In that most searing exploration
of the Irish psyche, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night,
James Tyrone urges his ghostlike wife: “Mary! For God’s sake, forget the
past!”
Mary Tyrone, “with strange objective calm”, replies: “Why? How can I? The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too.” In Ireland, we don’t live in the past – but the past lives in us.