This essay engages with the work of playwright Tom Murphy and suggests
that Murphy synthesizes the dialectic between past and present by
representing history as a process of story-telling, where hegemonic Catholic
bourgeois nationalist history is contradicted by repressed discourses of
class and gender. The aim is to move beyond a reading of Irish theatre
grounded in identitarian paradigms of nation and nationalism, towards
an engagement with ethical issues of class and gender subordination which
are as much a part of Irish cultural politics as the nation is or ever was.