In his essay ‘Ghosts’, Patrick Pearse summoned the spirit of Charles Stewart Parnell to stand beside those of Tone, Davis, Lalor, and Mitchel in the canon of Irish separatism. His speech at the grave of O’Donovan Rossa in 1915 was delivered in close proximity to the Parnell monument at Glasnevin Cemetery. It rejected the sort of ‘Ivy Day’ platitudes denounced by James Joyce in a short story in Dubliners; and it called for action. Prior to the delivery of that speech, the city of Dublin had been put into lock-down by Thomas MacDonagh, in what was effectively a rehearsal for the Easter Rising.

The legend of Deirdre and the Sons of Uisneach has been arguably the most popular of all Irish tales with artists and with audiences. It became famous as one of 'trí truaighe na scéalaíochta' ('the three sorrows of storytelling'). In the twelfth-century Book of Leinster it is referred to as a 'longas', a narrative of exile. That version centralises the three doomed brothers in a harsh account of warrior life. Deirdre's role is only briefly described - she is wild and rude, compelling Naoise to undertake with her the elopement to Alban. In one memorable scene, she grabs him by the ears to make him do her will, but she is not otherwise pivotal. After the brothers die, she is forced to live for a year of humiliation with an enemy of her lover, Naoise, after which she dashes her brains out upon a rock in a terrible image of female derangement and suffering. It is only in much later medieval versions that Deirdre's emotional graph is made a crucial element all through the narrative. Now, she moans with pain and in the end commits suicide on her lover's grave. In the words of Celtic scholar Eleanor Hull, the wild woman of the Book of Leinster has been 'transformed into the Lydia Languish of a later age'. Those changes reflect the growing importance of women as an audience for the heroic tales, with a consequent increase in the profile of female protagonists. After this reconfiguration the tale is seen as a love story rather than simply one of warrior honour: and indeed the clash between love and honour allows for a developing subtlety in the psychological portrayal of a tragic heroine.

The critical writings of poets often have surprisingly little to do with their own work. This sometimes has an obvious enough cause: poets are usually poor and must take in whatever reviewing work comes their way. But there are other, more interesting reasons for this state of affairs. An artist such as T. S. Eliot seems to have seen his critical essays as a sort of elaborate smokescreen thrown up around his poetry and plays, the better to keep their magic and mystery inviolate. The famous meditations on Milton, on the metaphysical poets, and on tradition itself have little enough in the end to do with The Waste Land or Four Quartets, despite the heroic and desperate efforts of scholars to posit some connections. When Eliot wrote of the need in all healthy art to make a separation between the man who suffers and the mind which creates, he may have come as near to critical autobiography as he dared.

Not so with W. B. Yeats. Though he was, in his youth, far more dependent than Eliot on whatever reviewing came his way, he had a happy knack of using every kind of artist as a means of exploring himself. Criticism, as he practiced it, was really an overflow of his autobiography, a way of sharing the readerly experience with a wider audience. Subsequent Irish poets have written good criticism - notably Patrick Kavanagh and Seamus Heaney - but they have often been fearful of writing too much. Heaney has spoken of an artist's need to remain capable of accident and surprise, and of the consequent danger of becoming overly self-conscious in the creative process. You might, he warns, come to believe more in the critical coroner in yourself than in the person open to the unexpected.

The artist and the social world

When Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, that story received front-page treatment in the Irish broadsheet press and on news programmes of the electronic media. This was but one indication that creative writers are central to the self-image of Ireland. Another might have been found on the national banknotes still circulating in that year. These featured such figures as W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Douglas Hyde and Jonathan Swift, as well as the nineteenth-century political leaders Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell. The number of artists far exceeded the number of political figures, such as were to be found on the currencies of most other European countries. In the modern Republic of Ireland, culture is often seen as healing, whereas history is viewed as divisive. If the last national currency before the arrival of the Euro in 2002 projected writers as part of the self-description of a people, the design of the very first set of coins for the Free State back in the 1920s had been entrusted to a committee chaired by W. B. Yeats. That same author was, even then, putting the final touches to A Vision, his attempt to write a personal imaginative system which might also function as a Celtic constitution for the emerging nation. Nor was there anything immodest about the ease with which Yeats identified his intellectual project with that of the nation. After all, by then James Joyce had presented his first collection of stories, Dubliners, as ‘a chapter of the moral history of my country’ and had ended A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with the protagonist’s promise to forge in the smithy of his soul ‘the uncreated conscience of my race’.

Charles Stewart Parnell, the great man whom we commemorate here, was a believer in an inclusive, agreed nation: ‘we cannot afford to lose a single Irishman’ was a favourite rallying cry. Another was his call, repeated on occasions when things seemed to be going wrong, that ‘we must resign ourselves to the cursed versatility of the Celt’. Perhaps this was just a colourful version of the better-known English political mantra to account for the inevitable frustration of plans – ‘events, dear boy, events’ – but I like to think that Parnell in those cryptic sentences was proclaiming the link between the ideal of a pluralist nation on the one hand and the expressive potential of the individual on the other. In the very year of Parnell's death, after all, Oscar Wilde straight-facedly told his disciples that the only way to intensify personality was to multiply it.

