In addition, nationalist disengagement from the colonial is in danger
of reiterating colonial structures of oppression as Irish women become
victims of the legislation of the Irish Free State. The newly
independent state repeats the master/slave dialectic whereby, in order
for the emerging nation to construct an identity, women become the
‘others’ of the new society. This is noticed by the Protestant critic,
Carol Coulter, who argues in her pamphlet Ireland: Between the First
and the Third Worlds (1990) that
many other elements which were undoubtedly present in Irish nationalism ñ not
just at the level of ideology, but expressed in the living people ñ ranging from
socialism and feminism to religious scepticism and various forms of mysticism,
were defeated and their adherents marginalised or forced to keep their dissident
views to themselves.^13As Uri Lotman has suggested, a national culture requires unity, the
introduction of order and the elimination of contradictions.^14
But as the Dublin poet Paula Meehan indicates, ‘Irishness’ is
fractured by gender and class struggles as well as by religion and race.
Mysteries of the Home (1991) writes of ‘ordinary people’ including
the ‘Woman Found Dead Behind Salvation Army Hostel’: ‘the purple,
the eerie green of her bruises,/ the garish crimson of her broken
mouth.’^15 Alternatively, Rita Ann Higgins’s collection Witch in the
Bushes (1988) contains poems about domestic violence, such as ‘It
Wasn’t the Father’s Fault’ and ‘She Is Not Afraid of Burglars’, where
children and even the family dog are represented as victims of
patriarchal abuse. Other poems by Higgins demonstrate how Irish
national experience is hardly cohesive but riddled with rifts between
citizens. ‘It’s All Because We’re Working Class’ addresses the
concerns of ‘Some People’, where there are some who ‘know what it’s
like’ ‘to be in hospital unconscious for the rent man’ or ‘to be dead for
13 Carol Coulter, Ireland: Between the First and the Third Worlds (Dublin: LIP,
Attic, 1990), p.7.
14 Uri Lotman, ëOn The Semiotic Mechanism of Cultureí, New Literary History,
Vol. IX, No.2, pp.227.
15 Paula Meehan, ëArd Fheisí and ëWoman Found Dead Behind Salvation Army
Hostelí, Mysteries of the Home (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1991, 1996), pp.14ñ5,
p.34.