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Sat 08 Aug 2009After Ireland?
ESSAY:The elements that today might form a national culture – language, religion, nationalism – are no longer so readily identifiable here, where the effect of Tiger affluence was not individualism but conformism
THINGS ARE often studied only when they start to go wrong. The end of things is the moment when we start to understand them: and only when they are understood do we begin to realise what might be lost. For instance, sociology emerged as a discipline in that era when society was no longer felt to fit like a glove. Perhaps the fairly recent development of Irish Studies on campuses is less a cause for celebration than a warning: that the identities which it sponsored were, in effect, being codified before their possible eclipse.
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