IRELAND
Irish Times

Fintan O’Toole

In that most searing exploration of the Irish psyche, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, James Tyrone urges his ghostlike wife: “Mary! For God’s sake, forget the past!”

Mary Tyrone, “with strange objective calm”, replies: “Why? How can I? The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too.”

In Ireland, we don’t live in the past – but the past lives in us.

The abusive relationship between church, State and society may, like the dead babies that have haunted us in recent weeks, be buried beneath the surface of our postmodern globalised reality.
But its consequences still lurk in our bloodstream and until we understand them, the past will be our present and our future too.