In an astute study of the Constitution of Ireland published in 2000, Patrick Hanafin reflected on how that document had sought to enshrine in key clauses a “definitive narrative of Irish identity,”1 which in its territorial ambitions constructed an exclusive version of Irishness. For, he argued, it “created an essentialised Irish type, a fior Gael, who was Catholic and nationalist, as the dominant subject of Irish law.”2 To achieve this, it had cast the Protestant and unionist community of Northern Ireland as the other, against whom the citizens of the Republic defined themselves in homogeneous terms. Yet the very act of claiming the North in Articles two and three involved contradictions, for the aspiration to a unity postponed pending the integration of the national territory, admitted difference to a text which celebrated the “people” as if they constituted an undifferentiated whole. Hanafin judges therefore, pondering the replacement of the old Articles two and three by the new: “the very fact that this sacred cow of Irish nationalist discourse was revised by the people in a referendum in the summer of 1998 is a sign of a transformed society.”3 Also in 2000, the literary critic and cultural analyst Declan Kiberd saluted this constitutional change, marking it as the evidence of a monumental shift in Irish consciousness. He wrote:
Of all the measures written into the Belfast [Good Friday] Agreement, the most astonishing is that by which the citizens of the Republic are to remove the territorial claim on the six northern counties currently part of the United Kingdom. Every schoolchild in the Republic has been taught to see that claim as a force of nature, confirmed by the very shape of Ireland as an island. Yet over 94 percent of the southern electorate voted to rescind the claim…The vote was, in fact, a recognition that any people’s claims need no longer be mediated by means of the nation and that identity is rooted less in the relation between people and territory than in relations of persons to one another.4
Kiberd attributed this significant shift in attitudes about the national question to the South’s concern for the well-being of “Unionist fellow islanders.”5 In the euphoria that followed the Good Friday Agreement, such generosity of spirit may well have played a part in encouraging the electorate to endorse change so convincingly. Hanafin’s more cold-eyed analysis interpreted the vote not only as the reflection of a society that had undergone remarkable social change since 1937, which challenged the exclusivist version of Irish identity it had constructed, but a sign “that the irredentist ethos of the Constitution no longer [sat] comfortably with the current Irish societal paradigm.”6 The country, under the pressure of manifold change, was becoming detached from the version of national identity the Constitution had constructed, so it could countenance constitutional reform, in the interests of peace, as part of the transformation a remarkable decade brought.
Cultural and intellectual life in the Republic in the 1990s had in fact engaged in various ways with the issue of Irish identity, to a degree that suggests a creative struggle was indeed in progress to respond to the changes that had been set in motion in the late 1950s and which were accelerating rapidly in the last decade of the century. What kind of country was Ireland, moving as it was from economic crisis to sudden affluence in the European Union and the global economy? How should it relate to its past and commemorate that past, what is the role of woman in the national story, and what of the Irish language and the cultural traditions associated with it in a period of multi-culturalism, what of the role of the plastic arts, and how could technology and science sustain the newly rich Ireland that had so amazingly come into existence? – these were some of the questions asked and answered in various ways in the 1990s and at turn of century. The intensity of the controversies they engendered indicated a society undergoing an even greater act of self-analysis about its identity and place in the world than had occurred in the 1960s and ’70s.
Fintan O’Toole in his book The Ex-Isle of Erin: Images of a Global Ireland (1997) announced that in 1996 Ireland had come of age. For in that year, the year that marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty which founded the state, the citizens of Ireland produced more wealth per head than those of the United Kingdom. No longer could Ireland blame residual problems on the old dependency on Britain. A suddenly wealthy country had found a new role, in a world which had seen the demise of the British Empire and the rise of a new globalized economy. A paradox ensued for O’Toole:
This is the paradox of the Republic in the aftermath of the British Empire: its national independence is underwritten by transnational corporations and by a supra-national European Union. Its sovereignty is a power that can be exercised mostly by giving it up. Its separation seventy-five years ago from one political and economic union, the United Kingdom, is justified by its membership of a bigger political and economic union, the EU. It cultural distinctiveness lies not in any inherited tradition but in the particular way that it reacts to an overload of global stimuli, taking possession of Anglo-American norms, putting its own stamp on them and exporting them back to England, America and the rest of the world.7
For O’Toole the key fact in this paradoxical version of separatism which fate has delivered, is that in cultural terms Ireland now inhabits a global economy. In this new order “the values, desires and dreams of people everywhere must be assimilated to international norms.”8
So “Ireland” could be marketed as a branded cultural artefact, as the “Riverdance” phenomenon and the later “Lord of the Dance” demonstrated internationally. The first, a surprisingly convincing blend for the stage of Irish traditional dancing with North American showbusiness panache, exuberantly re-sexualizing what had, since the nineteenth century, been overlaid with an inhibiting Victorian respectability, was first presented as interval fare by RTE for the Eurovision Song contest in Ireland in 1994. The effect was electrifying in the double sense that it made what had been the preserve of cottage kitchens, parish halls and the emigrant clubs of Britain and North America, immediately exciting for a mass audience on television and that it released energies that lay untapped in a traditional Ireland that the diaspora had cast on foreign shores. It was simultaneously authentic and completely new, a moment when past and present ignited a sense of the future, in which Irish identity in process was a matter for celebration. “Lord of the Dance” by contrast, offered a brilliantly-packaged overstatement of a theme. As such, it took its place with other cultural “products” of the period. Among these were various manifestations of New Age Celticism in printed or recorded form, the boy bands which advertised fresh-faced Irish energy, and the ubiquitous Irish pubs which mushroomed in cities around the world, until in a very peculiar, putative repatriation they invaded the Dublin scene, giving to the themed establishments of the capital a further air of post-modern weightlessness. In such phenomena, Irish identity, rather than remaking itself in acts of the imagination, seemed bereft of significance, a similacrum in a world of simulacra, where meaning had been hollowed out to allow for the easy transportation and assembly of Ireland Lite.
