But this time around, as many reviewers have already pointed out, we are presented with a maturer version of Rooney’s concerns — and a longer book with it. Gone are the characters who write for a living. Gone, too, are the earnest disquisitions on capitalism and inequality. Her characters are now more likely to discuss logic puzzles, or Christianity.

There is Ivan, and there is Peter. The brothers Koubek, who have just lost their father. The much younger Ivan is a brilliant chess player, who could have ended up as an incel but is instead having an affair with Margaret, a woman 14 years older than him. The older Peter is a lawyer and one-time debate champion. He’s also something of a Zhivago, with one woman to suit his heart’s deeper yearning, his former girlfriend Sylvia, and another to suit his needs, his sort-of-girlfriend Naomi, a younger collegiate OnlyFans type, who is such a cliched self-destructive beauty, she seems to have wandered in from Rooney’s first two books.

It’s not, then, all that new. But there is the injection of something, which marks a real divergence from her other novels: an attempt at self-conscious prose style. Rooney has never been much of a stylist, confessing to relative indifference to the language itself. When writing about Ivan or Margaret, Rooney works in her traditional third-person present-tense narration — a partial return to the mode of Normal People. But when writing about Peter, Rooney adopts an internal monologue generally broken up into terse, subjectless fragments.

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This monologue will probably get Intermezzo called Rooney’s most Joycean novel. Though other than her essential Irishness, the charge doesn’t properly stick. There’s nothing like Stephen Dedalus or the toddering Leopold Bloom, ordering the whole cosmos in his head, as if he were both God and Falstaff. Not even if the conspicuously educated Peter Koubeck is constantly referring to Hamlet, or the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Nevertheless, the most interesting writing in the book is often here, in the certain wandering monologues of Peter Koubek:

Says she’s staying with Max for the month, good old Max.
See him sometimes at Sylvia’s still. Useless he was too in
competition. Too nice, not ruthless enough, always seeing both
sides. Funny though. All her friends are. Lightly she has to hold
the world, lovingly but lightly…

It’s the first time I’ve read Rooney and felt the excitement of the writer at work with words. After reading those lines, it’s hard to say that Rooney is a writer uninterested in language. Even if it’s sometimes laboured, the freer syntax is a welcome change — it made me realise just how bare and overly-crafted her writing could be before. And as her former embarrassment with the artier side of the equation evaporates from many of the novel’s best pages, Rooney can now write something like that last sentence: “Lightly she has to hold the world, lovingly but lightly.” It’s among the most musical, most balanced phrases in her oeuvre.

Unfortunately, she cannot really sustain such a musical construction. Perhaps this isn’t entirely fair on Rooney: chess, logic, and debate are more clearly the organising themes of the book. And they’re especially good metaphors for all of her books, which have featured tight units of desperate people, engaged in romance as if it were a game they somehow had to win. Intermezzo is much the same, reading like nothing so much as Rooney’s account of a chess match. The way characters manoeuvre to get what they want, while poring over their own motives. These character dyads are very much opponents, and Rooney writes them as though forced to chronicle every last rhetorical move.

This makes the novel absolutely infuriating. And it brings me to the crux of Rooney’s wild success: that Rooney is indeed the perfect writer for our times, but that this may be a very sad thing for our times. For as good a writer as she often is, Rooney’s novels are stubbornly, even obsessively, about constructing ultra-realistic accounts of social behaviour between individuals in the 21st century. Rooney is consumed with psychology. So are her characters. Margaret, Sylvia, Naomi, and Ivan and Peter Koubeck are only the most recent in a long line of Rooney characters who are constantly musing about their own psychology, constantly searching for breakthroughs and finding that their insights don’t always bring them the peace and confidence they’re looking for.

This is wisdom on the part of Rooney, I must admit. She’s too smart and fine a writer to allow a character to have a revelation and then wrap it up, pat, in a nice truthy ribbon. She’s too cunning a psychological portraitist to let her characters off the hook. All are to blame, all are selfish, yet all need grace and compassion. One of the reasons people adore her books is, I imagine, because they would very much like to reach out and cradle these characters the way they, too, wish they could be cradled. I feel it when reading her books: an immense tenderness for these poor lonely people, the desire to help them because they remind me so much of me.

In this way Rooney is the great portraitist of the age — and that is precisely what depresses me. Because ours is an age so dreadfully and myopically concerned with its own psychology, often at the expense of everything else. What else but a self-obsessed culture would be so consumed with therapy as a substitute for life? The trouble with Intermezzo is just how little there ends up being in it besides this exhaustive play-by-play of human behaviour. In the narcissistic jail of contemporary life, Rooney is hardly a Prison Warden, yet neither is she a true accomplice in the escape. More like a priest on the eve of execution, there to dispense forgiveness but incapable of intervening in our ultimate doom. This is not to say she must intervene: there’s nothing Rooney ought to be doing, if we’re to regard literature as free in any meaningful way.

But there is, I think, a failure to interrogate the deeper myths which her books have all come up against, and skated over. This isn’t unique to Rooney — she’s merely in the position of most exemplifying it, because she’s become so adept at realising the minutiae of our contemporary psyches. The first of these myths is the most contemporary one. Our culture is fundamentally still reeling from the introduction of the idea of the Blank Slate, somewhere during the Enlightenment, after aeons of belief in essential nature. It’s there in contemporary gender theory, just as much as it is in the Silicon Valley techno-utopians transforming themselves into efficiency-machines. It’s the myth that at bottom we are infinitely changeable — that there is no bottom, really. Only the infinite input of senses, into an empty box.

Early in Intermezzo this rears its head in Peter’s monologue, as he muses about “classical conditioning”. It haunts the rest of the book. Isn’t it all just conditioning? Isn’t it all just bodies cajoling, persuading, conforming to other bodies, atoms colliding blindly in the dark? Yet in our world, this myth has become inseparable from another: that of the passing away of Nature. Just as we are watching a planet slowly dying because of our technological progress, so we’re trying to choke ourselves of any sense that there is a similar Human Nature — any set of instincts, beauties, or talents which are mysteriously inherent, or inheritable. We’re not sure which to hate more: the idea that there is something inherent in us, or the idea that there is not.

However, what lingers at the edge of Rooney’s fictions, and of all our contemporary fictions, is something deeper and stranger. Something we can’t quite seem to give ourselves up to. In Rooney’s work, it’s generally there in her allusions to the Catholicism of her native Ireland, and it buzzes around the boundaries of her work. In Beautiful World, Where are You, it was Alice and Eleanor’s conversations about Jesus, their wonderment at their perfect and pious friend Simon. In Intermezzo it resurfaces: Ivan or Margaret or Peter will think briefly about Jesus, about God, about bigger plans. But they will, like Rooney does, come just shy of admitting that there’s some more transcendent thing at play. This is the predicament of so much mundane fiction today: it insists that we must be concerned with the real world of practical socio-political problems, yet largely exiles the imagination, the capacity of fiction to open up the world for play.

There’s a logical paradox to the Blank Slate, which I’m sure Rooney herself would appreciate. If all we are is what our senses take in, then where does the capacity to compare things come from? How do we choose what to focus on? There must be something innate that can tell one sense from another. But this is a hard thing to accept. Rooney’s best quality is that she wants to take the confusing questions of nature vs. nurture head on. The issue is that she has chosen a very predictable form of fiction, all about the question of whether characters can change or not. Her project is to map out the webs of motives and reasons that drive her characters’ psychologies, but this only ends up reproducing the worst patterns of our contemporary self-absorption.

As in real life, her characters’ psychological revelations are Russian nesting dolls: self-discovery is ultimately as good as repression for continuing to lie to oneself, which is what her characters are continually doing, even as they confess their sins to one another. As a portraitist of our age, Rooney is at least wise enough not to say that this is the end of the story. Her books always wrap up at the moment her characters finally collapse and admit their problems. And this is a fine and ancient project for a book, to take characters from alienation to reconciliation. But in Rooney’s language, in the language of behaviour alone, it ends up looking conspicuously like therapy. And to paraphrase something the great prophet of modern narcissism, Christopher Lasch, once said: a narcissist is someone who can survive infinite therapy.

The screens show a livestreamed video, 24/7, of what’s going on at the other end. You walk down a drizzly Dublin street in the afternoon and there, shimmering ahead of you on the pavement, is an eight-foot slice of New York in the morning sun. You can wave through this portal to a stranger, going about his or her day, 3,000 miles away. And he or she can wave back.

Imagine the possibilities. A kiss across the ocean. A connection between the new world and the old one. Think of it as a Colm Tóibín novel without all the boring old words. There’d be curiosity and laughter, glinting interactions between strangers amid the play of happenstance and the quotidian events of an ordinary day. We’d all revel in new possibilities of human connection.

