Concept Introduction Most Americans are familiar with the famous building depicted on the back of the U. S. nickel.  But few realize that this image of Monticello indirectly bespeaks an early American connection with Ireland.  In Charlottesville, Virginia, Thomas Jefferson enlisted Irish master builders, one of them a veteran of the 1798 uprising in Ireland, to construct his beloved home on a little mountain, as well as a more imposing “academical village” – the University of Virginia, an architectural achievement now known worldwide. Ireland’s long and richly complex history has had a deep, sometimes-unexpected impact throughout the United States and on places all over the world.

Today, at the start of a new century, in this city with house, street, and place names that echo an Ireland of the past, in a state where the Irish were among the first permanent settlers in America, and where the Scots Irish found new lives in the Valley of Virginia, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities is working with a distinguished group of Irish consultants to create a multi-dimensioned public program that will explore Ireland’s culture in the light of history and from other scholarly and artistic perspectives.  The three-part program – including a conference, film, and book – will illuminate how global forces shape the local and, conversely, how the local continues to inform the global. 

Project activities will focus on three interrelated themes – the historic worldwide migration and interaction of national populations, the transforming effects of global economics on traditional cultures, and the relation of religious and political identity to issues of terrorism, war and peace.  Re-Imagining Ireland will show that the Irish example, though uniquely patterned, is widely relevant, reflecting issues of globalization as a historical phenomenon that is effecting significant, not always well understood, change around the world. 

Top:International Financial Service Centre,
Dublin / Courtesy IDA Ireland
Bottom: Connamara Ruin / © aw 1991

Re-Imagining Ireland will explore profoundly important topics connected with economics and culture, world consciousness, and the changing forms of expression through which individuals and nations gradually but inevitably negotiate such identity.  The conference will lay the groundwork for the efficient production of the integrated film and book, which are described elsewhere on this site. 

-- Day One of the initial, public event will provide an introduction and overview to the nature and purposes of the project.  Following this, the conference will unfold thematically, with each day devoted to a particular area of exploration.

-- Day Two of the program will concern the convergence of global economics, national politics, and traditional culture.  Specifically, the event will focus on the social and cultural effects of the historically unprecedented, recent economic boom in Ireland, now being reassessed as America and all of the world’s economies adjust to new realities.

-- Day Three will explore the global dispersion of national populations, especially the way in which they remain bonded to and exist in tension with their homelands, while enriching and challenging other cultures.  The focus here will be on Ireland’s historical and contemporary position relative to Europe and America.  Discussion will include how the Irish have contributed to the U.S., developed new relationships with Britain, and are now conditioned by ties to the European Union – exemplified by the switch to the Euro currency on January 1, 2002.  

--Day Four will center on connections between religious and political identity and issues of terrorism, war, and peace.  Discussion will encompass many of the issues raised by the process of negotiating peace in Northern Ireland, among these the cultural complexities of Catholic and Protestant communities and their linguistic inheritances and legacies, Gaelic and Ulster Scots, both in Ireland and America.

Re-Imagining Ireland, observes consultant Martin McLoone, has been shaped in response to a variety of sometimes mutually antagonistic and curiously reflective histories.  The broad historical context is the impact of the mass emigration of the Irish to, among other countries, the United States, where, between 1800 and the 1890s they were the most populous immigrant group. The history of the Irish in America’s formative years – “in labor unions and party politics; in music, dance, theatre and popular entertainment; and in …the movement from penury and prejudice to economic and political success” – exemplifies, says McLoone, the American dream itself.  At the same time, the history of Irish America is an ironic tale, resonant with the negative aspects of that often-elusive dream. 

For many years the victims of prejudice, poverty, and exploitation, the Irish responded by developing labor unions and powerful political machinery.  Yet this ethnic group also stood at the interface of racial tensions between African Americans and white America – sometimes visiting on their black neighbors the same kind of prejudice that they themselves had endured.  Theirs is “an economic and political success story undoubtedly, but also a story of political chicanery, vote rigging, and city hall corruption.”  Theirs is a story central to the development of American popular culture – yet it is a story, also, of religious censorship that worked in counterpoint to that same culture.

The historical context, full of contradictions and fault-lines, surely mirrors that of America at large.  But it also connects, notes McLoone, with issues to be raised at Re-Imagining Ireland about the contemporary homeland.   Decimated and demoralized by nearly two centuries of mass emigration, torn apart by violent conflicts resulting from its colonial past, Ireland has re-invented itself as a modern, financially and technologically advanced, increasingly affluent European nation.  Yet this success story at home, like its American counterpart, also has a negative face.  The prosperity is unequally shared, giving rise to a significant, excluded minority, mired in poverty and victimized by drugs and violence. Economic growth “has brought inward migration for the first time in modern Ireland’s history,” but the people, as though denying the lessons of their own story, “have not responded well.”

Beyond such issues, the Irish now fear that Ireland may undo and irrevocably lose its own culture and identity in pursuit of wealth.  In this context, the Irish increasingly refer to the history of the Irish America.  They are exploring how Irish Americans have negotiated and continue to address dilemmas of identity and assimilation.  Ireland, described by Luke Gibbons as “a first-world country with a third-world memory,” thus provides a window into the conflicted modern psyche, caught within a rapidly changing cultural and social environment.  Ireland illustrates the challenges that people are facing internationally and across the social spectrum as they personally negotiate between rampant secularism and traditional religious faith, and between rural social orders that are centuries old and an enveloping and transforming commercial sector, operating at ever-accelerating speed. 

