(De)constructing Irishness in the 1990s—The Gaelic Athletic Association and Cultural Nationalist Discourse Reconsidered

Using a constructionist model of nation-ness, this paper argues that given the changes in the balance of class forces in the contemporary Irish Republic, Ireland has been re-imagined as a normal, modern, metropolitan nation-state. These discursive constructions require their backward and ‘traditional‘ other; the GAA is regularly invoked as a signifier of such traditionalism. In the representational struggle between tradition and modernity, cultural nationalism is seriously misread and scapegoated. In order to facilitate a re-reading, the paper advocates a theoretical intervention involving a critical postmodernism which can deconstruct, and ultimately move beyond, the disabling binary oppositionalism which permeates these contestations.