Except, no, that wasn’t what happened; or, at least, it wasn’t all of what happened. “Portal to hell,” was what the New York Post called it: “Live Dublin-NYC video art installation already bringing out the worst in people with lewd displays.” It reported with a mixture of feigned dismay and barely repressed glee that “middle-finger exchanges and other lewd gestures are a common means of communication on both sides of the portal”.

The portal had only been open for a few hours when the Gardai had to forcibly remove a young woman who was “grinding her bum” on the screen on the Irish end of the connection. Drunken Dubliners have taken to waving swastikas or images of the burning towers of the World Trade Center at their American counterparts. In response, an American TikTokker flashed her breasts, claiming she wanted to show Dubliners her “two New York home-grown potatoes”.

Those of us for whom capitalising the word “Portal” immediately conjures the brilliant videogame about a laboratory experiment run by an insane computer will have sniffed trouble from the off. Likewise, those of us who have ever found ourselves in Dublin at pub kicking-out time. But even those who don’t have either of those reference points should have been able to see it coming. 

For isn’t the fate of the portals just a microcosm of the internet itself? The wired world seemed to promise a new era of global human connection, that would allow us to share the fruits of our knowledge, expand our communities, banish misunderstanding and widen our spheres of empathy. Instead, we turned 90% of it over to showing each-other our furry bits and used the rest of it to insult people we’d never even met, ambush innocent passers-by with Goatse or blue waffle, and ensure that death threats, rape threats and the music of Rick Astley spread at scale. And, yes, share a few cute pictures of cats. Thank heavens, at least, for those. Humanity is a many-splendoured thing.

These portals, on the other hand, can’t in any obvious way be used to siphon our personal information into the pockets of Mark Zuckerberg, derail democracy, hound people to death or reshape the world irrevocably in the interests of soulless capital. They can be regarded as a more benign and lower-stakes metonym for what the internet gave us; and, accordingly, the behaviours they brought out aren’t really going to do much harm.  

One can disapprove of much of the rowdiness — nobody’s going to defend the trolls waving swastikas — but doesn’t something in you respond, sneakingly, with a little leap of old-world pride that, home-grown potatoes aside, Dubliners are apparently proving so much ruder than New Yorkers? Here is a response that would be recognisable to Chaucer, Rabelais or the traditions of Commedia dell’Arte.

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It is also a teachable moment. Whenever we are tempted to imagine that some technological gizmo will transform human behaviour and usher in a new Age of Aquarius, we are brought rapidly down to earth. Technologies don’t change human behaviour: they simply amplify it. Pace the New York Post, “bringing out the worst in people” is just what technologies are going to do. We’re all still apes, with ape brains and ape instincts. When we see someone peering at us, our instincts may tell us to smile and wave — but more often, as with chimpanzees at the zoo, they tell us to fling something at the bars. 

We’d like to see the whole world as one big family, but Dunbar’s Number — saying we’re not neurologically equipped to handle a personal network of more than 150 people — means we struggle a little with the principle. We look through a magic portal, see some wazzock in cycle shorts in Manhattan, and instead of greeting him as a brother in humanity, there’s some part of us that thinks: “That’s a stranger, and a foreigner, and therefore funny, and what’s more he can’t get me from there: I should pull down my trousers and wave my bum at him.”

Here, then, is (mostly) amiable misrule. It’s lols. It’s craic. It manifests the unruliness, the corporeality, the boisterousness that’s the best of us as well as the most annoying of us. It’s just that boisterousness that derails utopian projects and reminds the self-serious and vainglorious that they belong in the mud with the rest of us. So here’s to grindy-bum girl.

This was to be the largest demonstration yet for Ireland’s nascent anti-immigration movement, hyped on social media as a countrywide show of force. While the inchoate movement has already changed the tenor of Irish politics, putting the country’s fragile coalition government on the back foot, it so far has no electoral representation. The Bank Holiday Monday protest aimed to change that, channeling a disparate set of local protest groups, fuelled by social-media anger, into a national electoral force for next month’s European and local elections.

“We’re expecting quite a big protest here today, all right,” Andy Heasman, the tweed-capped Dublin European election candidate for the Irish People party, an umbrella coalition of populist independents, told me. “There’ll be a lot of people here from the inner city. So we’ve a message to give them today that we’re ready to stand up for the Irish people, whether it be for immigration, housing, the indoctrination of children that’s happened, the NGOs, which have captured our media, and politics and government policy…” As I spoke to Heasman, his colleague filmed me on her mobile phone — perhaps the most marked trait of the activists on the march was a suspicion of journalists bordering on hostility, derived from the belief that the Irish press is working to marginalise them as extremists. “We wouldn’t talk to [state broadcaster] RTÉ,” an older woman, who had been loudly condemning what she called “Sharia Féin” told me: “Sure, if I said the sky was blue they’d say I said it was red.”

As the crowd assembled to march through the city centre, the delegation from Newtownmountkennedy, the rural Wicklow village where protestors clashed with Gardaí over the bussing in of migrants from central Dublin, shuffled to the front behind their banner to loud cheers. Maybe two or three thousand protestors had turned up, the Garda officer overseeing the demonstration told me: the organisers placed the figure at far more, and the Irish press at far less. As they marched through central Dublin, waving Irish tricolours and shouting “Get Them Out” and “You’ll Never Beat the Irish”, bemused tourists watched on from pub terraces. Working-class Dubliners were heavily represented, along with older couples from the provinces and a remarkable number of populist influencers, their selfie-sticks wavering in the air. Outside the GPO, the site of the Easter rebellion that eventually created the modern Irish state, Gardaí Public Order units in body armour separated the thousands of marchers from a few dozen Left-wing counter-protestors, waving Palestinian and Spanish Republican flags and chanting “Refugees are welcome here” through loudhailers. Sinn Féin, previously a staple of pro-migration activism, was notable for its absence: with the anti-immigration movement cutting into its support base in working-class Dublin, Ireland’s largest party has begun to pivot on its previous pro-migration platform, now voicing opposition to “open borders” and the new EU migration pact.

But that wasn’t enough for the protestors, loudly shouting “Sinn Féin traitors” and booing every time the party leader Mary Lou McDonald’s name was mentioned. There was something of a pantomime atmosphere as the folk villains of the moment were named from the podium, to loud boos from the crowd massed outside Dublin’s grand neoclassical Custom House. Taoiseach Simon Harris, Integration Minister Roderic O’Gorman, Justice Minister Helen McEntee were all met with boos and shouts of “Get them out!” from the crowd, as a speaker vowed to “clear that cesspool of a Dáil out”. So did Gardaí head Drew Harris, a controversial Northern Irish appointment “who learned his craft well with the RUC”, as the independent MEP candidate Malachy Steenson, a Dublin solicitor and former candidate for the Republican-Socialist Workers Party, told the crowd. “We are the risen people,” he declared, “and we have it within our power to change this society forever. And if we don’t take this opportunity in June, well then it’s over. Don’t come back whinging and saying ‘we should have done something’. Get out in June and make that change.”

Yet it is unclear whether the widespread popular dissatisfaction over migration will actually make an electoral impact. Recent polls show that Sinn Féin’s support has grown in recent weeks, while the different parties presenting themselves for popular acclaim in Dublin are competing for the same enthusiastic but not necessarily large voter base. The Midlands-Northwest constituency for the European elections alone is running 10 different anti-immigration candidates, while Dublin shows an equally crowded roster for a narrow vote share.

Insofar as the Irish press has covered these parties — which is not very far at all — very little effort has been made to analyse their platforms outside the immigration question. Yet while sharing the same podium, and making a show of unity against what they see as a hostile matrix of government, media and NGO lobbies, the parties competing for the popular anti-immigration vote represent a wildly differing policy mix, from the libertarian and anti-EU stance of the Irish Freedom Party, the largest party in attendance, to the continental-style Identitarianism of the National Party, standing on a “remigration” platform and railing against “global capital” from the stage. The Sinn Féin breakaway party, Aontú, the only immigration-sceptical party with a seat in the Dáil, and standing on a socially conservative, social-democratic platform, was not in attendance. Significantly more Left-wing than the Right-wing parties with which Irish leftists often bracket it, Aontú is perhaps the best positioned for an electoral breakthrough, and is now a regular staple for soundbites on the Irish television news.

