one well-grounded complaint against the present orchestra, it is that its instrumental constitution is slavishly international.²⁸

In speaking to limited government funding and competition with international broadcasting, O’Nolan identifies the two essential tensions for Irish radio at the time of its introduction.

At first, the radio set was a luxury item for those with refined tastes. However, radio’s transition to a ‘mass’ consumer product was swift and profound. The number of families that owned a radio set in the USA grew from just 10,000 in 1922 to 27 million in 1939, out of 32 million families.²⁹ The number of radio listeners in Ireland grew at a similar pace, although the overall proportion of the population was lower. Luke Gibbons reports that there were 2,805 licenses held in 1925, and this number increased to 33,083 by 1933.³⁰ Eddie Bohan claims this number was higher: ‘In 1935 the total number of radio licences in the twenty six counties was 78,627, which equated to one in every thirty eight citizens over eighteen having a licence. This figure would increase to one in seventeen by 1939’ – a total of 166,275 licenses across the Free State.³¹ In terms of penetration and infrastructure, Irish radio remained far behind the British Broadcasting Corporation (unlike the BBC, at an early stage most of RÉ’s license fee revenue was appropriated by the Irish Exchequer, forcing the station to rely on advertising which generated a revenue of £22,000 a year by 1933).³²

Across Europe, the number of stations grew at the same speed as the number of listeners and European airwaves were crowded by the 1930s. The tangled politics of Europe and its proliferation of nations in close proximity led to an inability to stay within frequency ranges. National broadcasters clashed and overlapped. The experience of trying to find your station by tuning a set into the successive variety of different languages and channels was like an encounter with a ‘Modern Tower of Babel,’ just as the radio editor of An Sgéaluidhe Nuadh/The New Irish Magazine suggested in May 1934.³³ In 1936 Rudolf Arnheim describes the ‘wireless war’ over European skies:

The total range of frequencies available for short and long distance extends over about 1120 kilohertz. To get a good reception which would include the notes in the upper limits of the human ear, a range of about 10 kilohertz per station would be necessary. Therefore in Europe, if they did not want to cut each other out, there would be room for about 112 stations altogether. But in 1933 there were already 235 stations in Europe.³⁴

The jostling of more radio stations than could be accommodated within the band width permitted by the technology reveals the coming of a new communication technology as something akin to an elemental force, where the uncoordinated mob action of aspirant states and individual actors gave rise to a wall of confusion and static.

Distinguishing signal from noise became the subject of international politics as states had to make the case for a thin slice of silence to enclose their own broadcast frequencies. Gorham notes how:

Ireland did not fare badly in these negotiations but its wavelengths were frequently being changed. 2RN began on 390 metres, but after the first few months this was changed to 398 m. Later in 1926 it changed again to 319 m under the Geneva Plan. In January 1929 it changed to 411 m., under the Brussels Plan, but this was revised later in the year by a conference in Prague to 413 m. 6CK opened on 400 m in 1927 but in 1929 it changed to 222 m and later to 224 m. Later years brought more changes again.³⁵

To make itself heard in the babble over European skies Ireland had only primitive means compared to the advanced radio infrastructures of the United Kingdom, Germany and France. O’Nolan, Niall Sheridan, Donagh MacDonagh, Niall Montgo­mery, and others in the UCD circle were broadcasting from the Dublin studio in Henry Street, which Gorham describes as ‘three makeshift studios at the top of the General Post Office, without proper ventilation, air-conditioning or sound insulation’:

Plays in particular were produced in conditions as primitive as they had been in the earliest days. “Effects” had to be produced in studio by the actors themselves. Broadcasters of those days can remember speaking a line, then backing away from the single microphone to rattle teacups whilst the next man spoke his lines. […] Gabriel Fallon […] remembers how on one occasion he wanted to insert music into a production […]. He had to get an ordinary gramophone, fix it in the passage outside the studio, and fade his music in and out by opening and closing the studio door.³⁶

We should note that in the final years of the 1930s, the time that the O’Nolan circle became involved, Gorham reports that ‘the broadcasting service’s resources were being gradually improved, though the additions were piecemeal and altogether inadequate.’³⁷ Poor conditions in the Henry Street studio placed, by necessity, a central emphasis on live voices, dialogue and its improvisations (rather than recorded effects or musical instruments) to deliver effective broadcasts.

