The National Gallery of Ireland, in Dublin, has holdings from many places, some of them quite good, like the collection of paintings from the Lowlands, and also the very good “The Dublin Volunteers on College Green, 4th November 1779” wherein Francis Wheatley, a recently arrived Britisher, painted a public and historic scene. The painting flatteringly captures Irish sunshine bathing a busy urban square, people gawking out of Georgian windows at the moment that an honorary gun salute has sent clouds of smoke into the air around a statue of King William III, the smoke billowing like Rubens’ clouds. So the picture may be taken as signifying the connection of Ireland to Britain as a long time thing. Wheatley’s painting also has the slightly higher than eye-level, straight on point of view that since Poussin has given seriousness to paintings by portraying the mythic as historical. The painting was not well appreciated at the time because of what I will consider an Irish aversion to overt political paintings.

All museums answer queries that are asked and some that go unasked. The question I have is this: what is the relationship of the Irish as a people to Ireland as a nation? Ireland is a geographical entity that became an ethnic group long before that term became fashionable as well as long before Ireland struggled for national independence, which was 300 years, or more, depending on when you start the count, before it succeeded in wrestling itself from Great Britain. Ireland had been the off-shore thinking house for all of Christendom when Christendom was relatively young. The struggles with the British conquest that make up what is known as Modern Irish history created that other struggle about whether to be Irish is to be a resident of Ireland or a resident of Catholic Ireland or just connected to Irish nationalism. It is to be remembered that De Valera was an American citizen. Or else Irish ethnicity can be defined as a comic garrulousness founded in a deep sorrow which an anthropologist might trace the distinctiveness of the Irish to the lack of primogeniture or to infant swaddling practices or child rearing practices which tend towards tough love, all of these post hoc explanations in that any difference in an antecedent can be treated as the cause of a cultural difference. Whatever the explanation, the fact of the matter is that the Irish, as Kennelly has said, have moved around the world and not only made an impact on it but retained their identity, whatever became of their nation, which is now independent but had its rebellion too late to save its language or, later, its family structure and distinctive class and family structure, from Westernization.