The Legacy of the Empire as a Pandora’s Box in Today’s Irish Society and Culture

The title quotes what Linda Colley once said about the legacy of the British Empire. By alluding to the myth of Pandora, she highlighted the difficulties confronting scholars investigating the multifaceted history of the Empire and its enduring, yet ambivalent, impact since its establishment – all of this adopting a markedly British perspective. In my paper, instead, I argue that shedding light on the legacy of the Empire implies opening a Pandora’s box also when the focus is on the Irish context and, specifically, on Ireland’s own collusion with Empire. I will not look at Ireland as England’s first colony and ‘laboratory’, where racist/imperialist ideologies were formulated and then exported to the far outposts; on the contrary, I intend to show how contemporary Irish society and culture are coming to terms with the country’s imperial past, bringing to light the stories of the Irish who operated as empire-builders. In particular, my interests lie with Ireland’s and the Irish’s colonial complicity in establishing the profitable institution of slavery, which I will investigate by looking at the novels The Ballad of Lord Edward and Citizen Small by film director Neil Jordan (2021) and Words to Shape My Name by debutant Laura McKenna (2021). Both novels, based on the same true historical facts, narrate the untold story of the allyship between Irish revolutionary Lord Edward Fitzgerald and former slave Tony Small, and have received mixed reviews. My intention is to analyse these novels against the background of the critiques they received and the debate they sparked, which are part of a broader discussion on Ireland’s imperial legacy and role in the slave trade. Arguably, the internal contradictions of the novels, which put forward apparent anti-colonial and anti-racist perspectives, and the polemics surrounding them mirror the sharp divisions marring Irish society today on the topic of Ireland’s imperial past as a perpetrator of colonial aggression.