Paradigms of Irishness for Young People in Dublin

The history of Ireland highlights how Irish identity has proved to be both an emotive and divisive force in Irish society. Events in both pre and post-independent Ireland point out how central Irishness has been within Irish society and also highlights how a sense of national identity has often been assumed as shared, natural and fundamentally taken for granted. Accepting that hegemonic understandings of Irishness change, so in 1900 ¿ when Ireland was of course part of the United Kingdom ¿ the dominant sense of Irishness may differ to that of 1971 or 2004, there can be no avoiding the position that people in Ireland remain firmly socialised through a discourse of nationalised identity. The aim of this book is to investigate how young people engage with this nationalised identity and position their own self-understandings of Irishness.