As the century concludes, a group of Ireland's cultural arbiters are preoccupied with this country's past. They seek to ensure that traditional forms of music, dance, poetry and theatre are preserved and celebrated. They look with disquiet on what are perceived to be pernicious outside influences which may do irreparable damage to indigenous art forms. And they consistently look backwards for inspiration.
This was the state of affairs in Ireland at the end of the 19th century, but the same description could be used today, because over the past 100 years precious little has changed. In particular, as a new millennium approaches its existence is barely noticed, since the country remains enthralled by history. While other countries keenly look to the future, Ireland continues to haunt her own past.
The outcome is that Modernism has yet to make much of an impact here, even though its central tenets were formulated in the very first decades of the 20th century. It is no accident that Ireland's two great modernist writers, Joyce and Beckett, both lived and worked outside this country. Had they remained here, they would probably have become as enmeshed in the past as everyone else. Compare what was happening elsewhere in Europe in the 1890s with Ireland's cultural life at the time. In Italy, the aptly-named Futurists were beginning to respond to the imminence of a new century, in France Cezanne and the post-Impressionists prepared the way for Cubism the following decade, Jarry's Ubu Roi of 1896 heralded the dawn of the theatre of the absurd, just as Wedekind's Pandora's Box a few years later proposed an entirely new form of drama. Alternatively, there were the mystical verse plays of Maurice Maeterlinck, whose ideas were echoed by his fellow-Belgian Symbolist painters. The Secessionist school appeared in Vienna, while Munich was home to Richard Strauss whose Also sprach Zarathustra was first performed in 1896; Schoenberg's Verklarte Nacht followed three years later. In England, the cult of decadence was at its height, aided by the publication of John Lane's Yellow Book with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. Across Europe, there seems to have been a palpable sense of excitement at the idea of a new century and the changes it might bring. Except, that is, for Ireland, where the past remained a favourite, if not the only, source of inspiration. The same selective moments of history were cannibalised by artists who preferred to glance backwards rather than confront the present or even the future. The cultural arbiters of the time such as W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory turned eagerly to certain moments of the country's past such as 1798 (with their play Cathleen Ni Houlihan from 1902) which continue to be in vogue. Then as now, the end of the century was marked by a disinterment of the past. Fin de siecle Ireland was characterised by the Celtic revival in which everything from furniture to clothing was given what were believed to be traditional Irish ornamentation. The same circular, entwining forms, bastardised offspring of the Book of Kells and its like, still turn up with unimaginative regularity on any item which is felt to require a stamp of Irish authenticity. Similarly, bands such as The Corrs drop in bitesized morsels of traditional Irish music to give an undemanding ethnic quality to their performances.
PARTICULARLY disconcerting is the fact that over the past century, such pastiche has remained consistently preferable to the authentic. In housing, for example, neo-Georgian design finds more supporters than does the preservation of original 18th-century properties. Round towers continue to be built, famine ships reconstructed, heritage centres opened. At the same time, much that is truly old suffers from persistent neglect. The new constructions can only ever be sanitised versions of the originals, no matter how authentic in appearance. Of course, it could be argued that constant reference to and reverence for the past is now a universal phenomenon in Europe and not exclusive to Ireland. In most matters of design recently, there has been a pillaging of the past, whether for 1950s furniture or 1970s fashion. In matters of style, retro-taste is chic at the moment, as old sources are ransacked and reordered to meet the demands of a temporary fad. But in Ireland, interest in the past is permanent, not transitory and of a highly selective nature. Riverdance, Ireland's most successful theatrical presentation at the end of the 20th century, represents perfectly this preference for the doctored past over the real present; it toys with Irish cultural history but only in a carefully homogenised format which avoids any real engagement with the subject. Ironically, the traditional Irish art form which Riverdance exploits was itself a late 19th-century reinvention of something still older, so at least there is consistency in this obsessive return to the previous eras.
"The past is a foreign country", wrote L.P. Hartley, but he could not have been referring to Ireland where the past is more familiar, more examined and more cherished than the present. History here is a comfort blanket to which the Irish repeatedly return for reassurance. The history does not even need to be especially glorious; in Ireland, past failure is as much cherished as success. What does this mean for the approaching millennium? Given the ongoing and allengrossing interest in Ireland's past, there would appear to be little enough curiosity about the future. Most of the proposals for marking the new millennium - such as reroofing the cathedral on Cashel's rock - display a predilection for acknowledging what has been rather than what might yet be. The year 2000 may be an arbitrary date, just as was 1900, but it provides a symbolic opportunity to look ahead, not behind. At the moment, Ireland seems indifferent to the millennium primarily because the present is barely investigated. This century will be remembered as being too preoccupied with the past to have left a legacy of its own.
The past is an all too familiar country: high crosses and round towers proliferate, while our most renowned cultural product, Riverdance, is rooted in pastiche