Internationalist Review of Irish Culture

An eccentric Irish internationalist, Brendan Behan, liked to remember how the Irish in the International Brigade always liked to fight alongside the Basques, because they had Catholic priests who would take the confessions of the wounded. And yet, when he was asked in Ireland if he had been to confession recently, he always answered, “no, that’s for sinners.” Such a “confession” coming from a Catholic socialist of spirit might look like an oneiric and rather utopian way of facing the problematic translation of national identity into cultural, religious, and historical terms. Yet, the joke seems to have also some very serious implications, like that the idea of nation always cuts across that of identity, let alone one based on religious beliefs. In fact, nations as “imagined communities”, provided with suitable “invented traditions” as well as a shared, cohesive “grammar of the past”, are really sums of differences rather than identities. This is all the more true when their social basis changes fast, as is happening in Ireland today. If identity is a most cogent issue, Ireland is a country where visitors can be welcomed at the main airport by Kia Motors and McDonald Burgers. And one suspects that things would not change much were Guinness in charge of welcoming travellers, since a great deal of the fortunes of the blackest of Irish beers depends on trans-national capital leading back to a genuinely black country; which, to be sure, would make Doyle’s black Dubs go white. In addition to the general replacing of old-fashioned dependences with new ones depending on multinationals, Ireland’s profile is changing quickly due also to a massive influx of immigration. This being the case, its shape is continually translated in the minds as well as in the social habits of those who live within its boundaries, but also according to what kind of resistance its past and tradition can still exert on the inevitable cultural turmoil caused by fractures within its very structure. Thus, a nation is no more just a sum of differences, but rather a deliberately engineered community whose shape is paradoxically meant to encompass such a sum of different cohabiting nations ...