Brian Feeney

William Faulkner wrote: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ How right he was and nowhere is that remark better exemplified than in Ireland. James Joyce said: ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’ He meant Irish history of course and like some nightmares it recurs again and again always with the same ending. The two governments, but particularly the Irish government, hoped that by developing a load of claptrap about a ‘shared history’ they could somehow exorcise the nightmare of Irish history 1912-22. In the flawed conce[...]