“I’m sure that once this election is out of the way, there will be a reconfiguration, an amalgamation of various parties,” Hermann Kelly, the sharply-suited leader of the Irish Freedom Party told me. In Kelly’s eyes, the opportunity is there for the taking: “Within the last six months, there’s been an absolute sea change in that a nationalist consciousness has started to rise again in Ireland,” he said. “Look at the polls, 79% of Irish people have had enough of mass immigration. So the political class are still mouthing the same words, but the people out there on the doors are all telling them we’ve had enough. Hey, we never consented to be colonised. Ireland is different from Britain in that we were never a colonial power, never colonised anyone else’s country, and we don’t expect it to be done to ourselves.”

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Standing on a diametrically opposed platform to the Irish Freedom Party’s long-term goal of leaving the EU is the radical-right National Party, whose new leader, the farmer James Reynolds, recently ousted its unsettling founder Justin Barrett. Barrett, given to approvingly quoting Hitler and wearing an SS uniform at protests, has in turn created a new, more or less openly fascist party, Clann Éireann, while running against Reynolds in the Midlands constituency on the same National Party ticket due to a convoluted internal feud. “We’re not pro-Brexit, we have a very different outlook to the British,” Reynolds told me. “And I think that Hermann Kelly’s outlook is as much fixated on leaving the European Union as it is on doing anything disruptive to change it from within, which is my intention. I believe there’s going to be a huge Right-wing surge in the next European elections. I want to be part of it. I think I can achieve much more within the European Parliament than if we were outside.” Citing his links with Estonia’s Conservative People’s Party and Hungary’s Mi Hazánk, Reynolds’s National Party represents the Irish wing of a European Right-wing political strand quite absent from Britain.

Yet even still, Irish liberals and Sinn Féin activists are wont to describe the nascent Irish Right-wing as a British plot. While the tortuous logic of this claim does not bear much scrutiny, what was instead most striking was the degree to which the protest was framed within the language and symbolism of Irish nationalism — indeed, it arguably represents a Rightward shift in the long and historically very politically diverse Irish nationalist tradition, which has in recent decades tilted the other way under Sinn Féin’s leadership. “We fought the Brits for 800 fucking years, and we beat them,” one speaker bawled at the microphone to loud cheers, “and we’ll beat these fucking cunts too.” Protestors waved the Irish Republic flag of the Easter Rising and sang along to Sinead O’Connor’s rendition of the rebel song “The Foggy Dew”, as speechmakers quoted Patrick Pearse, alluded to the ancient Irish tradition of aisling poetry, lamented the loss of the Irish language, and referenced the rebel justice mechanisms of the Civil War period: one speaker declared his wish to “appoint local people as justices” to “arrest all the traitors”.

At the same time, Steenson declared that the Irish government’s recent attempt to blame the migration crisis on Sunak’s Rwanda plan was populist misdirection. “They’re “trying to play on the old prejudices against the British government,” Steenson told the crowd. “They’re trying to get us to blame the Brits for the immigration problem in this country. The British government are doing what the Irish government should be doing… What they should be saying to Rishi Sunak is: when your plane takes off from whatever airbase in England, keep a few seats on it, land it at Baldonnel [airbase near Dublin] and we’ll fill the rest of those seats.”

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After the protest, Steenson, a Eurosceptic, described to me his hope to “reunite our country as a sovereign state — the sovereign Irish Republic… free from all imperialist powers, whether it’s Britain, Europe or the United States or anywhere else. We will determine our own destiny.” But asked whether he saw the protest movement translating into electoral success, Steenson was more equivocal. “I suppose we’ll know the answer to that on 8 June. There are a lot of people standing, and I think that the stronger candidates will prevail, hopefully,” he told me. “We know who stood with us, and we know who stood against us.”

Yet Monday’s protest, while large, was perhaps smaller than the organisers had hoped. While a significant majority of Irish voters support immigration restrictions, the degree to which the energy of the largely social-media-based protest movement can actually make an electoral impact remains, until next month, an open question. Some candidates, such as social media influencer Gavin Pepper and radio talk-show host Niall Boylan, command large audiences, yet as Reform’s performance in Britain’s council elections shows, an outsized media platform does not necessarily translate into electoral success.

The Euroscepticism of candidates like Steenson and Kelly’s Irish Freedom Party is also a marginal position in Ireland, a country whose urban economy has rocketed as the European tax home of American corporations, and whose sizeable farming constituency is largely dependent on European subsidies. To British eyes, more radical parties such as the National Party are remarkable for the degree to which their slogans are accepted by the essentially “normie” crowd — yet they are so far without any electoral representation. If Monday was an attempt by the aspiring leaders of the movement to gauge the turnout they can command, June’s elections will provide the answer as to whether it can reshape Ireland’s political system, or remain a loud and angry voice shut outside power. While Dublin’s anti-immigration marchers vastly outnumbered the pro-migrant counter-protestors, it is Ireland’s voting majority, sitting quietly at home, who will determine the country’s political future. And for all that Monday’s protestors revile them, Sinn Féin remain by far Ireland’s most popular party — and seem destined for power.

I had already wasted a few decades by the time I started drawing. No matter. I wanted a pastime that didn’t involve a screen. I was left with a choice between drawing and fishing. I chose the former because you need a car to reach most fishing spots, and I don’t have one. This was how I found myself boarding the bus to Dublin for a weekly evening class at the Drawing School. Classes take place in a roomy basement studio beneath Merrion Square, where serene plaster casts watch over rows of students as they work. The primary activity for a novice like me is deceptively simple. You are asked to copy a model drawing. The copy should be as exact as you can make it. The angle of every line, the internal proportions of the form, and the interplay of light and shadow must be faithfully reproduced.

This is incredibly difficult to do. The human eye is an awful cheat. You can be quite pleased with your copy until you put it next to the original and see what a mess you’ve made of everything. An ear too high, a shadow not half as dark as it needs to be. It’s a frustrating process, but compelling too. Students of all ages are genuinely absorbed in their work. The quiet is broken only by the occasional rasp of a pencil sharpener or the hushed advice of the instructors as they rove among the easels.

The model drawings are taken from the Cours de Dessin of Charles Bargue and Jean-Léon Gérôme, a three-volume manual published between 1868 and 1873. The Cours offers a series of drawings of progressive difficulty. Plate 1 is devoted to the human eye, Plate 28 depicts a crouched female leg, Plate 52 is a bust of Brutus, and so on. Bargue drew all of the images himself, selecting examples from ancient statuary that would provide students with the best lessons in form, line and tonal value. This means that a student copies Bargue’s drawing of a cast made from a statue inspired (in most cases) by a human model. Such a daisy chain of reproduction might seem absurd. In fact, it places the student in a tradition of artistic training that stretches back to Antonio Mini and beyond.

Picasso is known to have used the Cours as a teenager, but the method’s most enthusiastic proponent was Vincent Van Gogh: “It invigorates my pencil,” he said. In September 1880, he wrote: “I work regularly on the Cours de Dessin Bargue, and intend to finish it before I undertake anything else, for each day it makes my hand as well as my mind more supple and strong.” Although copying was an arduous and frustrating process, Van Gogh described it as “nothing other than a labour of giving birth. First pain, then joy afterwards.” Ten years later, just weeks before his death, he was planning to work through the Cours again.

The point of all that copying is to charm the cheating eye into submission and learn to really see. But most art schools today do not seem particularly interested in teaching their students this foundational skill. Drawing remains a central component of the BA Fine Art at City & Guilds, Falmouth University offers a dedicated BA Drawing degree, and The Royal Drawing School has become famous for its postgraduate Drawing Year. But the majority of art schools now focus on other activities, and those who want to learn traditional skills must look elsewhere.

“Why have people stopped drawing?” as a perplexed David Hockney recently asked. Around 1920, art education in Britain began with observational drawing; first of prints and casts, then of the living human figure. You had to earn your way to the life model through practice and dedication. And there was an academic component, too: anatomy, geometry, art history. Only then could the serious work of painting and sculpting begin. Although a very different experience to Michelangelo’s workshop, it was a training that Antonio Mini would have recognised.

By the Eighties, however, this traditional education had largely disappeared from Britain’s art schools. Samuel Horler, who founded the Dublin Drawing School I attended in 2010, says his father witnessed the shift first-hand: “As a student he did life-modelling to get a bit of money. He would go out to all the art schools in London and he said it was the easiest work because no one would show up to class. So he would just sit there and wouldn’t have to do much posing because no one was coming, they were all into new media suddenly.”

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William Coldstream, whose eponymous committee recommended a series of sweeping reforms to art education between 1960 and 1970, usually gets the blame for the elevation of ideas over practice. But as painter and writer Jacob Willer has shown, the death of the old order was a complex and lengthy process that began long before the Coldstream Committee was first assembled. Heads were already being turned by French abstractionism in the Twenties, a movement that did not require its adherents to be able to draw a convincing human hand. Photography’s ever-increasing reach had an equally dampening effect on realism. And by the Thirties, a peculiarly British interpretation of the Bauhaus Movement was taking hold. Walter Gropius’s 1919 Manifesto is a short exhortation to return to the crafts, or Handwerk: “[Artists] must return to the workshop. This world of mere drawing and painting of draughtsmen and applied artists must at long last become a world that builds.” In its British incarnation, Bauhaus became a rallying cry for those who wished to banish “mere drawing” from the art schools — the only problem was that most forgot to return to the workshop after they had done so.

