Finding our identity

Mind Moves: It's a well-worn truism to say that Ireland of today is not what it used to be. Change has been so dramatic and so accelerated in recent years that we have a hard time grasping what has become of us.

"Would someone please stop the world, at least for long enough for me to get my bearings," we all feel like shouting at some time or other.

We look to personal and collective memory, and try to discern the core of our cultural identity, some generic unchanging essence of our Irishness. Countless autobiographies, summer schools, historical revisions and courses in Irish studies seem hell bent on this pursuit.

For Alan Titley, this search to capture our Irish identity - "this search for an enduring core" - has itself become our cultural identity: "The single defining feature of Irish culture, the mark we have above all marks, that which makes us different and apart among the nations of the world is quite simply... our mental wrestling and torture, our wallowing and wailing... about ourselves."

His contribution to the recent anthology, New Ireland and its Sacred Cows, is one of the finest pieces of writing I've come across in a long time. Known to some of you but, sadly, as yet unknown to many because of his preference for writing "as gaeilge", Titley writes with an energy that's guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your seat.

Reeling between savage humour and sheer poetry, his words dance their way into your soul as you recognise, in all its contradictions, the Ireland you know deeply in your bones.

Titley argues that while it is a cliché that there have been amazing changes over the past 20 years, they are no more striking or challenging than the changes that have occurred during the lifespan of any given generation since Famine times.

Through all of this our quest for identity has been "a permanent question mark, an itch on our skins". What is remarkable, Titley observes, is how that search to grasp our essence, once captured, is immediately dumped and abandoned. Our native language, once a source of immense national identity, has been "pushed to the edge of the western shore"; the Catholic church, a pillar of our cultural identity, has been deemed irrelevant; and social justice and concern for the poor has taken a back seat to capitalism.

Identification with the less fortunate in the world has given way to a distinct racism as the same "black babies" we sponsored so willingly at school, have been arriving on our doorstep. We move with fashions and we seem unable to nail our colours to any particular post for very long. Modern achievements like Riverdance, the Republic of Ireland soccer team and various artistic masterpieces are momentarily applauded and held up as symbols of our identity, only to pass quickly into archival memory and be regarded as passé.

Alan Titley's commentary on the national search for identity parallels, in a loose way, the struggles I see clinically in people trying to search for a durable sense of themselves. It seems to be important for each of us to find some resting place where we feel we know who we are and have the freedom to act in a way that expresses that sense of identity. But what exactly is this sense of self?

It appears to be more fluid than fixed, constantly in a state of becoming, rather than something we achieve and hold on to. Our sense of self seems to be something we lose and find, over and over again. Identity, as a personal and a national quest, can never be for a fixed entity that we can possess. At least not for long, as it is inevitably broken and reformed in our encounter with the changing landscape of our lives.

We are drawn by ideas, projects and challenges that seem to hold deep personal relevance, but these same projects can leave us feeling exiled from ourselves. Personal identity is that resting place we come home to. A feeling for what matters to me, of what I value and cherish.

I suspect that the congregation in Croke Park at last week's hurling semi-final - where Galway emerged victors but both teams were heroes - felt deeply a familiar authentic sense of what it means to be Irish, although few might have needed to represent it conceptually.

Similarly, art, music and poetry can awaken deep bodily feelings of identity that reconnect us with our personal and collective values. These experiences bring us home to ourselves, and they also liberate us to see new possibilities of what we might yet become.

New Ireland and its Sacred Cows, edited by Jim Malone, is published by The Liffey Press.

Tony Bates is principal clinical psychologist at St James's Hospital, Dublin.