I don’t know about that, it’s a very interesting discussion to be eavesdropping on.

Conor,

It’s clear that your stuff has nothing to do with what we might call lit-crit post-colonialism. As I’ve said above, I think there were definitely colonial aspects to the relationship with Britain, and the economics were a huge part of it, but that the nature of Irish society and of Ireland’s place within the Empire - economically, politically and organisationally - still makes me nervous about characterising the whole situation as one of a colony.

But deindustrialisation in NI is not an episode, but a trend, that stretches all the way back to Partition, with a few interludes. Large-scale capital owned in NI has been eliminated, compared to Britain. (The FTSE 100 companies alone had market cap of over £4trn at the beginning of the year, now higher, and there are no NI equivalents). That is, swamped by larger entitities, obsolescence, lack of investment and sacrificed by deindustrialisation, NI looks increasingly like a dependent colony, rather than the equal partner of the WWI. The lack of foreign trade with all but the colonial power is both a sign and a key mechanism of that relationship.

http://www.irishleftreview.org/2010/04/29/100-years-date-toryuup-joint-election-manifesto/#comment-49378

A lot of Irish colonial discourse completely ignores class, and for good reason on its part - namely the existence of the Irish comprador class - so I’d share your criticisms. I don’t feel any urge to defend current Irish colonial and post-colonial studies because I don’t see what I am doing as part of what they are doing - as far as I can see they’re about making the Irish middle classes feel good about themselves by making out they’re the victims. At the same time, it is analytical lunacy to ignore the overwhelming evidence for the colonial relationship between Ireland and Britain both pre and post partition, simply because the Irish middle classes think a close reading of a poem by Yeats gets them off the hook for mass emigration and the industrial schools.

The colonial model as frequently used sets Britain up against Ireland, and is saturated with nationalist rhetoric, and such a clumsy tool neglects the development of the Catholic middle class in the 19th c, particularly around agriculture - for obvious reasons - who acted as middlemen for the production of raw material in Ireland and the exportation of same to Britain. It’s this class, whose economic power is directly related to the colonial relationship, which gets to set economic policy in the Free State, and it is through them that the colonial relationship gets to remain in place after partition.

I suppose the easiest way to counter the efficiency argument is to ask why the Shorthorn was used for milk production in Ireland. Why did a breed of cattle that is good for meat, but not great for milk, end up as the staple of the milk industry? what’s efficient about that? The answer in part has to do with the system of production which grew up around cattle, where small farmers bred cattle primarily for the ranchers, with the shorthorn marketed as a dual-use animal when in fact a much more efficient system would have had beef breeds for beef production, and milk breeds for milk production. It’s a bit like using broilers for eggs.

By which I meant that the choices made by Irish agrarian capitalists, going back to the later C18th, were pretty much rational ones maximising their economic advantage. Certainly, there are cases of industries being cut back by British interference, but I think there’s a case to be made that the development of large sectors of the Irish economy would have looked pretty much the same. Never mind the advantages derived by Ulster from membership of the Union.

I have doubts about the colonial model as an accurate description of society within Ireland (especially where people draw lazy comparisons to countries where colour was a fundamental difference), although clearly there were colonial, and later neo-colonial, aspects to the relationship with Britain. I also worry it denies the large elements of agency involved, and makes the Irish experience more exceptional in European terms than it was.