Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies 2020039468, 2020039469, 9780367259136, 9780367259228

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Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies

Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies begins with the reversal in Irish fortunes after the 2008 global economic crash. The chapters included address not only changes in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland but also changes in disciplinary approaches to Irish Studies that the last decade of political, economic, and cultural unrest have stimulated. Since 2008, Irish Studies has been directly and indirectly influenced by the crash and its reverberations through the economy, political landscape, and social framework of Ireland and beyond. Approaching Irish pasts, presents, and futures through interdisciplinary and theoretically capacious lenses, the chapters in this volume reflect the myriad ways Irish Studies has responded to the economic precarity in the Republic, renewed instability in the North, the complex European politics of Brexit, global climate and pandemic crises, and the intense social change in Ireland catalyzed by all of these. Just as Irish society has had to dramatically reconceive its economic and global identity after the crash, Irish Studies has had to shift its theoretical modes and its objects of analysis in order to keep pace with these changes and upheavals. This book captures the dynamic ways the discipline has evolved since 2008, exploring how the age of austerity and renewal has transformed both Ireland and scholarly approaches to understanding Ireland. It will appeal to students and scholars of Irish Studies, sociology, cultural studies, history, literature, economics, and political science. Renée Fox is Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Co-Director of the Dickens Project, an international research consortium headquartered there. She is completing a book entitled Necromantic Victorians: Reanimation and the Historical Imagination in British and Irish Literature, and her published work has appeared in Victorian Studies, Victorian Poetry, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, New Hibernia Review, and several collections and critical editions. Mike Cronin is the Academic Director of Boston College in Ireland. He has published widely on aspects of Irish history and in particular the sporting and social history of Ireland. He is the director of the government sponsored project, Century Ireland, which is a partnership with RTÉ and the national cultural institutions and is the digital repository for the history of Ireland in the 1913–23 period. Brian Ó Conchubhair is Associate Professor of Irish Language and Literature at the University of Notre Dame, where he is also a Fellow of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. He is a former president of the American Conference for Irish Studies and has published widely on various aspects of the intersections of Irish language culture and literature with modernity.

Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies

Edited by Renée Fox, Mike Cronin, and Brian Ó Conchubhair

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Renée Fox, Mike Cronin, and Brian Ó Conchubhair; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Renée Fox, Mike Cronin, and Brian Ó Conchubhair to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fox, Renée Allyson, 1977– editor. | Cronin, Mike, editor. | Ó Conchubhair, Brian, editor. Title: Routledge handbook of Irish studies / edited by Renée Fox, Mike Cronin, and Brian Ó Conchubhair. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routeldge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020039468 (print) | LCCN 2020039469 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367259136 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367259228 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Ireland—Civilization—Study and teaching. | Ireland—Social life and customs—Study and teaching. | Ireland—Historiography. Classification: LCC DA910 .R68 2021 (print) | LCC DA910 (ebook) | DDC 941.5—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039468 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039469 ISBN: 978-0-367-25913-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-25922-8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of illustrations List of contributors

ix x

PART I

Overview

1

1 Introduction: Irish Studies from austerity to pandemic Renée Fox, Mike Cronin, and Brian Ó Conchubhair

3

2 Towards a history of Irish Studies in the United States John Waters

15

3 Irish Studies in the non-Anglophone world Michael Cronin

32

PART II

Historicizing Ireland 4 Irish Historical Studies Avant la Lettre: the antiquarian genealogy of interdisciplinary scholarship Guy Beiner

43

47

5 Separate and together: state histories in the twentieth century Timothy G. McMahon

59

6 Beyond the tale: folkloristics and folklore studies Kelly Fitzgerald

69

7 The Irish language and the Gaeltachtaí: illiberalism and neoliberalism Brian Ó Conchubhair

77

v

Contents

8 The great normalization: success, failure and change in contemporary Ireland Eoin O’Malley 9 Northern Ireland: more shared and more divided Dominic Bryan and Gordon Gillespie

96

109

PART III

Global Ireland

123

10 Connections and capital: the diaspora and Ireland’s global networks Mike Cronin

127

11 Irish-America Liam Kennedy

137

12 Irish Britain Mary J. Hickman

149

13 Ireland Inc. Diane Negra and Anthony P. McIntyre

158

14 Ireland, Europe, and Brexit Martina Lawless

172

15 Digital Ireland: leprechaun economics, Silicon Docks, and crisis Kylie Jarrett

188

PART IV

Identities

199

16 Immigration and citizenship Lucy Michael

203

17 The “new Irish” neighborhood: race and succession in Ireland and Irish America Sarah L. Townsend

220

18 Gender and Irish Studies: 2008 to the present Claire Bracken

230

19 Queering, querying Irish Studies Ed Madden

245

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Contents

20 The Catholic Church in Irish Studies Oliver P. Rafferty

260

PART V

Culture

271

21 Reading outside the lines: imagining new histories of Irish fiction Renée Fox

275

22 Lyric narratives: the experimental aesthetics of Irish poetry Eric Falci

290

23 The crisis and what comes after: post-Celtic Tiger theater in a new Irish paradigm Laura Farrell-Wortman

300

24 Material and visual culture in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland Kelly Sullivan

311

25 “Mise Éire”: (re)imaginings in Irish Music Studies Méabh Ní Fhuartháin

323

26 Sport and Irishness in a new millennium Paul Rouse

334

PART VI

Theorizing

345

27 Environmentalities: speculative imaginaries of the Anthropocene Nessa Cronin

349

28 Irish animal studies at the turn of the twenty-first century Maureen O’Connor

362

29 Contemporary Irish Studies and the impact of disability Elizabeth Grubgeld

370

30 Irish media and representations: new critical paradigms Emma Radley

379

31 Totem and Taboo in Tipperary? Irish shame and neoliberal crisis in Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart Seán Kennedy

393

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Contents

PART VII

Legacy

403

32 Trauma and recovery in the post-Celtic Tiger Period: recuperating the parent-child bond in contemporary Irish fiction Kathleen Costello-Sullivan

407

33 Abused Ireland: psychoanalyzing the enigma of sexualized innocence Margot Gayle Backus and Joseph Valente

420

34 Surplus to requirements? the ageing body in contemporary Irish writing Margaret O’Neill and Michaela Schrage-Früh

435

35 From Full Irish to FREESPACE: Irish architecture in the twenty-first century Brian Ward

448

36 Repackaging history and mobilizing Easter 1916: commemorations in a time of downturn and austerity Mike Cronin

461

37 An ordinary crisis: SARS-CoV-2 and Irish Studies Malcolm Sen Index

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471

485

Illustrations

Figures 7.1 8.1 14.1 14.2 14.3 14.4 14.5 14.6 14.7 17.1 17.2 35.1 35.2

Údarás funding 2008–2015 Left–right self-placement from European Social Surveys, 2006–2014 Irish and UK GDP relative to the EU, 1970–2018 Shares of Irish exports to the UK and EU (excl. UK), 1972–2018 Irish emigrants to the UK versus UK immigrants to Ireland, 1987–2018 Satisfaction with the EU across the EU, Ireland, and the UK, 1983–2011 Trade between Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Great Britain and the impact of tariffs Impact of the ending of EU/UK trade on the EU’s nations Value of cross border deliveries and size of company Magic in Corktown Edsel Ford sports an Irish costume at the Risko-Heeney boxing match, 1927 Department of Finance, Dublin by Grafton Architects Map of the agencies and policies affecting towns in Ireland

81 105 173 175 177 178 182 183 186 222 224 451 455

Images 2.1 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 13.1 13.2

Past Presidents of the American Conference for Irish Studies at 2017 ACIS Dearg le Fearg election campaign poster Foras na Gaeilge funding 2008–2019 The graveyard of voluntary organizations Dearg le Fearg Poster demanding an Irish Language Act AIB’s “We Back Belief ” mortgage campaign Leo Varadkar, then Minister for Social Justice, launching the controversial Welfare Cheats campaign 13.3 “Vulture Funds Cheat Us All” 19.1 Anus Plate, ca. 2018 by Sarah Devereux 25.1 Sibeal Ni Chasaide performs Mise Éire

21 79 82 82 87 162 165 166 253 327

Tables 8.1 8.2 8.3

Class and satisfaction with the economy over time What do you think are the two most important issues facing our country at the moment? Data for Ireland, Portugal, and the UK Attitudes to abortion among Irish people

100 103 104 ix

Contributors

Margot Gayle Backus is John and Rebecca Moores Professor of English at the University of

Houston. She was 2014–15 Queens University Fulbright Scholar of Anglophone Irish Writing and 2015 James Joyce Scholar in residence at the University of Buffalo. Her books include Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars (2013) and The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (1999). With Joseph Valente, she coauthored The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable (2020). Guy Beiner is Professor of Modern History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He has held a number of research fellowships at Irish Studies centers and most recently was the Burns Scholar at Boston College. Among his publications in the field are the multiple-prize-winning books, Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory (2007) and Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster (2018). Claire Bracken is Associate Professor in the English Department at Union College, New York. She has published articles on Irish women’s writing, feminist criticism, and Irish cultural studies. She is coeditor of Anne Enright (with Susan Cahill, 2011) and Viewpoints: Theoretical Perspectives on Irish Visual Texts (with Emma Radley, 2013). Her book, Irish Feminist Futures was published by Routledge 2016 as part of the Transformations series. In 2017, she coedited with Tara Harney-Mahajan a double special issue of the journal LIT entitled: Recessionary Imaginings: PostCeltic Tiger Ireland and Contemporary Women’s Writing. Dominic Bryan is Professor in Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast. From 2002–2014

he was Director of the Institute of Irish Studies. He is author of Orange Parades: The Politics of Ritual Tradition and Control (2000), coauthor of The Flag Dispute: Anatomy of a Protest (2014) and coauthor of Civic Identity and Public Space: Belfast since 1780 (2019). Dominic is also the Chair of Diversity Challenges and co-Chair of the Commission on Flags Identity, Culture and Tradition in Northern Ireland. Kathleen Costello-Sullivan is Professor of Modern Irish literature and former Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Le Moyne College. She holds a B.A. in English and Spanish from Rutgers University-New Brunswick, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English/Irish Studies from Boston College. She is the author of Mother/Country: Politics of the Personal in the Fiction of Colm Tóibín (2012) and the editor of critical editions of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla (2013), and Norah Hoult’s Poor Women! (2016). Her most recent monograph, Trauma and Recovery in the Twenty-First-Century Irish Novel, was published in 2018. x

Contributors

Michael Cronin is 1776 Professor of French and Director of the Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation in Trinity College Dublin. Among his published titles are Translating Ireland: Translation, Languages and Identity (1996); Across the Lines: Travel, Language, Translation (2000); Translation and Globalization (2003); Irish in the New Century/An Ghaeilge san Aois Nua; Translation and Identity (2006); Translation goes to the Movies (2009), Translation in the Digital Age (2013), Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene (2017) and Irish and Ecology: An Ghaeilge agus an Éiceolaíocht (2019). He is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, the Academia Europaea and a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. Mike Cronin is Professor of Irish Studies and the Academic Director of Boston College in Ire-

land. He has worked widely in the area of Irish cultural and sporting history and is the author, with Daryl Adair, of The Wearing of the Green: A History of St Patrick’s Day (2002) and, with Mark Duncan and Paul Rouse, of The GAA: A People’s History (2009). He was the director of the GAA Oral History Project between 2008 and 2012, and since 2013 has been the director of the Irish government’s major digital project for the Decade of Centenaries, Century Ireland (www.rte.ie/centuryireland). Nessa Cronin is Lecturer in Irish Studies, Centre for Irish Studies, and Associate Director of the Moore Institute at NUI Galway, Ireland. She has published widely on various aspects of Irish literature, cultural geography, and environmental humanities. She has been the recipient of Irish Research Council awards, bursaries from the European Science Foundation and Culture Ireland, and has been awarded visiting fellowships in Stanford University, Univeristé de Nantes, and University of Concordia. In 2019, she was elected to the National Committee of Future Earth Ireland, based at the Royal Irish Academy. Nessa also contributes to eco-social community mapping projects with artists, activists, and community groups investigating issues concerning people, place, and planet in contemporary Ireland, and is currently working on a book project entitled, Earthworks: Irish Literature and the Environmental Imagination. Eric Falci is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of

Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, 1966–2010 (2012) and the Cambridge Introduction to British Poetry, 1945–2010 (2015), as well as a number of essays on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish and British poetry. Along with Paige Reynolds, he is the coeditor of Irish Literature in Transition, 1980–2020 (2020). His first book of poetry, Late Along the Edgelands, appeared from Tuumba Press in 2019, and his most recent book, The Value of Poetry, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. Laura Farrell-Wortman is a scholar, dramaturg, and higher education professional at the Uni-

versity of Arizona. She holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Theater Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her 2017 dissertation, “Theatre After Anglo: Irish Drama Responds to the Great Recession,” explores the impact of the 2008 financial crisis on theatrical production in the Republic of Ireland. She is the recipient of the New Scholars Prize from the International Federation for Theatre Research, the New Scholars Prize from the Irish Society for Theatre Research, and the Krause Research Fellowship from the American Conference for Irish Studies. Kelly Fitzgerald is Head of Irish Folklore & Ethnology in the School of Irish, Celtic Studies and Folklore, UCD. She has written on the intellectual history and development of Irish folkloristics and archives amongst other aspects of folklore studies and oral history. The chairperson of ANU xi

Contributors

Productions and a director with Fondúireacht Bhéaloideas Éireann, she is currently working on collecting a number of oral history initiatives in social housing communities in Dublin. Renée Fox is Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Co-Director of the Dickens Project, an international nineteenth-century studies research consortium headquartered there. She is completing a book entitled Necromantic Victorians: Reanimation and the Historical Imagination in British and Irish Literature, and her published work has appeared in Victorian Studies, Victorian Poetry, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, New Hibernia Review, and several collections and critical editions. Gordon Gillespie is a researcher and writer on Northern Ireland history and politics. Among the projects he has worked on are the Linen Hall Library’s Troubled Images exhibition and the Ulster Museum’s Troubles and Beyond gallery. He has taught at both Queen’s University, Belfast and Ulster University and is the author and coauthor of numerous works on Northern Ireland including: The Historical Dictionary of the Northern Ireland Conflict (2007), Years of Darkness: The Troubles Remembered (2008), and Northern Ireland: A Chronology of the Troubles (with Paul Bew) (1999). Elizabeth Grubgeld is Regents Professor of English at Oklahoma State University. In addi-

tion to Disability and Life Writing in Post-Independence Ireland (2020), she is author of two earlier monographs, Anglo-Irish Autobiography: Class, Gender, and the Forms of Narrative (2004) and George Moore and the Autogenous Self: The Autobiography and Fiction (1994), both of which received prizes from the American Conference for Irish Studies for the best book in literary and cultural studies in their respective years. Mary J. Hickman is Adjunct Professor in the Maynooth University Social Science Institute

(MUSSI). She established the Irish Studies Centre at London Metropolitan University in 1986, where she was also Director of the Institute for the Study of European Transformations from 2002–2012. She was Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for Irish Studies, St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, London, from 2012–2016. Professor Hickman has written widely on Irish emigration and diaspora, especially the Irish in Britain. She is coauthor of Migration and Social Cohesion in the UK (2012) and coeditor of Women and Irish Diaspora Identities (2014). Her current research focuses on the Irish in America. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK) and Chair of the campaign Votes for Irish Citizens Abroad (VICA) based in London. Kylie Jarrett is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at Maynooth University. She is author of Feminism, Labour and Digital Media: the Digital Housewife (2016) and coauthor of NSFW: Sex, Humor, and Risk in Social Media (2019) and Google and the Culture of Search (2013). She has extensively researched the political economy of the commercial Web and published studies examining a variety of digital media platforms, including Facebook, eBay, and YouTube. Liam Kennedy is the Director of the Clinton Institute at University College Dublin. He has

written widely on American cultural and media studies, globalisation, and Irish-US relations. He is the author of  Susan Sontag  (1995),  Race and Urban Space in American Culture  (2000), and Afterimages: Photography and US Foreign Policy (2016). He is editor of Urban Space and Representation  (1999), City Sites: An Electronic Book  (2000), Remaking Birmingham: The Visual Culture of Urban Regeneration  (2004), The Wire: Race, Class and Genre  (2013), The Violence of the

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Contributors

Image  (2014), and Neoliberalism and American Literature  (2016). He is currently researching contemporary Irish America. Seán Kennedy is Professor of English and Coordinator of Irish Studies at St. Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Recent publications include, as editor, “Samuel Beckett and Biopolitics” (Estudios Irlandeses, 2019) and Beckett Beyond the Normal (2020). Martina Lawless is Research Professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute with a Ph.D. in Economics from Trinity College Dublin. Her research focuses primarily on firm-level dynamics and decision making, covering a range of topics such as access to finance for small and medium firms, job creation, exporting, foreign direct investment, and the potential effects of Brexit. This work has been published in a number of leading international journals. Ed Madden is Professor of English, former director of the Women’s and Gender Studies

Program at the University of South Carolina, and the author of Tiresian Poetics: Modernism, Sexuality, Voice. His essays on Irish queer literatures and cultures have appeared in Éire-Ireland, Irish University Review, Irish Review, Breac, and Performance Ireland, as well as collections on Irish masculinities, transnationalism and Irish literature, and Irish studies and animal studies. He was a 2010 research fellow at the Centre for Irish Studies at the NUI Galway, and the 2017 William Neenan, S.J., Visiting Research Fellow in Irish Studies at Boston College Ireland. Also the author of four books of poetry, Madden was a 2019 artist fellow at the Instituto Sacatar in Brazil. Anthony P. McIntyre is Associate Lecturer in Film Studies at University College Dublin. He is coeditor of The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness (2017), book reviews editor of the journal Television and New Media, and is currently finishing a monograph, Millennial Tensions: Generational Affect and Contemporary Screen Cultures. Timothy G. McMahon is Associate Professor of History at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is the author of Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893– 1910 (2008) and editor of Pádraig Ó Fathaigh’s War of Independence: Recollections of a Galway Gaelic Leaguer (2000) and (with Michael de Nie and Paul Townend) of Ireland in an Imperial World: Citizenship, Opportunism, and Subversion (2017). A Past President of the American Conference for Irish Studies, he was the Rev. William Neenan, S.J., Visiting Research Fellow at Boston College-Ireland in 2011; was Visiting Research Professor at the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s University, Belfast, in spring 2018; and is currently a Way-Klingler Research Fellow in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Marquette. Lucy Michael is a sociologist in practice and consultant on equality and integration issues. Her

work particularly addresses racist discrimination and violence, experiences of victims, and the roles of statutory institutions and civil society in combating hate crime and exclusion. She is author (with Bryan Fanning) of Immigrants as Outsiders in the Two Irelands (2019), and (with Samantha Schulz) of Unsettling Whiteness (2019). She is also a Commission Member on the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission. Dr. Michael has conducted research with a wide range of public and private sector bodies including the International Organisation for Migration, UK Home Office, and European Network Against Racism. She is coauthor with INAR of the iReport.ie racist incident reporting system used to map racism in Ireland. She previously

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Contributors

held lecturing posts at Ulster University and University of Hull and is a former President of the Sociological Association of Ireland. Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture and Head of Film Studies at UCD. A

member of the Royal Irish Academy, she is the author, editor, or coeditor of ten books including What a Girl Wants?: The Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism (2008) and Extreme Weather and Global Media (with Julia Leyda, 2015). She serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Television and New Media. Méabh Ní Fhuartháin is Head of Irish Studies at the Centre for Irish Studies, NUI Galway.

Her research and teaching focuses on Irish Music and Dance Studies. Most recently, she has published on Irish dance in Galway, “Genealogies of Irish Dance in Galway, c. 1922–1993” in John Cunningham and Ciaran McDonough (eds.), Hardiman and Beyond: Galway Arts and Culture, 1820–2020 (2020), and was coeditor of the special issue journal volume Éire-Ireland: Nótaí/ Notes Music and Ireland (2019) to which she also contributed an article on the development of social dance spaces in early twentieth-century Ireland. Currently, she is coediting the special issue Ethnomusicology Ireland: Women and Traditional/Folk Music (2021). Brian Ó Conchubhair is Associate Professor of Irish Language & Literature at the University

of Notre Dame where he is also a fellow of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies and the Kellogg Institute for International Affairs. Recent publications include (with Jefferson Holdridge) After Ireland: Essays on Contemporary Irish Poetry (2017); My American Journey: Douglas Hyde (2019); and Cathair na Gaillimhe: Díolaim Cathrach (2020). Maureen O’Connor lectures in the School of English in University College Cork. She is the author of The Female and the Species: The Animal in Irish Women’s Writing (2010), coeditor, with Derek Gladwin, of a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, entitled Irish Studies and the Environmental Humanities (2018); with Kathryn Laing and Sinéad Mooney, of Edna O’Brien: New Critical Perspectives (2006); with Lisa Colletta, of Wild Colonial Girl: Essays on Edna O’Brien (2006); and, with Tadhg Foley, of Ireland and India: Colonies, Culture, and Empire (2006). Her most recent book, Edna O’Brien and the Art of Fiction, is forthcoming from Bucknell University Press in 2021. Eoin O’Malley is Associate Professor at the School of Law and Government, Dublin City Uni-

versity. He is author or editor of a number of books on Irish politics, over forty peer-reviewed articles, and of an upcoming book on political leadership in modern Ireland. Margaret O’Neill researches in twentieth-century and contemporary Irish literature, culture, and society, with a focus on gender and ageing. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the Irish Centre for Social Gerontology and the Huston School of Film & Digital Media, NUI Galway. With Cathy McGlynn and Michaela Schrage-Früh, she has edited Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture: Reflections, Refractions, Reimaginings (2017). She is also coeditor, with Michaela Schrage-Früh, of a special issue of Nordic Irish Studies, entitled Women and Ageing in Irish Writing, Drama and Film (2018), and a special issue of Life Writing, entitled Women and Ageing: Private Meaning, Social Lives (2019). With Michaela Schrage-Früh, she is co-founder of the Women and Ageing Research Network. Emma Radley teaches Film and Irish Studies in the UCD School of English, Drama and Film. Her research interests are in the area of Irish film and visual culture, horror and the gothic, and psychoanalytic theory. She is the editor of Viewpoints: Theoretical Perspectives on Irish Visual Texts xiv

Contributors

(with Claire Bracken, 2013). She has published articles and book chapters in the areas of Irish cinema and literature, psychoanalytic theory, and film theory. Oliver P. Rafferty is a Jesuit priest and native of Belfast. A past president of the Irish Historical

Society, he is currently Professor of modern Irish and ecclesiastical history at Boston College. Rafferty has written or edited seven books and penned numerous articles, book chapters, and reviews. His main interests are in the area of Church–State relations and much of his published work has focused on the role of Catholicism in Irish society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At present, he is researching for a book on the Catholic Church and the State in Ireland from 1795 to 1923. His most recent work is Violence, Politics and Catholicism in Ireland (2016). Paul Rouse is Professor of History at UCD. He has written extensively about the history of Irish sport. His most recent books are Sport and Ireland: A History (2015) and The Hurlers: The First All-Ireland Championship and the Making of Modern Hurling (2018). Michaela Schrage-Früh is Lecturer in German at the NUI Galway. She has published widely

on Irish, British, and German poetry and fiction and is the author of Emerging Identities: Myth, Nation and Gender in the Poetry of Eavan Boland, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Medbh McGuckian (2004) and Philosophy, Dreaming and the Literary Imagination (2016). With Cathy McGlynn and Margaret O’Neill, she has edited Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture: Reflections, Refractions, Reimaginings (2017). She is also coeditor, with Margaret O’Neill, of a special issue of Nordic Irish Studies, entitled Women and Ageing in Irish Writing, Drama and Film (2018), and a special issue of Life Writing, entitled Women and Ageing: Private Meaning, Social Lives (2019). With Margaret O’Neill, she is co-founder of the Women and Ageing Research Network. Malcolm Sen teaches in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research focuses on questions of sovereignty, sustainability, migration, and race as they emerge in climate change discourse and in the contexts of Irish and postcolonial literatures. He is the editor (with Lucienne Loh) of Postcolonial Studies and the Challenges of the New Millennium (2016); The History of Irish Literature and the Environment (2020); and Race in Irish Literature and Culture (with Julie McCormick Weng) to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. Sen’s monograph is entitled Unnatural Disasters: Irish Literature, Climate Change and Sovereignty (2021). His article “Risk and Refuge: Contemplating Precarity in Contemporary Irish Fiction,” was recently published in the Irish University Review. He is currently completing two essays on James Joyce: “Joyce and Race” and “Finnegans Wake as World Literature.” Kelly Sullivan is Clinical Associate Professor in Irish Studies at Glucksman Ireland House, New

York University. Her recent publications include “Elizabeth Bowen and 1916: An Architecture of Suspense” in Modernism/modernity Print+, “The Presence of an Absence: Yeats’s Solitary Swan” in International Yeats Studies, and “‘An Absolutely Private Thing’: Letters in Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices” in Irish University Review, as well as essays on Derek Mahon, Tim Robinson, and Irish artist Harry Clarke. She teaches and researches late modernism, environmental humanities, and contemporary Irish poetry. Sarah L. Townsend is Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Mexico, where

she specializes in modern and contemporary Irish fiction and drama. Her articles and chapters on immigration, globalization, race, and genre have appeared in New Literary History, Journal of xv

Contributors

Modern Literature, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and a number of edited collections. She has held residential fellowships at Wellesley College and the University of Notre Dame. Her current research traces the transatlantic history of the term “New Irish” in order to interrogate the racial striving that underwrites contemporary Irish multiculturalism. Townsend is co-founder of the Irish Studies Program at UNM and Past President of the American Conference for Irish Studies West. Joseph Valente is UB Distinguished Professor of English and Disability Studies at the Univer-

sity at Buffalo. He is the Treasurer of the International Yeats Society and Vice-President of the Northeastern Modern Language Association. He has authored The Myth of Manliness in Irish Nationalist Culture, 1880–1922 (2011), Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness and the Question of Blood (2002, 2012), and James Joyce and the Problem of Justice: Negotiating Sexual and Colonial Difference (1995, 2009). His edited collections include Quare Joyce (1997) and, with Marjorie Howes, Yeats and Afterwords (2014). Most recently, he coauthored, with Margot Gayle Backus, The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable (2020). Brian Ward is a lecturer in the Dublin School of Architecture at the Technological University Dublin. He has contributed to many publications on modern and contemporary architecture and town planning in Ireland. During 2019, as part of a curatorial residency with Sarah Sheridan, he organized a series of events on Marion Mahony Griffin for the Irish Architecture Foundation. In 2020, he published Irish Housing Design 1950–1980, Out of the Ordinary with Gary A. Boyd and Michael Pike. John Waters teaches in the Irish Studies Program at Glucksman Ireland House at NYU, where he wrote the curriculum for the interdisciplinary Masters in Irish and Irish-American Studies program that he directed from 2007 until 2016. He has studied at Johns Hopkins, Trinity College Dublin, and Duke, where he worked with literary theorists and scholars like Hugh Kenner and Fredric Jameson. His first teaching position was alongside Dillon Johnston at Wake Forest, and his second was at Notre Dame, during the early years of what would become the largest and most dynamic Irish Studies program in North America. He began teaching at NYU in 2000.

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Part I

Overview

1 Introduction Irish Studies from austerity to pandemic Renée Fox, Mike Cronin, and Brian Ó Conchubhair

The crash and its aftermath In her 2008 detective novel The Likeness, Tana French’s first-person narrator describes Ireland staring into a macabre abyss of change, unbalanced by Celtic Tiger prosperity and on the cusp of a horror-ridden future: Irish homicides are still, mostly, simple things. . . . We’ve never had the orgies of nightmare that other countries get: the serial killers, the ornate tortures, the basements lined with bodies thick as autumn leaves. But it’s only a matter of time, now. For ten years Dublin’s been changing faster than our minds can handle . . . and we’re fracturing under the weight of it. By the end of my stint in Murder I could feel it coming: felt the high sing of madness in the air, the city hunching and twitching like a rabid dog building towards the rampage. (11–12) Without predicting the financial crash that struck almost simultaneously with the novel’s publication, this passage’s anticipation of the economic boom’s impossible precarity imagines the ways Ireland’s shiny new integration into the global marketplace could reverberate through national culture in unexpected ways: although this crime novel is specifically focused on murder, these lines suggest that many diferent aspects of social, political, and cultural life might begin to crack under the weight of Irish neoliberalism. As the tipping point of Ireland’s prosperity neared, so too did nightmarish fractures to the self-proclaimed ideals by which Ireland measured itself and its relationships to the larger world around it. These nightmares took diverse forms during the years of austerity and after (2008–2015), although many of them proved to be the return of old miseries rather than the arrival of new ones. Ireland endured a collapse in property values, generational indebtedness, various forms of addiction, the return of large-scale emigration, the inhumane nature of Direct Provision, and an increased marginalizing and abandonment of the vulnerable: those with physical and intellectual disabilities, the aged, and the economically deprived. The grisly sorts of murders French predicted did arrive, splashing the headlines with tales of dismemberment and drug 3

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wars, but underlying these few stories of crimes “so brutal in nature that [they drew] comparisons with [the] TV show ‘Narcos’”1 lay the persistent yet well remembered problem of increasing economic insecurity, especially in rural Irish towns, and the domestic precarity that ensued.2 While a few sensational crimes made the news, rising levels of domestic abuse, child abuse, and femicide—the persistent terrors and dangers of the domestic interior—often went unremarked.3 Murder, violence, and abuse in Ireland remained (as they historically have been) predominantly aimed at women, often occurring behind the walls of private homes or institutional settings. In 2018 alone, Women’s Aid received 16,994 reports of abuse against women, and their annual report showed that nearly 90% of women killed in Ireland are killed by someone they know.4 And yet, Ireland was positioned as the poster child of the austerity years, quietly keeping calm and carrying on, no matter the cost, no matter the suffering behind closed doors. There were no riots or civil disobedience. Despite a few noisy protests organized by People Before Profit and others, in particular targeting water charges, Ireland generally seemed to quietly acquiesce to austerity as the world, and the certainties of the Celtic Tiger years, were turned upside down. In comparison to the United States and the United Kingdom, in which the post-crash recession and recovery gave rise to divisive right-wing nationalism and cults of political personality, Ireland appeared to remain stable, centrist, and sensible. It felt nearly emblematic that while the breakout global hit of American television in 2020 was Netflix’s Tiger King, post-Tiger Ireland’s breakout global hit was the television adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People: where the US gave the world an unimaginable story of bizarre excesses, outlandish murderous conspiracies, and polygamy amongst nature’s feline predators, Ireland gave us a heteronormative fetishization of normalcy, a story whose success rested on its ability to render a fully relatable, “ineluctably right”5 portrait of mundane Gen Z life.6 By 2020, the Irish nation had shifted its self-proclaimed character from a historic story of exceptionalism7—exceptional economic contraction, expansion, and contraction again; emigration, immigration, and emigration again; centuries of political and inter-communal violence; and extreme church-led abuse of its vulnerable—into a valorization of post-recession “normal people.” When COVID-19 locked the world down in the spring of 2020, Ireland could be riveted by the madness of Joe Exotic while still believing itself safely represented by the banal calamities of Sally Rooney. The Celtic Tiger might have crashed into bankruptcy, austerity, a housing crisis, and unprecedented levels of domestic violence and social inequality, but at least it didn’t spawn Tiger King. When the world economy went into recession in the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, Ireland was badly exposed. The Celtic Tiger years were revealed not as the period of economic normalization they had seemed to be but instead as years of economic dysfunction, where a mirage of wealth and booming property values rested on a thin veneer of ill-afforded state, business, and private credit.8 By November 2010, the nation’s banking system had failed and could not cover the cost of its loan book. Effectively bankrupt, the Irish government had to seek the assistance of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Union (EU), and the European Central Bank (ECB). The bailout amounted to €85 billion, and Dublin surrendered its economic sovereignty to Brussels. As the Irish Times wrote on the morning of the bailout (and in the context of the fast approaching centenary of the Easter Rising in 2016): It may seem strange to some the Irish Times would ask whether this is what the men of 1916 died for: a bailout from the German chancellor with a few shillings of sympathy from the British chancellor on the side. There is the shame of it all. Having obtained our political independence from Britain to be masters of our own affairs, we have now surrendered our 4

Introduction

sovereignty to the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund.9

The states of Irish Studies This Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies takes these dire economic events of 2008 as its starting point, investigating how scholars of Ireland and Irish Studies have radically revised our fields of inquiry as Ireland moved through a dozen years of economic trauma, austerity, recovery, and global pandemic. The chapters included here do not all examine Ireland itself since 2008 but rather unfold the revitalization and renewed relevance of Irish Studies as the economic movements of the last decade have catalyzed the field’s powerful reconsiderations of Irish history, literature, politics, culture, and language. Whether investigating the present moment, the Irish past, or dreams for a different kind of future, these chapters are marked by their awareness that our current academic interest in Ireland must account for the ways the years of the twenty-first century have unmoored—to both positive and negative ends—the critical truisms that defined our sense of Irish exceptionalism over the last 40 years. In the last decade, the effects of recession-era austerity in Ireland, combined with the failure of the peace process in Northern Ireland to deliver a unified post-conflict world and the complexities introduced to the “Irish Question” by the specter of Brexit, have brought Ireland back onto the political world stage. As these phenomena have drawn attention simultaneously to Ireland’s national crises and to the relationship between these crises and Ireland’s forms of international engagement, Irish Studies, too, has turned outward, resituating its scrutiny of the island in wider political, historical, theoretical, and ecological concerns.10 If Irish Studies has changed in response to austerity and its aftermaths, these changes have not simply been in how the field describes the grim economic and social repercussions of the crash; the field has also changed in order to grapple with the power of such bewildering and sudden national transformations to reshape culture, identity, and the usefulness of “nation” itself as a defining category. Many of the chapters in this volume address the ways that the economic, social, and political upheavals in Ireland over the last decade have prompted reconsiderations of the privileged place that “nation” has long had in shaping the parameters of Irish Studies’ inquiry, as such parameters have necessarily been rooted in sectarian divisions, fantasies of cultural and racial homogeneity, and imagined insularities that belie the realities of Ireland in the contemporary moment. As the ethos of Irish culture has moved away from the conservatism of the Catholic Church that dominated its political landscape since the 1920s, Irish Studies scholarship has reoriented itself in relation to social changes in Ireland over the last several years, embracing theoretical fields including queer studies, disability studies, critical race studies, and ecocriticism as crucial interlocutors in a field that has been primarily dominated by postcolonial studies.11 Ireland’s colonial past remains an essential foundation for much Irish Studies scholarship, but when the success of the 2015 Marriage Referendum made Ireland the first nation to support same-sex marriage by way of a popular vote, and a second referendum in 2018 removed the 8th Amendment from the Irish Constitution and allowed for abortion on demand, it became clear that Irish Studies needed to expand its critical networks in order to contextualize and engage with such social and political reforms. These referendums revealed the apparently loosening hold of Catholic dogma on Ireland, but conservatism can often find a foothold in the very policies that seem its antithesis, and Ireland’s Catholic history has continued to reverberate even as the religious affiliation of its population diversifies. The country’s dramatic demographic shift was on full display during Pope Francis’s visit to Ireland in 2018, which brought a mere 250,000 people out for mass in Phoenix Park (in contrast to the million faithful Irish Catholics that turned out to see Pope John Paul II in 1979). 5

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But the sparse papal crowds were as much a product of Catholicism’s unyielding historical presence in Ireland as they were a testament to Ireland’s present-day religious diversity: rather than go see the pope, many people instead chose to pay tribute to the Church’s abuse victims with vigils in Dublin’s Garden of Remembrance and at Tuam’s Bon Secour Home in County Galway.12 Newspaper headlines asked things like, “Where Did All the Catholics Go? Sparse Crowds for Pope’s Ireland Visit,”13 but the answer is more complicated than just a falling off of religious piety: while revelations about clerical abuse have drastically diminished the Catholic Church’s dominance and influence in Ireland, the repercussions of its historical patriarchal power continue to palpably assert themselves.14 There are, of course, other important ways to answer this headline’s question about the new demography of Ireland, beyond its population’s increasing unwillingness to tolerate clerical abuse and the Church’s political agenda. Whereas in the twentieth century the island’s residents included few non-Irish-born people, since 2004 there has been spectacular growth in immigration to Ireland and an exponential increase in the ethnic and cultural diversity of the Irish population, even as the 2004 Citizenship Referendum has withheld Irish citizenship from children born on the island to noncitizens.15 Despite some downturn in newcomers due to the recession, the number of non-Irish-born people in the Republic remains at approximately 13%, and as such the notion of what it means to be Irish has been transformed (despite the Citizenship Referendum’s xenophobic limitations).16 The ever-growing arrival of US-based companies to the island, and in particular to the Republic, has only increased immigration numbers and further globalized Ireland and its population. By the close of 2017, over 155,000 people were employed directly across the 700 US firms in Ireland, and these companies accounted for 67% of all foreign investment in the country.17 The arrival and retention of these US firms, particularly in the high tech and pharmaceutical areas, has been critical in economically stabilizing Ireland since the crash. However, for all the success of the Irish economy since 2014, it is clear that the debates that emerged during the austerity years—about property ownership, homelessness, access to public utilities like water, funding a functioning health service, and so on—have yet to be resolved. Ireland remains in a state of flux: an island of increasing economic inequality, despite its socalled recovery; a Republic with a progressive political agenda of sexual and gendered freedoms, inevitably tempered by the reified conservatisms of national identity; a place of unresolved and ungoverned sectarian impasse, even if religious domination is waning; and an ever-divided island, still unsure, despite huge public celebrations in 2016, what role the founding principles of its State(s) should have in a contemporary moment dominated by Brexit, a global pandemic, ongoing global and localized environmental challenges, and a looming new recession.

A brief history of the field All of these changing cultural, political, social, and economic phenomena have reoriented the field of Irish Studies, which since its emergence in the 1960s has balanced gingerly between the dictates of broad academic trends and the inward-looking focus of Ireland’s self-reflective cultural development. The rise of Irish Studies coincided with the general development of what was termed “Area Studies,” but also fit alongside that period’s quest for scholarship to be open to interdisciplinary approaches.18 In the spread of Irish Studies from the shores of Ireland to the UK, the US, and beyond throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, the field’s development had unique “advantages” and selling points that emerged from a coalescence of the island’s ongoing political crises with the formidable cultural productions of its local and diasporic populations. Irish literature, in particular among Ireland’s rich and vibrant cultural output, had a far-reaching 6

Introduction

international reputation, dominated for decades by James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, and Samuel Beckett but expanding in the 1990s to also include a wider array of contemporary Irish writers, especially after Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. (We would like to direct readers’ attention to just a few of the amazing nineteenth- and early-to-mid-twentieth-century Irish women writers who did not [and in some cases, still don’t] enjoy the same degree of international acclaim as the modernist writers listed above, but who should have: Emily Lawless, Lady Augusta Gregory, Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O’Brien, Molly Keane/M.J. Farrell, Mary Lavin, and Edna O’Brien. Some of their key works are included in the Works Cited list.) Northern Ireland was (from 1968 to 1998) one of the few regions in the West that endured a long drawn out and violent struggle between the state and domestic paramilitary forces. Ireland was also a place locked in an endless battle between economic modernization and recessionfueled backwardness. One key consequence of this lack of sustained economic development was the annual tide (particularly pronounced during the 1980s) of emigration, which served to build up the numbers belonging to the Irish diaspora across the globe. The diasporic movement to the US throughout the twentieth century, in particular, spurred the study of Irish language and culture in universities there. As John Waters argues in Chapter 2 of this volume, although Irish Studies is now a global field and has long flourished strongly in Irish and UK universities,19 the mid-century development of the field as a truly international consortium of scholars has strong roots in the Irish migrations, financial investments, and scholarly trends of US academia. With support from the Irish government, philanthropic bodies such as the Ireland Funds, and notable US universities—namely Boston College, New York University, and University of Notre Dame—Irish Studies became a dynamic and well-funded academic field, spreading its reach even to universities that did not have formal Irish Studies programs as Irish poets and writers like Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney, Colum McCann, Paul Muldoon, Pádraig Ó Siadhail, and Colm Tóibín made their academic homes in the US and Canada. Its conferences (in particular the American Conference of Irish Studies) and range of journals and publications grew in size and impact, and its community of undergraduate and postgraduate students increased over the years. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, a number of its leading scholars, including Angela Bourke, Patricia Coughlan, Elizabeth Cullingford, Seamus Deane, Marianne Elliott, Roy Foster, Kevin Kenny, Declan Kiberd, David Lloyd, Gerardine Meaney, Máirín Nic Eoin, and Ailbhe Smyth transcended narrow disciplinary boundaries as Irish Studies took up the mantles of postcolonial studies, gender studies, and diaspora studies.20 Yet in the years leading to the end of the twentieth century, Irish Studies was overly identified with scholarly practices and canon formations that emerged from heavily endowed US Irish Studies programs, programs that were highly heteronormative, masculinist, and white. The groundwork for a more capacious version of Irish Studies ultimately came from Ireland, rather than from the US: in the 1980s and 90s, radical pamphlets such as the LIP Pamphlets, as well as powerful critiques across a range of scholarly outputs and by leading contemporary women writers, condemned the masculinist shape of institutional Irish Studies and lay the foundations for the far more interdisciplinary and intellectually open work of Irish Studies in the twenty-first century.21 In the years leading up to 2008, however, academic and political concerns shifted and the growth of Irish Studies faltered. The start of the peace process in Northern Ireland contributed to this waning interest, as the North ceased to be a place of conflict and death and instead became a small provincial backwater where a society was trying to rebuild. Although this moment was certainly critical for those living in the North, post-conflict societies do not command the constant attention of news media outlets, and scholarly interest in Ireland dropped accordingly. As the Republic of Ireland grew economically through the latter half of the 1990s and lived, until 2008, under the wealth generated by the Celtic Tiger expansion, the political immediacy of postcolonial 7

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studies seemed less and less applicable to a nation that increasingly came to look like a paragon of global capitalism. In 1996, net outward migration stopped and from 2004 onwards Ireland became a place of immigration, especially when the EU expanded to include a number of post-Soviet states. In other words, the conditions that historically comprised Ireland’s, and Irish Studies’, sense of the island’s abject exceptionalism altered: in the wake of the peace process and in the midst of a burgeoning economy, Ireland seemed to begin functioning like the majority of western nations, comfortable in its neoliberal capitalist culture. It no longer seemed to be an island of sectarian conflict, economic failure, and emigration, but rather a successful European state, increasing its influence in the international marketplace and, if such a thing is ever possible, putting its history behind it. The Republic of Ireland was regularly cited as one of the most globalized nations in the world in the period up to 2008, even if it was this very globalization that left the nation in dire straits when the global downturn happened.22 For Irish Studies, a fairly parochial discipline whose primary theoretical foundation rested on the insistence that Ireland be numbered among the immiserated victims of European colonialism despite its outsized cultural influence, an Ireland at the forefront of globalized capital would clearly require a new set of critical frameworks.23 This “normalization” of Ireland led to an initial shrinking of the field, as academic culture at large relegated Ireland to the aggregate of white Western European cultures that had long had more than their fair share of scholarly attention, and as Irish Studies itself suffered a lack of clarity about what, exactly, it was supposed to be in the face of such unexpected Irish prosperity. Irish Studies had largely, although not exclusively, been defined by two primary interests: the history of the island and its diaspora, largely seen through the lens of conflict with Britain and/or sectarian conflict on the island itself, and the study of Irish literature, shaped by the Anglo-Irish interface and dominated by questions of how to situate Irish aesthetics in terms of provincial, postcolonial, peripheral, and global studies. Confronted with the “end” of conflict in 1998 and the apparent ending of a national narrative of economic failure and accompanying emigration, Irish Studies struggled to redefine itself. Essentially, what could Irish Studies become—what new sorts of inquiries and activisms could it mount—if the field wasn’t always framed by paramilitary conflict and viewed through the lens of a troubled social, cultural, economic, and political relationship with the UK? And how might Irish Studies learn to accommodate the demands of an academy in which shrinking humanities enrollments and increasing attentiveness to the cultural productions and needs of underrepresented populations made conventional approaches to teaching Irish literature and history seem out of touch?

The aims of this Handbook The central function of this collection is to consider how, why, and to what ends Irish Studies has changed in the years since the economic downturn. The chapters included examine the current state of the field from multi- and interdisciplinary points of views, focusing on the scholarship that has emerged since 2008 as Irish Studies research has attempted to reframe and reexamine Ireland in the wake of austerity and renewal. Unlike the several volumes since 2018 that have addressed the changing field from specific disciplinary perspectives—in literature, Cambridge University Press’s 6-volume Irish Literature in Transition series (edited by Claire Connolly and Marjorie Howes), The New Irish Studies collection (edited by Paige Reynolds), and the 50th anniversary special issue of the Irish University Review (edited by Emilie Pine); and in history, Cambridge’s 4-volume History of Ireland (edited by Thomas Bartlett)—this volume spans the humanities and social sciences in order to develop continuities and enable conversations across disciplines of Irish Studies that often move in different orbits. The volume is thus organized into seven broad conceptual categories that each span multiple disciplines: Overview, 8

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Historicizing, Global Ireland, Identities, Culture, Theorizing, and Legacy. The broad interdisciplinary approach of the volume means coverage of individual disciplines might seem scant: for instance, while several thematic chapters touch on literature, there are only two chapters (“Fiction” and “Poetry”) specifically devoted to Irish literary studies, and they make no attempt to address the entirety of their topics (including the large body of literature written in the Irish language). Instead, the authors of these chapters make their arguments about the critical investments of contemporary Irish Studies by examining specific texts and trends and ask readers to extrapolate from these narrower analyses wider claims about Irish literary studies at large. The chapters in the volume all take different approaches to their topics: some survey their critical or historical fields rather than make arguments about specific primary texts; some offer thesis-driven arguments that show the trends in the field through their own readings of primary texts, objects, or events; some offer overviews of arts or cultural productions; some produce or recreate historical timelines; and some mix and match from all of these. As a whole, however, the chapters use their differing disciplinary and critical approaches to show how the recent experiences of Ireland—bankruptcy, austerity, social liberalism, Brexit, post-conflict relations, centenary celebrations, and immigration, to name a few—have led to debates over what constitutes Irish Studies, how it might be reconceived in the twenty-first century, and what lessons can be drawn from Irish experiences in comparative settings. As a body, this collection imagines how Irish Studies might thrive in the uncertain political, ecological, epidemiological, and academic future we currently face and begins a conversation about how we understand and reconstitute the value of our disciplinary inquiry as this future comes ever closer. This collection was meant to end chronologically with the Republic’s general election in February 2020, in which Sinn Féin emerged as the largest single party but was bypassed by a coalition government formed by Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, and the Green Party. We imagined that this strange coalition, widely heralded as the end of civil war politics, would be the perfect uncertain ending for a volume about the many possible futures for an Irish Studies liberated from tired narratives of nation and state-formation. Likewise, we thought that completing the volume without yet knowing how Brexit will play out—without knowing how the future relationship between the UK and the EU will reshape the island’s dynamics between north and south, unionist and nationalist—would allow us to end on an idealistic note rather than on a dispirited one. Not writing from a position of hindsight has its privileges, even if it will also always feel woefully unsettled and incomplete: if we can’t look behind us to see exactly how the world ends, we can at least look around and ahead of us to imagine all the ways it might still be rescued. And yet, while we were figuring out how to deal optimistically with the political unknowns that 2019 and early 2020 brought us, the world crashed into an epidemiological and economic unknown that we never saw coming: COVID-19. With Ireland’s fairly recent recuperation of economic sovereignty in 2014, and this only by a continuing reliance on global capital, the specter of another global recession derailing the potentially unsustainable Irish economy had long loomed over its recovery. When this specter materialized in March 2020, it wasn’t shocking because a future recession was unexpected, but because its cause was a global pandemic rather than the failure of a major financial institution or economy. As COVID-19 quickly spread across China, Europe, and the Americas, spiking in countries like Italy and Spain in March before spiraling disastrously in Russia, Brazil, the UK, and especially the US as 2020 wore on, it was clear that even if Ireland’s infection rates weren’t as high as some of its neighbors, it was an integral participant in what had clearly become a global crisis. With public celebration of St. Patrick’s Day cancelled, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar made a televised address to the Irish people on St. Patrick’s Day 2020, effectively closing the country to stop the spread of the disease and putting essential services on an emergency footing. He warned that “this is the calm before the storm—before 9

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the surge. And when it comes, and it will come, never will so many ask so much of so few.” After outlining the various measures to be put in place to take Ireland through the undefined period of emergency, Varadkar closed by placing national concerns and fears in a global context: To all of those across the world who have lost a loved one to this virus, we are with you. To all those living in the shadow of what is to come, we are with you. Viruses pay no attention to borders, race, nationality or gender. They are the shared enemy of all humanity. So it will be the shared enterprise of all humanity that finds a treatment and a vaccine that protects us. Tonight, I send a message of friendship and hope from Ireland to everyone around the world this Saint Patrick’s Day. Lá Fhéile Pádraig shona daoibh! Oíche mhaith.24 By the time that Ireland began reopening its economy in June 2020, over 26,000 people in the State had contracted the disease and nearly 1,800 had died. When October of 2020 brought the much dreaded “autumn spike” of new cases to Ireland, as well as to the rest of Europe and to the US, and Ireland again locked down—this time to “save Christmas,” as Taoiseach Micheál Martin insisted—it finally became impossible to pretend that the virus would wane or that “normal life” would resume anytime soon. The devastating impact of COVID-19—not just the disease itself and its lingering effects on individual and public health, but the economic costs and the changes it wrought to the way people go about their day-to-day lives—will be felt long into the future, and will play out in unpredictable ways. While we don’t yet know how Irish Studies as a discipline will respond to such a seismic global event (beyond the postponement and new virtuality of its many conferences and events), we decided that this volume needed to end with a chapter on Irish Studies and the pandemic, one that considers the epistemology of global outbreak intersectionally with the equally pressing global crises of climate change and systemic racism that the pandemic has brought into even sharper relief. This is, in some ways, a complete negation of our initial hope that ending the volume in the midst of unknowable political outcomes would open spaces for imagining countless potential futures for Irish Studies. By ending instead with a meditation on the pandemic, we acknowledge that some futures are simply unacceptable, and that Irish Studies in the coming times will need to acknowledge and counter its own complicity in privileging some progressive politics over others, some forms of violence over others, some lives over others.

