Thomas Davis: ‘Make Ireland a nation and you will do more for national art than if you mortgaged your estates for pictures and turned your own halls into drawing school. Make Ireland a nation and the Irish artist will feel himself a partner in your toils, your ambition and your renown; he will be nourished upon great sights and thoughts of liberated people - he will be surrounded by men vying in nationality and worshipful of national genius. He will dedicate that genius to honour the influence that inspired it.’ (quoted in The Dublin Magazine, Spring 1966, with remarks, alas for Davis’s hopes! ... from the cultural point of view Ireland is a disgrace’ (p.5).

W. B. Yeats: ‘Ireland is between the the upper and the nether millstone - between the influence of America and the influence of England, and which of the two is denationalising us more rapidly it is hard to say. Whether we have still to face a long period of struggle, or have come to the land of promise at last, we need all our central fire, all our nationality.’ ([United Irishman [14 May 1892]; quoted in Tom Paulin, Minotaur, Poetry and the Nation State, 1992, p.157; cited [in part] in Micheál Ó Suilleabháin, ‘“All Our Central Fire”: Music, mediation and the Irish Psyche’, A. Halliday & K. Coyle, eds., The Irish Journal of Psychology, ‘The Irish Psyche’ [Special Issue], Vol. 15, Nos. 2 & 3, Psychological Society of Ireland 1994, p.351; also in John McGovern, MA Diss. UUC 2002.)

James Joyce (Review of William Rooney, Poems and Ballads): ‘They are illustrative of the national temper, and because they are so the writers of the introductions do not hesitate to claim for them the highest honours. But this claim cannot be allowed, unless it is supported by certain evidences of literary sincerity. For a man who writes a book cannot be excused by his good intentions, or by his moral character; he enters into a region where there is a question of the written word, and it is well that this should be borne in mind, now that the region of literatures is assailed so fiercely by the enthusiast and the doctrine. […] And yet he may have written well if he had not suffered from one of those big words which make us so unhappy.’ (Daily Express, 11 Dec. 1902; rep. in Critical Writings, ed. Mason & Ellmann, [1959] 1965, p.85, p.87.) Arthur Griffith reprinted much of the review without comment in United Irishman, 20 Dec. 1902, adding only the word ‘Patriotism ’ in brackets after Joyce’s phrase ‘one of those big words’. (Ibid., p.84.)

Samuel Beckett: ‘What constitutes the charm of this country, apart of course from its scant population, and this without the help of the meanest contraception, is that all is derelict, with the sole exception of history’s ancient faeces. These are ardently sought after, stuffed and carried in procession. Wherever nauseated time has dropped a nice fat turd you will find our patriots, sniffing it up on all fours, their faces on fire. Elysium of the roofless.’ (First Love and Other Shorts, London: Calder 1973, pp.1-30; p.21; also cited in Colm Tóibín, ‘New Ways to Kill Your Father: Historical Revisionism’, in Karl-Heinz Westarp and Michael Böss, eds., Ireland: Towards new Identities? (Aarhus UP 1998), pp.28-36; p.34.)

Patrick Kavanagh: ‘I would say not that the so-called Irish Literary Movement which purported to be so frightfully Irish and racy of the Celtic soil was a thorough-going English-bred lie’ (Collected Pruse, 1967, p.13) Further: ‘The writers of Ireland [are] no longer Corkery and O’Connor and the others, but Auden and George Barker. Saying this is liable to make one the worst in the world, for a national literature, being based on a convention, not born of the unpredictable individual and his problems, is a vulnerable racket and is protected by fierce wild men.’ (‘Waiting for Godot’, Ibid., p.266; cited in Edna Longley, ‘From Cathleen to Anorexia’, in The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1994, 173-95, p.178-79.)

Sean O’Faolain: ‘The very history being pumped into our children in the schools and the image of life being offered to them is all alien alike to our nature and to fact. It is a complete fairy-tale [...]. The main notion of it is that we have since the dawn of our history been united there in our efforts to eject all foreign ways, peoples, manners, and customs—which is, of course, arrant nonsense. On this fancy there has been piled up a gospel of the sanctity of the West and the evil of the East, the generative power and utter purity of all native custom and tradition, as handed down by an army of, mainly legendary, saints and heroes; a thirst for not only what little remains of this custom and tradition but the revival of what of it is actually dead or obsolescent; a drive towards authoritarianism to enforce these ideas and a censorship of cold-blooded economic pressure [...]. This farrago is called Nationalism. [...] (“The Stuffed Shirts”, The Bell, June 1943; rep. in Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Derry 1991, pp. 101-7.)

Francis Stuart: ‘National literature is to my mind a meaningless term. Literature can’t be national. Literature is individual. Nationality has nothing to do with it.’ (Cited in Gerry Smyth, The Novel and the Nation: Studies in New Irish Fiction, London: Pluto 1997, cp.15.)

Seamus Heaney (on Irish literature and culture today): ‘Further, ‘empowered within its own horizons, it looks out but does not necessarily look up to the metropolitan centres. Its impulses and possibilities abound within its boundaries but are not limited by them. It is self-sufficient but not self-absorbed, capable of thought, undaunted, pristine, spontaneous, a corrective to the inflations of nationalism, and the cringe of provincialism.’ (Preoccupations, 1980, pp.131-149).