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The limits of ‘Irish Studies’: historicism, culturalism, paternalism

2004; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 12; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0967088042000228914

1469-9303

Linda Connolly,

Philippine History and Culture

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes I would like to thank Dr Andy Bielenberg as well as friends and colleagues in the Postcolonial Study Group at University College Cork (who read and responded to a much earlier version of this paper) for their comments and criticisms. Of course, the views expressed, and any errors made, are entirely mine. The methodology in this paper is based on a comprehensive literature review of Irish Studies, conducted as part of a much larger project to map and theorise the development of Irish social and cultural studies conducted throughout the course of the twentieth century. This research is supported by a Government of Ireland Fellowship, from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (2003–4). Seminal Field Day publications include: Seamus Deane (ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vols 1, 2 and 3 (Field Day, 1991), and the eleven volumes of the Critical Conditions Field Day Monographs series (Cork University Press). Claire Connolly, 'Theorising Ireland', Irish Studies Review vol. 9, no. 3 (2001), pp. 301–315. See J. J. Lee, 'Irish History', in The Heritage of Ireland, ed. Neil Buttimer, Colin Rynne and Helen Guerin (Collins Press, 2000), pp. 117–136, for an excellent review of the discipline's history in Ireland. The nationalist and revisionist controversy is well documented in D. George Boyce and Alan O'Day (eds), The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy (Routledge, 1996); Brendan Bradshaw, 'Nationalism and Historical Scholarship in Modern Ireland', Irish Historical Studies vol. XXVI, no. 104 (1986), pp. 329–351; Ciarán Brady (ed.), Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism (Irish Academic Press, 1986). There are several examples of this in the field, too numerous to mention here. For an early example, see Deane (ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. The eleven volumes of the Critical Conditions Field Day Monographs also demonstrate this very well. For an in‐depth discussion, see Joe Cleary, 'Misplaced Ideas?: Colonialism, Location and Dislocation in Irish Studies', in Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Clare Carroll and Patricia King (Cork University Press, 2003), pp. 16–45. See also David Lloyd, Ireland after History (Cork University Press, 1999), p. 5. Claire Connolly, 'Theorising Ireland', p. 312. See Deane's introduction to The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Early Field Day (Derry) pamphlets include Deane's Civilians and Barbarians (1983), Declan Kiberd's Anglo‐Irish Attitudes (1984), and Tom Paulin's A New Look at the Irish Language Question (1986). Deane (ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing; Theo Dorgan and Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha (eds), Revising the Rising (Field Day, 1991). Thomas A. Boylan and Timothy P. Foley (eds), Political Economy and Colonial Ireland: The Propagation and Ideological Function of Economic Discourse in the Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 1992); David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Postcolonial Moment (Lilliput, 1993); David Lloyd, Ireland after History; Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (Jonathan Cape, 1995); Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (Verso, 1995). The eleven Critical Conditions Field Day Monographs generated another proliferation of postcolonial theorising. See, for example, Terry Eagleton, Crazy John and the Bishop (Cork University Press, 1998); Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork University Press, 1996); and David Lloyd, Ireland after History. Colin Graham and Glenn Hooper (eds), Irish and Postcolonial Writing: History, Theory, Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 16. See Graham and Hooper, Irish and Postcolonial Writing; Claire Connolly, 'Theorising Ireland'; Clare Carroll and Patricia King (eds), Ireland