Some final words The global success of the television adaptation of Normal People during the COVID-19 lockdown should remind us how easy it is to mistake “normative” for “normal” when we seek escapist fantasies to drown out the shattering worlds beyond our doors. As the pandemic ground the world to a standstill, a story of the relationship between two white, straight students in Dublin garnered the world’s attention and acclaim, becoming one of the most significant Irish cultural exports since Riverdance. And yet the series, set in the post-2008 downturn, turns a blind eye to the austerity politics, the abnormality, the dislocation, and the complex feelings of betrayal that conditioned Irish experiences of those years, and that continue to reverberate now. Deirdre Flynn has argued that it is precisely the absence of these complexities, these signals of economic and social reconfiguration, that made Normal People so appealing to such a wide viewership: in her words, the “chaos of the outside world” could vanish into “universal themes,” into a “very simple, and common” love story between two “ordinary” people (n.p.). But these nearly banal adjectives describing a love story—“universal,” “common,” “ordinary”—are the very terms that Irish Studies must continue to resist as it confronts rather than hides from the ways that the crises of 2020 reconfigure Ireland and the rest of the West. 10

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This volume resists and refutes both the fantasy of Normal People and the myth that Ireland is full of such “normal people.” Such easy cultural exports make the “ordinary life” of white, educated heteronormativity shorthand for an Ireland whose violent colonial and sectarian past has been successfully overwritten by its forays into western neoliberal capitalism. In contrast, Irish Studies scholarship in the last decade has intensified its focus on the complex interconnected narratives, the multiplicity of identities, the orthodoxies and heterodoxies, and the ongoing struggles against systemic inequality that hover behind the symbols of social liberalization that make Ireland look “normal” to a superficial viewer: among them, the appearance of economic recovery, the referendums, a gay Taoiseach of Indian heritage, and the lack of an ethno-nationalism producing an Irish Donald Trump or Boris Johnson. But a “normal” Ireland clearly has international appeal—the post-recession Republic has packaged itself as the best small country to do business in, as somewhere safe, friendly, welcoming, and socially inclusive. The state has no interest in representing itself to the world as complex or challenging, when Guinness and shamrocks and low corporate tax rates are all already so globally alluring. Irish Studies has long refused such inventions of the normal, save to interrogate and displace them in favor of the far more diverse, far more difficult, and far more creative narratives and experiences that lay below their surface. As scholars of Irish Studies, it is our responsibility to make visible the people excluded from Ireland’s state-sanctioned, welcoming, “normal” ethos: women, members of the traveling community, those with physical and intellectual disabilities, those seeking safety and asylum but forced to live in Direct Provision centers, those who are not white or who have non-conforming gender identities, those unhoused thousands who live on the streets or in substandard bed and breakfast accommodations, and those who endure daily fear of violence and sexual abuse within their homes. For these people, Ireland is not a safe and welcoming place in which to live. For these people, “normal” is a state of unmitigated precarity. Irish Studies has always spanned multiple centuries, disciplines, languages, and political positions, but in our contemporary world it has room to become even broader in its remit and more empathetic in its inquiries. The study of Ireland and Irishness is a study of aesthetic heterogeneity, of socioeconomic and geographical difference, of linguistic hybridity, of myriad forms of affiliation, of privilege and injustice, and, perhaps most importantly, of our own habits, assumptions, and normalizing scholarly practices. TV may momentarily transfix us with the ease of Normal People, but when the romance ends a complex Ireland itself remains, irreducible to singular types or languages, resistant to the lull of the ordinary, and challenging all of us to seek out the stories that could never, and should never, be normal.

Notes 1 “How drug wars in Ireland led to the murder and dismemberment of a teenage boy”: www.cnn. com/2020/02/07/europe/drogheda-gang-wars-ireland-drugs-intl/index.html (Accessed July 28, 2020) 2 Lenny Abrahamson’s 2007 film Garage (written by Mark O’Halloran) tells a heart-wrenching version of this story. 3 According to Women’s Aid, fewer than a third of women in Ireland who are victims of severe domestic abuse report it. See www.womensaid.ie/about/policy/natintstats.html for a full list of statistics related to domestic and sexual abuse against women and children in Ireland. See Valente and Backus for an analysis of child sexual abuse scandals and the narrative devices that both suppressed and exposed them across twentieth and twenty-first century Irish literature. (Accessed July 24, 2020) 4 www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/most-women-killed-by-partner-or-ex-230-diedviolently-since-1996-two-thirds-in-their-own-home-965824.html (Accessed August 1, 2020) 5 Peter Coviello, “So-Called Normal People,” Post-45 “Reading Sally Rooney” forum, 6.15. 20 (http:// post45.org/2020/06/so-called-normal-people/) (Accessed July 13, 2020) 11

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6 In Dwight Gardner’s words, “Rooney’s characters are similarly estranged from their environments and from one another. Rooney herself, on the other hand, seems completely plugged in.” www.nytimes. com/2019/04/08/books/review-normal-people-sally-rooney.html (Accessed July 13, 2020) 7 See, for instance, Cronin, John O’Sullivan, and Scharbrodt. 8 See Kitchin, et al. and Maher and O’Brien. 9 “Was it for this?” Irish Times, November 18, 2010, p. 1. 10 On Ireland in a transnational/global context, see Michael O’Sullivan; Tucker and Casey; and Ulin, Edwards, and O’Brien. On Ireland and race, see Faragó and Sullivan; Fitzgerald; Moynihan; and VillarArgáiz. On Irish feminisms, see Boland; Bracken; Coughlan; Meaney; Sullivan; and Ward. On Ireland and queer theory, see Ferriter; Giffney and Shildrick; Mullen; Walsh; and two “Queering Ireland” special journal issues, one edited by Mulhall and one by Kennedy. On Ireland and ecocriticism, see Cusick; Gladwin and O’Connor; and Sen. On transnationalism and Irish language, see O’Rourke and Walsh; Mac Giolla Chríost; Nic Eoin; and Ó Conchubhair. 11 See in particular chapters in this volume by Ed Madden, Sarah L. Townsend, Elizabeth Grubgeld, and Malcolm Sen. 12 For more on the abuses of the Catholic Church and the Magdalene laundries, see Pine (2011); Keenan; and Smith. 13 www.themonastery.org/blog/where-did-all-the-catholics-go-sparse-crowds-for-popes-ireland-visit (Accessed June 29, 2020) 14 See Oliver P. Rafferty’s chapter in this volume for a detailed analysis of the Catholic Church’s place in contemporary Ireland. 15 See Lucy Michael’s chapter in this volume. For migration statistics, see Gilmartin. See also Ulin, Edwards, and O’Brien. 16 See the introduction to the “Identities” section of this volume (Part IV) for a brief overview of the changing nature of “Irishness.” 17 See statistics posted by the American Chamber of Commerce Ireland: www.amcham.ie/about-us/usireland-business/stats-facts.aspx (Accessed July 26, 2020) 18 See the 50th anniversary issue of the Irish University Review, edited by Emilie Pine, that outlines this key journal’s sense of the field’s movement between the 1970s and today. 19 See the final four essays in Emilie Pine’s edited 50th anniversary special issue of the Irish University Review that detail its international reach. 20 For an important collection of theoretical essays in these areas, see Connolly. 21 See for example Boland, Coughlan, Fitzgerald, Meaney, Sullivan, and Ward. 22 See, for instance, https://irishamerica.com/2013/03/the-most-globalized-nation-of-the-western-world/ and https://cvdl.ben.edu/blog/ireland-globalization/ (Ireland apparently slipped to #2 in 2017, after ranking #1 as recently as 2016 according to some globalization indices). (Accessed July 26, 2020) 23 See, for instance, Coulter and Coleman. As Balzano, Mulhall, and Sullivan argue, however, the embrace of Western neoliberalism can operate in both directions, serving as a deterrent to adopting new “AngloAmerican” theoretical practices as often as it did spurring the field to do so (xvii). See Faragó and Sullivan for an intersectional critique of neoliberal Ireland at the height of the boom that both expands the purview of Irish Studies and defines a number of broad areas related to race and gender that would be interrogated during the downturn. 24 For the full text of Varadker’s 2020 St. Patrick’s Day address, see: www.gov.ie/en/speech/72f0d9national-address-by-the-taoiseach-st-patricks-day/ (Accessed July 26, 2020)

Works cited Balzano, Wanda, Anne Mulhall, and Moynagh Sullivan, Eds. Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture. Palgrave, 2007. Bartlett, Thomas, General, Ed. The Cambridge History of Ireland (4 vols). Cambridge University Press, 2018. Boland, Eavan. A Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in National Tradition. LIP Pamphlet. Attic Press, 1989. Boland, Eavan. Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. W.W. Norton, 1995. Bourke, Angela. The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story. Penguin Books, 1999. Bourke, Angela, Siobhán Kilfeather, et al., General Eds. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vols. IV-V: Irish Women’s Writing and Tradition. Field Day Publications. New York University Press, 2002. Bowen, Elizabeth. The Last September. Constable & Co. Ltd., 1929. 12

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Bowen, Elizabeth. The Heat of the Day. Knopf, 1948. Bracken, Claire. Irish Feminist Futures. Routledge, 2016. Connolly, Claire, Ed. Theorizing Ireland. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Connolly, Claire and Marjorie Howes, General Eds. Irish Literature in Transition (6 vols.). Cambridge University Press, 2020. Coughlan, Patricia. “‘Bog Queens’: The Representation of Women in the Poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney.” Gender in Irish Writing. Edited by Toni Johnson and David Cairns. Open University Press, 1991, pp. 88–111. Coulter, Colin and Steve Coleman, Eds. The End of Irish History? Critical Reflections on the Celtic Tiger. Manchester University Press, 2003. Cronin, Michael. “Small Worlds and Weak Ties: Ireland in the New Century.” Journal of Irish Studies. Vol. 22, 2007, pp. 63–73. Cullingford, Elizabeth. Ireland’s Others: Ethnicity and Gender in Irish Literature and Popular Culture (Critical Conditions 10). University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. Cusick, Christine, Ed. “Out of the Earth”: Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts. Cork, Cork University Press, 2010. Deane, Seamus. Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790. Oxford University Press, 1997. Elliott, Marianne. Wolfe Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence. Yale University Press, 1989. Elliott, Marianne. Robert Emmet: The Making of a Legend. Profile, 2003. Faragó, Borbála and Moynagh Sullivan, Eds. Facing the Other: Interdisciplinary Studies on Race, Gender and Social Justice in Ireland. Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008. Farrell, M.J. (Molly Keane). Devoted Ladies (1934). Virago, 2006. Ferriter, Diarmaid. Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland. Profile Books, 2009. Fitzgerald, Gretchen. Repulsing Racism: Reflections on Racism and the Irish. Attic Press, 1992. Flynn, Deirdre. “‘Normal People’ in Lockdown.”Irish Humanities Alliance, June 11, 2020. www.irishhumanities. com/blog/normal-people/ (Accessed July 26, 2020). Foster, R.F. Modern Ireland 1600–1972. Penguin/Viking, 1988. Foster, R.F. Paddy and Mr. Punch: Connections in Irish History and English History. Allen Lane/Penguin, 1993. Foster, R.F. W. B. Yeats, A Life, Vol. I: The Apprentice Mage, 1865–1914, and Vol II: The Arch-Poet 1915– 1939. Oxford University Press, 1997, 2003. French, Tana. The Likeness. Penguin Books, 2008. Giffney, Noreen and Margrit Shildrick, Eds. Theory on the Edge: Irish Studies and the Politics of Sexual Difference. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Gimartin, Mary. “Changing Ireland, 2000–2012: Immigration, Emigration and Inequality.” Irish Geography, Vol. 46., No. 1–2, 2013, pp. 91–111. Gladwin, Derek and Maureen O’Connor, Eds. “Irish Studies and the Environmental Humanities.” Special Issue of Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1, 2018. Gregory, Lady Augusta. Cuchulain of Muirthemne: The Story of the Men of the Red Branch of Ulster (2nd edn.). J. Murray, 1903. Gregory, Lady Augusta. Selected Writings. Edited by Lucy McDiarmid. Penguin Books, 1995. Keenan, Marie. Child Sexual Abuse & The Catholic Church: Gender, Power, and Organizational Culture. Oxford University Press, 2012. Kennedy, Seán, Ed. “Queering Ireland.” Special Issue of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1, Spring 2010. Kenny, Kevin. Making Sense of the Molly Maguires. Oxford University Press, 1998. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. Longman, 2000. Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of a Modern Nation. Harvard University Press, 1995. Kitchin, Rob, Cian O’Callaghan, Mark Boyle, Justin Gleeson, and Karen Keaveney. “Placing Neoliberalism: The Rise and Fall of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger.” Environment and Planning A, Vol. 44, No. 6, January 2012, pp. 1302–1326. Lavin, Mary. Tales from Bective Bridge. Little Brown, 1942. Lavin, Mary. Collected Stories. Houghton Mifflin, 1971. Lawless, Emily. Hurrish: A Study. William Blackwood and Sons, 1886. Lawless, Emily. Grania: The Story of an Island. Smith, Elder & Company, 1892. Lloyd, David. Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment. Duke University Press, 1993. Lloyd, David. Ireland after History (Critical Conditions 9). Cork University Press, 1999. Mac Giolla Chríost, Diarmait. The Irish Language in Ireland: From Goídel to Globalisation. Routledge, 2005. 13

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Maher, Eamon and Eugene O’Brien, Eds. From Prosperity to Austerity: A Socio-Cultural Critique of the Celtic Tiger and Its Aftermath. Manchester University Press, 2014. Meaney, Gerardine. Sex and Nation: Women in Irish Culture and Politics. Attic Press, 1991. Meaney, Gerardine. Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change: Race, Sex, and Nation. Routledge, 2010. Moynihan, Sinéad. “Other People’s Diasporas”: Negotiating Race in Contemporary Irish and Irish-American Culture. Syracuse University Press, 2013. Mulhall, Anne, Ed. “Queering the Issue.” Special Issue of the Irish University Review, Vol. 43, No. 1, May 2013. Mullen, Patrick R. The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History. Oxford University Press, 2016. Nic Eoin, Máirín. Trén bhFearann Breac: An Díláithriú Cultúir agus Nualitríocht na Gaeilge. Cois Life, 2013. Nic Eoin, Máirín. “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Transnational Irish-Language Writing.” Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies, April 12, 2013. https://breac.nd.edu/articles/interdisciplinary-perspectiveson-transnational-irish-language-writing-2/ (Accessed August 3, 2020). Pine, Emilie. “Coming Clean? Remembering the Magdalen Laundries.” Memory Ireland, Vol. 1: History and Modernity. Edited by Oona Frawley. Syracuse University Press, 2011. Pine, Emilie, Ed. “Golden Jubilee: Irish Studies Now.” Special Issue of the Irish University Review, Vol. 50, No. 1, 2020. O’Brien, Kate. Mary Lavelle. William Heinemann Ltd., 1936. O’Brien, Kate. The Land of Spices. Doubleday, Doran & Co., Inc., 1941. O’Brien, Edna. The Country Girls Trilogy: The Country Girls (1960), The Lonely Girl (1962), Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964). FSG Classics, 2017. Ó Conchubhair, Brian. “The Global Diaspora and the ‘New’ Irish (Language).” A New View of the Irish Language. Edited by Caoilfhionn Nic Pháidín and Seán Ó Cearnaigh. Cois Life, 2008, pp. 224–248. O’Rourke, Bernadette and John Walsh. New Speakers of Irish in the Global Context: New Revival? Routledge, 2020. Ó Siadhail, Pádraig. Peaca an tSinsir. Cló Iar-Chonnacht, 1996. Ó Siadhail, Pádraig. Na Seacht gCineál Meisce agus Finscéalta Eile. Cló Iar-Chonnacht, 2001. O’Sullivan, John. “The End of Irish Exceptionalism.” The National Review, June 7, 2018 www.national review.com/2018/06/ireland-abortion-referendum-irish-exceptionalism-ending-european-identity/ (Accessed August 3, 2020). O’Sullivan, Michael. Ireland and the Global Question. Cork University Press, 2006. Reynolds, Paige, Ed. The New Irish Studies. Cambridge University Press, 2020. Scharbrodt, Oliver. “From Irish Exceptionalism to European Normality?: The New Islamic Presence in the Republic of Ireland.” Études Irlandais. Vol. 39, No. 2, 2014, pp. 147–160. Sen, Malcolm, Ed. The Cambridge History of Irish Literature and the Environment. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2021. Smith, James M. Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment. University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Sullivan, Moynagh. “Feminism, Postmodernism and the Subjects of Irish and Women’s Studies.” New Voices in Irish Criticism. Edited by P.J. Matthews. Four Courts Press, 2000, pp. 243–251. Tucker, Amanda and Moira Casey. Where Motley Is Worn: Transnational Irish Literatures. Cork University Press, 2014. Ulin, Julieann Veronica, Heather Edwards, and Sean O’Brien, Eds. Race and Immigration in the New Ireland. University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Valente, Joseph and Margot Gayle Backus. The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature. Indiana University Press, 2020. Varadker, Leo. “National Address by the Taoiseach, St. Patrick’s Day.” March 17, 2020. www.gov.ie/en/ speech/72f0d9-national-address-by-the-taoiseach-st-patricks-day/ (Accessed July 26, 2020). Villar-Argáiz, Pilar, Ed. Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland: The Immigrant in Contemporary Irish Literature. Manchester University Press, 2014. Villar-Argáiz, Pilar. Irishness on the Margins: Minority and Dissident Identities. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Walsh, Fintan. Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Ward, Margaret. The Missing Sex: Putting Irish Women Into History. Attic Press, 1991.

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2 Towards a history of Irish Studies in the United States John Waters

This chapter examines four eras, successive but overlapping, of intellectual engagement with the academic study of Irish language, culture, literature, and history in the American academy. These heuristics range from the Celtic Studies boom in the first three decades of the twentieth century, the mid-century anthropological study of the Irish peasantry and its folklore, the New Critical study of Irish writers in the post-war period through to the advent of theory, and the development in recent decades of work driven by several theoretical commitments—chiefly feminist and postcolonial—that coincided with the formal foundation of degree-granting Irish Studies Programs and institutes at US universities and colleges. There are many ways to narrate this complex history. The approach adopted here considers how Irish subject matter was made usable within the prevailing modes of knowledge production. The history of Irish Studies shows us that academic labor, whatever logic governs its internal procedures, is subject to societal pressures, influences, inducements, and tastes. Irish Studies has always been uneasily positioned between disciplinary forms that did not come into being solely or primarily to suit the production of knowledge about Ireland. Consequently, we find that a host of disciplinary concerns that shaped the emergence of the humanities and social sciences in the twentieth century—utility, scale, objectivity, geography, periodization, to name a few—come under pressure by the residual force of Irish difference. The study of Ireland in North American universities long predates the formal establishment of Irish Studies Programs, Institutes, or Centers. That long precedence can be and has been invoked or represented in a variety of ways. Origins are multiple. Irish was the native tongue of one of the first Euro-American lexicographers, Matthias O’Conway from Galway, who mastered several Native American languages and taught French, Spanish, Irish, Latin, and Greek in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, and Havana between his arrival in 1783 and his death in 1842 (Mathias O’Conway papers).1 Many other scholars who carried language and learning out of Ireland came to the US in the 19th century. The century began with the an Irish wave of emigrants, among them educated members of learned families—MacNevin, Emmett, Sampson, O’Connor—who forged careers as teachers, scholars, and public intellectuals in the US. By the late 19th century, visiting lecturers from Ireland could count on substantial Irish and IrishAmerican audiences for lectures and presentations. Oscar Wilde’s notoriety as intellectual and performer paved a way for Yeats, Hyde, Griffith, and many other figures associated with Irish culture and politics to speak about Ireland and Irish culture to American audiences. 15

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The philological revolution underway in European scholarship made its impact on American universities at the very end of the 19th century. When Johns Hopkins University was established in 1876 on the German research-based model, centered on graduate instruction, the role of Classics in the curriculum was cemented with the appointment of Basil Gildersleeve, Confederate veteran, defender of slavery, Professor of Greek at the University of Virginia, as the first of five full professors. It is notable, though, that Hopkins did not follow contemporary German and French philologists in incorporating the study of Celtic languages; the study of Celtic languages and antiquities was relatively insubstantial in the pages of the American Journal of Philology in contrast to the later Linguistic Society of America (see Ó Conchubhair 2008). Whereas Notre Dame offered Irish language from earlier than 1867 (Ó Conchubhair 2020), Harvard began offering Celtic languages in 1896 when Fred Robinson, recently returned from two years of study in Celtic philology under the Swiss scholar Rudolf Thurneysen, began a long and productive career teaching Irish and Welsh alongside his studies of medieval English language and literature. Some academic genealogy is necessary to recap here, for it can give us some sense of the network (associational, Old Boy) by which academia operated. Robinson’s and Harvard’s impact on the field was broad and long-lasting, sustained by his contact with eminent European Celticists. ACL Brown studied with Robinson at Harvard, used a Rogers Traveling Fellowship to study with Thurneysen at Freiburg and with Marie Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville at the Collège de France, Paris, then taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison before moving on to a long, productive career at Northwestern, teaching courses in medieval Irish, Welsh, and French Literature, and publishing widely on Arthurian romance (a field that attracted many trained Celtic philologists). Joseph Dunn studied with Robinson and then Thurneysen before taking up Richard Henebry’s endowed Professorship of Celtic Studies at the Catholic University in Washington DC. Tom Peete Cross went from Robinson to Osborn Bergin in Dublin before teaching at North Carolina and then the University of Chicago. If Philology and its methods got the study of Celtic language and culture into the American university, it was unable to keep it there. The reasons for this are complex and worth addressing in detail, because they point out those forces that support the initiation of academic fields of study, that are necessary for their continuance, and that are fatal in their absence. Of course, money answers all three of these, and at the conclusion of this chapter I shall return to discuss the role of private philanthropy in advancing Irish Studies departments and programs since 1993. Money certainly was a prominent factor in attempts to establish and grow the first organized programs. Henebry’s Chair in Celtic at Catholic University was endowed in 1896 with support from the Ancient Order of Hibernians and private gifts; it was filled first by Father Richard Henebry, a native-speaker from Waterford, and then by Joseph Dunn. When Gertrude Schoepperle, who studied with Robinson while at Radcliffe and went on to study with d’Arbois de Jubainville in Paris, tried to establish the study of Irish at Illinois, she concluded “Americans must be led to an interest in Irish by other paths than linguistic.” She identified a general cultural predisposition against the idea that the Irish language should be studied: “A student, even a student of Irish descent, thinks he out to know something of French or German, but he can get along without Irish. This point of view we are trying to change” (Schoepperle, 101). She, too, turned to the Hibernians for financial support (they supported an essay prize), and she convinced the University to bring Kuno Meyer as visiting lecturer and the Old Irish scholar Andrew O’Kelleher as an appointed lecturer in Irish. She recognized that “the recent brief blossoming of Celtic Studies in Europe is over,” death having claimed the most eminent scholars, the World War doing its share (Schoepperle 106). Her plans were vast and involved the integration of the study of Irish matters across all the disciplines of the university in much the same way the University of Notre Dame has done in recent decades. But Schoepperle, whose research interests 16

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were split between Old Irish and Arthurian Studies, left Illinois when she married Roger Sherman Loomis, another Robinson student who was also devoted to Arthurian Studies. She went to teach at Vassar but died in 1921, while he took up an appointment in English at Columbia, where John Lawrence Gerig taught as Professor of Irish (Ó Conchubhair 2008, 177–178). The teaching of Irish at Illinois was thereafter covered sporadically by medievalists John Parry, a scholar of Welsh, and Roland M. Smith, another Robinson protégé whose research interests were in Arthurian Studies. Schoepperle’s recognition that linguistic study might not be the only or best path to grow Irish Studies in America was born out at both Berkeley2 and Fordham in the later 1920s. The simultaneous work of Joseph Campbell on the East Coast and Ella Young on the West captures both the breadth and the marginality of Irish Studies with respect to institutions and disciplines. Campbell carved a place within the immense associational culture of the Irish in New York attractive enough to be absorbed, for a time, within Fordham University; his efforts can properly claim to have led to the first Irish Studies Program, though it was always precarious in its finances and did not survive the depression. Both Campbell and Young were poets who came to Irish through the Gaelic League. Both were considered exceptionally charismatic and could teach from the standpoint of having participated in the Irish Revival. Neither, however, was able to generate sustained institutional investment. After Lyman left Berkeley, and the university hired Young as the “James D. Phelan Lecturer in Irish Myth and Lore,” her left-wing, anti-treaty political sympathies made her vulnerable to nativist regimes of citizenship in the US; she was prevented from entering the country for a year. During her decade teaching at Berkeley and during her residence at Taos, New Mexico, where she helped Ernie O’Malley revise his memoirs, her mystic ideas and extravagant force of personality sowed Celtic forms into the fabric of 20th-century Bohemian California (McDowell). She was replaced by A.E. Hutson (Ó Conchubhair 2008, 181). Like Young, the poet Joseph Campbell came to Irish through the Gaelic League and the culture of the Revival, and like Young, he felt it necessary to leave Ireland after supporting the anti-treaty side in the Irish Civil War. Campbell founded an Irish School of Learning in New York (Schoepperle tried something similar in St. Louis, with less success). Charismatic, eloquent, and widely published, Campbell forged an alliance with the President of Fordham, the Rev. Miles J. O’Mailia, whereby the School was incorporated within the University. Campbell’s course of study included study of the Irish language but integrated that study with broad attention to Irish drama, poetry, music, and history through the medium of English: “Other American universities have Chairs of Celtology, but this will have the distinction of being the first school of its kind to study in the Irish arts as a whole” (Fordham). The School lasted only four years; Campbell was retained as a lecturer at Fordham after 1932 but at a low pay given his lack of academic credentials. He was dismissed in 1938 and returned to Ireland in 1939 (DIB, “Campbell”). What we might think of as the Robinson seedlings took root across the landscape of American higher education where it was most actively supporting growth, the major private research universities and the growing land-grant colleges and flagship state universities. Apart from the programs at Harvard and Berkeley, though, there is very little institutional continuity from the early twentieth century to the present. The reasons for this are social and cultural. Irish was for the most part abandoned by emigrants and was never sufficiently revived as a vernacular in the twentieth century in Ireland itself to make study of the language compelling, outside of the many academic and intellectual strengths and opportunities offered by the field. Those strengths were, however, developed primarily in Irish Universities, and after 1940, in the Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin. There are many other intrinsic reasons why the study of the Irish language has been challenging. Philology is dependent on access to texts, and in the Irish 17

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context this has meant access to manuscripts. The work of the Irish Texts Society, founded in 1898, the year Robinson was appointed at Harvard, sought to overcome this obstacle; it should be noted that the first American scholar to contribute a volume to the series was Joseph Nagy in 1996. An American Committee of the Society was established in 1912, “on the initiative of Arthurian Scholar A.C.L. Brown:” the members nominated were the presidents of Notre Dame and Catholic Universities, the philanthropist John Quinn, Robinson, and two of his students, Tom Peete Cross and Joseph Dunn (Ó Riain, 72). None of these scholars, however, were ever commissioned to edit one of the Society’s volumes. The divergence of Modern Irish from Middle Irish and Old Irish is certainly relevant in this context, but so too is the relative appeal of continental languages and their more successful incorporation into the discipline of comparative literature. While the productivity and the prestige of Celtic Studies reached a steady to declining state in the American academy in the 1930s, the study of modern Irish culture turned decisively toward studies of the Irish peasantry, Irish folk life, and the emergence of an Irish literature in the English language that was either inspired by a construct of the peasant, or written in reaction against that construct. A great deal has been written about the social, cultural, and ideological construction of the Irish peasantry and the role that it played in the Irish Revival of the early twentieth century. Here again, Harvard played a significant role, and it did so by devoting resources to faculty and graduate students devoted to modeling disciplinary methodology across a range of disciplines. The “Harvard Mission to Ireland” attempted to examine “the Celt” with the best contemporary tools of the human sciences. Three strands of research were established, in Social Anthropology, Physical Anthropology, and Archaeology. The whole initiative was undertaken with the cooperation of the Free State government; as Mairéad Carew has shown, the Physical Anthropology and Archaeology initiatives were shot through with racist and eugenicist thinking (Carew). The Social Anthropology study, based in west Clare and led by Arensberg and Kimball, proved more influential; it has been suggested that this is primarily because the study was based in kinship models of social structure, developed structural-functionalism as the theoretical model of social research, and centered community as the unit of analysis. This proved influential not merely for the study of Ireland but, as Thomas Wilson has argued, for research methods in social and cultural anthropology (Wilson and Donnan, 17). Arensberg and Kimball recognized that they were not studying a static community living a timeless peasant existence; Irish society was worth studying precisely because of the specific conjunction of modernity and tradition that was to occupy a prominent role in analyses of literature in 20th-century Ireland. Their exploration of the sexual experiences of Irish people was to provoke the kind of censorship that operated against modern Irish literature in the name of tradition (Byrne and O’Sullivan). Governmental assistance and cooperation with large research initiatives like the Harvard Mission were matched by a more general receptivity (accompanied by literary satire) to Americans researching Irish culture. Three years before the Harvard Irish Study got underway, Horace Mason Reynolds, a young assistant professor at Brown University who had recently graduated from Harvard, traveled to Ireland on behalf of the Hay library at Brown to meet contemporary Irish intellectuals and to purchase books for the John Hay Library. Reynolds’ diary of the trip records meetings with, among others, W.B. Yeats, Maude Gonne, Seamus O’Sullivan, Eoin MacNeill, Oliver St. John Gogarty, Sean O’Casey, Brinsley MacNamara, Lennox Robinson, Frank Cruise O’Brien, and, on their first visit back to Ireland, Pádraic and Mary Colum (Reynolds Papers). His reception by so many notable people, especially Yeats, who agreed to Reynold’s proposal to republish his contributions to the Providence Journal as Letters to the New Island, mark for us the degree to which the study of Irish life was recognized as a trans-Atlantic, cooperative endeavor. After seeing O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones at the Abbey Theatre, Reynolds 18

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was led to speculate on a potential research topic: the influence of America on the Irish Renaissance (Reynolds Papers, 584). The “Modernity and Tradition” dyad names an enduring framework by which Irish culture was made productive within the disciplines of university research and teaching. (It took a great deal of work to undo this formulation in the 1980s and 1990s.) The subtlety of Arensberg and Kimball was washed out in the condescending framework that, as Johannes Fabian demonstrated in Time and the Other, operated by thinking that one could move back in time by moving in space. In the decades after the Second World War, the question of how to study Ireland was subsumed by the question of how Ireland offered material to answer the universalist, humanist ethos by which literary and cultural study were conducted. Ireland was unusually, but instructively, productive in provoking the framework and its revision. The work of making Irish Literature gave the gift of revising Irish Literature to subsequent generations; anthropological study made explicit what was tacitly assumed in other disciplines. (It is notable to me that the revisionism debates that raged in Irish Historical Studies from the 1970s through the Celtic Tiger years, or sometime during the two George W. Bush administrations, failed to consider the structural conditions that provoked the production of scholarship and scholarly argumentation.) The elevation of literature to its role as an index of national-cultural achievement was a principal objective of the disciplinary labor of English literature scholars working within the paradigm of nationalist literary history. Ireland fared poorly in the first wave of this scholarship, between 1870 and 1930, when writing by Irish writers in the English language was set within or against the writing that was used to solidify the canon of English literary achievement. The paradox that emerged in the post-war period is that newly independent Ireland, the first nation within the English empire to successfully stage an anti-colonial revolution, provided models of literary achievement that by virtue of their formal sophistication were able to be subsumed within the larger development of the English language and its literature. We might view the New Criticism that emerged before and after the Second World War as a mechanism by which the cultural products of the imperial center and imperial colonies and peripheries could be recoded for second service within the imperial project. Certainly this is borne out by the manner in which a generation of critics who came of age in the 1940s and 1950s seized on the possibilities of Irish writing for critical commentary and exegesis. Joseph Brooker memorably characterized “the men of 1946” in his study of the history of Joyce criticism (Brooker 2004, 97–136). He was referring to the twin titans of Richard Ellmann and Hugh Kenner, entirely apposite in the context of Joyce Studies, but it is worth noting that Ellmann was accompanied on his first visit to Dublin by John Kelleher, then a junior fellow at Harvard who arrived two years after Robinson retired, one year after Henry Lee Shattuck, through the Charitable Irish Society of Boston, endowed a professorship of Celtic to birth the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures, where Kelleher studied under Kenneth H. Jackson (Galvin 1996; Ó Conchubhair 2008, 174). Kelleher’s long career in Irish Studies modeled a kind of humanist interdisciplinary approach that was personally and institutionally idiosyncratic (he was an appointed faculty member of both History and English), in part because it was deeply grounded in both the Irish and English language literary and cultural traditions (Irish Times Jan. 17, 2004). Although sometimes represented as opposing critical thinkers, both Ellmann and Kenner were steeped in the New Critical methodological consensus that Cleanth Brooks embodied at Yale; Ellmann won the John Addison Porter prize for his study of Yeats in 1947, Kenner for his study of Joyce in 1950. The extraordinary utility of New Critical exegesis as a pedagogic model for an expanding US university system enhanced and amplified the claims of Irish writers on the modernist canon. This had a complex effect: while on the one hand culture within the American academy, on the other hand that study was predicated on the idea that both writers 19

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were worthy of study because of their putative ability to rise above their particular local connections to Ireland in the making of a properly universal order of aesthetic creation. In Ellmann’s case, the meticulous tracing of every connection of Joyce’s life to his work unified both in the construction of a monumental modernist artist (Bush 1996, 523–529). Kenner’s extraordinary range of reference and rare syncretic intelligence allowed him to see and express the connections between small artistic gestures and large cultural movements, but the grand narratives to which his ingenious critical intelligence contributed were especially poorly suited to understanding Ireland in all but the most reductive ways (Kenner 1983). The limitations of American (and Canadian) critics in understanding the complex intellectual and psychological dimensions of Irish identity were to play an important role in the development of an Irish Studies scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s that established Irish Studies as a distinct mode of intellectual endeavor worthy of formal institutional support. Before that could happen, a great deal of work needed to be done to elevate the reputation of the study of Ireland and of Irish culture. This was accomplished by complex macro-social changes, especially the shift from an autarkic model of national development in Ireland in the late 1950s, and also by individual intercultural exchanges, especially the recruitment of Irish intellectuals by American universities. An important pioneer was Myles Dillon, a student of Osborn Bergin at University College Dublin (UCD), who went on to get his doctorate in Old Irish working with Thurneysen at Bonn. Dillon left UCD for Wisconsin in 1937, then went to Chicago in 1946 before accepting a position in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies on its founding in 1940 (DIB, Dillon). Although Wisconsin–Madison remained a center for Celtic Studies, with varying levels of administrative commitment, through 2015, when the Program was suspended, it has been a consistent home for Irish Studies. The Center for Celtic Studies Program at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, founded by John Gleeson and Bettina Arnold in 2002, remains active under the guidance of José Lanters and Bairbre Ní Chiardha. The individual migrations of scholars went in multiple ways. David Greene, for example, studied at Harvard in the 1930s in the last years of Fred Robinson’s active teaching, using a Harvard traveling fellowship to get to Ireland. He left Harvard just when Kenneth Jackson arrived from Cambridge University to take up the first Chair in the Department of Celtic Language and Literature. Greene, Jackson, and Kelliher worked in Intelligence services in the Second World War, Greene afterwards accepting an appointment at NYU, where he taught until 1985; Jackson went in 1950 to Edinburgh, where he taught until 1979. Greene’s scholarship was infused with his study of the Irish language, and among his many publications, his two-volume Anthology of Irish Writing and his 100 Years of Irish Prose testified to his belief that the brilliant English-language literature produced in Ireland must be studied in relation to the long tradition of Irish-language poetry that was in continuous production up through the present (NYTimes July 13, 2008). In this respect he plowed an adjacent furrow to what John V. Kelleher was able to dig at Harvard. Few among the generation of scholars who went on to found Irish Studies out of the declining stock of Celtic were to devote as much effort to acquiring and teaching the Irish language. A notable figure whose work between English and Irish modeled an idiosyncratic path through Irish and American institutions, Vivian Mercier was a trailblazer for Irish academics making a career in the US. A graduate of Portora Royal School like Samuel Beckett, he graduated Trinity as a brilliant scholar of English (where he roomed with Conor Cruise O’Brien), but only upon his appointment to an assistant professorship at City College in New York did he undertake the study of Irish, with David Greene at NYU (with whom he coedited the popular anthology 100 Years of Irish Prose). Mercier made frequent trips back to Ireland to learn Irish in depth; the scholarship he produced, most notably The Irish Comic Tradition (1962) and 20

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the unfinished Modern Irish Literature: Sources and Founders (1994), bears witness to a sustained attempt to overcome the linguistic divisions in Irish cultural history (DIB, Mercier). The model proved hard to follow. Hugh Kenner, Mercier’s colleague at Santa Barbara, for example, could write a half dozen books on Joyce, Beckett, and “the modern Irish writers” without any attention to the Irish language, and yet would dedicate a book to “Vivian Mercier, Polymath.” The division of labor in Irish Studies between languages and traditions was firmly established by the early 1950s (Kenner 1962, ii). The discussion up to this point might be considered as the prehistory of Irish Studies as it came to be established within American universities in the 1990s and beyond. I would nominate 1963 as the year when that prehistory came to an end, for it saw the first national meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS) (see Image 2.1) and the first issue of the James Joyce Quarterly. The formation of the ACIS arose out of separate conversations held at annual meetings of the American Historical Association and at the Modern Language Association. The founding members were Lawrence McCafrey and Emmet Larkin, both historians whose middle and late careers were in Chicago, Larkin at the University of Chicago, McCafrey at Loyola University. Both were the children of immigrant parents from Ireland, educated on the G.I. Bill, and were adept at infusing academic labor with social connection. As Irish-Americans with quite immediate connections to Ireland, they approached the study of Irish cultural and historical materials without the cultural or academic connection to philology. This is not to say that the ACIS was at its founding

Image 2.1 Past Presidents of the American Conference for Irish Studies at 2017 ACIS3 Source: Ó Conchubhair

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in any way antipathetic to the Irish language; John V. Kelleher’s work featured prominently as a keynote speaker at early conferences, and early newsletters promoted the Merriman Summer School and opportunities to study Irish in Ireland (ACIS). The vision of “Irish Studies” that the ACIS embodied, however, was one primarily driven by the vast expansion of interest in Ireland and Irish culture from those without access to the study of the Irish language. It meant a great deal that the extraordinary achievements of Irish writers in the English language, principally but not only in the period of the Irish Revival, presented rich objects for study and exegesis. Thus early pioneers of Irish Studies in the US academy in the 1950s, such as David Greene at NYU or Vivian Mercier at City College and then UC-Santa Barbara, who read and taught the Irish language, increasingly made an impact as scholars and teachers in the medium of English. When Thomas Staley and a cohort of Joyce scholars began the James Joyce Quarterly in 1963, the academic study of Irish writing was being recast in light of the rise in respectability of Irish culture in America following the election of John F. Kennedy and his early 1963 visit to Ireland (Staley). The preceding year, 1962, saw a popular effort to celebrate Ireland when Eoin McKiernan of the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul presented “Ireland Rediscovered” on public television and used the success of that program to found the Irish American Cultural Institute (McKiernan Hetzler; IACI). This conjunction of the scholarly and erudite with the celebratory and popular was to characterize the Irish Studies field in the academy, not always in positive ways. McKiernan learned Irish not in a university setting but via the New York Gaelic Society; a keen supporter of Irish-language learning, his many lifelong efforts on behalf of Irish culture issued primarily in popular initiatives linking Ireland and Irish-America. The most significant of these was the journal Éire-Ireland, the principal home for Irish Studies scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s. (I discuss the rise of other academic journals following.) The growth of knowledge production in the Irish academy, while outside the scope of this chapter, is notable in relation to the development of Irish Studies in the US, largely because of the exclusion of American academics in the defining collective endeavor in the field of Irish Historical Studies, the Oxford New History of Ireland. Only four US-born scholars contributed, all to the last two volumes, Ireland Under the Union II, edited by W.E. Vaughan, and Ireland 1921–1984, edited by J.R. Hill. This reflected more than the insularity of the Irish academy; the guiding methodological assumptions of the New History were profoundly positivist, and Ireland was conceived in isolation from its considerable diaspora. The 10 volumes drew contributors from all the Irish research universities and a generous selection of English universities as well, but as a generation-defining work of collective scholarship, it was decidedly not impacted by what was driving the field of History in the US, namely the new social history and the rise of feminist scholarship. The strengths of the Irish university system in the 1950s and 1960s were in a kind of scholastic rigor that in practice rewarded talent that came in male packages. This is a feature of a patriarchal culture that was slower to change in Ireland than in the US, but slow to change in both. The migration of talented Irish scholars to American institutions in the 1960s bears this out. The roster of Irish scholars who came to American universities as visiting scholars or teachers is impressive and evidence not only of their talents and training but of the wider social and institutional recognition that Irish intellectual life was vibrant and could contribute to the mission of American higher education. A distinctive feature of this cultural exchange is the number of Irish intellectuals who straddled the creative/critical divide in a way that was unusual in American culture. Thomas Kinsella set a pattern; a prize-winning scholar at UCD, he worked by day in the Department of Finance of the Irish Government, by night writing poems that built the reputation that allowed him to secure a poet-in-residence post at Southern Illinois University (1965–1967) and then a professorship at Temple University in 1970 (Kinsella papers, SIU). 22

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Seamus Heaney’s career in the US academy began with a visiting appointment to UC-Berkeley in 1970. His close friend Seamus Deane, after finishing his D.Phil. at Cambridge, also held a visiting appointment at Berkeley, where an extraordinary community of scholars of Irish writing were then working, including the American scholars Thomas Flanagan and Robert Tracy, and the brilliant Irish/Irish-American Joyce scholar Breandán O’Hehir. (All three were members of the department when it appointed David Lloyd, an Irish intellectual migrant who would shift dramatically the concerns of the Irish Studies field.). Deane’s colleague at UCD, Denis Donoghue, arrived at NYU (where Conor Cruise O’Brien had been visiting professor from 1965–69) in 1973, when he was appointed Henry James Professor of English and American Letters (he was pleased to say that he had not been appointed to an Irish literature post, though he regularly taught classes on Yeats, Joyce, and Irish modernism). Vivian Mercier supervised Anthony Roche’s Ph.D. dissertation at UC–Santa Barbara and supervised Declan Kiberd’s M.A. before Kiberd went to Oxford to do his Ph.D. under Richard Ellmann. The point of this enumeration, which the 1980s would dramatically expand, is twofold. First, it is to recognize that the interpellation of Irish scholars and cultural figures into the American academy preceded the creation of Irish Studies Programs; I argue subsequently that this suggests the rise of Irish Studies in the US is best understood within and against the broad social transformation of the university and the position of Ireland and Irish culture in America. Second, it is to note the extraordinary bias toward male academics and poets in the Irish and the American spheres of knowledge production and dissemination. Indeed, it was only in the middle of the 1980s that Irish women like Maria Luddy, Clíona Murphy, or Siobhán Kilfeather would enter US universities as Ph.D. candidates working as feminist social historians (Luddy at Syracuse, Murphy at SUNY–Binghamton) or as feminist literary scholars (Kilfeather at Princeton). Eavan Boland held the most prestigious appointment among Irish women in the American academy, at Stanford; she was appointed in 1996. Irish Studies in the US academy has always been notable for the manner in which the critical and the creative have been kept in proximity. ACIS meetings, national and regional, have always incorporated readings of poetry and to a lesser extent fiction as integral parts of the proceedings. And, since 1972, the poetic field has been served by an exemplary small press devoted to publishing Irish Poetry, founded by Dillon Johnston at Wake Forest University. Wake Forest Press curated a relatively small list, but its selectivity was matched by the extraordinary quality and sustained productivity of the poets on its list. The connection between contemporary Irish poets and the Irish Studies field, as it was embodied by ACIS and its sister/rival organization, International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures, testifies to a link between Irish Studies scholarship, the performance culture of Irish poetry, music, and drama, and the intrinsic social/ intellectual pleasure that is a distinctive feature of Irish culture. As a field of academic labor, Irish Studies in the US has always had an improvisational and entrepreneurial character. As an adjunct of Historical Studies (an important but subordinate part of English History, of British History, of European History) and of Literary Studies (a sideline of English Literature, of Modernism), it fell on individuals to aggregate the potential of Irish Studies across university departments to develop the research questions and the pedagogic possibilities that the field presented to those awakened by it. Thus, we find the labor of individual scholars issuing in journals like the Journal of Irish Literature, hosted and funded from 1972 until 1994 by the University of Delaware. There Robert Horgan, with assistance from Donald Torchiana and Kathleen Danaher, maintained an unlikely outpost in the Irish Studies empire and published via Proscenium Press an unpredictable and attractively noncanonical collection of Irish writers. No full history has been written of Irish publishing in the US, and yet, as an expression of the commitment of capital resources to an idea, to an aspiration, that history would tell a crucial 23

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part of the history of the Irish Studies field. McKiernan was prescient in founding, alongside the IACI, Irish Books and Media, a small press distribution platform whereby Irish books made their way to American readers. (This was an underfunded and frustrated initiative, but unforgettable to anyone who shopped at Angela Carter’s delightful Keshcarrigan Bookshop on 90 West Broadway in New York in the 1980s or 1990s, or at the Irish Books and Media shop, shortlived, on Madison Avenue.) The improvisatory quality of Irish Studies scholarship is reflected in the willingness of Directors of University Presses (rather than commercial presses) to agree to subsidize Irish Studies book series. The Director of Bucknell University Press, for example, J.F. Carens, recognized that Irish writers were underrepresented in scholarly monographs; this led to the Bucknell Irish Writer Series, which published short monographs on Irish writers from 1970–78, and in a revived format since 2014. The University of Kentucky Press hosted a shortlived, but important, Irish Studies series between 1997 and 2014; this complemented established series at the University of Notre Dame Press, Syracuse University Press, the University of Wisconsin Press, the University of Florida Press, and Yale University Press, among others. Forming a proper perspective on the growth of scholarship in Irish Studies requires that one step outside the field itself to question the governing concepts of value and valuation that guide the investment in resources, and gamble on gain, in sustaining what has been called the academic crisis of the overproduction of knowledge. The answer could only be methodological. That is to say, Irish Studies had to acquire the kind of general interest to Humanities and Social Science scholars that it acquired by virtue of the interest of Celtic language to philological scholars when they were in the vanguard of university scholarship. In the mid-1990s, this general question of why and how to study Ireland motivated special issues of established humanities journals, notably the Southern Review in 1995, devoted to Irish poetry in Irish and in English, and the South Atlantic Quarterly in 1995, devoted to Irish Cultural Studies. Both of these were organized by scholars whose training had been in both Ireland and America, and both sought to answer the question of how Irish Studies might be exemplary for problematic questions confronting scholars of contemporary culture. The conditions of possibility for asking such questions are individual (one editor was a student of Fredric Jameson, the other of Edward Said), but also cultural and historical, in that the very possibility of questioning the grounds of knowledge about Ireland had to be reconceived to generate adequate answers. The field required theory. And theory had, until that point, entered Irish Studies, with important exceptions, via the study of Irish authors, rather than the study of Irish history or culture. The transformation of Irish Studies by theory occurred largely outside the pages of Irish Studies journals; Joyce and Yeats were subject to post-structuralist critique in the pages of Diacritics or the James Joyce Quarterly, not Éire-Ireland. The influence of New Critical formalist aesthetics on Irish poetry and fiction in the 1960s through the 1980s can be seen to have inhibited critical innovation (and invited voluminous formalist appreciation) at least until Paul Muldoon’s poetry became widely read in the late 1980s. Although innovative special issues of the Oxford Review (1991, on “Neocolonialism”) and of Race and Class (July 1995) devoted substantial attention to Ireland (foreshadowing important special issues of boundary 2 edited by Seamus Deane and Joe Cleary), bespoke Irish Studies journals came to be founded as extensions of Irish Studies Programs. During its short but spirited run, Bullán featured innovative work that blended History and Cultural Criticism; founded by Ray Ryan and Rónán McDonald as graduate students at Oxford, the journal migrated to Notre Dame before being abandoned in favor of the most lavishly produced and intellectually ambitious journal of Irish Studies yet, the Field Day Review. After Éire-Ireland shifted its editorial home from St. Thomas University in St. Paul to Boston College, following the relocation of the Irish American Cultural Institute to New Jersey, Thomas Redshaw and James Silas Rogers at St. Thomas founded New Hibernia Review in 1997. 24

