Sarah Brouillette Struggle tourism and Northern Ireland’s culture industries: the case of Robert McLiam Wilson Northern Ireland’s continuing political volatility has encouraged conflict- ing interpretations of its cultural development. Recently some scholars have begun to emphasize a transition from nationalist cultural production to a more liberal and transnational literary practice in both the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. In the Republic the triumph of a new transnational politics is often associated with Mary Robinson’s presidential election. Its inauguration is dated back to the 1958 ‘watershed’ initiation of Sean Lemass and T. K. Whittaker’s First Programme for Economic Expan- sion, followed by the establishment of an Anglo-Irish free trade area in 1965, ridding Ireland of its former protectionist policies and opening it to foreign capital investment. 1 Joe Cleary points to Robinson’s election as the culmination of a process underway since this time, which entailed Ireland pursuing ‘a policy of dependent development that involved the assiduous courting of multinational, mostly American, investment and the political integration of the country into the European Community’. 2 Robinson’s inaugural speech, with its frequent invocation of Irish cultural history and its simultaneous celebration of the introduction of the ‘new’ into the political landscape, emphasizes the existence of a productive relationship between the traditions of Irish culture and the prospect of a united Europe. ‘The best way we can contribute to a new integrated Europe of the 1990s’, she says, ‘is by having a confident sense of our Irishness’, claiming the Irish must take ‘full advantage of our vibrant cultural resources in music, art, drama, literature and film’. 3 For Robinson the maintenance of local Irishness is precisely what allows for a productive relationship with an international political and economic system that is not so much introducing the threat of homogenization, as it is solidifying a free market for the exchange of national identities and cultures. In the North, a perspective like Robinson’s, emphasizing being Irish as a way of being more fruitfully European, and suggesting a willingness to give up some of the strictures of faith in a separate Irish nationality, has not Textual Practice 20(2), 2006, 333–353 Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2006 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09502360600703377