A mock customs post is set up at Ravensdale, Co Louth, as anti-Brexit campaigners highlight concerns about the impact on trade, February, 2017. Niall Carson/Press Association. All rights reserved.
Ireland was described by the French writer Jean Blanchard in 1958 as “an island behind an island”. The phrase has regularly been used since then to indicate Ireland’s peripherality in British and European terms. As Theresa May invokes Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty this week, Ireland is determined not to be caught in another pincer of peripherality between Europe and Britain. Ireland is determined not to be caught in another pincer of peripherality between Europe and Britain.
Ireland’s political, economic and cultural dependence on Britain that continued after formal independence started in the 1920s was only really reversed in the decades after both states joined the European communities in the 1970s. Ireland’s political elites and mass publics experienced that opening of horizons as a liberation from a suffocating post-colonial intimacy with its large neighbour.