It was this trivially post-modern country that drew from the poet Derek Mahon in a long poem set in Dublin, the satirically pained, fin de siècle observation:
Mostly now the famous Georgian doors will house a junk-film outfit or an advertising agency. the fountain’s flute is silent though time spares the old beeches with their echoes of Coole demesne; foreign investment conspires against old decency, computer talks to computer, machine to answering machine.9
Yet a post-modern turn in the culture was not always represented in the obviously commercial, or in the slick emptiness of the advertisers’ take on identity (in the period television advertisements became marked by an ironic, knowing play on Ireland’s new-found modernity, especially in sexual matters), or in the virtual reality of cyberspace. It could find expression in darker, truly ambiguous cultural productions too, which raised complex critical issues. Among these were a novel by Patrick McCabe and a trilogy of plays by Martin McDonagh. McCabe’s novel The Butcher Boy (1992) took as its setting the kind of small provincial town in which much conventionally realist Irish fiction had allowed innocence to accede to experience as a male hero comes of age. Bleakly parasitic in post-modern fashion on this tradition, McCabe’s grim text renders innocence monstrous through the casually black-comic first-person narrative of a young lad who is the unconscious victim of a society that has made him the dangerously disturbed creature he is. Victim turns predator in the book, even preying on the priest who molests him in the reform school to which he has been dispatched. McDonagh’s trilogy of plays (The Leenane Trilogy, first produced in 1996 and 1997) feeds artistically on an even more august Irish tradition, the western plays of J. M. Synge, as well as on the staple of the Abbey Theatre’s repertoire of peasant plays, which had stultified the theatre until the 1960s. Grotesquely violent, with the superficial motivations of a TV sitcom, they were realized in the Druid Theatre productions like The Playboy of the Western World as if directed by Quentin Tarantino (Christopher Morash has pointed out that all three plays, like The Playboy, involve an alleged murder of a family member).10
Both these works achieved international as well as local notice. Butcher Boy, Neil Jordan’s film version of McCabe’s book, was released in 1997, while The Leenane Trilogy played in theatres in London, New York and other cities to great acclaim. In Ireland they induced a troubled response: some were exhilarated by the iconoclastic energy they involved, others unsure what their scarifying violence might portend for the society they represented in such brutal terms. Was the success of the Leenane Trilogy in particular (written by a London Irishman, who took his view of Ireland from limited exposure to its canonical drama) symptomatic of a coarsening of taste which allowed a nouveau riche Irish audience to laugh at its immediate ancestors, and international audiences to indulge a view of the Irish as the unreconstructed primitives of historical stereotype? Or did Butcher Boy (in prose and film version) and the Trilogy involve penetrating interrogations of the present in terms of familiar images of the past? As Morash has written of McDonagh’s work:
The plays are, in a sense, copies that have forgotten their originals.…By creating an image that audiences are invited to see as “traditional”, and then removing from it the last vestige of “traditional values”, the plays stage the contradictions of a society that continues to nurse images of itself in which it no longer believes.11
Was modern Ireland, such works could be taken to ask, a society bereft of values, as those which had sustained it in the past were discarded? As the decade went on and the economic success of the country seemed to make such grim versions of Irishness anachronistic, critics pondered how indeed they, and works like those of Friel and McGahern with their rural focus, could relate to the new social conditions. Joseph Cleary, for example, reflected that a society enamoured of its own modernity relied “heavily on invocations of the darkness of the past to validate its sense of its own enlightenment.”12 For him Cathal Black’s 1996 film Korea, with its narrative of rural electrification hard-achieved in the 1950s, was read as expressing in this context a hesitation “between confidence and doubt, to suggest a sense of tentativeness about the course of Irish social development that will not easily resolve itself.”13 In 2002, Luke Gibbons, by contrast, considered the same film, with its Civil War flashbacks, as part of a new capacity and intent in Ireland to say things that could not be uttered in the past about the pain of Irish history. Works of recollection in a period of new wealth were aspects of “traumatic memory,”14 which the good times had not assuaged. They were cultural versions of the tribunals of the 1990s, which made the decade an era of revelations.
A curious obsession with the past in the decade of a radical, beneficial change in Irish economic fortunes was in fact a characteristic of much cultural production in the period. And it was not only the rural, Catholic and Gaelic past that had been the stuff of so much conventional art and semi-official ideology in former days, which began to be opened up for recollective inspection in the 1990s. Rather, in the last decade of the century, as the encroaching millennium encouraged retrospection, diverse voices recalled individual experience as it had been affected by history to a degree that had scarcely occurred before. In the theatre, where in the 1980s Frank McGuinness and Tom Murphy had shown the way, this often involved dramas which depended on monologues, as personal ghosts were summoned in memory to challenge historical orthodoxies. In this respect Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, in which the action all takes place in the memory of an adult narrator remembering the sexual and social complexities of his Donegal origins, set a kind of agenda for the decade, which was followed by playwrights such as Marina Carr in The Mai (1994) and Sebastian Barry in The Steward of Christendom (1995). In this latter play a Catholic chief superintendent with the pre-independence Dublin Metropolitan Police, recalls in old age his childhood and happy marriage, the death of his wife in childbirth, the death of his son in the Great War, and his relationships with his three daughters. At the heart of the drama is his paean of love and praise for the Queen, Queen Victoria, whom he had loyally served as an Irishman, until her death and history overtook him and those like him, the many who had taken the “wrong” side in the Irish twentieth century by enlisting to fight for “gallant little Belgium” in 1914. As Nicholas Grene has observed of this powerful play, Barry sought in The Steward of Christendom “to re-write the traditional nationalist version of Irish history as a tyrannically patriarchal colonial power oppressing a feminised Ireland from the viewpoint of a man who sees his role as a servant of protective matriarchy.”15 Barry’s play was a contesting of the past, a serving notice that the past was not solely owned by those who had won power in the land. The past could be remembered and interpreted in many ways by differing individuals.