That, for me, is the true significance of Parnell's career – that he opened up a debate about cultural sovereignty. Although the yearnings which he articulated seemed solely political in their language, they were also implicitly cultural: he wished for a form of sovereignty in the cultural domain so that Irish people might once again become interesting and metropolitan to themselves. The poet W. B. Yeats had the shrewdness to sense this point: in his writings Parnell is presented as an image of great conflicting passions marvellously controlled, whether the picture is of Parnell holding Kitty O'Shea over the turbulent sea-waters of Brighton or facing down his enemies at Westminster, the lesson is one of self-conquest, self-command, self-reliance.

In 1991, a human corpse was used in a sculpture by an American artist; and another artist dipped a crucifix in a container filled with his own urine to make a model called Piss Christ. In 1990, the controversial photographs of the late Robert Mapplethorpe were exhibited, including depictions of one man stuffing his fist up another man's rectum. All of these cases provoked massive controversy, and they were part of a wider pattern of debate in the developed – some might say, overdeveloped – nations of the West. In February 1989, a British jury had ruled that the use of human foetuses as earrings in a work of art was an outrage to public decency. The ten-to-two majority, far from being seen as conclusive, provoked a new debate: should they have the right to dictate what can or cannot be enjoyed by the minority?

That question of a desirable balance between expressive freedom and the social order is as old as the law itself, but it has been posed with particular intensity in the past century, ever since art proclaimed itself the new religion and Matthew Arnold proclaimed that the place of the priests would now be taken by poets. The high modernists contended that life was justified as an aesthetic phenomenon, or else not at all. This led them to challenge bourgeois proprieties in a series of well-publicised contests, beginning when the Lord Chamberlain banned a performance of Wilde's Salomé in London in 1894, and culminating in the unbanning of Lady Chatterley's Lover after the famous trial of 1960.

The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century programme of cultural decolonisation in Ireland is an important precursor of a related struggle in Africa more than forty years later. Undoubtedly England's only European colony differed from imperial territories in Africa, most obviously as a result of Ireland's centuries of enforced intimacy with England – an intimacy based on proximity and affinities of climate, temperament and culture. And while Europe's race for empire in Africa occurred in the latter half of the nineteenth century, England had occupied Ireland for more than 700 years. Thus at the time of Irish decolonisation, the imperial culture had penetrated far more deeply than in Africa or Asia. Despite such differences, however, the shapers of modern Africa (as well as India) looked on occasion to Ireland for guidance. But if Ireland once inspired many leaders of the ‘developing world’, today the country has much to learn from them.

In spite of episodic involvement with India's decolonisation, Irish nationalists and writers were slow to identify with other resistance movements, preferring to see their own experiences as unique. Moreover, a strain of white triumphalism, running from John Mitchel to Arthur Griffith, would never countenance Irish solidarity with the anti-imperial struggles of other racial groups. And although many nineteenth-century Irishmen, serving in the British army, had assisted in the conquest of India and Africa, the English colonisers imputed many of the same qualities to natives in these remote territories that they were attributing to the Irish.

For most of the nineteenth century, and for some time before that, England and the English had been presented to Irish minds as the very epitome of the human norm. Only with the onset of the Irish Renaissance did it begin to become clear that, far from being normal, England's was an exceptionally stressed society, whose vast imperial responsibilities were discharged only at an immense psychological and social cost. In some ways, the invention of modern Ireland had far more in common with the state-formation of other European countries such as Italy or France. In other respects, the analogies – especially in the domain of culture – would be with the emerging peoples of the decolonising world. The debates about language revival, like the arguments about nationality and cosmopolitanism in literature, anticipated those which would later be conducted in Africa and Asia, just as Pan-Celticism seemed to resonate with Pan-Africanism. One abiding difference, however, which left the Irish experience unique, was the sheer proximity of the imperial power, as a not-always-appreciated model, as a source of ideas, and as a market for surplus theories and labour. Also important was the significant number of Irish persons recruited into the imperial service overseas, as Joyce acidly noted in his passage about examination results in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

The revivalist myth of the Irish as ‘a people like no other race on earth’ militated against the comparative method.

DYING ACTS

The old order of the filí or Gaelic poets began to disintegrate after 1600, as the English extended their conquests over Ireland. In response, many poets began to proclaim the death of their tradition: but they did so in lines of such vibrancy and power as to throw the thesis into question. They were rather like those soldiers who play dead on a battlefield, the better to rise and fight again. Ever since the early 1600s, the Irish language has contained statements of its imminent doom in every generation, yet four hundred years later it faces into the new millennium still truculently alive.

The best poems of the filí were in fact written after the crisis of 1600 and in direct response to it. ‘Ceist, Cia Cheannóidh Dán?’ (Question, who'll buy a poem?) captures the crisis of men deprived of ancient patronage and forced instead to contemplate the indignities of the open market. Like Baudelaire's flâneur they traverse their society, ostensibly to take a look at it but in reality to find a buyer. As such, these ruined bards provide a spectacularly early case of modernism avant la lettre. Their attempt to fit the old mandarin forms to the needs of a new social order put them in the classic predicament of the dandy – courtiers dispossessed of a court.