Jacob Willer has argued that the true break from the past came when art education opened its doors to fashion’s unceasing churn and found that it could not close them again. Bauhaus Modernism was swept away by Pop Art, and the modish tide has continued to go in and out ever since. We’re all supposed to be artists now, isn’t that right? I am not so sure. Nouns tend to lose their meaning when universally applied. That is certainly Horler’s view on the matter. His grandmother is the celebrated sculptor Imogen Stuart, a member of both the Royal Hibernian Academy and Aosdána. In 2015, Stuart was elected Saoi, Ireland’s highest cultural honour. Despite these accolades, Stuart knows that there is always more to learn: “She’s hesitant about calling herself an artist,” says Horler, “And that is quite a traditional view. It shows how misunderstood art is today, that people can just call themselves artists… From the Renaissance right up until at least the Twenties, you had to qualify. And that’s missing now.”

Horler’s Drawing School is one of an increasing number of institutions trying to bridge the artistic skills gap. These range from the glossy Florence Academy of Art and New York City’s Grand Central Atelier to boutique outfits such as the Glasgow Academy of Fine Art. Teaching approaches vary, but all these academies and ateliers are united by a conviction that learning to draw accurately and beautifully is an essential starting point for any artist. Naturally, not everyone has the time and money to attend these schools. But teaching yourself to draw has probably never been easier. Books on the subject are legion and thriving drawing communities exist online. YouTube channels such as ProkoTV pull in millions of subscribers, while digitised museum collections make it possible to learn from the work of supremely gifted and classically trained artists like Käthe Kollwitz and Thomas Anschutz. (Still, I suspect there’s no real substitute for a teacher looming up behind you and murmuring “what’s going on with that nose, Alex?”)

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The growth of atelier education has not been universally welcomed. Despite being a critic of the contemporary art world, Willer has little time for the revival of 19th-century teaching methods either. Of both approaches he writes “they do not know what they do not know”. So, while many art schools are now little more than community theatre for the upper-middle classes, ateliers that offer a supposed recreation of a Parisian studio circa 1880 risk becoming a stultifying dead-end. Clearly, a curriculum that marries hard-won skill with creative expression is the ideal to strive for. Some argue that the only solution is to resume the Renaissance practice of seeking out a master willing to impart his or her wisdom in a private setting, away from the institutions and their various diktats.

Art schools and ateliers have their respective ultras, but Horler is not among them. For him, observational drawing is a useful tool for beginners and a handy refresher for the experienced, not an article of faith. Copying provides a solid technical grounding and a set of objective criteria through which a student’s work can be evaluated. A student working through the Cours de Dessin is not making art, he says: “I always tell students that I’m not an art school, I’m not teaching art. But you learn certain skills and techniques that will help you as an artist.”

I still draw most days. Nothing special. Household clutter, mostly. I attempted the dozing figure in Francisco Goya’s “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” a few weeks ago and was pleased with the result, until I noticed that my copy’s legs were much too small. In my case, the sleep of reason produces shrunken tibia. So I drew it again. And again. There is a compulsive element to drawing that I had not anticipated. I think it is a result of trying to see, really see. After three hours, I would walk out into Merrion Square to find that it had been rolled up and replaced with ink-damp forms and strange prospects. A busy garden square in central Dublin was now a question, the same question that Antonio Mini must have asked himself 500 years ago — how would I draw that?

But there is something elemental, beyond rational considerations, in the appeal of the Irish cottage. Few were the Irish emigrant homes of a certain era that didn’t have a framed farmstead hanging on the sitting room wall, whitewash sparkling against the Kodacolor green. A symbol of a simpler, harder lifestyle, simultaneously fetishished and spurned, the Irish farmstead, built from rubble from its surrounding fields, conveys deep, ambivalent realms of meaning, quite distinct from and darker than the prettily uncomplicated charms of the chocolate-box English cottage. Empty farmhouses, which in England would each be spick and span with Farrow and Ball, litter Northern Ireland’s countryside like abandoned crime scenes. In Ireland, the rural cottage still lurks in the imagination like a half-remembered, troubling dream.

It is no surprise, then, that houses loom large in Ireland’s cultural production. Indeed, it is only partly an exaggeration to say that Irish literature — at least in English — consists of a collection of domestic metaphors. In an island whose history has been defined by contested land ownership, houses dominate the country’s literary landscape like an Anglo-Irish “Big House” overlooking its demesne.

From the very birth of the Anglo-Irish novel, with Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) and The Absentee (1812), the Big House of the landlords was presented as a mouldering, moss-streaked metaphor for the country’s social and political order, a literary premonition of the gloomily decaying wrecks of the 20th-century Anglo-Irish novel, their shrubbery haunted by rebellious tenants and doomed to fiery dissolution. Even Bram Stoker, giving his imagination the freest rein, was compelled to conjure up a landlord, surrounded by superstitious peasants, vacating his crumbling mansion in a box of his native soil, while casting an acquisitive eye on the London property market.

On the other side of Ireland’s great political divide, the idealised peasant cottage of early 20th-century Irish nationalism, successor to the squalid 19th-century tenant cabin, marks the point at which improved economic conditions following the Famine laid the foundations for Ireland’s separation from its negligent neighbouring freeholder. The tidy, homely cottage became the moral and political contrast to the ramshackle and disorderly Big House, just as independent Ireland was to draw from its own native folk resources in establishing itself as a nation once again.

But one man’s bucolic fantasy is another’s nightmare. Ulster Unionist election posters contrasted the tidily prosperous farmsteads of the Protestant statelet with the tumbledown thatched cabins of De Valera’s Republic — relying on cultural tropes that, ironically, only make sense within an Irish context. The dominant stage of post-independence Realist literature — the isolated Midlands farmhouse ruled by a fallible, domineering father — provided a handy metaphor for writers chafing against the stultifying claustrophobia of mid-20th century Ireland. In today’s neurotically globalising Republic, scene of a housing crisis that makes Britain’s Generation Rent look comparatively blessed, the abandoned estates of the Celtic Tiger boom fulfil a similar purpose: they are vacant symbols of a country caught between outward-looking aspirations and the material reality of a marginal country on Europe’s westernmost fringe.

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But here in Northern Ireland, a century after the border uncurled itself across Ulster’s rainy country lanes, this domestic metaphor has its own specific, harder edge. As bookseller-turned-writer Alexander Poots observes in The Stranger’s House, his excellent new book on Northern Irish writing, David Trimble instinctively returned to the trope in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, proclaiming that “‘Ulster Unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house, but it was a cold house for Catholics. And northern Nationalists, although they had a roof over their heads, seemed to us as if they meant to burn the house down.” A solid house built on uncertain ground, now Northern Ireland’s knife-edge demographic balance is shifting back in turn, looking to wash the state’s foundations away with it.

The politics and culture of Northern Ireland, Britain’s neglected stepchild over the water, are after all defined by one great building project, 400 years ago. Until the early 17th-century plantation of British Protestant settlers, Ulster was the wildest of Ireland’s four provinces, the last holdout of the old Gaelic order, and the least influenced by English culture. Over the course of a century, reshaped by its new population, it became the most distinctively British corner of the island, farms and sturdy grey market towns, in mainland style, blooming like mushrooms on Ulster’s levelled woodlands. Like a family’s private ways of speech, the shared dialect of its two peoples is still rich with the expressive Germanic vocabulary of the Scots colonists: people still hoke and boke, they gulder and gurn in the linguistic residue of “the Hamely Tongue”. Forced into loveless cohabitation by history, the province’s two nations have explored their predicament, in literature, through the image of the uneasily shared home.

In Reading in the Dark (1996), the Catholic writer Seamus Deane layers two oppressive domestic metaphors on top of each other: the claustrophobic Derry two-up, two-down where family life is weighed down by dark secrets, and the stolen farmhouse just across the border in Donegal, where a life of bucolic freedom and contentment lies unfairly out of reach. In the Monaghan writer Eugene McCabe’s cycle of fiction set across the border in Northern Ireland’s Fermanagh, the uneasy cohabitation of Catholic and Protestant finds expression in a lush and lurid Ulster Gothic: in Siege (1973), IRA gunmen hold an Anglo-Irish gentry family hostage in their Big House, finding uncomfortable intimacy in their unwillingly shared predicament; in Death and Nightingales (1992), the Catholic stepdaughter of a cuckolded Protestant landlord plots his murder, before being betrayed in turn by his devious Fenian tenant. Most explicitly, in Bill Morrison’s A Love Song for Ulster trilogy (1994), the Catholic Kate, abandoned by her mother as the border closed, is trapped in unwilling domesticity with the Protestant John, prisoner in a cold and isolated Northern farmhouse.

