ABSTRACT
This book has sought to frame the Irish Catholic encounter with Scotland against the backdrop of Britain’s long colonial and imperial adventure in Ireland and the legacies, reverberations, mutations and reincarnations of this adventure in Scottish social, political, cultural and economic life. I take the Irish Catholic community in Scotland to occupy a very specific geographical and cultural location; it exists as a community of former colons, and their descendants, who now reside in diaspora in a metropolitan heartland of the former colonial power who once ruled over them, and their forebears. Based upon this point of departure, I have approached public disputation, controversy and recrimination over past and present attitudes in Scotland towards the Irish Catholic community – what has been labeled ‘Scotland’s secret shame’ – through the lens of critiques of metrocentric both populist and social scientific over determinations and over readings of concrete colonialisms. There is an undoubted frustration within both the Irish Catholic community in Scotland and some constituencies within Scottish society that the ‘other side’ simply cannot hear their story; their listening position puts it beyond their comprehension. What one side regards as obvious the other side simply cannot see. What sense might be made of this incommensurability? Can one camp be proven right and the other proven wrong? In debate, both constituencies make strong assertions of the truth of their stories but tellingly both are pervaded by a degree of concealed insecurity, uncertainty, and fear. I have argued that recent debates and disagreements over the extent of sectarianism and bigotry in Scotland are infact best apprehended as
manifestations of classic metropolitan anxieties over the intelligibility of histories of colonised populations. Accordingly, this book has set out to take seriously the charge of metrocentricism as it bears on the search for the meaning of the Irish Catholic community in Scotland and has refused to permit any simplistic interpretation of the intelligibility of this community and the logic of its historical emergence. Nevertheless in this closing chapter, I will attempt to bring Jean Paul Sartre’s theory of colonialism into a provisional and partial dialogue with the Irish Catholic story of settlement in Scotland. In so doing will court, indulge, ruminate on and expose my own specific metrocentricism and metropolitan anxieties.