Frank McCourt’s international bestselling book Angela’s Ashes (1996), was the most popular work of recollection in the decade (more exacting works of memorialization and memoir were Seamus Deane’s novel Reading in the Dark, Dermot Healy’s The Bend for Home, and Nuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody?: The Life and Times of Nuala O’Faolain, all of which appeared in 1996). McCourt’s evocation of a grotesquely deprived, almost Dickensian, childhood in a class-ridden Limerick city (made even more grim as a place in Alan Parker’s rain-washed film version) came from an emigrant Irishman, one who seemed to insist that the diaspora could strike back, that it would not be inhibited by misty-eyed sentiment about the old country or by symbolic presidential gestures. A sentimentality of its own about American opportunity, however, probably accounted for its popularity on both sides of the Atlantic. Limerick, initially affronted by a deeply unflattering version of its past, quickly saw how tourism might be boosted through opportunistic exploitation of what might otherwise have meant only notoriety.16
A preoccupation with the past and its contested meanings in drama and literature was accompanied in the 1990s by a vigorous debate about the practice of history itself as an academic discipline with national implications. In 1986 the newly founded Irish Review had headed its first issue with an article by the renowned Irish historian Roy Foster (then at work on the book he was to publish as Modern Ireland in 1988). Entitled “We Are All Revisionists Now,” the article assumed that the historiographic revolution set in motion in the 1930s had been completed by younger scholars. The rousing version of Irish history as a “ ‘story of a people coming out of captivity’ ”17 no longer had purchase in the Irish academy, whatever its popularity in Camden Town. In Irish academe “revisionism” had made “swift progress.”18 Aware that the term “revisionist” had been questioned in the press, and that historians identified by the media as such were assumed to claim for themselves an offensive impartiality about the traumata of Ireland’s distressing history, Foster in 1986 had nevertheless envisaged a serene enough future for Irish historians: the old battles “are so long forgotten that those once called ‘revisionists’ are now being themselves revised.”19 He summed up: “In a country that has come of age, history need no longer be a matter of guarding sacred mysteries. And to say ‘revisionist’ should just be another way of saying ‘historian’.”20
By the early 1990s such equanimity had shown itself to be premature as the ideological foundations of history as a scientific discipline with pretensions to objectivity came under intensified, sustained attack in the Irish universities and, more generally, in cultural debate. As Foster himself advised in 2001: “The idea of ‘revisionist historiography’ as a conspiracy against nationalist probity…certainly gathered volume from the late 1980s.”21 This counterattack on the assumed pretensions and failings of revisionism reached a crescendo in 1991 with the publication, under the auspices of the Field Day Theatre Company, of a collection of essays entitled Revising the Rising (the book marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Easter Rising). Seamus Deane’s essay in this volume launched an assault on the ideology (“unionist,” “partitionist,” “pluralist,” even “British nationalist”) that he took to underpin revisionism in general and, in particular, the work of Foster himself. Deane’s analysis was in part echoed by some other contributors to the book in a manner that set the tone for what became in the 1990s a settled critique in which cultural theorists in the universities took as a given that historical writing was one discourse among many, which could not escape its imbrication with ideology. And historical writing that claimed to dispel the myths of the past, when not simply deluded, was as likely as not written in fully conscious or troublingly unconscious lack of sympathy for Irish nationalism or for the pain of Ireland’s subject, colonial experience. It was deemed to represent too a form of shamefully evasive “liberal humanism,” predicated on an impossible impartiality or objectivity. As such, it should be unmasked in the kind of terms Deane deployed in another intervention of 1991 which identified “revisionism” with periods of Irish history when there is
…anxiety to preserve the status quo, to lower the political temperature and to offer the notion that historical processes are so complex that any attempt to achieve an overview cannot avoid the distortions and dogmatism of simple-minded orthodoxy. This is a powerful antidote against criticism and rebellion.22
In 1997 Deane was even more explicit, stating: “The rhetoric of revisionism obviously derives from the rhetoric of colonialism and imperialism.”23
Some analysts of this development in the country’s intellectual life read it as a regrettable reversion to a traditional nationalism among significant opinion-formers,24 if currently expressed in the accents of fashionable theory. Others sought to contextualize the debate dialectically, allowing thereby the idea of post-revisionism to take hold.25 It was hoped that this concept could clear a space for local, specific studies of neglected aspects of Irish history, and could proceed without necessary recourse to grand narratives of the nation or their revision. In fact local histories of individual Irish counties appeared in the 1990s and works dealing with specific issues caught the public imagination.26 However, it was not a work of literature or drama or of historical research, but a film, which most convincingly indicates that in the 1990s history had become a highly contested matter, in which the meaning of the present was being politically addressed by many in vital ways amid Ireland’s new prosperity (tax breaks were introduced for film makers in 1993 by a newly-appointed Minister for the Arts and the Film Board re-established).
When Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins was released in November 1996, with its heroic narrative of the Rising of 1916, the War of Independence and Civil War it became an instant box-office success, both in Britain and Ireland, and the object of an intense critical debate. In 2002, Stephen Rea (a founder of the Field Day Theatre Company) who, in the film, played the part of a Dublin Castle spy, one of several who passed crucial information to Collins and his men during the War of Independence, recalled the impact of the film on the popular mind:
Suddenly history was being discussed, suppressed stuff was coming out into the open. Kids would come up to me who had never heard of Michael Collins. This was in Ireland. They were never taught about Michael Collins. They didn’t know who he was. There was a deliberate silence about that pivotal time, that whole area of history. There was a very exciting feeling in Ireland then that things were opening up and you could discuss issues again…the film made discussion possible and in doing that it also helped Irish society to move on.27
Not all who saw the film and observed its impact were as sanguine (though Rea himself entered a caveat about its portrayal of Eamon de Valera). In Britain and in Northern Ireland there were even demands that the film should be banned. Some Irish intellectuals preferred to attack the film on the grounds that they thought it likely to foment anti-British nationalism at a time when the Provisional IRA had returned to violence after the “cessation” of 1994. The historian and political commentator Ruth Dudley Edwards, for example, feared that Collins, as represented by the charismatic Liam Neeson, had become “a cult figure in fashionable Ireland” and could “become the acceptable face of Irish irredentism throughout the English-speaking world.”28 By contrast, nationalist Ireland in general tended to read the film benignly as a powerful foundational myth for the state that had emerged from a period of bloodshed and an endorsement of those who in current circumstances were seeking to shift the republican movement as Collins had done, from brutal violence to a political compromise. For in the film it is de Valera as ascetic, zealous diehard who is made to seem tragically ridiculous in face of the convincing humanity of Collins, who fights only because he has to and comes to see “we’ve got to learn to build with what we have.”
The debate provoked in Ireland by Michael Collins focused in particular on one scene – that in which a police officer, drafted in from the North of the country to give some backbone to counter-insurgency, is assassinated in a booby-trapped vehicle. This was not only an anachronism (one of a number in the film), since in the War of Independence such a tactic had not been used, but it seemed a direct reference to the modus operandi of the Provisional IRA in modern Northern Ireland (it was greeted by cheering audiences in some cinemas in Ireland). Accordingly there were those who objected to the manipulation of history which anachronism involves, and those who rejected the claim such an historical elision seemed to imply: that the struggle of 1919–21 and the struggle in present-day Northern Ireland were one and the same. This latter point touched a raw nerve since many in the Republic had, since 1969, sought to distance themselves from Northern events by distinguishing past and present IRA violence, while a minority had regretted that the Irish state had not given open support to those whom they believed to be true inheritors of the republican flame.