and Postcolonial Writing, pp. 1–15; Joe Cleary, 'Misplaced Ideas?'; Conor McCarthy, Modernisation: Crisis and Culture in Ireland 1969–1992 (Four Courts Press, 2000); P. J. Mathews (ed.), New Voices in Irish Criticism (Four Courts Press, 2000); Colin Graham, Deconstructing Ireland: Identity, Theory, Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2001); Colin Graham and Richard Kirkland (eds), Ireland and Cultural Theory: The Mechanics of Authenticity (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999); Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2000). Jim Smyth, 'Review of Modernisation: Crisis and Culture in Modern Ireland 1969‐1992', History Ireland (Summer 2002), p. 53. For example, Lloyd, Ireland after History. See several chapters in Graham and Hooper, Irish and Postcolonial Writing; Carroll and King (eds), Ireland and Postcolonial Writing; P. J. Mathews (ed.), New Voices in Irish Criticism; Graham, Deconstructing Ireland; Graham and Kirkland (eds), Ireland and Cultural Theory. See also McCarthy, Modernisation, and recent contributions by Connolly, 'Theorising Ireland'; Cleary, 'Misplaced Ideas?'; and Eoin Flannery, 'Outside in the Theory Machine: Ireland in the World of Postcolonial Studies', Studies vol. 92, no. 368 (2003), pp. 359–369. This is a core question in my monograph 'Theorising Ireland: Social Theory and the Politics of Identity', Sociology vol. 37, no. 1 (2003). For example, several socio‐cultural studies in anthropology, social history, cultural geography and social studies—including those carried out in rural Ireland from the 1930s onwards—provide critical insights into Irish culture. The writings of Aransberg and Kimball, Estyn Evans, K. H. Connell and others are exemplary in this tradition. For a more recent example, see Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, Locating Irish Folklore (Cork University Press, 2000) and Angela Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary (Pimlico, 1999). Some Irish Studies programmes (in Britain, for instance) are anchored more in social science, history and/or Irish diaspora studies, than in literary/postcolonial criticism. For a more extensive discussion, see Hooper, Irish and Postcolonial Writing, pp. 4–18. See also Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Bloodaxe Books, 1994). For example, Longley, The Living Stream and Graham, Deconstructing Ireland. The work of Declan Kiberd, Luke Gibbons, Seamus Deane and David Lloyd has been especially associated with a critical version of Irish nationalism. For an example of the controversy concerning The Field Day Anthology and nationalism, see Luke Gibbons, 'Constructing the Canon: Versions of National Identity', in The Field Day Anthology, ed. Deane, vol. 2, pp. 950–955. See also Howe, Ireland and Empire, for an extensive critique of critical nationalism. Graham, Deconstructing Ireland, p. 51. Elizabeth Butler‐Cullingford, Ireland's Others: Gender and Ethnicity in Irish Literature and Popular Culture (Cork University Press/Critical Conditions Field Day Monographs, 2001), p. 2. Ray Ryan (ed.), Writing the Irish Republic (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), interrogates the Irish Republic as a frame of analysis. The fact that Field Day was based in Derry is sometimes used as a simplistic way of explaining the nationalist stance of its key intellectuals. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts (Routledge, 1994), p. 217. Butler‐Cullingford, Ireland's Others, p. 1. See Graham, Deconstructing Ireland, for a discussion of this. Liam Kennedy, 'Postcolonial Ireland or Postcolonial Pretensions?', Irish Review no. 13 (1992), pp. 107–121. See also Lloyd's riposte to Kennedy, in Ireland after History, p. 5. Howe's book, based on empirical evidence, is a thoroughly researched survey of postcolonial writing and scholarship in Irish academia. See Stephen Howe's meticulous survey for a discussion. McCarthy, Modernisation, p. 204. For Kennedy (1992), the 'threadbare' identification of Ireland's postcoloniality with liberation struggles in Third World countries is essentially conceived to legitimise nationalist rhetoric. For an overview of the field, see Claire Connolly (ed.), Theorizing Ireland (Palgrave, 