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In 2000, Glucksman Ireland House at NYU began publishing Radharc, an annual publication of proceedings of public events, rather than an open submissions journal; after 8 years, Radharc became The American Journal of Irish Studies in 2011. There is a signal moment in the development of the field that is worth unpacking here. Early in her career, one of the most innovative scholars in the Irish Cultural Studies field, Cheryl Herr, author of a groundbreaking monograph on Joyce and Popular Culture, published an article, featured as the opening issue of a new volume of Critical Inquiry, entitled “The Erotics of Irishness.” The essay sought to document a transhistorical Irish anti-feminist unconscious by reading pre-Christian figural art of putatively feminine shapes against the regime of twentieth-century Irish censorship, here ingeniously embodied by its absence, by the fact that Irish censors missed the opportunity to censor a video featuring dominatrix and S/M images, putatively because the Irish censors were too dim to see the outrageous provocation to Irish moral codes. What any Irish watcher of music videos in Dublin in 1986 would have recognized, however, is that the video never aired on an Irish channel, but was shown on MusicBox, a Belgian channel over which Irish censors, to their frustration, had no control. Missed thereby was the chance to assess the larger question of how Ireland was situated within an emerging global capitalist order of cultural production that eroded national boundaries. This mistake, it should be noted, was made by a sophisticated and sympathetic analyst of Irish cultural history. Herr’s essay embodies what Edward Said termed “traveling theory”: the tendency of intellectual and cultural assumptions formed in the metropole to travel to the colonial periphery to find their powerful application, their application of power. Edward Said’s relation to Irish Studies began with Declan Kiberd’s invitation to lecture at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo in 1986; that is also when Fredric Jameson visited Ireland at the invitation of Seamus Deane, and both contributed essays (Said’s on Yeats, Jameson’s on Joyce) that were published with Terry Eagleton’s essay on nationalism and irony as pamphlets by Field Day in Ireland in 1988 and as Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, edited and with an introduction by Seamus Deane, by the University of Minnesota Press in 1990. These had a significant impact in their own right; more impactful, perhaps, was the fact that Said and Jameson both began working with students who would go on to careers in the Irish Studies field. Said was, with his colleague Gauri Viswanathan, an especially productive mentor, supervising theses by Joe Cleary, Laura O’Connor, Amy Martin, and others before his untimely death in 2003. Mentorship is one of the aspects of the development of a field that can be too easily reduced to linear modes of identification and patrilineal or matrilineal successions. In the development of Irish Studies, it was often the conjunction or adjacency of colleagues at an institution that allowed for innovation to flourish within graduate communities. Elizabeth Cullingford and Barbara Harlow at the University of Texas–Austin, supervised Laura Lyons, Joseph Kelly, and Margot Gayle Backus in the early 1990s. The most influential single volume to energize the Irish Studies field in the US in this period was, to the present author, David Lloyd’s Anomalous States: Irish Writing in the Post-Colonial Moment, copublished by Lilliput Press in Ireland and by Duke University Press in North America in 1993 (Lloyd). Following on the 1987 publication of his dissertation on James Clarence Mangan, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Post-Contemporary Interventions) included provocative readings of Yeats, Beckett, and Heaney via the Subaltern Studies scholars whose work was most electric at that moment in its call to rethink the European project via its export of violence, domination, and cultural degradation. Lloyd’s book was a can opener with enormous leverage, and it gave younger scholars permission to ask questions about Irish writing and Irish culture that the wider field of literary and cultural studies were beginning to value. And Lloyd’s work was congruent with a dissident strain of Irish Studies scholarship that 25

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could be found in the Field Day Pamphlets and in the early turn toward Cultural Studies as a critical methodology. It should be noted in passing here that the crisis in Northern Ireland precipitated, by its complexity and its multiple explanatory challenges posed to the disciplines, a vast tide of academic production. The issue of disciplinary innovation motivated by specifically Irish circumstances can be seen in a number of landmark works in anthropology and sociology. The anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes published her first book, provocatively titled Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland in 1979; although it won the Margaret Mead Award from the Society of Applied Anthropology, it was bitterly resented and condemned in Ireland for its insensitivity to the people of Kerry. Scheper-Hughes revisited the controversy of the book on its republication in 2001, recognizing that she had not yet understood the ethical complexity of ethnographic fieldwork. No such reaction greeted the publication of Henry Glassie’s landmark work of ethnographic study of a small community in Fermanagh, Passing the Time in Ballymenone: Culture and History of an Ulster Community in 1982. Glassie’s work was motivated by a deep concern not to condescend to his subjects; his methodology was in fact organized to uncover communal forms of wisdom and practical knowledge passed through custom and storytelling. Not only rural Ireland provoked ethnographic innovation from American anthropologists; Allen Feldman’s Formations of Violence: the Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (1991) examined the spatial and psychological circuits of violence by bringing together discursive analysis and critical social theory. The anxiety about traveling theory shadowed the formal establishment of Irish Studies Programs and centers in the early 1990s. It is worth noting here that before 1993, no graduate student would expect to find employment based solely on credentials earned exclusively within the Irish Studies field. Job advertisements would list Irish Studies as a secondary or subsidiary field to a main teaching field defined by period. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Irish universities began to develop M.A. programs that enrolled substantial percentages of American students; a signal commitment to this model occurred when Trinity College upgraded its “Diploma in Anglo-Irish Literature” to an M.Phil. Program with a thesis component in 1986. At that time, though, Ireland was still stuck in an economic rut of high unemployment, low wages, and high emigration. Culturally, the universities, especially Trinity, were anchors of an order resistant to change; although UCD was mildly better, Trinity was profoundly resistant to the seductions of “theory.” This would change, rapidly and radically, between 1987, when Thomas Docherty was appointed to a Professorship at Trinity, and 1992, when the first of the “Culture and Colonialism” conferences was held at NUI Galway. Although Docherty did not stay long at Trinity, his hiring signaled the slow eclipse of a conservative attitude toward literature and culture. The Galway series of conferences (six to date) coincided with the rapid expansion of the Irish economy and the beginning of migration into Ireland. The conferences signaled the adoption of postcolonial theory as a critical methodology in Ireland and in the larger Irish Studies field; all of the conferences were notably international, drawing scholars from Ireland, Britain, Europe, the US, the West Indies, and South Asia. By 1995, NUI, Galway had established the M.A. program in Culture and Colonialism, and Irish Studies MA programs had been instituted at a number of American Universities. As Ireland became wealthy, the wider investment in Irish Studies grew as well. This calls for some discussion of the relation between academic labor and accumulated capital. The 1980s were notable for the production of a large number of Ph.D. theses and published monographs devoted to Irish topics, not only in Irish Literature, though that field outpaced other disciplines, but also in Irish History and, in small but significant numbers, in Irish Folklore Studies. The international reputation of Irish poets in particular had risen dramatically by the 26

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late 1980s, and this occurred as the study of the now canonical Irish modernists Joyce and Yeats had become the center of vast industries of academic production, with specialist journals and annuals gathering content from occasional conferences and regular sessions at national meetings. All of this occurred without the founding of Irish Studies Programs or Centers. Yet in 1991, 1992, and 1993, Boston College initiated the Burns Library Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies Program, Notre Dame inaugurated the Keough Center, and NYU opened Glucksman Ireland House. (Boston College and Villanova inaugurated Irish Studies Programs in 1978 and 1979, but did so without changing standing faculty appointments or inaugurating new degree programs. Also in 1979, Emory University began its program of acquiring Irish literary materials for the Stuart Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Archive.) Each of these initiatives was begun with major philanthropic gifts, derived from wealth acquired via careers at major US corporations. The Burns library honors John J. Burns, a law professor whose son, Brian Burns, also a lawyer, was Director of the Kellogg corporation and of the Coca-Cola Bottling company, and a leading figure in the formation of The Ireland Funds; Don Keough was Chairman of CocaCola, and also a significant supporter of The Ireland Funds; and Lewis Glucksman was CEO of Lehman Brothers (and Loretta Brennan Glucksman was Chair of The Ireland Funds). The Ireland Funds is the largest nongovernmental organization to support Irish cultural initiatives and organizations devoted to peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland and in the Republic. Study of the conflict in the North of Ireland had been pursued by Irish and non-Irish academics at a broad range of American universities. The US role in bringing about an end to the conflict (a topic to be approached warily in any context) coincided with the rapid growth of the economy on both sides of the border, but especially in the Republic; it coincided also with the growth of Irish Studies Programs and initiatives. Following the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the scale of study abroad and student exchange programs between Ireland and the US grew rapidly; this coincided as well with a rapid inflation of Irish culture and arts in the increasingly internationalized cultural field. Among the US centers of Irish Studies, the University of Notre Dame amassed the most funding for its Irish initiatives. Although led by its first Director, Seamus Deane, the Notre Dame Irish Studies initiative was set in motion by the Swift scholar Christopher Fox, who leveraged Notre Dame’s significant cultural connection to Ireland and Irish America to secure Deane’s appointment in a brief bidding war with Duke University. (The sticking point was Notre Dame’s ability to give Deane a guarantee of only four month’s annual residence in South Bend, similar to the deal that Seamus Heaney had secured as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and oratory at Harvard, and one which Duke, without any academic foothold in Ireland or tradition of supporting Irish Studies, declined to match.) Deane set about marshalling the seemingly unending funds that could be raised at the university of “the Fighting Irish” to build an Irish Studies Program that was broadly interdisciplinary, with the Irish language at its heart, and that in its early years largely avoided the study of Irish America (despite the alumni and the presence on the faculty of Jay Dolan, one of the leading historians of Irish America). He succeeded; Irish Studies at Notre Dame came to encompass a stunning array of university disciplines and became anchored by two study abroad locations in Ireland. A different disciplinary path was pursued by Robert Scally, inaugural Director of Glucksman Ireland House; the study of Irish America was part of the initial plans for what would become the Center for Irish and Irish-American Studies at NYU, where an undergraduate Minor in Irish Studies was initiated in 1995, and a graduate M.A. Program was established in 2008. The concern with the Irish Diaspora at NYU was cemented by the founding of the Archives of Irish America by Marion Casey, and the publication of Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States, edited by Joe Lee and Marion Casey, in 2006; that volume opened with Lee’s masterful historiographic survey of historical studies of Irish migration and Irish America, 27

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a text that obviates the need to cover that literature here. Boston College developed its programs in parallel disciplinary forms; Adele Dalsimer and historian Kevin O’Neill, a student of Perry Curtis at Brown, were joined by Rob Savage and by Kevin Kenny, whose monograph on the Molly Maguires demonstrated what trans-Atlantic Irish Studies scholarship could accomplish; both joined Philip O’Leary, a protégé of John Kelleher at Harvard whose prize-winning book Ideology and Innovation: The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 1881–1921: Ideology and Innovation (O’Leary 2004, 2010, 2011, 2017) exemplified the possibilities of linguistic training and archivally based literary history for a whole generation of Irish Studies scholars, and eventually Marjorie Howes, whose first monograph on Yeats has been followed by major editorial works and a collection of essays published by Field Day, Colonial Crossings, that like Kenny’s work exemplifies what trans-Atlantic Irish Studies can accomplish when conducted with exemplary rigor. As the three largest Irish Studies initiatives in American academia grapple with the question of how to engage Irish America and the Irish diaspora, the question of how Irish Studies, and the study of Irish America, should understand their relation to America and to American Studies has not yet been adequately addressed. By American Studies, I mean studies of race and ethnicity in America. And by race and ethnicity, I mean, for the most part, race. The specter haunting Irish Studies in the mid-1990s founding period of Irish Studies Programs and Centers was the specter of race and the body. The first to prick the conscience of the field was Noel Ignatiev, a Jewish labor organizer turned academic, whose Ph.D. thesis was published in 1995 as How the Irish Became White. Despite being based on a weak representative archival set, for the most part confined to Philadelphia labor strife in the mid-19th century, the book made it clear that how Irish Studies negotiated questions of race and identity would mark how humanities and social science scholarship would understand Irish Studies as a field, how it might contribute to, or diverge from, the disciplinary and scholarly agendas of the moment. Race and power are in contemporary academia what philology and progress were in the earlier currency of academic concerns; within that paradigm it was an open question as to whether Irish/Irish-American Studies would take its place within the American academy as a safe form of whiteness studies, unlikely to engage in dialogue with other cultural and area studies scholarship, or whether the field would seek to answer broader questions about how power and cultural identities interact in the modern world. Significant conferences devoted to race and Irish Studies were held at NYU in 2004 and at Notre Dame in 2007. And, in 2009, David Lloyd and Peter D. O’Neill published their edited collection The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-currents of the African and Irish Diasporas. The book was published just as US President Barack Obama’s Irish roots had been uncovered (but before it was revealed that Michele Obama also had some Irish ancestry, via the rape of a 15-year-old slave in 1859), and it allowed a host of issues to rise to the surface within Irish Studies Programs. In the first instance, interest in the book by African-Americans spoke to the swelling awareness via DNA analysis that many had Irish ancestry. And yet, Irish America as a social construct, in line with hypodescent and the one-drop rule, had been constructed as a whites-only polity despite abundant evidence that Irish and African-Americans had been intimately engaged with one another throughout the history of the United States. The Obama’s Irish connections were embraced by many in Ireland, not least because Ireland had been rapidly transformed in the Celtic Tiger years to a multicultural and multiracial society, with a host of attendant problems surrounding prejudice, assimilation, and cultural change. But the specter of racial prejudice and white privilege that Ignatiev and others had posed in the Whiteness debates emerged with force in the reactions against Obama; Irish-Americans were among the most prominent supporters of the politics of racial resentment and antagonism that succeeded Obama and that haunt the present moment. 28

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The conceptual question of what kind of Irish Studies-based intellectual production would emerge from the proliferation of formal programs pivoted according to the kind of interdepartmental relations that those programs were able or inclined to establish. Certainly the prominence of literary studies in the American Irish Studies landscape has created in the last three decades a feedback loop: Irish writers are seen to engage their tradition and thereby supply raw material for a critical commentariat; the commentariat applies a set of critical tools honed to explicate texts that generate their use value by expanding or subverting a literary tradition always in need of renovation and/or expansion. The symptom of this malady, a not unpleasant one, and not in immediate need of cure, is the single-author study of the oracular writer. And yet, one might glimpse on the horizon a specter named reification, from which literary critical and exegetic commentary paddles away. What is to be done? For most of the period under review here, we can see that the capacity of Irish cultural gatekeepers to exclude women writers and artists renews itself generationally; what should surprise is the enduring capacity for being surprised. The controversy over the first, three volume edition of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing was white-hot and clear in its implications (Bourke); the project had been more than a decade in preparation, had involved enormous efforts in fundraising in Ireland and Irish-America, and yet had negligible input from women scholars and included little content from women writers. Yet that decade, from 1983 to 1993, saw the dramatic expansion of scholarship within the Irish Studies field to include anthologies of women writers, the ascent to prominence of women scholars and artists, and the publication of landmark works in the history of women’s experience in Ireland and in the Irish diaspora. By the end of the following decade, in 2002, when Volumes 4 and 5 of the Anthology devoted to Irish women’s writing were published, the landscape of Irish Studies scholarship had been radically transformed. At the moment of writing, the field has seen the ascension of Irish women scholars and the social and political agendas of marginalized voices have moved closer to the center of its discursive and professional agenda. Certainly Joyce Studies put forth a model for thinking about Ireland’s connection to empire studies and to the discursive constitution of sexuality and of race; pioneering work by Frances Restuccia (Joyce and the Law of the Father 1989), by Vincent J. Cheng (Joyce, Race, and Empire 1995), greeted with fury by the field), by Enda Duffy (The Subaltern Ulysses 1994), and by Joseph Valente (James Joyce and the Problem of Justice 1995) and, as editor, Quare Joyce (1998) began to map out concerns that would become broadly relevant to Irish Studies scholars as Ireland reckoned with its imperial and colonial past and its neoliberal, multicultural present. The academic study of Ireland in the US has changed as Ireland and the Irish Studies field has changed; it remains to be seen how Irish America and Irish Studies will relate to one another in the future.

Notes 1 Among O’Conway’s unfinished works was an Irish-English dictionary. His notes on Native American languages provide a fascinating point of contact between Irish and Native American cultures; see the collection at the Philadelphia Diocesan Archive, Charles Boromeo Seminary. Another collection of his papers is at the National Library of Ireland. See also his entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography (hereafter DIB). 2 Charles Mills Gayley established an Irish-language program at UC Berkeley and hired William Whittingham (Jack) Lyman Jr. who spent a year with Rhys at Oxford and two further years at Harvard before returning to a tenure-track position as Instructor in Celtic in the English Department in 1911–1912. See Ó Conchubhair 179–180. 3 Past President of the American Conference for Irish Studies: 1962–1965 Gilbert Cahill, State University of New York at Cortland; 1965–1968 David H. Greene, New York University; 1968–1971 John V. Kelleher, Harvard University; 1971–1973 Harold Orel, University of Kansas; 1973–1975 John Rees 29

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Moore, Hollins College; 1975–1978 Lawrence J. McCaffrey, Loyola University, Chicago; 1978–1981 Emmet Larkin, University of Chicago; 1981–1983 Alan Ward, College of William and Mary; 1983– 1985 Thomas Hachey, Marquette University; 1985–1987 Robert E. Rhodes, State University of New York at Cortland; 1987–1989 Maureen O’Rourke Murphy, Hofstra University; 1989–1991 James S. Donnelly, Jr., University of Wisconsin—Madison; 1991–1993 Mary Helen Thuente, Indiana University; 1993–1995 Blanche Touhill, University of Missouri–St. Louis; 1995–1997 James MacKillop, Onondaga Community College; 1997–1999 Lucy McDiarmid, Villanova University; 1999–2001 Nancy Curtin, Fordham University; 2001–2003 Michael Patrick Gillespie, Marquette University; 2003–2005 John P. Harrington, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; 2005–2007 Eamonn Wall, University of Missouri–St. Louis; 2007–2009 José Lanters, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; 2009–2011 James S. Rogers, University of St. Thomas; 2011–2013 Sean Farrell, Northern Illinois University; 2013–2015 Mary Trotter, University of Wisconsin—Madison; 2015–2017 Brian Ó Conchubhair, University of Notre Dame; 2017–2019 Timothy G. McMahon, Marquette University; 2019–2020 Kate Costello-Sullivan.

Works cited Bourke, Angela. General Ed. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing Vols V and VI: Irish Women’s Writings and Traditions. Cork University Press, 2002. Brooker, Joseph. Joyce’s Critics: Transitions in Reading and Culture. University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Bush, Ronald. “James Joyce: The Way He Lives Now.” James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 4, 1996, pp. 523–529. Byrne, Anne and Eoin O’Sullivan. “Arensberg, Kimball, and de Valera: A Story of Sex and Censorship.” Irish Journal of Sociology, Vol. 27, No. 3, 2019, pp. 227–250. Carew, Mairéad. The Quest for the Irish Celt: The Harvard Archaeological Mission to Ireland, 1932–1936. Irish Academic Press, 2018. Cheng, Vincent. Joyce, Race, and Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1995. Deane, Seamus, Ed. Colonialism, Nationalism, and Literature. University of Minnesota Press, 1990. Deane, Seamus, General Ed. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (3 vols.). Field Day Publications, 1991. Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University. https://celtic.fas.harvard.edu/ history-celtic-studies-harvard. Dictionary of Irish Biography (hereafter DIB), James McGuire and James Quinn, General Editors. https:// dib.cambridge.org/. Dunn, Charles. The Study of Celtic. Washington D.C. s.n., 1916. Feldman, Allen. Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. University of Chicago Press, 1991. Fordham University webpage, Irish Studies at Fordham. www.fordham.edu/info/24590/history Galvin, John. The Gentleman Mr Shattuck: A biography of Henry Lee Shattuck, 1879-1971. Massachusetts Historical Society, 1996 [1995]. Glassie, Henry. Passing the Time in Ballymenone: Culture and History of an Ulster Community. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. Herr, Cheryl. “The Erotics of Irishness.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17, No. 1, 1990, pp. 1–34. Howes, Marjorie. Colonial Crossings: Figures in Irish Literary History. Field Day Publications, 2006. Kelleher, John V. “John V Kelleher: Creative Force for Establishment of Irish Studies in US Universities.” Irish Times, January 17, 2004. Kenner, Hugh. Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study. John Calder, 1962. Kenner, Hugh. A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers. Knopf, 1983. Kenny, Kevin. Making Sense of the Molly Maguires. Oxford University Press, 1994. Kinsella, Thomas. Papers. Stuart Rose Archives, Rare Books, and Manuscripts Library, Emory University. Finding Aid. https://fingingaids.library.emory.edu/documents/kinsella774/. Lee, J.J. and Marion Casey, Eds. Making the Irish American. New York University Press, 2006. Lloyd, David. Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Postcolonial Moment. Lilliput/Duke University Press, 1993. Lloyd, David and Peter O’Neill, Eds. The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-currents of the Irish and African Diasporas. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Mathias O’Conway papers, Philadelphia Diocesan Archive, Charles Boromeo Seminary. McCaffrey, Larry. Obituary for ACIS note. www.donnellanfuneral.com/obituaries/Lawrence-JohnMcCaffrey?obId=13622874. 30

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McDowell, Dorothea. Ella Young and Her World: Celtic Mythology, the Irish Revival, and the California AvantGarde. Maunsel, 2014. McKiernan Hetzler, Deirdre. Guide to the Eoin McKiernan and Deirdre McKiernan Hetzler Papers AIA.081. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York, 2013. Mercier, Vivian. The Irish Comic Tradition. Clarendon Press, 1962. Mercier, Vivian. Modern Irish Literature: Sources and Founders. Clarendon Press, 1994. Ó Conchubhair, Brian. “The Irish Language in American Universities.” Why Irish? Irish Language and Literature in Academia. Edited by Brian Ó Conchubhair. Arlen House, 2008, pp. 167–200. Ó Conchubhair, Brian. “Irish.” Divers Kinds of Tongues. Edited by Maggie Mello, Tokozile Mukuruva, and Brian Ó Conchubhair. Notre Dame Press, 2020, pp. 9–12. O’Leary, Phillip. Ideology and Innovation: The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 1881-1921. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. O’Leary, Phillip. Gaelic Prose in the Irish Free State, 1922–1939. University College Dublin Press, 2004. O’Leary, Phillip. Irish Interior: Keeping Faith with the Past in Gaelic Prose, 1940–1951. University College Dublin Press, 2010. O’Leary, Phillip. Writing beyond the Revival: Facing the Future in Gaelic Prose, 1940–1951. Dublin, University College Dublin Press, 2011. O’Leary, Phillip. An Underground Theatre: Major Playwrights in the Irish Language, 1900-1980. University College Dublin Press, 2017. Ó Riain, Pádraig, Ed. Fled Bricrenn: Reassessments (ITS Subsidiary Series, 10). Irish Texts Society, 1999. Reynold, Horace Mason. Papers. Houghton Library, Harvard University. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Madness in Rural Ireland. University of California Press, 1979. Schoepperle, Gertrude. “Irish Studies at the University of Illinois.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 7, No. 25, 1918, pp. 100–111. Staley, Thomas F. “Fifty Years with Joyce.” James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 1/2 (Fall 2012–Winter 2013), pp. 19–22. Valente, Joseph. James Joyce and the Problem of Justice: Negotiating Sexual and Colonial Difference. Cambridge University Press, 1995. Valente, Joseph, Ed. Quare Joyce. University of Michigan Press, 1998. Wilson, Thomas and Hastings Donnan. The Anthropology of Ireland. Bloomsbury, 2006.

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3 Irish Studies in the non-Anglophone world Michael Cronin

In 1990, the election of Mary Robinson as President of Ireland signaled the advent of a markedly different set of public values on the Irish political scene. One consistent theme of her presidency was the Irish diaspora. If Éamon de Valera was doomed to be forever associated with twirling maidens dancing at crossroads hops, Robinson would be linked to the candle in the window of Áras an Uachtaráin symbolically lighting the way at Christmas for millions of Irish emigrants to their island point of origin (O’Leary and Burke 196–198). The gesture was not merely symbolic, however, and related to a desire to retrieve a lost or largely ignored dimension to Irish culture: the existence of a substantial Irish diaspora living outside of Ireland. In 1995, when President Robinson addressed the Joint Houses of the Oireachtas, the title of her speech was “Cherishing the Diaspora.” This diaspora, remembered once a year in the photogenic bonhomie of St. Patrick’s Day, was largely marginalized in Irish life and did not impinge in any major way on the consciousness of those living and practicing politics on the island. Robinson argued that their role was more central than previously thought and that “[o]ur relation with the diaspora beyond our shores is one which can instruct our society in the values of diversity, tolerance and fair-mindedness” (O’Leary and Burke 196).

Diffusion/translation By 1996, “Ireland and its Diaspora” was the theme selected by the Irish Stand at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the most important book fair in the world, where Ireland was the main guest. The diasporic theme dominated the 1990s as researchers, columnists, and politicians of various hues drew public and scholarly attention to the lives and contributions of the millions of people of Irish descent who had settled in various parts of the world. In 2000, Alan Gilsenan and David Roberts directed a five-part television series entitled somewhat provocatively The Irish Empire where they offered viewers a summary account of the lives and fates of the Irish who had left the shores of Erin for a better life elsewhere. Though the series did look briefly at the Irish presence in Africa, India, the Caribbean, and South America, the focus was overwhelmingly on the Anglophone countries of destination: namely, Britain, the United States, Canada, and Australia. In one sense, this is hardly surprising because that is where most of the Irish went. The Anglophone hegemony has also traditionally been a feature of Irish Studies where outside 32

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of Ireland itself scholars from Britain, North America, and former British colonies have, by and large, tended to dominate the area. One of the challenges for Irish Studies, therefore, in addition to disciplinary expansionism (moving away from an excessive emphasis on history and literature) has been to engage in a shift from a diasporic to what might be termed a diffusive perspective on Irish culture. What is intended by the term diffusive is a way of capturing the influence of Irish cultural activity on the different literatures, languages, and polities of the world outside of the increasingly well-documented networks of an Irish Anglophone diaspora. A diffusive perspective focuses on the Irish presence in the non-Anglophone world. In this we include both the work of non-Anglophone scholars writing on Irish culture and the impact of Irish culture on the non-Anglophone world. Given that (contrary to what most English speakers appear to believe) the majority of human beings do not speak English, it is the non-Anglophone world that offers the most obvious growth opportunities for Irish Studies as an area of scholarship and enquiry. In addition, taking the diffusive perspective seriously means moving outside the linguistic comfort zone of English which reinforces an unfortunate and unhelpful Anglocentric provincialism at both national and global levels. In order to assess the contribution of a diffusive perspective to Irish Studies, it is useful to consider the various forms in which it manifests itself. What do one of Spain’s greatest living writers, a former President of Hungary, and a German bankrupt all have in common? Javier Marías, Árpád Göncz, and Felix Paul Greve have all translated works by Irish writers and contributed to the strong international reputation that Irish literature enjoys in the world today. One of the often forgotten paradoxes of writing that Jacques Derrida was one of the first to point out is that it is translation rather than the originals themselves that make writers famous. Without the work of translators in many different languages, most readers on the planet would not be aware of the writings of a Joyce, a Beckett, a Yeats, a Ní Dhomhnaill, or an Enright. Since the establishment of Ireland Literature Exchange, now known as Literature Ireland, in 1996, over 2,000 works of Irish literature have been translated into over 56 languages. The Irish themselves are generally unaware of the amount of translation activity of Irish writing in English and Irish into other languages which is and has been going on over many centuries (Cronin). In addition, the labors of those who do so much to promote Irish writing abroad through translation are generally unsung, rarely appearing in major domestic news outlets, though they may appear alongside Irish authors at international book fairs. An indication of the scale of this activity was revealed in two major research projects that were undertaken in Dublin City University between 2002 and 2011, the TRASNA and Ireland in the World Projects. In 2002, a team of researchers from the Center for Translation and Textual Studies at DCU decided to build a public, freely available online resource that would give the first true picture of the extent of the translation of Irish literature abroad and also give a public profile to the translators of the literature. The purpose was not only to provide information to scholars but also to help organizers of Irish literary festivals in other countries with compiling reading lists and bibliographies, to assist literary translators in identifying whether a work had already been translated and what works needed to be translated, to help strengthen the growth of Irish Studies in non-English-speaking countries, and to highlight domestically an often invisible dimension of Irish writing. There were two parts to the project. The first part involved the production of an online bibliography listing details relating to Irish works in translation and the creation of an online biographical database known as TRASNABIO, which gave biographical information on translators of Irish literature. The second part involved the in-depth investigation of three sets of translation relationships: Irish–Finnish relationships in the twentieth century; Irish–Polish relationships in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and French–Irish relationships in the nineteenth century. 33

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The scale of what the research team has unearthed shows just how extensive the impact of Irish literature has been in translation. The online bibliography as it currently stands includes over 16,000 entries on 350 writers who have been translated into more than 60 languages. Jonathan Swift, for example, with 1,161, entries has been translated into a total of 47 different languages. Among the languages into which Irish writing has been translated are French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, Portuguese, Urdu, Serbian, Croatian, Catalan, Icelandic, Assamese, Sinhala, Gujurati, Bengali, Georgian, Persian, Romanian, Norwegian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Swedish, Lithuanian, Danish, Galician, Finnish, Macedonian, Kirghiz, Azeri, Telugu, Malayam, Tadzik, Kannada, Basque, Albanian, Tamoul, Indonesian, Moldovan, Slovak, Slovenian, Czech, Flemish, Scots Gaelic, Glosa, Hebrew, Korean, Latin, Latvian, Marathi, Occitan, Welsh, and Uzbek. The 200-plus online biographies of the translators that have been compiled showed that they have come from all sectors of society, from national presidents to full-time revolutionaries, and are often acutely aware of the importance of bringing Irish writing to their own country in their own language. As TRASNABIO was the first translator biographical database of its kind anywhere, it was important to provide as much information as possible on the translators who do so much for the literature of a country that only rarely acknowledges their achievement or their contribution to the spread of Irish literature. As Rose-Marie Vassallo, a French translator of Peadar O’Donnell and Siobhán Parkinson, put it in an e-mail to one researcher, what I think is crucial is to make translation visible at long last! Dammit, people read translated texts everyday and never realize that those were born in another language! Our little persons are not that important, although, of course, translation being a living thing, we translators certainly are part of the context. (n.p.) More detailed investigation of specific sets of translation relationships such as Barry Keane’s pioneering study of Irish theater in Polish translation showed how Irish dramatic works often functioned as both illustrations of and triggers for political and cultural changes in Polish society and culture. Tracking influence in the other direction, Michèle Milan has indicated how such distinctive features of Irish Catholic piety in the nineteenth century as the Marian cult and the iconography around the Sacred Heart of Jesus were largely attributable to the publishing success in Ireland of French works of popular piety translated by Irish translators in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The European Eye Part of the context of how we think about Ireland must be how Ireland appears in different contexts. In recent decades, there has been much talk about the Irish diaspora and about Ireland as one of the most globalized countries on the planet. However, a great deal of the attention on Ireland’s relations with elsewhere is bound up with the Anglophone world, as can be seen both in the kinds of news stories and celebrities that appear on Irish television screens and in the kinds of literature that gets into Irish bookshops. As a result, Irish interest in how others respond to them tends to focus almost exclusively on British and American reactions or opinions, a tendency which reached paroxysmal levels as Britain exited the European Community. All this may be understandable because of language economy (no need for translation) but it does the country and its literature a great disservice in that other forms of reaction, other kinds of feedback, other ways of interpreting Ireland and its writing remain largely invisible in the public sphere 34

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in Ireland. This, of course, is where the non-Anglophone Irish Studies community has such an important role to play. Part of this problem is to do with a lack of awareness, simply not knowing what is out there in other languages about Ireland and its culture. It was precisely to address this question of a lack of awareness that the Royal Irish Academy Committee on Language, Literature, Culture and Communication commissioned a publication entitled Ireland in the European Eye to examine postindependence Ireland from the standpoint of different European countries and languages. As the authors of the volume claim, Traditions in different cultural and academic spheres that extend beyond the confines of the EU, present, as this volume will show, a much richer tapestry of mutual influences and appreciation that merit greater attention; they are often forgotten in the heated discussions of everyday politics. (Holfter and Migge xi) The professional composition of the volume’s authors speaks to the hybrid nature of nonAnglophone Irish Studies, as the volume brings together contributors based in the Modern Languages Departments of Irish Universities and scholars working largely in Irish Studies in continental European universities. Though the chapters chart the difering perceptions of the Irish in literatures and cultural practices across Europe, they are continually haunted by an observation made in December 1938 by the newly appointed Irish Ambassador to Italy that Italians barely gave Ireland a thought except when it served their interests to use the question of Ireland as “a convenient weapon with which to belabour John Bull” (O’Driscoll 26). Discussing Nordic encounters with Irish literature, Anne Karhio claims that the international standing of authors such as Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett gives their texts a canonical status as world literature rather than as Irish authors. While their works tend to be included as required reading in the curricula of the English departments of Nordic universities, they are frequently discussed through their alignment with other, non-Irish texts that are now considered part of the western cultural and literary heritage. (Karhio 205) Where the Irish diplomat and the Norwegian academic concur is that the study of Ireland in the non-Anglophone world has an identity problem. The problem is partly ideological and partly institutional. The ideological hinterland is that of nationalist investment in the credo of monolingualism, primarily from the nineteenth century onwards (Yildiz; Gramling). Language difference becomes the touchstone of political sovereignty. A distinct language implies a distinct people and a distinct people warrants nationhood. The iconic flags which tell ATM users what language to use are a neatly reductive illustration of the one language/one nation ideology that has so permeated popular consciousness. Douglas Hyde, in his moves to de-Anglicize Ireland, was aware of the problems of identification the Irish would face in their separatist future but, of course, Irish-language monolingualism in its political claims was equally rooted in the Statist ideology of nationalist monolingualism. Assuming language to be coterminous with nationhood, perceiving Irish Studies to be wholly distinct from British Studies or more generally English Studies becomes something of a problem for many observers in the non-Anglophone world. If these people speak English and are right beside Britain, they must be English or British. At best, their literature and history can be tolerated as a colorful sub-plot in the Story of English but beyond this, claims for a wholly separate area of study can be interpreted as a puzzling form of special pleading. The institutional difficulty lies in the relative size and global influence of 35

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Ireland. Though part of the Irish national narrative is to proudly proclaim that the country punches above its weight, even the most benign university administrator in the non-Anglophone world will be loath to equate Ireland with, for example, Britain or the United States in terms of population, historical influence, or economic clout. Trying to justify wholly separate programs or departments or institutes of Irish Studies can rarely be justified on the sole grounds of economic or strategic self-interest, so the rationale must lie elsewhere. How to articulate this rationale brings with it another set of difficulties. Marieke Krajenbrink, discussing the representation of Ireland in Dutch literature, notes that in recent years, there has been a decline in Dutch literary fiction located in Ireland. With the secularizing of Ireland, the increasing domestication of its spatial, social and cultural landscape and its more open and multi-cultural society, moving away from a traditional Irish identity to a European identity, the attractions of Ireland for Dutch writers seems to have diminished. (Krajenbrink 163) If, as Anne Gallagher notes in describing Ireland’s place in the French cultural imaginary, Ireland has largely been presented as “an untamed land, bathed in mystery and mythology, where rationalism has no place and the life of the imagination reigns supreme,” moving away from these essentializing stereotypes brings with it its own perils (Gallagher 76). If Ireland is no longer so diferent, why does it make a diference to study it? If its attractions or interest (positive or negative) formerly lay in its refusal to conform to norms around the place of religion in public life, the use of political violence, civil liberties, and personal rights, the role of agriculture in the political economy, and the hegemony of clock time in the administration of daily life, what happens as the society moves closer to the conventional social, economic, and cultural practices of late modernity? The dual challenge for Irish Studies in the non-Anglophone world, therefore, is both to overcome the monolingual reductionism that conceals Irish specificity from public view and to articulate that specificity in a way that does not imprison the area in the contours of exotic otherness.

Vernacular cosmopolitanism The broadening out from a diasporic to a diffusive perspective in Irish Studies is also congruent with a major transformation in Ireland itself, namely the shift from extrinsic alterity to intrinsic alterity in the society. In a sense, this paradigm shift mirrors the demographic shift in Ireland itself, where a country with the highest net emigration rate in the European Union in the 1980s found itself with the highest net immigration rate by the start of the new century.1 The foreign is no longer over there or beyond the waves (extrinsic alterity) but next door, across the street, in the local corner shop (intrinsic alterity). One immediate consequence of the arrival of new migrants in Ireland has been a dramatic increase in the number and size of foreign-language communities in Ireland: there are now estimated to be approximately 160 different languages spoken in the country. The Census 2016 Summary Report, published in April 2017, gave statistics on the diversity of foreign nationals living in Ireland by nationality. Poles constitute the largest group of foreign nationals (122,515), followed by UK nationals. The other significant groups of foreign nationals living in Ireland were: Lithuanians (36,552), Romanians (29,186), Latvians (19,933), Brazilians (13,640), Spaniards (12,112), and Italians (11,732). More than 612,000 of those who responded to the Census spoke a language other than Irish or English at home, up from 514,000 in 2011. Just over 22% of these spoke Polish and 9% spoke French (Department of Education and Skills 14).

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One immediate consequence for Irish Studies has been the need to speak to those elements within the culture that relate to contact with the wider, non-Anglophone world. Linguistic foreignness, difference, or alterity are no longer elements without or external to the culture but an intrinsic part of it. At one level, the altered nature of Ireland’s linguistic present has brought in its wake a revisiting of Ireland’s multilingual past. Two volumes of essays offer evidence for this shift in perspective from the beginning of the century: The Languages of Ireland, coedited by the author of the present chapter and Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, and Language and Tradition in Ireland (Cronin and Ó Cuilleanáin), coedited by Maria Tymoczko and Colin Ireland. Tymoczko and Ireland stress the flexible, adaptable, and inventive nature of tradition, which they contrast with the tendentious reduction of the term by Hobsbawm and others to essentialist, timeless immobility. They go on to trace the outlines of a history of linguistic mixing for Ireland, which is explored in detail for a number of languages in The Languages of Ireland: From the pre-Celtic languages and the various dialects of the Celtic invaders to the integration of Latin after the conversion of the Irish to Christianity by British clerics, from the linguistic diversity encountered by Irish missionaries abroad to the assimilation of Scandinavian dialects introduced by the Vikings, the early history of Ireland is rich in multilingualism. The Anglo-Norman conquest brought still other languages to Ireland at the end of the twelfth century, with armies and settlers speaking more than one dialect of French, Occitan, Welsh, Flemish, and English. (Tymoczko and Ireland 1) Thus, an efect of the marked increase in multilingualism in Ireland over the last decade has been to make visible elements of the Irish multilingual past so that language change is presented less as a threat to the founding languages of the nation (to borrow a Canadian term) and a more as part of an Irish multilingual tradition which has been largely though not exclusively overshadowed by the rivalry between English and Irish. Developments in the present, then, are likely in the future to further bring to the fore the particular variety and richness of Ireland’s multilingual past. Significantly, as part of the events to mark Ireland’s presidency of the European Union in 2004, the European Commission building in Brussels hosted an exhibition curated by the poet Peter Sirr that had as its theme the multilingual heritage of the island of Ireland. In this way, the growing emphasis on internal alterity, on already existing instances of internal interlingual and intercultural contact, opens up new areas of research and ofers further cross-disciplinary opportunities for researchers in Irish Studies. As the linguistic composition of the Irish population undergoes significant change, the Anglocentric dominance of Irish Studies is no longer tenable, and the difusive perspective ofers an opportunity to engage with a globalized country that has a daily experience of what Stuart Hall called “vernacular cosmopolitanism” (Hall 30). Joanna Kosmalska ofers an example of what this might mean in practice in her “Turning the Foreign Land into a Homeland: The Representations of Ireland and the Irish in Polish Literature” (Komalska). One of the largest migrant groups in contemporary Ireland and speakers of a distinctive language with a long literary tradition, the Polish migrant experience has given rise to a plethora of novels, short stories, autobiographical texts, and travel accounts that engage with this new reality. As Tomasz Borkowski claims in the opening pages of Irlandia Jones poszukiwany [Ireland Jones Wanted]: [This book] is an attempt to describe my personal experiences in Ireland which I have shared with thousands of my fellow compatriots and with millions of Irish people. Presumably,

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there have been as many perplexities and explanations as there were people involved in that process. Here I put only one account of what happened. One could call it a ‘tomography.’ (Borkowski 10) Part of this tomographic exploration is the tension between mythic representations of the island and the difculty reality of migrants’ lives. Łukasz Šlipko in Pokój z widokiem na Dunnes Stores [The Room with a View of Dunnes Stores] assesses the mixed feelings of his compatriots about their new home: They took shelter under the umbrella of wealth, leaving their decayed villages, potholes in roads and rust-eaten buses behind. They were let into the crystal palace, but even in this place they are not devoid of worries and they atone for the high standard of living by being “the Other”, “proles from the outside.” (Ślipko 21) Here there is almost a reverse image of the Irish diasporic experience (“leaving their decayed villages, potholes in road and rust-eaten buses behind”) where Ireland becomes the theater of immigrant arrivals rather than emigrant departures. Irish Studies in the non-Anglophone world takes on a new meaning or relevance as the island is experienced and inhabited by speakers of dozens of languages from all over the world. In other words, English or Irish alone are no longer adequate to capture the multiplicity of lived experiences on the island of Ireland. The interpretive skills of scholars versed in the linguistic and cultural traditions of many non-Anglophone countries are necessary to arrive at some understanding, however partial, of the new multiethnic and multilingual Ireland that is emerging in the twenty-first century. This change or shift towards a transnational or translational reading of Irish experiences has been prefigured by Irish Studies scholars working in non-Anglophone countries such as Aidan O’Malley and Stephanie Schwerter. Though they were looking at modern Irish literature and not the experience of recent migrants in Ireland, their insistence on the importance of translation to the working out of Irish cultural problematics provides an important conceptual backdrop to a more sustainable engagement with intrinsic alterity.

Soft power Irish Studies in the non-Anglophone world is for reasons of funding and institutional support inescapably bound up with the political imperatives of Irish foreign cultural policy. In a report published by the European Federation of Associations and Centers of Irish Studies (EFACIS) in 2018, the authors pointed to the activities of EFACIS members as a means of promoting Irish “soft power” (EFACIS 4–5). The notion of “soft power” was first enunciated by Joseph Nye, the former Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Nye argued that attraction rather than coercion was much more effective in the medium to long term in terms of enduring influence in international relations. Although Nye’s concept was first developed in the context of thinking about the limits to military and economic coercion (“hard power”) as the preferred foreign policy instruments of the US as a superpower, it was soon apparent that the distinction could be usefully used by a whole range of actors on the world stage. For smaller nations, the options of exercising “hard power” are generally relatively restricted, either because of the lack of resources or, in certain cases, the unwillingness of populations with colonial or postcolonial histories to exercise such power. In this respect, the notion of “soft power,” influence through attraction or co-option, appears both more feasible and more desirable or acceptable. Culture is 38

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frequently the arsenal that is drawn upon for the weaponry of soft power, even for superpowers as demonstrated by the long association of Hollywood with the superiority of the American Way of Life. For countries lacking in significant economic or military resources, cultural promotion can be seen as a relatively inexpensive means of exercising soft power. The power, of course, is unlikely to exert any influence if it is not brought beyond the shores of the national culture. To this end, two types of translation are required, spatial (it must be moved from the point of origin to various points around the globe) and semantic (the content must be understood in various points of the globe). Soft power as a concept is increasingly linked to the notion of “nation branding” or brand nationalism.2 This was described in The Boston Globe as “shorthand for coordinated government efforts to manage a country’s image, whether to improve tourism, investment, or even foreign relations” (Risen n.p.). The “nation brand” is one that marries positive associations to the profit imperative. These are associations that help bring foreign investment and tourists into a country while also acting as a stimulus to the sales of nationally produced goods and boosting the international image of the country. The emphasis on image is seen to parallel the transition from modernist industrial production to postmodern consumption, “a move from the modern world of geopolitics and power to the postmodern world of images and influence” (Van Ham 4). As Volcic and Andrejevic argue: The promoters of nation branding market it as a powerful equalizer—a way that countries without the economic or military clout of superpowers can compete in the global marketplace. They claim that nation branding can help such nations to achieve greater visibility, attract tourists and foreign investors, expand exports, and promote their profile among the member states of various international organizations (such as the EU), all the while cultivating patriotism at home. (Volcic and Andrejevic 604) The concert of nations becomes the global trading floor, each nation clamoring for competitive advantage as the notion of political sovereignty becomes subservient to market position or positioning. Given the critical tenor of many of the publications produced by Irish Studies scholars from Europe and elsewhere (as evidenced, for example, by titles published in the Reimagining Ireland series edited by Eamon Maher),3 there is little likelihood of these scholars being coopted into more naive and egregious forms of brand nationalism. There remains, however, a curious inability at the State level to perceive the implications of soft power diplomacy for the non-Anglophone world (Hunt Mahony). EFACIS membership in 2018 included 37 Centers of Irish Studies incorporating 51 institutions in 20 countries across Europe, but it is significant that in a survey of its membership only 16% had Chairs in Irish Studies and all of these were in one country, France. A minimal level of financial support was provided by the Irish government to support the Secretariat of EFACIS but otherwise member Centers and Institutes are dependent on funding from their own national funding agencies or on ad hoc forms of financial assistance from Culture Ireland or Irish Embassies on the European continent. The authors of the 2018 report make a claim that is not especially controversial but that does not appear to have permeated the logic of Irish foreign policy: [I]t is clear that the lecturers, researchers, translators, editors, publishers, performers, journalists, musicians, and other cultural experts who receive their education from Irish Studies specialists and through Irish Studies centres are key players in the promotion and appreciation of Irish culture in continental Europe. (EFACIS 5) 39

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In a Soft Power Index compiled in 2017 by Portland Communications and the Southern California School of Public Diplomacy, Ireland ranked 19th, behind countries of a similar size such as Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Finland, New Zealand, Austria, and Norway.4 The findings of this research are a useful corrective to the delusional hubris that can result from an obsessive concern with Irish presence in Anglophone spaces. In the case of Europe, it is clear that much remains to be done in terms of structured and consistent support for the development of Irish Studies—support that is all the more crucial in terms of building alliances and cultivating public understanding in a post-Brexit Europe. As the journalist Ruadhán Mac Cormaic pointed out in an opinion piece in the Irish Times, “Ireland, for so long in the shadow of another neighbour, remains cocooned in a linguistic bubble that makes strangers of its friends” (n.p.). In the case of Irish friends outside of Europe, there are strong and emerging centers of excellence in different parts of the world. In Brazil, for example, the University of São Paulo has been offering courses on Irish literature since 1997 and there is a dedicated association, the Associação Brasileira de Estudos Irlandeses, that publishes the ABEI journal, the Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies.5 IASAIL Japan, the Japanese branch of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures, has been in existence since 1984, and in addition to organizing an annual conference publishes The Journal of Irish Studies, formerly known as The Harp. In March 2014, a number of Irish Studies centers in China jointly set up an Irish Studies Network. The Network includes Irish Studies centers at Nanjing University, Fudan University, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai University of International Economics and Business, Hunan Normal University, and the Beijing Foreign Studies University (Wang 20–21). In the words of Wang Zhanpeng, one of the aims of the Network is to “contribute to the development of Sino-Irish relations by promoting mutual understanding and facilitating people-to-people dialogues” (21). What that dialogue might be and how it might develop reveals in part the contribution of the non-Anglophone world to the understanding of what constitutes Irish culture and identity in both the past and the current moment. Wang notes that thanks “to the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on Irish independence movements, which were seen as part of the international struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie, Chinese scholars translated into Mandarin the first modern book on Irish history, Edmund Curtis’s A History of Ireland in the early 1970s” (20). In this overall context, writers such as Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, and Bernard Shaw “gained a warmer reception in China for their vehement social criticism and great sympathy towards working people” (19–20). The perception of Swift, Wilde, and Shaw as representative figures of a socialist avant-garde is a valid part of the reception of Irish literature in a particular place at a particular time and is a useful check to the convenient generalizations that are predicated solely on the recorded reactions of the English-speaking world. It is worth observing also that language difference itself alters the nature of what Irish Studies chooses to focus on. In analyzing the Irish Studies courses that most appeal to students in continental Europe, the authors of the EFACIS survey note that “Language and language learning, both in the Irish language and English, and translation have become key aspects in Irish Studies in continental Europe accounting for almost 20% . . . of the most popular Irish Studies subjects for students” (EFACIS 13). This greater focus on language(s) and translation is equally apparent in the scholarship and research interests of Brazilian, Japanese, and Chinese scholars and will no doubt shape the global research agenda of Irish Studies in the twenty-first century. Scholars coming from the non-Anglophone world are not only likely to be more sensitive to translation questions but are also arguably more attuned to the question of language difference. This not only relates to the Irish/English language relationship and the presence of migrant languages in Ireland but also to the English language itself. It is striking that although there is still remarkably 40

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no Chair of Irish English in an Irish higher education institution, the foremost authority in the world on Irish English is based in a German university.6 Irish Studies will inevitably be linked to the kind of society in Ireland that comes into being. As the country becomes ever more deeply embedded in global relations of economy, migration, and ecology, the significance of the non-Anglophone world will only continue to grow. The bloodline of the diaspora may have sustained Irish Studies in previous decades, but it is the diffusive inclusiveness of voluntary adhesion on an interconnected, multilingual planet that represents its most resilient and exciting future.