In the heat of the controversy this film generated, only a few critics were able to address the film as text and to note its complex, almost literary, layering of allusion and reference which made it more than simply an epic costume drama with current political implications.29 Its negotiations of gender issues, for example, in the context of nationalism’s troping of Irish identity as female and erotic, was not emphasized. Nor indeed was the way in which the film adapted a prevailing theatrical obsession to the screen. For the film, like so many plays of the period, was a work of memory, introduced by a survivor who advises that what follows is a work of creative interpretation: “Life is possible. He [Collins] made it possible.” That the Irish response to the film so centrally engaged with the film as history (interpreting the introduction in strictly political terms), rather than as a work interrogating the imaginative and psychological constituents of republican nationalism and the nature of memory, suggests how firmly the historical itself remained as a crucial category of Irish self-understanding, even in a period of rapid social and cultural change.30
Michael Collins, as Ruth Barton observed, “was made and received as a national event in Ireland.”31 It made history a public matter in the way nothing had quite done since the commemorative ceremonies that had marked fifty years since the Easter Rising in 1966, in which the then government had played a leading role. And commemoration indeed was a marked feature of the decade. The manner in which in the 1990s the Irish government involved itself in acts of commemoration indicated in fact that it appreciated how the capacity to foretell the past remained a key skill of governance in a period of change and crises of public confidence in church and state. Two events at the end of the decade required careful planning if they were to be commemorated in a way the government could enthusiastically endorse (throughout the Northern “Troubles” official commemoration of the Easter Rising had been fairly muted): the 150th anniversary of the Famine, in 1997 (the worst year of the Great Hunger was 1847), and the bicentenary of the United Irish Rebellion, in 1998.
The summer of 1997 was designated by the Irish government as the time when Famine commemoration should climax and conclude (time was needed to prepare for the next act of commemoration in 1998). There was something almost Canute-like about this decision, for the mid-1990s had in fact seen a remarkable, apparently unquenchable flood of Irish and North American interest in the catastrophe which had overtaken the country in the mid nineteenth century. In the past a poor Ireland in the old country, all too conscious of its contemporary failures, and a struggling Irish-America in the New World anxious to put its past behind it if it could, had found it very difficult to confront this profoundly painful chapter of their distinct histories. Wealth and success in both constituencies seems to have allowed a hitherto unspoken misery to be admitted in all kinds of ways, some deeply moving, others exploitative – even crass.32 Writing in 1996, one commentator noted how the memory of the Famine had already stimulated in Ireland and abroad “Public and private ceremonies, remembrance and memorial services, publications, paintings and plays, television documentaries and debates, symphonies and statues, exhibitions and conferences, famine walks and wakes, even a court case”33 as if in an outpouring of suppressed feeling. A dominant note in much of this and subsequent memorializing was an expressed determination not to have a terrible experience written out of history. (“Revisionist” historians who were reckoned to have sanitized the suffering in their conscientiously neutral tones were given a particularly hard time in debate and in the press.) All this suggested that, as nationalist Ireland was preparing for a historic settlement with the British state, it was simultaneously acknowledging to itself that the national story involved a tragic relationship with England which must be put right, once and for all. For as Luke Dodds observed in 1996:
The Famine represents one of the key determining events in the relationship between Ireland and England, a powerful, all-encompassing metaphor for loss, death and victimization. The 150th anniversary could not have been more timely. As the traditional relationship between the two countries is beginning, however haltingly, to be transformed through the peace process, the famine has re-appeared, centre stage.34
Yet this involved problems. Roy Foster has identified an obsession with commemoration in 1990s’ Ireland, as an effect of a culture becoming absorbed by “the idea of self-validation through received memory.”35 The problem of what became known as “Faminism” was that the self-validation offered by this particular memory in Ireland was “received” only among the nationalist and republican communities North and South. Although parts of Ulster had in fact suffered significantly in the 1840s, and Protestants and Catholics had both endured starvation then, the memory of the dead had, over the intervening 150 years, become a property of nationalist feeling in which Protestants and especially unionists could not easily share. Unionists, indeed, would necessarily feel uncomfortable as defenders and supporters of a union with a Britain which had been put in the dock of public opinion to the degree that the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, had felt moved to offer what could be read as a national apology to the Irish for what had transpired in the 1840s. It was as if unionists were being asked to feel a guilt they were signally disinclined to shoulder; they had their own more recent sufferings to remember.
At a time when the government of Ireland was actively seeking a resolution of the Northern problem, and hoped to create a climate in which Unionists there might feel reasonably secure as they negotiated in John Hume’s terms “an agreed Ireland,” a more inclusive set of memories was desirable. The United Irish Rebellion of 1798 was accordingly commemorated by official Ireland in 1998 in a way that emphasized how the memory of the past could be made conducive to sound democratic and inclusive politics in the present.
This was by no means a simple task. Like the Famine, the 1798 Rebellion, in its tale of republican endeavour brutally suppressed, could supply much grist to the mill of historical grievance. One hundred years earlier it had been the Irish Republican Brotherhood (with its violent revolutionary tradition) which had led the way in organizing memorial events (and by so doing had reinvigorated a tradition of physical force nationalism for the new century), only to find that Catholic Ireland awaiting Home Rule also appropriated the Rebellion for its own more pacific, Catholic nationalist politics.36 In the 1990s the political class had the double responsibility of ensuring that the commemoration was not hijacked by the modern republican movement and that the event was to be remembered in a way which could appeal to Protestant and Catholic alike throughout Ireland.
Like the Famine, “1798” stimulated an extraordinary range of activities, from scholarly publication to pageants and the creation of a heritage centre (there was even a commemorative cream liqueur). As Ian McBride has observed:
Few Irishmen or women can have escaped the mighty wave of anniversary fever which broke over the island in the spring of 1998. As if atoning for the failed rebellion itself the bicentenary was neither ill-coordinated nor localised, but a genuinely national phenomenon produced by years of planning and organisation.37
When the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern launched his government’s commemoration programme in 1998 he made no bones about its purpose: “We are commemorating the most sustained effort in Irish history to reconcile and unite what were three communities with different religious beliefs and ethnic backgrounds – Protestants, Catholics and Dissenters.”38 In the year of the Good Friday Agreement, an inclusive interpretative agenda was being envisaged. Recent historical scholarship had fortunately supplied support for this eirenic perspective on what had hitherto been represented as a bloody business. For a book by Kevin Whelan, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity, and a contribution from the same hand to a volume of essays on 1798, The Mighty Wave: the 1798 Rebellion in County Wexford (both published in 1996, the latter edited by Dáire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong), had engaged with the United Irishmen in a way the government and official Ireland found ideologically persuasive.