2002), which anthologises these and other essays: Seamus Deane, 'Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea'; Sean Richards, 'To Bind the Northern to the Southern Stars: Field Day in Derry and Dublin'; Luke Gibbons, 'Narratives of the Nation: Fact, Fiction and Irish Cinema'; Terry Eagleton, 'Changing the Question'; Siobhan Kilfeather, 'The Nineteenth‐century Novel'; Chris Morash, 'Tantalized by Progress'; Clair Wills, 'The Politics of Poetic Form'; Richard Kirkland, 'In the Midst of all this Dross: Establishing the Grounds of Dissent'; David Lloyd, 'The Spirit of the Nation'. Roy Foster, 'Something to Hate', Irish Review no. 30 (2003), p. 4. For an excellent account of the history of the theories and practice of historicism, see Paul Hamilton, Historicism: The New Critical Idiom (Routledge, 2003). An example is the manner that Seamus Deane engages closely with history in the final passages of his Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford University Press, 1997). Richard J. Evans, 'Prologue: What is History?—Now', in What is History Now?, ed. David Cannadine (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 607. See Tom Dunne, 'New Histories: Beyond "Revisionism" ', Irish Review no. 12 (1992), p. 3, for an excellent discussion; and Seamus Deane, 'Wherever Green is Read', in Interpreting Irish History, ed. Brady, pp. 234–245. Lloyd, Ireland after History. Gerry Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism: The Construction of Irish Literature (Pluto, 1998), p. 1. See, for instance, McCarthy, Modernisation. Foster, 'Something to Hate', p. 4. Cited in Howe, Ireland and Empire, p. 108. Cited in Howe, Ireland and Empire, p. 108. Foster, 'Something to Hate', p. 4. Joep Leerssen, 'Monument and Trauma: Varieties of Remembrance', in History and Memory in Modern Ireland, ed. Ian McBride (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 208. See Foster, 'Something to Hate'. Graham and Hooper, Irish and Postcolonial Writing, p. 15. See Deane, Strange Country. See Foster, 'Something to Hate', for a discussion. Butler‐Cullingford, Ireland's Others, p. 4. Historians contribute regularly to public debate in the newspapers and national media in Ireland; for instance J. J. Lee, Dermot Keogh, Ronan Fanning, John A. Murphy and Paul Bew, to name a few. For some commentators the event was viewed more cynically as a political attempt by Fianna Fáil to undermine the electoral support gained by Sinn Féin in recent years. For a more extensive discussion, see Linda Connolly, The Irish Women's Movement: From Revolution to Devolution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, and Lilliput Press, 2002). For example, in social research, the writings of Aransberg and Kimball (1968), Brody, (1974), Messenger (1971) and Schepher‐Hughes (1982) were critical. In the field of social history, the outstanding work of K. H. Connell illuminated several 'subaltern' questions in Irish culture, such as illegitimacy. The journal Irish Economic and Social History has documented these studies since the 1970s. See Ashcroft et al., Postcolonial Studies, pp. 216–219. Ashcroft et al., Postcolonial Studies, p. 216. Foster writes that the Revising the Rising volume 'traduced historians for their perceived inadequacies on the national question … It came as a surprise when Seamus Deane asserted that historians were blithely ignorant of the complex agendas behind the very idea of narrative history; some of us had been teaching Hayden White for years and had noted his strictures that historians must at least consider the theories of knowledge which lay behind their philosophical assumptions.' 