Notes 1 See Ruhs for further immigration and emigration statistics. 2 See Anholt for a more detailed discussion of this sort of branding. 3 The list of books in this series can be found here: www.peterlang.com/view/serial/REIR (Accessed August 3, 2020). 4 The rankings can be found on p. 40–41 of the report. The full Soft Power Index from 2017 can be found here: https:// softpower30.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/The-Soft-Power-30-Report-2017-Web-1.pdf (Accessed August 3, 2020). 5 For more on the state of Irish Studies in Brazil see Mutran and Izarra. 6 See Hickey for more details on Irish English.

Works cited Anholt, Simon. Competitive Identity: The New Brand Management for Nations, Cities and Regions. Palgrave, 2007. Borkowski, Tomasz. Irlandia Jones poszukiwany. Gajt, 2010. Cronin, Michael. Translating Ireland: Translation, Languages, Cultures. Cork University Press, 1996. Cronin, Michael and Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, Eds. The Languages of Ireland. Four Courts Press, 2003. Department of Education and Skills. Languages Connect: Ireland’s Strategy for Foreign Languages in Education 2017–2026, 2017. Derrida, Jacques. “Des Tours de Babel.” Translated by Joseph F. Graham. Difference in Translation. Edited by Joseph F. Graham, Cornell University Press, 1985, pp. 165–248. EFACIS. Irish Studies in Continental Europe Today and its Potential. EFACIS, 2018. Gallagher, Anne. “Destination of the Imagination: Representations of Ireland in Modern French Literature.” Ireland in the European Eye. Edited by Gisela Holfter and Bettina Migge. Royal Irish Academy, 2019, pp. 75–96. Gilsenan, Alan and David Roberts. The Irish Empire. BBC, 2000. Gramling, David. The Invention of Monolingualism. Bloomsbury, 2016. Hall, Stuart. “Political Belonging in a World of Multiple Identities.” Conceiving Cosmopolitanism. Edited by Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen. Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 25–31. Hickey, Raymond. Irish English: History and Present Day Forms. Cambridge University Press, 2007. Holfter, Gisela and Bettina Migge. Ireland in the European Eye. Royal Irish Academy, 2019. Hunt Mahony, Christine, Laura Izarra, Elizabeth Malcolm, John P. Harrington, Ondřej Pilný, and Catriona Crowe, Eds. The Future of Irish Studies: Report of the Irish Forum. Prague Centre for Irish Studies, 2006. Karhio, Anne. “At the Brink of Europe: Nordic Encounters with Irish Literature.” Ireland in the European Eye. Edited by Gisela Holfter and Bettina Migge. Royal Irish Academy, 2019, pp. 203–223. Keane, Barry. Irish Drama in Poland: Staging and Reception, 1900–2000. Intellect, 2016. Komalska, Joanne. “Turning the Foreign Land into a Homeland: Representations of Ireland and the Irish in Polish Literature.” Ireland in the European Eye. Edited by Hofter Gisela and Bettina Migge. Royal Irish Academy, 2019, pp. 119–146. Krakenbrink, Marieke. “Ierland Is Anders: Representations of Ireland in Dutch Literature.” Ireland in the European Eye. Edited by Gisela Holfter and Bettina Migge. Royal Irish Academy, 2019, pp. 147–172. Literature Ireland. “About.” www.literatureireland.com/about (Accessed December 4, 2019). Mac Cormaic, Ruadhán. “Ireland Is Not Ready for Its Post-Brexit Future.” Irish Times, December 14, 2019. 41

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Milan, Michèle. Found in Translation: Franco-Irish Translation Relationships in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. Unpublished PhD thesis, Dublin City University, 2013. Mutran, Munira H. and Laura P.Z. Izarra. Irish Studies in Brazil. Associação Editorial Humanitas, 2005. Nye, Joseph. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. Public Affairs, 2005. O’Driscoll, Mervyn. “Re-Envisioning Independent Ireland.” Ireland in the European Eye. Edited by Gisela Holfter and Bettina Migge. Royal Irish Academy, 2019, pp. 20–51. O’Leary, Olivia and Helen Burke. Mary Robinson: The Authorised Biography. Hodder & Stoughton, 1998. O’Malley, Aidan. Field Day and the Translation of Irish Identities: Performing Contradictions. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Risen, Clay. “Re-Branding America.” Boston Globe, March 13, 2005. http://archive.boston.com/news/ globe/ideas/articles/2005/03/13/re_branding_america?pg=full (Accessed 3 January 3, 2020). Ruhs, Martin. Emerging Trends and Patterns in the Immigration and Employment of Non-EU Nationals: What the Data Reveal, 2004. www.policyinstitute.tcd.ie (Accessed December, 2019). Schwerter, Stephanie. Northern Irish Poetry and the Russian Turn: Intertextuality in the work of Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and Medbh McGuckian. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Šlipko, Łukasz. Pokój z widokiem na Dunnes Stores. Wydawnictwo, 2011. Tymoczko, Maria and Colin Ireland, Eds. Language and Tradition in Ireland: Continuities and Displacements. University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. Van Ham, Peter. “The Rise of the Brand State: The Postmodern Politics of Image and Reputation.” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 8, No. 5, 2001, pp. 2–6. Vassallo, Rose-Marie. Private e-mail communication to Rita McCann, January 17, 2005. Volcic, Zala and Mark Andrejevic. “Nation Branding in the Era of Commercial Nationalism.” International Journal of Communications, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 598–618. Wang, Zhanpeng. “Irish Studies in China.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 39, No. 2, 2016, pp. 19–24. Yildiz, Yasemin. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. Fordham University Press, 2014.

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Part II

Historicizing Ireland

Introduction: historicizing Irish history was, in the 1980s and 1990s, a battleground over the ways in which the subject was written and presented (although the debate had been ongoing in various forms since the 1930s).1 The revisionist debate was complex, but was essentially a struggle (led most publicly by R.F. Foster) between those who wished to broaden and reframe the history of the Irish state to acknowledge a multitude of complexities and causations, and those who wanted no challenge to the orthodoxy of Irish nationalist history. With the signing of the Belfast Agreement in 1998 and the ending of the conflict in Northern Ireland, however, the intensity of the revisionist debate subsided, and a growing body of criticism suggested that the whole debate had been centered too tightly on the political history of Irish nationalism. Calls came instead for a more general revisionism of Irish historical methods and approaches that would produce a far wider and inclusive historical canvas, particularly one that included new avenues in social and cultural history: one focused on the history of women in Irish society as well as on popular pastimes, work, local history, and myriad other areas of life. As Margaret McCurtain and Mary O’Dowd wrote wearily in 1992, at the height of the revisionist debate: “A revision of Irish history, which would incorporate the history of women, is still not even on the research agenda of most Irish historians” (McCurtain and O’Dowd 4). Diarmaid Ferriter argued that the generation of younger scholars, entering the historical profession after the turn of the century, had grown tired of the revisionist debate and sought an escape in social, cultural, and economic history (Ferriter 750). This new body of work, produced since the late 1990s, has been broadly defined as post-revisionism. There is not space here to provide a full account of the broadening out of Irish history in the last two decades, but we can offer some general trends. First, Irish history moved beyond the narrow confines of national history, with scholars turning to social, cultural, and economic lines of inquiry that produced a wealth of work in women’s history, local history, the history of sport and leisure, and medical history, to name just a few. This work was produced by the dogged pursuit of material in archives and newspapers (a process that was assisted by large-scale digitization projects and the inspirational advocacy for the value of the archive by individuals such as Caitriona Crowe) as well as a turn towards fresh methodologies such as oral history, visual history, and textual analysis. It was also clear that a new generation of scholars, trained to

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think beyond the possibilities of national history, were drawing inspiration from the trends of global historiography, and work began to emerge that was informed by transnationalism, ecocriticism, ethnography, and other theoretical approaches. Also critical was the mass of material, rich in detail and highly personalized, that emerged from two of the major archival openings of the twenty-first century: material relating to institutional abuse in Ireland, and material that recorded the activities and pensions of those involved in the Irish revolution (which is discussed here in Chapter 36). It is also clear that historians responded to national and global events from 2008 to illuminate the relevance of their work in the contemporary world, whether by linking Dublin’s abject poverty during the lockout period, and in the run up to 1916, with the impact of post-2008 austerity, or else by using their work on the 1918 global influenza outbreak to better understand the rapid spread of COVID-19 around the world.2 Evidence of the changing approach of scholars within Irish Studies is clear in this volume. Chapters that are written with historical methodologies in mind, or else informed by history, are evident throughout the book. Some are written by scholars who would self-identify as historians and others by scholars from other disciplines. And perhaps this has been the great success of the post-revisionist period: the collapsing, within Irish Studies at least, of tightly defined disciplinary lines so that history, the archives, and the machinery of capturing history are everywhere. The wider understanding of what history is and how it can be approached is evident in the first two chapters of this section, by Guy Beiner and Timothy G. McMahon. Beiner demonstrates how a wealth of pre-twentieth century material, collected by nonprofessional historians who have been collectively labelled (and often dismissed) as antiquarians, contains huge amounts of material which are not only invaluable but also critically important for contemporary scholars. He positions these deep reservoirs of material as part of the record of memory and argues that the use of these artifacts and recollections from within the island’s cultural memory can be used to challenge and disturb the sense of history that has been imposed by the historical profession for over a century. Where Beiner looks at memory as a repository of history prior to the foundation of the modern Irish state (which dovetailed neatly with the emergence of professional, scientific-minded history within Irish universities), Timothy G. McMahon examines how the history of the Irish state has been written since 2008. McMahon explores how the certainties (if there was ever such a thing) of Irish history were disrupted not only by the events following on from the 2008 downturn but also by a broadening out of how Irish history was produced. In a similar manner to the ways in which Beiner argues for the use of antiquarian memory, McMahon demonstrates that when faced with multiple contemporary crises, a transformed sense of what constitutes an archive, and a wealth of new available material covering a wide swathe of Irish life, historians can expand their horizons and transform their methodological and disciplinary tool box. The result has been a far broader sense of history and a much deeper appreciation of the past (and also of memory) as well as a far wider definition of which individuals or groups can be included within the frameworks of history. Kelly Fitzgerald’s chapter on folklore continues the same debates as Beiner and McMahon, but in the context of how a further form of history or memory has been mobilized in recent years. She argues that the move away from the official archive by historians and the advance of memory studies has produced a renewed interest in folklore collections. Access to and use of such collections, in particular those of the Irish Folklore Commission, have, as she explains, been heighted by major digitization and dissemination projects since the turn of the century. Together, the chapters of Beiner, McMahon, and Fitzgerald demonstrate how the understandings and definitions of what constitutes history have changed dramatically since the years of the revisionist debate. The distinctions between “history” and other adjacent fields have blurred, 44

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and the varied ways the past can be explored through vehicles such as memory and folklore have gained greater prominence. In our contemporary age of centenary commemoration, of events close enough to have been passed down within families and communities within a single generation, memory and folkore, telling and hearing, are as critical to how the past is constructed as the “official” record is. The final three chapters in this section, one written by an Irish language scholar, one by an economist, the other by anthropologists, deal with contemporary events. Brian Ó Conchubhair explores the fortunes of the Irish language, both in the Irish Republic and in the North. He argues that with the language seemingly faltering in the Gaeltacht, used as a political football in the North, and hampered by a lack of financial and political support across the island, Irish has been a victim of neoliberalism. In the years of the boom it was deemed a policy irrelevance in the face of the triumph of global capital in Ireland, and in the age of austerity it became a luxury that could not be afforded full support by the state. Ó Conchubhair’s outlining of how the language, and specifically government policy that relates to it, has been devastated by the arrival and retreat of global capital demonstrates the powerful effects of the boom-then-bust cycle on key aspects of Irish culture. Eoin O’Malley also works with these themes—these flows of capital and their effect on the island—as he tracks the history of political and economic change in Ireland since the 1990s. He demonstrates that while the Irish experience of boom, bust, and renewed boom can be viewed as if Ireland was some form of malfunctioning roller coaster, the whole experience of the last three decades can instead be understood by a process of Great Normalization. In this, Ireland began to function and perform in common with its European neighbors and, even down through power sharing in Northern Ireland or coalition government rule in the Republic, the politics of the island increasingly reflect the shared trajectory of Western liberalism. Dominic Bryan and Gordon Gillespie build on O’Malley’s treatment and explore in detail how Northern Ireland has functioned since the end of the conflict in 1998. They explain how Northern Ireland was treated as a place that was “stuck” in history (the nature of sectarian division and relations with the Republic and the rest of the United Kingdom), and that these certainties of history did much to sustain the conflict and shape initial responses in the moves towards a post-combat society. They show that history, over the two decades since the signing of the Belfast Agreement, has ceased to imprison Northern Ireland, but that even if it is no longer “stuck,” a range of common problems still beset that society. These problems and challenges of socioeconomic inequality, of integration, gender bias, and race discrimination, amongst others, are not unique to Northern Ireland but are further problematized when they are viewed through the lens of old history and identity politics. History has been, and will remain, a powerful force on the island of Ireland. As the chapters in this section demonstrate, what history means and how it is made is broadly defined and wide ranging. What is evident is that within Irish Studies, the understanding of Irish history has proved to be a remarkably nuanced yet highly mobile force, and one that—as its changing outlines since 2008 demonstrate—will always be profoundly shaped by contemporary events.

Notes 1 For an overview of the debate, see Perry. 2 See for example MacNamara and Yeates on 1913 and Milne on the flu.

Works cited Ferriter, Diarmaid. The Transformation of Ireland, 1900–2000. Profile, 2005. 45

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MacNamara, Conor and Padraig Yeates, Eds. The Dublin Lockout 1913: Perspectives on Class War and Legacy. Irish Academic Press, 2013. McCurtain, Margaret and Mary O’Dowd. “An Agenda for Women’s History in Ireland, 1500–1800.” Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 28, No. 109, 1992, pp. 1–37. Milne, Ide. Stacking the Coffins: Influenza, War and Revolution in Ireland, 1918–19. Manchester University Press, 2020. Perry, Robert. Revisionist Scholarship and Modern Irish Politics. Routledge, 2016.

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4 Irish Historical Studies Avant la Lettre The antiquarian genealogy of interdisciplinary scholarship Guy Beiner

Irish Studies is in its very essence a multidisciplinary field, and yet, echoing nineteenth-century patterns in the development of the humanities elsewhere, the two disciplines of literature and history have traditionally claimed pride of place within its gamut. The privileged status of the first might seem obvious. After all, Irish writers have produced a truly remarkable literary output, featuring creative works of prose, poetry, and drama that have attained worldwide renown. It is therefore of little surprise that such a rich harvest provided ample fodder for literary critics, who have adroitly uncovered how Ireland has been repeatedly “invented,” or, perhaps more accurately, how traditions of literary representation were imaginatively reinterpreted. The case for the continued primacy of Irish historiography, on the other hand, is less straightforward. Although the writing of history stands out as a reputable form of nonfiction that attracts a fair degree of popular readership in Ireland, it has not acquired a reputation for cutting-edge methodological or conceptual innovation. With notable exceptions, Irish historiography has been faulted for its tardiness in taking on board new approaches to the study of the past and for the limited extent to which it has engaged with other disciplines. While noteworthy attempts have been made to redress these shortfalls, Ireland has not been at the forefront of international historiographical developments. Nevertheless, Irish historians appear to have retained an august standing in the public eye as evident in their being called upon to commentate the “Decade of Centenaries” launched in 2012. A social scientist’s diatribe against the elevation of historians into “high priests of the commemorative rituals” (Bryan 39) is in itself an animated reaction to the favoring of history over other, not-less-worthy, disciplines. It is commonly claimed that the ascent of Irish academic history originated in the professionalization of the discipline, signaled by the launch in 1938 of Irish Historical Studies, the joint journal of the Irish Historical Society and the Ulster Society for Irish Historical Studies (founded respectively in Dublin and Belfast in 1936). As a cross-border cooperative venture, it was premised on the “realization that the writing of Irish history would now be conducted within an entirely new territorial relationship of two sovereign entities occupying a partitioned island” (Brady 2010, 302). This achievement is primarily credited to T.W. (“Theo”) Moody of Trinity College Dublin and R.W. (“Robin”) Dudley Edwards of University College Dublin, alongside a “small group of enthusiasts” who “were convinced that it was highly important to promote the disinterested study of Irish history” (Moody 1977, 377). 47

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The influence of contemporary English historiography was pervasive. Both Moody and Edwards were trained at the Institute of Historical Research in the University of London and their “indebtedness to that Institute, which is at once an experimental laboratory of research methods, a clearing house of historical information, and a meeting place of historians from all parts of the world” was dutifully acknowledged in their editorial preface to the inaugural issue of Irish Historical Studies (Edwards and Moody 1–2). Another of the founding figures of the “new Irish history,” T.D. Williams of University College Dublin, was trained at Peterhouse Cambridge, where he was mentored by Herbert Butterfield, who in 1945 would read to the Conference of Irish Historians a paper on “Tendencies in Historical Study in England” (subsequently published in Irish Historical Studies).1 According to Brendan Bradshaw, an outspoken critic of “the ideology of professionalism as it developed in Ireland,” the “revisionist enterprise” readapted Butterfield’s seminal thesis on The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) and redirected his critique of an English celebratory meta-narrative towards undermining the nationalist interpretation of Irish history as continuous opposition to English conquest and colonization.2 By modeling themselves on the more established schools of English historiography, Irish historians generally showed a preference for studies of high politics and administrative history—“history from above” in which “social, cultural and economic history has tended either to be ignored or treated as a specialist discipline worthy of no more than peripheral attention in the general historical narrative” (Daly 2007, 94–95). This tendency often resulted in what has been described as an “anodyne version of Ireland’s past” (Canny 2006, 404). Maintaining that “conservatism was the hallmark of the revisionist project,” Kevin Whelan questioned the methodological innovation ascribed to the new history: While it paraded its up-to-dateness, Irish Historical Studies was already old-fashioned at its inception and remote from the cutting edge of contemporary European historiography. Its parochialism was demonstrated by its insulation from the intellectual revolt in historiography spearheaded by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in France, and signaled by the advent in 1929 of the innovative journal Annales. (Whelan 185) These arguments touch on the crux of the so-called “revisionist debate” that would preoccupy Irish historians in the 1980s. There was, admittedly, a certain measure of diversity, even among the core group involved in the professionalization of Irish history. D.B. Quinn, “more than the others, remained alert to historiographic trends” and pioneered Atlantic history (Canny 2003, 727), for which he is acknowledged in the Dictionary of Irish Biography as “the only historian from Ireland of his generation to have gained international distinction in an area other than Irish history” (Canny 2010, n.p.). A less-prominent example can be found in G.A. Hayes-McCoy, founding editor of the Irish Sword (the journal of the Military History Society of Ireland, launched in 1949), who advanced the study of military history—often in its broader transnational contexts (Hayes-McCoy 1969), as well as historical cartography (Hayes-McCoy 1964). Having worked for over two decades as an assistant keeper in the National Museum, Hayes-McCoy also attributed significance to the historical study of material culture. Yet, such other directions were seldom at the fore of Irish historiography. Moreover, the professionalization of history in Ireland was by and large a maledominated affair in which the contribution of women was marginalized (O’Dowd 52) and “some popular women historians also functioned as the ‘others’ against whom academic historians could define themselves as they created their own identities as professionals” (Smith 159). 48

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A reassessment of “revisionism and the revisionist controversy” cautioned against “attributing excessive importance to the academic pioneers centered around the founding of Irish Historical Studies in the late 1930s” and noted that “while these historians made a considerable contribution to the field and to academic history in Ireland, their work, methodology and inspiration was derivative, their influence on historians of Ireland elsewhere (the majority) remained slight” (Boyce and Alan O’Day 6). Similarly, Ciaran Brady questioned the “particular myth which, ironically enough, began to surround the first great generation of self-conscious de-mythologizers among Irish historians,” whereby “the establishment of historical research and writing in Ireland as a professional discipline was the achievement of a small group of energetic reformers who came to prominence in Irish universities in the late 1930s” (Brady 2010, 275–276). There was in fact a preexisting vibrant scene of historical scholarship. Moody and Dudley Edwards were aware of the many other organizations that were active in promoting historical studies: There are various bodies, central and local, such as the Royal Irish Academy, the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, the Down and Connor Historical Society, the Galway Archaeological Society, and the Louth Archaeological Society, which do valuable work in encouraging the study of particular branches and aspects of Irish history, usually in conjunction with archaeology. (Edwards and Moody 1) These well-established scholarly institutions were deemed outmoded and inadequate, insofar as local studies were considered to be of lesser significance and archaeology was to be decoupled from document-based history. Looking back in 1958 at the accomplishments of the previous two decades, Moody paid homage to some of the earlier pioneers of “that renaissance of Irish history,” in particular Eoin MacNeill and Edmund Curtis. Yet, in stating that prior to Irish Historical Studies “there had never been a journal exclusively devoted to the scientific study of Irish history” (Moody 1958, 1), Moody distanced the new flagship journal from the scholarly periodicals of learned societies and drew a line between academic history and what has been described as a “great flowering of interest in antiquarian and archaeological research” (Brady 2010, 283). Repeatedly hailed as a “historiographical revolution,” the “revision of Irish history undertaken from 1938” has been applauded as “the most persistent effort to accomplish a separation between sophistry and knowledge” (Gkotzaridis 23). More soberly, when enumerating Moody’s accomplishments, F.S.L. Lyon noted that “historiographical revolution” is an accolade that “has been used so often that it is in danger of becoming a cliché to which everyone subscribes, but which nobody pauses to analyse” (Lyons 1). A reappraisal may benefit from considering Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, which contended that the radical innovation of revolutions comes at the price of wholesale devaluation of earlier traditions. In this vein, it is worth examining what was thrown out with the bathwater at the birth of the new Irish history, as this may reveal an alternative genealogy for the place of history in Irish Studies. A conventional search for harbingers of the professionalization of Irish history might only look as far back as the Victorian historian W.E.H. Lecky, whose extensively researched five-volume History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century “remains one of the great books on Irish history” (McCartney 92, 187). Such a teleology, which effectively faults all earlier historical writing for a supposed lack of scholarly rigor and an overt tendency towards religious and political polemics, would need to concede that Lecky’s writings were tinged by unionist concerns over the rise of nationalism. It would be naive to surmise that this was the last time personal views influenced academic historical writing. If the ostensibly dispassionate “critical assault on cherished 49

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nationalist myths” was left largely unchallenged in its first decades, the heated controversies that followed the outbreak of the northern Troubles “exposed some Irish historians to charges of political partisanship” (Daly 1997, 514). The placing of the “objectivity question” at “the very center of the professional historical venture” (Novick 1) is a moot principle, which has been heavily contested and cannot be a sole defining criterion for bona fide historical scholarship. Offering an unorthodox starting point, Oliver MacDonagh posited that “modern Irish historiography was born in 1790 with the publication of the Revd. Edward Ledwich’s Antiquities of Ireland.” While acknowledging that for early historical debates “it would be difficult to deny that all of them were politics by other means,” MacDonagh argued that “it is also true that somewhere amidst the heat and dust the foundations of modern historical scholarship in Ireland were being laid” (MacDonagh 1, 6). Ledwich, who also completed two volumes of Antiquities of Ireland prepared by the English antiquarian Francis Grose, issued an expanded edition of his own Antiquities of Ireland in 1804 (the combined sales of his two editions reportedly reaching an impressive 2,200 copies). Notably, he consulted primary sources and applied the skepticism of the Enlightenment to dispel “bardic fictions.” Yet, Ledwich’s unwillingness to take on board manuscripts in the Irish language was lambasted by the contemporary Gaelic scholar Theophilus O’Flanagan, who labeled his Antiquities of Ireland “a Counter-work to those Antiquities” (Lucius/Lynch xv). This controversy was significant. As put by Donal MacCartney, “it is in this problem of authentic sources that the signs of scientific method appear” (MacCartney 348). There is a long history of dismissing antiquarians as dilettante enthusiasts with insignificant esoteric interests. They have been repeatedly lampooned in literary representations, perhaps most memorably in Sir Walter Scott’s The Antiquary (1816), though the pedantic obsession of the novel’s main character—Jonathan Oldbuck of Monkbarns—with the collection and study of old coins, books and relics, affectionally reflected Scott’s own fascinations. Pervasive disregard of antiquarianism was forcefully challenged by the classicist Arnaldo Momigliano, who traced the origins of antiquarian history back from the Renaissance to a rejection of the Thucydidean school of political-diplomatic-military history in favor of a more broad-minded Herodotean approach, championed by admirers of Marcus Terentius Varro’s lost work from the first century B.C., Antiquitates Rerum Humanarum et Divinarum [Antiquities of Human and Divine Things]. Rejecting the notion that this seemingly dated erudite approach was irrelevant in a modern historiographical context, Momigliano proclaimed that “antiquarianism is alive, and we have not yet heard the last of it” (Momigliano 1990, 79). A substantial body of recent studies have completely revised the understanding of antiquarianism and, by following its manifestations throughout cultures and time periods, have convincingly replaced the old pejorative image with a vision of the antiquary as a dynamic, interdisciplinary, questioning scholar whose work stretched across many disciplines and fields of enquiry and whose scholarship lay at the centre of humanist and enlightenment projects to recover and understand the human past. (Williams 95) Although it is difcult to pin the wide range of antiquarian study down to a precise definition, “its most singular characteristic” has been identified in “its promiscuous mix of sources” (Levine 71), which “privileges an eclectic mixture of textual, material, visual, and oral sources” (Battles ii) Momigliano’s regret of being unable to “simply refer to a History of Antiquarian Studies” as “none exists” (Momigliano 1950, 286) was echoed more recently by Peter N. Miller. In a chapter on antiquarianism in the Oxford History of Historical Writing, Miller states that such a history “despite being a desideratum of the highest degree, remains impossible” (Miller 2012, 50

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244), though elsewhere he outlined “A Tentative Morphology of European Antiquarianism” that spans the early-modern and late-modern periods (Miller 2013). A similar lacuna can be identified in the history of Irish antiquarianism, which has attracted increasing scholarly interest and yet, in absence of a comprehensive survey, remains a partially charted field. The circulation of manuscript copies of the narrative history written by Geoffrey Keating [Seathrún Céitinn] Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (“Compendium of Wisdom about Ireland,” completed c. 1634), a precursor of antiquarianism, played a “leading role in shaping the particular combination of myth, religion and history that has defined Irish Catholicism for over three centuries” (Cunningham 226). Keating’s work, alongside the contemporary compilation undertaken by a team of scribes headed by Mícheál Ó Cléirigh (Michael O’Clery) Annála Ríoghachta Éireann (“Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland”)—commonly referred to as the “Annals of the Four Masters” (completed in 1636 and published in a bilingual edition edited by John O’Donovan in 1848–1851), opened the door for new studies of early Irish history. This inspired the landmark antiquarian works of such scholars as Sir James Ware—author of De Hibernia et Antiquitatibus Ejus Disquisitiones (1654, with an enhanced edition in 1658), his amanuenses Dubhaltach Óg Mac Firbhisigh who “represents something of a bridge between the last remnants of a native Gaelic learned class and the new Anglo-Irish antiquaries” (Ó Muraíle 1996, xv), and Roderick O’Flaherty—author of Ogygia: Seu, Rerum Hibernicarum Chronologia (1685; appeared in 1793 in an English translation by James Hely as Ogygia, or, a Chronological Account of Irish Events). In turn, the eighteenth century saw a resurgence of antiquarian scholarship, which centered around General Charles Vallancey, who was long dismissed as a colorful figure but has been shown to be “more complex” than previously recognized (O’Halloran 1995, 173). It featured such works as Charles O’Conor’s Dissertations on the Antient History of Ireland (1753, with an enhanced edition in 1766), Sylvester O’Halloran’s An Introduction to the Study of the History and Antiquities of Ireland (1772) and General History of Ireland (1778), and Vallancey’s multi-volume compendium Collectanea de Rebus Hibernicis (1770–1804), which at first showcased the work of Frances Ledwich but later turned against him. Antiquarian scholarship found a lasting home in Dublin with the founding in 1786 of the Royal Irish Academy. The initial six volumes of its Transactions (published 1787–1797) featured contributions from all the leading antiquaries of the day. While consulting a diverse selection of sources, early-modern antiquarian writing mirrored the changing fashions of Celticism, Gothicism, and Orientalism and was often geared towards generating origins myths and far-fetched pedigrees for the identity politics invested in polemical debates over who should be considered “the real, the genuine Irish” (Leerssen 1997a, 12). Nonetheless, Clare O’Halloran has persuasively argued that Far from being the eccentric, marginal and unscholarly productions of cranks, polemicists and enthusiasts, these are among the most important shaping texts in Irish cultural development. Their impact on historical research—and more especially on popular perceptions of Irish history—continued to be important into the twentieth century. (O’Halloran 2004, 186) The greater influence of the antiquarians went far beyond the study of history and initiated a panoply of writing on Ireland. Following the violence of the 1798 Rebellion, “the study of Gaelic antiquity fell under a cloud, [and] lost its fashionableness in the salons of Dublin” (Leerssen 1997b, 75). During this hiatus, the “treatment of antiquarian themes” (O’Halloran 2010, 332) continued in the flourish of historical fiction that followed the passing of the Act of Union and is particularly evident in such key works as The Wild Irish Girl (1806) by Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson), The Absentee 51

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(1812) by Maria Edgeworth, and The Milesian Chief (1812) by Charles Robert Maturin. Thomas Moore’s immensely popular Irish Melodies (issued in ten volumes between 1808 and 1834, with a new edition in 1853 illustrated by Daniel McLise) show the influence of antiquarian studies of Gaelic songs and poetry, which had effectively initiated the field of Irish ethnomusicology, namely Joseph Cooper Walker’s Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1786), Charlotte Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789), and Edward Bunting’s General Collection of Ancient Irish Music (1797, with two additional volumes appearing in 1809 and 1840). In non-textual form, the inspiration of antiquarianism is visually apparent in the paintings of Irish romantic artists, such as James Barry (who corresponded with Sylvester O’Halloran) and Daniel Maclise (who benefited from the patronage of the numismatic-antiquarian Richard Saintfield and the folkloristantiquarian Thomas Crofton Croker). Pursuit of antiquarian interests was a feature of the post-Union vogue for ethnographic travel writing. Its influence can be traced in travelogues written by visiting outsiders, such as Journal of a Tour in Ireland (1807) by the English antiquary Sir Richard Colt Hoare, as well as Irish antiquarians. Investigative scholarship is apparent for example throughout Caesar Otway’s Sketches in Ireland (1827), A Tour in Connaught (1839), and Sketches in Erris and Tyrawly (1841), described by the author (in the subtitle of a new edition in 1850) as “Illustrative of the Scenery, Antiquities, Architectural Remains, and the Manners and Superstitions of the Irish Peasantry.” Interest in “popular antiquities” gave birth to the study of folklore and folklife. Charles Vallancey, who had “an attentive eye and ear to the doings and the sayings of the common people,” has been acclaimed as “the first practitioner of ethnology in Ireland” (Ó Danachair 4). Even more significantly, Thomas Crofton Croker’s Researches in the South of Ireland: Illustrative of the Scenery, Architectural Remains, and the Manners and Superstitions of the Peasantry (1824) is credited as “the first intentional field collection to be made in Great Britain” (Dorson 45). Croker went on to write other pathbreaking studies of Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825) and The Keen of the South of Ireland as Illustrative of Irish Political and Domestic History, Manners, Music, and Superstitions (1844). Antiquarian interest in popular culture and traditions was picked up on by authors of fiction, such as William Carleton in Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830, 1833) and Samuel Lover in Legends and Stories of Ireland (1831, 1834). Above all, antiquarians were polymaths. Moving seamlessly between scrutiny of oral traditions, written manuscripts, and material culture, they inaugurated the study of archaeology as “the science, par excellence, of ‘old things’” (Macadam 1853, 1). Robert Shipboy Macadam, a pioneer collector of proverbs, launched the Ulster Journal of Archaeology, editing its first series (1853–1862) as a meeting ground for the study of “Ethnology, Topography, Philology, Music, History both civil and ecclesiastical, and Irish Antiquities in every department” (MacAdam 6). Sir William Wilde, praised for his Irish Popular Superstitions (1852) as “one of the most insightful and sympathetic of the nineteenth-century antiquary-folklorists” (Ó Giolláin 103), investigated prehistoric sites with George Petrie, the pre-eminent antiquarian of the first half of the nineteenth century. For his pioneering contributions to various fields, Petrie has been hailed as “the father of Irish archaeology” as well as the “father of Irish history, and of the study of Irish art and music” (Dillon 266). Cultivating a museological sensibility, Petrie’s collections of historical artefacts (1,372 mostly undocumented objects) marked a first step towards the eventual establishment of a national museum in Dublin. Similarly, the antiquarian collections of the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society formed the nucleus of the collections of the Belfast Museum, which would evolve into the Belfast Municipal Museum and Art Gallery and would ultimately become the Ulster Museum. In addition to collecting historical relics, antiquarians also formulated standards for preservation and public access to rare bibliographical and manuscript collections. By 52

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reorganizing the Irish Record Office, Sir J. T. Gilbert and Sir Samuel Ferguson laid the foundations for what would become the national archives. Showing an awareness to the value of popular print, Charles Haliday amassed a remarkable collection of historical pamphlets (deposited in the library of the Royal Irish Academy and catalogued by J.T. Gilbert). James Henthorn Todd—designated by a contemporary as “the sine quo non of every literary enterprise in Dublin” (Webb 525)—advanced the professional cataloguing of manuscripts, turning the collections of Trinity College Dublin into a world-class research library. Driven by a pedantic passion to expose forgeries and error, the methodologies of antiquarianism evolved over time and increasingly contested the wilder speculations of earlier generations. Following his election to the Royal Irish Academy in 1828, Petrie was largely responsible for the nineteenth-century revival of antiquarianism. He introduced “the precise and critical spirit of new scientific scholarship” (Leerssen 1997b, 107) and, in the words of his contemporary biographer, “earnestly upheld the true antiquarianism that brings history and tradition to be tested by fact” (Stokes 399). Recognizing his exceptional abilities, Thomas Larcom, the assistant director of the ordnance survey in Ireland, recruited Petrie in 1833 to head a team of researchers, which included such luminaries as the Gaelic scholars John O’Donovan and Eugene O’Curry, who were entrusted with writing historical memoirs designed to supplement the work of the cartographers. This quintessentially antiquarian project, labelled later by Alice Stopford Green a “peripatetic university” (Green 244), amounted to an in-depth ethnographical and historical survey, by outstanding scholars and administrators, of the Irish people, their culture, folklore, religious practices, oral histories, and social structures in the first half of the nineteenth century, and before much was swept away by the Great Famine, modernization and anglicization. (Doherty 11) Moreover, it “inaugurated an archive that found creative expression and also opposition in the work of modernist writers” (Parsons 2). Local history would be another focus of antiquarian attention, producing such meticulously detailed studies as Samuel McSkimin’s The History and Antiquities of the County of the Town of Carrickfergus (1811, with a new edition in 1823) and James Hardiman’s History of the Town and County of the Town of Galway (1820), after which “it was now acknowledged that original documentary matter must form the basis for any reconstruction of the past” (MacCartney 351). Antiquarian interests broadened beyond the ancient past and took on more recent historical conflicts, as evident for example in the collections of Jacobite poetry in Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy, or, Bardic Remains of Ireland (1831)—which “provoked sharp controversy in the antiquarian community” (Boran 39)—and in the Reliques of Irish Jacobite Poetry (1844) compiled and translated by Edward Walsh. An antiquarian approach to topical history, involving scrutiny of overlooked documents in conjunction with personal testimonies, underpins Richard Robert Madden’s monumental The United Irishmen: Their Lives and Times (published in eleven volumes between 1842 and 1867), which would be consulted by all subsequent historians of the 1798 Rebellion. At the fin de siècle, antiquarianism provided resources for the Irish literary revival. Explaining the intellectual trajectory behind his History of Ireland (1878 and 1880), the work for which he was saluted by W.B. Yeats and George William Russell (“AE”) as the “Father of the Literary Revival,” Standish James O’Grady recalled how he was originally inspired by reading Sylvester O’Halloran; he then found his way to the library of the Royal Irish Academy, where he encountered the writings of “the Vallency School” (sic.). O’Grady eventually read Eugene O’Curry’s Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History (1861) and his posthumously published lectures 53

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On Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish (1873), through which he was introduced “to the wonder-world of Irish heroic and romantic literature” (O’Grady 1918, 4). Francis Joseph Bigger, whose “fireside school” in Belfast offered a northern counterpoise to Yeats’s “Celtic Twilight,” revived the Ulster Journal of Archaeology and edited its second series (1894–1911). Bigger’s farreaching impact was acknowledged by practically all the leading writers and scholars of the period in “countless dedications and acknowledgments” (Beiner 2012, 146). By the early-twentieth century, antiquarians were coming under pressure to adapt to the restructuring of universities, as in the case of R.A.S. Macalister, who while professor of Celtic archaeology at University College Dublin was also president of the Royal Society of Antiquities of Ireland and the Royal Irish Academy and “bridged the gap from antiquarianism to modern archaeology” (O’Sullivan 169). The enthusiastic amateur erudition of antiquarianism was ultimately displaced by the emergence of strictly defined professional academic disciplines. Their wide-ranging and eclectic scholarly interests were partitioned, segregated, and parceled into separate university departments: history, literature, Irish, archaeology, geography, art history, folklore, linguistics, sociology, and anthropology. The “scientific” history, marked by the launch of Irish Historical Studies, turned its back on the homegrown antiquarian tradition. For all the advantages of the more rigorous and critical methods imported from England, vernacular sources in Irish and local dialects, oral history, traditional music and folk songs, material and visual culture, and local history were no longer regarded with the same esteem. By contrast, the Irish Folklore Commission was established in 1935 under the direction of Séamus Ó Duilearga [James Hamilton Delargy], a former assistant to Douglas Hyde, whose Beside the Fire: A Collection of Irish Gaelic Folk Stories (1890) “pointed the way for a mature, scientific, and truly national folklore movement in Ireland” (Dorson 431). Charged with the mission of documenting oral traditions before they were swept away by modernity, the Commission sent field-workers throughout the 32 counties of Ireland, distributed questionnaires on specific topics, and also ran a highly successful folklore collecting scheme in the national schools of independent Ireland in 1937–38. The yield was impressive and “by the mid 1940’s the Commission had as a result of its extensive collecting, undertaken on an unprecedented scale, amassed a very large archive of folk tradition, reputedly one of the largest in the world” (Briody 20). At the time, the newly professionalized discipline of Irish history showed little, if any, interest in the folklore archive, which seemed less amenable to the kind of positivist history that was being promoted. An indication of how history could be written differently can be seen in a study by a maverick, who was contemporaneous with both the professionalization of Irish history and the early work of the Folklore Commission: The Last Invasion of Ireland: When Connacht Rose (1937) by Richard Francis Hayes. In accordance with standard historical practice, when researching the United Irish rebellion in the West of Ireland that was sparked by the arrival of a French republican expeditionary force under Jean-Joseph Amable Humbert in the late summer of 1798, Hayes consulted all the available sources in the state archives of Ireland, England, and France. More innovatively, he also traveled along the route of the Franco-Irish campaign from Killala in county Mayo, up to the site of a skirmish near Collooney in county Sligo, across county Leitrim, and on to Ballinamuck in county Longford, collecting along the way a large volume of oral traditions and folk songs (both in English and Irish), which he integrated into the narrative and historical analysis (Beiner 2000). The extent to which this study stood out among the historical publications of the period can be sensed in a review by the writer Sean O’Faolain: When we read a grand, live, book like Dr. Richard Hayes’ record of the Humbert expedition in ’98 we may well wonder how Irish history ever came to be written even as well as 54

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it has been—and that word “even” measures our dissatisfaction with the way it has been written. For history is nothing if it is not alive, and personal. And where are the personal records to enliven the history books of a people whose traditions have been almost destroyed, and who possess no vast stores of native State Papers to counter the lies of the conquerors? For O’Faolain, the approach taken by Hayes promised a diferent future for Irish history: With such a book as this we see the national tradition come to life at last. One closes it in gratitude, but also in envy—envy of the schoolboy of fifty years hence who will, thanks to the labours of such men as Richard Hayes, see the geography of Ireland with the eyes of vision, and her history as a procession of living men whose reality will stir the heart as no dry record can when it is informed by life itself. (O’Faolain 6) However, this innovative attempt to combine oral history with more conventional archival research, looking not only at the historical events but also at how they were remembered over time, signifies a “road not taken” by Irish historiography (Beiner 2000). It would take more than a half century for historians to realize, on the background of the late-twentieth-century “memory boom,” that “a social and cultural history of remembering would unravel the various strands of commemorative tradition which have formed our consciousness of the past” (McBride 42). With the emergence of memory as a key theme in the humanities and social sciences, an alternative genealogy of modern Irish historiography as stemming at least partly from traditions of antiquarianism has acquired a new relevance. The growing literature in the inherently interdisciplinary field of Irish memory studies demonstrates how “cultural memory and ideas of cultural memory work to unsettle and preserve our notions of historicity and time, of the past and the present” (Frawley xxiv). It is worth taking into account that “memory too has a history” (Beiner 2015, n.p.) and that an appreciation of the prolific legacy of antiquarian scholarship can open up other ways of approaching the past.

Notes 1 For Butterfield’s lifelong connections with Irish historians see Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield, pp. 138–139, 239–241, 286–287, 310, 357–359. 2 Bradshaw’s claim that the devotees of Butterfield “aspired to produce ‘value-free’ history” (Bradshaw 1989, 329) has been contested by Ciaran Brady, who maintained that “Butterfield’s influence on Irish historiography is a subject which certainly requires further investigation, but it is unlikely that any examination will reveal that such a man had set out to persuade anyone of the possibility, still less the desirability of value free history” (Brady 1994, 17–18).

Works cited Battles, Kelly Eileen. The Antiquarian Impulse: History, Affect, and Material Culture in Eighteenth- and NineteenthCentury British Literature. Dept. of English, PhD, Michigan State University, 2008. Beiner, Guy. “Memory Too Has a History.” Dublin Review of Books, No. 65, 2015. www.drb.ie/essays/ memory-too-has-a-history. Beiner, Guy. “Revisiting F. J. Bigger: A Fin-de-Siècle Flourish of Antiquarian-Folklore Scholarship in Ulster.” Béaloideas, Vol. 80, 2012, pp. 142–162. Beiner, Guy. “Richard Hayes, Seanchas-Collector Extraordinaire: First Steps Towards a Folk History of Bliain na Bhfrancach: The Year of the French.” Béaloideas, Vol. 68, 2000, pp. 3–32. 55

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Bentley, Michael. The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield: History, Science, and God. Cambridge University Press, 2011. Boran, Mary. “James Hardiman, 1782–1855: ‘The Historian of Galway’.” Pathfinders to the Past: The Antiquarian Road to Irish Historical Writing, 1640–1960. Edited by Próinséas Ní Chatháin et al., Four Courts, 2012, pp. 35–43. Boyce, David George and Alan O’Day. “Introduction: ‘Revisionism’ and the ‘Revisionist Controversy’.” The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy. Edited by David George Boyce and Alan O’Day, Routledge, 1996, pp. 1–14. Briody, Mícheál. The Irish Folklore Commission 1935–1970: History, Ideology, Methodology. Finnish Literature Society, 2008. Butterfield, Herbert. “Tendencies in Historical Study in England.” Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 4, No. 15, 1945, pp. 209–223. Bradshaw, Brendan. “Nationalism and Historical Scholarship in Modern Ireland.” Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 26, No. 104, 1989, pp. 329–351. Brady, Ciaran. “‘Constructive and Instrumental’: The Dilemma of Ireland’s First ‘New Historians’.” Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism 1938–1994. Edited by Ciaran Brady, Irish Academic Press, 1994, pp. 3–31. Brady, Ciaran. “Arrested Development: Competing Histories and the Formation of the Irish Historical Profession, 1801–1938.” Disputed Territories and Shared Pasts: Overlapping National Histories in Modern Europe. Edited by Tibor Frank and Frank Hadler, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 275–302. Brooke, Charlotte. Reliques of Irish Poetry. George Bonham, 1789. Bryan, Dominic. “Ritual, Identity and Nation: When the Historian Becomes the High Priest of Commemoration.” Remembering 1916: The Easter Rising, the Somme and the Politics of Memory in Ireland. Edited by Richard S. Grayson and Fearghal McGarry, Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 24–42. Bunting, Edward. A General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music. Vol. 1, printed by Preston & Son, 1797; Vol. 2, Clementi, 1809; Vol. 3, Hodges and Smith, 1840. Canny, Nicholas. “Writing Early Modern History: Ireland, Britain, and the Wider World.” The Historical Journal, Vol. 46, No. 3, 2003, pp. 723–747. Canny, Nicholas. “Historians, Moral Judgement and National Communities: The Irish Dilemma.” European Review, Vol. 14, No. 3, 2006, pp. 401–410. Canny, Nicholas. “Quinn, David Beers.” Dictionary of Irish Biography. Edited by James McGuire and James Quinn, Cambridge University Press, 2010. http://dib.cambridge.org/viewReadPage.do?articleId=a7556. Carleton, William. Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry. William Curry, 1830, 2nd Series, 1833. Croker, Thomas Crofton. Researches in the South of Ireland. John Murray, 1824. Croker, Thomas Crofton. Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland. John Murray, 1834. Croker, Thomas Crofton. The Keen of the South of Ireland: As Illustrative of Irish Political and Domestic History, Manners, Music, and Superstitions. Printed for the Percy Society by T. Richards, 1844. Cunningham, Bernadette. The World of Geoffrey Keating: History, Myth, and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Ireland. Four Courts Press, 2000. Daly, Mary E. “Recent Writings on Modern Irish History: The Interaction between Past and Present.” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 69, No. 3, 1997, pp. 512–533. Daly, Mary E. “Forty Shades of Grey?: Irish Historiography and the Challenges of Multidisciplinarity.” Ireland Beyond Boundaries: Mapping Irish Studies in the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Liam Harte and Yvonne Whelan, Pluto Press, 2007, pp. 92–110. Dillon, Myles. “George Petrie (1789–1866).” Studies, Vol. 56, No. 223, 1967, pp. 266–276. Doherty, Gillian M. The Irish Ordnance Survey: History, Culture, and Memory. Four Courts Press, 2004. Dorson, Richard M. The British Folklorists: A History. University of Chicago Press, 1968. Edeworth, Maria. “The Absentee.” Tales of Fashionable Life, Vol. 5–6, printed for J. Johnson, 1812. Edwards, R.D. and T.W. Moody. “Preface.” Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1938, pp. 1–3. Frawley, Oona. “Introduction.” Memory Ireland. Edited by Oona Frawley, Vol 1: History and Modernity, Syracuse University Press, 2011, pp. xiii–xxiv. Gkotzaridis, Evi. Trials of Irish History: Genesis and Evolution of a Reappraisal, 1938–2000. Routledge, 2006. Green, Alice Stopford. Irish Nationality. Henry Holt and William & Norgate 1911. Grose, Francis and Edward Ledwich. The Antiquities of Ireland (2 vols.). printed for S. Hooper, 1791 and 1795. Hardiman, James. The History of the Town and County of the Town of Galway. Printed by W. Folds and Sons, 1820. Hardiman, James. Irish Minstrelsy, or, Bardic Remains of Ireland; with English Poetical Translations (2 vols.). Joseph Robins, 1831. 56

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Hayes, Richard Francis. The Last Invasion of Ireland: When Connacht Rose. M. H. Gill and Son, 1937. Hayes-McCoy, Gerard Anthony. Ulster and Other Irish Maps, c.1600. Stationery Office for the Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1964. Hayes-McCoy, Gerard Anthony. Irish Battles. Longmans, 1969. Hoare, Richard Colt. Journal of a Tour in Ireland, A.D. 1806. Printed for W. Miller, 1807. Hyde, Douglas. Beside the Fire: A Collection of Irish Gaelic Folk Stories. David Nutt, 1890. Keating, Geoffrey. Foras Feasa ar Éirinn: The History of Ireland (4 vols.). Edited and Translated by David Comyn and P.S. Dinneen. David Nutt, 1902. Ledwich, Edward. Antiquities of Ireland. Printed for Arthur Grueber, 1790; 2nd edition printed by John Jones, 1804. Leerssen, Joseph Th. Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century (2nd ed.). University of Notre Dame Press in association with Field Day, 1997a. Leerssen, Joseph Th. Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century. University of Notre Dame Press in association with Field Day, 1997b. Levine, Philippa. The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians, and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886. Cambridge University Press, 1986. Lover, Samuel. Legends and Stories of Ireland. W.F. Wakeman, 1831; 2nd ser. Baldwin and Cradock, 1834. Lucius, Gratianus [John Lynch]. Cambrensis Refuted . . . Translated from the Original Latin, with Occasional Notes and Observations, by Theophilus O’Flanagan, A.B. Some Time Scholar of Trin. Col. Dublin. Printed by Joseph Hill, 1795. Lyons, F.S.L. “T.W.M.” Ireland under the Union: Varieties of Tension: Essays in Honour of T.W. Moody. Edited by F.S.L. Lyons and R.A.J. Hawkins. Clarendon Press, 1980, pp. 1–33. MacAdam, Robert Shipboy. “The Archæology of Ulster.” Ulster Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 1st. ser., 1, 1853, pp. 1–8. MacCartney, Donald [Donal McCartney]. “The Writing of History in Ireland 1800–30.” Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 10, No. 40, 1957, pp. 347–362. MacDonagh, Oliver. States of Mind: A Study of Anglo-Irish Conflict, 1780–1980. Allen & Unwin, 1983. Madden, Richard Robert. The United Irishmen: Their Lives and Times. 1st ser., 2 vols., J. Madden, 1842; 2n ser., 2 vols., J. Madden, 1843; 3rd ser., 3 vols., James Duffy, 1857–8; 2nd edn, 3rd and 4th ser., 2 vols., The Catholic Publishing & Bookselling Company and J. Mullany, 1860. Maturin, Charles Robert. The Milesian Chief: A Romance (4 vols.). Printed for Henry Colburn, 1812. McBride, Ian. “Memory and National Identity in Modern Ireland.” History and Memory in Modern Ireland. Edited by Ian McBride. Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 1–42. McCartney, Donal. W. E. H. Lecky: Historian and Politician, 1838–1903. Lilliput Press, 1994. Miller, Peter N. “Major Trends in European Antiquarianism, Petrarch to Peiresc.” The Oxford History of Historical Writing (Vol. 3). Edited by José Rabasa et al. Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 244–260. Miller, Peter N. “A Tentative Morphology of European Antiquarianism, 1500–2000.” World Antiquarianism: Comparative Perspectives. Edited by Alain Schnapp et al., Getty Research Institute, 2013, pp. 67–87. Momigliano, Arnaldo. “Ancient History and the Antiquarian.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 13, No. 3/4, 1950, pp. 285–315. Momigliano, Arnaldo. The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography. University of California Press, 1990. Moody, T.W. “Twenty Years After.” Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 11, No. 41, 1958, pp. 1–4. Moody, T.W. “The First Forty Years.” Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 20, No. 80, 1977, pp. 377–383. Moore, Thomas. Irish Melodies. New edition, illustrated by Daniel Maclise. Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1853. Morgan, Lady Sydney. The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale. Printed for Richard Phillips, 1806. Novick, Peter. That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge University Press, 1988. O’Clery, Michael et al. Annala Rioghachta Eirean: Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland, by the Four Masters, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1616 (3 vols.). Edited and Translated by John O’Donovan. Hodges and Smith, 1848–1851. O’Conor, Charles. Dissertations on the Antient History of Ireland. Printed by James Hoey, 1753; 2nd edn printed by G. Faulkner, 1766. O’Curry, Eugene. Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History. James Duffy, 1861. O’Curry, Eugene. On the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish: A Series of Lectures (3 vols.). Williams and Norgate, W.B. Kelly, Scribner, 1873. 57

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Ó Danachair, Caoimhín. “The Progress of Irish Ethnology, 1783–1982.” Ulster Folklife, Vol. 29, 1983, pp. 3–17. O’Dowd, Mary. “From Morgan to MacCurtain: Women Historians in Ireland from the 1790s to the 1990s.” Women & Irish History: Essays in Honour of Margaret Maccurtain. Edited by Maryann Gialanella Valiulis and Mary O’Dowd. Wolfhound Press, 1997, pp. 38–58. O’Faolain, Sean. “When the West Rose: Dr. Richard Hayes’ Thrilling Narrative.” Irish Press, August 11, 1937, p. 6. O’Flaherty, Roderic. Ogygia, or, a Chronological Account of Irish Events (2 vols.). Translated by James Hely. Printed by W. M’Kenzie, 1793. Ó Giolláin, Diarmuid. Locating Irish Folklore: Tradition, Modernity, Identity. Cork University Press, 2000. O’Grady, Standish. History of Ireland (2 vols.). Sampson, Low, Searle, Marston & Rivington and E. Ponsonby, 1878 and 1880. O’Grady, Standish. Selected Essays and Passages. Talbot Press and T. Fisher Unwin, 1918. O’Halloran, Clare. “An English Orientalist in Ireland: Charles Vallancey (1726–1812).” Forging in the Smithy: National Identity and Representation in Anglo-Irish Literary History. Edited by Joseph Th Leerssen et al. Rodopi, 1995, pp. 161–173. O’Halloran, Clare. Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations: Antiquarian Debate and Cultural Politics in Ireland, c.1750–1800. Cork University Press in association with Field Day, 2004. O’Halloran, Clare. “Harping on the Past: Translating Antiquarian Learning Into Popular Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland.” Exploring Cultural History: Essays in Honour of Peter Burke. Edited by Joan PauL Rubiés et al. Ashgate, 2010, pp. 327–343. O’Halloran, Sylvester. A General History of Ireland, from the Earliest Accounts to the Close of the Twelfth Century (2 vols.). Printed by A. Hamilton, 1778. O’Halloran, Sylvester. An Introduction to the Study of the History and Antiquities of Ireland. Printed by Thomas Ewing, 1772. Ó Muraíle, Nollaig. The Celebrated Antiquary Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh (C.1600–1671): His Lineage, Life and Learning. An Sagart, 1996. O’Sullivan, Muiris. “R.A.S. Macalister.” Pathfinders to the Past: The Antiquarian Road to Irish Historical Writing, 1640–1960. Edited by Próinséas Ní Chatháin et al. Four Courts, 2012, pp. 161–171. Otway, Caesar. Sketches in Ireland: Descriptive of Districts in the North and South. William Curry, 1827. Otway, Caesar. A Tour in Connaught: Comprising Sketches of Clonmacnoise, Joyce Country, and Achill. William Curry, 1839. Otway, Caesar. Sketches in Erris and Tyrawly. William Curry, 1841. Parsons, Cóilín. The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature. Oxford University Press, 2016. Scott, Walter. The Antiquary. Archibald Constable and Co. & Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816. Smith, Nadia Clare. A “Manly Study”?: Irish Women Historians, 1868–1949. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Stokes, William. The Life and Labours in Art and Archæology, of George Petrie. Longmans, Green, & Co., 1868. Vallancey, Charles, Ed. Collectanea De Rebus Hibernicis (7 vols.). Edited and published by Luke White et al., 1770–1804. Walker, Joseph C. Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards. Printed by Luke White, 1786. Walsh, Edward. Reliques of Irish Jacobite Poetry. Samuel J. Machen, 1844. Ware, James. De Hibernia & Antiquitatibus Ejus Disquisitiones. Printed by J. Grismond, 1654; 2nd edn. printed by E. Tyler, 1658. Webb, Alfred John. A Compendium of Irish Biography: Comprising Sketches of Distinguished Irishmen, and of Eminent Persons Connected with Ireland by Office or by Their Writings. M. H. Gill & Son, 1878. Whelan, Kevin. “The Revisionist Debate in Ireland.” Boundary 2, Vol. 31, No. 1, 2004, pp. 179–205. Wilde, W. R. Irish Popular Superstitions. James McGlashan and William S. Orr and Co., 1852. Williams, Kelsey Jackson. “Antiquarianism: A Reinterpretation.” Erudition and the Republic of Letters, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2017, pp. 56–96.