Whelan himself was well aware that in these works he was doing more than adjusting the historical record as established in the academy, but intervening directly in the public sphere. His book had been a considered effort to reassess the nature of the background to the Rebellion in County Wexford, thereby downplaying what earlier historians had seen as its sectarian aspects and emphasizing its Enlightenment, republican and democratic inspiration. In his contribution to The Mighty Wave, Whelan was uninhibited in claiming a current relevance for his interpretation. “By recovering,” he asserted, “the real history of the Wexford Republic, we can re-appropriate a profoundly democratic symbol, and an inspiring example of an effort to construct a representative, secular and pluralist politics on the island of Ireland.”39 The sectarian version of 1798 should be discarded as discredited and its modernity, its pluralist “forward looking democratic dimension,”40 its essential unity as to North and South (taking due account of the role of Presbyterians in the Rebellion), its mobilizing of mass politics, should all be highlighted. “By relieving the Rebellion of its oppressive weight of misinterpretation, 1798 ceases to become divisive,”41 Whelan proclaimed, and we “can make it speak to the Irish people as a whole, including our diaspora. We can use the 1790s as a vision and inspiration for the 1990s.”42
It was clear that the Irish government welcomed Whelan’s version of the 1790s, for the mission statement issued in April 1997 to civil servants and diplomats by the government-appointed “1798 Commemoration Committee”, with its base in the Minister of State’s office in the Department of the Taoiseach, echoed its terms almost exactly.43 For such a version of a grim period in the country’s history could perhaps serve the immediate need for a national rapprochement between Protestant and Catholic, North and South, and would surely do no harm. In the same spirit the government gave financial and moral support to a plethora of events centred on Wexford, organized by Comoradh ’98, established there by the county council, which presented the progressive version of the Rebellion, as commemoration became celebration and then heritage, to be exploited as tourist resource.
The problem was, however, that just as the revisionists had been accused of draining the horror from the Famine in their neutral tones, so the celebrants of an exemplary Wexford Republic in the 1790s, model for a new Ireland in the 1990s, were criticised on the grounds that they had wished, rather than convincingly argued, away the sectarian violence the Rebellion had involved in Wexford and in so doing they were evading both past and present problems. It was a historian, Tom Dunne, who entered that critique. He wrote:
Growing up in New Ross, my early life was saturated in the culture of ’98. This has heightened my awareness that the events we commemorate this year were so terrible and traumatic that we have never confronted them. The temptation has always been there – and has usually been given in to – to make a horrific past palatable, and this has not only robbed people of their history, but has made it more difficult for us as a community to face the still lethal legacies of that time in our own day. Any commemoration should keep in full view the overwhelming fact that perhaps in excess of twenty thousand people died horrible deaths in the course of three hot summer weeks in that prosperous county.44
In other words 1798 should serve as a warning for 1998 and any attempt to avert the historical gaze from its darker aspects might encourage a similar refusal to face unpalatable truths in the present, linked as they were to forces unleashed in the 1890s. So Dunne felt himself bound to disagree profoundly with Whelan’s admonition that we should raise our eyes from “pikes, and deaths, murder, mayhem and martyrdom” to contemplate “the living principles of democracy and pluralism which the United Irishmen formulated.” Dunne countered:
However universalist in origin, the principles of the United Irishmen have long become identified with one side in the Northern Ireland conflict, and no “peace process” can succeed through the rehabilitation of their rhetoric, or by constitutional arrangements alone. As the United Irishmen found, obstinate realities like sectarian conflict are not so easily overcome.45
So what the government genuinely intended to be a commemorative effort in which all could share, ran the risk, in Dunne’s terms, of alienating unionists, just as much as the Famine memorials, by permitting nationalists to occlude the sectarian violence in their own tradition. It is striking however, that though the unionist community in Northern Ireland largely chose to ignore the 1798 commemoration, which had been envisaged in part as intimate with their presumed historical memory, cross-community acts of commemoration did take place there in 1998.
Other historical issues with contemporary relevance aroused heated debate in the Irish academy in the 1990s, amounting almost to the kind of “culture wars” that had disturbed universities in North America since the early 1970s. Whether Ireland was or was not a post-colonial society became a matter of contention, with historians and economists sceptical of a set of theoretical models about Ireland’s alignment in the world which became normative in the field of cultural studies.46 At a popular level the film version of Roddy Doyle’s novel of north-side Dublin working-class life, The Commitments, had given this concept cultural kudos, when its hero announced: “The Irish are the niggers of Europe, lads…Say it proud, I’m black and I’m proud.” In 1995 a foundational form of post-colonial theory and critical practice as it related to Irish writing was given wide currency in Declan Kiberd’s bestselling and prizewinning volume of literary criticism, Inventing Ireland. In celebratory tones in respect of the cultural nationalist writers of the Irish literary renaissance, this volume drew on the writings of the Algerian writer Frantz Fanon, for whom the struggle to establish an independent nation state is a proper initial response to the colonial predicament. By contrast, in the most advanced versions of post-colonial analysis of Irish society47 Ireland was in no sense a successful nation that had heroically invented itself in a colonial context, but was reckoned to be in the midst of a profound and ongoing crisis which affected and affects the colonized world as a whole under capitalism. The violence of the Northern conflict until the mid 1990s was only the most obvious manifestation of a general pathology deriving from the colonial condition the Irish people have endured for centuries. The establishment of the Free State and the Republic of Ireland were not ameliorative stages in a process of a post-colonial construction, in which, despite many difficulties and failings, substantial achievements could be attributed both to the state and to Irish society in general (an implicit assumption of this volume, in fact). They were themselves manifestations of the post-colonial, not workable attempts at state and nation-building as a society sought to deal with the problems a colonial and politically dependent past had bequeathed. And the economic miracle of the 1990s had not positioned Ireland among the first world nations of continental Europe, any more than it had raised the tiger economies of Asia to a similar status in the 1980s and early 1990s. To imagine that it had was to fall prey to the false lure of modernization theory (especially attractive, it was argued, to liberals and neo-liberals alike, anxious for differing reasons to escape the trammels of a traditional social order). Such theory lacked, as Joseph Cleary had it, “the wider historical and geographical span of modern colonial capitalism that constitutes the proper contextual frame for the study of modern Irish society.”48
At their most self-avowedly radical, Irish theorists of postcoloniality in the 1990s allied their work with the “subaltern studies” of the Indian subcontinent and examined aspects of Ireland’s past and present – its popular nationalisms, as distinct from the state-sponsored variety – as sites of resistance to be read as paradigms of liberationist politics. An endorsement of the concept of ethnos and the ethnic community was implicit in some of such writing even as the grand narrative of traditional nationalism (which was taken to underpin the hegemony of the Irish state formation) was eschewed.