'Something to Hate', p. 4. Lloyd, Ireland after History, p. 80. Each edition of Irish Economic and Social History provides an excellent bibliography of publications in the field. In the case of women's history, see Alan Hayes and Diane Urquhart (eds), The Irish Women's History Reader (Routledge, 2002), which anthologises some of the major contributions to this field, since the late 1970s. See also, for example, Jacinta Prunty, Dublin Slums, 1800–1925: A Study in Urban Geography (Irish Academic Press, 1998). For an excellent discussion see Beverly Southgate, Why Bother With History? (Pearson, 2000). Evans, What is History Now?, p. 8. Dunne, 'New Histories: Beyond "Revisionism" ', p. 4. Ian McBride, (ed.), History and Memory in Modern Ireland. See Graham, Deconstructing Ireland; Roy Foster, The Irish Story (Allen Lane, 2002); McBride (ed.), History and Memory in Modern Ireland. Colin Graham, Deconstructing Ireland. See, for example, the Irish Women's History directory of archives on the National Library of Ireland website, and Donnchadh Ó Corráin, 'The CELT Corpus of Irish Texts', in The Heritage of Ireland, ed. Neil Buttimer, Colin Rynne and Helen Guerin (Collins Press, 2000), pp. 339–340. Dunne, 'New Histories: Beyond "Revisionism" ', p. 3. For Dunne, 'Deane's intellectual doubts about historians' basic honesty, competence and self‐awareness are also underpinned by more profound reservations about his perception of their social role, in what he, like Bradshaw, seems to regard as an ongoing battle for the Irish mind and soul.' Brady (ed.), Interpreting Irish History, p. 15. See Connolly, The Irish Women's Movement, for a discussion. Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 98. See Mary E. Daly, 'Women and Work in Ireland', Studies in Irish Economic and Social History vol. 7 (1997); Mary Cullen, 'Breadwinners and Providers: Women in the Household Economy of Labouring Families 1835–6', in Women Surviving: Studies in Irish Women's History in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Maria Luddy and Clíona Murphy (Poolbeg, 1990), pp. 85–116. Margaret MacCurtain and Donnchadh Ó Corráin (eds), Women in Irish Society: The Historical Dimension (Arlen Press, 1978); Mary Cullen, 'How Radical was Irish Feminism between 1860 and 1920?', in Radicals, Rebels and Establishment, ed. P. J. Corish (Appletree Press, 1985); Margaret Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism (Pluto, 1989). Maria Luddy, 'Women and Politics in Nineteenth‐century Ireland', in Women and Irish History, ed. Mary O'Dowd and Maryann Gianella Valiulis (Wolfhound, 1997), pp. 89–108. See several chapters in Luddy and Murphy (eds), Women Surviving. For recent surveys of the development of women's history in Ireland, see O'Dowd and Valiulis (eds), Women and Irish History. Hayes & Urquhart (eds), The Irish Women's History Reader, anthologises some of the major contributions to this field, since the late 1970s. Women's history is mentioned in the introduction to this collection but is not elaborated upon in any depth, or dealt with in an individual chapter. See Francis Mulhern, The Present Lasts a Long Time: Essays in Cultural Politics, Critical Conditions Field Day Essays (Cork University Press, 1998), pp. 150–151. Hamilton, 'Historicism', p. 163. Brady, Interpreting Irish History, and Boyce and O'Day, The Making of Modern Irish History, pp. 1–14. In my recent book, The Irish Women's Movement, I use these examples: Charles Townshend seeks to 'rectify an imbalance in Irish history by enlarging access to the findings of a generation of historians who have recently transformed the study of Irish history'. Sources from women's history, however, do not inform either the overall frame of analysis mapped at the outset of the book—suggesting that historians of women and the growing field of Irish women's history are not part of this 'new generation'. Furthermore, specific arguments made about issues extensively researched in the field of women's history are not referred to, in other sections of the book (such as the discussion of contraception). Alvin Jackson's preamble and overall historical framework does not include the women's history debate either, as a controversy, which can impinge on the essence of the discipline as a whole. See Alvin Jackson, Ireland 1798–1998 (Blackwell, 1999), p. 5, and Charles Townshend, Ireland: The 20th Century (Arnold, 1998), p. xiii. See Connolly, The Irish Women's Movement, pp. 3–55. A highly impressionistic assertion by Tim Pat Coogan in the 1980s highlights this exceptionally well: The women of Ireland in particular are buoyed up by what one might imagine would buoy them down, the church of childbearing and childrearing. It is they who hitherto have most sustained the church, both by keeping up the Catholic ethos in the home, and very often by acquiring