Ireland’s Diaspora, Yet Again - NYTimes.com
Can people please stop using novelists to explain Ireland’s economic crisis? Specifically John Banville, here, and to a somewhat lesser extent, Joseph O’Connor (I don’t know where the female or satirical novelists are, except not on the op-ed pages). Using overwrought prose to make generalisations about national psychology does nothing for the problems of politics and economics. ‘Society’ is not an allegory.
Mind you, this is a pretty funny attempt to delineate the waves of emigration from these shores:
“The young people leaving Ireland today are nothing like the pitch-capped rebels of ’98, the starvelings of the Black Forties or the youths with their suitcases on that 1950s ferry.”
How many of the 1798 rebels, leaders especially, would in fact be considered “well educated and, for the most part, middle class” by the standards of their time? If you’re going back that far to make a point about - literally involuntary - emigration, rather than say the 1980s, you’re talking nonsense.