Background  

O'Connell Street Bridge, Dublin

Now the Irish are reassessing their progress in light of a new appreciation of global economic realities and political uncertainties.  Their democracy and republic are framed by many of the ideas that informed the American Revolution.  The country has in some respects become a laboratory and launch pad for American corporations seeking to accommodate to the culture of an emerging “United States of Europe.”  Seeking to preserve affiliations while asserting their nation’s independence, Irish politicians debate how best to negotiate a position “between Boston and Berlin.”  Yet Ireland is, at the same time, linked by history and contemporary feelings of cultural dislocation to a third-world sense of powerlessness and alienation.  Despite a sophisticated and largely pro-American orientation, many in Ireland remain cautious of a U.S. that could, in consultant Theo Dorgan’s words, “stray from its own best formulations of itself.”

Until very recently, the identity of Irish Americans was largely connected with romantic views of the homeland, hearkening back to the loyalties of nineteenth-century Irish nationalism and the troubled cultural legacy of the Great Famine.  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, Irish Americans are fundamentally re-evaluating their ethnicity.  With Americans in general they have been introduced to newly-framed Irish myths.  They are being exposed to transformed traditions, to forms of expression created by the Irish in a secular, if sometimes spiritually resonant, process of cultural repossession.  This was typified by the Riverdance phenomenon, but has been generally realized in an extraordinary renaissance of the arts in Ireland.  Recently, Irish America has become aware of critical strains of Irish political thought that, while familial in their character, express a sense of disconnection that often proves difficult to accept or relate to home-grown perceptions and attitudes.

Taken together, such developments have resulted in a new and intensely realized, historically based exchange both among the Irish and Irish Americans.  In the widest sense, there has been a resurgence of Irish-American interest in and wish to engage the cultural origins and landscape of modern Ireland.  This is matched by a newfound Irish interest in the character and institutions of America and an impetus for dialogue with their native descendants in the U.S.  The Irish are, in fact, starting to come to terms with the Irish Diaspora.  They are considering the nature of the “Irishness” that persists abroad – they are looking at the effects of their Irish forebears on overseas cultures, especially on those of the U.S. and Australia.  Proud of their contributions to American history and life – including a significant influence on contemporary music and letters – they are also debating how Ireland is being affected by the new internationalism, in particular by its exposure to American culture and values. 

Re-Imagining Ireland will take such parallel and intersecting movements as its starting point and guiding principle, creating a forum for exploring issues of national identity in a global context.  In particular, the conference will focus on how notions of Irish identity have emerged, are being re-imagined, and may be transformed in Ireland, America, and other countries affected by the Irish Diaspora.  In the last ten to fifteen years, Irish commentators in many media have been working to reassert a critical sensibility that attends to the unique conditions of Irish cultural development, while setting the Irish experience in broader contexts of understanding.  Economic growth has allowed the Irish the luxury of coming to terms with themselves, while attendant social and cultural change have raised the stakes, and, some would say, made this imperative.  Melding commentary with performance, constantly turning to reflective and critical dialogue, Re-Imagining Ireland will explore the shifting nature of Ireland’s identity, as related to global cultural exchange and the impact of multi-national development on the communal order.

In playwright Brian Friel’s modern classic, Translations, the aging schoolmaster Hugh – quoting almost word for word from George Steiner’s After Babel – observes that “a civilization can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of …fact.”   “It is,” he later comments, “not the literal past, the ‘facts’ of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.”   While there are models of analysis to evaluate or criticize what happened in Ireland during the so-called dependency and early modernization periods, there is no accepted way, no language, for approaching the big questions about human choice and destiny in the contemporary era.  Re-Imagining Ireland will provide numerous opportunities to find and develop language that is conscious of the past and can be brought to bear on what is happening now in a country whose people are wrestling with their concept of self.   The Irish are working to integrate and speak of their social, cultural, and economic perceptions.  The questions they are raising are very real, concrete, and specific for those living in Ireland today. Such questions are also significant, some would say critical, on a global level, where they may hold the key to the survival of civil, multi-cultural societies. 

In this regard, writer and project consultant Susan McKay’s observation that many working-class, Northern Ireland Protestants are uneasy with projects of self-articulation assumes, for example, a special significance.   The feeling in Protestant communities, she explains, is that to talk about the conditions of private and social life “is somehow to betray one’s core principles.”  It is better, from this perspective, “to say nothing, to hold your ground, rather than to risk change.”  Intransigence becomes a virtue when the perception is that those who speak of reflective alternatives seek simply to undermine cherished, protected positions and self-perceptions.  Re-Imagining Ireland will unearth such complex, diverse, sometimes counterproductive attitudes.   Articulated or not, these have implications for the fundamental and material realities of life in Ireland and beyond today – in fact, they concern the vital issue of peace in war-torn cultures everywhere.

Contemporary Ireland is in motion and the oscillation is not limited to two imaginative poles.  In ambiguous but undoubtedly real ways, Irish identity is being reconstructed, or re-imagined.  Nobody quite knows how to make sense of or bring together the competing tendencies and elements that constitute the whole, although journalists, artists, and academics seem agreed that such an overall effort is required.  Through its exploratory structure, Re-Imagining Ireland will address Ireland’s past and contemporary dynamic, bringing together notions, frames of reference, and sometimes-overlooked issues and ways of talking about identity and cultural change.  Those attending the conference, viewing the video, or reading the book will come to appreciate the elusive, fugitive form of an Irishness that is, in Declan McGonagle’s words, “a question rather than a statement.”

