The ashes of our fathers by Margaret Hickey
I
den�ty poli�cs is as much about the collapse of old iden��es as the forging of new ones. The current discussion about how the centenary anniversary of Ireland’s par��on should be marked shows how radically poli�cal iden��es can be reconstructed over �me. When Micheál Mar�n stood up in Dáil Éireann about a year ago and declared Ireland had moved on from “backward ideas about sovereignty” in favour of “the ideals of the European Union”, it must have struck a lot of people that this was something quite incongruous from the leader, of what was proudly the republican party, the an�-par��on party, the party most iden�fied with the pursuit of a unified and sovereign Irish na�on. The same party was also the one most enthusias�cally promo�ng the country’s na�ve
culture and language. It drew its vision from the 1916 signatories and in par�cular Patrick Pearse who aspired to an Ireland, that was “not merely free but Gaelic as well”. A week is a long �me in poli�cs so it should not be surprising that, over a number of decades, a poli�cal party like Fianna Fáil could recast its iden�ty to the point of discarding what it once held to be non-nego�able core values. Like all such evolu�ons it did not happen overnight. The EU as an en�ty in itself, rather than a collec�on of en��es, was implicit in its adop�on of the symbols and structures associated with sovereign states. Its grand assembly was designated a parliament, presided over by its president. It had its own anthem and its own flag and logo. It didn’t set out to dissolve its members’ 9