The relationship of post-colonial theory to nationalism and the degree to which it transcended or merely offered in a new guise the emotional satisfactions of Irish nationalist feeling was in fact a recurrent issue in cultural debate in the 1990s. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991) was the stimulus for a good deal of often vigorous discussion. This three-volume work by various hands under the general editorship of Seamus Deane (promised as we saw in the mid-1980s), published by the Field Day Theatre Company in Derry, offered itself as an inclusive re-reading of the multiple traditions of Irish writing. Some critics were ready to complain, however, that its ostensible pluralism was undermined by the overarching assumption that all those traditions shared in the colonial predicament, in which a healthy nationalism had not yet been realized. As such, it was judged by Francis Mulhern, for example, as expressing a form of “prospective” nationalism in which Field Day “takes its distance from one after another version of cultural nationalism but holds on to the axiom that founds them all: the proposition that the sovereign cultural concern of the Irish population is its national identity. To a nationalist this is a self-evident truth.”49 Another critic censured Deane’s general approach in this and other work in similar terms, in the name of a more deconstructive version of post-colonial theory: “He falters at the conceptual leap from the nation into whatever comes next,”50 wrote Colin Graham, earnest to escape from the tired binaries of “revisionist/anti-revisonist” polemic. He offered, by contrast, as a proper object of study “the fractured range of complex cross-colonial affiliations which have existed within the British-Irish axis by acknowledging and adapting the critical methodologies which post-colonialism has employed to disintegrate and fragment the monologism of cultural affiliation.”51 Such a project, which did not presume that a final realization of Irish identity was implicitly on the agenda, might, it could be argued, allow unionists to participate as equals in a cultural debate about the future, in a way they scarcely did in the 1990s.
Writing about these sometimes acrimonious controversies, Stephen Howe has reflected:
The intensity of these culture wars, the unusually high profile of literary politics in Ireland and its intrinsic intertwinement with arguments over historical interpretation, national identity and politics itself in the more narrow and conventional sense, help explain the sharpness of the contestation. They help explain why, for instance, [the novelist] Colm Tóibín, can in the course of a discussion of literary history, suddenly burst out apropos of the Easter Rising and by extension of Irish nationalism generally: “I loathe everything about it, every single moment of it.” Such explosions of rage are lurking, barely concealed, beneath the surface of much of the writing we are examining, from all sides of the arguments.52
What this does not explain, however, is why, in a period when Ireland was undergoing an undeniable improvement in its economic fortunes, cultural debate was so fraught. It was probably that the focus of debate was often the status of the country itself in which much emotion was invested – fragile post-colonial society in a global capitalist world or a confident nation taking its proper place among the richest countries of Europe – that sometimes gave the culture wars the quality of a stentorian dialogue of the deaf. On the one hand it could be demonstrated that Ireland by any objective measure of incomes, life-expectancy, literacy rates, educational opportunities, housing stock, access to information, citizens’ rights, was a member of the club of first world European states. Indeed in the 1990s income had “risen to the European average in terms of GDP per person, adjusted to purchasing power of currencies.”53 Those who thought such things definitive were impatient to the point of exasperation with the argument that the global economy might offer temporary relief to a post-colonial people but did not alter a fundamental condition of dependency shared with the Third World nor palliate the cultural and psychological pathologies associated with the ongoing crisis of capitalist modernity. On the other hand it was argued with ideological rigour that economic and social indicators cannot be analyzed ahistorically, but must be part of an investigation of “the discrepant ways in which Irish political and cultural life, which were obviously shaped and textured by European developments, were at the same time over-determined by the country’s dependent socio-economic composition.”54
Considered as a cultural phenomenon in its own right, the post-colonial turn in cultural and critical discourse in the 1990s in Ireland shared something with the developments in literature, drama and film, that we noted above. For it did allow intellectuals to say, just as novels, plays and memoirs were doing in the period, that whatever about the ambiguous present, the past had indeed been grim, even atrocious. That the Field Day Theatre Company, with its roots in Derry, was a key force in disseminating the concept of the colonial and post-colonial in Irish thought in the 1990s, may be salient. For in Northern Ireland atrocity was not a matter of a superseded history the Celtic Tiger could choose to forget,55 but an experienced reality that not even the Good Friday Agreement had ended. So colonial and post-colonial critique served as the ghost at the feast. On the metaphoric level, in the zone of discourse, at the very least, such critique augmented the acts of memory and revelation that marked the decade in other cultural spheres. It offered too international perspectives, however arguable, on Irish experience at a time when so much attention was directed to unravelling the meanings of the Irish past.
Seamus Deane in his general introduction to the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing in 1991 had asserted that the work did not “propose that we have here an exemplary instance of either a ‘national’ or a ‘colonial’ literature or body of writing.”56 However it did in his view “propose that the interchange between these conceptions of writing, more violently and frequently effected in Ireland than in most European countries, demonstrates the configurations of power within a society that consistently has refused to accept their force or yield to their allure.”57 The anthology initially met with a very positive critical response, especially abroad. However feminist critics in Ireland were quick to observe with dismay that an enterprise so manifestly and ambitiously attentive to the “configurations of power within society,” alert to the fact of colonization, had a glaring lacuna in its pages – the issue of women and the “colonization” of women by a patriarchal society had been ignored. Although feminist objections to the anthology were sometimes expressed in terms of the exclusion of particular current writers, and involved the observation that the editorial team (which included the present writer) was all-male, the affront was more fundamental. For the anthology which had embraced a wide variety of types of writing had ignored, they argued, the “discourse of woman” which had been a highly significant fact of political and cultural life in the Republic since the 1970s. The ensuing controversy probably marked the point where Field Day as a political and cultural force began to wane somewhat. That the feminist critique of the anthology certainly had justification was acknowledged by Deane, who moved to commission a further volume from a group of women scholars and editors, which might fully reflect women’s writing and discourse (a two-volume addition edited by a team of women scholars appeared in 2002). Yet Field Day had been founded as a response to the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland and its great achievement in the 1980s had been to inject an essentially Northern sense of how the crisis there was an all-Ireland matter into the consciousness of the South. The controversy over the anthology’s attitude to women was the site where tectonic plates collided: a markedly Northern view of the country’s current state of national crisis met a powerful body of opinion in the South which saw the position of women in the Republic as a matter of at least equivalent political and social import.58 In consequence, the way in which the anthology might have contributed to a reimagining of the country as a whole regrettably got lost to a large degree in a quickly established journalistic consensus that it had committed a folly in the arena of gender politics.
