Joe Lee, Professor of history and author 1985, Politics and Society

Being Irish today is, for a historian intrigued by issues of identity, like living in a participatory laboratory. The Irish are at one of the periodic hinge moments in their history when they are reinventing themselves. Remaking always involves a degree of refaking, which requires in turn a capacity for both unctuous self-righteousness and massive self-deception, both in ample supply. A pluralist Ireland can enrich Irish culture. But where pluralism is really a fraudulent ploy for the destruction of everything distinctively Irish, then it becomes simply an agent for global homogeneity, contributing more to conformity than to diversity. That is why so much of what passes as cosmopolitanism in Ireland is so redolent of provincialism, with globalisation in place accompanied by provincialism in time, fostering an obsession to rubbish the dead in order to enhance the self-importance of the living.