The Re-Imagining Ireland conference – as well as the video and book – will at some level be an exercise in social or historical philosophy: participants will almost inevitably find themselves wrestling with vexing, real-life cultural questions.  They will ask whether the notion of being “Irish” embraces just Irish citizens, or whether “Irishness” is a phenomenological reality – one that concerns how a culture and identity are now being felt, questioned, and expressed by those who claim them.  They will also explore whether or how the dominant sensibility in Ireland today differs essentially from past versions of awareness and the forms of experience to which they were related – for example, the Great Famine of 1845-52 and the 1916 Easter Rising.  But whatever the answers, the format of the event and its products will be compelling and accessible – melding the arts and humanities, appealing to a broad public audience.

Consultants & Project HistoryRe-Imagining Ireland has been planned in consultation with an outstanding board of ten Irish and American writers, scholars, and arts/performance experts.   Seven of the consultants are based primarily in Ireland and Northern Ireland.  These include University College Dublin Irish Studies expert Angela Bourke, National University of Ireland sociologist Mary Corcoran, poet and radio presenter Theo Dorgan, Notre Dame-Ireland cultural theorist Luke Gibbons, Dublin City Arts Centre Director and former Irish Museum of Modern Art Director Declan McGonagle, Sunday Tribune journalist and author Susan McKay, University of Ulster film scholar Martin McLoone, and cultural commentator, author and Irish Times journalist Fintan O’Toole.  U.S. based consultants include University of Missouri emigration historian Kerby Miller and musicologist and performance artist Mick Moloney, founder of the “The Green Fields of America.”  For further information on the consultants, who will also participate as panelists at the Re-Imagining Ireland program, please see the Featured Guests section of this web site.

In March of 2000, VFH project director Andrew Higgins Wyndham began exploring the program concept with Martin McLoone, Senior Lecturer in Media Studies and former Head of the School of Media and Performing Arts at the University of Ulster, Coleraine.  McLoone suggested the theme of the conference and collaborated with VFH to devise an initial working plan.  This included recruiting members of the above-named consulting team, who were given free rein in critiquing and helping staff to refine the project idea and in developing the public program itself.   Planning for Re-Imagining Ireland began in earnest at a November 2000 meeting in Dublin, during which eight members of the consulting team worked to develop the concept and structure of the program.  During this intense but enjoyable two-day period, the group defined the nature of the issues to be addressed, outlined the schedule of the program, and created lists of participants who could contribute to specific parts of the event.  Following this meeting, the project director developed a program schedule that integrated the ideas of the group, also creating a concept narrative based on their discussion.  In March 2001, at a second consulting session, the emerging conference package was reviewed and revised to reflect new perceptions concerning the emphases of individual panels and the overall logic of the program.  Originally scheduled for 2002, the program was postponed following the events of September 11.  Since then, the collaboration with our Irish and American consultants has been sustained via personal meetings and phone and e-mail communications; the consulting process continues throughout the final phases of project implementation.

Interpretive Approach

Top: Beenatoor, Co. Kerry / © aw 1991
Bottom: Dame Street Spar, Dublin / Photo by
Dara Mac Donaill. - Courtesy The Irish Times

Currently, to take a straightforward example, Ireland’s economic development is effecting a fundamental restructuring of the country’s historical, communal order.  Consultant Mary Corcoran has analyzed a version of the resulting dislocation.  She points to the “ex-urbanized city” of Dublin that now extends in all directions beyond the county boundaries:  “On the perimeter of the city, industrial estates, business parks, and, most recently, shopping malls have sprung up, all of which are linked through a series of ring roads and motorways.”   Relying “on a consumer class with spending power and access to private vehicles,” the malls usurp “the concept of public space for the use of a civic community.”  They require “massive infrastructural investment,” generate increasing traffic volume, virtually excluding the many in Ireland who do not own cars.  They homogenize experience, “reshaping the notion of what constitutes shopping” in a whole people’s social imagination, making it less and less possible “to return to, much less imagine, alternative means of consumption.”

Here we are brought face to face with a type of involuntary re-imagining, with the imposition of newly shaped cultural forms on traditional ways of viewing, behaving, and succeeding in the world. The issue, say our consultants, may go to the heart of the conflict between tradition and modernity, pointing to the significance of the Re-Imagining Ireland event, not just for Ireland but for those in the U.S. and other first-world nations.  The example may speak to how, on a wider basis, forms of multi-national economic development, often associated with America’s economic dominance worldwide, may generate antagonistic attitudes, or encourage volatile movements and reactions on the part of those left out.  Ireland, however, provides an unusual example, for in small it represents, our advisors say, how a people may intentionally negotiate and transform their contemporary self-image in dialogue with the past, creating versions of national identity that constantly transcend restrictive ideological impulses. 

This is not merely a contemporary issue – it has historical roots that speakers will explore throughout the Re-Imagining Ireland event.  Consultant Luke Gibbons connects this history to the first official narrative of Irish identity, which was adopted by Eamon de Valera’s newly formed independent state.  Though initially inspired by French republican philosophy and American governmental systems, Ireland’s nationalists came to promulgate a vision that fixed on ancient symbols and fetish-like representations of a supposedly unbroken, rurally-based history, adopting the distinctively reactionary “Celtic Twilight” literary movement.  The conservative government’s tacit goal was, in effect, to paper-over discontinuous or fractured, largely irrecoverable features of a lost national community – persistently arguing for an enduring Irish sense of historical connection, disconnecting from more liberal forms of political philosophy. 

