Memory Ireland: Computing Consciousness and Historical Coma

Even for well-informed Irish Studies scholars in the year 2010, Vincent Buckley's Memory Ireland: Insights into the Contemporary Irish Condition, makes some startling claims. A few of his 1985 pronouncements: the Irish are not religious and have not been so for some time; Buckley asserts that "while most are religious adherents and 'believers' . . . a deep basic religion, and certainly mysticism, have long been merely residues"¹ He disposes of the notion that the Irish possess any meaningful historical consciousness. Rather, they live in a frozen present," for sure what ever happens but the same old thing" (MI 1). In addition, the Irish are not communal and are really only loyal to their own immediate families although "Home is where you can't take your 'illegitimate' baby" (MI 21). Furthermore, the Irish are not nationalists in any real sense: "They have little sense of a nation, and none of a polis" (MI 50).

Where does a third-generation Irish Australian find the temerity to make such pronouncements?

Buckley is certainly conscious of his outsider status. The second sentence of his introduction offers a sort of apology (or is it an apologia?): "He, I, do not claim to have the full range of Irish virtues and vices; and I do not want to think with the extravagant evasiveness of many Irish writers and intellectuals I know" (MI vii). The glibness of the assumption not so deeply buried in Buckley's sentence introduces us to his deft ironic tone—a tone that allows him to make claims that, handled otherwise, would have produced faction fights. Buckley is extravagant, but he is assuredly not evasive.

Buckley's tone sounds like Irish wit—a charge he might enjoy. For him, Ireland is what he called a "source country," the "imagination's home," as he argues in a 1979 essay by that title. Ireland "is a source in the sense that the psyche grows from and in it, and remains profoundly attuned to it."² Memory Ireland arises out of the legacy of his source country, for such a country creates even in expatriates, "habits of perception pregnant with the language which presents them."³

Already, I can hear the immediate judgments of some Irish intellectuals concerning such remarks: they are romantic twaddle, of Australian and not Irish, provenance. Romantic ruminations about Irish ancestry are not hard to find; the 1960s radical Tom Hayden's Irish on the Inside (2001) springs quickly to mind. But Buckley cannot be so easily categorized and summarily dismissed.

Perhaps, as an Irish American, I incorrectly imagine that a defensive Irish reception must have greeted Memory Ireland. In fact, when the book appeared in 1985, two critics did present a broader range of responses than I would have guessed. In North America, Lucy McDiarmid panned Buckley's tone as "earnest and dull," convicted Buckley of the sin of name dropping, and described his emotions as "bordered in green."⁴ On the other hand, in the pages of Fortnight, out of Belfast, Terence Brown called the book "an unnervingly clear-eyed, singularly unimpressed account of our present condition."⁵

Buckley was so right to be unimpressed by what was then Ireland's present condition. The twenty-five years since Memory Ireland appeared have also revealed how right he was to perceive the spinelessness of the Irish Catholic bishops. In the political row over an abortion referendum, they "had failed in courage and in purpose" and had led some observers to wonder "whether the bishops believed anything very much at all" (MI 19). Buckley avers, moreover, that the bishops' pusillanimous behavior resembles Irish behavior in general. From failing to react to annunciating burglar alarms, to a studied indifference to the Northern "Troubles," Buckley observes a national inclination toward willed apathy: "it seemed that people preferred to be confused about what was happening, preferred not to know" (MI 78). Roddy Doyle's Henry Smart, in The Dead Republic—the aptly named third part of The Last Roundup trilogy—makes much the same claim, in a novel that ends in 2010, and thereby suggests that Buckley's judgment of the...