Time & Perspective Quote by Fiona Shaw

Shaw lands the joke with a scalpel: Irish nationalism, for all its genuine wounds and hard-won pride, can curdle into a kind of domestic propaganda. The line "almost Soviet" is deliberately provocative not because she’s equating Ireland’s struggle with Stalinism, but because she’s pointing to a recognizable family-level mechanism: history taught as destiny, identity taught as inheritance, narrative taught as moral instruction. In that frame, children don’t just learn what happened; they learn who they are supposed to be because of what happened.

The subtext is affectionate and skeptical at once. "Like a lot of Irish households" signals solidarity - she’s not speaking as an outsider scolding a culture, but as someone shaped by it. Then she punctures the reverence with "mythic", a word that doesn’t deny truth so much as it questions packaging. Myth is history with the messy parts edited out, the compromises softened, the heroes tidied up. It’s emotionally efficient: it binds a household, explains suffering, offers a script for pride. It’s also politically useful, which is why the Soviet analogy stings: states and families both pass down curated stories to keep the group coherent.

Context matters here: Shaw is of a generation raised in the afterlife of revolution and partition, when Irish identity was still negotiated through memory, and memory often came in epic form. As an actress, she’s sensitive to how narratives are staged. She’s describing an origin story rehearsed so often it starts to feel like truth and theater at the same time.