This approach, though supposedly countering the psychic and social consequences of a colonial past (e.g., emigration), in actuality denied them.  An understandable coping response, the new state’s defensive, stabilizing posture was assumed in the wake of a traumatic history of internal social domination and disruption.  In certain respects, nonetheless, such attitudes fed a set of paralyzing social and economic policies.  And it was not until the second half of the last century that state policies were directed at shifting the ground of national attention.  The goal then became to alleviate economic stagnation by incorporating a newly approved vision of rapid industrial development.  The aim was to move from an enmeshing and debilitating anti-colonial, rural and superstitiously-linked identity to a more adaptive, participatory set of thoroughly modern, temporally freed-up, internationalist attitudes.

As with many things Irish, the grounds of certainty here remain problematic.  Kerby Miller has, for example, argued that, “though withered from the blasts of conquest and change,” the Gaelic Ireland of old actually did constitute an historically persistent cultural force.  “Certain real continuities,” he says, remained “to justify the retention of archaic attitudes and behavior patterns.” In fact, he suggests, an inherited “worldview which de-emphasized and even condemned individualistic and innovative actions such as emigration,” goes far to explain the emergence of the image and reality of the Irish as sorrowing, homesick exiles.  Emigrants were persons who actually responded to an internalized demand to redress the expediency of their choice to leave the homeland by continually expressing fealty to Mother Ireland.

The fact is that neither the traditionalist vision of de Valera’s immutably countrified Ireland, which closed-off potentially fruitful avenues of conscious self-assessment and development, nor the Irish Industrial Development Authority’s later vision of an Ireland technologically liberated from time and space, could truly answer Ireland’s national psychic needs and aspirations.  The official canon of economic development was a version of censorship just as self-distancing as a seemingly retrograde romantic vision of Gaelic-Catholic Irishness.  The modernist credo suppressed genuine impulses to plumb and expand on the cultural significance of rural attachments and remnant connections to early Irish, or “Celtic,” history.

Today, however, the people of Ireland are engaging their culture in newly affirming ways.  They are asserting a novel awareness, negotiated as they recast contrary, but equally suppressive viewpoints.   They are celebrating and encouraging self-actualizing acts of cultural repossession.  The emergence of a transformative consciousness is, suggests Fintan O’Toole, exemplified in the poetry of Paul Durcan, whose attitude to Ireland the writer summarizes as follows:  “He does not fly from the narrowness of Irish history or the absurdity of Irish geography.  He imagines alternatives to them. And these alternatives are themselves rooted in Irish reality. They are made, not by pure invention, but by loosening the tongue of a hidden Ireland, allowing it to speak out its own unspoken complexities and richly contradictory possibilities… He lives neither in an immemorial Ireland of the past nor in an amnesiac Ireland of the present, but on the stairs between them.”

O’Toole is describing a process of self-reflective “identity formation” that Durcan acts out in a symbolic and private realm, but that also concerns publicly and widely experienced cultural transformations.   In either case, the resulting efflorescence or emergence involves the creation of new ways of representing experience or framing aspirations.   Such expressive re-imaginings, such world-shaping changes in self-conception and understanding, are, says Luke Gibbons, reflected in, negotiated through, and generated in terms of cultural production.  This, Gibbons says, may “take the form of the mass media, literary genres such as the novel and drama, visual representations, or other cultural or symbolic practices.”

The Re-Imagining Ireland program will illustrate and examine issues of memory and changing forms of expression, considering Ireland in the light of global movements, but remaining centered primarily on how the Irish themselves – synthesizing and transforming their past – are negotiating, interpreting, and celebrating contemporary experience. “Understanding a community or a culture,” Gibbons comments, “…means taking seriously their ways of structuring experience, their popular narratives, the distinctive manner in which they frame the social and political realities which affect their lives.”   By way of example, project consultant Angela Bourke recalls that seventeenth-century visitors to Ireland who witnessed poetically figured laments for the dead, heard only noise and disorder.  Later commentators, who at least knew the language, saw the laments only as poetic expressions of love.  In fact, says Bourke, these highly structured poems are now interpreted as forms of feminist assertion, employing art as socially effective discourse.

Declan McGonagle, reflecting on the artistic forms through which Ireland’s people are negotiating contemporary realities, observes that artists are now confounding old dualities, “of male and female, of urban and rural, of past and present, of North and South, of Protestant and Catholic, which correspond to increasingly visible tensions in cultural and social processes elsewhere in the world.”  The task for Irish artists (and, one might add, for Ireland in general, and perhaps for us all) is, he says, “to establish a cultural space in which composite, third readings can be generated, …in which linear, one-dimensional readings of anything of value – from culture, politics, and society, to identity – can be dismantled and reconfigured.”

Themes Re-Imagining Ireland will explore numerous examples of the process of reconfiguring Irish identity, considering both contemporary motivations and the history that underlies them.  The conference and festival will acknowledge that, whatever their universal features, the conditions surrounding the realization of the “Irish moment,” with all its related forms of expression, are in some ways special.  The message of the program, however, will be that the Irish example is widely relevant.  Following opening day activities – including an address by President Mary McAleese of Ireland and a welcoming reception and major concert – participants will consider how Ireland’s circumstances may reveal and bring into focus highly significant issues connected with global economic change, cultural expression, and the nature of identity.  They will then discuss historical and emerging, internationalized forms of national consciousness, including in particular Ireland’s relationship with America.  Participants will finally consider the nature of sectarian conflict and violence – and how newly negotiated, local or national, political and religious allegiances may bear on the prospects for peace. 