The 1990s were in fact the decade in which not only did the women’s movement achieve, as we saw, a kind of professional critical mass in public life up to and including the presidency, but a period in which women writers and artists noticeably flourished. In 1996 one critic could justifiably conclude that “any genuinely attentive reader of contemporary Irish poetry knows that the standard-bearers for the next century will be found equally among the women poets as among the men now coming into their stride.”59 An anthology and annotated directory of twentieth-century Irish women poets, which appeared in 1999, reflected much of this activity. It included more than a hundred poets who had been published in volume form.60 Many were younger poets who had graduated from the poetry workshops that had been a feature of cultural activity since the 1970s throughout the country (in 1995 there were more than 600 public poetry readings in the country as a whole). In 1995 Eavan Boland’s Object Lessons – the Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (Boland had herself contributed unstintingly to the workshop movement) was published, to give the authority that an internationally acclaimed Irish woman poet could to the belief that a woman’s imaginative engagement with the matter of her private and public life was wholly valid as artistic subject.
That engagement in the 1990s served notice that in a decade when Ireland was involved with acts of memory, commemoration, retrieval and revelation, the distinctive contribution of women to that process must be heard. For as Anne Fogarty has argued, the work of some of the most interesting women writers of the period in no way retreats to a subjective sphere which could be invoked by literary historians “as an absent presence that sanctions cultural debates which still remain inveterately male-centred.”61 Rather, as she argued, women’s writing is “integral to the cultural history of Ireland in the 1990s,”62 for “above all, their writing is compelling because of its desire to interrogate notions of identity, whether it be in the realm of the sexual, the national, the local, the political, or the familial.”63 And they produce work in which issues of identity surface in highly complex forms that reflect the imbrication of the private with the public in disturbing ways, both akin to and different from work produced by men in the same period. Fogarty judges:
Their writing depicts the self not only as fissile and divided but also as defined by and entangled with historical, familial, and socio-political legacies of meaning. Moreover, the probing of identity in their writing occurs in tandem with a number of other shared thematic concerns…including the use of retrospection, the surprising prevalence of Oedipal plots and incest themes, the employment of the double or split self, and the scrutiny of the limits of language and of narrative.64
It was such work, indeed, which made lines by Eavan Boland representative of the decade, when she addressed Joyce’s Anna Liffey:
Maker of
Places, remembrances,
Narrate such fragments for me:
One body. One spirit
One place. One name.
The city where I was born.
The river that runs through it.
The nation that eludes me.
Fractions of a life
It has taken me a lifetime
To claim.
(“Anna Liffey”)65
The national inheritance invoked here as “fractions of a life,” for some poets in the 1990s still included the Irish language. Indeed as the use of Irish as a vernacular became more and more in doubt even in the Gaeltacht (a sobering report in 2003 suggested that the numbers actually using Irish on a daily basis in those districts had declined to as low as 10,000)66 its cultural prestige remained high throughout the decade. For example, one of the most distinguished poets currently at work, Nuala Ní Dhomhaill, writes only in Irish (though her work has attracted many translators, including Michael Hartnett and Paul Muldoon, bringing it to a wide international audience). Her achievement was recognized when she succeeded John Montague as professor of poetry in a scheme sponsored in association with Irish universities by the Arts Councils of Northern Ireland and of the Republic. That hardy cultural prestige and the sense that Irish is a major “fraction” of Irish identity helped as well to sustain the popularity among a small minority of parents of schools where all instruction is through the medium of Irish. In the country at large at the beginning of the twenty-first century about 20,000 pupils attend Irish-language primary schools, about 5,000 attend such secondary schools.67 The belief that Irish could be a “cool” acquisition for young people (as distinct from the dreary imposition many found it in the English-speaking schools) was fostered in the 1990s by an Irish-language television channel (TG4) which began broadcasting as Teilifís na Gaeilge in 1996. It broadcasts sixteen hours per day (though not entirely in Irish), with soap opera, European football and international films interspersed with more demanding fare. The effect (production values are high) is to suggest that Irish is a vital and attractive cultural asset in a country beginning to acknowledge, as immigration becomes a reality, the challenges of multi-culturalism.
In fact the term multi-culturalism became ubiquitous in journalism in Ireland in the late 1990s, replacing indeed “pluralism” as a desideratum of liberal and progressive thought and deployed as a way of referring to a condition in which new immigrant communities began to make the country more socially heterogeneous. As Ireland took its place in January 2002 as “by far the world’s most globalized country,”68 it found itself issuing more and more work permits to non-European nationals (the numbers grew from under 5,000 in 1994 to 40,000 in 2002) to sustain its high levels of growth, making it evident on a daily social basis that the country was now a significant small economy in an international system of trade, with its often desperate economic migrants. Some of these entered the country illegally, often as the victims of organized crime. In 1998 the novelist Hugo Hamilton chose the crime fiction genre (itself a burgeoning subset of Irish fiction) to explore this dark side of the new Ireland. The plot of Bad Bastard revolves around the smuggling of Romanians into the country by a vicious Irish criminal. In 2001 Susan Knight allowed a number of these new Irish to speak in their own voices. Her book Where the Grass is Greener: Voices of Immigrant Women in Ireland collected interviews with sixty-one women from thirty-one countries, many of them recent arrivals, which reflected a country uncertain of how it should respond to a sudden influx of non-nationals in its midst (recurrent themes were the difficulty newcomers experienced in breaking through a superficial friendliness to real intimacy with the Irish and the centrality of alcohol in social life).
That a globalized Ireland now felt itself to be capable of competing with the best in the international economic stakes (however it felt about itself in even the recent past) was evident in the changed attitude to research and development at government level in the 1990s. Since the foundation of the state, science had attracted very little state support. In the late 1990s, however, the recognition that in an advanced economy knowledge is a key asset took hold of the official mind and a programme was put in place to bring Ireland closer to international levels in research and development in the advanced economies of Europe and North America. In 1996 the government issued for the first time a White Paper on Science, Technology and Innovation, making scientific innovation a national imperative. Subsequently the Higher Education Authority, responsible for university education, was charged with creating a number of centres of research excellence that would bring together in inter-disciplinary contexts the best practitioners in various fields and attract outstanding scientists from abroad. And in a national plan for 2000–2006 the government envisaged earmarking about 2.5 billion euro for research (a dramatic rise, since in the period 1994–1999 the state had spent the equivalent of a mere 500 million euro on research activities.69) Science Foundation Ireland was founded in 2000 to support research in biotechnology and information and communications technology.
