Raising the Green Curtain: Sean O’Faolain, Edward Said and the Defence of the Public Intellectual.

Abstract

This article primarily aims to highlight the importance, in the current context, of revalorizing the figure of the p1ublic intellectual. The current crisis can be interpreted as not only economic but also intellectual and in the light of this I revisit, and suggest as exemplary, Sean O’Faolain and Edward Said. Specifically, a Saidian “close reading” (Said 2004: 62) is undertaken of the public intervention of O’Faolain in relation to a 1950s controversy in Ireland around the issue of Church influence in the public sphere. I read O’Faolain’s polemic “On a Recent Incident at the International Affairs Association” in dialogue with the ideas on the public intellectual outlined in Said’s Reith Lectures and with the conceptual vocabulary of the Palestinian intellectual, so participating in the broader debate of Ireland in relation to postcolonial critique.