In Shakespeare's Henry V we are given a fleeting glimpse of an Irishman named Macmorris, a captain in the king's army. In this splenetic figure, we find those traits of excitability, eloquence, pugnacity and strong national pride which would later become the stock-in-trade of the Stage Irishman. For Macmorris was, despite his fierce loyalty to the king, a figure of fun on the London stage. For some strange reason, generations of Englishmen, including the open-hearted Shakespeare, have found it amusing that the Irish should be proud of their own nationality. Some of the soldiers in the Globe audience would already have had grim experience of the Elizabethan military campaigns in Ireland, a campaign conducted in treacherous boglands into which the agile Irish repeatedly lured the enemy forces before battle. Hence the endless references to Irish bogs, bogtrotters and bogmen in the subsequent literature of England. Hence, too, the phrase ‘wild Irishman’ which was used as early as 1608 by the playwright Dekker in Lanthorn and Candlelight. By the time the theatres of England were closed under the Puritan ban of the 1640s, the rudimentary image of the Stage Irishman had been formed: he wore trousers, drank endlessly, swore wildly, and spoke a broken but colourful brand of English, salted with Gaelic exclamations. In the eighteenth century, new features were added: now the character invariably carried a shillelagh under his arm, ate potatoes as a staple diet and frequently appeared with a pig in close attendance.

When Patrick Pearse wrote in 1899 that the concept of an Irish national literature in the English language was untenable, he cannot have reckoned with the emergence of a writer such as Synge. Pearse's doctrinaire statement became a major policy of the Gaelic League and this led to an artificial division between writing in Irish and English on the island. Such a division persists in Irish schoolrooms to this very day, where Anglo-Irish literature is studied in one class and literature in the Irish language is considered in another. The short stories of Liam O'Flaherty are examined in courses on the Anglo-Irish tradition, with no reference to the fact that many of them were originally written in the native language. Similarly, the Irish-language versions of such stories are studied in a separate class, with no attempt to appraise the author's own recreation of these works in English.

‘Virtues are individual; vices are national.’ That witty Enlightenment formulation gained added authority through the twentieth century, as nationalists of one kind or another wrought havoc. By the 1980s the very notion of international solidarity had changed its meaning, having ceased to denote the pooling of national resources and become instead an alternative to nationalism, an international style. All talk was of ‘world novels’ and ‘world music’ in a global economy. Yet by 1998 cricket fans celebrated a famous victory in the test series with South Africa by waving English flags rather than Union Jacks. The Cross of St George flies ever higher on these occasions, while cultural nationalism enjoys a new vogue even among exponents of left–liberal Critical Theory. John Rutherford's Forever England concludes with a lament that ‘England’ remains as yet undefined.

Only rare contemporary thinkers such as Tom Nairn have registered the fact that, far from being only a backward-looking philosophy, nationalism might also be the sign and shape of the future. The collapse of communism in 1989 simply speeded up a process which had marked a growth from about fifty recognised nation–states in 1945 to something more like two hundred as the century ends. Critical Theory is now becoming open to the suggestion that many ‘international’ arrangements from Great Britain through the European Union to the Organisation of African States may be little more than mechanisms for reinforcing the hegemony of one strong power at the expense of all others.

In its heroic phase, the city was a site of pluralism, an example of the uses of diversity. It was in such a period that Dr Johnson could observe that when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life. The celebration of urbanity was not confined to cities – even the greatest of all Lake Poets could join in:

Wordsworth (1807) here explicitly says that no valley, rock or hill can bring out natural beauty as well as does Westminster Bridge. The city still in sleep becomes an illustration of that romantic definition of poetry which sees it as might half-slumbering on its own right arm.

In 1888, that prince of literary diplomats, Henry James, observed with some tact that ‘the little story is but scantily relished in England, where readers take their fiction rather by the volume than by the page’. Pondering this text almost seventy years later, Sean O'Faolain remarked with a kind of baffled triumph that ‘the Americans and Irish do seem to write better stories’. The short story as a literary form has flourished in many countries besides Ireland and America. The Russians of the past century are rightly regarded as masters of the genre and Chekhov is justly celebrated as the master of the Russians. France, too, has produced many great storytellers in the tradition of Daudet and Maupassant. In his study of the genre, Mr O'Faolain attempted to explain why the English, who have given the world so many great novels, should have failed so spectacularly to master the short story. He concluded that English readers preferred the social scope of the novel to the more private concerns of the short story. English writers, he believed, found a natural form for expressing their social philosophy in the extended narrative. The short story, on the other hand, was ‘an emphatically personal exposition’. Mr O'Faolain offered various explanations for the strength of the shorter genre in other countries. The form had prospered in the United States because ‘American society is still unconventionalized’, in Ireland because her people were still ‘an unconventional and comparatively human people’, and in France which was ‘the breeding ground of the personal and original way of looking at things’.