Radio had developed from an experience for the wealthy and the avant-garde into a mass medium during the 1920s and 30s. Radio ownership became more common. By the 1950s, prices for new radios and gramophones ranged from fifteen to twenty-five guineas depending on the size and model.³⁸ This pricing starkly contrasts with earlier decades when buying a radio constituted a major purchase. To encourage sales at Christmas time, retailers published advertisements in Irish newspapers and broadcasters aired special Christmas programming. As Catriona Clear writes, Western People ran an advertisement ‘on 5 December 1936 for a “Radio for Xmas” (run on battery of course). Not all homes had in-house entertainers, and the seasonal atmosphere, then as now, was often helped along by broadcasters.’³⁹ However, as a mass medium of the 1930s it bore some important differences to the radio of the decades that followed. It was rare to broadcast recorded music in this period. Disc recording, which enabled broadcasts to be recorded and for those pre-recorded performances to be broadcast, was only installed at Radio Athlone in November 1936.⁴⁰ Performances were therefore invariably live, which has some important implications for the contemporary approach to – and understanding of – radio.

The early radio broadcast, as Denis Hollier writes, is ‘live’ in the truest sense: ‘the living word flows from it and expends itself unreservedly.’⁴¹ The importance of radio for the imagination of the 1930s lies not in the proliferation of pre-recorded sound via its technical reproduction, a Benjaminian loss of aura, but in the generation of new forms of live performances. Connections across space, rather than necessarily across time, allowed access to experiences like symphony concerts; and to people, like artists, commentators and intellectuals, that could not have existed before wireless transmission. These are important grounds for the formation of O’Nolan as a mature writer, who through his entire journalistic career held an intimate connection with his daily readership. Bohan echoes this point:

People began to speak about presenters in the same way they would talk about a family member even though they would never actually cross paths. Presenters were becoming household names […] Listeners across the length and breadth of the country were able to hear the same music, talk or news at the same time as everyone else. The advertisement of products was now a national endeavour rather than a local necessity. Radio became a shared experience with people they would never meet. There was no need to leave the house to be entertained. No need to go to the theatre as 2RN broadcast plays, no need for vaudeville as comedians embraced the new medium and the musical hall came to your living room rather than the need to travel or pay an admission fee.⁴²

This mistaken sense of intimacy with the broadcast voice finds singular expression in ‘!CEÓL!’ In this short story, the narrator is driven mad by ‘Annie Laurie’ constantly playing on the wireless because he is unable to distinguish between wireless transmissions of people and their corporeal equivalents.⁴³ O’Nolan’s widely published 1941 essay, ‘These Dance Halls,’ which explored jazz and the new culture of dance halls spreading across Ireland for The Bell, observes that ‘a dance is regarded as successful according to the distance the band has to travel’ and that a band can only be regarded as ‘good’ if they ‘have “own electric amplification” but may lack a piano’.⁴⁴ This piece can be read as a radio-inflected text capturing what O’Nolan called the ‘general social change that is bound up with altering conditions of living and working’ epitomised by the wireless cultural moment in Ireland.⁴⁵

The form and content of early radio was determined, to some extent, by commercial considerations. In the case of Irish radio, the funding structure left it dependent on advertising after 1932, when the Irish Exchequer seized the radio import duties that had made up a third of 2RN’s funding mix. This made it reliant on an advertising slot each evening. Of these Sponsored Programmes, Luke Gibbons has claimed businesses were ‘extremely reluctant to sponsor programmes which catered for “minority” interests such as classical music and the Irish language, and looked instead to a popular formula of jazz, tin-pan alley and swing music to sell their wares.’⁴⁶ Gibbons also notes that later in the 1930s Irish radio began to treat British listeners as a lucrative market.

Youth comprised an outlier radio demographic. As Eleanor O’Leary has argued, outside dancehalls and ballrooms, young people primarily experienced music through radio and records:

Radio Éireann did not provide individual programming aimed at teenagers, although they did interview some […] jazz stars who visited Ireland or produced one-off music shows […]. The radio station that catered mainly to teenage tastes and was available on the airwaves in Ireland was Radio Luxembourg. A poll of Dublin radio listeners, conducted in 1953 on behalf of Radio Luxembourg, indicated that a higher percentage of people listened to Radio Luxembourg on a regular basis than those who tuned into Radio Éireann or the BBC radio service.⁴⁷

