This essay explores the writings of Irish essayist Hubert Butler (1900-1991) on Yugoslavia, where he lived for three years in the 1930s and by which he remained preoccupied for the rest of his life. It focuses on his search for connections and analogies between Ireland and Yugoslavia, examining this within wider patterns of deinsulation of Irish cultural and political discourse around the time of the Second World War, a phenomenon which involved both imaginative attempts to understand Irish questions with reference to international analogues and precedents, and sometimes sinister translations of matters of global consequence into local political debates.