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5 Separate and together State histories in the twentieth century Timothy G. McMahon

The scaffold of the island’s political history in the twentieth century is well established, but in the past 20 years, historians and colleagues in cognate disciplines have complicated the story in important ways. That process has been evident in works produced after the interlinked economic and political shakeups of 2008–10, which exposed some of the shibboleths that undergirded Irish society, north and south, to great scrutiny. Rather than prompting entirely new approaches to research, however, that crisis point catalyzed emerging scholarly trends shaped by several factors that encouraged historians to raise questions about our own long-accepted assumptions. These factors included the release of new sources; the commemoration of numerous centenaries related to independence and partition; the crash itself, which highlighted the nexus of business practices and government oversight; and the ongoing tribunals investigating government corruption and abuses within state-funded-but-Church-managed institutions. Taken together, these interrelated phenomena are setting the stage for comparative, transnational, and social historical approaches that promise greater dynamism in a field that was too long the creature of a statist approach. Typically, general accounts of twentieth-century Ireland note that the early century push by Irish nationalists for Home Rule within the British Empire gained momentum after the administration of Liberal Prime Minister H.H. Asquith won back-to-back General Elections in 1910.1 Although the Liberals had first committed to Home Rule in the 1880s under W.E. Gladstone, Asquith remained lukewarm to the issue until these elections gave the Irish Parliamentary Party led by John Redmond the balance of power in the House of Commons. The new situation prompted the concurrent radicalizations of the Ulster unionist and nationalist communities, bringing the United Kingdom to the edge of civil war before the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914 and the final passage and suspension of Home Rule. The Easter Rising in 1916, the subsequent shift of nationalist opinion toward the separatist program of Sinn Féin at the General Election of 1918, and the establishment of the underground Dáil Éireann in January 1919, all had parallels in the Ulster unionist story of loyalty at the front, sacrifice on the Somme battlefield, and continued allegiance to the Union in the face of nationalist perfidy. The Crown government, meanwhile, had reconstituted itself during the War, and although a Liberal—David Lloyd George—remained at its head, the Cabinet included a majority of British Conservatives, who sympathized with their Ulster unionist allies’ desire to remain within the United Kingdom. 59

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The legislative solution brought forward in the midst of the Irish War of Independence—the Government of Ireland Act of 1920—replaced its 1914 predecessor, partitioning the island and creating the central political dynamic of the rest of the century. Separate states, Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State (later Éire and finally the Republic of Ireland), emerged from these stressful circumstances. Northern Ireland enforced the will of its Protestant majority, expressed through what was a de facto one-party state led by the Ulster Unionist Party, through extraordinary security measures and systemic exclusion of its nationalist (primarily Catholic) minority (Hennessey 1997; Ó Dochartaigh). The Free State, meanwhile, arose amid a bitter Civil War that erupted after the agreement ending the War of Independence failed to recognize a 32-county (non-partitioned) republic external to the Empire. The pro-Treaty side won the Civil War and, led by W.T. Cosgrave, stamped the decade with its concern for internal security and fiscal and social conservatism. The emergence of Fianna Fáil in the mid-’20s reconfigured the Free State into a virtual two-party state, with Civil War affiliation serving as the primary party identifier rather than class or social interests. Both states on the island were insular in their own ways, each with cultural identities and economies that appeared increasingly stagnant through mid-century, with emigration from the Republic peaking in the early 1950s. Neither state was welcoming to women in public office or other public roles; indeed, Article 42.2.1 of the constitution written by Fianna Fáil leader Éamonn de Valera in 1937 specifically highlighted the support “woman” gave to social order through “her life within the home.” The histories of the “two Irelands” remained distinct, though not entirely separate. Emblematic of their different paths were their approaches to the Second World War, in which Northern Ireland played a significant role as—among other things—a mobilization site for Allied, especially American, forces, while de Valera’s Ireland remained neutral, to the apparent aggravation of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. “Emergency” Ireland was, however, not divorced completely from the wider conflict, as some 60,000 men and women from Éire joined the Allied cause, and Irish intelligence services provided useful information to their British counterparts.2 But in the early 1960s preliminary talks between the Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O’Neill and the Republic’s Taoiseach Seán Lemass seemed emblematic of change. Their meetings roughly coincided with the opening up of Republic’s economy to foreign investment and freer trade, inspired by T.K. Whitaker’s report on Economic Development, and with growing calls for civil rights reforms in Northern Ireland.3 Those calls inspired a backlash because some unionists saw in them the thin end of the wedge toward dissolution of the Northern state and its social order. Attacks by active duty police and their auxiliary Special Constabulary on protestors calling for fair housing, employment, and voting rights led the United Kingdom government to send in units of the British Army to act initially as a buffer protecting civilians. Their increasingly invasive security operations inspired response from paramilitaries claiming descent from the island’s nationalist revolutionary tradition as well as counterparts recalling its unionist past. The Troubles that erupted lasted into the 1990s, claiming more than 3,500 lives and displacing tens of thousands more. Commentators have placed the lion’s share of attention in coverage of the Troubles on terrorist attacks and on state security efforts, especially those of the United Kingdom to criminalize paramilitary actors and to defeat the IRA with state-sanctioned violence, intelligence gathering, and collusive relationships with loyalist paramilitaries; nonetheless, attempts at peaceful change and at using constitutional means to transform the political dynamic were arguably more important to reaching the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement of 1998. For instance, the Social Democratic and Labour Party’s John Hume remained steadfast over decades in his approach to talk with anyone who was willing, from British and Irish government officials to rival party members and paramilitaries to international players in the USA and Europe. The 60

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United Kingdom gradually acknowledged a role for the Irish Republic in this process. By the 1990s, mutual respect among the permanent civil servants engaged in these efforts, combined with external partners such as the administration of US President Bill Clinton, enhanced the work undertaken by the successive administrations of UK Prime Ministers John Major and Tony Blair and Irish Taoisígh Albert Reynolds, John Bruton, and Bertie Ahern. All of which created the context for hard negotiations that featured, centrally, Northern Irish parties who worked together in spite of decades of learned distrust. Initially the agreement seemed to promise reward for the more moderate parties associated with unionism and nationalism, but by the early 2000s, the more strident voices of the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin won positions at the head of the devolved Stormont administration. In spite of the numerous fits and starts of that executive, as Paul and John Bew have argued recently, the public “widely supported [it] because it delivered peace” (Bew and Bew 473). Those same decades, moreover, marked profound transitions for the Republic, though as Girvin has argued, change both was not initially apparent and occurred alongside important continuities (Girvin 2018a). The two leading parties since the 1930s, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, retained much of their electoral support. Fine Gael traditionally had only governed in coalition, usually with partners in Labour or, briefly in the 1990s, with Labour and the Democratic Left. By the end of the eighties, even Fianna Fáil had taken to coalition-building to win and hold power, yet it remained the largest party in Dáil Éireann until 2011. The economic growth fostered under Lemass slowed in the later 1960s and early 1970s, and although the European Economic Community accepted the Republic’s application for membership in 1973—along with those of Britain and Denmark—Irish average annual income continued to lag considerably below European averages. Coupled with tight labor markets at home, low incomes encouraged emigration from the Republic into the 1990s, a prospect made all the more important for those seeking escape from the ongoing influence of institutional Catholicism and the social conservatism of a majority of citizens, expressed in referenda on divorce, contraception, and access to abortion (Girvin 2018b, 420–425; Daly 2018b, 533–536). The Republic in the 1990s and 2000s saw two profound turning points involving the place of the Church in society and the economy. A series of scandals implicating the Church catalyzed what had been the gradual secularization of Irish society. In May 1992, news broke that Bishop Eamonn Casey of Galway fathered a child years earlier when he had been Bishop of Kerry. He would be the first of several prominent clergy whose relationships became widely known. Also, as occurred in other parts of the world, reports surfaced that pedophile priests had sexually abused minor children, and that Church authorities had known and kept silent about this criminal behavior. At the same time, media attention brought to light the horrific conditions within Church-affiliated-but-state-funded facilities that had “concealed citizens already marginalized by a number of interrelated social phenomena: poverty, illegitimacy, sexual abuse, and infanticide” (Smith xiii). Taken together, these undermined the Catholic hierarchy’s claims to speak definitively on matters of morality and exposed a dark side to the picture independent Ireland had tried to paint for itself (see following). Crude measurements suggested that the position of organized religion was indeed slipping: For instance, “ordinations in Dublin fell from 129 in 1990 to 1 in 1999” (McGarry 2016, 133), while weekly mass attendance among Ireland’s Catholics declined from about 82% in the early 1980s to 42% by the turn of the twenty-first century (Girvin 2018b, 431). Referenda on formerly taboo issues—divorce (1995), same sex marriage (2015), and abortion (2019)—achieved steadily larger majorities in the face of diminishing but still important opposition from Church authorities. Such data should be balanced against expressions of popular piety, which remain vibrant. Noteworthy among the examples Fuller highlighted in her study of late-twentieth-century Irish Catholicism was that, 61

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in a three-month period in 2001, “an estimated three million people turned out to venerate the relics of St. Thérèse of Lisieux at venues in every diocese in the country” (Fuller 251). Concurrently, an economic boom had gathered steam through the early 1990s and became readily apparent by the time that Ahern participated in the Belfast negotiations. The so-called Celtic Tiger was fed by foreign direct investment, itself fueled by low corporation taxes and the desire of companies for an educated workforce and access to the European market. By 2003, per capita income rose to 141% of the European Union average, and Ireland became a destination for returned migrants and for immigrants from the EU and beyond. By the 2006 census, roughly 10% of those living in the Republic were foreign born, and they spoke some 167 languages (Girvin 2018b, 429–430). Indeed, it would have been hard to disagree with the almost astonished tone of the opening paragraph of Roy Foster’s Luck and the Irish, published just prior to the crash in 2008: “As the twentieth century reached its end, Ireland’s transformation had become an established fact . . . the most surprising metamorphosis of all: the country had apparently become vastly rich” (Foster 2008, 7). The crash that might have bolstered the case of those Foster deemed “Begrudgers”—that is, those who questioned the impact of rapid change on the people and the state—serves as a convenient dividing line for assessing changing approaches to the picture presented earlier. The interpretive trends that were already reshaping our views on the twentieth century took greater hold in the wake of the financial and political upheavals at the end of the first decade of the twentieth-first. The Irish situation was tied to a deep international recession, but its local manifestation raised several familiar specters, from the recurrence of emigration to limits on sovereignty. The 2010 bailout facilitated by European partners in the so-called “Troika” dictated that Irish governments impose several years of austerity budgets on the country. Among those understandably held responsible for these difficulties was Fianna Fáil, which had led coalitions through the Tiger’s buoyant days but which also came under scrutiny for its generally lax regulatory approach, especially toward the banking sector. One result was that, for the first time since the mid-1990s, Fine Gael and Labour formed a coalition after the 2011 general election. This new combination subsequently continued the austerity even beyond the end of the bailout period in 2013, and although the economy recovered and expanded in the 2010s, income inequality continued to feature prominently as it had during the Tiger years. The foregoing account was necessarily painted with a broad brush, and recent historiography has suggested further important qualifications to a straight-line narrative approach. For decades, county-based studies—such as those of Fitzpatrick in Clare, Hart in Cork, or Coleman in Longford— and those with a regional focus—such as Campbell’s on eastern Connacht—have provincialized the War of Independence, making clear that the guerrilla actions in Munster and the intelligence gambits in and around Dublin, which had formed much of the first generation of memoir-shaped scholarship, were not wholly representative of the actions that occurred.4 Indeed, new sources, including the Bureau of Military History Witness Statements, the Military Service Pensions Collection, and collections of letters and memoirs written by people from previously overlooked segments of the population, have deepened our understanding of the transition to partition and independence. In particular, they have democratized the revolutionary period and its aftermath in two key ways. First, academic historians have offered more finely grained interpretations of the years from the Easter Rising through the Civil War with greater cognizance of the experiences of ordinary Volunteers, of women who participated through the Irish Citizen Army or Cumann na mBan, and of victims of revolutionary, Crown, and Civil War violence.5 Perhaps no single volume brought more of these ideas together better than did the Atlas of the Irish Revolution, in which more than 120 historians, geographers, and literary scholars presented state-of-the-field work through 2017 in graphically interesting, lushly illustrated, short essays (Crowley, et al). 62

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There is another way in which these new sources democratized study of the independence struggle: Because many were searchable online, anyone with internet access could find information about their forebears and their communities. Much of that information remained partial, requiring contextualization, including recognizing that only those who had supported the Free State during the Civil War were eligible for pensions in the first iteration of the program, that only those who could demonstrate having fought (i.e., through use of firearms) were initially eligible, and that it was not until the 1930s that those who had taken the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War (or their dependents) had a chance to obtain a pension. Indeed, in the years after the revolution and Civil War, many veterans and their dependents suffered deprivations, and their desire for pension relief was both a plea for recognition and for the state to uphold the promises of the 1916 proclamation and the First Dáil’s Democratic Programme.6 The light shed on those denied pensions and on those whose pensions were only granted after multiple appeals begs the question of whether the definition of the Irish revolution has been too restrictive: Did the reification of the flying columns as the symbol of resistance to the Crown underestimate a broader change in mentalities represented by resistance in other realms of daily life? For instance, Foster’s study of the myriad movements—artistic, educational, sexual, and political—that coalesced around the idea of “revolution” highlighted the disappointment many, not all of whom were anti-Treatyites, felt at the mundane reality of Free State society.7 Perhaps no segment of the nationalist population in the south felt this sting more acutely than did nationalist women.8 Works by McAuliffe, Gillis, Ryan, and Ward have demonstrated their varied roles throughout the revolutionary era—including some who fought, others who supported the Volunteers either within Cumann na mBan or in intelligence work, others who provided international publicity for the Irish cause, and others who engaged in governmental service or worked in the Dáil courts. Women were also among the Free State’s most trenchant critics, raising concerns about the unfinished business of the revolution, including the failure to attain a 32-county republic, or gender and social equality.9 Meanwhile, nationalists in Northern Ireland had expected to join an all-island state at least until 1914. Even after partition and the Treaty, some still anticipated seeing their county or region being moved into the Free State by the Irish Boundary Commission. Border issues, as Lynch and Moore have argued, were seen at the time as part of the island-wide political dynamic, with violent outbursts in 1920–1922 often tied at least tangentially to events in Munster. Even as the Northern state became more firmly established with the failure of the Commission to shift territory, connections through churches, sport, and trade remained across the island in ways that reverberated through the Troubles and the ramifications of the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the EU in 2016.10 The interlinked phenomena of scholarly interest the island’s varied traditions and the push, from 2012, to commemorate the decade leading up to the foundation of the two states has spurred further reconsideration of the revolution’s roots and legacy. One result of this has been to establish the centrality of the Great War in shaping the political and cultural dynamics of those years, not only because it provided the opportunity for a small group of republicans to challenge the United Kingdom, but because it disrupted the assumptions of existing political parties, fundamentally altered the leadership in London, and set the contexts for the foundations of the two Irish states through altering power dynamics at home and in the British Empire.11 From the outbreak of the War, unionists asserted their commitment to the British connection, and the Northern state embraced and celebrated their sacrifices thereafter, even as the Free State and Republic downplayed nationalist participation in the War. In fact, the further in time one moved from their return in 1919 or the formal unveiling of the Celtic cross memorial to the 16th (Irish) Division in 1924, the more that the Free State disavowed even the symbols associated with remembrance, including the wearing of poppies, as imperial legacies. Veterans and their families, 63

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therefore, sustained its memory in more intimate settings, in churches and the British Legion.12 A very different set of veterans maintained their own non-sanctioned commemorative tradition from the mid-20s: republican dissidents held annual events through the National Graves Association to highlight what they saw as the failures of the divided island to uphold the promise of the Easter Rising. Given that “successive governments in the independent state had struggled to find consistency and unity in remembering Easter Week,” dissident events were the more consistent expressions of public memory until the Lemass government launched a programme to link their modernization agenda with the legacy of 1916 at its 50th anniversary (Higgins 58). Even that effort was not sustained, particularly after violence erupted in Northern Ireland, and politicians and public intellectuals such as Conor Cruise O’Brien suggested that honoring the violence of the past inspired violence in the present. In the wake of the Belfast Agreement, however, elaborate state commemorations again became acceptable, culminating in the immense interest in the centenary of the Rising—when events occurred throughout the Republic, in particular in Dublin when hundreds of thousands participated on Easter Weekend.13 If the commemorative impulse has focused on the revolutionary tradition that became the mainstay of postindependence Ireland, it has also placed attention on its constitutional counterpart. Indeed, beginning in 2014 in a submission to the Irish Government calling for greater recognition of the Home Rule tradition, former Taoiseach John Bruton called the Rising “completely unnecessary,” suggesting that the creation of a unified Irish dominion was achievable had Sinn Féin and the IRA not engaged in violence.14 And numerous recent works on the pre-War Home Rule party, its long underappreciated leader John Redmond, its constituent work, and its legacies in the new state have demonstrated that constitutional nationalism was certainly not made of dry bones coming into the 1920s.15 There are, however, two important caveats to that conclusion, which run counter to Bruton’s reading. First, if constitutionalism was not spent, it was vulnerable. In spite of the party’s position at Westminster and Redmond’s long experience, he was ultimately no match for the Liberal prime minister in decisive moments. Asquith’s deft maneuverability—that is, his skillful shifts as the unionists’ threat of civil unrest increased in 1913 and 1914—left Redmond wanting, such that Home Rule languished on the Statute Book. That inability to deliver, coupled with the party’s support for what was an increasingly unpopular war among its supporters, made it ripe for electoral challenge from the radicalized Sinn Féin party in 1918.16 Second, although one can find clear legacies from the Home Rule tradition in the parties formed out of the Civil War— including personnel and party discipline—even the Cosgrave Party of the 1920s had a legitimate revolutionary pedigree. In style and substance, particularly on matters of sovereignty in international affairs, it differentiated itself from the old party and its significantly more limited aim of achieving devolved government within the Empire. To be sure, Cumann na nGaedheal, as the pro-Treaty party of government, benefited from the votes of former Home Rulers, and by the early 1930s, it incorporated people with direct ties to and experience of the pre-independence party, including William Archer Redmond, who held his late father’s Waterford seat. But that came only after the younger Redmond’s attempt to challenge them through reconstituting elements of the old party as the National League Party in 1926. (Still more, including James Dillon, would merge with what became Fine Gael in 1933.) Indeed, Fine Gael’s and Fianna Fáil’s ability to adapt to political circumstance demonstrated that the convenient label of “Civil War politics” underestimates the subtle yet very real transformations that occurred during the Free State period.17 Adaptation and incorporation of older forms of doing business in independent Ireland manifested in at least two other ways that promise to receive ongoing attention in the years to come. The first sits uncomfortably alongside the state’s view of itself as an anti-imperial beacon: that is, 64

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its ongoing attachment to the British Empire. To be sure, what Harkness long ago called “the restless Dominion” was a lynchpin in the restructuring and ultimate undermining of the Empire, but Irish engagement with it had existed on a continuum from opportunistic support through to active subversion since at least the mid-nineteenth century. People from all religious and class backgrounds on the island stood at each point on that continuum. Perhaps the best explored of these complex ties are those with the Indian subcontinent, which had extensive Irish networks into the administration of the Raj and among anti-imperial campaigners. Recent studies of British armed forces and colonial services in the Palestine Mandate, Cyprus, south Asia, and east Asia show that recruitment from the Irish Free State and Republic continued at least into the 1950s. (And this leaves aside the extensive work of Irish missionaries, many of whom saw themselves as building an Irish spiritual empire under the umbrella of the British Empire.) Reconciling these realities with the national narrative will undoubtedly form an important thread in future work.18 The second legacy involved the rather comfortable way that political, economic, and cultural leadership linked hands, often ensuring that clientelism made money—or ensured position and silence—for all concerned. Numerous examples can be found from the earliest days of the state. Coleman’s study of the Irish Sweep, for instance, showed how, rather than raising taxes, the Cosgrave government authorized a lottery in order to subsidize voluntary hospitals run by religious orders. But the Sweep did more than just finance the hospitals: it made a fortune for its chief proponents, most especially Joseph McGrath who may have become the wealthiest man in 1950s Ireland.19 How closely interrelated power interests remained became apparent during and after the Celtic Tiger years when more than thirty public inquiries occurred in a span of just twenty years. One study of political corruption concluded optimistically that “self-regulated institutional authority has been comprehensively challenged and a sea change in attitudes toward the integrity of power has occurred” (Byrne 181). Certainly, one would hope that the legacy of these investigations would be justice for those wronged and the creation of a trove of data for scholars. Unfortunately, as of this writing, there are also signs that the ranks are closing to prevent access to at least one of the most important such collections, that is, material related to the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, by passing legislation to put the testimonies under seal for 75 years.20 That this case involved children housed in institutions directly run by religious institutions but under the state’s remit makes such wagon-circling particularly troubling and worthy of ongoing scholarly attention.

Notes 1 Any attempt to encapsulate a century or more into a few paragraphs is necessarily inadequate and elides detail. For reference, key works that inform these paragraphs include Lyons (1973), Lee (1989), Fitzpatrick (1998b), and Ferriter (2005, 2012). 2 On life in Ireland during the Emergency, see Girvin (2006), Wills (2007), and Evans (2014). On espionage and counterespionage, see O’Halpin (2008). On Irish veterans returning from World War II, see Kelly (2012). 3 On Lemass and the limits of change in the 1960s, see Girvin and Murphy (2005) Garvin (2009); and Daly (2018a). 4 Fitzpatrick (1998), Hart (1998), Coleman (2003), Campbell (2008). 5 McGarry (2010, 2011), Townshend (2011, 2014), Clark (2014), G. Foster (2015). 6 Coleman (2013), Ferriter (2015b). 7 Foster (2014). 8 Paŝeta (2013). 9 McAuliffe and Gillis (2016), McAuliffe (2020), Ward (1996, 2018, 2019). 10 Laffan (1983), Hennessey (1998), Lynch (2019), Moore (2019), Ó Beacháin (2019), Ferriter (2019). 65

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11 Jeffery (2000, 2015), Dungan (1997), Dooley (1995), Hennessey (1998), Sheehan (2011), Yeates (2011). 12 Johnson (2003), Myers (2013), and Link (2019). The Celtic Cross Memorial was sent to Guillemont, France. 13 On the fiftieth anniversary commemorations of 1916, see Daly and O’Callaghan (2007), Higgins (2016). On post-1990s commemorations, see Graff-McRae (2010). For a broad discussion of commemorating the period from 1916–1923, see part iii of Ferriter (2015a). For the Civil War, see Dolan (2003). 14 Ronan McGreevy, “Former Taoiseach Says Easter Rising ‘Unnecessary’”, Irish Times, 4 August 2014. 15 On Redmond, see Meleady (2008, 2014, 2018). On nationalist culture prior to 1918, see Maume (1999). On the party and how it worked at the constituent level and at Westminster, see McConnell (2013) and Mulvagh (2016, 2018). On intellectual and personal legacies, see Reid (2011), Farrell (2017), McCarthy (2018), and O’Donoghue (2019). 16 Fanning (2013). Not all within the Irish Parliamentary Party supported the war effort, with party stalwart John Dillon being a significant dissenting voice. See Mulvagh (2016, 2018). 17 Meehan (2010), Laffan (2014), Knirck (2014), Farrell et al. (2015), Farrell (2017), and O’Donoghue (2019). 18 Harkness (1969), Silvestri (2009), McMahon et al. (2017), O’Shea (2015), Gannon (2019) Sweeney (2019). 19 Coleman (2009). 20 Ronan McGreey, “Report Containing Submissions from Abuse Survivors Will Not be Made Public,” Irish Times, 26 November 2019.

Works cited Bartlett, Thomas, Ed. The Cambridge History of Ireland, Vol. IV: 1880 to the Present. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Bourke, Richard and Ian McBride, Eds. The Princeton History of Modern Ireland. Princeton University Press, 2016. Byrne, Elaine A. Political Corruption in Ireland, 1922–2010: A Crooked Harp? Manchester University Press, 2012. Campbell, Fergus. Land and Revolution: Nationalist Politics in the West of Ireland, 1891–1921. Oxford University Press, 2008. Clark, Gemma. Everyday Violence in the Irish Civil War. Cambridge University Press, 2014. Coleman, Marie. County Longford and the Irish Revolution, 1910–1923. Irish Academic Press, 2003. Coleman, Marie. The Irish Sweep: A History of the Irish Hospitals Sweepstake, 1930–1987. University College Dublin Press, 2009. Coleman, Marie. “Military Service Pensions for Veterans of the Irish Revolution, 1916–1923.” War in History, Vol. 20, No. 2, 2013, pp. 201–221. Crowley, John, Donal Ó Drisceoil, Mike Murphy, and John Borgonovo, Eds. Atlas of the Irish Revolution. Cork University Press, 2017. Daly, Mary E. The Slow Failure: Population Decline and Independent Ireland, 1922–1973. University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. Daly, Mary E. and Margaret O’Callaghan, Eds. 1916 in 1966: Commemorating the Easter Rising. Royal Irish Academy, 2007. Daly, Mary E. Sixties Ireland: Reshaping the Economy, State and Society, 1957–1973. Cambridge University Press, 2018a. Daly, Mary E. “Migration Since 1914.” The Cambridge History of Ireland, Vol. IV: 1880 to the Present. Edited by Thomas Bartlett. Cambridge University Press, 2018b, pp. 527–552. Dolan, Anne. Commemorating the Irish Civil War: History and Memory, 1923–2000. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Dooley, Thomas P. Irishmen or British Soldiers? The Times and World of a Southern Catholic Irishman (1876– 1916) Enlisting in the British Army During the First World War. Liverpool University Press, 1995. Dungan, Myles. They Shall Not Grow Old, Irish Soldiers and the Great War. Four Courts Press, 1997. Evans, Bryce. Ireland during the Second World War: Farewell to Plato’s Cave. Manchester University Press, 2014. Fanning, Ronan. Fatal Path: British Government and the Irish Revolution, 1910–1922. Faber and Faber, 2013. 66

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Farrell, Mel. Party Politics in a New Democracy: The Irish Free State, 1922–37. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Farrell, Mel, Jason Knirck, and Ciara Meehan, Eds. A Formative Decade: Ireland in the 1920s. Irish Academic Press, 2015. Ferriter, Diarmaid. The Transformation of Ireland. Overlook Press, 2005. Ferriter, Diarmaid. Ambiguous Republic: Ireland in the 1970s. Profile Books, 2012. Ferriter, Diarmaid. A Nation and Not a Rabble: The Irish Revolution, 1913–1923. Profile Books, 2015a. Ferriter, Diarmaid. “‘Always in Danger of Finding Myself with Nothing at All’: The Military Service Pensions and the Battle for Material Survival, 1925–55.” Years of Turbulence: The Irish Revolution and Its Aftermath in Honour of Michael Laffan. Edited by Diarmaid Ferriter and Susannah Riordan. University College Dublin Press, 2015b, pp. 191–208. Ferriter, Diarmaid. The Border: The Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics. Profile Books, 2019. Ferriter, Diarmaid and Susannah Riordan, Eds. Years of Turbulence: The Irish Revolution and Its Aftermath, in Honour of Michael Laffan. University College Dublin Press, 2015. Fitzpatrick, David. Politics and Irish Life: 1913–1921: Provincial Experiences of War and Revolution. Cork University Press, 1998a. Fitzpatrick, David. The Two Irelands, 1912–1939. Oxford University Press, 1998b. Foster, Gavin M. The Irish Civil War and Society: Politics, Class, and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Foster, R.F. Luck and the Irish. Oxford University Press, 2008. Foster, R.F. Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890–1923. Allen Lane, 2014. Fuller, Louise. Irish Catholicism since 1950: The Undoing of a Culture. Gill and Macmillan, 2002. Gannon, Seán William. The Irish Imperial Service: Policing Palestine and Administering the Empire, 1922–1966. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Garvin, Tom. Preventing the Future: Why Was Ireland So Poor for So Long? Gill and Macmillan, 2004. Garvin, Tom. 1922: The Birth of Irish Democracy. Gill and Macmillan, 2005. Garvin, Tom. Judging Lemass: The Measure of the Man. Royal Irish Academy, 2009. Girvin, Brian. The Emergency: Neutral Ireland, 1939–45. Macmillan, 2006. Girvin, Brian. “Stability, Crisis and Change in Post-War Ireland, 1945–73.” The Cambridge History of Ireland, Vol. IV: 1880 to the Present. Edited by Thomas Bartlett. Cambridge University Press, 2018a, pp. 381–406. Girvin, Brian. “Ireland Transformed? Modernisation, Secularisation and Conservatism since 1973.” The Cambridge History of Ireland, Vol. IV: 1880 to the Present. Edited by Thomas Bartlett. Cambridge University Press, 2018b, pp. 407–440. Girvin, Brian and Gary Murphy, Eds. The Lemass Era: Politics and Society in the Age of Seán Lemass. University College Dublin Press, 2005. Graff-McRae, Rebecca. Remembering and Forgetting 1916: Commemoration and Conflict in Post-Peace Process Ireland. Irish Academic Press, 2010. Grayson, Richard S. and Fearghal McGarry, Eds. Remembering 1916: the Easter Rising, the Somme and the Politics of Memory in Ireland. Cambridge University Press, 2016. Harkness, D.W. The Restless Dominion: The Irish Free State and the British Commonwealth of Nations, 1921–31. Gill and Macmillan, 1969. Hart, Peter. The I.R.A. and Its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916–1923. Oxford University Press, 1998. Hennessey, Thomas. A History of Northern Ireland. St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Hennessey, Thomas. Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition. Routledge, 1998. Higgins, Roisín. Transforming 1916: Meaning, Memory and the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Easter Rising. Cork University Press, 2016. Jeffery, Keith. Ireland and the Great War. Cambridge University Press, 2000. Jeffery, Keith. 1916: A Global History. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015. Johnson, Nuala. Ireland, the Great War and the Geography of Remembrance. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Kelly, Bernard. Returning Home: Irish Ex-Servicemen After the Second World War. Merrion, 2012. Knirck, Jason. Afterimage of the Revolution: Cumann na nGaedheal and Irish Politics, 1922–1932. University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. Laffan, Michael. The Partition of Ireland, 1911–1925. Dundalgan Press, 1983. Laffan, Michael. Judging W. T. Cosgrave: The Foundation of the Irish State. Royal Irish Academy, 2014. Lee, J.J. Ireland, 1912–1985: Politics and Society. Cambridge University Press, 1989. Link, Mandy. Remembrance of the Great War in the Irish Free State, 1914–1937. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Lynch, Robert. The Partition of Ireland, 1918–1925. Cambridge University Press, 2019. 67

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Lyons, F.S.L. Ireland since the Famine. Fontana, 1973. Maume, Patrick. The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Life, 1891–1918. Gill and Macmillan, 1999. McAuliffe, Mary. Margaret Skinnider. Dublin, University College Dublin Press, 2020. McAuliffe, Mary and Liz Gillis. Richmond Barracks 1916: We Were There: 77 Women of the Easter Rising. Four Courts Press, 2016. McCarthy, Pat. The Redmonds and Waterford: A Political Dynasty, 1891–1952. Four Courts Press, 2018. McConnell, James. The Irish Parliamentary Party and the Third Home Rule Crisis. Four Courts Press, 2013. McGarry, Fearghal. The Rising: Ireland Easter 1916. Oxford University Press, 2010. McGarry, Fearghal. Rebels: Voices from the Easter Rising. Penguin Ireland, 2011. McGarry, Fearghal. “Independent Ireland.” The Princeton History of Modern Ireland. Edited by Richard Bourke and Ian McBride. Princeton University Press, 2016, pp. 109–140. McMahon, Timothy G., Michael de Nie, and Paul Townend, Eds. Ireland in an Imperial World: Citizenship, Opportunism, and Subversion. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Meehan, Ciara. The Cosgrave Party: A History of Cumann na nGaedheal, 1923–33. Prism, 2010. Meleady, Dermot. Redmond: The Parnellite. Cork University Press, 2008. Meleady, Dermot. John Redmond: The National Leader. Irish Academic Press, 2014. Meleady, Dermot, Ed. John Redmond: Selected Letters and Memoranda, 1880–1918. Merrion Press, 2018. Moore, Cormac. Birth of the Border: The Impact of Partition in Ireland. Merrion Press, 2019. Mulvagh, Conor. The Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster, 1900–18. Manchester University Press, 2016. Mulvagh, Conor. “Home Rule at Westminster, 1880–1914.” The Cambridge History of Ireland, Vol. IV: 1880 to the Present. Edited by Thomas Bartlett. Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 62–88. Myers, Jason R. The Great War and Memory in Irish Culture, 1918–2010. Bethesda, Munsel and Co., 2013. Ó Beacháin, Donncha. From Partition to Brexit: The Irish Government and Northern Ireland. Manchester University Press, 2019. Ó Dochartaigh, Niall. “Northern Ireland Since 1920.” The Princeton History of Modern Ireland. Edited by Richard Bourke and Ian McBride. Princeton University Press, 2016, pp. 141–167. O’Donoghue, Martin. The Legacy of the Irish Parliamentary Party in Independent Ireland, 1922–1949. Liverpool University Press, 2019. O’Halpin, Eunan. Spying on Ireland: British Intelligence and Irish Neutrality during the Second World War. Oxford University Press, 2008. O’Shea, Helen. Ireland and the End of the British Empire: The Republic and Its Role in the Cyprus Emergency. I.B. Tauris, 2015. Pašeta, Senia. Irish Nationalist Women, 1900–1918. Cambridge University Press, 2013. Patterson, Henry. Ireland’s Violent Frontier: The Border and Anglo-Irish Relations during the Troubles. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Reid, Colin. The Lost Ireland of Stephen Gwynn: Irish Constitutional Nationalism and Cultural Politics, 1864– 1950. Manchester University Press, 2011. Regan, John M. The Irish Counter-Revolution, 1921–1936: Treatyite Politics and Settlement in Independent Ireland. Gill and Macmillan, 1999. Regan, John M. Myth and the Irish State: Historical Problems and Other Essays. Irish Academic Press, 2013. Sheehan, William. The Western Front: Irish Voices from the Great War. Gill and Macmillan, 2011. Silvestri, Michael. Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Smith, James M. Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment. University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Sweeney, Loughlin. Irish Military Elites, Nation and Empire, 1870–1925. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Townshend, Charles. Easter 1916: the Irish Rebellion. Ivan R. Dee, 2011. Townshend, Charles. The Republic: The Fight for Irish Freedom, 1918–1923. Penguin, 2014. Ward, Margaret. Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism. Pluto Press, 1996. Ward, Margaret. Hanna Sheehy Skeffington: Suffragette and Sinn Feiner: Her Memoirs and Political Writings. University College Dublin Press, 2018. Ward, Margaret. Fearless Woman: Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, Feminism and the Irish Revolution. University College Dublin Press, 2019. Wills, Clair. That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of the Second World War. Faber and Faber, 2007. Yeates, Padraig. A City in Wartime: Dublin 1914–1918. Gill and Macmillan, 2011.

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6 Beyond the tale Folkloristics and folklore studies Kelly Fitzgerald

This chapter sets out to investigate and discuss how folklore studies and folkloristics have developed over the past ten years or thereabouts. Recent developments in Irish Folklore Studies demonstrate that the field has undergone a number of shifts and changes and perhaps a more reflective approach has been adopted. This transferral is epitomized in Mícheál Briody’s The Irish Folklore Commission 1935–1970: History, Ideology, Methodology that was published in 2007 along with Ríonach uí Ógáin’s Mise an fear ceoil: Séamus Ennis—Dialann Taistil 1942–1946. These works brought folkloristics into a new realm where less focus was given to the content within collected folkloric material, and the emphasis was transferred, rather, to the context around the collecting situations. At this time the publication of Guy Beiner’s Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory appeared (2007). This work brought memory and identity to the fore in a way that may have produced a more gradual growth of awareness of the central role of context in earlier scholarship. This is also demonstrated in the further development of the journal Béaloideas, where a shift from primary texts to analysis is now much more evident. The following year, 2008, saw a similar contextual approach in Séamas Ó Catháin’s Formation of a Folklorist. The book, published by the revived Comhairle Bhéaloideas Éireann/The Folklore of Ireland Council Press provides an understanding of Séamus Ó Duilearga’s development as a folklorist. Ó Duilearga was founder of the Irish Folklore Commission 1935–1970, a repository now housed in University College Dublin in the National Folklore Collection. The year 2008 was also a critical year as the largest folklore conference ever staged on this island took place on the Magee campus of the University of Ulster and was not organized by folklorists in University College Dublin. In July of that year, over 500 folklorists, anthropologists, and other cultural researchers visited Derry for the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore, SIEF, conference headed by Professor Ullrich Kockel, President of the organization at the time. Professor Kockel was then based in the University of Ulster. In terms of a wider impact of folklore within society, the launch of www.duchas.ie in 2013 has rejuvenated an interest in the materials collected during the time of the Folklore Commission. Finally, the shift that occurred when the Cork Northside Folklore Project renamed itself as the Cork Folklore Project in 2017 demonstrates a growth in the scheme, as it broadened its horizons to expand the collecting field.

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The changing field Intangible cultural heritage and its recognition are becoming increasingly valuable in collecting, preserving, and documenting traditional culture. In December 2015, Ireland ratified the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Intangible cultural heritage “refers to the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills—as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts, and cultural spaces associated therewith—that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage. This intangible cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature, and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for cultural diversity and human creativity.” The interdisciplinary development of Irish Studies in the 1960s on both sides of the Atlantic was parallel to the development of Folklore Studies in Ireland.1 The inclusion of a number of subject areas worked well for folklore as it is, by its nature, broad ranging and covers a cross-section of a number of methodologies, theoretical frameworks, and subject matter. Both Irish and Folklore Studies embrace a number of disciplines. A single definition could not be applied to Irish Studies and, similarly, folklore could not be defined using a single definition. The amount of time spent by scholars debating the term “folklore” is apparent in numerous journal articles, conference papers, and classroom discussions. It has variously been viewed as antiquarian, non-academic, politically incorrect, and much else, but the term has nonetheless survived. Perhaps, it is more advantageous to focus on the sources and manifestations of the vernacular material that imbues the concept of folklore, rather than discussing the term itself. Vernacular culture and traditions encompass all aspects of life and this is no different in Ireland. These traditions are as ephemeral as oral culture and the verbal arts, which span from ritual, belief, and customs into the very physical world of material culture. The focus of folklore studies and folkloristics is folk culture, ethnicity, and identity. It may be that the importance which has been placed on Irish storytelling and its link to the success of Irish literature and Irish identity has created a hierarchy in vernacular tradition and related scholarship. Hence, terms such as oral literature heighten storytelling’s perceived position in Irish folkloristics. Without question, the international folktale and various other oral genres were the main focus of the Irish Folklore Commission. The term ethnology2 asserts itself as a term which is more encompassing of all aspects of folk culture. Ethnology in an Irish context is often synonymous with the concept of folk life. The crossover of folklore into oral history is also complex, and perhaps the simplest delineation between oral tradition and oral history is that oral tradition encourages the inclusion of community memory and passed down narratives, while oral history seeks the narrative in first person. Nonetheless, significant similarities exist, including the emphasis of both on the individual’s contribution captured through narrative. Another strong link between Irish and international folklore studies is folklore’s strong connection from its inception of a national identity linked to material under scrutiny and examination. In more recent years, across folklore studies, a greater recognition of more regional and local studies has been a focus. An undeniable development across folklore studies is a greater recognition of regional and local studies, as opposed to an overarching sense of a national identity. Together with engaging in a deeper scrutiny of material, an examination of the relevance of broader geographic areas is also necessary. For example, it is not possible to study a Donegal fiddle style, let alone the Irish fiddle, without further reference. The fiddle in Donegal is not played as a single style throughout the county, and there are several styles within Donegal. In addition, to fully examine Donegal fiddle as a style of playing one requires the inclusion of Scottish material as well. 70

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The establishment of the Irish Folklore Commission set about the systematic collecting, archiving, and cataloguing with aspirations to disseminate vernacular traditions within Ireland. The Commission catalogued items of folklore, whether they were long folktales or pithy Wellerisms, customs and beliefs or drawings of vernacular farm instruments and houses, for example. Particular criteria were applied in order to understand the validity and antiquity of an item of folklore. It was believed that the older the material, the better it was. Those who embraced this material often referred to its alleged “pagan” or “medieval” characteristics and qualities. Those who rejected this subject matter found it full of nonsense and saw it as the embodiment of backwardness. In terms of the development of individual folklore archives, it was observed by the mid-twentieth century that tradition archives develop under the tutelage of an individual in the field.3 Ireland was no exception where Seán Ó Súilleabháin, as the Commission’s archivist, led the way in which Irish folkloric material would be categorized, organized, and indexed. His approach was the result of his apprenticeship in Sweden. It was only in 2016, however, that the tradition archive was recognized by the International Council of Archives after the concerted efforts of the SIEF working group on archives, which included Irish members. For folklore studies to continue to develop, it is necessary to recognize that much of the previous scholarship cannot be taken as definitive. It may be used as a starting point, however, in terms of the overarching chronology and as an introduction to some of the key figures in the history of Irish folklore. In order to understand the earlier mindset, the motto of the Irish Folklore Society, “Colligite quae superaverunt fragmenta ne permeant” /“Gather the remaining fragments lest they perish” is a pertinent starting point. The early premise around collecting folklore since the nineteenth century revolved around a common perception that oral traditions were in need of rescue, and that the core responsibility of the folklorist was to save vernacular culture from extinction. Irish society was perceived to be static and traditions and rituals were seen as fixed structures. This was particularly true regarding the perception of the rural, poorer classes, as aspects around individual artistry appeared at times not to apply to such people. Instead, they were seen as representatives of a way of life that was in decline and bearers of endless riches in the form of tales, folk knowledge, and rituals from this vanishing life. A certain kind of epistemology was inherent in the understanding of rural, peasant culture that was to color further interpretations and analysis. Early scholarship started from such a clearly defined area of ethnicity that it was never able to fully question itself or indeed question what it is to be Irish. The Irish national bias was so strong that, although Folklore Studies is comparative by nature, scholars, for the most part, functioned within their own national spheres. An area of debate that was to the fore in folklore studies throughout Northwestern Europe was the question of research in the archive in relation to material obtained through one’s individual fieldwork. It could be argued that the two methodologies should coexist in order to maintain the rigor which the material deserves, and that both archival work and field work are necessary to understand the dynamic nature of vernacular material. As folklore studies engages with theoretical as well as historical practices, an understanding of the cultural practices and audio recordings captured in fieldwork can be more clearly deciphered. This, in conjunction with material found in the archive, allows us to gain a deeper insight into the past and a stronger understanding of the present, as well as to better understand the relationship between the two. When material from the archive is interpreted in a purely historical manner, it is crucial to understand how the material was collected and collated. The essentialist approach—that is purely based on archival findings—is no longer a suitable way to understand the complexities of orality and literary, archival and live performance phenomena. In folklore studies, the domination of the backward look must be broken, just as further developments towards understanding the nuances and complexities of the vernacular process need to be explored. 71

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In common with parallel disciplines, folkloristics has continued its interrogation of the ethnographic process. Knowledge of how the Irish Folklore Commission actually came about through a government initiative and how it was put in place through the actions of civil servants was greatly enhanced by the work completed by Mícheál Briody in 2007. This work on the history of the Irish Folklore Commission was a pinnacle in the shift towards scholarship questioning the role of a tradition archive, which led to a philosophy of no longer being able to take the archive at face value. There was groundwork before this such as Diarmuid Ó Giolláin’s work Locating Irish Folklore: tradition, modernity, identity in 2000. Ó Giolláin’s work concentrated largely on the cultural ideals and structures that had been in place since the nineteenth century. Again, the emphasis on the importance of understanding folklore’s role in nation building and which nations chose this route as opposed to a more progressive empire building path sheds light on the macro, aspirational level of this intellectual commodity. By the late twentieth century, the Irish Folklore Commission’s work and role in Ireland as an infant State needed to be reassessed. The Commission was a unique organization in that, for the most part, its sole purpose was to collect, archive, and disseminate folklore. It was key that this was not a part-time, enthusiastic, and highly skilled amateur venture but was instead the result of paid fulltime collecting work by designated folklore collectors. Recognition of the international dimension has driven scholarship to situate folkloristics into the larger, European dimension. The political, ideological, and cultural background was taken into account in a scholarly manner that hitherto had not been undertaken. Briody takes into account the perception of culture in Ireland prior to independence and analyzes how the earlier ideologies around language and tradition inculcated and were transferred into the new state. It was perceived that it was crucial to save the folklore of Ireland from extinction. Séamas Ó Catháin’s research into Séamus Ó Duilearga’s earlier training across northwest Europe with established folklorists and cultural institutions allows for a deeper and more intimate insight into Ó Duilearga’s intellectual development. Briody contextualizes Ó Duilearga’s background that allows us to understand the breadth and depth of the vision and mission for a national folklore collecting scheme. One of Briody’s contributions to an understanding of the Irish Folklore Commission is in the rigor he applied to the management and administrative side of organizing, as he dealt with the government and civil servants in the Departments of Education and Finance. The primary source material for Briody’s research is largely drawn from the National Archives of Ireland, which, again, is a novel approach in terms of examining this incomparable repository. A further valuable perspective which is offered is the work of the Head Office of the Commission in Dublin and how it communicated with staff and organized its work across Ireland. Finally, Briody takes this opportunity to step back and reflect on an assessment of the Commission’s work and its legacy. He notes particular issues of neglect: for example, neglect of more recent living and urban traditions, English language material, and material from female collectors and female informants. Séamus Ennis (1919–1982) is one of the most renowned uilleann pipers of the twentieth century. He was also a fulltime collector with the Irish Folklore Commission from 1942 to 1947 and focused on seeking music and song in many parts of Ireland. Ríonach uí Ógaín edited and translated the field diaries that Ennis kept during his time with the Commission. Her ethnographic field work and research in the early 2000s focused on interviewing those who were present in the 1940s and were able to give further insight into the collecting process. The Irish version of the book appeared in 2007, followed by the English translation in 2009. It offers additional information from informants Ennis collected from as well as from other individuals and thus created a fuller picture of Ennis’s fieldwork. Similar to Briody, this research does not focus on the individual folklore pieces, as such, but is a text purely in the form of the fieldwork context. This work allows one to gain a better understanding of the day-to-day life of the collector and what 72

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was actually entailed in the process of collecting. The complexities of the individual relationship that develops between each informant and collector have an overall impact on the material deposited in the archive. This is an aspect of a tradition archive that needs to be continuously examined by those who engage with the material. The factors involved in analyzing an item of folklore are unimaginably varied in a way that Ó Duilearga and the Irish Folklore Commission could not have foreseen. The tension between the collection of vernacular culture and the analysis of traditional material can only be mitigated by the continuous training of folklorists as collectors, ethnographers, and oral historians. It is necessary to reiterate the folkloristic process and not just the perceptions of folkloric product, which is the archive. Oral history and folkloristics have been viewed as two parallel paths that occasionally meet at a junction. Folklorists and oral historians are responsible for the creation of their primary source material. This recognition appears in the similar training involved moving from the theoretical to the applied work in the field. The researcher’s emphasis in both disciplines is on the vernacular voice as the source. The importance of the individual narrative is still paramount in what should be captured.