The mass experience of radio attracted attention from commentators as a cultural opportunity or a threat. O’Leary has noted how Sean Ó Faoláin suggested in 1953 that ‘light entertainment radio shows should be interrupted with at least fifteen minutes of adult education programming and then it could be “on with the fun again.” He also objected to the establishment of a national broadcasting station and other “low” forms of entertainment.’⁴⁸ O’Leary shows that many writers of the period, Gorham included, had reservations about the Americanisation of Irish entertainment and art, and while ‘national broadcasters like Radio Éireann and the BBC attempted to limit access to popular music and culture by only broadcasting it as a small part of their overall entertainment schedule, teenagers gained access through radio stations available on other frequencies, such as Radio Luxembourg and American Armed Forces Radio.’⁴⁹

Writing for the ‘Radio-Mind’: On-air and in Print Media

Radio as a means of cultural transmission, a mass media object and a striking new experience of form, where many narrative voices became tangled together and many genres jammed up next to each other, led to new forms of written expression in the first half of the twentieth century. One key example is Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf (1927), which was first translated into English in 1929 and contains a description of Mozart exhibiting a wireless that is redolent both of ‘!CEÓL!’ and MacCruiskeen’s mangle in The Third Policeman:

to my indescribable astonishment and horror, the devilish tin trumpet spat out, without more ado, a mixture of bronchial slime and chewed rubber; that noise that owners of gramophones and radios have agreed to call music. And behind the slime and the croaking there was, sure enough, like an old master beneath a layer of dirt, the noble outline of that divine music. I could distinguish the majestic structure and the deep wide breath and the full broad bowing of the strings. […]

How the weird man laughed! And what a cold and eerie laugh! It was noiseless and yet everything was shattered by it. He marked my torment with deep satisfaction while he bent over the cursed screws and attended to the tin trumpet. Laughing still, he let the distorted, the murdered and murderous music ooze out and on.⁵⁰

Hesse focuses on distortion as a formal element. Once transmitted, familiar music performances become horrific due to technological reproduction and yet still transcend the limitations of the radio medium. O’Nolan seems to agree with the idea that orchestral performance can maintain its beauty through the transmission process and nevertheless still suffer from bad production or broadcasting practices – like talking over the symphony. In a 23 July 1947 Cruiskeen Lawn column, Myles compliments the musical performance presented by Radio Éireann but complains that it is marred by the carelessness of the presenters, joking that Radio Éireann’s style of broadcasting is so egregious that its worthy of making the 6.30 News: ‘Radio Eireann Symphony Orchestra […] Followed up by the usual radio carelessness—the result was not included in the 6.30 News.’⁵¹ Hesse closes the scene about the wireless set with Mozart’s theory by noting that when ‘you listen to radio you are a witness of the everlasting war between idea and appearance, between time and eternity, between the human and the divine.’⁵²

The advent of modern radio changed Irish writing practices. This new technological framing prompted references throughout 1934–1935 to the emerging ‘Radio-Mind,’ the importance of ‘Aerial’ infrastructure in Ireland and ‘Irish broadcasting,’ and ‘The Modern Tower of Babel,’ along with instructions on how to purchase and calibrate wireless sets in the new popular radio editorial featured in An Sgéaluidhe Nuadh/The New Irish Magazine.⁵³ This ‘Radio-Mind’ in turn prompted new approaches to the business of writing in Ireland. Writing for radio would eventually entail pitching material to civil service staff. For instance, the Irish poet Roibeárd Ó Faracháin (Robert Farren, 1909–1984) was very likely the ‘Talks Officer’ that O’Nolan dealt with in February-March 1940 when ‘John Duffy’s Brother’ (1940) was accepted by Radio Éireann and presented on air.⁵⁴ According to a 19 February 1940 letter from the Talks Officer, O’Nolan received a fee of £3:3 for the ‘broadcast of John Duffy’s Brother,’ and it was ‘read on air from 8:50–9:05 pm, sandwiched between “Friday Orchestral Hour” and Stella Seaver playing accordion on 15 March 1940.’⁵⁵ For O’Nolan, writing for radio as Flann O’Brien entailed setting aside his regular office work in the Department of Local Government and Health while still directing his spare time literary activities back into the civil service structure, albeit to the Department of Posts and Telegraphs.

Exploring the conditions in which radio broadcasts were delivered live on air helps us to understand the creative and critical activities of O’Nolan’s circle as they shifted their focus from producing a magazine such as Blather to producing radio. In one sense these radio collaborations were an extension of O’Nolan’s private friendships; while in another, broader sense, they were part of an engaged, highly literate Irish response to the radio medium.

