This paper examines how the key 20th Century, Irish public intellectual,
Sean O’Faolain, elaborates what we can term an “imaginative geography”
in relation to the problematic issue of religious identity and its relationship
to the universities in Ireland in the decades following independence. Using
particularly the critical vocabulary of Edward Said around the tropes of
exile and counterpoint, I will examine how O’Faolain deals with sectarian
clashes in order to map a public space of democratic engagement in
which strategies akin to Said’s idea of secularity, and appropriate to his
“unhoused” model of intellectual participation in society, are employed to
negotiate shifting, interconnected paths between the universities and religions.
From such strategies we can adduce suggestive “secular,” spatial
paradigms of consciousness which are neither moulded to fit in with the
stasis of rural “authenticity” nor perpetually in desperate and always
urgent pursuit of “mature,” non-contradictory and ultimately metropolitan
identity.
