Summary: Professor Norman Vance asks whether there is such a thing as 'the Irish mind', or whether that is the ultimate Irish joke. If there is a distinctive Irish intellectual history, how did it develop in the face of the disruptions of a complicated and traumatic political and social history? Somehow, new ideas and initiatives keep bubbling up in every generation, but where do they come from? Is there an Irish intellectual aristocracy, or should that be aristocracies? This lecture explores these and other Irish questions.
