This paper illustrates the post-national aspects in The Blackwater Lightship of the Irish life trapped in the double bind of the ethos of collectivity in tradition and the emerging individualism in the process of modernization. The 1999 novel by Tóibín has been regarded in general as an acclamation of the personhood liberated from the idealism of the Irish solidarity based upon family bond. It is, yet, shown that The Blackwater Lightship makes its appeal to the tradition of the patriarchal heterosexuality Irish Catholicism generates. In the novel, Helen’s attachment to her father is evidently traced back to Eamon de Valera’s Catholic politics and the heterosexual idealism of family bond, which is detailed in the 1937 Irish Constitution. The double bind in the condition of the Irish modern life is a cultural direction for the family bond contradicting the desire for individual freedom arising from modernization and Europeanism in the era of the Celtic Tiger.