the helpfulness of a post-colonial vision for the island of Ireland,
resenting ‘intellectual holiday romances in a post-colonial never-never
land’.
Longley prefers to compare Ireland with Bosnia and quotes the
Croats calling themselves ‘the Ulster of Yugoslavia’.^7 It is worth
unpicking why Longley turns to the Bosnian rather than the post-
colonial comparison. There are other unstable and divided states in
Europe including Northern and Southern Italy, Eastern and Western
Germany, and the Basque country of Spain that Longley ignores.
Using the Bosnian example, her comment builds on the idea of Europe
as a tortured place of ethnic and religious conflict, and in so doing, she
ignores the colonial dimension of the war in the North of Ireland.
Longley’s connection between Bosnia and Belfast avoids a more
obvious colonial comparison between Ireland and South Africa, thus
evading the colonial status of the North of Ireland and a history of
imperialist invasion.^8
At a broader level, Northern critics including Colin Graham have
problematized post-colonial strategies of decolonization by asking
how far nationalist disengagement from colonialism is in danger of
reiterating colonial structures. Putting essentialist constructions of
national identity under pressure, Graham identifies problems with
founding a national identity on a negation of stereotypes originating in
colonialist discourse. Likewise, Seamus Deane describes the way in
which the cultural nationalism of the Irish Literary Revival,
particularly that of W.B. Yeats, celebrated the positive attributes of
the Celt so as to provide an answer to the view of ‘the Celt’ which is
found in Matthew Arnold’s essay, ‘The Incompatibles’ (1878–81).
7 Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland
(Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1994), p.61.
8 There are further problems with Longleyís comparison between former
Yugoslavia and the North of Ireland. First, the conflict between religious
groups in the former Yugoslavia was not a conflict within Christianity as in the
North of Ireland, but a war between Greek Orthodox Serbs, Muslim Bosnians
and Catholic Croatians. Second, unlike Ireland, Croatia and Slovenia could
claim independence fairly easily because the ethnic population largely matched
the state and there was only a very small ethnic minority in each country. Cf.
Table stating numbers of different ethnic populations in Croatia and Serbia in
Gerald Segal, ëThe New Europeí, The World Affairs Companion: The Essential
One Volume Guide to Global Issues (London: Simon and Schuster, 1987,
1991), p.158.