the vocation which their sons subsequently suffered. It was, and to a large degree still is, the women who fuss over the priest and it is the conservative influence of women, paradoxically enough, which inhibits any meaningful movement toward giving women a greater say in the Irish church. For all the froth of feminist media activity, the majority of women are simply not interested in change. (Disillusioned Decades: Ireland 1966–1987 (Gill and Macmillan, 1987), p. 81) Pat O'Connor, Emerging Voices: Women in Contemporary Irish Society (IPA, 1998), p. 255. Clíona Murphy, 'Women's History, Feminist History or Gender History?', Irish Review no. 12 (1992), pp. 21–26. See also David Fitzpatrick, 'Women, Gender and the Writing of Irish History', Irish Historical Studies vol. 27, no. 107 (1991), pp. 267–273. See Hayes and Urquhart, The Irish Women's History Reader. Murphy, 'Women's History, Feminist History or Gender History?', p. 23. Kelleher, 'The Field Day Anthology and Irish Women's Literary Studies', in Irish Review, no. 30 (2003), p. 82. Richard Kirkland, 'Questioning the Frame: Hybridity, Ireland and the Institution', in Ireland and Cultural Theory: The Mechanics of Authenticity, ed. Colin Graham and Richard Kirkland (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp. 210–228. Pat Coughlan, ' "Bog Queens": The Representation of Women in the Poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney', in Gender in Irish Writing, ed. Toni O'Brien Johnson and David Cairns (Open University Press, 1991), pp. 88–111; Margaret Kelleher, 'Writing Irish Women's Literary History', Irish Studies Review vol. 9 (2001), pp. 5–14; Gerardine Meaney, 'Sex and Nation: Women in Irish Culture and Politics', in A Dozen Lips (Attic, 1994), pp. 188–204; Siobhan Kilfeather, 'The Nineteenth‐century Novel', in Theorising Ireland, ed. Connolly; Connolly, 'Theorising Ireland'; Moynagh Sullivan, 'Feminism, Postmodernism and the Subjects of Irish and Women's Studies', in New Voices in Irish Criticism, ed. P. J. Mathews, pp. 243–250. Colin Graham, 'Subalternity and Gender: Problems of Postcolonial Irishness', in Theorising Ireland, ed. Connolly. Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism. See McCarthy, Modernisation, pp. 190–196. Feminist theory/criticism is not drawn upon to illuminate the main argument. In fact the main source is Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture. There are three references to feminism in the footnotes of this book and none in the index. Ashcroft et al., Postcolonial Studies, p. 4. Cited in Kelleher, 'The Field Day Anthology and Irish Women's Literary Studies', p. 82. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell, 1996), p. 182. Pat Coughlan, ' "Bog Queens" '. See also Kelleher, 'The Field Day Anthology and Irish Women's Literary Studies'. Siobhan Kilfeather, in Theorising Ireland, ed. Connolly. Margaret Ward, 'Nationalism, Pacificism, Internationalism: Louie Bennett, Hanna Sheehy‐Skeffington, and the Problems of "Defining Feminism" ', in Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland, ed. Anthony Bradley and Maryann Gialanella Valiulis (University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), pp. 60–84. Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, pp. 117–127, and McCarthy, Modernisation, pp. 190–196. Kirkland, 'Questioning the Frame', p. 213. For feminist critique of the nation, see Nira Yuval‐Davis and Flora Anthias, Woman‐Nation‐State (St. Martin's Press, 1994), and Lois West (ed.), Feminist Nationalism (Routledge, 1997). Examples in Irish feminist criticism include: Gerardine Meaney, 'Sex and Gender: Women in Irish Culture and Politics'; Eavan Boland, 'A Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in a National Tradition', in A Dozen Lips (Attic Press, 1994), pp. 72–92. See Davis and Anthias, Woman‐Nation‐State. See Butler‐Cullingford, Ireland's Others; Connolly, 'Theorising Ireland'; Meaney, 'Sex and Nation'; C. L. Innes, Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and Society 1880–1935 (University of Georgia Press, 1993); Connolly, The Irish Women's Movement; and Graham, Deconstructing Ireland. Louise Ryan, Irish Feminism and the Vote: An Anthology of the Irish Citizen Newspaper 1912–1920 (Folens, 