The largest Provisional Irish Republican Army bomb so far on the English mainland exploded in Manchester on 15 June 1996. It destroyed most of the main shopping mall in the city centre. There was a forty-minute warning, but the area was not fully cleared and many people were injured. This time nobody was killed, unlike the Canary Wharf bombing in London earlier in the year that signalled the end of the recent ceasefire. Manchester has a large Irish community, and that day there was an Irish festival in nearby Bolton. The Irish came over last century to build the infrastructure for England's industrial success, with labourers working on the waterways which run from Liverpool through to the Manchester Ship canal. In some senses, then, Manchester was an obvious economic target, with the Provisionals taking back what Ireland had built with a demand that the six counties in the North of their country be returned, united in one thirty-two county republic.

English identity is bound up with Ireland, and the complex cultural processes that reconstitute this identity with each attempt and failure to make reparation are ripe for psychoanalytic study. But as well as needing to fix on appropriate psychoanalytic frameworks to make sense of this mess, we also need to locate those frameworks themselves in the culture that spawned them, in the mess itself.