In O’Nolan’s oeuvre, the primacy of voice flows through the montage patterning of At Swim-Two-Birds and Cruiskeen Lawn. Both may be seen as a product of the lived experience of live radio technology. The disembodied voices of the Good Fairy in At Swim-Two-Birds and Joe in The Third Policeman, for example, recall the capabilities (and potentialities) of radio broadcasting. Adorno’s Current of Music is illuminating here with its focus on (1) the phenomenology of the radio listener, (2) the physiognomics of radio itself: physics, sound, the abolishment of the original, the mechanics of how sound is embedded, and (3) the overlap between authoritarianism and entertainment as part of the intimacy of radio. At Swim-Two-Birds aestheticizes this overlap between authoritarianism and entertainment in radio as part of the comic potential of the disembodied voice, what Joseph Brooker has productively called ‘montage,’ and Paul Fagan has cited as an aspect of the disembodied voice across O’Nolan’s oeuvre.⁵⁶ Adorno writes:

When a private person in a private room is subjected to a public utility mediated by a loudspeaker, his response takes on aspects of a response to an authoritarian voice even if the content of that voice or the speaker to whom the individual is listening has no authoritarian features whatsoever.⁵⁷

A comparison between Adorno’s themes and O’Nolan’s early work reveals that he was not a writer who also wrote for radio in an opportunistic way, but rather that, as a member of the Irish ready-made School, his writing is reshaped by radio-consciousness.⁵⁸ Adorno notes an early phase of radio ‘haunting’ listeners by doubling or pluralising people, which he identified in the 1931 ‘Spooks in Radio’ article by Günther Stern. This effect is registered in the account of a rural listener driven into a murderous rage by the radio apparitions he encounters in ‘!CEÓL!.’⁵⁹

The merging of the figure of the writer and entertainer with the authoritarian personality engendered in the private context of radio listening and reading is clear in Blather as well. This authoritarian stance likewise informs Blather’s relationship to radio. The author-dictator is also a central motif in At Swim. Adorno’s point that any entertainer can seem like a dictator on the radio concretizes the rise of the dictator as a radio personality, and the dictator-author in At Swim can be seen as a translation of that radio consciousness into the novel.

In turn, the appreciation of the impact of radio aesthetics on O’Nolan’s work for print presents new opportunities for close reading and re-engaging his radio plays. This is particularly the case for Something in the Air: A Drama of the Skies, and many of the adaptations of O’Nolan’s work for radio such as H.L. Morrow’s adaptations of his theatre plays for Irish radio, because their connection to radio as an informing context is obvious.⁶⁰

Scholars should also pay attention to the nuances and differences between novelistic fictionality and radiophonic fictionality. Radio programmes and stories published in magazines and books offer different mediations of ‘reality’ and distinct sorts of meta/fictionality. Adorno’s concept of the loss of the category of the original is convincing in this regard. What he sees as the emergence of the category of ‘ubiquity-standardization,’ which derives from the technical nature of radio broadcasts, informs O’Nolan’s early writing focused on standardisation: all-purpose speeches, readymade novels, interchangeable characters, and his overall montage aesthetic.⁶¹ Many of these conventions echo Adorno’s concept of ‘dial twirlers’ and ‘fan mail’ writers as descriptions that metaphorise the subject’s pursuit of pleasure and feelings of control within the ubiquity-standardization paradigm. O’Nolan’s literary characters attempt to express themselves within a pre-determined assemblage of possibilities. Notably, the way the stock characters in At Swim silence Finn and summon up Jem Casey thematises dial-twirling behaviour. Irish radio featured both sorts of material (work in the Finn canon and ‘A Pint of Plain’), and the text therefore mediates between limited choices available to the characters in the novel.

Writing about Radio: The Mark left by Radio Programmes on Late Irish Modernism

The influence of wireless and this new radio awareness in Ireland made a lasting impression on many Irish writers. For example, the works of Máirtín Ó Cadhain and James Joyce also exhibit the characteristics of literary work shaped by an emerging Irish Radio-Mind. Declan Kiberd has argued that Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille (1949) mimics the form of a radio play by pitching the characters’ voices over the narrator.⁶² This effect is borne out in the text by Ó Cadhain’s references to radio in the list of speaker events given in Interlude 7, ‘We’ll have debates regularly, lectures, soirées, Question Time, Symposium, a Prestigious Periodical, Colloquium, Discussion, Summer School, Weekends, and Information Please for the Half-Guinea Regions.’⁶³ In the original, Ó Cadhain refers to broadcasting information, and translates the English titles of the radio programmes such as ‘Question Time’ literally:

