ABSTRACT
Shame is one of the self -regarding emotions in which the self is implicated, alongside the intentional object about which shame is felt. Probyn remarks that “it is a capacity for shame that makes us such fragile beings” compelling an “involuntary and immediate reassessment of ourselves”. It makes evident the entanglements of our lives and “how we are positioned in relation to the past”.(Elspeth Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), XII–3.) My starting point for these reflections was my own recognition that alongside the horror which I felt when Catherine Corless(www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/tuam-796-irish-children-vanished-why-1.3275280. Accessed 2 June 2019, 9.56.) discovered the children’s bodies thrown in a sewage system in Tuam was a sense of shame. In this chapter I explore the role of shame and other emotions in the revealing or unravelling of the self. I explore this with particular reference to a sense of Irishness which does not equate to laying claim to an Irish identity.