As a consequence of this troubled cohabitation, Poots observes, throughout its century-long existence Northern Irish literature “has seen writer after writer grasp for an elusive home. Inevitably they fail, and that failure becomes the subject of their work. They are all inhabitants of the disappearing island, tenants of the Strangers’ House.” Perhaps it is natural, then, that an unstable hold on uncertain ground pervades much of the province’s writing, a persistent sense that there are stranger things lurking beneath Ulster’s stolid surface. In Northern Irish writing, the hamely always threatens to become unheimlich.

Poots opens with a portrait of three Belfast writers — C.S. Lewis, Forrest Reid, and Louis MacNeice — and the comfortable and unhappy red-brick bourgeois homes that shaped their imaginations. Like their homeland, in their infancy “all had nightmares so memorable that they seemed worthy of record decades after their occurrence”, Poots notes, and “all three men described their childhood nightmares in their respective memoirs”. The triad are strangely interchangeable, Poots observes: “All were Protestants, and while some were more comfortable than others, all were vastly better off than the average Irishman. All had black dreams, all became writers. All knew the dark well.” And like Carson, the statelet’s sceptical founder, all three were repelled by the Loyalist culture of their tribe, “the marching bands, the sashes and banners, the great bonfires lit at midnight on the Twelfth of July”. Lewis, who would write that “if I ever get interested in politics, I shall probably be a nationalist”, described his distaste as simply a “natural repulsion to noisy drum‐beating, bullying Orangemen”.

Instead, for Lewis, in the dim afterglow of Yeats’s Celtic Twilight, escape was to be found in fantasy worlds, a hidden realm where time is so distorted that the ordinary human lifespan extends disorientatingly into mythicised, glorious history. Though Poots notes laconically that “not many people would associate Narnia with Ireland”, this parallel is surely inescapable. As Lewis would write in Surprised by Joy, “the country I grew up in had everything to encourage a romantic bent, had indeed done so ever since I first looked at the unattainable Green Hills through the nursery window”.

Explicitly transposing his beloved Oxford on the Mourne Mountains and Donegal, Narnia was a fantasy Ulster for Lewis, a land of “roaring waterfalls and mossy rocks and echoing caverns”, of “heathery mountains” and “windy slopes alight with gorse bushes”. For MacNeice, who “always thought of himself as Irish, a visitor to the English zoo”, escape from middle-class Belfast was sought in fantasies of Gaelic peasant authenticity, and his dubious claim that “my relations are still living in mud‐floored cottages in the West of Ireland”. And Reid in turn, that rare thing, an early 20th-century Ulster Protestant gay writer, found release in a lush, Bohemian fiction which, Poots remarks, fits “none of the stereotypes associated with Ulster Protestantism: they are queer, allusive, beautiful, and fantastical. And yet, despite everything, he was a Northern Irish Protestant novelist, and his books reflect his culture and his class.”

This yearning of the stereotypically matter-of-fact Ulster Protestant for the fantastical is a thread that runs through modern Northern Irish fiction, and Poots could perhaps make more of it than he does. Another recent book, 2021’s The Black Dreams: Strange stories from Northern Ireland, foregrounds the country’s under-analysed literary preoccupation with the weird and eerie, making the implicit explicit. In each of the stories, domestic life becomes unsettled by hidden worlds lying just at the edge of ours, by the intrusion of the old ways and a history that refuses forgetting. Indeed, perhaps the singular distinctive trait of the country’s best current writers, such as Antrim’s Jan Carson, is a magical realist sensibility now largely alien to their southern counterparts.

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Across the border, the long shadow of literary Modernism has congealed in Sally Rooney’s affectless, Xanax prose, making her a suitable literary avatar for a country rushing headlong into an increasingly contested postmodern internationalism. In contrast, Carson’s unsettling engagement with Irish folk traditions, her pagan sensibility, rooted in the soil and lurking beneath working-class Protestant community life — the literary equivalent of the Fairy Tree at the heart of Belfast’s Loyalist Sandy Row — would be so unfashionable among Dublin writers, still eager to shake off the shackles of tradition, as to be unwritable. History’s separation of North and South perhaps permits a critical engagement, in Northern writers, with a lost sense of Irishness, the bifurcated insider-outsider perspective of the anthropologist, both at home and not in either culture. In one of the many contradictions typifying Northern Ireland, it is the explicit Irishness of Carson’s writing that separates her from the Republic.

If the singular characteristic of Northern Irish prose is its yearning for the fantastical, its poetic counterpart is perhaps a shrewd and unromantic, even tormented relationship with the land. “Northern Ireland is the result of an argument about land,” Poots notes, “an argument conducted over four long centuries”, and this stubborn rootedness adheres to the best Ulster poetry like wet clay. In the work of farmer-poets like Seamus Heaney and John Montague, both brought up in smallholdings in Northern Ireland’s rural, Catholic west, small farms, hard soil and deep history intertwine to create a distinctive imaginative space. Poots writes compellingly, often in passages of great beauty, of the nature writing tradition in Irish-language poetry, observing that “if a sense of homelessness and dislocation forms one pillar of northern writing, then the natural world forms the other. Indeed fields, trees, and birds have often supplied the language through which writers can express darker truths.”

Yet the land itself may express other, happier resolutions: for the great Belfast Protestant poet John Hewitt, who deserves greater analysis than Poots’s excellent survey of Ulster writing gives him, the same Antrim countryside that inspired Lewis grounded him in a sense that he, too, belonged to this contested soil, where though “once alien here my fathers built their house/claimed, drained and gave the land the shapes of use”, so that “because of all the buried men/in Ulster clay”, he is “as native in my thought as any here”. Poots quotes Tom Paulin’s poetic lament of the Ulster Protestant seaman in London as proof of “the uncertainty at the heart of Ulster Unionism — the terrible suspicion that they are mired between Catholic Ireland and indifferent Britain, foreigners everywhere”. But the Roman settler in Hewitt’s more hopeful 1950 poem The Colony instead derives from his perception that “we would be strangers in the Capitol” a belief that time and shared love of the land may change relations “if not to kin, to co-inhabitants, as goat and ox may graze in the same field/and each gain something from proximity”.

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This ameliorating influence of the land pervades Belfast, too, MacNeice’s “city built on mud” where, as Poots notes, “the smell of silage and cow dung still wafts across the city when the wind is right”, and where the street art, unlike the mainland, displays fat bramble hedges and woodland paths as well as the paramilitary murals so beloved of Troubles tourists. From the centre of Belfast, you can see the hedgerows and green fields of hill farms overlooking the postindustrial cityscape; mist-shrouded mountains loom oppressively over the terraced red-brick streets, the grim majesty of the land itself our reminder we are not in Manchester or Liverpool. Like the inner city’s sectarian murals fading into the Alliance Party posters of the prosperous leafy suburbs, Ulster’s countryside softens Belfast’s brick-sharp edges.

In his conclusion, Poots declares that “a tribal writer will never produce great work”. Instead, “the best northern writers have rejected the answers that their respective communities offer up… Perhaps this is the root of the homesick quality that, for me, defines Northern Irish writing” — “where home is revealed to be a delusion.” But perhaps what Poots interprets as loss and homelessness can also be a strange liberation: by belonging to both Britain and Ireland, Northern Ireland ultimately belongs to neither. For writers, condemned by temperament to view their home society from the outside, looking in, such ambiguity can be productive, as the vigorous imaginative possibilities displayed by Ulster’s new writing proves.

As with the shrewd and slightly roguish inhabitants of Northern Ireland’s border villages — my own new home — with their pocketfuls of Euros, at ease in both societies, or the best of both worlds Sunak strains to convince Unionists that the Windsor Agreement offers, the ambiguity detested by Belfast politicians may yet be a profitable wellspring. For all its political uncertainty, or perhaps because of it, Northern Ireland’s cultural output possesses a complex, unaffected sense of place and continuity distinct from, and perhaps increasingly foreign to, both the British mainland and the Republic. A traditional Ulster farmhouse has no foundations, built directly on the heavy soil: but it is no less solid or homely for that, and will sit sturdily on its squat fieldstone haunches long after the political certainties of today have washed away.

