Decommissioning Masculinities

The optimism that greeted the successful referendum to approve the Belfast/Good Friday AgreementBelfast/Good Friday Agreement marked a discursive shift in the politics and culture of Northern Ireland. The peace was described in terms that reflected the dominance of cultural liberalism as an antidote to the seemingly irresolvable conflict between Nationalist and Unionist aspirations. Respect for differences in identity was the focus of contemporaneous political and cultural commentary. Roy FosterFoster, Roy, perhaps Ireland’s David most prominent historian, conceptualised the peace accord as a triumph of a ‘flexible, outward-looking and pluralist answer to the question of defining an Irish person’ over ‘the voice of the flat-earther, Orange and Green’ (FosterFoster, Roy 1998). For Fintan O’TooleO’Toole, Fintan, leading commentator and drama critic for the Irish Times, support for the Agreement across the island showed: ‘All that is left of Ireland is an extraordinary openness’. (O’TooleO’Toole, Fintan 2000b). The theatre in Ireland was regarded as one index of this change. According to O’TooleO’Toole, Fintan, playwrights had moved away from exploring the issue of national unity, whether lost or recovered, to the ‘dramatisation of the fragments’ and ‘isolated pieces of a whole story that no one really knows’ (O’TooleO’Toole, Fintan 2000a). This fragmentation of nationalist images, myths, and narratives implicated the gender norms cultivated to support them. Ireland’sIreland, David embodiment on stage ‘was no longer John B. Keane’s proud, confident, dangerous Bull McCabe, but Sebastian Barry’s odd, sad, comic, encircled Boss Grady’s Boys, imagining themselves as foot-soldiers in Custer’s Last Stand’ (O’TooleO’Toole, Fintan O’Toole, Fintan, ‘Play for Ireland’, Irish Times (Dublin, 12 February 2000), p. 63). In this account, drama underwrote a new political reality in which pluralist conceptions of belonging rendered military masculinities redundant, lost in nostalgia for a time when their heroic exploits were symbolically central to the state.