Irish culture is burdened by an apprehension of its discontinuity that recurs as rhythmically as the pulsations of the unconscious, irrupting periodically and in relation to the most diverse phenomena with all the force of unfinished business. This apprehension is as old as the effort to forge a nation and a tradition that could unify a people divided by sect and national origin and by an ongoing historical violence of which the memory was, if Ernest Renan's famous formulation on the nation and forgetting is to be credited, too alive to permit a redemptive narrative of integration and unity. The succession of conquests and catastrophes lacked what one Young Ireland leader called “the unity and purpose of an epic poem.” In comparison to the apparently continuous evolution of the British constitution, as it was rendered in both Whig and Burkean histories, Ireland's story seems one characterized by rupture and antagonism:

One hundred years after partial decolonization, as commemoration hesitates on the brink of summoning the ghosts of civil war and partition, whose legacy remains the unresolved matter of the present, charged with restive memories and the potential for resurgent violence, Ireland remains haunted by the absence of a continuous narrative and a “common story.”

That haunting may be—again, like the rhythmic pulsations of the unconscious—an effect produced precisely by the desire to let the past go, to “move on” from or repress the divisive and unresolved traumas of the past. As Renan saw, the memory of past violence, as much as the recurrence of violence in the present, troubles the legitimacy of any nation state whose foundations inevitably lie in that violence.