ABSTRACT
This is a book about separations. To separate, here, does not mean to repudiate; it means to step back in order to rethink some of the prevailing ideas and images that have shaped the political understanding of most modern Irish citizens. My aim is not to denounce nationalism-Irish or British-out of hand, but to reinterrogate its critical implications. Hence my endeavours, in what follows, to evaluate the origins and ends of the main ideologies informing the Irish-British syndrome and to suggest how they might be critically redeployed in a new configuration. My own tentative itinerary on this path is charted, for what it is worth, in three joint-submissions to political Forums published below as Chapter 5-Forum for a New Ireland (1983), Opsahl Commission (1993), Forum for Peace and Reconciliation (1995). These represent three stages in a transition from what might broadly be called a nationalist to a postnationalist position. I include them not out of self-regard, but because I consider it unwise for anyone today to speak about the ‘national question’ without also stating where he/she is speaking from.