The Dublin Tenement Museum As a practitioner in these subject areas, it is becoming more difficult in my case to clearly define the difference between a folklorist and an oral historian. Hence, it is crucial to understand the influence of the historical developments on the accepted views of traditional material. In terms of methodological approaches, it is difficult to separate the two subject areas and the interview practice. An expanded view of subject material traditionally sought in folklore studies is required, and the oral historian must recognise the inclusion of traditional influences extending beyond first-person experiences. There are numerous benefits to oral historical studies, if it allows greater discussions around the input of folkloristic theoretical frameworks to develop within oral history. A particular emphasis placed on the areas of performance, tradition, and ethnographic fieldwork allows for a more profound understanding of the oral interview. The twopronged oral historical and folkloric approach demonstrate both the reflexive turn in folklore studies, and the way, the methods, and investments of ethnographic practices produce knowledge around communities, ways of life, and urban spaces far beyond the traditional rural and agricultural life. Oral histories that recall life in Dublin’s tenements are central to the newly opened Tenement Museum Dublin. In September 2015 Dublin City Council, working with the National Folklore Foundation, began the Urban Memories and Tenement Experiences oral history project. Memories of people who lived in tenements on Henrietta Street and elsewhere in Dublin were recorded. The project included reminiscence evenings, formal and informal interviews, and remembering the tenements open days. The interviews gathered have guided the design of conservation works in the former tenement and are central to the museum exhibition that opened in September 2018. From the end of the nineteenth century, hundreds of occupants inhabited the Georgian houses on Henrietta Street. Testaments of the 1901 and 1911 censuses show the vast number of residents on the street. By the end of the 1970s, very few tenants remained in 14 Henrietta Street and many of the 17 flats it once contained had gradually emptied or were amalgamated to make larger ones. In the end, a few short-lived and seemingly informal tenancies as well as some squatters had replaced the stable community of families that once lived there. Then, in 1979, the front door of 14 Henrietta Street was shut once and for all, and a period of approximately 100 years of tenement life in the house had come to an end. After nearly 30 years of vacancy neglect 73

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and decay, the house has been transformed into a museum dedicated to collecting and preserving Dublin’s tenement history, urban life, and architectural heritage. Engaging and listening to people’s first-hand experience of life in the tenements has become an integral aspect of the recovery of this extraordinary mid eighteenth-century house and the making of the museum. The recorded oral histories have focused on one of the more fetishized streets in Dublin, a street that holds memories and an identity of its own. Perceptions of this imagined community that grew over the years within Dublin at large had an impact that affected each and every interview recorded. Examining the collected narratives of what is remembered, disremembered, or perhaps excluded created a number of roles of research to be selected and presented around the museum’s curation. In particular, perceptions of poverty and how socio-economic conditions were expressed varied greatly from interview to interview. To allow a platform of contested histories, the need for a repository of many voices is essential. The museum was planned during the years of austerity and opened up questions and perceptions of the issues surrounding poverty, homelessness, and the availability of access to home ownership at a time when many felt Dublin City Council should allocate more resources to housing. The innovative partnership between a local community, a local government agency, and members of the academic community created a space that presents the personal narrative with authenticity. The oral history project neither provided a strictly economic account of inner-city poverty, nor created a narrative based purely around social geography. Instead, it integrated the story of the emergence of Dublin’s tenements with as detailed a reconstruction as possible of Henrietta Street and the lived experience of those who inhabited it. While issues such as social structure and occupational composition were still central to the project, the aim was to incorporate a social analysis with more qualitative accounts of the tenements on a household and personal level. The recorded interviews also placed Henrietta Street within the debate over workingclass housing in the early twentieth century both within Ireland and beyond, providing a wider comparison with the tenements of other cities. The contribution of oral history in documenting life in a Dublin tenement building is immeasurable. Today this aspect of Dublin City’s heritage is celebrated not just because of these physical attributes and cultural achievements, but also increasingly through its intangible qualities: that is, its character, atmosphere, mood, people, and their customs and narratives. Unfortunately, that is not the celebration for twentieth-century tenement dwellers. The use of oral histories as a vehicle to examine and understand the tenements is necessary. The Museum fuses an exploration of tangible heritage (the house as primary artifact) with intangible heritage: the collected oral histories of tenement life that evoke the city’s urban life and social practices in the twentieth century. A combination of all of these factors were necessary to give as broad a picture as possible. The research team recognized early on that archival or published sources, while extremely valuable to their endeavour, offered little information to illustrate what daily life was actually like for families in Dublin’s tenements. Oral histories revealed nuanced social and biographical detail, vignettes, and perspectives that the traditional archival sources could not have offered. The areas of investigation included things like the structure of the day, and how people ate and slept in the tightly contained areas of single rooms partitioned into specific functions. Interviews revealed how meals were prepared and delivered. The hierarchy of the working men being fed first and the children lined up along the wall to be given their share was documented. The list of shops and local grocers within the area were described in detail, as were narratives of how the rent was paid, how money was earned, and how financial transactions occurred. This was the space where tenants celebrated and commemorated births, weddings, communions, wakes, and funerals. The interviews allow us to understand what it was like to live without an inside 74

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toilet. Through the recorded interviews we could understand where and how the washing was done. The oral histories are primarily memories of childhood from the 1940s to 1960s. Prevailing themes that emerge involve memories of the mother, the home, the communities that once existed, military associations, emigration, the move to the suburbs, local shops and factories, street games, boxing and soccer sports clubs, religious traditions, and school. The intimate narratives emerged from the oral histories, from further research, and from the characteristics of the house itself. At the first reminiscence evening in 2015, the former Henrietta Street residents were asked what they thought of the house in its present state. They unanimously voiced disapproval. While the ostensibly romantic substrate of mottled peeling interior wallpaper left behind after the process of tenement erasure of the early 1980s has been aesthetically influential—it is beloved of photographers and for which Henrietta Street has become synonymous—the reminiscence evening produced a realization that this in itself may not be of intrinsic value or worthy of conservation. The rooms and the house generally in their present state represented neither the heritage of tenement life nor any period of the house’s history. Quoting one individual at the reminiscence evening, the present state of the house was “a disgrace.” This statement was revelatory. If the house was to properly represent the tenement period, or any of its other significant periods, then we needed to reconsider our values and approach to the conservation of the interior of the house.

Digital futures In the past decade, folkloristics has devoted much of its time looking at how and why it has developed in Ireland; at the same time, folklore studies have rarely addressed the question of its trajectory. As with all subject areas within the arts and humanities, digital innovations have transformed the landscape. Arguably, there are now sufficient resources to allow an initial assessment of the Irish approach taken in folkloristics, and where resources have been directed in the creation of digital projects. When www.duchas.ie was launched at the end of 2013 by University College Dublin and Dublin City University, its initial aim was to digitize and disseminate the Schools’ Manuscripts Collection, a scheme from the 1930s now a part of the National Folklore Collection. It has since expanded, and continues to expand, to include photographic and audio material and manuscripts moving on from the Schools’ Collection of 1937–1938. This project can also be seen to fall within the more limited engagement with the internet, as it has used the web to create databases in order to publish folklore material collected from a much earlier era. Irish folklorists have not yet undertaken research into actual folklore phenomena found on the internet, or to collect current, or contemporary folkloric phenomena to any systematic extent. Internet studies and folklore have been to the fore for the past decade in the United States, but they have barely begun in Irish folklore studies. The digital landscape on dúchas.ie also creates another layer between the original performance and the collected material from the event. An archive does not hold actual folklore, but the documentation of a folkloric object or event; a digitized image is even further removed, and training is required to assist those trying to make sense of the material. Oral history has come to the fore at a time when folklore phenomena have a greater recognition and presence through texts and pictures. Visual folklore primarily distributed through the internet allows for new ways to disseminate vernacular culture. Collecting schemes around memes found on the internet highlight an area in which many institutions and repositories are engaged around the world. As of yet, this does not figure largely in Irish collections. Whether considering vernacular culture of the present or material from the archive, the historical and 75

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literary considerations continue to facilitate analysis. An area that has not been taken into consideration to any great extent is the impact of aesthetics on what is perceived as being optimal in terms of collecting. The nuances and subtleties of earlier artistry and imagery of oral literature may be seen to be lacking in an internet meme of a dog stealing a Flake 99. The imagination required when there was far less external stimulus surrounding the performer allowed the aesthetic to come to the fore and play a more central role. The earlier audience had very little to distract their attention and allowed the performer the space they required and time to develop the narrative. Folklore studies was inherently comparative at its inception. In these times of ever-shrinking university faculties, collaboration and collaborative projects have never been more important. Currently, international partnerships are partly fostered due to European funding models. The most recent SIEF conference took place in Spain in April 2019 and there were more Irish folklorists attending than attended the 2008 conference that actually took place in Ireland. Complexities of the cultural material are now taken into consideration, and these materials are finally understood as more than just a one-way transmission. They circulate beyond the national, closer than the regional, reflecting the individual, and the collective or collectives more accurately. The need to observe and query the world and worlds around us is as valuable today as it was in 1935, the first year of the Irish Folklore Commission.

Notes 1 The American Conference for Irish Studies lists its first president in 1962. IASIL was formed in 1969 the same year the School of Irish Studies was developed in Dublin. 2 Ethnology: the branch of knowledge concerned with human society and culture, and its development or the culture of a place or society, and its development; the development and characteristics of a people (Oxford English Dictionary). 3 As Dr. Åke Campbell says at the beginning of “Symposium II: Archiving Folklore,” “Every archive is the development of an idea of some one pioneer in the field” (“Symposium” 89).

Works cited and suggested readings Béaloideas: The Journal of the Folklore of Ireland Society, 1927. Béascna: Journal of Folklore and Ethnology, University College Cork, 2002. Beiner, Guy. Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory. University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. Briody, Mícheál. The Irish Folklore Commission, 1935–1970: History, Ideology, Methodology. Finnish Literature Society, 2007. Cronin, Nessa, Seán Crosson, and John Eastlake, Eds. Anáil an Bhéil Bheo: Orality and Modern Irish Culture. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. De Cléir, Síle. Popular Catholicism in Ireland: Locality, Identity and Culture. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Harvilahti, Lauri, Audun Kjus, Clíona O’Carroll, Susanne Österland-Pötzsch, Fredrik Skott, and Rita Treija, Eds. Visions and Traditions: Knowledge Production and Tradition Archives. Folklore Fellows’ Communication, 2018. Ó Catháin, Séamas. Formation of a Folklorist. Comhairle Bhéaloideas Éireann, 2008. Ó Duilearga, Séamus. Leabhar Sheáin Í Conaill. The Folklore of Ireland Society, 1948. Ó Giolláin, Diarmuid. Locating Irish Folklore: Tradition, Modernity, Identity. Cork University Press, 2000. Ó Giolláin, Diarmuid, Ed. Irish Ethnologies. Notre Dame University Press, 2017. Thompson, Stith, Ed. “Symposium II: Archiving Folklore.” Four Symposia on Folklore. Indiana University Press, 1953, pp. 89–154. uí Ógáin, Ríonach. Going to the Well for Water: The Séamus Ennis Field Diary, 1942–1946. Cork University Press, 2009.

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7 The Irish language and the Gaeltachtaí Illiberalism and neoliberalism Brian Ó Conchubhair

The end of days? Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will gather Irish-language discourse in the first two decades of the twenty-first century is dominated by politics. The central issues in the Republic concern Gaeltacht sustainability and viability; in the North of Ireland the official role and legal position of Irish exercises politicians and public alike. A chapter of this nature cannot do justice to the diversity and complexity of the entire Irish-language experience. Just as various chapters in this volume focus on a particular aspect of contemporary Irish experience, in focusing on certain key trends and developments, this chapter omits and occludes other trends and patterns. Such a perspective attempts to see the wood through the trees, the forest through the wood, and focus on the big picture behind the confounding, complicated, surprising realities of the Irish-language world as it is. To do so is not to ignore or minimize any aspects of this world but to recognize that some events loom larger and appear more significant at this time. Specific controversies, while illustrative of broader issues, are not discussed here.2 Such events include the targeting of Irish-speaking Catholic PSNI member, Peter Heffron; the Dingle/An Daingean placename controversy (2009); the Language Commissioner’s resignation over “Government hypocrisy” (2014); sex abuse scandals associated with Domhnall Ó Lubhlaí, Fr. Greene and Coláiste Cholm Cille; Circular 44 by Minister of Education Mary Hannifin ordering Irish-language Immersion schools to introduce English in infant classes (2007); Eircode’s anglicization of indigenous placenames (2014); the Supreme Court decisions on Irish-Speaking citizens’ “conditional” rights (2014); Gaelscoil admission policies; RTÉ’s censorship of KNEECAP, a hip-hop group (2017); Fliuch, an Irish-language porn magazine (2016); the abuse of dyslexic exemptions (2019); Irish as a requirement to join An Garda Síochána (2005); Enda Kenny’s refusal to answer Mick Wallace in English in Dáil Éireann (2015); the cancelation of Irish-language mass in Dún Laoghaire (2017); #NílSéCGL (“Níl sé ceart go leor,” or “It’s not OK”) twitter campaign (2018); Ray Darcy’s complaints about Irish-language news bulletins (2015); Ivan Yates description of Irish-speakers as “cultural terrorists” (2019); an employee’s right to speak Irish at work (“The Flying Enterprise”) (2016); Máire Nic an Bhaird’s arrest for speaking Irish (2007); racist reactions to Ola Majekodunmi (2020); and Irish-language graveyard inscriptions in Coventry, England (2020). Such a catalogue is by no means exhaustive, but such controversies, while revealing, distract from the broader narrative arc. Such controversies 77

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aside, two issues dominate twenty-first-century Irish-language discourse: the survival of the Irish language as a communal language in An Ghaeltacht, those areas where it is designated a first language in the Republic; and the role of the Irish in civil society in Northern Ireland.

The apocalypse: the end is nigh! The geographer Reg Hindley’s provocatively titled and candid 1990 study The Death of the Irish Language: A Qualified Obituary is a pivotal text. It not only shocked but provoked a detailed debate in the English-language media.3 Some qualifications aside,4 the book angered many, but informed commentators confirmed that his conclusions were far from shocking and had long been tacitly accepted if not openly acknowledged, despite some alleged subterfuge.5 Written in English and published by an English scholar, the State could not ignore it and it set the stage for subsequent interventions. The battle between globalized capitalism and the traditional communal life of the Irish-language district entered into the public domain: in the clash between the namelessness and placelessness of modern capitalism and the traditional way of life where toponomastics and onomastics are intaglio of its cultural knowledge and sophistication, the struggle was decidedly one-sided. The Celtic Tiger saw several language-related developments, not least of which was TG4’s establishment and Irish, finally, becoming an official EU working language. The 2001 Housing (Gaeltacht) (Amendment) Act 2001 which funded housing for Irish-speakers within Gaeltachtaí areas marked an early response to The Death of the Irish Language, as did the 2002 Coimisiún na Gaeltachta (Gaeltacht Commission). Initiated in 2000, it was considered the State’s response to Hindley’s warnings. That Commission confirmed the erosion of Irish as the dominant vernacular in the various Gaeltachtaí and forecasted that it was only a matter of time before such protected areas disappeared entirely. In some, Irish had already ceased to be the community language of such areas. In others, they observed the emergence of communal bilingualism: the invariable precursor to the dominance of English as the daily communal vernacular. The report dismissed official State policies as largely useless and recommended a comprehensive linguistic study to assess the language’s vitality in the official areas, a serious reconsideration of what constituted a Gaeltacht and, based on that, a redrawing of Gaeltachtaí boundaries. The State responded with the Official Languages Act (2003), designed to promote the use of Irish for official purposes in parliamentary proceedings, Acts of the Oireachtas, the administration of justice, and the work of public bodies. Critically, the 2003 Act also established Oifig Choimisinéir na dTeangacha Oifigiúla (the Office of the Commissioner for Official Languages). A cross-political party statement affirming “support for the development and preservation” of Irish across political parties appeared in 2006. In 2007, Acadamh na hOllscolaíochta Gaeilge issued Staidéar Cuimsitheach Teangeolaíoch ar Úsáid na Gaeilge sa Ghaeltacht (A Comprehensive Linguistic Study of the Usage of Irish in the Gaeltacht), as recommended by the 2002 report. Once again it confirmed the previous dire assessments: Irish, as a communal, collective linguistic identity, was “on its last legs.” The report attributed the language collapse in the Gaeltachtaí to a strong decline in the proportion of young, home-speakers of Irish and an inadequate communal and educational support system to enable them to acquire a native-like ability and to function linguistically with social ease through Irish in their own peer groups.6 It proposed the subdivision of Gaeltachtaí into three linguistic zones depending on the extent to which the community employed Irish. Category A districts would receive priority funding, while Category C areas, if they did not reverse the linguistic decline, would lose both their Gaeltacht designation and associated funding. 78

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Three years later, with cross-party support, the government unveiled its very ambitious, but equally controversial, Straitéis 20 Bliain don Ghaeilge 2010–2030 (20-Year Strategy for the Irish Language 2010–2030). Launched the same week that the Troika took control of State finances (Ó Ceallaigh 87), it drew on the previous reports and targeted nine areas of action: (1) education, (2) the Gaeltacht, (3) the family, (4) the community, (5) the media, (6) technology, and (7) the economy. Among its aims were: (i.) to increase the number of people who speak Irish on a daily basis outside the education system from 83,000 to 250,000; (ii.) to increase by 25% the number of people who speak Irish on a daily basis in the Gaeltacht; (iii.) to ensure that in public discourse and in public services the use of Irish or English will be, as far as practical, a choice for the citizen to make and that over time more and more people throughout the State will choose to do their business in Irish; and (iv.) to ensure that Irish becomes more visible in our society, both as a spoken language by our citizens and also in areas such as signage and literature.

Image 7.1 Dearg le Fearg election campaign poster Source: Courtesy Dearg le Fearg

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Irish became an election issue in the 2011 election. Fine Gael committed to abolishing Irish as a required school subject but quickly reneged in the face of public pressure (see Image 7.1). As Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, a fluent Irish-speaker, downgraded the cabinet position responsible for Gaeltachtaí from a Senior Minister to a (Junior) Minister of State. The appointment of Donegal North-East T.D. Joe McHugh to that devalued position led to a hue and cry. McHugh openly admitted his shock at the appointment given his lack of proficiency and became an object of ridicule (Cullen 14).7 Since 2011, the continued absence of a Senior Government Minister for Irish and a voice for Irish at Cabinet (where power theoretically resides) has reflected the persistent downgrading and devaluation of Irish at the highest political levels. An Straitéis laid the groundwork for the 2012 Gaeltacht Act, the first major piece of legislation dealing specifically with Gaeltachtaí areas for some 60 years. For critics, however, it merely adopted “elements of the stylistics of the study, but in essence it is an act of evasion rather than engagement . . . the new Act lacks both analytical rigor and political sincerity” (Ó Giollagáin n.p.). The abolition of direct elections for Údarás na Gaeltachta, (Ó hAoláin 2002, 2009, quoted in Ó Ceallaigh, 36), the regional authority responsible for the Gaeltacht’s economic and social development, saved approximately €100,000 annually (Irish Times n.p.), but led opposition T.D.s to walk out of Dáil Éireann in protest of an Act they described as “effectively facilitating the demise of the Gaeltacht” (Ó Giollagáin n.p.)—an example of “democracy reduced to theatre” (Monbiot 2016, n.p., see also 2017). Údarás na Gaeltachta had provided local governance and allowed locally elected officials to make policy decisions affecting their locality. The abolishment of the elections ended local governance and decision-making based on local concerns and priorities: a clear illustration of neoliberalism8 challenging democratic norms of collective decision-making and undermining local politics to the extent that local, regional, cultural, and linguistic concerns are not elevated to the highest level of State governance. And even then, they are subject to corporate imperatives. A key factor to consider when critiquing Straitéis 20 Bliain and the Gaeltacht Act is the 2008 crash. Both documents emerged while the “Irish” economy reported to the “Troika.” Not only is neoliberalism dogma for the IMF, ECB, and EC, but the Irish economy has always dictated Irish-language policy (Ó Riagáin 36). Thus neoliberalism informs and dictates State policy on Gaeltachtaí and the Irish language. Ben Ó Ceallaigh’s brilliant 2019 analysis clearly determines “the extremes of neoliberal reform associated with the death of the Celtic Tiger led to an acceleration of state withdrawal from Irish-language maintenance efforts” (79). Ireland had become integrated into the neoliberal system before 2008, but the crash allowed State policies and practices to be reformed and reimagined in ways previously unacceptable Klein, in The Shock Doctrine, argues that neoliberal theorists avail of crises to impose unpopular policies while people are disorientated and distracted. The financial crisis then buffeting the country offered an unbeatable opportunity and was fertile territory for a reevaluation of national priorities based on a knowledge of price but with no appreciation of value. In response to the 2008 economic crash, Brian Lenihan as Minister for Finance commissioned the Special Group on Public Service Numbers and Expenditure Programmes (Bord Snip Nua) to produce the McCarthy report. With disregard for rural Ireland in general, this plan driven by neoliberal, free-market economics, deemed Irish-language communities neither economically viable nor deserving of State support.9 Ostensibly, the McCarthy Report purported to save the State €5.3bn by slashing non-essential expenditure across all sectors, but some slashes appeared ideologically

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Údarás na Gaeltachta

Enterprise Ireland

Industrial Development Agency

2008

€25.5 million

€56.4 million

€78.5 million

2015

€6.7 million

€52.7 million

€116 million

% change 2008–15

−73.7%

−6.6%

+47.8%

Figure 7.1 Údarás funding 2008–2015 Source: Ó Ceallaigh 96 Note: Foras na Gaeilge, the all-island British-Irish organization charged with coordinating language policies on the entire Island, also suffered draconian cuts post 2008.

motivated and more savage than others. While recommending an overall reduction of 9.4% in state expenditure, the Department for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs (DCRGA)’s budget reduction (32%) was the highest of any department. Within DCRGA, expenditure on Gaeltachtaí and islands was to be cut by 58% (Ó Ceallaigh 84). Údarás na Gaeltachta, also suffered disproportionate cuts (see Figure 7.1), an imbalance starkly revealed by Ó Ceallaigh by comparing Údarás funding with Enterprise Ireland and the Industrial Development Agency (IDA) funding from 2008 to 2015. While most of neoliberal-inspired suggestions largely failed to materialize, they did not go away and remerged more brazenly and more emboldened as the Celtic Phoenix arose from the austerity ashes of the recession in 2014. With further cuts to its budget (see Image 7.2), ostensibly due to austerity, Foras na Gaeilge, having internalized the neoliberal policy emanating from central government, restructured its “core funding” (Ó Ceallaigh 107–112). From supporting 19 organizations, henceforth, it funded six and immediately reshaped the Irish-language voluntary sector.10 Competition, according to neoliberalism, is the universal value by which to order human life and society. The cuts pitted long-established organizations against one another in a survival of the fittest. Cultural groups had to submit plans and budgets to prove their merit against “competitors.”11 This competition clearly illustration the demand for “entrepreneurialism” and “innovation”; a market now existed where it had never existed; voluntary groups, now “stakeholders,” had to become self-optimizing, competitive, and individualistic. There is now a natural hierarchy of winners and losers among language organizations. Within this recasting, inequality is virtuous and monopoly power is now a reward for efficiency. Arguments to create a more equal system are deemed counterproductive and morally objectionable.12 Fair and open competition (the market) ensures every organization gets what it deserves. The result seriously restricted the activities of or, in some cases, precipitated the demise of, several organizations: Forbairt Feirste, Iontaobhas ULTACH, POBAL, Na Naíonra Gaelacha, Featsa, An tUltach, and An Comhlachas Náisiúnta Drámaíochta (see Image 7.3). In such a system, where competition is the be all and end all, those organizations that lose funding become defined (and self-defined) as losers, underperformers, and unnecessary duplications.13 Such organizations’ impact on rural Ireland and their role in combating rural isolation as well as energizing isolated communities, providing opportunities and soft skill training are of little consequence to “the market.” In a dystopian future, one might envision a scenario where various Gaeltachtaí compete on a cost-efficiency basis for State funding. A cross-cultural fusion of The Apprentice, Cast Away, and Survivor: Cois Fharraige v. Na Rosanna; Ceantar na nOileán v. Corca Duibhne, Baile Bhúirne v. Ráth Chairn will fight it out for “core” funding.

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Image 7.2 Foras na Gaeilge funding 2008–2019 Source: Courtesy of Conradh na Gaeilge

Image 7.3 The graveyard of voluntary organizations Source: Courtesy of Lá Nua

The Gaeltacht is now perceived within some government circles as a brand to attract cultural tourists who pay for the experience and service. Culture, its expression and experience, is a commodity for purchase by consumers. The “culture” ofered here is a prescribed set of idealized cultural practices of a safe, sanitized, timeless past, rather than a contemporary hybrid challenging cultural expression. Most neoconservatives are economic neoliberals and cultural neoconservatives.14 Thus, language and culture are optional extras; responsibility for the language maintenance and survival is outsourced to language commissioners, language planners, and service towns. The State will not interfere; it will assist and help, but not intervene. The

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State abdicates responsibility. Yet, as budgets decrease the voluntary sector is expected to do more with less, and the crisis in Gaeltachtaí persists. Another report, Nuashonrú ar an Staidéar Cuimsitheach Teangeolaíoch ar Úsáid na Gaeilge sa Ghaeltacht: 2006–2011 (Comprehensive Linguistic Study of the Use of Irish in the Gaeltacht: 2006–2011), issued in 2015, predicted that Irish as a community language in Gaeltachtaí would cease within ten years, (i.e., 2025). Controversy ensued when its authors concluded that the social use of Irish in Gaeltachtaí was declining more rapidly than predicted in their 2007 report. Conspiracy theorists reveled in a dispute between Údarás and the report’s authors which delayed its publication by over a year. When finally published, it appeared without the authors’ recommendations. Published separately, they offered a stinging critique of State response to the linguistic crisis. That policy critique consisted of five identifiable features: A) the conflation of Language 1 (Irish) and Language 2 (English) contexts in the Strategy and the Act; B) the Language 2 (English) discursive colonization of Language 1 (Irish) concerns; C) an emphasis on the Language 2 (English) educational sphere; D) a naïve portrayal of the minority bilingual condition: (i.) minority language acquisition is more complex and challenging than majority language acquisition, and (ii.) the report was unidirectional in its social dynamic, i.e., favoring English; E) a sectoral rather than sociological and linguistic response to identified difficulties Activist Donncha Ó hÉallaithe, concerned at a lack of leadership and the absence of any debate in Anglo-centric media about the language on the program for Government, proposed steps to address the crisis in June 2020.15 Among his proposals were the complete abandonment of An Straitéis in place of a new ten-year plan with realistic goals; the appointment of three language commissions to redraw the boarders of Gaeltachtaí based on linguistic criteria; a focus on preschoolers; the encouragement of language usage among university students; a plebiscite or referendum in every community to decide whether to avail of the Irish-language version of the placename; the setting of clear targets for a certain number of bilinguals in each Civil Service branch; the resolution of Gaeltachtaí planning permission disputes and the housing crisis by Údarás na Gaeltachta; financial retrenchment by reviewing article 10 of the 2003 Act requiring translation of ofcial documents; and the reinstatement of Údarás elections. What is needed is indisputable action; an end to the inertia and the collective complicity. Educated young speakers evacuated their home regions for economic advancement elsewhere. Politicians seem to be either unreflective neoliberalist zombies or avowed advocates of localized socialism where state intervention is the first and last recourse. Neoliberalism’s triumph reflects the failure of the left. Neoliberalism is not good for minorities, rural Ireland, Gaeltachtaí, islands, culture or heritage, yet localization has benefitted both Gaeltachtaí and the Irish-language sector (Ó Conchubhair 224–30). Consumer demand and economic growth are not only motors of environmental destruction but also mean the decimation of rural communities, fragile linguistic ecosystems, island life, indigenous cultures, and minoritized languages. The State’s priorities are political choices, not preordained market pulls. There is no “correct” market-derived price for language, literature, song, music, dance, art, community vitality, and social engagement: these are fundamental issues of social cohesion and human well-being and fulfillment. Such choices are social choices, not market choices. Market economies work for supermarkets but not for

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humans as social beings in a social organization. But the neoliberal zombie crawls and lurches forward because we have not offered a different, more balanced, coherent, and elegant way to walk.16 Outside of the Gaeltachtaí, the Government is committed to doubling the number of pupils currently enrolled in Gaelscoileanna from 60,000 to 120,000 (Department of Education and Skills 2019). Pop-up Gaeltachtaí succeed in providing a social network for urban-based Irishspeakers.17 While the 2020 coalition government remains committed to An Straitéis, Conradh na Gaeilge, among others, argue that senior officials and members of the inspectorate in the Department of Education and Civil Service are not only actively opposed to Irish but persistently undermine promotional strategies and disincentivize its use and promotion. While such claims echo Trump’s war on the “Deep State actors,” President Higgins alluded to the issue in 2016. Critics point at the 2015 revelation that Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht Heather Humphreys directed the Irish language be relegated near the bottom of principal themes for 1916 celebrations. The Department’s admission that the Irish-language version of the State’s official 1916 website came from Google Translate caused further embarrassment. Described as “gibberish,” the text was quickly replaced. Such bizarre events may be simply incompetence, or may be symbolic of wide-spread antagonism toward Irish within the Civil Service and elected officials. The role Irish Language Studies’ can play in the successful renewal of Gaeltachtaí lies in productive scholarly engagements with the broader field of Irish Studies, drawing on the work of creative and critical thinkers such as: Peader Kirby’s Todhchaí d’Éirinn: Pobal, Féinmheas, Teanga (2004); Tomás Mac Síomóin, Ó Mhársa Go Magla: Straitéis nua don Ghaeilge (2006); Tomás Mac Síomóin, The Broken Harp: Identity and Language in Modern Ireland (2014); Finbarr Bradley, Meon Gaelach, Aigne Nualaíoch (2011); Michael Cronin’s An Ghaeilge san aois nua/Irish in the new century (2005); Michael Cronin, An Ghaeilge agus an Éiceolaíocht /Irish and Ecology (2019); Jeannine Woods, “Aithníonn queeróg queeróg eile: Gaeilgeoirí aeracha aontaithe agus gluaiseacht chomhaimseartha na Gaeilge” (1998); Seán Mac Risteaird, “An Teacht Amach Aniar: Collaíocht, Corp agus Rúin i Saothair Liteartha Mhichíl Uí Chonghaile” (2018); and Seán Mac Risteaird, “Coming Out, Queer Sex, and Heteronormativity in two Irish-language Novels” (2020). Monographs and essays such as Máirín Nic Eoin, Trén bhFearann Breac: An Díláithriú Cultúir agus Nualitríocht na Gaeilge and “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Transnational Irish-Language Writing” as well as Lillis Ó Laoire, “Artists as workers in the rural; precarious livelihoods, sustaining rural futures,” and “Murder in a Meadow: Environmental and Cultural Extinction in Cathal Ó Searcaigh’s ‘Scrúdú Coinsiasa Roimh Dhul Chun Suain’” are theoretically informed, focused on contemporary issues, socially engaged, and politically aware. Unsurprisingly, dramatists such as Breandán Ó hEaghra and Darach Ó Scolaí have resorted to satire and black humor to address the Gaeltachtaí crisis, a designated area that is often hardpressed, perplexed, and abandoned. Ó hEaghra’s Gaeilgeoir Deireanach Charna revolves around Tommy, the last Irish-speaker in Carna, expecting a visit from the Minister. Darach Ó Scolaí’s play Coinneáil Orainn features the Government’s last inspector in search of the last two native speakers. In another play, An Braon Aníos, Ó Scolaí combines global environmental concerns such as rising sea levels with linguistic issues, the weakening ozone layer in Connemara with introducing Osama Bin Laden to Connemara. And so it goes. Yet where is the criticism that responds to such engagement? Since Hindley’s intervention, more surveys, strategies, articles, and monographs have appeared than at any time in the past. Yet what is needed is indisputable action: an end to the inertia and the collective complicity. Irish is not dying, it is being abandoned. Educated young speakers evacuated their home regions for economic advancement elsewhere. With some notable 84

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exceptions,18 many politicians downplay the crisis, ignore experts, and, in place of solutions, offer a heavy dose of happy talk and sweeping away of worries. Intellectually, they flounder between unreflective neoliberalist zombies and avowed advocates of localized socialism. Neoliberalism’s triumph reflects the failure of the left.19 In 2020, the Gaeltachtaí are hard pressed on every side but not yet fully crushed; perplexed and in despair; abandoned, but not yet destroyed. But for how much longer? Such a crisis is rendered more ironic as 2019 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Cearta Sibhialta na Gaeltachta, and 2020 saw the death of Joe Steve Ó Neachtain. A Gaeltacht icon, Ó Neachtain was a towering figure of the Gaeltacht civil rights movement, a stalwart champion and outspoken advocate in the struggle for equality. Fifty years after their campaign which resulted in the foundation Údarás as a democratic state agency responsible for economic, social, and cultural development of the Irish-speaking regions, the Údarás is undermined and underfunded. The over-centralised Irish State always aspired to remove the inconvenience of a democratically elected board to the Údarás, and, in the years after the crushing economic crash Fine Gael and Labour abolished the elected board and appointed its ‘yes-men’ instead. (Insider n.p.) A coherent alternative response, tailored to twenty-first century demands, is urgently required. Irish-language studies, to be relevant, must respond to contemporary twenty-firstcentury realities and demands. Such a response must not treat linguistic, cultural, economic, and environmental crises in isolation, but must instead recognize them as catalyzed or exacerbated by the same things: global capitalism and translational neoliberalism. The current list of dire and deeply interconnected global emergencies are disproportionately felt most acutely, even within advanced nations, by the most vulnerable peoples and historically marginalized groups. Charting a pathway towards an economic and linguistic sustainable Gaeltachtaí is intimately connected with the sustainability of the environment, the maintenance of rural communities, and the provision of basic services to all regardless of location. The Gaeltachtaí crisis is a local expression of global efforts to create more resilient and regenerative societies across the globe. To paraphrase Ó Cadhain, “is í athghabháil na timpeallachta athghabháil na Gaeltachta, agus is í athghabháil phobal na Gaeltachta, slánú na Gaeilge.”20 It should not, however, be assumed that the Irish-language communities are immune to the power dynamics, social hierarchies, or discriminations evident in English or other languages communities. To propose old solutions to the current crises is to ignore the obvious problems. The essence of the revivalists’ thought, such as the Gaelic League and Douglas Hyde’s approach, is certainly relevant, but it must be recalibrated for the twenty-first century. It is hard to mobilize people around old ideas that fail to address the gravest predicaments. The decline of Irish is less a case of linguistic genocide, as some commentators term it, and more linguistic euthanasia. When Covid-19 posed an existential threat to Ireland, the communities accepted previously unthinkable draconian measures: quarantine, travel bans—the voluntary quarantine of the Aran Islands, the refusal to allow Spanish sailors ashore in Dingle—social distancing, mandatory face masks, and suspension of social practices that lead to contamination and spread of the virus. In lieu of schools, classes went online; St. Patrick’s Day parades were cancelled; State examinations were cancelled; and private hospitals nationalized. Yet when globalized capitalism poses an existential threat to the Gaeltachtaí, the response is another report, another disquisition, another survey, another commission and so on. What amount and what quality of Irish that survives in the everdiminishing, ever-shrinking Gaeltachtaí, meanwhile, will be determined not by any top-down plan—local community leaders must be at the strategic center, not in the background of any 85

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response—but by its inhabitants’ willingness to take action and responsibility for their linguistic environment and communal identity.

There will not be left here one stone upon another: apocalyptic Acht Teanga? Neoliberalism is no less pervasive in Northern Ireland, as the closure of several university departments attest: Queen’s University, for instance, closed its Armagh campus (2005), its German Department (2009), and Italian and Slavonic Studies, and Classics survived only due to public outcry. The University of Ulster abolished the School of Modern Languages.21 While neoliberalism is certainly a factor, the old reliable and ever faithful factors of sectarianism, bigotry, cultural intolerance, as well as illiberal attitudes are of such magnitude that neoliberalism seems to shrink in the background. The Irish language in Northern Ireland received official recognition, protection, and funding under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement (Belfast Agreement/ Comhaontú Aoine an Chéasta/Comhaontú Bhéal Feirste/Guid Friday Greeance/Bilfawst Greeance) as part of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. With the collapse of the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2002, Northern Ireland functioned under Direct Rule from the Westminster Parliament in London, England. In 2003 POBAL, an umbrella organization for language groups, informed by practices in Wales and European states, began agitating for separate Irish-language legislation.22 Under direct rule, advocates argued that Irish in Northern Ireland deserved similar protections as Welsh in Wales and Gaelic in Scotland, all parts of the United Kingdom. Three years later, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Féin signed the 2006 St. Andrews Agreement that established a power-sharing executive and that appeared to promise an Irish Language Act. The promise of the Act appeased language activists and appeared to meet Nationalist demands. Nationalists, supported by certain politicians in the Republic, believed and argued that a Language Act was not only promised, as part of the Good Friday Agreement, but was integral to the entire peace process. But official recognition of Irish, let alone parity of esteem and legal standing, was anathema to many, if not most, loyalists. The framers of the Agreement intentionally and knowingly, it appears, fudged the issue as long as the violence ceased and peace held. That unresolved issue has dominated the cultural stage in the North. The “Troubles” may have concluded, but a long war of symbols and competing cultural traditions has been unceasing. In this cold cultural war, language is central. Irish, Gaelic, Erse, Ulster-Scots, English, Ullans, and “Leprechaun Language” serve as codes for identity that various factions manipulated to advance a particular agenda and curry favor with their base. Engaging in the “politics of hate”—drumming up “bloodsport” conflict with the opposing party—can be relied on to drive emotions and distract from social and economic issues. As language replaced religion as a marker of sectarian affiliation, the rights of Irish-speakers to interact with the State was at the heart of this conflict (see Image 7.4). These rights crystalized in legal courts where the issue of respect and rights were paramount. On numerous occasions, the legal system refused to recognize Irish or the rights of Irish-speakers, based on the Administration of Justice (Language) Act (Ireland) 1737 which forbids the use of any language but English, in court proceedings. While England, Scotland, and Wales had long abolished their versions of this Act, Northern Ireland maintained it, and in 2010, the Court of Appeal (Belfast) dismissed claims that the law was discriminatory or breached the European Convention on Human Rights (Irish Times n.p.). When Northern Ireland’s (Sinn Féin) Finance Minister Máirtín Ó Muilleoir challenged the law, he again met opposition from Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) leader Jim Allister, who claimed that multilingual court hearings would hinder the administration of justice.23 86

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Image 7.4 Dearg le Fearg Poster demanding an Irish Language Act Source: Courtesy of Dearg le Fearg

In 2006, Sinn Féin and the DUP signed the St. Andrew’s Agreement/Comhaontú Chill Rímhinn/St. Andra’s ‘Greement. For Sinn Féin, the DUP agreed to an Irish-language Act and subsequently failed to implement it; for the DUP, an Irish-Language Act was never conceded, let alone agreed. The amnesia became clear when Edwin Poots, a former Northern Ireland culture minister and health minister stated on BBC Radio Ulster in 2017 that the DUP at no point ever agreed to an Irish Language Act. Sinn Féin argued the opposite: an Irish-Language Act as part of the St. Andrews Agreement. Dermot Ahern, the Irish Foreign Affairs Minister, who helped to negotiate the Agreement, claimed the British government agreed to the legislation, but that the responsibility then transferred to Stormont: “there was a tacit understanding—an implicit understanding—that ultimately if they accepted the St Andrews agreement regime, they had to accept it all” (Ahern n.p.). Peter Robinson claimed that Tony Blair’s Labour government 87

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had “conned” Sinn Féin into believing that an Irish Language Act would be introduced. He believed that a reference was inserted into the Agreement at the very end of the talks and when queried, the Government responded that “the section had been carefully and deliberately worded. It was not an issue that should cause us any concern” (Breen 2017, n.p.). Instead, the Government agreed to “dilute any reference to the Irish language to a requirement for an Irish Language Strategy.” They also inserted an equal requirement for an Ulster-Scots Language and Culture Strategy. Yet, Annex B of the Agreement appears to state: The Government will introduce an Irish Language Act reflecting on the experience of Wales and Ireland and work with the incoming Executive to enhance and protect the development of the Irish language. (Agreement at St. Andrews, Annex B) The Government firmly believes in the need to enhance and develop the Ulster Scots language, heritage and culture and will support the incoming Executive in taking this forward. (Agreement at St. Andrews, Annex B) There are two wrinkles to this political contract. “Government” in this context refers to the British Government, not the DUP; and Westminster legislated for a language strategy which would ensure the “enhancement and protection of Irish and Ulster Scots language.” The legislation did not mention an Irish Language Act. The DUP signed an agreement, but did not agree to an Irish-language Act. The DUP was consistent and persistent in its opposition. A fact-check by TheJournal.ie found no mention in the House of Commons Library of a DUP commitment in Assembly debates, in Westminster debates, or in media reports at the time of St. Andrews or ever since. Opponents to the Act argue that unionist opposition to Irish is not due to Protestant bigotry or sectarianism. Unionists, wanting passionately to stay British, feel threatened and under siege. They resent Sinn Féin’s depiction of the DUP’s position on gay marriage, fundamentalism, and anti-scientific beliefs to portray unionism as prejudiced, bigoted, and antiquated. Repeated pandering to Sinn Féin, whom they blame for the Executive’s collapse, infuriates them. Sinn Féin, they argued, paid little price for a litany of IRA actions: spying at Stormont, the Castlereagh police station break-in, the Northern Bank heist, and the brutal murders of Robert McCartney and Kevin McGuigan. Such behavior, they attest, cannot be rewarded with a Language Act. Unionist fears curdle into resentment both at Dublin’s increased participation in Northern Ireland’s affairs and the threat of direct rule from Westminster.24 “Protestants believe the Irish language is used as a cultural wedge, and that legislation will make this worse” (Lowry n.p.). For some unionists, the Irish language is a dead language used provocatively, rather than spoken fluently, by those who killed and maimed the representatives of their State during the Troubles. It is the language of the other, a religious, cultural, and social other that threatens their cultural and political existence. It is “the incomprehensible, the sinister, and the secret . . . never a real language—rather, it was a treachery, a plot, and a Machiavellian political scheme of the disloyal and the dangerous” (Irvine n.p.). For the Traditional Unionist Voice, “No matter how it is deceptively packaged, the inescapable purpose of an Irish Language Act is to hollow out the Britishness of Northern Ireland. It is political in its intent” (TUV 2017, n.p.). Conversely, Sinn Féin wants a standalone piece of legislation to protect speakers—an Irish Language Act—so that “[s]peakers of Irish, be they speakers using the language in their home, in their schools or in the community, can no longer be treated as second class citizens” (Audley n.p.), but the DUP has long insisted it would only countenance new laws if they also incorporate 88

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other cultures, such as Ulster Scots. The existence of Gaelic-speaking Protestant loyalists in Scotland does nothing to undermine such deeply entrenched fears. Consequently, every penny spent on Irish is a corrupt waste of resources. But language attitude does not always align with political allegiances. Within the broad Loyalist/Unionist/Protestant community, individuals such as Linda Ervine, David Ervine’s sister-in-law,25 run Irish classes in the heart of unionist east Belfast. Her Turas program on the Newtownards Road currently has more than 150 people studying the language in 13 classes. On the other side, Ciarán Ó Coigligh, an Irish-language academic, rejected my forebears republicanism, nationalism, & socialism & joined the DUP, the only political party on the island of Ireland with Christian principles, supporting life, marriage, family, faith & the poor—na nithe is gaire do mo chroí/the things close to my heart. (Ó Coigligh n.p.) One school of thought argues that Sinn Féin had little interest in advancing the Irish language. Rather, the move for separate legislation came from the Irish-language sector, whose umbrella body in POBAL (1998–2019)26 began lobbying for an Irish Language Act in 2003.27 The SDLP introduced a private member’s Bill on the Irish language in 2009, but Sinn Féin did not attempt an Executive Bill until 2014. When Paul Givan, DUP Minister for Culture, crassly cut a £55,000 grant for funding for Líofa, an initiative that allowed people from disadvantaged areas to attend language courses in a Gaeltacht, it became clear that the decision was based on little more than intolerance and hatred (Economist). When Sinn Féin collapsed devolution in January 2017, activists repeatedly referred to this controversy. Despite the reversal of the funding cut, the initial decision came to epitomize the DUP’s “disrespect” for Irish and its speakers. That disrespect crystalized in 2017. When asked at the launch of her 2017 election campaign why the DUP, given its numerical strength, had not been more magnanimous in relation to an Irish Language Act, Arlene Foster, the first woman and the youngest person to lead Northern Ireland and the DUP, declared that she would never accede to an Irish Language Act. She then uttered the fateful words, “If you feed a crocodile it will keep coming back and looking for more” (McAdam n.p.).28 The comment played well with the Orange Order,29 but the crocodile comment is seen as the moment which energized nationalists’ voters and demands for an Irish Language Act. Memes, t-shirts, and full-sized costumes of crocodiles appeared everywhere. “It was a crass blunder: the sort of blunder that enraged a Sinn Féin voting base which hasn’t come out for years” (Kane n.p.). The result: the unionist majority gone; the gap between Sinn Féin and the DUP now a mere 1,200 votes; and a ten seat advantage reduced to one. Under pressure, Foster refused to stand aside to facilitate an investigation into her role in the botched green energy scheme, the Renewable Heat Incentive scandal. In 2017 Martin McGuinness, the terminally ill Deputy First Minister, resigned in protest after holding the post for nearly ten years, citing the failure to introduce legislation on the Irish language among his chief reasons. An Irish Language Act was now at the center of the Sinn Féin agenda. Whether by accident or design, the Act became a red line for both sides: Sinn Féin would not enter a power-sharing arrangement with the DUP without an Irish Language Act. The DUP would not countenance a Language Act. The cold war of antagonism, sniping, and cultural colonialism continued in the Assembly: Nationalists demanding, Unionists demeaning. The low point of such behavior appeared to be Gregory Campbell’s mocking of Sinn Féin politicians’ manner of addressing the Assembly Chairperson with the transliterated phrase:30 “Curry my yoghurt can coca coalyer,” mocking “Go raibh maith agat, Ceann Comhairle” (“Thank you, Chairperson”). Unrepentant, he 89

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promised to treat any proposed Irish Language Act “as no more than toilet paper” (Clarke n.p.). Widely decried and condemned for insulting language, language advocates argued that such actions would be considered racist if directed towards any other culture. Campbell refused to apologize and, in addition to death threats, received a one day suspension from the Assembly. Some hope of a compromise emerged in 2018 when Foster announced at the DUP conference, We recognise there are many in Northern Ireland who love the Irish language and for whom it is an intrinsic part of who they are . . . if we can find a way to craft language and culture laws that facilitates those who speak the language, but does not appropriately infringe on or threaten others, the DUP will not be found wanting . . . it is not incompatible to be an Irish language speaker and a unionist—indeed there might even be one or two here today. (Breen n.p.) A rumored compromise in February 2018 foundered when DUP leadership realized that their grassroots would not countenance it. The awareness that gay marriage—anathema to evangelical Protestants—and abortion—opposed by a significant percentage of Catholics and Protestants— would be legalized in Northern Ireland (NI), via direct rule, led to pressure to compromise, epitomized by Presbyterian leader Rev. Trevor Gribben declaring the Irish language is nothing to fear in my community. People have politicized it by saying ‘it’s a big demand’—it’s not. My fellow citizens, often many Roman Catholics, people from a nationalist background—the Irish language is precious to them .  .  . Abortion is more important—we should get back to our devolved settlement. (Gribben n.p.) Power-sharing talks resumed involving both parties, Northern Ireland Secretary Julian Smith and Republic of Ireland Tánaiste Simon Coveney. In January 2020, as the chaos of Brexit lurched into a realm of the unfathomable, Sinn Féin and the DUP reached a new agreement to restore Stormont. Under the heading “Language and tradition” the agreement included: 1 2 3 4 5

An Office of Identity and Cultural Expression “to celebrate and support all aspects of Northern Ireland’s rich cultural and linguistic heritage” A new Commissioner “to recognise, support, protect and enhance the development of the Irish language in Northern Ireland” A new Commissioner “to enhance and develop the language, arts and literature associated with the Ulster Scots/Ulster British tradition” Official recognition of both Irish and Ulster-Scots languages in Northern Ireland Any person can conduct their business in Irish or Ulster-Scots before the Assembly or one of its committees (2020 Northern Ireland Agreement/New Decade, New Approach 15–17)

The two-commissioner approach which put Irish on a legal par with English while protecting Ulster’s British culture was key to Stormont opening on January 11, 2020. As part of the deal, the 1737 Act was finally repealed.31 Not everyone was pleased. The provisions for bilingual signage and wider visibility, according to Conradh na Gaeilge, fell far short of that envisaged in the 2006 St. Andrews Agreement. The Orange Order noted the detailed list of measures to promote the Irish language, in contrast to Ulster Scots. The few references to Ulster Scots/Ulster-British culture, they complained, were 90

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ambiguous: they lacked meaningful detail or delivery mechanisms and threatened “[a]nyone who hopes to see their children or grandchildren employed and promoted in the Civil Service” (TUV 2019, n.p.). In reality, the challenges posed by Brexit and the December 12, 2019 election results drove the compromised agreement. Voters rejected the DUP and Sinn Féin in favor of the centrist Alliance party and the resurgent SDLP. The Tory Government no longer relied on the DUP, and English nationalism, as always, trumped British unity. Both parties need to be in power and to be seen to be governing in order to remain viable in the next round of elections. Irish and its speakers’ rights are recognized under Council of Europe treaties, the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, and the Framework Convention for National Minorities. But post-Brexit, these treaties no longer apply to Northern Ireland. The advantages accrued since 1998 could be undone.32 Equally, Foras na Gaeilge is a cross-border body responsible for funding Irish activities on the entire island of Ireland. Established by the Good Friday Agreement, it is unclear how such a cross-border body operates in a post-Brexit environment.33 Having “resolved” Acht na Teanga (Language Act), the focus in mid-January 2020 moved to Brexit. On January 16, RTÉ first reported a mysterious pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan in China called COVID-19 and the world entered “the first economic crisis of the Anthropocene” (Tooze n.p.). On July 26, 2020, with most people engrossed in the coils of COVID-19 surges, reopenings, and infection rates, politics in Northern Ireland returned to normalcy as Campbell took to social media. Referring to a BBC NI documentary about a suspected WW2 Nazi spy who had lived in Donegal and spoke Irish with a German accent, he said, “I vill not be tempted to ask vot is dis curried yoghurt mein herr” (Mullan). And so it is: normal service is resumed. The post-COVID-19, post-Brexit world is uncertain, but the problems besieging the Irish language North and South show no signs of abating. In the Republic, neoliberalism appears entrenched and likely to become more pernicious in the administration of social and cultural policies. The 2020 election and the emergence of Sinn Féin as the largest single party may pause the global capitalist advance, but will that be enough to save the Gaeltachtaí? In the North, old hatreds die slower than old habits. Stormont is up and running, but for how long? The wise men say that the remembrance of things past is all that we have for a future and the present moment is merely a preview of what is to come. In the decades to come, will the post 2020 period be considered post-COVID 19, post-Brexit, or post-Gaeltacht?

