A serious gap now exists between the realities of Irish life and the version of Irishness which is being held up to the Irish people and the outside world, the Parnell Summer School in Co Wicklow was told yesterday.
PJ Mathews, UCD lecturer in Anglo-Irish literature, said today's Ireland, despite apparent economic success, was undergoing a traumatic transition into a first-world society.
This brought with it an unprecedented level of social inequality, unbridled consumerism, the shrinking of government services, the lack of coherent political vision beyond the tyranny of the marketplace, the transformation of Ireland's ethnic composition and the panoply of discontents that accompanied first-world development, he said.
"These are realities which are not reflected in Ireland's official version of itself, nor in current critical thinking," he said.
The standard revisionist analysis did not have much potency in post-Belfast Agreement Ireland, where Irish nationalism had been well and truly revised, republican guns were silent and cultural identity was now vested in the people rather than the territory.
In a similar way, the classic post-colonial analysis of Irish underachievement was under strain in an Ireland now securely positioned as one of the most successful economies in the developed world, which had fully embraced global capitalism and enjoyed high growth rates, low unemployment, a deregulated economy, a vigorous consumer culture and a high global cultural profile.
"Clearly new critical thinking is required to make sense of the frenetic pace of change here, politically and economically, over the last decade," Mr Mathews said.
With political and economic transformations had gone a remarkable change in Ireland's cultural fortunes. Within a decade it had been transformed from a relatively impoverished backwater on the periphery of Europe to a prosperous first-
world economy whose culture was increasingly recruited to the global capitalist enterprise.
Mr Mathews said: "Increa-
singly, images of Ireland are once again being generated which bear little or no resemblance to the locale they purport to describe."
The idea of a singular Irish identity had been well and truly deconstructed by now and replaced by more liberating and open-ended conceptions of national being.
New challenges had been posed by immigration, which had changed Ireland's relatively homogeneous ethnic character for ever. "New republican thinking will be required more than ever to articulate civic-minded notions of cultural possibility on the island of Ireland," Mr Mathews said.