One strand of the story concerns the Ulster Scots, who once regarded and treated the native Irish as a tribal culture beyond the boundaries of their civilizing influence, but who later, as the Scots-Irish, spearheaded the drive to explore and settle the American South and West.  The native Irish, who would later join them, first arrived in America mostly as indentured servants and lived on a par with enslaved African Americans.   Later, of course, many of these same Irish acted as agents and proponents of an economically advantageous system of slavery through which they affirmed their whiteness.   In the twentieth century, racist attitudes have proven particularly persistent in some Irish American communities, yet it is also true that Irish American leaders, including, for example John and Robert Kennedy, supported the developing Civil Rights movement.   Aspects of the appetite for Irish studies in the U.S., which largely inspires Irish pride, may still be implicated in an affection for an essentially separatist set of racial attitudes.   Contemporary Irish consciousness, radiating beyond and returning to the immediate circumstances of newly discovered racial divisions in the Republic, variously takes into account the ironic dimensions of such history.   The recognition, of course, is that the mixed, Irish American record on issues of race relations and racial justice has been easy to deplore, but that it may not be simple to undo or redress the consequences of similarly conflicted attitudes at home.

Courtesy Intel

Such analysis will highlight the far-reaching meanings of economic change and its challenges as placed in the context of analysis through the humanities. But the Irish economy is unique, first, in that it simply does not accord with standard patterns of economic development.  Few other societies in the world have achieved modernization so rapidly.  And the Irish case stands alone in being almost exclusively a result of external investments.  The fundamental and primary leap of development for those countries collectively known as the Asian Tiger was internal, arising from state-driven economic investment.  Ireland, however, has been transformed through state incentives directed at enticing foreign, particularly American, corporate interests to make the country a base for their European and world operations.  Abiding historical ties, bonds of language, and shared entrepreneurial values have fostered a kind of collaborative economic dependency, in which Ireland’s highly educated population has confirmed and expanded on a mutually beneficial relationship.

However, if identity, as some argue, is largely a function of an interplay between individual and corporate memory, Irish identity may be under threat by the very economic forces and developments that are trumpeted by government and which garner popular support through the media and the press.  “Highly desirable economic growth, but at what cost?” is, of course, a question that many nations would like to answer.In the current climate, Irish history and accomplishments are often turned into a dreamy pageant that sanitizes the awkward features of local life.  Should efforts be made to discover and preserve pained connections with a troubled history – perhaps in the process opening to and realizing the possibility of forgiveness? 

In plumbing the economic profile of the “new Ireland,” Re-Imagining Ireland will look to possibilities not just for moving beyond, but of catching up with the past.  Part of that past is reflected in music, dance, and a still vibrant spiritual inheritance.  But recent revelations regarding the clergy and the policies of the Irish Catholic Church, stories of hidden family abuse and trauma, the experience of the travelling people, and the fate of the still economically disenfranchised, will also be among the program topics.  Speakers will thus lend nuances to the form in which the contemporary economic and cultural renaissance is evaluated.

Top: Scribe from Giraldus Cambrensis's Topographia
Hiberniae / Courtesy National Library of Ireland
Bottom: Courtesy MIT Media Lab Europe, Dublin

The disenfranchisement of Irish Catholics by way of the British-imposed, 17th - 19^th-century Penal Codes left them, said Edmund Burke, foreigners in their own country.   Disempowered and impoverished millions would leave Ireland, becoming – in the title words of Kerby Miller’s book – Emigrants and Exiles.  But the scale of current social and economic change, says Fintan O’Toole, has also “induced a sense of internal exile, a sense that the Irish people feel less and less at home in Ireland, that Ireland has become somehow unreal.  …Since Ireland has become in some respects a little America, emigration can no longer be posited as a shift from one state of being to another.  …Because Irish places have themselves been radically changed, it has been possible, in a sense, to emigrate without leaving the island.  …The difference between home and abroad has shrunk to virtually nothing.” 

Can the Irish maintain their local and regional cultures, with a sense of core values and connection to tradition and place, in a world that is characterized more and more by de-personalizing, ex-urban experience?  Is there a distinction to be made between justifiable concerns about such change – e.g., the development of highly acquisitive attitudes that involve all aspects of a culture – and what is mere apathy about or hostility towards socially and culturally productive innovation?  Ireland is now the largest exporter of software in the world; this has immeasurably improved material life for many in the population.  Yet there are few debates in Ireland about how technologies affect society and culture.   Where, asked our project consultants, are the discussions that address what is happening socially and culturally, focusing on how communal perspectives and practices are inevitably and sometimes radically altered? 

Re-Imagining Ireland will be a focused effort to address such issues and other related concerns.  Will, for example, Ireland continue to ride the “tiger” of US-driven globalization?  Is the phenomenal growth recently experienced in Ireland a signpost on the road to more-or-less permanent economic and social stability, or an ephemeral effect bound to result in renewed emigration, disillusionment, and socio-political upheaval?  The 18^th-century surges and declines in the linen market, the severe postwar depression of the early 1800s, and the internationalization of agricultural product exchange in the late 1800s and the first half of the 1900s demonstrated Ireland’s fatal vulnerability to economic forces seemingly beyond its control.  Will the Ireland of the “Celtic Tiger” suffer the same fate, or is the country’s economy now founded on a more durable base, protected by its access to European markets and capital?

