“Dolores knows things she doesn’t know,” said John Waters on a recent Late Late Show.

He wasn’t suggesting that the Limerick singer had reached some kind of Socratean state of wisdom where the more she knew the more she realised the limits of her knowledge. He was rather pointing out that there is a history reflected in her voice of which she is not necessarily conscious. Just as, as human beings we have a collective unconscious, we also carry the emotional history of our race, a history which is reflected in everything from our art, music and literature to our accents, manners and physical posture.

Nothing your average Jungian psychologist would argue with there, but Waters, who was on the Late Late to publicise his forthcoming book on U2, maintains that we are, as a country, denying the reality of our past. It has of late, he argues, been left to a large extent up to popular artists to attempt to deal with it, politicians being too busy embracing the notion of Ireland as a new, progressive European democracy and none too keen, for pretty obvious reasons, to rake over the past.