1996), documents these as well as other conflicting perspectives in feminist debate, in the early twentieth century. The archive of the second wave of the Irish women's movement, the Attic Press Collection (held in the Boole Library at UCC) also provides documents to substantiate this claim. C. L. Innes, Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and Society 1880–1935 (University of Georgia Press, 1993), focuses on the way in which women activists and writers have operated within the complex interplay of gender and nationality and in cultural conceptions of Irishness and Irish identity. Women sometimes managed to use and work within the established political iconography of Ireland to great political effect, but they also challenged what they saw as a politics that elevated great leaders and symbols above the welfare and cohesion of the wider community. Butler‐Cullingford, Ireland's Others, p. 5. In his collection, Timothy P. Foley does, however, go some way towards developing this debate. Butler‐Cullingford, Ireland's Others, p. 1. Young, Postcolonialism, p. 97. See Connolly, The Irish Women's Movement. Kirkland, 'Questioning the Frame', p. 211. Cited in Ashcroft et al., Postcolonial Studies, p. 4. See, for example, the internationalist ideology of Louie Bennett, discussed in Margaret Ward, 'Nationalism, Pacificism, Internationalism'. Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism, p. 20. See Graham, Deconstructing Ireland, for a more in‐depth discussion. David Lloyd, Ireland after History, p. 88. Some examples in historical literature include: Catríona Clear, Women of the House: Women's Household Work in Ireland 1922–1961 (Irish Academic Press, 2000); Joanna Bourke, From Husbandry to Housewifery: Women, Economic Change and Housework in Ireland 1890–1914 (Clarendon Press, 1993); David Fitzpatrick, 'Marriage in Post‐Famine Ireland', in Marriage in Ireland, ed. Art Cosgrave (College Press, 1985), pp. 116–131; Mary E. Daly, ' "Turn on the Tap": The State, Irish Women and Running Water', in Women and Irish History, ed. O'Dowd, and Valiulis, pp. 206–219. Anne Fogarty, 'Challenging Boundaries', Irish Literary Supplement (Spring 2003), p. 3. The most recent example being The Field Day Anthology, vols IV and V: Irish Women's Writing and Traditions, ed. Angela Bourke, Siobhán Kilfeather, Maria Luddy, Margaret MacCurtain, Gerardine Meaney, Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha, Mary O'Dowd and Clair Wills (Cork University Pres in association with Field Day/New York University Press, 2002). Butler‐Cullingford, Ireland's Others, p. 5. Ashcroft et al., Postcolonial Studies, p. 219. Anne Fogarty, 'Challenging Boundaries', p. 3. Graham, Deconstructing Ireland, p. 106. See Connolly, The Irish Women's Movement, pp. 56–88. Kelleher, 'The Field Day Anthology and Irish Women's Literary Studies', and Anne Fogarty, 'Challenging Boundaries', both review The Anthology. Connolly, 'Theorising Ireland', p. 310. McCarthy, Modernisation, p. 224. McCarthy, Modernisation, p. 223. McCarthy, Modernisation, p. 227. Recent examples include several chapters in The End of Irish History? Critical Reflections on the Celtic Tiger, ed. Colin Coulter and Steve Coleman (Manchester University Press, 2003); Ireland Unbound, ed. Mary Corcoran and Eamonn Slater (IPA, 2002); and Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy, ed. Peader Kirby, Luke Gibbons and Michael Cronin (Pluto, 2002). See Connolly, The Irish Women's Movement, for a review of this field. Michel Peillon, 'Culture and State in Ireland's New Economy', in Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy, p. 45. See Connolly, The Irish Women's Movement, for an extensive discussion of actual research on Irish feminism. Hillary Tovey and Perry Share, A Sociology of Ireland (Gill and Macmillan, 1999); Corcoran and Slater (eds), Ireland Unbound; Kirby et al., Reinventing Ireland; Coulter and Coleman (eds), The End of Irish History? Lloyd, Ireland after History, p. 5. Alan Finlayson, 'Towards a Radical Empiricism?', Irish Review no. 28 (Winter 2001), p. 141. For example, Butler‐Cullingford, Ireland's Others, McCarthy, Modernisation and Connolly, 'Theorising Ireland'. Finlayson, 'Towards a Radical Empiricism', p. 139.