"Anyway, by the time I had more or less adjusted myself to the life about me, it suddenly broke in on me that Ireland had not adjusted herself to the life about her in the least little bit. Irishmen in general were still thinking about themselves, or rather, in their usual way, double-thinking or squint-thinking about themselves, in terms of dawns, and ands, and buts, and onwards, and dew, and dusk, while at the same time making a lot of good, hard cash to the evocative vocabulary of tariff, tax, protection, quota, levy, duties or subsidies, meanwhile carefully compiling a third and wholly different literary style (pious, holy, prudent, sterling, gorsoons, lassies, maidens, sacred, traditional, forefathers, mothers, grandmothers, ancestors, deep-rooted, olden, venerable, traditions, Gaelic, timeworn and immemorial) to dodge more awkward social, moral and political problems than any country might, with considerable courage, hope to solve in a century of ruthless thinking. This ambivalence, once perceived, demanded a totally new approach. I have been trying to define it ever since. For, as long as we were all in a splendidly romantic-idealist fervour about Ireland we could all write romantically, or idealistically, about Ireland, as Sean O'Casey did. (He is sometimes called and probably thinks himself a realist but he is actually the biggest old romantic we ever produced.) Or if we were being realistic we could write in the realist tradition. But for any kind of realist to write about people with romantic souls is a most tricky and difficult business [.]
"[...] [W]hen it comes to writing about people who, like the Irish of our day, combine beautiful, palpitating tea-rose souls with hard, coolly calculating heads, there does not seem to be any way at all of writing about them except satirically or angrily. Once a writer's eye gets chilly about their beautiful souls he becomes like the only sober man at a drunken party, and the only decent thing for him to do then is either to get blind drunk with the rest of the boys (all singing in chorus, 'I'll take you home again, Kathl-ee-eeen') or else to go home and scrub himself clean in a raging satire on the whole boiling lot of them."
-- Sean O'Faolain, from "Foreword." Selected Stories of Sean O'Faolain. Penguin 1970. p.11-12.
