Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Problematising Undecidability
The transferability of postmodern discourse, and its endless repetition over recent decades in academic essays, papers, dissertations, articles, talks and books, throws its usefulness into question in a way not intended by its adherents; it may also induce in the…
All Or Nothing
A union of solidarity will never work if some people retire at sixty-seven and others at fifty-five or sixty; if some duly pay their taxes and others do not; if some increase their competitiveness while others do not; if some…
The Good Statesman
My work meant that I travelled fairly frequently with Garret and Joan and he would often extend an invitation to dinner. These affairs were always convivial but also intellectually stimulating occasions. In private I found him to be extraordinarily humble…
Beyond The Bel Paese
Italians are famous for their campanilismo, a word which literally means “attachment to one’s own bell tower”, and is a lyrical way of describing provincialism or localism in a nation with hundreds of medieval towns and cities, each with its…
That Which You Had To Do
When democracy arrived in full force in Paris in 1848, Tocqueville led the assault on its pretensions. No universal tendency was going to have its way there. It could go tend elsewhere. A good war would stop it; bring the…
Use The Mirror
Yes, there has been a paucity of bold political leadership in Europe. However, in the almost four years since the onset of the international credit crunch, Ireland has managed only a number of baby-steps in the area of overdue structural…
Harvesting Souls For The Lord
In 1916 Revd JW Tristram summed up his early thoughts in the Church of Ireland’s Irish Church Quarterly in opposition to “The late Rebellion”: “When Irish people learn to rise early, tell the truth, use soap and water more freely,…
Mean Street USA
From the novel of manners to the crime novel of bad manners
History In A Hurry
Murphy shows little interest in or awareness of previous studies of the social context of the revolution, accepts the reality of the probably imaginary “Cairo Gang”, and utterly misrepresents the level of confidence of IRA leaders at the time of…
This is my Letter to the World
Emily’s self-seclusion was in the family tradition, as was her feeling of superiority, which she expressed in her inimitable manner. At a dinner during her visit to Boston, when presented with a flambé dessert she enquired from the judge sitting…
No Sad Imperialist of the Aesthetic Self
Just as the exiled Joyce carried his own flawed Ireland into exile with him and had then to devise his own means for imaginatively reinventing it, so O’Doherty carried with him an Ireland and found in the then radical movements…
Behind The Curtain
The memory of Robert Emmet would remain venerated in the James family – Henry James Snr was adept at reciting the speech from the dock. But his novelist son had little sympathy for Ireland. When his sister’s diary was printed…