Transnational Identity>>>Day Three – Home and Away – will address the wider economic story of Ireland, which has everything to do with the fact that it is the only country in the world whose population is half or less than half of what it was in 1845.  The enormity of Irish emigration confounds the rules of economic logic.  The emigration equation was at first one-sided, merely a sign of national disorder or devastation.  Emigration deeply wrote the story of Ireland into American life, affecting the arts and politics, labor unions and the popular culture of vaudeville, as well as the course of history in the South and West.  As recently as the 1980s, emigration, particularly to the United States, still provided a safety valve for a faltering Irish economy, while bolstering productivity in the U.S. and elsewhere.  More recently, the Irish Diaspora has in a sense returned the favor, contributing to a culturally and socially renewed Ireland, effectively working to re-populate, in not always welcome ways, the mythical isle of saints and scholars.

Left: The Statue of Liberty /
Photo courtesy of GreatBuildings.com
Right: An Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern T.D.
at the opening of Ireland's European Union House /
Photo by David Sleator - Courtesy The Irish Times

Throughout the day, featured guests and registrants will discuss issues of personal, national, and cultural identity as related to Ireland’s history of emigration and multifold global allegiances.  Such issues have been particularly charged for the people of Ireland.  They now negotiate their position as a nation no longer defined against Britain, yet ambivalently positioned between Europe and America.   Is there a virtual Irish Empire?  Does it include Irish-made America?  Are the leprechauns and shamrocks of America’s Irish festivals merely an embarrassment, or a valid expression of an alternative Irish identity?  Can Ireland’s film industry survive Hollywood alone, or must Irish-based producers ally themselves with Europe?   How will Irish culture and other “peripheral” cultures in Europe sustain their voices in the face of growing European and global integration? These are among the issues to be highlighted. 

In exploring questions of this kind, the program will implicitly address how the Irish have constantly been forced by circumstance to question their status in the world.   At times virtually without a nationally-sanctioned identity, they struggled to discover or create self-defining meanings – a logic of identity – out of their fractured history.  Effectively cut loose in space and time, they have yearned for “still points” – the rural Ireland, for example, of a mythological bardic tradition – seeking referential certainty, identifying and celebrating distinctive forms of cultural expression.  They have sought to revive the “true language of their nation,” a movement considered in a session called “The Universe of the Gaeltacht.”

In a personally confusing game of negotiating the meaning of Irish identity, the stakes have now been raised, as Irishness enters the field of dreams of a transnational consciousness.  Irishness as “Celticness” has globally become the one identity that is almost optional for anyone, that can be adopted and worn as a form of designer – some would say kitschy – multi-culturalism.  That, at any rate, is the suspicion harbored by many Irish, who have observed the emergence of a malleable, widely accessible, quasi-commercial version of their national identity (“Buy an Enya album and become Irish!”) in the global marketplace.   The Re-Imagining Ireland program will address this phenomenon, exploring the imagined Ireland of the future. 

Will that Ireland largely be characterized by sense of a lost, if briefly confirmed, national identity?  Will Irish notions of Irishness be subsumed by global European and Anglo-American definitions of what Irish culture generally is?  Will the “authentic” and traditional persist, or will what is now happening create a new culture between East and West, at the intersection of past and present – one just as authentic as whatever may be left behind?  Does, in other words, the view that Ireland is selling or losing its national identity, miss the point that a blend of imagined past identities – recast in the rapidly changing, self-altering matrix of modern memory – is now emerging?   Or do such counter-interpretations yield to a destructive, even fatal form of decline?   Do they effectively ratify a virtual venture of re-colonization, one that is substituting new and more insidious, because less obvious, forms of control than those that threatened the Ireland of old?

The “Enyanization” of Irish culture is both troubling and gratifying to the Irish.  After all, it means that the question urgently asked of foreign guests by popular TV talk show host Gay Byrne in the 1960s (“What do you think of us?”) is no longer at issue.  Ireland has established itself both in popular cultural consciousness worldwide and as a viable national entity.   Once globally marginalized, the Irish in dispersion no longer struggle to define themselves against mainstream culture.  On the contrary, they can pat themselves on the back, secure in the knowledge that they and theirs have assumed a significant role in creating that vibrant culture, and that they now have a homeland, a prosperous capital city, a viable government, a nation to call their own. 

At the same time, however, this renewed sense of Irishness has led to a new questioning awareness, to feelings of responsibility and a loss of innocence.  Faced with the peculiar complexities of history, the Irish no longer, for example, default to the notion that they have merely been a victimized people.  The full story is more ambiguous and confusing.  After all, Philip Henry Sheridan, thought of by some as one of America’s most brutal Indian killers, was of Irish descent.  But then, again, there is the fact that an entire regiment of Irish, fighting for the U.S. in the Spanish-American war, deserted to support the Mexican cause, having come to identify with their exploited and beleaguered counterparts.  Roy Lee Riley, a black man living on Montserrat, is, reports Mick Moloney, still indignant about Irish slave-owning there, while African American Irish dancer Lenny Sloan takes a painfully ironic pride at having a great grandfather who bought or bartered human beings.  The late 19th-century Bishop Hughes of Portland, Maine, who officiated at the consecration of St. Patrick’s cathedral in New York, had an Irish father and African American mother but only called himself “Irish.”  Though dark skinned, he achieved prominence in Irish American society in part by singularly affirming his Irishness, never publicly allowing of the fact that he was also black. 