The cemetery is all that is left of my connection to Leitrim — that and my surname. In this tiny patch of Ireland, far from home, lie various McTigues and McTeigeus, the ancestors who may have given us our name. But that link has been frayed in the churn of emigration and divorce, remarriage and death. Today, the banal truth is that I’m English, not Irish. All my immediate family were born in England. Everything I know and feel has been shaped in England. Like Joe Biden, my closest connection to Ireland is three generations ago. And yet, I’m English and he, as he claims, is Irish.

But don’t just take his word for it. Before the US President arrived in Dublin, the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, said how honoured he was to be welcoming Joe Biden “home” to Ireland; fifth cousins lined up to celebrate this homecoming; over the next few days, every sinew in the Republic will be strained to affirm the President’s Irishness. And why not? Not only is it wise to claim the most powerful man in the world as one of your own, doesn’t it make sense to greenwash those US corporate profits sloshing through Ireland?

Not that Biden is faking it. The President’s grandfather, Ambrose — whose father came to America from from Ireland in the 1850s — drummed it into the young Joe Jnr that he should remember “the best drop of blood in you is Irish”. The worst, you see, was English, which had dripped down through the generations on his father’s side. In his speech in Belfast yesterday, Biden even joked about this somewhat embarrassing revelation. 

Just as nations are no more than “imagined communities”, so too are diasporas. What is important is not the purity of Biden’s bloodline — a horrible, fascistic idea — but the strength of belief in the idea of Irish-Americanness. If enough people believe they are Irish-American, then Irish America exists not only in theory but in practice — a living reality with its own power that must be reckoned with in Belfast and London. Irish America votes and feels, and therefore has to be taken seriously. In the Seventies and Eighties, it funded the IRA. Today, it warns Britain there will be no trade deal should it abandon the Northern Irish Protocol.

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The real potency of the idea of Irish America is that it shapes not only how America sees Ireland but also how Ireland sees itself. “Biden comes with a vision of Irishness which is really an Irish American vision,” Kieran Cuddihy, an Irish radio presenter, told me. “It is quaint and twee — all comely maidens dancing at the crossroads.” 

When this caricature is ridiculed, though, the Irish bristle, as happened recently on Saturday Night Live, when two presenters pretended to be Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson on the Oscar’s red carpet. The pair spoke in unintelligible accents to the bafflement of their interviewers, who quipped: “Wow, and they haven’t even started drinking yet!” Farrell, who has been sober for years, later criticised the skit, as did the Irish government. And yet, the film for which Farrell was nominated has been slated for playing on these very same stereotypes. How’s that for meta? 

The Irish, Cuddihy explains, are happy to indulge that stereotype — but only when it suits them. “We won’t challenge it when Biden’s here,” he says. “In fact, we will lean into it.” As if to prove a point, the teetotal Biden was taken to a pub on the first night of his visit. And Biden plays up to it, describing himself as “the only Irishman you’ve ever met who’s never had a drink”. He has even joked:“I may be Irish but I’m not stupid.”

Hayek observed that tradition was not something constant, “but the product of a process of selection guided not by reason but by success”. So it is with Irishness. The Irishness on offer today works; it is successful. In August, tens of thousands of Americans will fly over to watch “the fighting Irish” of Notre Dame play a College football game in Dublin. As Cuddihy puts it, you can’t put on such a display of Irish-Americana and then tell them their version of Irishness is all wrong. The same is true of the St Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin, now more of an American tribute than an “authentic” celebration.

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And yet, much as this version of Irishness is successful for both Irish-American presidents and Ireland itself, there are costs to accommodating such unsubtle caricature. There is another Ireland that does not sit easily with Irish America, just as there is another Irish America that does not sit so easily in Ireland. And that is the one that originated in and is now largely confined to Northern Ireland.

By some estimates, more Irish Americans in the US are now Protestant than Catholic. This is partly because the descendants of Catholic Irish-Americans have since converted — such as the former Vice President Mike Pence, who became an Evangelical to his mother’s distress. For millions of others, though, it is ancestral, their roots reaching back not to a lost Ireland and the trauma of the famine, but to Ulster and a fierce Protestant individualism. It is one of the great ironies of this strange trans-Atlantic relationship, in fact, that in the most hardline of “loyalist” communities in Northern Ireland, murals still depict “Scotch-Irish” American founding fathers such as George Washington, perhaps the most famously disloyal subject in British history.

Biden cleverly nodded towards this heritage in his speech yesterday. “The pride in those Ulster Scots immigrants… who helped found and build my country, they run very deep.” His words were designed to soothe unionist criticism of his own perceived nationalist partisanship. “Men born in Ulster were among those who signed the Declaration of Independence in the United States, pledging their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honour for freedom’s cause.” 

While the Irish America that President Biden embodies has proved resilient, the roots and influence of this other Irish America are just as profound. Back in that beautiful little cemetery in Leitrim there lies one gravestone after another telling the true story of Irish America: of men, woman and children born in Ireland, but spread throughout the world, from New York to London. Each life is its own story. This is the reality of Irish America: a story far more complicated than the one on display over the next few days.

The focal point of the protests is Dublin’s East Wall, where, in November, after the government converted a state building into a migrant residence without consulting locals, hundreds of people started to gather week after week. By December, the demonstrations spread to other areas — Drimnagh, Finglas, Ballymun and Fermoy. Rather than losing steam as each month went by, the protests continued to intensify, sprouting across the country. And as they did, it became clear that they were different from other anti-migrant demonstrations in Europe.

Last month, a group of 300 anti-migrant protestors clashed with a smaller counter-protest outside the Shelbourne Hotel in central Dublin. The demographic profile of each faction revealed something curious. As one might expect, the anti-migrant protesters were from the working-class areas where the migrants are being housed, while the counter-protesters were largely middle-class liberals. More surprising, however, was the significant proportion of women among the anti-migrant contingent.

One of the principal motivating factors behind Ireland’s anti-migrant protests concerns a number of reports of migrants mistreating women and even young children. Last week, for instance, a male migrant allegedly walked into Temple Street Children’s Hospital and announced that he wanted to rape children. This week, a migrant was charged by the Gardai with the sexual assault of a teenage girl.

A few days earlier, unfounded rumours circulated about a migrant from a camp in Finglas sexually assaulting a woman. The impact of such incidents is borne out in national polls: in one recent survey carried out by The Business Post, only 38% of women supported building new homes for migrants, compared to 55% of men. As The Irish Independent noted: “The view that Ireland has taken in too many refugees is notably stronger among women in working-class communities.”

If true, the government’s official depiction of Ukrainian women and children fleeing war and persecution doesn’t seem to be taking hold in the minds of voters. And the reason for this seems straightforward: it ignores a surge in non-Ukrainian asylum seekers piggybacking off Ukrainian sympathy. The Business Post recently reported that “the number of international protection applications in the first half of last year had gone up by 200% compared to an average increase of 25% in such applications across the EU”. Elsewhere, the government’s Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth reported that, of the roughly 20,000 non-Ukrainian asylum seekers, 50% are single males. In other words, there is a glaring dissonance between the Government’s official depiction of women and children fleeing the Ukrainian war and the observed reality of suspicious young single men from non-Ukrainian countries rapidly increasing.

In any other European country, such a scenario would be ripe for a Right-wing populist party to make electoral headway. But Ireland’s modern political landscape has no equivalent to Le Pen, Orbán, or Trump. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have ruled Ireland for a century. The former positions itself as more traditional and working-class, and the latter as more secular and pro-business — but, by and large, they govern identically. Over the past decade, as any legacy of Right-wing attitudes dissipated from the post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, anti-establishment angst had channelled itself into support for the rising Sinn Féin party — to great success. Under the slogan promising “time for change”, the party’s first-place position suggests it will take control of the government in the next election. Unless, that is, the anti-migrant protests overshadow Sinn Féin’s rising star.

These working-class protesters are the same demographic as Sinn Féin’s reliable voter base. As Dublin City University Professor Eoin O’Malley discovered after polling individual issues, “Sinn Féin support is correlated with anti-immigrant sentiment”. Meanwhile, The Business Post poll referenced above indicates that while 75% of Fine Gael and 71% Fianna Fáil supporters believe that only the far-Right oppose taking in refugees, that figure dropped to 45% among Sinn Féin supporters.

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This anti-immigrant sentiment contrasts starkly with the Sinn Féin party leadership, which perhaps explains the three-point drop from its all-time high last June. It is noticeable, for instance, that the East Wall protests were actually located in Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald’s constituency. A number of placards showed a photo of McDonald with the words “Traitor” written across it. Similarly, protests in Finglas singled out the local Sinn Féin TD Dessie Ellis for condemnation.

