ABSTRACT
Q: I am sure that Professor Ricoeur realises that in a country like Ireland we have a particular interest in the idea of obsessive memorisation, and of repetition and ritual in political terms, so that if we could retell stories, if we could re-create a narrative and liberate ourselves from this, we would be looking to a better future. But the problem of retelling the narrative is that it is told and retold, so that you get not one agreed narrative but two narratives, and the competing narratives simply duplicate the conflicting ideologies from which they come. How, in this country, can you get to a shared narrative about identity?
