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Sat 03 Mar 2007Neutral but not neutralisedInterviewClair Wills has written a book about how the Emergency and neutrality affected Irish culture, in which she challenges the perception of an island stagnating under censorship. She talks to Shane HegartyWhen Clair Wills takes a moment to analyse her career, she doesn't need to grab hold of a Freud reader to give her guidance. Born to a nurse who had left post-war Skibbereen, Wills describes herself as a "child of the NHS". Brought up in England, with an English father, she visited Ireland regularly throughout her 1960s childhood. Now Professor of Irish Literature at Queen Mary, University of London, her CV is heavy with examinations of Irish identity. An editor of the fifth Field Day Anthology - Ethnicities, she has also written extensively on Northern Irish poetry. And this Thursday sees the publication of That Neutral Island, a cultural history of Ireland during what we still so delicately describe as "the Emergency".