Amid such a politically hostile climate, Sinn Féin’s detachment from its anti-migrant working-class base is starting to open the door to something modern Ireland has never experienced: Right-wing populist parties, the most prominent being the Irish Freedom Party (IFP). Led by Hermann Kelly, an ally of Nigel Farage, the IFP has primarily campaigned for an Irish exit from the EU since it was founded in 2018. It should be stressed that it remains on the margins of Irish politics and is yet to register any serious uptick in the polls. But Kelly and the IFP are starting to position themselves as the party of the protestors, and it seems unlikely that they won’t be listened to. At the recent Shelbourne Hotel protest, for example, IFP Chairman Michael Leahy gave a prominent speech, no doubt hoping to encourage former Sinn Féin voters to switch to his party.

For his part, Malachy Steenson, the anti-migrant protests’ unofficial leader, appears willing to give the IFP a chance. Steenson, a solicitor with a history of advocacy in the broad republican movement, has maintained neutrality on any specific party monopolising the protests but frequently speaks alongside IFP members at demonstrations. In 2021, he gave a speech at an IFP demonstration, while last June he attended the IFP Ard Fheis (annual party conference), where he was photographed next to Kelly and Leahy. While Steenson might not officially label himself as part of the IFP, and is always referred to as a “guest” when he appears at their events, he is certainly friendly with them.

Of course, whether this translates into meaningful change remains unclear. The IFP’s challenge will be to turn this spark of popularity into a political machine. Can the IFP recruit the popular Steenson to run on its behalf? Can the party field enough candidates across many localities? Does it have the bureaucratic nous to conduct a campaign and, eventually, state operations? Can it appeal to voters less persuaded by its core objective of leaving the EU to increase its numbers?

These questions are yet to be answered, but it is not inconceivable that the energy of the anti-migrant protests will converge around the IFP. Perhaps the next election won’t mark IFP’s ascendence — but if conditions stay the same or deteriorate, Sinn Féin could find itself staring at an exodus of voters for whom Right-wing populism is suddenly palatable.

Dante speaks of such grand affairs as heaven and hell, church and state, while Joyce loftily dismisses the lot of them. One panic-stricken English critic compared Ulysses to an Irish Republican bombing. A former Provost of Trinity College, Dublin remarked that the novel showed what a blunder it had been to establish University College, Dublin, where Joyce was a student, “for the aborigines of this island, for the corner-boys who spit in the Liffey”.

Yet the two writers have a good deal in common. It’s true that the language of Dante’s Divine Comedy can be a touch too mellifluous for some modern ears, but it can also be the idiom of the street, rough and abrasive, crammed with insult and abuse. Dante chose to write in the vernacular (and thus for the common reader) rather than in Latin, and in doing so played a major role in establishing everyday Italian as the literary language of his people. It was a choice which helped to revolutionise the writing of other European cultures as well.

For his part, Joyce has an uncannily well-tuned ear for the speech of working-class Dubliners, and Ulysses, which is awash with pub talk, gossip, political polemic and satirical invective, is one of the first novels in English to portray what we might now call mass culture. It includes tabloid journalism, scientific jargon, a pastiche of women’s romantic fiction, a mini-Expressionist jargon, the language of the unconscious and a good deal more. There is really no answer to the question “What is Joyce’s style?” even though he could spend days on end sculpting a sentence.

Like his compatriot Samuel Beckett, Joyce has an intense fascination with the ordinary. Both men hailed from a small, impoverished island, “an afterthought of Europe” as Joyce scornfully called it, and both kept faith with the modest and inconspicuous. This most fastidious of artists once compared his mind to that of a grocer’s assistant. There are shopkeepers and taxi drivers in Ireland today who have a go at reading some of his work, just as they may have a stab at reading some Yeats or Seamus Heaney. In small nations, writers can be less private individuals than public institutions. And there may be few other public figures to be proud of. Yet Joyce’s great novel is also notoriously difficult and abstruse, so that everyday life and high-modernist experiment sit cheek by jowl. Hardly any other modernist writer is at once so esoteric and down to earth. One finds a similar combination in Dante, whose poem ranges from celestial beings to fraudsters and bent Cardinals.

If Dante turned from Latin to the vernacular, Joyce was also caught between two languages. Like Yeats and Oscar Wilde, he didn’t speak Irish himself, but in all these authors you can feel the way it bends standard English slightly out of shape. Unlike the playwright J.M. Synge, who was said to write in English and Irish simultaneously, Joyce isn’t exactly writing in his native tongue. Instead, he is using the language of what part of him saw as the imperial invader. Yet it was precisely his freedom from English social and artistic conventions which lay at the source of his talent, as he himself once remarked. Unconstrained by such orthodoxies, he was free to improve and experiment. So, indeed, was his native country, Britain’s oldest colony, which in the year of Ulysses’s publication became the Irish Free State. As the first post-colonial nation of the 20th century, it had few models to rely on, and thus had to make itself up as it went along.

It was not an experiment which Joyce stuck around to witness. Despising both clerics and nationalists, he had recourse to one of the oldest customs in Ireland, namely getting out of the place. Nothing is more native to the country than exile. Since the Great Famine of the 1840s, which killed one million people and forced millions of others to flee, there had been far more Irish men and women living outside the country than living in it. Joyce’s own self-exile to Paris, Zurich and Trieste was a more privileged affair, but it reflected in its own way the fate of his compatriots. Just as they couldn’t survive materially in one of Europe’s most economically stagnant countries, neither could a whole lineage of artists like Joyce and Beckett survive spiritually. Homeless, displaced and bereft of any stable identity, they exemplified the rootless condition of modern humanity. As cosmopolitans adrift between different cultures, they rejected their own national traditions and set up home instead in the lingua franca of art. So it was that in a myriad polyglot cafes from Paris to St Petersburg, the artistic movement we know as modernism was born.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein's war on philosophy

By Terry Eagelton

Dante, too, was an exile. Like Joyce, he denounced what he saw as corruption in both church and empire (in his case the Holy Roman rather than British variety), and paid a steep price for it. Expelled from his native Florence on trumped-up political charges, and threatened with being burnt alive if he returned, he spent the rest of his days on the hoof, straying in his own words “through nearly all the regions to which the Italian tongue belongs, a wanderer, almost a beggar, truly a ship without sail or rudder, driven to many ports and straits and shores by the parching wind of grievous poverty”. Joyce, who eked out a precarious living by teaching English in one corner of Europe after another, could identify with this easily enough; but what really drew him to Dante was his scholasticism.

It’s hard for the modern English reader to share this enthusiasm for medieval philosophy, but Joyce was Irish, not English. He was brought up in a Catholic culture which placed a high value on systematic thought, and had no admiration for endless open-mindedness. He once remarked that he was a scholastic in everything but the premises, meaning that he approved of the rigorous reasoning of scholastics like Thomas Aquinas even though he didn’t believe in the God they reasoned about. He was much closer to the world of Dante and Aquinas, writers he deeply respected, than he was to the world of English middle-class liberalism. A character in his early novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man remarks to the Joyce-like hero on “how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve”. There are many ways of being religious in Ireland, and atheism is one of the most familiar. As one of Graham Greene’s characters cries out to God, “I hate you as though I believed in you.”

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Boris Johnson was too Dickensian

By Terry Eagelton

When Joyce said that he had a mind like a grocer’s assistant, he meant not only that he had a passion for the mundane but that he dealt with it in an orderly, row-stacking way. Like Beckett, he is an obsessional classifier, conjuring the most ingenious combinations out of a few sparse bits of reality. He was intrigued by the way the 26 letters of the alphabet could yield you such a prodigal wealth of words. The world could be seen as an endless play of permutations, continually changing but never getting anywhere. The ideology of progress, so central to modern English thought, never had many takers in Ireland. The literary equivalent of progress is the realist novel, which, as with George Eliot, tells stories about a steadily improving world. It is not a form likely to impress those colonial subjects whose history is a function of someone else’s, which is one reason why all the finest Irish novels — Gulliver’s Travels, Tristram Shandy, Castle Rackrent, Dracula, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, Malone Dies, At Swim-Two-Birds — are resolutely anti-realist.

What follows from a view of the world as both constantly different and constantly identical?  For Joyce, one might claim, it is the idea of comedy. Not comedy in the rib-tickling sense, though Joyce can be funnier than most other modern writers. It is rather comedy in the deep sense of the word to be found in Dante’s title The Divine Comedy, which is a matter of vision rather than laughter. Comedy of this kind means the faith that despite appearances to the contrary, all is ultimately well. This is naturally true for a devout Christian like Dante, for whom love has already won out in principle over violence and hatred; but it is also the creed of the atheistic Joyce, for whom nothing in the great cycle of things can be ultimately lost but will return in a different guise. His novels, which go round in circles, are microcosms of this universe.

