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Wed 03 Mar 2010Being Irish in tough times
WHETHER AS an angry rock anthem from Mike Scott and the Waterboys on the Abbey stage, or in the musings of an opinion page writer on the state of Ireland, it seems that Yeats’s September 1913has become an irresistible metaphor for our sorry plight. “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone . . .”. Even “O’Leary” has a certain new, distinctly non-Fenian resonance.
But in truth, although the melancholy note perhaps strikes a chord, Yeats’s poem has more to say about the days of the Celtic Tiger and its get-rich-quick, money-as-the-measure-of-all-things values, indeed values epitomised by O’Leary, than it does about our current, anxious redefinition of ourselves.
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