Such ambiguously cast stories, turning on questionable concepts of race, exemplify a more general phenomenon of the questioning and revision of received norms among both the Irish and Irish Americans.  Overseas, in the realm of music and the arts, explains Mick Moloney, modernization has been viewed with trepidation or distrust.  In a broadly multi-cultural environment, innovation is often seen threatening a cherished authenticity.  Irish American musicians and Irish musicians abroad therefore tend to conform to traditional norms, avoiding what may be perceived as inauthentic.  At the same time, it was actually in Irish America that the contemporary renaissance in Irish music found its momentum and audience.  Thus, says Moloney, despite persisting protocols, the concept of authenticity is becoming more negotiable, being viewed in terms of a shifting, hence sometimes confusing, set of interrelations.  The Re-Imagining program will highlight this fact, presenting concerts by “The Green Fields of America,” “De Dannan,” “Solas,” and “Cherish the Ladies,” calling on a variety of individual musical interpreters – like Martin Hayes and Andy Irvine – to illustrate and explain the influence of Europe on Irish music, Irish-American-African musical hybrids, and the spiritual dimensions of Irish musical art.

The paradoxically complicated relation between Irish and American culture will also be exemplified by short films and dramatic features, presented in cooperation with the Cork International Film Festival and Bord Scannán, the Irish Film Board.  Martin McLoone has pointed to the “dialectic between tradition and modernity” as a central “recurring theme in Irish cinema,” a theme that finds particular expression in films that explore American culture as both a liberating and corrupting influence.   Numerous new Irish films reflect the fact that “the younger generation has mastered many of the tropes of American popular culture, especially, of course, rock and pop music.  …They feel they have inherited the world already from their traumatized parents and can breezily cast aside their neuroses and learn to live with an American popular culture that their emigrant ancestors helped to build in the first place.”   Beneath the often parodic surface of contemporary films, McLoone, however, detects a largely repressed anxiety that may respect generational disconnection and may be linked to a sense of being victimized by an imperial American culture.   At the same time, a new spate of Irish and American films are probing “the relationship between the two countries through the presence of the Irish diaspora.”   And this is ironically happening “precisely at a time when Ireland is moving closer economically and politically to Europe.”

Efforts at Peace >>>Day Four – Peace, Northern Ireland, and Beyond – will explore the historical, socio-political, religious, and personal dimensions of sectarian conflict in contemporary Irish society.  Discussion will focus on the progress and form of the Northern Ireland peace process, which is unique, both in itself and in its American connections. The U.S. has long been implicated in the Troubles; republican paramilitaries were once substantially funded by Irish Americans.  More recently, of course, Irish American business interests and philanthropists have vigorously supported efforts aimed at peace and economic development in the North.  The Irish American community and the U.S. government itself played an important, if essentially advisory, role in the formulation of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.  This settlement emerged as a consciously crafted, virtually theatrical document that announces and seeks to give place to competing discourses, establishing a kind of post-modern political dynamic of persisting difference within a framework for accommodation.  Though the mechanisms of “devolution” are now suspended, the accord will likely provide an enduring and effective framework for political dialogue, governance, and cross-community understanding.

There is no other international treaty that contains a sentence allowing that citizens in a particular territorial region may identify themselves bi-valently – that is, as Irish, or British, or both.  In such a post-modern framework, persons may not only have multiple internal allegiances; they may hold allegiance to both, or one, or neither of two sovereign nations.  And one of many questions to be asked about this arrangement is “Why?”  Or, under what conditions has a leading-edge intellectual theory virtually come to be realized in the terms of a political document?  One answer may be found in the person of John Hume, former leader of the Social Democratic and Labor Party, who originally proposed that the emerging agreement be negotiated in three strands – concerning Northern Ireland on its own terms, North-South arrangements, and British-Irish accommodation – in a sense forecasting a framework that would elaborate and protect multiple affiliations and identities.    Still another answer, suggests Colin Coulter, must be that Arthur Aughey is correct in his conclusion that, “The island of Ireland simply does not constitute the site of the principal community to which members of the unionist tradition imagine themselves to belong.”  Even an acknowledged liberal and pluralist Republic of Ireland will, says Coulter, never be a place that accords with the unionist “sense of historical or cultural self.”

Perhaps, and yet a political movement towards the development of some kind of cross-cultural identity for the people of Northern Ireland has, however tenuously, been evident since the IRA’s historic decision to begin “decommissioning” its stockpile of armaments.  Early in 2002, Unionist and former First Minister, David Trimble, and his then-collaborating Nationalist First Deputy Minister, Mark Durkan, jointly condemned violence in the Ardoyne area of Belfast.  At a meeting of the North Down Unionist Association, Durkan declared that he was there “to listen to Unionists as well as talk to them.”  He looked to a future in which “we can fulfill the ‘covenant of honour’ between our two traditions that the Good Friday agreement can constitute.”  Meanwhile, against a tragic backdrop of shootings in Northern Ireland – which earlier this year rose to the highest level since 1994 – President Bush’s special advisor on Northern Ireland, Richard Haass, called for attention to “the insecurities within the Unionist community.”   He cited the need to develop an inclusive cross-communal vision as “a challenge for all who want to see today’s fragile peace become rock solid.”

Mark Durkan, Bertie Ahern, David Trimble,
Brian Cowen / Photo: Frank Miller -
Courtesy The Irish Times

Re-Imagining Ireland will consider the Unionist and Nationalist positions from within, involving a range of speakers that reflects a broad spectrum of opinion.  The program will similarly explore the history and contemporary manifestations of the Protestant and Catholic traditions in the North and Ireland as a whole.  Participants will discuss the connections between religion and identity and will consider whether many in Ireland may not have already found a global, super-sectarian identity.  “Songs of the Peace Process,” a musical narrative presented by singer-songwriter Tommy Sands, and a group of short films related to the day’s theme, will complement the panel discussions. The goal is to explore the nature of the competing parties’ distrust and fear, to encourage dialogue, and to enhance the American audience’s understanding of a situation that still shows promise of being resolved.  In that situation, what might be termed pre-modern allegiances, essentially irrational and dangerous, have constantly threatened violence, tending as the Belfast Telegraph once said, to throw Ulster “back into a dark past.”   Yet project consultant Susan McKay sounds a note of hope, asserting that “though there are monsters which have to be faced down, …there is much to be proud of too.  There is honest ground to stand on.” 

