Derrida proposes that borders are imagined; I wonder if he’s ever been to Crossmaglen. Deconstructing as a deconstructionist does, he makes the rather valid point that borders are a construct used to define both national geography and identity, but they remain just a construct. Death is in a sense another kind of border, only a far more concrete one. Put this all together and you get to an issue that comes with dying for your country; essentially, you die for the existence of a space which you can never actually occupy, a space that doesn’t exist beyond a sense of cultural identity. Only, when you cross that border into death, you’re not doing much in the way of existing anyway. A lot of our modern history is marked by borders and death, so this is an interesting lens through which to think about the last 100 or so years of Irish nationalism. If this sounds very well-informed and -put together, it’s because I stole it from a great essay by John Brannigan, which you can find somewhere in the depths of Ussher 4.
What spurred me into thinking about Irish nationalism was in part this essay. It was also in part from coming across an excellent interview with the sí féin of Sinn Féin, Mary Lou McDonald, where she spoke very eloquently on the subject. Mary Lou defines Irish nationalism as being a kind of resistance to oppression; that is, the oppression of colonial powers. She defines this version of nationalism as differing from that which can be found on the continent, as she found out from her fellow members of parliament during her time as an MEP, because in other Western European countries, nationalism rolls nicely into fascism (given the state of recent elections in most of Western Europe, this is fair enough). However, McDonald argues, given our modern history of resisting subjugation instead of forcing it upon others, Irish nationalism can escape these connotations.
It’s worth considering what those two words mean, given that the luxuries we enjoy in our daily lives are a product of them. However, in 2025, Irish nationalism apparently means setting Direct Provision Centres, housing women and children, on fire (this, then, is more in line with recent events in most of Western Europe). I remember the first large scale display from the hate movement within our country being the Dublin riots in November 2023; the growing displays of violent xenophobia have been a feature of my college years in terms of frequency and scale in much the same way as I haven’t been able to get away from Gracie Abrams since I first got to Trinity. The problem with both of these things is that they’ve become normalised to a degree; in the case of the hate movement, the world doesn’t stop when refugees in Coolock are unable to leave their rooms because of protesters (if one can call them that) outside.
The movement suits Fianna 1 and 2’s governance; let the immigrants take the brunt of the criticism when trying to create dialogue on housing in this country, and avoid facing a decade-long failure in dealing with it. But as people we cannot let this overly loud subsection of our populace become the defining voice on any of the issues facing Irish society. We cannot let the terms “patriot”’ and “nationalist” be co-opted in this racist context, especially given what these words have meant in the past. I mean, come on, the 1916 leaders were socialist trade union leaders and Irish-language poets. And because of events such as this we have not only secured our independence, but turned ourselves into a functioning society, economically, culturally and socially. Pats on the backs all around, but now the systematic power is there to turn our version of nationalism into something darker and more exclusionary.
We see this with the hate movement in this country, but this doesn’t have to be the case. Borders are constructs, and so is nationalism, but if that’s true then we have a say in what that construct looks like. The first 100 years of the nation have brought the wrong parts of our identity to the fore: the suffocating, arch-Catholic sense of insularity that has had no end of negative effects on generations of Irish citizens, as well as making all the decent writers move away (apart from Kavanagh). Now, with the degree of critical distance history has given us, we can remake our cultural identity for the better. We’ve seen this most recently in the national response to the genocide in Gaza; the empathy we’ve exhibited (beyond the scale of the human tragedy at play) has been accredited in part to the memory of our own history as an oppressed nation. We should handle ourselves in a similar manner when faced with other issues, not to define ourselves by the negative parts of our history, but to allow them to lend a benign quality to our presence on the world stage and our way of treating people who live in our country, whether they’re Irish or not.
This means we have to speak Irish, by the way. There’s no discussion to be had over how we’re proud to be Irish if we can’t make ourselves learn our own language. Coming home over the weekend of the Presidential election, I found myself explaining my reasoning for supporting Catherine Connolly, one of which was her proficiency as a Gaelgóir. Maddeningly, I kept being told how this wasn’t a big enough quality upon which to base one’s choice for the Arás, considering that “no one could understand her anyway”. Honestly, we should have given Lloyd George a 7th county if we’re going to be talking like that. Every bit of Irish we speak is correcting our colonial past; it gives us the rare opportunity to affect change with words as well as actions. This is not to argue we should give up speaking English completely, for the record, because then we’d have to stop writing novels that are better than anything being written in England over the past century.
In terms of actions, we can work collectively to prevent a vocal minority from assimilating a term that in the past has been reserved for revolutionaries. While there’s plenty in our modern history we oughtn’t to be proud of (as well as our present moment), by pushing the best parts of our identity to the fore we can take steps towards a better vision of the country. Irish nationalism can mean something more than an account titled IrishPatriot24 (based in America of course), just so long as we don’t all start singing Wolfe Tones songs.
