Colin Graham & Willy Maley, ‘Introduction: Irish Studies and Postcolonial Theory’, pp.149-152.
There is a resistance to theory on the part of some ‘nationalist’, ‘liberal’, and revisionist’ critics when theory is perceived as challenging their own views or supporting those of critics with different views. The ways in which the postcolonial has been caught up in these pre-existing debates has both promoted and stifled postcolonial theory’s Irish existence so far. (p.150).

Ironically, Ireland, so susceptible to binaries, undoes the double bind of the West and the rest. Postcolonialism is primarily concerned with understandings of fringes and hinges, intellectual as well as political, conceptual as well as cultural. The connotations of poscolonialism, in its immediate offering of connections with “other” anti-colonial/poscolonial histories, can all too easily and reasuringly occlude its central usefulness in providing a detailed outline and set of critical modes in which the meeting of powerful and disempowered cultural formations interact, define themselves, and are recognised by each other. / It is through this model, a focus on the structures of postcolonial theory rather than its pre-existing politics, that we can see how to achieve a mocve away from fixity towards fluidity, from identity to difference, from dogma to dialogue. (p.151.)

Bibl., Claire Connolly, ‘Postcolonial ireland, Hyperreal Europe: Irish studies: The Postcolonial Debate’, in The European Messenger, 7, 1 (1998).

Gerry Smyth, ‘Irish Studies, Postcolonial Theory and the “New” Essentialism’, pp.211-220
‘[…] comparing Declan Kiberd’s 1984 essay “Inventing Irelands” with his blockbusting Inventing Ireland published just over a decade later.In the earlier piece Kiberd emerged as a fierce opponent of that version of nationalism which at the time was still colouring every aspect of post-Partition Ireland. It was in this context that he criticised Yeats’s [214] continuing hold on the Irish imagination (as well as academia’s support of that hold), and the derivatiness of those nationalists who ‘found nothing better to do with their new freedom than to duplicate the British system. (‘Inventing Irelands’, p.21). In this manner he invoked (albeit non-systematically) an argument that would become postcolonial orthodoxy later in the decade. / As revisionism began to register in Irish life throughout the 1980s, however, Kiberd has been forced to backtrack somewhat so that his angry queries from within the fold are not mistaken for an assault from without. The analysis of (pp.614-23), in the later text, for example takes place in the contexst of revisionsist critiques (for which he was partly responsible) which see Friel’s work as symptomatic of Field Day’s misguided nostalgia. [214]. ‘Here and throughout the volume, Kiberd is in fact forced to walk a very thin line between disavowal and identification: disavowal of the misconceptions and blindspots of that particular form of Irishness which emerged from (or as a result of) the revolutionary period; identification with the fundamental aims of the revolutionary project itself. As a consequence, Inventing Ireland takes as its focus not what is wrong with nationalism but what went wrong with the irish version of nationalism, and what cause the misprisions and mirecognitions that so blighted the post-revolutionary era [...] his essentialism is not so much strategic as pragmatic.’ (p.214-15)

Smyth writes, ‘I would suggest that we recognise the cycle of irony and commitment as a peculiar effect of post-Enlightenment theoretical discourse, and move on.’