Féachfaidh muid le faisnéis a chraobh-scaoileadh faoi ghnéithe eile den tsaol—gnéithe coimhthíocha go sonrach — agus dhá réir sin tuiscint a thabhairt do dhaoine agus do dhreamannaí ar leith de na daoine ar a chéile. Beidh dífospóireachtaí againn go féiltiúil, léachtaí, soirées, Tráth Ceist, Symposium, Tréimhseachán Teann, Colloquium, Caibidil, Scoil Shamhraidh, Deirí Seachtaine, agus Faisnéis Más É Do Thoil É do Chríocha na Leathghine.’⁶⁴

Similarly, James Connor has claimed radio to be the key context for Finnegans Wake, as the experience of radio listening is central to the text. It is full of interference and static, and the blurring of identities (Hesse’s ooze-like distortion) that early broadcasting entails. Connor argues that in some passages the main character HCE is a radio set.⁶⁵ Radio provided a practical bridge to Ireland for Joyce as well as a source of figurative inspiration during the completion of Finnegans Wake. Jane Lewty points out that the best months of the year to receive 2RN’s long wave radio frequencies were March and April, for lack of ionisation in the atmosphere and notes that ‘the apparent date of the Wake is March 21 and 22’ and the year is ‘estimated as 1938.’⁶⁶ Joseph Brooker discusses the significance of radio broadcasting to Joyce suggested by Constantine Curran’s memoir, James Joyce Remembered, in which Curran claims that on Wednesday, 2 February 1938, a selection of Joyce’s works were read on a Radio Éireann broadcast marking Joyce’s 56^th birthday.⁶⁷ Brooker notes that ‘the Joyce family and entourage (including Samuel Beckett) all tuned in, before going on to further birthday celebrations.’⁶⁸ While radio broadcasts from Dublin formed Joyce’s link to Ireland, O’Nolan similarly depicts listening to Radio Paris in the Gaeltacht. In ‘!CEÓL!,’ a Northamptonshire station based in Daventry is heard on one side of a neighbourhood in Ireland, while ‘Radio Paris [is] steering the revelry on the other.’⁶⁹

The radio activities of O’Nolan’s friends do not evince his commitment to radio. He made only a handful of on-air appearances, whereas some of his close friends, like Niall Sheridan for instance, had wide-ranging involvement in Radio Éireann and RTÉ. The central problem is that we know so little about O’Nolan’s on-air appearances. For example, in his 1976 essay on presenting ballads on radio, Benedict Kiely recalls ‘a discussion programme, involving Myles and Anthony Cronin and myself and some others, that ended abruptly in comedy or disaster —depending on how you view such things’ and stated that this program must be ‘written about after another fifty years.’⁷⁰ Sadly, waiting this length of time has ensured we know little about O’Nolan’s involvement in radio. Kiely’s description of his book review programme appears to match the listing for the show O’Nolan was involved with in 1935:

For the course of its brief and hapless life the programme was called ‘Bookman’s Round Table.’ The idea was that two people who were supposed to be literary discussed an author, and the chairman did whatever a chairman is supposed to do in such circumstances. (All life in Ireland, as a lady I know says, is a supposition.)⁷¹

Kiely remembers a particular broadcast when the chair announced ‘he knew damn all about Canon Sheehan but that the plain people of Ireland (he was not Brian O’Nolan), if they cared to listen, could hear all about him from his (the chairman’s) learned friends.’⁷²

Scholars are left with an aching question: what is different about O’Nolan’s view and his use of the radio medium? It is not a simple matter of radio influence. Radio was important to O’Nolan and his circle’s aesthetic agendas, but it is difficult to gauge the full extent of radio’s impact on O’Nolan’s circle and Irish writing generally.

Radio brought about radical technological change, as we have seen. Radio work was often tied to financial opportunities for struggling writers, and it is not apparent that the circle were only motivated by aesthetic ideals in their radio activities. Money is one of Donagh MacDonagh’s motivations in his letter to Montgomery about selling aborted radio talks to the New Yorker, for instance.⁷³ It is difficult to do much more than speculate about O’Nolan’s view of the radio medium outside of the Blather article and his Cruiskeen Lawn columns about quiz programmes like ‘Question Time’ and ‘Information Please.’ But as a technology-inflected interpretive context, the pervasiveness of radio in Ireland is undeniable during O’Nolan’s most prolific period, and we have argued that radio technology acted as an enclosing form on this period.

Competing Interests

The authors are guest editors of this issue of the journal but had no involvement in the peer review or acceptance process of this article.