The magic word “colonisation” is today being weaponised to beat whole nations into acknowledging how appallingly immoral their entire history is. On the air and in lecture theatres, the youth of the Western world’s future learns that every last one of their forebears was nothing but an irredeemable racist bigot.

This perhaps has a sliver of credibility for Americans and British. But for the Irish? How many colonies did they have? None! They were a colony themselves, of the British Empire, arguably their most longstanding and most oppressed one.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Ireland’s greatest ever poet, W.B. Yeats, winning his much-deserved Nobel Prize for Literature, but many contemporary Irish writers, sharing the same deracinated, globalist mindset of the likes of their current transnationalism-obsessed Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, now appear to dislike the suddenly "problematic" poet’s work immensely, as a point of purest principle.    

One of the ways the British Empire tried to deracinate the Irish people was by banning and then substituting their native Gaelic tongue with the English language instead. Accordingly, during the lead-up to eventual independence from Britain in 1922, many nationalistically minded Irish writers and artists co-opted the language of the colonisers itself to play its ironic part in fostering a coherent sense of Irish national self-consciousness prior to casting off all imperialist chains.

The key figure here was the above-mentioned great Anglo-Irish poet, playwright and mystic W.B. Yeats, who sought to forge an articulate and inspiring national literature for the Irish by patching together their history, myth, folklore and heroes into one great intelligible tapestry. Then, when asked what it meant to be Irish, his countrymen could respond by citing tales of mythological heroes like Cuchulain, real-life revolutionary heroes like Wolf Tone, ancient native goddesses like Brigid, or supernatural entities like the sidhe (Irish fairy-folk), as handy means to define themselves imaginatively against their English colonisers.

Considered in a certain sense, Yeats’ works were the poems that helped win Irish independence: that is certainly how they were taught in Irish schools up until very recently. But, in our current woke age, how much longer will this still remain the case? Is the anti-colonial W.B. Yeats now about to be cancelled… in the name of anti-colonialism?

She hates Yeats

Irish literature is supposedly undergoing a massive renaissance these days, with novels by leftish young Irishwomen winning plaudits, prizes and high sales figures across the English-speaking world. Yet, are these novels really Irish, in any meaningful sense of the term? Solipsistic, agonised, over-analytical tales of generic urban and sexual angst, this brand of millennial Mills & Boon could effectively be set anywhere across the technocratic post-Christian Western world, not necessarily in Dublin or Cork, if only you altered the characters’ surnames.

The prime example of this rarified species, of course, is Sally Rooney, a self-confessed Marxist whose book Normal People, about a pair of abnormally self-absorbed teenage lovers, seems to have won her fame for life. I can’t say I have absorbed any of Rooney’s texts myself (I prefer reading books), but they appear paradigms of the whole dismal genre. In 2017, during an interview with the Irish Independent prior to the release of Conversations With Friends, her debut non-novel about people talking to each other about themselves endlessly, as such people often do, miserable-faced Ms Rooney made headlines after detailing her dislike of W.B. Yeats thus:

“Sally Rooney is apoplectic. She squirms in her seat, hands flapping in disgust, and doesn’t mince her words. ‘I hate Yeats!’ she shrieks. ‘A lot of his poems are not very good but some are obviously okay. But how has he become this sort of emblem of literary Irishness when he was this horrible man? He was a huge fan of Mussolini, [so was Lenin] he was really into fascism, he believed deeply in the idea of a ‘noble class’ who are superior by birth to the plebs … He wasn’t just this harmless weirdo who wrote poetry. People misinterpret him in this country, and when we’re taught about him in school, it’s just hagiography.’”

And there you have it: the authentic voice of modern "literary" Ireland – or of non-literary non-Ireland, I should perhaps say. Doesn’t Sally Rooney herself, rather like liberal ruling-caste politicians such as Leo Varadkar and his ilk, think she belongs to a contemporary, non-aristocratic “noble class” who “are superior by birth to the plebs” too, though?

Normal people (must be ignored)

In a 2019 New Yorker interview, for instance, Rooney spoke superciliously of how, despite not even having a vote on the issue, when it came to the UK’s 2016 Brexit referendum, “I was Remain, like any sensible person.” If moral snobs like Rooney had represented Ireland’s cultural elite back in the years leading up to 1922, I wonder if Ireland would ever have gained her independence from foreign rule at all.