In this sense, Joyce is that most unusual of modernist writers, a non-tragic one. Comedy in his view is a kind of realism: if it were possible for us shuck off our fantasises and delusions and see the world as it really is, we would come to accept it in a kind of cosmic joy. Tragedy does not necessarily disagree. It simply draws attention to the painful self-transformation involved in seeing things as they are, and asks whether the pain is worth it.

Point out that these are contradictory in any way, like mentioning Ireland’s role as an international tax haven or asking why there are so many Irish nationalists living in London, Berlin and San Francisco and so few living in Dublin, and you will be met with defensive anger.

As a former colony, historically unsullied by the sins of slavery and imperialism, Ireland’s national identity has been largely free of the culture of pathological self-hatred found across most of the liberal West today. An uncomplicated sense of national pride has remained the default, even and sometimes especially on the political Left. But all of that is about to change.

“Toppling statues is just the beginning”, ran a recent Irish Times headline, if the goal is “How to make Irish culture less racist.” As self-flagellating stories about the Irish public’s racism are set to now become a daily part of life, Ireland’s elites can breathe a sigh of relief. Any populist pressure they sensed brewing while overseeing a deeply economically unequal society with skyrocketing homelessness, rents and outward youth migration can now be replaced with an imported moral narrative that turns the spotlight around on the reactionary masses who must, in the name of equality, learn to think of themselves as privileged.

While educated Irish young people in Dublin copied the Black Lives Matter protests from America, our culturally progressive and economically Thatcherite Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, recently singled out the statue of Irish Republican Sean Russell as a problematic target. Russell fought in the War of Independence and died trying to secure arms from Germany in 1940.

Wrongly thinking that historical facts could ever stand a chance against the wrecking ball of the current international woke cultural revolution, some Republicans correctly pointed out that he was not doing so out of any allegiance to Nazism, having tried to secure arms from any nations that might give them. Protesters still vandalised the statue anyway, painting it with the gay pride rainbow flag with added black and brown to mark their support for Black Lives Matter.

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The disturbing history of statue-smashing

By Sean Thomas

Having uncritically adopted the fashions of American academia, Ireland’s new young educated elite have started parroting the imported language of “white privilege” versus “people of colour”, and the dangers of nationalism versus the superior multinational capitalism-friendly values of openness.

There is little reason to think the cultural revolution sweeping across Europe from America will stop and listen to the “but we’re on your side!” pleas offered by Irish Republicans about how they supported the anti-apartheid movement in the Eighties or how our nationalist heroes were anti-imperialists or that our Republicans today are economically left-leaning and pro-immigration.

Anyone who thinks these details will matter, and that any remnant of Irish cultural nationhood will be immune, is simply not paying attention to the unstoppable internal logic of the current cultural revolution underway. This new generation of elite aspirants are already showing that they make no such distinction and simply recast the native Irish as “white people” whose privilege needs to be checked and ultimately dismantled.

It is worth asking why the woke cultural revolution sweeping Irish society would spare a single one of our national statues, monuments or heroes. One could go through the entire list of signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and find cancellable and problematic thoughts uttered by each of them in different contexts. The deeply Catholic Constance Markievicz cited the “anti-Irish ideals” of “immorality and divorce” against the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Patrick Pearse explicitly wrote of blood sacrifice and the Irish race, saying that, “there can be no peace between the body politic and a foreign substance that has intruded itself into its system” which must be expelled or assimilated through war.

Why wouldn’t our literary heroes also be wiped from the canon and from the public space? The continued dominance of Irish literature in our universities is certainly open to the accusation of being exclusionary and too white. What about George Bernard Shaw, who once wrote that “Any competent historian or psychoanalyst can bring a mass of incontrovertible evidence to prove that it would have been better for the world if the Jews had never existed”? What about W. B. Yeats, who preferred fascism to democracy? Who will be left in our compliant little colony of Silicon Valley to defend any of these figures a few years from now after the woke cultural revolution has replaced the unsuspecting old guard with the new?

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Why shouldn't the curriculum be 'Eurocentric'?

By Nigel Biggar

What about the special place given to the Irish language in state institutions, which it could be easily argued excludes and discriminates against foreigners? What about the explicitly ethnocentric Irish right of return policy, which grants people with Irish grandparents the right to citizenship? Irish liberal media used to love showcasing the young children of immigrants playing hurling or speaking Irish, which offered a vision of the future in which anyone could be Irish through adoption of the national culture, but what happens when those young people are filled with poison in the indoctrination camps of university and taught to fear and resent the native population as white racists?

Surely they’ll let us keep the Marxist James Connolly, one might think, who could be spared due to some often cited quotes that liberals love about the limitations of nationalism without economic equality or against the oppression of women. In fact, the Connolly statue was defaced by anarchists years ago. On May Day 2005, the statue of James Connolly in Dublin was graffitied, and a black bloc hood and mask — the kind associated with antifa today — placed on its head, supposedly in the name of “appropriating” and “reclaiming” the figure; and that was back when the anarchist cultural project was not yet indistinguishable from every elite institution, from academia to the NGO sector to the international capitalist class.

Connolly, the Catholic revert who fought and died alongside ethno-nationalists won’t stand a chance when they come for him next time.

Unlike the republics that can claim to be founded on abstract and universalist principles, sooner or later there is simply no getting around the brick wall of truth that the Irish nationhood envisioned by our revolutionary founders was fundamentally ethno-nationalist. How could it have been otherwise? Historians can offer all the contextualising explanations they like but this will be the awkward truth the woke internationale will use to bury it in shame.

Nationalists will no longer be dealing with a few scattered genteel revisionist intellectuals like Conor Cruise O’Brien, but the full tidal ideological force of the American Empire, with its sophisticated cold war psychological warfare tactics, its world dominating oligarchy and every elite institution at home and abroad on its side.

Ireland is uniquely vulnerable to all of this as a nation without a national economic base, wholly reliant on the whim and will of aggressively ideological multinationals temporarily parked there for tax purposes. After gaining national independence, Ireland had to embark upon the difficult task of making an agrarian economy, which had been shaped and distorted by its role as a colony of the British Empire, independent and backed by an indigenous industrial base. As trade union economist Michael Taft has documented, this project failed at key historical moments and was ultimately replaced by the easier route to modernity of inviting international capital to base itself there using tax incentives.

As a result of the low-tax policies introduced in the late Nineties, Ireland today is effectively a tax haven, hosting the European headquarters of Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter and many others. Some of these companies have been found to be paying as little as 0.005% tax. While this project gave Ireland the Celtic Tiger economy, it also produced a deeply unequal society totally subservient to the sovereignty and ultimately the values and culture of the corporations who today are its guiding force. For our obedience, we received surely the lowest of honours just last year when anti-yellow vests French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy congratulated us for being “a people who resist the winds of populism”.

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How we bend the knee to our HR overlords

By Aris Roussinos

It is a tragic irony of Irish history that, having fought a globe-spanning empire to build an independent Irish nation, and having fought the imperial landlords through agrarian peasant movements before that, giving the world the very word boycott, it stands today as a tax colony of American tech in which the native young leave because of its unchecked speculative landlordism.

While its subservient relationship to the British Empire brought famine and hardship, Ireland’s subservient relationship to an American progressive tech oligarchy brought about the Celtic Tiger and as a consequence we were happy to ignore the truth of the arrangement: that we were simply passing from one form of colony to another. It will now be a second but no less bitter irony that the native Irish working class will soon find themselves in the same position as the British have — despised as reactionary by our own elites and morally and economically blackmailed into accepting their more enlightened values.

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Not all the facts fit the anti-colonialist narrative

By Remi Adekoya

Like all doomed traditions, our banal ethno-nationalism has been passively held by the majority while the intellectual and moral foundations that once justified it have been slowly replaced and degraded while nobody was paying attention. When a full confrontation with the liberal internationalism we invited in during the Celtic Tiger years inevitably happens, those foundations will already be gone and we will no longer be able to explain why having any right to a national culture or national sovereignty is anything other than racist and exclusionary.

The small conflict sparked by the Sean Russell statue was a moment of escalation. Whether it was too soon to bring the wrecking ball in or not, to make the Irish too acutely aware of what is coming, remains to be seen, but the direction of the historical winds should be obvious.

The revolutionary generation that gave us the Irish nation understood that you cannot be culturally, intellectually or economically self-directed if you’re ruled from a foreign power. These recent events have started to reveal the irreconcilable and contradictory nature of the official ideology of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, which tried to dress our colonial relationship to international capitalism as a national triumph. The Irish will soon learn that if your economy is ruled from California, your society will start to look like California, a nowhere of the very rich and very poor, but without the sunshine.