I was recently talking with an Irishman from Galway who told me that he "hated Guinness," by which he meant that he hated the marketing of Guinness as representing Ireland.
This made me think: if one wished to put other goods forward for export as representing Ireland, what could one put forward? This in turn reminded me of the following passage from James Joyce's Ulysses: "Where are our missing twenty millions of Irish should be here today instead of four, our lost tribes? And our potteries and textiles, the finest in the whole world! And our wool that was sold in Rome in the time of Juvenal and our flax and our damask from the looms of Antrim and our Limerick lace, our tanneries and our white flint glass down there by Ballybough and our Huguenot poplin that we have since Jacquard de Lyon and our woven silk and our Foxford tweeds and ivory raised point from the Carmelite convent in New Ross, nothing like it in the whole wide world. Where are the Greek merchants that came through the pillars of Hercules, the Gibraltar now grabbed by the foe of mankind, with gold and Tyrian purple to sell in Wexford at the fair of Carmen? Read Tacitus and Ptolemy, even Giraldus Cambrensis. Wine, peltries, Connemara marble, silver from Tipperary, second to none, our farfamed horses even today, the Irish hobbies, with king Philip of Spain offering to pay customs duties for the right to fish in our waters. What do the yellowjohns of Anglia owe us for our ruined trade and our ruined hearths?" So here are my economic questions about this passage: - which of the descriptions of economic activity in the tirade are historical, and which of them are Joyce's rhetorical flourish, poking fun at Irish nationalism? - which of the historical economic activities described are still going propositions? - which of the historical economic activities described could be revived or expanded today? P.S. Apparently "the Carmelite convent in New Ross" is still producing stuff for sale: http://www.carmelitesnewross.com/news.html -- Robert Naiman Policy Director Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org [email protected] _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
