In Towards 2000 Raymond Williams considered a socialist future in which old notions of territory and sovereignty might be undone. Francis Mulhern justly observes that, although the significant societies of today are either larger or smaller than the nation-state, it nonetheless persists as the site of despatch. Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, more and more nations have clamoured for the right to recognition which is embodied in some form of state. This is but one sense in which Mulhern’s present lasts a long time. The current situation persists, but only as a travesty of William’s imagined future. The most one can do is survey the botched narrative with pessimism of intellect, optimism of will. Such stoicism makes for a remarkable diagnostic coherence in these disparate essays, which trace the history of intellectuals in many places, most notably Britain and Ireland.

If some things never change, others have been transformed beyond recognition. Over the past three decades the welfare state in Britain has been dismantled as a touchstone of political legitimacy, much as the teaching authority of the Catholic Church has been shattered in the Republic of Ireland. That analogy is not as far-fetched as it might seem, since the Church was used by an impoverished, insecure state to provide social services and thus a political stability beyond that state’s own material potential: but Mulhern prefers to think of Irish clericalism as uniformly reactionary. He emigrated to Britain just before a gospel of liberation theology was imported back to Ireland by nuns, priests and lay workers. He has accordingly slender knowledge of the ways in which his own devastating critique of Celtic Tiger economics has been endorsed by those clergy who form the core of current oppositional thought in Ireland. Instead, he must write that ‘the oppressive clericalism of official Southern culture has confirmed, by negation, the value of development in itself, the general critical appeal of the “modern”.’ That sentence might still say something valid about the conservative nostra of Northern Irish Catholicism (whose archbishop recently denounced the speaking of eulogies by lay persons at funerals) but it would hardly fit the Southern community which, as far back as 1972, voted to remove references to the special position of the Catholic Church from its Constitution.

The truth is that the island has long been a two-stroke society: and it is in Northern rather than Southern Ireland that the present lasts longest of all. With the ceasefires by the IRA, there is at last the chance of reopening the civil rights agenda of 1968—a thing worth doing, for which Mulhern advances a strong case here. But meanwhile, in the South, a strange version of the revolution longed for by Williams has already been achieved, two years short of 2000. In May 1998 over 94 percent of the electorate in the Republic voted to endorse the Belfast Agreement, which effectively overrode the 1937 Constitution from that moment on. In doing so, the people did what no other people in modern history has done: for the sake of good relations with their Unionist neighbours on the island, they voted to reduce the extent of their national territory, rescinding the claim made in 1937 on six northern counties. If constitutions are written in the language of the nineteenth century, revolving around concepts of sovereignty and boundaries, this was a gesture out of the twenty-first century, a recognition that identities are overlapping and dialogic and that it is now possible to be ‘Irish or British or both’. One of the problems faced by the framers of the Belfast Agreement is that there is no readily available language in which to give legal expression to these insights other than the constitutional discourses of the nineteenth century: but they did their best in the circumstances. Other eventualities may flow from their formulation: the possibility that people in Northern Ireland might vote representatives to the Dáil as well as Westminster and even, in due time, remit taxes to their chosen state.