Whatever the ultimate resolution, it is apparent for the moment how intimately connected issues of peace are to the ways in which inhabitants of the island of Ireland are negotiating and confirming or, re-imagining, concepts of belonging and identity.   The overwhelming Good Friday “Yes” vote in the Republic, acknowledged, as the Irish Times then reported, “that if there is ever to be a united Ireland it will only come about by consent.”  The result, says Martin McLoone, was indicative of a fundamental re-imagining of the meaning of citizenship in the South, opening the possibility of new and more constructive relations throughout the British Isles.  Sinn Fein has itself appeared to be reaching to re-imagine itself, forthrightly renouncing the Omagh attack, for example, working, as Agnes Maillot notes, to become an “authentic socialist party” and “conquer the middle classes.”   Such change suggests that the iron grip of the colonial past on Irish consciousness is loosening.  And in this process, says Farrel Corcoran, an extensive public debate has been generated, “scrutinizing as never before what it now means to be Irish or British, nationalist or loyalist.”

Feeding into examinations of such contemporary questions, but turning to explore depths of historical ambiguity related to Ireland’s colonial past, participating historians will shed light both on Ireland and its American connections.  Re-Imagining Ireland consulting historian and speaker Kerby Miller argues, for example, that, as related to such labels as “Ulster Scots” and “Scots-Irish,” ethnic identities are “diverse, complex, mutable, contextual, and contingent.”  Surprisingly, he notes that, during the 17^th century, the marker “Scots-Irish” – so freely used with specific religious connections to Ulster in current discussions of Ireland’s influence on the U.S. – “apparently referred primarily to Gaelic speaking, Catholic residents of the Scottish Highlands, the Western Isles, and the parts of Ulster where they settled.”  During and following this period, he continues, “the term ‘Ulster Scots’ referred specifically to Scots Presbyterian settlers in Northern Ireland.”  However, “during much of the 18th century, ‘Scots-Irish’ was one of several labels (including ‘Irish’) applied in North America specifically to Presbyterian migrants from Ulster.”  The issue of meaning became even more problematic during the 19^th century in the U.S., when Miller says, “the term ‘Scots-Irish’ (more commonly ‘Scotch-Irish’) broadened to include all Americans of Irish birth or descent who were not currently Catholic.”  This was the case “regardless of whether their ethno-religious backgrounds were Presbyterian, Anglican, or other Protestant, or whether their ancestors had been Gaelic or Hiberno-Norman or Scottish, English, or other ‘planter stock.’”  Today, he says, we confront an analogous situation with the “popular usage of ‘Ulster Scots’ in Northern Ireland (and increasingly in the Irish Republic, the U.K., and the U.S.).”  The term has curiously “become equally inclusive, encompassing all Northern Irish Protestants, regardless of denomination or ancestry.” 

This shifting set of sometimes overlapping and progressively more encompassing meanings is not merely a matter of etymological curiosity.  It points to an evolving pattern of choice in matters of tradition and identity, to changes made in response, Miller says, to particular “circumstances, opportunities, and pressures.”  Re-Imagining Ireland may not plumb how, when, and why the Gaelic and Catholic connotations of “Scots-Irish” were lost, or when and how what Miller calls “its early, ‘negative’ connotations” were socially rehabilitated.  But in the course of examining Ireland’s colonial legacy and North America’s Irish inheritance, speakers will consider the implications of such interacting and alternating labels and how the hidden history behind these changes may speak to the  meaning of other terms of identification, such as “Irish,”  “British,” “Unionist,” and “American.”

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Ignatiev, Noel.  (1995).  How the Irish Became White.  New York:  Routledge.

Lloyd, David.  (1999).  Ireland After History.  Notre Dame:  University of Notre Dame Press in association with Field Day.

McGonagle, Declan; O’Toole, Fintan; & Levin, Kim.  (1999).  Irish Art Now:  From the Poetic to the Political.  New York:  Independent Curators International.

McKay, Susan.  (2000).  Northern Protestants:  An Unsettled People.  Belfast:  The Blackstaff Press Limited.

McLoone, Martin.  (2000).  Irish Film:  The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema.  London:  British Film Institute.

Miller, Kerby A.  (1985).  Emigrants and Exiles:  Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America.  New York:  Oxford University Press.

Moreton, Cole.  (2000).  Hungry for Home:  Leaving the Blaskets:  A Journey from the Edge of Ireland.  New York:  Viking.

O’Toole, Fintan.  (1997).  The Ex-Isle of Erin.  Dublin:  New Island Books.

O’Toole, Fintan.  (1997).  The Lie of the Land:  Irish Identities.  London:  Verso.

Peillon, Michel, & Slater, Eamonn, (Eds.).  (1998).  Encounters with Modern Ireland:  A Sociological Chronicle 1995-1996.  Dublin:  Institute of Public Administration.

Slater, Eamonn, & Peillon, Michel, (Eds.).  (2000).  Memories of the Present:  A Sociological Chronicle of Ireland, 1997-1998.  Dublin:  Institute of Public Administration.

 

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