Notes 1 Gaeltachtaí (plural) rather than Gaeltacht (singular) is used frequently throughout this chapter as the various island, coastal, and inland districts differ in resources, size, and population just as the challenges and threats they face differ. Space does not allow for a discussion of urban Gaeltachtaí. 2 Currently the best overview of the Irish language remains Caoilfhionn Nic Phaidín & Seán Ó Cearnaigh’s edited volume, A New View of the Irish Language. For a history of the language see Aidan Doyle, A History of the Irish Language: From the Norman Invasion to Independence. For a useful guide to the attitudes toward Irish and Irish-speakers, see Colm Ó Broin, “I’ve Nothing Against Irish Speakers, But . . .” www.broadsheet.ie/2018/06/13/ive-nothing-against-irish-speakers-but/ 3 For more on this debate see Ó Riagáin. 4 See in particular, Éamonn Ó Cíosáin, Buried alive: A reply to Reg Hindley’s ‘The Death of the Irish Language’ and Joe Mac Donnacha, “The Death of a Language.” 5 In 1990, Breandán Ó hEithir allegedly stated in a report commissioned by Bord na Gaeilge that the number of native Irish speakers stood at 10,000 or there about. The report was suppressed and remains unpublished. Uinsionn Mac Dubhghaill, “10,000 cainteoirí dúchais fanta,” The Irish Times, May 8, 1991, p. 9. 6 See Ó Giollagáin. 7 Clare Cullen, “‘Dearg le fearg’ at Minister for Gaeltacht gan Gaeilge,” Irish Independent, July 16, 2014. McHugh, who chronicled his language journey in a radio documentary entitled “Fine Gaeilgeoir,” earned respect for his affability, honesty, and willingness to learn and make mistakes in public. Whether a 91

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8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19

20

21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28

29 30

31 32 33

genuine slight or a stroke of genius, McHugh’s “turas teanga” highlighted the linguistic reality for many politicians and citizens. For the purposes of this chapter, neoliberalism is understood as a set of overlapping political, economic, and philosophical commitments, rather than a precise ideology. Neoliberalists are free-market globalists and evangelists of the trade liberalization and commercial capitalism where the market decides policy and values. Its emphasis is on the individual rather than the collective, the consumer rather than society, and it embraces market-based solutions to social problems. See Walsh. For contrasting views, see Ó Coinn and Ó Liatháin. See Burns. For an overview of possible alternatives, see Ó Croidheáin. For an early version of this approach, as regards Comhdháil Náisiúnta na Gaeilge, see Ní Chinnéide and Ó Lochainn. See Kuttner. See Ó hÉallaithe, and de Barra. See Crouch. See Pollak. Michael D. Higgins, Éamon Ó Cuív, Seán Kyne, and Catherine Connolly are among the politicians who have argued coherently on behalf of rural Ireland and the dangers of a blanket acceptance of neoliberal thought. Nor is it a simple choice of good and evil. Neoliberalism is not good for minorities, rural Ireland, Gaeltachtaí, islands, culture or heritage, yet localization has benefitted both the Gaeltacht and the Irish-language sector (Ó Conchubhair 224–30). Nor are Irish-language communities any more immune to the power dynamics, social hierarchies, and racial and sexist discriminations than any other language community. Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s original slogan was “Is í an Ghaeilge athghabháil na hÉireann agus is í athghabháil na hÉireann slánú na Gaeilge.” The Irish language is the reconquest of Ireland and the reconquest of Ireland is the salvation of the Irish language. See McKendry. See Mac Ionnrachtaigh. See Preston. It may be possible that Unionists empathized with the Nationalist position in the twentieth century but that empathy was denied, neglected, rejected, and consequently channeled into something twisted and perverse, a fear of what could happen if roles were reversed. David Ervine: member of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) (an Ulster loyalist paramilitary group that led an armed campaign in NI), political thinker, and leader of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP). See Muller 2010, 2019. Emerson (2017). She subsequently claimed the crocodile remark was in relation to Sinn Féin and not in relation to the Irish Language Act. Mrs. Foster said it was “entirely wrong” to say her party did not support Irish, adding that £171 million had been spent on the language, including Irish-medium education. “I have always made it clear that if people want to converse or learn the Irish language then they should be allowed to do so and should be able to do so and indeed we have spent millions of pounds through the Executive.” (Staff Reporter n.p.). See Choyaa. In 1985, Campbell, an evangelical Protestant and avowed creationist, allegedly claimed that the AIDS scare then currently running through America is proof that homosexual practice is something that calls upon the curse of God. (O’Toole n.p.). Ironically in May 2020, Conall Patton, a “native” Irish-speaker from Derry, became the youngest Queen’s Counsel in London (McKinney n.p.). See Mac Giolla Chríost and Bonotti. See Mac Giolla Bhéin.

Works cited Agreement at St. Andrews. www.dfa.ie/media/dfa/alldfawebsitemedia/ourrolesandpolicies/northernireland/ st-andrews-agreement.pdf. 92

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Ahern, Dermot. “Irish Act ‘agreed’at St. Andrews.”BBC, October 8, 2017.www.bbc.com/news/uk-northernireland-politics-41542746. Audley, Fiona. “Irish Language Battle Resurfaces as Power-Sharing Talks Resume in Northern Ireland.” Irish Post, January 6, 2020. Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood. New Directions. (1937) 1961. “Belfast Court Upholds Ban on Irish.” Irish Times, June 2, 2010. Bradley, Finbarr. Meon Gaelach, Aigne Nualaíoch. Coiscéim, 2011. Breen, Suzanne. “Tony Blair deceived Sinn Féin on Irish language at St. Andrews, Says Ex-DUP Chief Robinson.” Belfast Telegraph, June 28, 2017. Breen, Suzanne. “DUP Olive Branch to Nationalists on Irish Language.” Belfast Telegraph, October 28, 2019. Burns, John. “Comhar Faces Grant Cut and the End of Its Print Edition.” The Sunday Times, September 15, 2019. Clarke, Liam. “Gregory Campbell’s Toilet Humour More Suited to Playground Than Party Conference.” Belfast Telegraph, November 26, 2014. www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/archive/liam-clarke/ gregory-campbells-toilet-humour-more-suited-to-playground-than-party-conference-30775446.html. Coyaa. “The Orange Order’s Complex Relationship with the Irish Language . . .” January 12, 2020. https:// sluggerotoole.com/2020/01/12/the-orange-orders-complex-relationship-with-the-irish-language/# more-127815. Cronin, Michael. An Ghaeilge san aois nua/Irish in the New Century. Cois Life Teo, 2005. Cronin, Michael. An Ghaeilge agus an Éiceolaíocht/Irish and Ecology. Foilseacháin Ábhair Spioradálta, 2019. Crouch, Colin. The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism. Polity, 2011. Cullen, Clare. “‘Dearg le fearg’ at Minister for Gaeltacht gan Gaeilge.” Irish Independent, July 16, 2014. De Barra, Caoimhín. Gaeilge: A Radical Revolution. Currach Books, 2019. Department of Education and Skills Press Release, December 30, 2019. www.gov.ie/en/press-release/ 3eacb0-minister-mchugh-announces-plan-to-double-number-of-students-in-irish/. Doyle, Aidan. A History of the Irish Language: From the Norman Invasion to Independence. Oxford University Press, 2015. The Economist. “The Lighting of a Fire: The Role of the Irish Language in Northern Ireland’s Deadlock.” The Economist, April 12, 2017. www.economist.com/britain/2017/04/12/the-role-of-the-irish-languagein-northern-irelands-deadlock. Emerson, Newton. “Sinn Féin Has Never Wanted an Irish Language Act.” Irish Times, July 6, 2017. Grenoble, L.A. and Whaley, L.J. “Toward a Typology of Language Endangerment.” Endangered Languages: Language Loss and Community Response. Edited by L.A. Grenoble and L.J. Whaley. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 22–54. Gribben, Trevor. “Presbyterian Leader Wants Unionists to Drop Irish Language Red Lines to Stop Abortion Legalisation.” Belfast Telegraph, September 30, 2019. www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/ northern-ireland/presbyterian-leader-wants-unionists-to-drop-irish-language-red-lines-to-stop-abortionlegalisation-38546588.html. Higgins, Michael D. “Óráid an Uachtaráin ag Féasta 100—Ceiliúradh Athbheochan na Gaeilge.” Double Tree Hilton, Ballsbridge, Dublin, Decemebr 3, Nollaig 2016. Holborow, Marnie. “Language, Ideology and Neoliberalism.” Journal of Language and Politics, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2007, pp. 51–73. Hull, Dan. “Funding and Governance Arrangements for the Irish Language Voluntary Sector: Recent Developments and Background Information.” Research and Library Service Briefing Paper, 187. www. niassembly.gov.uk/globalassets/documents/raise/publications/2010/culture-arts-leisure/18710.pdf. “Insider.” “What the Gaeltacht Civil Rights Movement Can still Teach Us Today.” Galway Advertiser, March 28, 2019. www.advertiser.ie/galway/article/106627/what-the-gaeltacht-civil-rights-movement-canstill-teach-us-today. Irvine, Richard. “We Protestants Fear Gaelic, and We Were Raised to Mock It.” Irish Examiner, February 21, 2018. Journal.ie.“FactCheck: Did the DUP Really Never Commit to an Irish Language Act? January 28, 2017, www.thejournal.ie/factcheck-irish-language-act-3209218-Jan2017/ Kane, Alex. “Crocodile Bites Arlene Foster back.” Irish News, March 6, 2017. Kirby, Peadar. Todhchaí d’Éirinn: Pobal, Féinmheas, Teanga. Coiscéim 2004. Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Picador. 2008. Kuttner, Robert. “Neoliberalism: Political Success, Economic Failure.” The American Prospect, June 25, 2019. https://prospect.org/economy/neoliberalism-political-success-economic-failure/. 93

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Little, Ivan. “David Ervine’s Sister-in-Law Linda Hits Out at DUP Diehards over Attitude to Irish Language.” Belfast Telegraph, January 13, 2017. Lowry, Ben. “Why We Unionists Are So against the Introduction of an Irish Language Act.” Irish News, February 26, 2018. Mac Donnacha, Joe. “The Death of a Language.” Dublin Review of Books, Vol. 123, June 2020. Mac Dubhghaill, Uinsionn. “10,000 cainteoiri duchais fanta.” The Irish Times, May 8, 1991, p. 9. Mac Giolla Bhéin, Ciarán. “Brexit and the Irish Language.” August 12, 2019. https://thedetail.tv/articles/ brexit-and-the-irish-language. Mac Giolla Chríost, Diarmait and Matteo Bonotti, Eds. Brexit, Language Policy and Linguistic Diversity. Springer, 2018. Mac Risteaird, Seán. An Teacht Amach Aniar: Collaíocht, Corp agus Rúin i Saothair Liteartha. Mac Ionnrachtaigh, Fergal. Language, Resistance and Revival. Pluto Press, 2013. McAdam, Noel. “Arlene Foster’s ‘Feed the Crocodiles’ Snap Could Come Back to Bite Her.” Belfast Telegraph, February 7, 2017. Mac Risteaird, Seán. “Coming Out, Queer Sex, and Heteronormativity in Two Irish-Language Novels.” Studi irlandesi: A Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 10, No. 10, 2020, pp. 63–75. Mac Síomóin, Tomás. Ó Mhársa Go Magla. Straitéis nua don Ghaeilge. Coiscéim 2006. Mac Síomóin, Tomás. The Broken Harp: Identity and Language in Modern Ireland. CreateSpace. 2014. Madron, Roy. “Neoliberalism, George Monbiot and an Alternative Theory of Everything,” April 24, 2016. https://medium.com/@ROY_MADRON/neoliberalism-george-monbiot-and-an-alternative-theoryof-everything-4de09111b537. McHugh, Joe. “Fine Gaeilgeoir.” Produced by Sara Blake. Broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1, July 25, 2015. McKendry, Eugene. “Celtic Languages in Education in the United Kingdom’s Devolved Jurisdictions of Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland.” Studia Celtica Fennica XIV, 2017, pp. 113–128. McKinney, Séamus. “Irish language speaker appointed London Queen’s Counsel.” Irish News, May 15, 2020. Mac Risteaird, Seán. “An Teacht Amach Aniar: Collaíocht, Corp agus Rúin i Saothair Liteartha Mhichíl Uí Chonghaile.” Irisleabhar Mhá Nuad, 2018. Monbiot, George. How Did We Get into This Mess? Politics, Equality, Nature. Verso, 2017. Monbiot, George. “Neoliberalism: The Ideology at the Root of All Our Problems.” The Guardian, April 15, 2016. www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot. Moriarty, Máiréad. Globalizing Language Policy and Planning: An Irish Language Perspective. Springer, 2015. Mullan, Kevin. “DUP MP Gregory Campbell Criticised for Making ‘curried yoghurt mein herr’ Joke about Irish Language.” July 28, 2020. www.derryjournal.com/news/politics/dup-mp-gregory-campbell-criticised-making-curried-yoghurt-mein-herr-joke-about-irish-language-2925973. Muller, Janet. Language and Conflict in Northern Ireland and Canada: A Silent War. Springer, 2010. Muller, Janet. “What Does Pobal’s Closure Say about the State of Irish Language Provision?” Belfast Telegraph, April 12, 2019. Nic Eoin, Máirín. Trén bhFearann Breac: An Díláithriú Cultúir agus Nualitríocht na Gaeilge. Cois Life, 2013. Nic Eoin, Máirín. “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Transnational Irish-Language Writing.”Breac, April 12, 2013. https://breac.nd.edu/articles/interdisciplinary-perspectives-on-transnational-irish-language-writing-2/ Ní Chinnéide, Máiréad and Aonghus Ó Lochainn. Scéal Chomhdháil Náisiúnta na Gaeilge. LeabhairComhar, 2018. Nic Phaidín, Caoilfhionn and Seán Ó Cearnaigh. A New View of the Irish Language. Cois Life, 2008. Northern Ireland Agreement/New Decade, New Approach. 2020. www.dfa.ie/media/dfa/newsmedia/pressrelease/New-Decade-New-Approach.pdf. Ó hAoláin, P. “Regional Development and the Role of Údarás na Gaeltachta.” Economy, Society and Peripherality: Experiences from the West of Ireland. Edited by J. McDonagh. Arlen House, 2009, pp. 23–36. Ó Broin, Colm. “I’ve Nothing against Irish Speakers, But .  .  .” June 13, 2018. www.broadsheet. ie/2018/06/13/ive-nothing-against-irish-speakers-but/. Ó Ceallaigh, Ben. Neoliberalism and Language Shift: The Great Recession and the Sociolinguistic Vitality of Ireland’s Gaeltacht, 2008–18, PhD thesis, the University of Edinburgh, 2019. Ó Cíosáin, Éamonn. Buried Alive: A Reply to Reg Hindley’s “The Death of the Irish Language.” Dáil Uí Chadhain, 1991. Ó Coigligh, Ciarán. @ctaoc “Explaining an enigma. Dúcheist dá réiteach.” Tweet 8:10 AM, August 1, 2020. Ó Coinn, Seán. “Twenty Years after the Good Friday Agreement, the Irish Language Sector Is in Better Health Than Ever.” Belfast Telegraph, May 13, 2019.

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Ó Conchubhair, Brian. “The Global Diaspora and the ‘New’ Irish (Language).” A New View of the Irish Language. Edited by Caoilfhionn Nic Pháidín and Seán Ó Cearnaigh. Dublin, Cois Life, 2008, pp. 224–248. Ó Croidheáin, Caoimhghin. Language from Below: The Irish Language, Ideology and Power in 20th-Century. Peter Lang, 2006. Ó hEaghra, Breandán. “Gaeilgeoir Deireanach Charna.” Jude, Gaeilgeoir Deireanach Charna & Incubus. Edietd by Micheál Ó Conghaile. Cló Iar-Chonnacht, 2007. Ó hÉallaithe, Donncha. “12 moladh do chlár rialtais a dhéanfadh leas na Gaeilge agus na Gaeltachta.” Ó hÉallaithe, Donncha. “12 moladh do chlár rialtais a dhéanfadh leas na Gaeilge agus na Gaeltachta.” Tuairisc.ie, June 11, 2020. https://tuairisc.ie/12-moladh-do-chlar-rialtais-a-dheanfadh-leas-na-gaeilgeagus-na-gaeltachta. Ó Giollagáin, Conchúr. “Why Irish Language May Soon Be a Celtic Myth.”Irish Independent, October 31, 2012. Ó Laoire, Lillis. “Murder in a Meadow: Environmental and Cultural Extinction in Cathal Ó Searcaigh’s ‘Scrúdú Coinsiasa Roimh Dhul Chun Suain’.” From Ego to Eco. Brill Rodopi, 2017, pp. 112–134. Ó Laoire, Lillis. “Artists as Workers in the Rural: Precarious Livelihoods, Sustaining Rural Futures.” Journal of Rural Studies, Vol. 63, 2018, pp. 271–279. Ó Liatháin, Concubhar. “Showdown at the Cultúrlann.” February 6, 2014. https://sluggerotoole.com/2014/02/ 06/showdown-at-the-culturlann/ Ó Riagáin, Pádraig. Language Policy and Social Reproduction: Ireland 1893–1993. Oxford University Press, 1997. O’Rourke, Bernadette and John Walsh. New Speakers of Irish in the Global Context: New Revival? Routledge, 2020. Ó Scolaí, Darach. Coinneáil Orainn. Leabhar Breac, 2005. Ó Scolaí, Darach. An Braon Aníos. Leabhar Breac, 2007. O’Toole, Fintan. “Fire and Brimstone.” Magill, November 13, 1985. Pollak, Sorcha. “Move over Ring and Dingle: The Pop-Up Gaeltacht Is Here.”Irish Times, September 25, 2017. www.irishtimes.com/culture/move-over-ring-and-dingle-the-pop-up-gaeltacht-is-here-1.3232314. Preston, Allan. “Ó Muilleoir Wants to End 279-Year-Old Ban on Irish in Courts in Northern Ireland.” Belfast Telegraph, December 16, 2016. Staff Reporter. “Arlene Foster ‘Regrets’ Comparing Sinn Féin to a Crocodile.” Irish News, March 10, 2017. Tooze, Adam. “‘We Are Living through the First Economic Crisis of the Anthropocene.” The Guardian, May 7, 2020. TUV. “TUV Publish Document Spelling Out Dangers of Irish Language Act.” September 5, 2017. http:// tuv.org.uk/tuv-publish-document-spelling-out-dangers-of-irish-language-act/. TUV. “Why Irish Language Legislation Remains Unacceptable.” July 2, 2019. https://tuv.org.uk/whyirish-language-legislation-remains-unacceptable/. Walsh, John. Contests and Contexts: The Irish Language and Ireland’s Socio-Economic Development. Peter Lang, 2010. Woods, Jeannine. “Aithníonn queeróg queeróg eile: Gaeilgeoirí aeracha aontaithe agus gluaiseacht chomhaimseartha na Gaeilge.” Irish Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 3, 1998, pp. 41–59.

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8 The great normalization Success, failure and change in contemporary Ireland Eoin O’Malley

The puzzle of Ireland In the three decades from the early 1990s, Ireland underwent a remarkable transformation. The economy grew at breakneck speed, with employment almost doubling. What had been a country of emigration became one of immigration. The physical appearance of Ireland changed radically, as its roads infrastructure was improved, urban retail areas became more internationalized, and parts of Dublin city saw the growth of urban quarters that looked much wealthier, more cosmopolitan, more European. The people on the streets were different too; where it was once unusual to see anyone who was not white Irish, the population became much more diverse. Ireland became less Catholic, as mass attendance which had been at near universal levels, fell markedly from the early 1990s. This was accompanied by equally remarkable changes in social attitudes, where there was a significant liberalization of views towards issues such as marriage, homosexuality, and abortion. Ireland elected Mary Robinson as president in 1990, and she was unusual not just in her sex, but also her more liberal attitudes and engagement with issues that Ireland had tended to ignore. One issue that Irish politics had tended to ignore in practical terms was Northern Ireland. Despite the rhetoric about reunification of the island, little was ever done. This changed in the 1980s, culminating in the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement, signed in 1998. So Ireland also saw a partial resolution of the conflict in Northern Ireland, which had caused the deaths of over 3,000 people, and the formation of a newly devolved assembly in Belfast and the formation of a government that included erstwhile enemies. Mary McAleese, a second woman president and one from Northern Ireland, spoke in 2003 of Ireland: “If the men and women of Ireland’s past could choose a time to live, there would be a long queue for this one. It is far from perfect but it is as good as it has ever been” (7 May 2003). This was not just a politician selling her country; a number of measures, for instance, The Economist “quality of life” index, put Ireland at or near the top of places to live. As dramatic as those changes were, the even more spectacular collapse in the economy in 2008 saw Ireland enter a lending program, which in theory severely circumscribed the ability of government to make decisions. The accompanying social ill-effects, increased unemployment, emigration, and the physical scars on the landscape of unfinished Ghost estates, would have made people wonder if the earlier Tiger period was purely illusory. It was not, but some of 96

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the more eye-catching statistics said more about the data gathering than they did about Ireland. Because Ireland is so exposed to capital movements by large multinational corporations (MNCs) instead of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the Irish Central Statistics Office (CSO) developed and now uses an adjusted measure of national productivity, GNI*, which strips out much of the income that might give an incorrect impression of Irish growth. This was especially evident in the uplift in the Irish economy from about 2013, including in 2015 which saw a growth rate of 23%, simply due to the moving to Ireland of assets in the aircraft leasing industry, of which Ireland is a leader. Ireland’s remarkable bounce back made it appear a poster child for austerity,1 but it quickly led to warnings of Ireland entering another boom-and-bust cycle. What the crash did establish, however, was that Ireland found a new equilibrium, and there was no sense of Ireland falling back to where it was before the Celtic Tiger. That was until the COVID-19 crisis, which led to a massive uplift in unemployment on a scale never seen before. Irish politics changed in that there was the fragmentation of the party system and increasing evidence of a left/right divide emerging. The dominance of the two largest parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, was threatened, but until 2020 they remained the two largest parties, if now joined by a plethora of other small parties on the left. Ireland avoided the populism poisoning much of Europe’s politics, and there was a more muted reaction to austerity than occurred in other so-called PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain). The election in February 2020 saw Sinn Féin join the two now medium-sized parties in what was surely the complete breakdown of the old established order. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael’s attempt to form a coalition might cement a more normal class-based politics. The start of power-sharing administrations in Northern Ireland, including at one stage erstwhile enemies, Rev. Ian Paisley and former IRA leader Martin McGuinness, (non-ironically) getting the epithet the “Chuckle Brothers” and becoming First and Deputy First Ministers, respectively, was never followed by reconciliation between the two communities there. By the late 2010s relations at the elite level had soured, only to be made worse by Brexit. In the Republic, talk of a united Ireland, once the preserve of extremists, entered mainstream debate. Ireland’s rise, crash, and return suggests discrete periods. If we tend to think of history occurring in phases, the Celtic Tiger seems to have had a sharp end in September 2008. The narrative is then Celtic Tiger went from about 1994 to 2008. Then was the Great Recession, until about 2013, followed by the Celtic Phoenix—Ireland’s remarkable recovery. But it would be more accurate to think of it all as one period, starting about 1987. The ebb and flow of the economic performance and thus migration patterns are cycles within a period of Ireland’s economic expansion, liberalization, and peace building that we might call the Great Normalization. For as much as Ireland changed, much of the change merely made the country look like a normal western European country—wealthy, secular, and peaceful. The puzzle, then, is how did Ireland get there? It could be that Ireland simply “caught up”; that it finally converged with the normal performance of a European economy. Of course this begs the question, why did it happen when it happened, and why did Ireland take so long? Why was Ireland subject to such violent swings in fortune? Much of the intellectual commentary on Ireland has tended to answer that with a view that is dismissive of Irish elites and culture; Ireland became successful due to luck, or despite corruption, the efforts of the Irish elite and culture to “prevent the future.”2 I will argue here that, in fact, the successes, failures, and changes that have taken place in this period of Great Normalization can be attributed to political decisions made in Ireland, and specifically the political and economic context in which decisions were made (though the importance of random luck should never be discounted). The country’s recovery from that collapse, for instance, can be seen as primarily a result of political forces, whereby the political 97

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system “corrected itself ” following its earlier excesses. As well as (in part) making them, politics also interacts with other social phenomena, and politics has been impacted by the economic performance and demographic and social changes. This chapter will trace the arc of the social, economic, and political performance in Ireland from 1987 to 2020 but concentrate more on the period from 2008 when Ireland, faced with economic collapse, reacted in a more moderate—some might say supine—way than other countries. It will review the literature on the nature of the collapse, the political and economic response, and ask (if not fully answer) questions on, for instance, why Ireland chose to take the austerity path with such alacrity, whether it worked, and why some issues, such as water charges, provoked such strong reactions. Furthermore, the chapter will set out the radical changes in Irish society, not least the liberalization of attitudes, the changing face of the Irish people, and the physical space that Ireland, Brexit, and what that means for Ireland. Throughout that, we will look at the impact of and on politics.

Economy and economic performance In the 1980s, the Irish economic performance was such that while few if any explicitly questioned whether independence was a failure, the inference in many writings was that had the question been posed the answer would have to be “Yes.”3 Ireland was mired in a debt crisis, with high unemployment and high wage inflation, which had no obvious politically available solution. It was portrayed in The Economist in 1988 as the “Poorest of the Rich.” Yet within a decade, Ireland made a remarkable and seemingly permanent turnaround. The figures are now as well-known as they are eye-watering. Employment almost doubled, unemployment dropped from over 18% to about 4%, and annual growth rates averaged at about five percent, about twice the European Union (EU) average. (It had averaged just 0.2% in the five years up to 1988, which given the inflation rate meant that Ireland’s economy was contracting.) GDP went from about two-thirds the EU15 average to 120% of the average in 2003. Public debt went from 109% of GDP to 25% in 2007. Economists’ explanations for the Celtic Tiger tend to be dry and unsatisfactory. They rely on improvements in concepts such as Total Factor Productivity and ask whether such improvements “are due to workers using more machinery or other factors of production and how much is due to a more efficient use of existing factors of production” (Wycherley 187–8). These measure progress but do not explain it. Frequently cited explanations4 include the introduction of the European single market, the availability of an educated workforce, wage stability and industrial peace, foreign direct investment, and increased investment in research. With the exception of the opening up of the EU single market, these were either already available or might be thought of as correlates of growth rather than potential causes. For instance, why did so many companies choose to invest in Ireland in this period but not earlier? We can probably place the conception of the economic Celtic Tiger at political decisions made in 1987, but other earlier decisions, such as the introduction of free education and the decision to join the EEC, were also necessary causal conditions. In 1987, a new Irish government under Charles J. Haughey introduced Social Partnership. This was, on the face of it, a wage bargaining process, but it reached far beyond that into fiscal and industrial policy. Unions were primed to support this plan—as it brought them into the decision-making tent and offered favorable tax changes in return for wage restraint. This immediately reduced industrial unrest. But with it came fiscal retrenchment, so cutbacks in government spending reduced the need for borrowing. This increased confidence that the Irish state was now serious in dealing with its problems of debt and wage inflation, which encouraged private investment. The government 98

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pushed hard to increase employment in existing industries and to encourage foreign investment.5 For instance, there was a strategy for commercializing agriculture by increasing the valueadded in agriculture, marketing Irish food abroad, and through the privatization of agricultural cooperatives. Ireland got lucky too. Ireland’s geography had always been a problem. Its relative isolation as an island behind an island at the edge of Europe meant that economically it was essentially a region of the UK, even after independence. Transporting heavy industrial goods was prohibitively expensive. The opening up of the European single market in 1992 and increased globalization coincided with Ireland now being able to skip that industrialization phase and go straight to high-tech growth with lighter industry in pharmaceuticals and the IT sector. Ireland was particularly well positioned to attract investment from US MNCs wanting to establish a European base, especially given Ireland’s cultural connections, shared language and legal systems, and the low corporate tax rate (Donovan and Murphy). There were then agglomeration effects, with companies choosing to locate where others had located. By the 2010s, the relatively new social media companies such as Twitter and Facebook headquartered their European operations in Dublin, and an area of Dublin became known as Googletown. The positive news about the economic growth and increased employment had some negative side effects that the state failed to deal with. House prices doubled between 1995 and 2000 and doubled again between 2000 and 2006. After 2000, much of the continued economic growth was related to the financialization of property (Ó Riain). Normally an economy that is booming will have high interest rates to act as a brake on growth, but as a result of European Monetary Union in 1999, the cost of borrowing money became very cheap. Irish banks could borrow money at low rates and in turn they lent freely to property developers and to those who wanted to buy homes. Household debt went from €72 billion in 2003 to a peak of €203bn in 2008. There was little to stop this lending as the Irish government was ideologically attached to competition as a solution to most problems. It therefore refused to intervene when banks offered 100% loan-to-value mortgages, which had the effect of increasing house process as consumers were able to borrow more and more (FitzGerald). In addition, the state had in place a huge number of tax breaks designed to encourage property development. Easy money was not only available to banks and borrowers. The state took in record tax revenues, and the low unemployment and relatively young demographic profile of the population meant that the pressure on social spending was low. Social Partnership, which had helped kick start economic growth, was now delivering big pay raises for public sector workers. This was done under the pretext that the public sector should keep up with the private sector, but it failed to recognize the security and superior pensions available to public sector workers. Indeed, one analysis showed that the public sector “premium”—the extra reward a public sector worker would receive, controlling for experience, education, etc.—doubled between 2003 and 2006 from 10% to over 20% (Kelly et al.). Some opposition politicians complained that Social Partnership was usurping the role of the Dáil and cabinet in running the country, and it was unclear that the public was getting any improvement in public services in return for the increased pay to public sector workers. What it did do, however, was help the Fianna Fáil-led government receive a third consecutive election victory. The 2007 election was more closely run that the previous election, with Bertie Ahern appearing lethargic during the campaign. He managed to secure a governing majority, however, with support from the Green Party and the two remaining Progressive Democrat TDs, a party which had long been a cheerleader for tax cuts but after 2002 had been incapable or unwilling to demand control of public spending. Much of the debate during the election was about Ahern’s 99

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private finances, which were at best unorthodox, rather than the state’s finances, which though healthy on paper were vulnerable to economic shocks. On some measures the property and constructions sectors accounted for almost a quarter of Irish economic activity in 2006.6 Most of the political class was unable or unwilling to countenance that the boom would not continue as it had for over a decade (Casey 20). The banking sector too seemed willfully ignorant of the risks it was taking.7 Before that election, a former chief economist of the Central Bank of Ireland set out why a recession was inevitable (Casey 2007), and an academic economist, Morgen Kelly (2006), warned of the consequences of a rapid fall in property prices. In 2008, the “credit crunch”—a sudden reduction in the availability of credit—put the Irish banks under severe pressure, as they had borrowed money on short-terms but lent it out at much longer terms. Its creditors wanted their money, but the banks had no alternative sources. Rising interest rates squeezed household disposable income in Ireland. The property sector went into freefall, and construction workers were laid off. This created in Ireland a “five-part crisis,” banking, economic, fiscal, social, and reputational (NESC). As the banking sector suffered, this impacted on the broader economic performance leading to increased unemployment, which in turn had impacts on Ireland’s fiscal position and had negative societal effects. The sharp nature of the crash also damaged Ireland’s reputation. Bertie Ahern defended Ireland’s management of the economy, suggesting that an open economy like Ireland’s could not withstand “a global recession and the collapse of the global investment banking system” (quoted in Fiach Kelly, 2015), but more disinterested observers found that while “Ireland’s banking crisis bears the clear imprint of global influences, yet it was in crucial ways ‘home-made’” (Regling and Watson 5). Indeed, there is much more consensus about the causes of the crash: the formation of a property and construction bubble fueled by reckless lending, allowed by loose financial regulation, and all aided by pro-cyclical government spending (Roche et al.). The impact on the economy was swift and dramatic. Unemployment doubled in two years and had trebled within four years. Emigration returned and GDP growth went into reverse. The economic crisis was initially a middle-class problem, as those who had been very comfortable suddenly weren’t. The poorest in society were protected by the automatic stabilizers of the welfare state, which unlike in other European countries, such as Greece, continued to be paid and were reasonably generous. Table 8.1 shows that initially it was the wealthiest in society who were most dissatisfied with the economic performance. But tellingly four years later, after the full force of the government’s austerity policies had been felt, the wealthy were once again satisfied the economy was picking up, whereas the poorest sections of society failed to feel this in such significant numbers. But almost all in Irish society were forced to change their habits as a result of the recession. What had become for many middle-class norms, such as foreign holidays and weekends away, were now more limited or cut out altogether. A German diplomat had noted, at the end of the Celtic Tiger, that cars on Irish roads were usually less than three years old, compared to an average of eight or nine years in Germany. True or not, new car sales had risen greatly in the boom and fell completely in the bust. Claudy et al. (2017) outline data that shows that people tended to go out less and changed shopping habits, and they report that many respondents found that Ireland Table 8.1 Class and satisfaction with the economy over time Decile/Year

2010

2014

1st and 2nd (poorest) deciles “extremely dissatisfied” (0–2 on 0–10 scale) 9th and 10th (wealthiest) deciles “extremely dissatisfied” (0–2 on 0–10 scale)

53.2% 61.6%

33.1% 7.5%

Source: European Social Survey, Rounds 5 and 7

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became more friendly, and that there was a renewed sense of community during austerity. This is consistent with a lot of research that finds times of adversity tend to bring people together. The reaction to the crisis was just as swift and dramatic. Most Irish banks were basically insolvent, and Ireland decided on a massive bank bailout, whereby the banks’ private debts were socialized. This made the state liable for €440 billion in banks debts, twice the Irish annual GDP. Ireland set up a “bad bank” (NAMA) that assumed many of the non-performing loans from the banks’ balance sheets and allowed all but Anglo-Irish Bank to continue trading. Estimates of the final cost of the bailout vary, but a recent ofcial estimate was about €40 billion. The bank bailout and the necessary increase in state spending was only possible with the help of a lending program with the EU, the European Central Bank (ECB), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—the so-called Troika agreed in December 2010. Ireland was put under pressure to accept the program, under threat that the ECB would effectively bankrupt the Irish banks and hence the Irish state. Attempts at sharing the burden with the banks’ creditors were rejected by the ECB. It caused some unhappiness at the EU position, though this never really affected the broadly positive sentiment towards EU membership. The lending program was portrayed in the media as a “day of surrender,” suggesting it represented a complete loss of sovereignty, with the plaintiff question “Was it for this?” asked, invoking independence.8 The lending program required Ireland to increase existing and impose new taxes, reduce spending, especially by cutting back on the public sector pay bill, to recapitalize banks, reduce the minimum wage, and reform sheltered professions, such as the law and medicine. The Fianna Fáil-led government collapsed under the pressure of public disaffection, and an election in February 2011 saw Fianna Fáil cease to be the largest party for the first time since the 1920s. The newly elected Irish government was a coalition of Fine Gael and Labour. It had the largest majority in Ireland’s history, but arguably the toughest job any Irish government faced. The Troika was sent in to oversee the adjustments in spending, though there appear to be few instances where the government was forced into specific cuts in spending that it had not suggested. Fianna Fáil, now decimated and the main opposition party, was not in a position to object to the austerity measures being imposed. It was then left to a growing Sinn Féin and a number of smaller left-wing parties to express alternatives to austerity. But it was unclear that any real alternatives actually existed. Ireland had no money, with debt reaching over 100% of the GDP. There was no support in northern Europe for fiscal transfers to the countries most affected by the Great Recession. In Germany, the sense was that these were countries that borrowed too freely in good times. That a cause of the problem was that German banks had lent so freely at rates that suited the sluggish German economy but not the booming peripheral ones was ignored. Many eminent economists suggested a growth policy; however, it was not clear how such a policy could be funded, unless by international institutions, as the market was not willing to let Ireland borrow. So Ireland was stuck with austerity. Ireland emerged from the lending program in March 2013. It might have been a great victory for the government, and in particular Taoiseach Enda Kenny. But even though the economy had slowly started to recover, with unemployment trending downward, recessionary budgets continued, with further cutbacks to public services. This may account for the results in Table 8.1. In delivering austerity with alacrity, Ireland was able to recover its reputation relatively quickly, but whether austerity was the reason for the recovery is moot. Ireland to some extent has a dual economy (hence the need for GNI*). There is a domestic economy, which was driven by the construction and property boom, but there is the FDI-based economy, which trades internationally and has low, if any, exposure to the Irish economy. So while the international tech and pharma sectors were affected by the slowdown in the world economy in 2008, they recovered reasonably quickly. 101

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There is some controversy as to whether Ireland is a tax haven for these companies, paying very low rates of corporation tax (much lower than the headline rate of 12.5%) but not really adding much value in the country. The rates reported in the Apple case that was taken by the European Commission were vanishingly small. Given 230,000 people work in FDI-related companies, the activities of these companies in Ireland are more than just tax avoidance. But though the Commission found that Apple should repay Ireland €13 billion in tax, and Ireland was opposed to this, the tax statuses of these companies so far have failed to become a political issue. There was a sense that Ireland was benefiting from their being here. Being an open and globalized economy meant that the economy could recover when the world economy had, and it meant that though many of the indicators of economic progress pointed in the right direction, it was possible that the domestic economy picked up at a much slower rate than the figures suggested. For this reason, some of the austerity measures caused controversy even after the Troika Economic Adjustment Programme had ended. As part of that program, Ireland was required to introduce taxes on carbon and property and to institute charges for water. The first two were relatively uncontroversial; the first because it was introduced in name only, and the second because it was low and affected the middle class the most. Bringing in water charges, however, became politically incendiary in 2014, not long after Irish Water—a company to manage the water supply—was set up. The installation of water meters caused the first mass protests in the recession Ireland. Quite why nothing else had is moot, but one explanation for the relative acquiescence with austerity is that unlike in other parts of Europe, the Irish state continued to work effectively. The social welfare system offered an automatic stabilizer, ensuring that the economy did not collapse and allowing people to maintain a relatively good standard of living—Irish unemployment assistance rates are among the highest in the EU. The government took measures to ensure that there were almost no evictions from homes because of an inability to pay housing-associated debts. Generally the state did a good job of protecting the worst off. This explanation seems more plausible than cultural explanations, as Ireland had seen mass protests, even spilling over into violence during the Troubles, or demographic ones, as Greece had similar levels of youth emigration (Pappas and O’Malley). Although social partnership was ended in 2010, Irish unions remained part of the mainstream in Irish society. The protests on water charges were large, and at times threatened to spill over into violence, but they never came close to being “the Irish Occupy, the Irish ‘Spring’, or the crumbling of the Berlin Wall,” as some commentary hoped (Hearne n.p.). Good policing methods, which compare favorably to those in Greece, and an effective state ensured that this did not happen. But the local elections in 2014 emphasized water charges and pushed more mainstream parties to opposition to the water charges, which were then withdrawn after the general election of 2016. That election failed to produce a clear winner. Fine Gael ran on the slogan “Keep the Recovery Going,” but it seemed that many people had failed to feel the recovery. It remained the largest party but lost a lot of support to Fianna Fáil, which recovered to become the second largest party. Labour was punished for its part in the government, possibly because it had overpromised in 2011 at how it might avoid austerity. It took 70 days to agree a Fine Gael-led minority government, supported by Fianna Fáil, which agreed to abstain on key votes. It was a remarkably stable government, especially given the political unrest in other countries at the time.

Migration and demography The growing economy created new pressures. Homelessness rose dramatically, as many people were forced out of private rented accommodation. The state spent large amounts on social housing but usually in the form of subsidizing private rents, which arguably made the problem worse 102

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by putting upward pressure on rents. Part of the reason for the increased rents was increased immigration. The Irish economy is built on openness to the outside world, and it is one of the more globalized countries in the world. About 17% of the Irish population is foreign born according to OECD data,9 and about 17% of those born in Ireland now live abroad.10 These are larger than for any other OECD countries. It is in part a function of size, as smaller countries tend to have more outward migration, but EU membership and a thriving economy means that Ireland is also more open to labor flows than anywhere else. The Irish population continued to grow, having slowed slightly during the Great Recession. The population of the state was 3.5 million in 1987, reaching 4.1 million in 2005 and 4.9 million in 2019. Ireland’s population is still lower than it was before the Great Famine; Ireland is likely to be the only country in the world whose population is lower in the twenty-first than it was in the mid-nineteenth century. Immigration did not become the political issue that it was for neighboring countries such as the UK. It might be because immigrants to Ireland tend to be from other EU countries, tend to be better educated, and are not of religious minorities. For instance, over 20% of non-Irish nationals living in Ireland were from Poland, a country that shared its religious traditions with Ireland. These might, however, have led some of the “losers from globalization” to resent immigrants. Immigration was a minor issue during the first wave of immigration in the early 2000s. This was politicized at the time, and a referendum was introduced that took away the automatic right to Irish citizenship for those born on the island of Ireland. You now had to have established links with the country. Table 8.2 following gives a sense of what was important to Irish people over this period, and while housing becomes important, especially during the recovery, there does not seem to be much antiimmigration sentiment was as there was in the UK pre-Brexit. And any such sentiment failed to translate electorally into support for explicitly anti-immigrant parties or candidates. Having experienced large-scale immigration during the Celtic Tiger years, emigration restarted during the recession. It affected the make-up of the Irish population. Between 2007 and 2013, the proportion of the population that was in the 15–24 age category and the 25–34 category fell from 22% to 17% and 25% to 24%, respectively. This represented a loss of 230,000 young people, about half of which is accounted for by aging and falling birth rates. Even when the economy was booming in the late 2010s, emigration among the younger cohorts was still relatively high, partly because of tradition, but also because of the cost of housing.