Also in the late 1990s the role of science as an aspect of culture began to be considered in national debate. A topic that since 1922 had received almost no attention from academics and social commentators (Æ in the Irish Statesman in the 1920s was one of very few alert to the potential of the huge increase internationally in scientific knowledge in the early twentieth century)70 started to surface, for example, as an aspect of Irish Studies. The Irish Review began to publish articles on the history of Irish science and on the significance of science as a cultural phenomenon in the country.71 And the Irish Times expanded its science coverage, publishing a weekly page covering developments in Irish and international science. In this context John Wilson Foster’s edited volume Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History (1997) was something of a watershed. In this work he brought together twenty-six contributors with specialist knowledge, himself supplying an interwoven cultural/historical context in a broad survey of the cultural history of scientific thinking about nature in Ireland. In his introduction he characterized his book as “the first sustained traffic in Ireland between the history of the sciences and the history of culture.”72 He hoped to “re-house natural history in Irish culture from which it [had] effectively been evicted for a century or so.”73 In 1999 Nicholas Whyte in his book Science, Colonialism and Ireland took up the questions raised by Foster and others in the 1990s as to whether and to what degree “the Catholic church…discouraged science among its followers” and whether or not “the culture of Irish nationalism as it developed, being anti-modern and anti-Protestant as well as nationalist,” was “responsible for the failure of the Irish state to utilise its (mainly Protestant) scientific potential after independence.”74 He concluded that the “case against either Irish nationalism or Roman Catholicism as despoilers of science remains to be proven,” as did the argument tested in his book that science in Ireland should be treated as “an example of colonial science.”75 However, despite its tentative conclusions, Whyte’s was a stimulating entry in an embryonic discourse of science (though a discourse notably historical in tone) in a country that in the twentieth century had emphasized literary and dramatic production as a marker of its cultural achievement and identity.
Foster in Nature in Ireland had noted that “science prides itself on being international in method and procedure” and that the “global span” of contemporary science’s concern with environmental issues “demonstrates the growing internationalism of contemporary culture.”76 In the light of this, the emergence of science as object of cultural study and the state’s commitment to raising the level of Irish research and development could be taken as counters of an internationalism of mind that co-existed with cultural introspection in Ireland at the turn of century. It was perhaps in the field of the plastic arts that an international outlook was reflected most strikingly in the cultural sphere in a decade when Irish memory, commemoration and introspection had played so central a part.
Since the publication of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses in 1922 and the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to W. B. Yeats in 1923 and to Samuel Beckett in 1969, the contribution of Irish letters to international literature could be taken for granted both in Ireland and abroad. And the fact that each of these writers had been in their different ways in the vanguard of the literary experimentalism that characterized international Modernism in the first half of the twentieth century meant that it was no matter for surprise that in the 1990s a writer like the novelist John Banville should publish finely wrought works of high artifice, owing as much to Nabokov or Borges as to any native precursor. In the field of the fine arts in independent Ireland, by contrast, it was not until the 1980s with, as we saw, Rosc providing the occasion, that Irish work in modern idioms began to find its place as a substantial and recognized contribution to international modern art. Since then, Irish artistic production has more and more reflected the “plurality of styles” of the international art world (though a fascination with landscape has remained as a kind of leitmotif) and has been seen to do so by international commentators. Writing in 1997 the critic Dorothy Walker noted that “the closest thing to a dominant movement in Irish art over the past twenty years was the so-called New Expressionism, which had deep roots in Germany, but made an international splash beginning in the early eighties.”77 But she also noted that conceptual art had its adherents too, with, for example, the work of James Coleman attracting international attention, while abstract work remained strong “throughout the eighties alongside the Expressionist movement.”78
Until 1991 Ireland had had no permanent space (with the exception of Trinity College’s Douglas Hyde Gallery which opened in 1978) in which twentieth-century art by Irish and international artists could be regularly exhibited. In that year the Irish Museum of Modern Art was opened in a renovated and redesigned public building – the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham (a seventeenth-century residence for retired soldiers built in emulation of the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris). In the 1990s this new facility appreciably raised the profile of modern sculpture and painting in the country, with its programme of Irish retrospectives and exhibitions by international artists and their Irish contemporaries. In 1993 Ireland was represented at the Venice Biennale after a gap of thirty years. In 1995, in what was “seen by many as a significant marker of the arrival of contemporary Irish art on the international stage,”79 a young Irish artist, Kathy Prendergast (born in Dublin in 1958), won the Premio Demila award at Venice, presented to the best artist under forty years of age. Also in the 1990s the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin enlarged its collection through a well-informed purchasing policy, adding works by younger Irish artists to the holdings bequeathed to it by Hugh Lane himself. And outside Dublin, galleries such as the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery in Cork spread the message of contemporary art in international idioms in the provinces.
It was in fact the Crawford Gallery which in 1999 held an exhibition which suggested how a generation of Irish artists – graduates of reinvigorated colleges of art in Dublin, Cork and Limerick (as well as Belfast) – were making their mark in the UK, itself in the midst of a cultural renewal associated with the young British artists phenomenon. Writing in the volume of interviews that accompanied the exhibition, which drew on the work of twenty artists in their thirties and forties, the gallery curator Peter Murray noted:
Although resident in Britain most of the artists continue their links with Ireland and regularly exhibit new work in Irish galleries or at the new Irish Museum of Modern Art. Their art practice is held in high regard in Ireland, perhaps because there is a perception that their work is more connected to the international art world. Evidence of this can be found in the high proportion of Irish artists resident in Britain who have been selected in recent years to represent Ireland at the Venice Biennale, including Kathy Prendergast (1995), Jaki Irvine (1997) and Anne Tallentie (1999).80
Intriguingly, in a decade in which issues of communal memory and national identity were the stuff of so much debate in Ireland, many of these artists, as Murray reports, “when invited to participate…voiced a concern at participating” in what they feared might be “an exhibition that would celebrate ethnicity or nationality.”81 It was not that they rejected their Irish inheritance, as interviews with them in the exhibition handbook make clear, but that they explored it with a keen appreciation of the fact that, as the critic Claire Schneider describes it, for “artists all around the world, national identity has become less relevant as the world becomes increasingly interconnected through mass communication and international commerce and a global art market.”82 So as the same critic observes of Kathy Prendergast’s remarkable preoccupation with maps and map-making since the 1980s (a major project, City Drawings, has involved unannotated maps of numerous capital cities):
No matter how precise and current, any schematic can only crudely document where a person is, politically, spiritually, and creatively. Her maps demonstrate the challenge we take on when we try to locate ourselves in space and time, and how hard it is to know who we are, regardless of the signposts in our lives. For Prendergast, identity and maps are opposite sides of the same coin. They both deal with a real world and the surreal, with facts as well as perception, and ultimately they reveal the futility of recording our constantly shifting positions.83
Accordingly, it might be suggested, Prendergast’s art stood in the period as a kind of symbol of a time and indeed of a century in which the Irish had repeatedly attempted to map their identity, depending on the signposts the remembered past provided and on those of a national life which since the 1960s constantly pointed in the direction of change and fluid renewal in an international context.