IRELAND
Irish Central

Cahir O’Doherty @randomirish January 19,2015

One of the most distinguishing characteristics of Irish life is caution. We have learned to tread carefully everywhere. It’s probably a legacy of 800 years of colonialism, which have shown us that you can’t be too careful in a small country.

It’s caution about what might take its place that prevents much needed social and political reforms from happening in Ireland at the pace they do on the European continent. We seem to prefer being stuck with a host of familiar problems in preference to tackling a host of new ones.

All that abundance of caution has a price: paralysis.

Paralysis was the word James Joyce used to describe the state of turn of the century Ireland, and it is suddenly in vogue again. The social and political fault lines that Joyce discerned in “The Dead” have altered, but the tentative,…