Nigel Mulligan

The Republic of Ireland as a nation is 100 years old. The embryonic roots of this nation began with the 1916 revolution; ‘the Rising’, a time of casualties and fatalities. In the post-colonial aftermath, Ireland has struggled to fully separate from England which has arguably created an anxious search for an Irish identity. Ireland has transitioned from a traditional, rural-religious society to somewhere post-modernity, where European capitalism is, arguably, the new coloniser. In this paper, through reflections on Irish revolutionaries, writers, poets and playwrights and psychoanalytic theorists’ discourses around the 1916 rebellion and significant aftermath events are explored through the imaginary eyes of “Dazzler Mulligan” , a real soldier that played a significant role in the printing of the Proclamation. This paper also investigates how the temporal logic of master signifiers in the Proclamation continues to anchor but also shape Irish identities. Lacanian discourse analysis (LDA) utilises a particular set of Freud’s psychoanalytic concepts to  explore the possible emergence of discourses in the language and also has utility in considering the effect of ideologies and to what extent the subject is established in the symbolic structures that create the conditions of possible identities.