A more liberal country If Ireland’s population make-up has changed in the period of Great Normalization, the opinions of the people in it were also changed in radical ways. The diminution of the younger population Table 8.2 What do you think are the two most important issues facing our country at the moment? Data for Ireland, Portugal, and the UK

Year 2005 2010 2015 2019*

Economic situation

Crime

IRL 5 44 16 11

IRL 50 27 14 13

Por. 42 42 28 22

UK 8 38 14 17

Housing Por. 15 10 4 3

UK 31 28 10 27

IRL 11 3 23 54

Immigration Por. 1 2 1 7

UK 6 6 15 14

IRL 12 4 7 7

Por. 5 1 3 4

UK 31 28 32 14

Source: Eurobarometer; *UK data for 11/2018

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cohort might have had an impact on the political views of the country. If the young are more likely to be liberal, losing them, especially if replaced by people from more conservative places, might make the Irish more conservative on aggregate. Ireland in the mid-1980s appeared in thrall to the Catholic Church, with near universal levels of mass going; a referendum to insert the constitutional ban on abortion was easily carried, and an attempt to legalize divorce failed. By 2015, Ireland became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage by a public vote, and in 2018, Ireland voted clearly to allow abortion, paving the way for a liberal abortion law. The 2016 census shows that almost 80% of the Irish population identify as Roman Catholic, though this might not translate into behavioral and attitudinal traits we might associate with devout Catholics. Some estimates of mass going saw them fall to 79% by 1991, at about the time scandals in the Church were becoming discussed more publicly. Since then the fall has been greater, especially in urban areas. An archbishop of Dublin claimed that the attendance in some working-class areas of Dublin was just 5%. According to European Social Survey data, the percentage attending mass at least weekly was 58% in 2004, dropping to 44% in 2008, 39% in 2012, and 38% in 2016. Attitudes to abortion have seen similar changes (see Table 8.3), with the Irish becoming more ambivalent after 2007 and then much more liberal before 2016. The event that caused that was probably the death of an Indian dentist in an Irish hospital. Savita Halepanavaar was suffering complications in her pregnancy and became severely unwell. She died of sepsis, when some reports show that her treatment was compromised by her pregnancy and the fear of the medical team that a treatment might lead to the termination of her pregnancy. In response to this, campaigns to repeal the 8th amendment that had been largely ignored gained public and political support. When change came, it came rapidly. Mainstream parties began to speak of an issue that had been non-grata for decades. Labour and Fine Gael openly supported that the issue would be sent to a citizens’ assembly, which it was after the 2016 election. Following a parliamentary committee inquiry, the Irish government chose to put an amendment largely repealing the 8th amendment to the people in 2018. Most leading politicians, including the Fianna Fáil leader, Micheál Martin, supported repeal, to many people’s surprise. After a vigorous campaign, the proposal was passed easily. Because of its easy passage, it is expected that abortion will not become the divisive political issue that it remains in the US. The mobilization of people on the abortion issue was not party-based. Party attachment remained low,11 whereas people seemed much more likely to be issue-based voters than party-based ones. If positions changed in relation to social and moral issues, no such shift took place in relation to economic issues as a result of the financial crisis. Given the large-scale failure of the

Table 8.3 Attitudes to abortion among Irish people

Total ban (0–2) Ambivalent (3–7) Freely available (8–10) Don’t know

2002

2007

2011

2016

2018

33.5 38.2 23.4 5.1

27.0 40.8 26.7 4.5

15 50 27 9

15 44 35 4

18 41 40 1

Q. People who fully agree that there should be a total ban on abortion in Ireland would give a score of “0.” People who fully agree that abortion should be freely available in Ireland to any woman who wants to have one would give a score of “10.” Other people would place themselves in between these two views. Where would you place yourself on this scale? 2018 question is to voters in the referendum, and worded slightly differently. Source: Irish National Election Survey, various years, and RTÉ Exit poll, 2018

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economy and the blame being set in part at a failure of deregulation of financial institutions, one might expect that Irish voters would shift to the left. While voters shifted away from Fianna Fáil, they shifted to other centrist parties. Smaller left-wing parties grew, as did Sinn Féin, but even by 2016 centrist parties still performed best. Figure 8.1 shows the absence of an ideological shift as a result of the crisis. Almost nothing happened. That said, where politics was non-ideological there is evidence of an emerging left-right divide in Irish politics, and something approaching social bases for Irish politics (Garry). This emergence might have been accelerated somewhat by the water charges protest, which seems to have politicized at least a group of people. The shift to a more “normal” left-right divide emerged more clearly in the February 2020 election, which saw a spectacular rise in support for Sinn Féin. The ensuing Coronavirus crisis, which saw an equally spectacular rise in unemployment and economic crash meant normal politics was suspended, making it hard for Sinn Féin to push its case. But the center-right Fine Gael caretaker government introduced measures that Sinn Féin had been calling for years, and an agreement between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to form a government together seemed to upend the historic party system. The parties’ agreement also signaled a notable leftward shift by those parties. But those parties would have to contend with a new economic crisis, have just emerged from the last one. This time, however, politicians were not blamed. The volatility of the electorate means that we cannot be certain of any permanent shifts among Irish voters.

All Left-Right Positions 2006–2014 50

40

30

20

10

0 0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Lef t

9

10

Right 2006

Figure 8.1

8

2010

2014

Left–right self-placement from European Social Surveys, 2006–2014

Source: European Social Surveys

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Northern Ireland and Brexit Another issue that became politicized in the late 2010s was Northern Ireland. From the 1980s, and especially after the 1998 Good Friday or Belfast Agreement, there was a sense that Irish governments would be good friends with the UK but using the institutions of the Belfast Agreement to promote the interests of nationalists in Northern Ireland. This worked well while Tony Blair remained the UK prime minister. His successors either had other priorities or a complete lack of interest. The fundamental nature of the Belfast Agreement is sectarian, and so few incentives exist for Irish nationalists or British unionists to work together. It provided a temporary peace but no resolution. Nationalists were seen as trying to extract something more in an inexorable movement towards a united Ireland, and northern Protestants increasingly became “an unsettled people,” unwilling to concede anything (McKay passim). Regular elections increased the rhetorical divisions between these groups. At the societal level, the absence of reconciliation and integration was as obvious. Segregation in urban areas continued, and the so-called “Peace Walls” erected to keep the communities apart were retained and in some instances increased in height. Those borders within Northern Ireland remained as space was increasingly demarcated by local nationalists and loyalists who tagged their areas with flags, murals, and paint. Even if the murals displayed less violent imagery, they still had the impact of excluding others. Flags and protests about flags ended in violence and the worsening of relations between the communities. Might we then argue that the Belfast Agreement was ultimately a failure? This would be going too far, but the relationships in the islands have become worse. The Stormont Assembly was in perpetual crisis mode, with collapse following collapse. Efforts to patch a new deal rarely led to improved relations. Electoral competition within the two blocs of nationalism and unionism fosters an atmosphere that did not incentivize compromise. Indeed, there was a politicization of issues that had not been central to the cleavage divisions in Northern Ireland. Sinn Féin claimed that the Belfast Agreement could only be fully implemented if issues such as abortion rights and the Irish language were settled. Abortion became an odd division, given that most of Northern Irish society regardless of their faith was conservative on the issue. But the successful change in the law in the Republic made it fashionable to pursue in the north, and it cohered with Sinn Féin’s “rights” frame. While it was always associated with a particular community, the Irish language too became something more readily politicized. Unionist politicians made either deliberately antagonistic or culturally insensitive references to the Irish language. Sinn Féin insisted on an Irish Language Act as a precondition for the reopening of the Stormont institutions, which continued in abeyance for many years. These problems were made worse when the UK voted to leave the European Union. Brexit was supported by only a minority of unionists in Northern Ireland, and so Brexit was an ethnonational issue. The inability of the UK to agree on a deal was in part because of the unwillingness to allow a regulatory and customs border in the Irish Sea. What was once a minority sport—talk of a united Ireland—became increasingly mainstream, which hardened unionist attitudes. Ireland also cemented its attachment to the EU, which during the Brexit negotiations remained steadfast in its support of the Irish position. But it was unclear what the impact of Brexit would be on Ireland, north and south. It was likely to lead to economic, social, and political changes that might start a new phase in the Irish story, one beginning at the end of the Great Normalization.

Notes 1 Ireland might have been a poster child for austerity, but see Kinsella (2017) for an alternative perspective. 2 See Lee (1989). On “luck,” see Foster; on “preventing the future,” see Garvin; on Corruption see Byrne (2012). 106

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3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

See, for example, Lee (1982). See especially Barry (1999). See O’Connor. See especially Donovan and Murphy, Chs. 4 and 5. See especially Nyberg. “Was it for this?” Irish Times, Thursday, November 18, 2010, p. 1. OECD Economic Outlook 2019, p. 238. OECD Ireland Survey, 2015, p. 83. See Costello (2018).

Works cited Barry, Frank, Ed. Understanding Ireland’s Economic Growth. Palgrave, 1999. Byrne, Elaine. Political Corruption in Ireland, 1922–2010: A Crooked Harp? Manchester University Press, 2012. Casey, Michael. “Inevitable Recession Awaits Poll Winner.” Irish Times, May 14, 2007. Casey, Ciarán. Policy Failures and the Irish Economic Crisis. Springer, 2018. Claudy, Marius C. et al. “Consumption”. Austerity & Recovery in Ireland: Europe’s Poster Child and the Great Recession. Edited by William K. Roche et al. Oxford University Press, 2017. Costello, Rory. “Party Identification in the Wake of the Crisis: A Nascent Realignment?” The Post-Crisis Irish Voter: Voting Behaviour in the Irish 2016 General Election. Edited by Michael Marsh et al. Manchester University Press, 2018. Donovan, Donal and Antoin E. Murphy. The Fall of the Celtic Tiger Ireland and the Euro Debt Crisis. Oxford University Press, 2014. Fitzgerald, Cathal. “Give Credit to the Market: The Decision Not to Prohibit 100 Per Cent Loan-to-Value Mortgages.” Administration, Vol. 67, No. 2, January 2019, pp. 25–45. doi:10.2478/admin-2019-0012. Foster, R.F. Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change 1970–2000. Allen Lane, 2007. Gallagher, Michael and Michael Marsh, Eds. How Ireland Voted 2016 The Election That Nobody Won. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Garry, John. “Social and Ideological Bases of Voting.” The Post-Crisis Irish Voter Voting Behaviour in the Irish 2016 General Election. Edited by Michael Marsh et al. Manchester University Press, 2018. Garvin, Tom. Preventing the Future Why Was Ireland so Poor for so Long? Gill Books, 2014. Hearne, Rory. “Protests Are a New Type of Active Citizenship Politics Here.” Irish Examiner, November 19, 2014. www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/commentanalysis/arid-20298452.html. Kelly, Eilish, Seamus McGuinness, and Philip O’Connell. The Public-Private Sector Pay Gap in Ireland: What Lies Beneath? No. 321. ESRI Working paper, 2009. Kelly, Fiach. “Bertie Ahern to Banking Inquiry: ‘I Did Make Mistakes.’” Irish Times, July 16, 2015. www. irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/bertie-ahern-to-banking-inquiry-i-did-make-mistakes-1.2287305. Kelly, Morgan. “How the Housing Corner Stones of Our Economy Could Go into Rapid Free Fall.” The Irish Times, December 28, 2006. Kinsella, Stephen. “Economic and Fiscal Policy.” Austerity & Recovery in Ireland: Europe’s Poster Child and the Great Recession. Edited by William K. Roche et al. Oxford University Press, 2017. Lee, J.J. “Society and Culture.” Unequal Achievement: The Irish Experience 1957–1982. Edited by Frank Litton. IPA, 1982. Lee, J.J. Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society. Cambridge University Press, 1989. Marsh, Michael et al., Eds. A Conservative Revolution? Electoral Change in Twenty-First Century Ireland. Oxford University Press, 2017. Marsh, Michael et al., Eds. The Post-Crisis Irish Voter Voting Behaviour in the Irish 2016 General Election. Manchester University Press, 2018. McKay, Susan. Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People. Blackstaff Press (updated edition), 2005. National Economic and Social Council. Ireland’s Five-Part Crisis: An Integrated National Response. Dublin, National Economic and Social Council, 2009. Nyberg, Peter. “Misjudging risk: Causes of the Systemic Banking Crisis in Ireland.” Report of the Commission of Investigation Into the Banking Sector in Ireland, 2011. O’Connor, Philip. A Very Political Project: Charles Haughey, Social Partnership and the Engineering of the Irish Economic “Miracle,” 1970–92. PhD thesis, Dublin City University, 2019. Ó Dochartaigh, Niall et al., Eds. Dynamics of Political Change in Ireland: Making and Breaking a Divided Island. Routledge, 2018. 107

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Ó Riain, Seán. The Rise and Fall of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger. Liberalism, Boom and Bust. Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pappas, Takis S. and Eoin O’Malley. “Civil Compliance and ‘Political Luddism’: Explaining Variance in Social Unrest during Crisis in Ireland and Greece.” American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 58, No. 12, 2014, pp. 1592–1613. Regling, Klaus and Maxwell Watson. A Preliminary Report on the Sources of Ireland’s Banking Crisis. Dublin, Government Publications Office, 2010. Roche, William K. et al., Eds. Austerity and Recovery in Ireland: Europe’s Poster Child and the Great Recession. Oxford University Press, 2018. Wycherley, Michael. “Growth in Output and Living Standards.” The Economy of Ireland: Policymaking in a Global Context (13th ed.). Edited by John O’Hagan and Francis O’Toole. Palgrave, 2017, pp. 181–203.

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9 Northern Ireland More shared and more divided Dominic Bryan and Gordon Gillespie

The story of Northern Ireland, or the six counties as many Irish nationalists call it, is usually delivered as a historical narrative starting 100 or 400 years ago. It is packed with path dependency, with repetition, with two religious or political groups confronting each other in an ongoing, if intermittent, cycle of violence. The narratives told by members of Unionist and Nationalist groups are remarkably similar, with many of the key conflicts and dates being agreed upon even if the claim to victimhood is disputed. Both “sides” agree that this relationship is trapped in a history of struggle and symbolize and dramatize the conflict in remarkably similar ways through rituals, memorials, museums, television dramas, and commemorative days. Centenaries, bicentenaries, and tercentenaries of events come and go as a reminder of an apparent ongoing struggle across time. As popular and hegemonic as this approach is to Irish and Northern Ireland history, there are some deep flaws. First, there is a profound argument that, in some respects, the historical narratives are irrelevant as an explanation. The conflict in and about Northern Ireland is a conflict of ethnonational identity common globally, particularly through a twentieth century which saw the end of traditional empires and decolonization (O’Leary & McGarry 55). As such, the contemporary conflict takes on aspects of social group conflict common across the world. All these conflicts are understood with long, path-dependent histories built around battles and periods of suffering going back centuries. All use forms of commemoration and legitimization, all involve understandings of ethnicity, nation, and the imagined community.1 In other words, understanding the conflict involves exploring the relationship between group identity and cohesion and the role of the given state or states. The specific historical narrative of each conflict is secondary to the core dynamic of intergroup conflict. Second, a history of conflict imagined through commemorative symbols and practices gives the impression of continuity as music, memorials, murals, and marches refer to the martyrs and heroes of the past. However, as Bryan has argued elsewhere, we cannot assume that “the sash my father wore” was understood then, as it is now, or that the martyrs of Easter 1916 died for the contemporary Irish Republic.2 Those carrying the banners of Sarsfield and King Billy a hundred or two hundred years ago understood a very different political world. Indeed, the first Orangemen could not have been “unionist” in the modern sense since they started marching in 1795, six years before the Union of Great Britain and Ireland came into existence. While 109

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the vehicles of history suggest continuity, we must not uncritically accept this assertion. Most importantly, throughout these periods of apparent political or cultural continuity social structures have changed dramatically. The narratives of conflict might appear to be consistent, but the conflict itself is structured through changed social relationships. Third, we are surrounded by rituals, symbols, and stories of conflict and relatively devoid of commemorations of peace and commonality. The argument that Ireland’s history compared to much of Europe is a peaceful one may create its own problems, but it is worth considering in contestation of the narrative of Irish trauma.3 Perhaps more usefully, we might note that society has functioned for long periods with managed “peaceful” relationships. Those “peaceful” relationships might of course disguise structural violence, but this is true of most societies. Looked at from this perspective, the conflict might be considered as the exception, not the rule, albeit that we should not pretend that structural violence is not built into the state and economic capital flows. Northern Ireland since the 1998 Multi-Party (Good Friday) Agreement has seen a large reduction in the level of political violence, albeit that there remain consistent numbers of bombing and shooting incidents (Gray et al. 108–109). There is significant evidence of changes in identity amongst key social groups as well as shifts in the social and economic structures that underpinned society in the second part of the twentieth century. Differentiation of social class, poverty, and unemployment remain significant, but they are not underpinned by higher levels of discrimination in the key areas that buttressed the civil rights campaign of the 1960s (Gray et al. 141–145). Equality and human rights legislation, particularly section 75 of the Northern Ireland Act 1998, and an agreed policing structure has had a profound impact on the delivery of services. The creation of policies of “shared space,” though often criticized, can be evidenced to have been part of changes in the public and civic spaces. Northern Ireland looks more diverse and more shared. And yet, residential segregation has been maintained, particularly in working class areas, through public housing policies, through the demarcation of space using memorials, murals, flags, and parades, and a largely segregated school system (Shirlow and Murtagh, Gray et al., 177–179). The 1998 Agreement, modified at St. Andrews in 2006, was premised on a consociational political model and institutional structures that, out of some necessity, protected the dominant political groupings of nationalism and unionism. The focus of power within those groups also moved away from the more centrist parties, the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), to the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Féin. The violence of the 1969–1998 period left victims and survivors with physical and emotional injuries and unresolved issues of truth and justice.4 Mixed with the narratives of historical struggle, conflict, and discrimination they provide the material for apparently polarized identity politics. From a panoramic perspective, the north of Ireland often looks as divided as at any time in its history. It is easy to look at Northern Ireland as being, as the author Dervla Murphy once described it, “a place apart” (Murphy). It is distinct from other parts of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland with ethnic divisions that have required both states to accept that it needed special treatment to avoid the potential of “polluting” the politics of parliaments in London and Dublin. Some have described it as “a failed state,” but 100 years of history make that difficult to sustain. Northern Ireland is a part of Europe and processes of globalization and like everywhere else it is impacted by changes taking place in the world. Additionally, Brexit, the United Kingdom referendum vote to leave the European Union in 2016, changed the wider political equation that had been uncomfortably agreed upon in 1998. A marginal rejection of the European Union by the British public shifted the political architecture in which Northern Ireland 110

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had been relatively comfortable and potentially altered key aspects of identity politics. Northern Ireland is in one sense a place apart, but it exists as part of broader political constructs and will remain a very particular part of the European institutional architecture over the coming decades. To appreciate this, we need to have a clear model of how identity politics works and look at what is shared and what divides. There is a key debate over the fluidity of identities, but most scholars agree that changes in the political equation can cause significant shifts.5 Northern Ireland is not captured by its past but is very much part of a contemporary negotiation over identity. Two decades on from the 1998 Agreement, from the end of a period of high levels of ethnic strife, uncertainty surrounding Brexit led to warnings about “the return of conflict” in Northern Ireland.6 The argument we wish to make in this review is that this conflict cannot return. The conflict in and about Northern Ireland, commonly known as the Troubles, was a function of particular political, economic, and social structural relationships in the 1960s and 1970s, not an inevitable path dependent outcome of history. Those conditions no longer exist and will not exist again. This does not mean that we cannot have significant violent conflict, although we will argue that it is less likely, but that the conditions for conflict, twenty years on from the Agreement, are substantially different. First let us examine those aspects which evidence sustained division, then we will look at some of the evidence suggesting society in Northern Ireland is substantively changing.

Difference and separation The groundbreaking qualitative work of Rosemary Harris, based on research in County Tyrone in the mid-1950s but only published as Prejudice and Tolerance in Ulster in 1972, describes those institutions and practices of society that maintain difference but also norms and values that provide a sense of cohesion in the largely rural setting. She describes a plural social world that effectively functions through management of difference leading to what would probably be described as “peace.” This of course ignores the structural inequalities present at the time and the way this impinged upon people’s ability to express their identities in particular contexts. It does, however, provide us with a baseline of everyday life in rural Northern Ireland in the 1950s. The institutions through which differences are structured have not all faired in the same way. For example, we can reasonably conclude that whilst residential segregation has become more acute, and the education system has largely maintained structural differences in teaching Catholic and Protestant children, employment practices and legislation has seen substantial change. Arguably the element of social structure most impacted by the high level of conflict between 1969 and 1998 is that of residential segregation. Whilst the nature of this segregation differs in urban and rural contexts and substantially in terms of social class, it is nevertheless built into the geography and defensive architecture of housing; the policies of the Northern Ireland Housing Executive which manages public housing; the demarcation of space through flags, murals and memorials; continued forms of threatening control by paramilitaries; through some forms of policing; and through the memories, stories and mental maps that people have of the places in which they live and work.7 It remains true that in almost every village or town in Northern Ireland that you could map perceived “orange” and “green” areas and spaces. Needless to say, this means that the provision of new housing remains one of the hottest political topics since it can directly impact political representation at elections. In addition, there have been no more than minor attempts to create “shared” housing areas that have themselves consistently come under attack from paramilitaries through demarcation by flags.8 That said, there are some significant changes in the geography of sectarianism. Since Catholics have over the past thirty years been increasingly moving into white collar and professional sector 111

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jobs, private housing has become more mixed and the value of housing in certain areas perceived as Catholic has risen. If we also note an increase in groups migrating into Northern Ireland and some evidence of a decrease in residential segregation, then there is a more challenging job in understanding the working of residential space.9 Similarly, the institutions of the education system have remained a political battleground with enormous impact on social structure, culture and identity in Northern Ireland. It remains, arguably, a key institution of division with the largest numbers of children educated in schools deemed as state schools with a Protestant ethos and Catholic Schools. This is more complex at the margins since many of these schools are more ‘mixed’ as parents seek to send their children to the best school in the area. Nevertheless, the ethos of these schools remains an issue. It is also true to say that schools teach a common curriculum, which is particularly important in terms of the teaching of history, and that there has long been significant attempts to create school exchanges, through versions of Education for Mutual Understanding and more recently the development of joint campuses and “Shared Education.”10 The integrated education system has grown slowly but remains robust and a popular choice of parents when asked about their ideal school. However, there has been no change to the fundamental sectional structure to education in Northern Ireland.11 The situation is exacerbated by consistent inequalities in the education system and the continued poor educational performance including persistent underachievement from male working-class Protestant students (Gray et al. 2018, 163). The defining of group identities in policies, allied to the territorial geography discussed previously, undoubtedly plays a key role in sustaining ethno-sectarian difference in twenty-first century Northern Ireland. The implications for this play out in both the political and cultural realms. One critical argument around the reasons that ethno-sectarian divisions have been maintained is that those same ethno-political divisions are written into the 1998 Agreement in the form of protection for the position of unionist and nationalist blocks within political structures.12 Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) must designate themselves as “Nationalist,” “Unionist,” and “Other” for a weighted voting system on key issues to come into effect and undermine the domination by one political group. This system was originally designed to protect nationalist parties from a recurrence of what had been a Stormont government dominated by Unionism (1921–72), but it has increasingly been used by unionist parties over recent years. However, this system does marginalize those political parties who define themselves as “others” and potentially institutionalizes the ethno-political divisions. This power sharing model, offering protection to designated groups, is a key idea in the consociational design for dealing with this type of conflict.13 Voting since the 1998 Agreement has, until recently, remained polarized and the parties perceived as more extreme, the DUP and Sinn Féin, have developed a clear dominance. At the same time, votes for the SDLP and UUP have dropped dramatically. The collapse of the UUP, given its political dominance in twentieth-century Northern Ireland, is distinctive with 26.8% of the vote in the 2001 UK General Election down to 10.3% in the 2017 General Election.14 Whilst other smaller parties have made inroads, we will discuss the Alliance Party next, the position of the two largest party appears unassailable. We must be careful, however, to not overstate the view of political polarization. Elections in Northern Ireland exacerbate the profiling of the ethno-national identities. There is a competition to be the largest party, because that party then selects the First Minister. Ironically, the First and Deputy First Ministers’ positions are technically equal and in practical terms it makes little difference. The “threat” of having a Sinn Féin First Minister was certainly used by the DUP to draw in unionist voters. In addition, it is reasonable to argue that, compared with the positions both major parties took up to the 1990s, the DUP and Sinn Féin occupy more centrist political 112

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positions. Sinn Féin has become more socially liberal and is essentially participating in the British State while the DUP, much to the ire of many of its supporters, has worked in partnership with Sinn Féin in government. Indeed, there is some suggestion in Sam McBride’s book Burned that both parties show similar traits of governance and control. In addition, as we will discuss later, surveys have provided some evidence of growing diversity in identities suggesting that that Northern Ireland might be becoming less polarized. In short, voting activity appears to show polarization but shifts in political views and identity are more complex. The other area in which the maintenance of the ethnic polarization of society in Northern Ireland remains significant is in what has been called the “culture war.” That is, the countless number of conflicts over flags, parades, memorials, anthems, graffiti, symbols, statues, bonfires, names on buildings, bridges and parks that make the daily diet of newspapers, radio news, and chat shows. As already discussed, the landscape of Northern Ireland, urban and rural, is littered with points of symbolic demarcations just as the annual calendar is full of days of remembering, commemoration, and celebration that mark difference and help imagine the delineation of ethnic groups in space and time. The most notable dispute in recent years came when Belfast City Council voted to have the Union Flag flown only on a designated number of days rather than 365 days a year.15 Significant street protests took place, displays of flags in loyalist areas seemed to grow in numbers and size and it became part of a toxic political rhetoric which led to the setting up of yet another body, the Commission of Flags, Identity, Culture and Tradition, which was tasked with solving this and other similar problems. As contested Orange parades had been a cause célèbre in the 1990s and identified by some as being part of a coordinated attack on “unionist culture” by republicans, flags, bonfires and the Irish language are perceived as part of a continued republican strategy to undermine unionism. Whether this argument can be sustained or not, in ethnic politics, the important thing to note is that it is widely believed. This way of conceptualizing conflict in culture must be critically assessed. Taking a broad definition of culture as all the traits, values, and skills that human beings learn in order to be part of a social group those people defined as “Catholic” and “Protestant” in Northern Ireland are almost indistinguishable. Those cultural elements through which difference is defined such as history and commemorative practices and symbols are themselves drawn from a common set of cultural practices. So, for example, both use banners at parades, albeit the people depicted upon them are from different sides of the same battle. These are not different cultures, but different political identities within the same cultural or social field. In addition, whilst there is evidence that there has been a clear shift in the use of public spaces with some reduction in those practices defined as unionist and an increase in those that might be seen as nationalist or republican, this must also be seen in the context of the widespread dominance of unionist or British political culture across the public sphere up until the 1990s. This dominance had been maintained legally and through policing despite resistance by nationalists from the setting up of the state. If you want to use the term “culture war,” then the war has been underway since Northern Ireland came into existence, but there has been a shift in power and those that were dominant are now less so. It is probably more helpful to see public or civic spaces and places of negotiation though which a variety of political relationships are reflecting change.16 To give one example of the negotiated civic space, in Belfast City Hall stained glass windows, memorials and statues had traditionally reflected a broadly unionist ethos. As unionists became a minority within the council in the post Good-Friday Agreement era, the images on display reflected a broader perspective. Stained glass windows on the subjects of the Great Famine (1999), Celtic Myths and Legends (2012) and (arguably) the Spanish Civil War (2015) which might be perceived as having a greater appeal to nationalists or republicans were added as 113

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were the more neutral “pathway window” and a centenary window. At the same time, however, an Operation Banner (the British Army operation in Northern Ireland) memorial, a sculptural bench, was added in 2013. The latter would undoubtedly be received more sympathetically by unionists than republicans. Frank Burton, in his important ethnography set in Belfast in the early 1970s, coined the term “telling” for all the processes and practice by which people through everyday life in Northern Ireland determine who is Catholic and who is Protestant.17 As was clear from Harris’s earlier work in Tyrone, in the main, the practice of telling allows for peaceful and polite relationships to be sustained between people through avoidance of difficult controversial topics in “mixed” company.18 This practice is memorably, and more caustically, described in Seamus Heaney’s poem in 1975 as “Whatever you say, say nothing”: Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us: Manoeuvrings to find out name and school, Subtle discrimination by addresses With hardly an exception to the rule. (Heaney 91) This form of telling is so “naturalized” that most people raised in Northern Ireland, when the practice is described to them, take some time to articulate how it works. The persistence and centrality of this cultural practice, or type of stereotyping, in social life still identifies Northern Ireland as distinct from most other parts of Ireland and the UK. The maintenance of ethno-political differences in Northern Ireland therefore seem robust. This allows for the view that nothing ever changes, that we have been doing this since 1690. But as we discussed at the start, we roundly reject this claim. It is better to see the ethnic divisions as being continually being reconstituted in everyday life. This reconstitution is impacted by contemporary social, cultural, legal and class structures. The processes that underpinned discrimination and difference are shifting under pressure from globalization and local social dynamics. The 1998 Agreement was an important point of change, but it would be foolish not to understand that a process of social change predated it and has accelerated since.

Diversity, sharing and integration The picture painted above gives the impression that Northern Ireland remains substantially divided on ethno-sectarian lines and consequently, whilst largely peaceful, appears to work on what some have called benign apartheid.19 Under this argument, the consociational political solution arrived at in 1998 has, as designed, suited the two political blocs who divide the spoils between them, maintaining an uneasy, if sometimes competitive, status quo.20 In February 2009, Deputy First Minister Martin McGuiness suggested the six counties were “no longer an orange state, but an orange and green state.”21 This appearance of balance, we would argue, underestimates considerable forces of change that create a much more diverse dynamic picture. There has been a massive change in the type of employment in Northern Ireland, reflecting globalization, mobility and changes in social class. Perhaps most obvious is the collapse of a local industrial and landed bourgeois class that would in the past have underpinned Ulster Unionism and particularly the Ulster Unionist Party. Understanding how the class relationships within unionism have shifted has been an important part of analyzing Northern Ireland.22 The industries that underpinned Belfast, the Lagan Valley and Derry/Londonderry, along with the employment, a considerable amount of which had a sectarian basis, have gone. Their 114

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replacement has been globalized, with multinational companies little interested in local forms of patronage, and service sectors that can ill afford to be viewed as associated with a specific ethno-political group. To take one example, the majority of the large pubs in central Belfast, the number of which have grown rapidly in the twenty-first century, would not now have an obvious association with sectarian difference. By the mid-1990s employer organizations, as part of civic society, were keen backers of a peace process having abandoned any association with a status quo that involved majoritarian Unionist governance.23 This shift in local economic structures took place at the same time as the state developed mechanisms of fair employment. Legislation in 1976, 1989 and 1998 served not only to force employers to use hiring mechanisms conforming to a code of practice, which although littered with controversy and legal cases, has created cultural change through much employment in Northern Ireland supervised by a powerful Equality Commission.24 Large public employers, the civil service, legal service, the health service, even the police, all have broader employment profiles which better reflect society in Northern Ireland. Some associate this change with the introduction of an expanded higher education system and the welfare state in the post-war UK which led to a growing educated Catholic middle-class. This group was held back for a time by sectarian employment practices, but eventually, in the last two decades of the twentieth century, entered the middle classes in much greater numbers. Viewed in this way, the peace process of the 1990s might have been an outcome of political negotiations reflecting the changing political strategies of both Sinn Féin and the British Government but it was also rooted in substantive structural changes in society, removing some of the key issues that had underpinned the civil rights movement and consequent civil disturbances in the late 1960s and 1970s. Although not easy to directly evidence, political changes were predated by substantive changes in society. The peace process is of course discussed by political scientists and historians as a process involving key individuals, organizations, politicians, political parties, states and international organizations as well as secret negotiations and mediators along with analyses of the interests of those involved. The role of the European Union and the United States and the apparent shifts of policies within Sinn Féin and the British and Irish governments provide a functioning explanation of how political processes replaced violence as a form of communication.25 This led to the, previously unlikely, moment in 2007 when it became clear that Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley had struck up a friendship. These become the moments which the media used to depict the success of the peace process, but it only occurred as a result of changes within a context. The political status of Northern Ireland had broadly remained the same for a hundred years so examining the cause of the outbreak of violence in the late 1960s and the restoration of widely accepted political processes in the 1990s needs deeper explanation.26 If we accept the argument that the political processes took place within a context of social change, then that process in turn produced outcomes which also shifted society. The new political architecture, it could be argued, institutionalized ethnic politics in ways that had not existed before. But the 1998 Agreement and the Northern Ireland Act 1998 provided a new environment for citizenship with articles, funding, pieces of legislation and public bodies designed to protect rights, create greater equality and potentially reconfigure the public sphere or civic space. Crucially, section 1 (v) of the Agreement (constitutional issues) states that the participants: (v) affirm that whatever choice is freely exercised by a majority of the people of Northern Ireland, the power of the sovereign government with jurisdiction there shall be exercised with rigorous impartiality on behalf of all the people in the diversity of their identities and traditions and shall be founded on the principles of full respect for, and equality of, civil, 115

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political, social and cultural rights, of freedom from discrimination for all citizens, and of parity of esteem and of just and equal treatment for the identity, ethos, and aspirations of both communities.27 The language of “parity of esteem,” “equality,” and “rights” was to become central to politics and policy in Northern Ireland. From an institutional standpoint, this rights-based approach was underpinned by the creation of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission and a strengthened Equality Commission for Northern Ireland, and the European Convention on Human Rights was brought into UK law in 2000 by the 1998 Human Rights Act. Of arguably even greater significance was section 75 of the Northern Ireland Act (1998). Section 75 of the Northern Ireland Act 1998 places a statutory obligation on public authorities to carry out their functions with due regard to the need to promote equality of opportunity in respect of religious belief, political opinion, gender, race, disability, age, marital status, dependents and sexual orientation. In addition, a public authority shall have regard to the desirability of promoting good relations between persons of diferent religious belief, political opinion or racial group. This piece of legalization had a profound impact on the working of public bodies in Northern Ireland and ultimately on the wider public sphere. Every new piece of policy produced by a public authority was duty bound to be “equality tested” for impact on diferent sections of the community. This meant that for all funding, policies and practices the distribution of resources had to be “Section 75” compliant. The combined contribution of shared political power in the Assembly and in local Councils (although this varied widely between councils), new legislative structures and relatively powerful independent bodies to hold the state to account led to a change in the public space and a change in the ways public space was imagined. This took its most concrete form in 2005 in A Shared Future which, although endorsed by a direct rule administration and later replaced by the local administration with Cohesion Sharing and Integration (2010) and Together: Building a United Community (2013), created the broad idea that society should be “shared” and that we should be developing “good relations.” This reworking of what in the early 1990s was termed “cultural traditions” and then “community relations” was repeated in countless policy documents and millions of pounds of public funding across Northern Ireland. Every district council, whatever its political make-up, needed to work with policies of sharing and the discourse of “good relations.” The out workings of this were numerous discussions of “shared space.” Countering the apparent territorial imperative in key parts of housing across Northern Ireland, there was a sincere move to make civic space in cities and towns shared. There was of course considerable discussion over what was defined as shared space and discussion over whether shared space had an impact on good relations or on people’s sense of citizenship.28 In other words, despite the maintenance of separation in residential areas and schooling, was there increased engagement in civic spaces with potential political impact. Belfast, Derry/Londonderry and town centers across Northern Ireland show evidence of significant change. Derry/Londonderry has invested heavily in the city Centre, ambitiously opening the Peace Bridge in 2011 linking the walled city Centre on the west bank of the Foyle to Ebrington Square, formerly a British military barracks, on the east bank. This came out of significant local and international funding and was followed by Derry becoming UK City of Culture in 2013. There was, of course, much discussion over the merits of the applications, but this was a council run by Sinn Féin and the SDLP applying for a UK designation.29 It allowed for high-profile public events across the city and the use of the new Ebrington Square. New businesses, a new hotel and a Maritime Museum, currently being developed, represent a significant attempt to move the “city center” and civic space on to the Waterside and the side of the river 116

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perceived as a Protestant area. We make no judgement yet on the success of this endeavor, but it is one of many examples in Northern Ireland of investment in shared space. In Belfast, investment in the waterfront formerly under the Laganside Corporation, including Custom House Square, eventually saw the development of the former Harland and Wolff Shipyard as the Titanic Quarter with the successful Titanic Experience and the global success of the TV show Game of Thrones, with many scenes filmed in a large former shipyard building (the Paint Hall), boosting the local TV, Film and arts sector. At the same time, just across the River Lagan, also linked by a new footbridge, the Cathedral Quarter, now a home for the arts sector, has seen many new pubs and restaurants open. The city center has seen marked development with a new retail outlet, Victoria Square (2008), with a large range of festivals including a massively enhanced Pride event and, since 1998, a St. Patrick’s Day Parade.30 This is a reflection on both the policies of the Northern Ireland Executive and local Councils. Belfast City Council has produced a series of policy documents and directed funding to create a shared city center.31 It is the policy out working of shared space. Inside City Hall, the sharing of the key offices, such as Lord Mayor, and positions on Committees has also been matched by changes in the symbolic and commemorative displays with the movement of certain statues and pictures and the addition of others including a set of stained-glass windows remembering Belfast women, the famine and the Belfast Dockers Strike discussed earlier. The decision of Belfast City Council, in December 2013, to reduce the flying of the Union flag outside the building was controversial and widely criticized by unionists; nevertheless, it reflected this same policy development.32 Whilst the resulting demonstrations were widespread, particularly in Protestant working class areas, they were of a noticeably smaller scale to those in the 1990s over restrictions on Orange parades and never reached anything like the level of protests against the Anglo-Irish Agreement from 1986–88 or the Ulster Workers’ Council Strike of 1974. Outside City Hall, the favored venue for demonstrations in the city, including the flag protestors, a wide range of political groups are allowed freedom of speech including Irish republican groups which were restricted until the 1990s. Just as significant were the large demonstrations on global environmental issues and campaigns on marriage equality and abortion rights.33 The key question is whether this impacts on politics and group identity in Northern Ireland. We can evidence both the sustaining of ethno-political boundaries through residential demarcation, schooling and everyday practices and through maintained voting practices, and we can also evidence significant sharing of civic space and the rise of cultural practices that, at the very least, recast identity politics.34 We cannot ignore the popularity of the annual Pride event in Belfast, a widely commercially sponsored event (unlike the St. Patrick’s Day parade or the Twelfth), but does this represent a change in people’s attitudes? There is little doubt that major urban centers and some commercial centers are more shared. Evidence from the Belfast Mobility Project, which explored people’s movement in north Belfast and the City Centre, clearly shows the sustaining of ethno-political boundaries in the residential areas, but that the city center shows almost no pattern of discrimination in movement from those same people. In addition, large shopping centers in north Belfast, such as the one at Yorkgate (partly built from the structure of a former Gallaher Tobacco factory), show a degree of sharing.35 There is some interesting, though inconclusive, evidence on people’s chosen identity in the annual Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey. In 2019, 39% of people described themselves as neither unionist nor nationalist.36 It is important to remember this does not reflect what people might do when voting, but there has been a rise in the number of people who do not wish to be designated with an ethno-political identity. Hayward and McManus have questioned the “two community thesis,” arguing that those picking the neither option are diverse, coming from all 117

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religious backgrounds, across age groups, containing people who see themselves as British and Irish, from across the class spectrum although they are more likely to be in employment than nationalists and unionists. One factor identified by Hayward and McManus is that the Neither group is more likely to have spent time outside Northern Ireland. They conclude that whilst the Neither identity has grown in number they have not, yet, translated this into a coherent political movement or a clear way forward (Hayward and McManus 152). Related to the “neither” category, in trying to explore potential shifts in political or cultural identity, it is also worth looking at people that describe themselves, in some contexts, as Northern Irish rather than, or as well as, Irish or British.37 Whilst the use of this category as a descriptor for identity has grown in use, with its meaning heterogenous and multidimensional, it is perhaps a subordinate identity that needs to be taken seriously (McNicholl et al. 488). It is articulated by people in all political parties in different ways but, particularly when offering a sense of “place,” it may still be important in offering a form of in-group identity attachment and pride that provides social cohesion (Fenton 252; McNicholl et al. 5012) The use of the Northern Irish identity is favored by those within the Alliance Party as well as other centrist parties (McNicholl 510). The Alliance Party has shown a limited but significant advance. It is not easy to compare election results, particularly in a period when Brexit was a significant issue, but the Alliance Party broke through the 10% barrier in the 2019 Council election (taking 11.5% of the vote), won 16.8% of the vote in the 2019 General Election and 18.5% in the 2019 European Election, gaining one of the three seats available.38 The Alliance Party did receive nearly 10% of the vote several times in the 1970s before declining but recent results do suggest a significant uplift. Alliance designate as “other” in the Northern Ireland Assembly, so if such results were to be repeated in an Assembly election, it would raise questions of the coherence of the “cross-community” voting system put in place under the 1998 Agreement. Migration into Northern Ireland has made it more diverse. Census data indicates a rise in the ethnic minority population from 0.8% (14,259) in 2001 to 1.8% (32,414) in 2011 (Gray 2018, 200). Migration numbers may have been impacted by Brexit, but it is still likely to indicate an increase in the next census. It is important to stress that we cannot make assumptions about the political identities of these heterogeneous groups, but it is further evidence that a simple polarized understanding of politics is inadequate. We are not predicting the end of ethno-political politics in Northern Ireland. What we are suggesting is that identity politics is more fluid than representations of a polarization might suggest. Support for a United Ireland has looked stronger in recent polls during the instability of Brexit, but the 2019 Northern Ireland Life and Times survey still only had support at 22 percent.39 Whilst this remains relatively distant from the numbers that might trigger a referendum on Northern Ireland’s sovereignty, and we have suggested there are significant groups of people who are wary of the polarized identities, our argument on the fluidity of identity politics also suggests that things can change quite quickly if the political context changes.

Conclusion It is frequently suggested that Northern Ireland is somehow trapped in a historically longstanding conflict that some would date back to the Plantations of the seventeenth century. Historical narratives making significant links to the past often engulf political rhetoric and are visible across the public spaces from memorials and museum exhibitions to murals, flags and commemorations. It is very easy, therefore, to depict Northern Ireland as being stuck in history or bound into a path-dependent political future. It sometimes allows politicians and media commentators to raise the possibility of inevitable violence returning the north to the dark days of “the Troubles.” 118

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We think such an approach is a mistake. Northern Ireland is still a deeply divided society, and we have identified aspects, such as the dominance of ethno-political parties, residential segregation and elements of institutionalized sectarianism in areas such as education. However, to think that the political divisions between groups in Northern Ireland in 2020 are the same as in 1998 or 1969 or 1921, or even 1690, is wrong. When worried journalists ask if instability over Brexit might bring on a return of the Troubles there is a simple answer: No. A level of political violence has been present in Northern Ireland since the 1998 Agreement, and there is the potential for this to get worse through periods of political instability. But the social structure of contemporary Northern Ireland is very different from the one which existed in 1969. Politicians may well haunt the present by raising the ghosts of the past, but when they do, they are trying to engage in a look into the political future by invoking a sense of continuity with the past. Northern Ireland is part of a process of globalization that is economic and cultural and, in many ways, undermines local ethno-politics. It is also subject to a range of instabilities within the United Kingdom made clear during the fractious Brexit process and significant social changes in the Republic of Ireland. It has an increasingly diverse population attracted to a range of popular and global issues to which the local political parties have had to adapt. Rather than see the ethno-political positions sustained over a long period of time, it is perhaps better to view those political identities as being in a constant process of negotiation with significant changes within Northern Ireland and from the wider world.

Notes 1 See Benedict Anderson. 2 See Dominic Bryan (2000, 2016) for an argument on symbolic meaning in ritual. 3 Such an argument has been made by John Wilson Foster in a lecture “Catastrophe and Irish History: Some Observations” (unpublished mss, 2011). 4 See the work of Bolton, McEvoy et al. and Lawther for more on this issue. 5 For discussion on the fluidity of identity, particularly ethnic and national identities, see Jenkins or Eriksen. 6 Bronwen Maddox, “Brexit threatens to reopen old wounds in Northern Ireland.” Financial Times, September 13, 2019, www.ft.com/content/18bef7bc-d57c-11e9-8d46-8def889b4137; Danica Kirka, “Brexit ignites fears of renewed violence in Northern Ireland.” AP News, October 16, 2019, https:// apnews.com/d64e8170c29e477eb2774e198ed4cd06; Sinead Barry, “Northern Ireland conflict 50 years on: will a no-deal Brexit threaten the peace?” EuroNews, August 19, 2019, www.euronews. com/2019/08/14/northern-ireland-conflict-50-years-on-will-a-no-deal-brexit-threaten-the-peace; James Angelos, “Will Brexit Bring the Troubles back to Northern Ireland?” The New York Times, December 30, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/12/30/magazine/brexit-northern-ireland.html 7 For the fullest description of this process see Shirlow and Murtagh. 8 “UVF flags in Belfast mixed housing scheme ‘absolutely appalling.’” Belfast Telegraph, June 30, 2019, www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/uvf-flags-in-belfast-mixed-housing-schemeabsolutely-appalling-38267969.html 9 See Shuttleworth and Lloyd and Stevenson et al. for more detailed discussions of residential diversity. 10 See Blaylock and Hughes on shared education. 11 see Anthony Gallagher (2017) for an overview. 12 See the books of Wilson (2010) and Finlay (2010) for the full argument. 13 See Taylor (2009), O’Leary and McGarry (2015) full discussions of the consociational model. 14 For a detailed history of the Ulster Unionist Party see Walker and Hennessey et al. 15 You can find a detailed discussion of this dispute in Paul Nolan et al. 16 Bryan et al. discuss this process of negotiated civic space in detail in Civic Identity and Public Space. 17 Frank Burton’s discussion of “telling” can be found in Ch. 2, pp. 37–67. 18 Rosemary Harris. 19 “Separate schools ‘benign apartheid.’” Belfast Telegraph, October 15, 2010, www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/ news/northern-ireland/separate-schools-benign-apartheid-28565119.html 119

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20 See Taylor for a discussion of consociational agreements. 21 In the BBC’s reporting of the speech, they use the term Northern Ireland which we suspect Martin McGuinness would not have used. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7902986.stm (accessed July 27, 2020). 22 See Bew, Gibbon, and Patterson for the key work on the relationship of social class, and Shirlow and McGovern for a particular discussion on social class and loyalism. 23 See Bryan in Titanic Town for these changes in Belfast. 24 See McCrudden et al. and Cunningham. 25 See Hennessey, Cox et al., and Dixon. 26 Mac Ginty and Darby. 27 The full text of the Agreement can be found here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/136652/agreement.pdf (accessed July 27, 2020). 28 For some details on the discussions of shared space and good relations see O’Dowd and Komerova, Komerova and Bryan and also Bryan (2015). 29 See Boland et al. for a discussion on the City of Culture in Derry/Londonderry. 30 For the development of the Titanic Quarter see Bryan (2015) and for St. Patrick’s Day Bryan (2015). 31 See chapters 8 and 9 of Bryan et al. to look at the development of civic Belfast. 32 Nolan et al. 33 See Nagle for discussion of alternative forms of political identity and social movements in Belfast. 34 See the recent work of the Belfast Mobility Project (https://belfastmobilityproject.org/) found in papers by Hocking et al. (2018). 35 See Belfast Mobility Project: https://belfastmobilityproject.org/ 36 Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey 2019: www.ark.ac.uk/nilt/2019/ 37 See McNicholl, Fenton, and McNicholl et al. for discussion on the category of Northern Irish. 38 Election results at www.ark.ac.uk/elections/. 39 Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey 2019: www.ark.ac.uk/nilt/2019/

Works cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Verso, 1983. Bew, Paul, Henry Patterson, and Peter Gibbon. Northern Ireland, 1921–96: Political Forces and Social Classes. Serif, 1996. Blaylock, Danielle and Joanne Hughes. “Shared Education Initiatives in Northern Ireland: A Model for Effective Intergroup Contact in Divided Jurisdictions.” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Vol. 13, No. 3, 2013. https://doi-org.queens.ezp1.qub.ac.uk/10.1111/sena.12044. Bolton, D. Conflict, Peace and Mental Health: Addressing the Consequences of Conflict and Trauma in Northern Ireland. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017. Boland, Philip, Brendan Murtagh, and Peter Shirlow. “Fashioning a City of Culture: ‘Life and Place Changing’ or ‘12 Month Party’?” International Journal of Cultural Policy, Vol. 25, No. 2, 2016, pp. 246–265. doi:10.10 80/10286632.2016.1231181. To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2016.1231181. Bryan, Dominic. “Ritual, Identity and Nation: When the Historian Becomes the High Priest of Commemoration.” Remembering 1916 The Easter Rising, the Somme and the Politics of Memory in Ireland. Edited by Richard Grayson and Fearghal McGarry. Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 24–42. Bryan, Dominic. Orange Parades: The Politics of Ritual Tradition and Control. Pluto Press, 2000. Bryan, Dominic. “Titanic Town: Living in a Landscape of Conflict.’ Belfast 400: People Place and History. Edited by Sean Connolly. Liverpool University Press, 2012, pp. 317–353. Bryan, Dominic. “Parades, Flags, Carnivals, and Riots: Public Space, Contestation, and Transformation in Northern Ireland.” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology Vol. 21, No. 4, 2015, pp. 565–573. doi/10.1037/ pac0000136. Bryan, Dominic, Sean Connolly, and John Nagle. Civic Identity and Public Space: Belfast since 1780. Manchester University Press, 2019. Burton, Frank. The Politics of Legitimacy: Struggles in a Belfast Community. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Cox, Michael, Adrian Guelke, and Fiona Stephen, Eds. A Farewell to Arms?: From War to Peace in Northern Ireland. Manchester University Press, 2000. Cunningham, Tim. “Monitoring Equality: Reflexive Regulation, Planning Systems, and the Role of Equality Law: Lessons from Northern Ireland.” The Equal Rights Review, Vol. 14, 2015, pp. 119–247. 120

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Davies, Gemma, John Dixon, Colin G. Tredoux, Duncan Whyatt, Jonny Huck, Brendan Sturgeon, Bree Hocking, Neil Jarman, and Dominic Bryan. “Networks of (Dis)connection: Mobility Practices, Tertiary Streets, and Sectarian Divisions in North Belfast.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Vol. 109, No. 6, 2019, pp. 1729–1747. doi:10.1080/24694452.2019.1593817. Dixon, Paul. Performing the Northern Ireland Peace Process: In Defence of Politics. Palgrave, 2019. Eriksen, Thomas Hyland. Ethnicity and Nationalism Third Edition: Anthropological Perspectives. Pluto Press. 2010. Fenton, Owen. “Narratively Framing Emergent Identities in Post-Agreement Societies: Patterns of the Northern Irish Identity within the Provincial Media.” National Identities, Vol. 20, No. 3, 2018, pp. 235– 257. doi:10.1080/14608944.2016.1212000. Finlay, Andrew. Governing Ethnic Conflict: Consociation, Identity and the Price of Peace. Routledge, 2010. Gallagher, A. “Addressing Conflict and Tolerance through the Curriculum.” (Re)Constructing Memory: School Textbooks, Identity, and the Pedagogies and Politics of Imagining Community: Vol III: (Re)Constructing Memory: Education, Identity, and Conflict (Vol. 3). Edited by M. Bellino and J. Williams. Sense Publishers, 2017, pp. 191–208. Gray, Ann Marie, Jennifer Hamilton, Gráinne Kelly, Brendan Lynn, Martin Melaugh, and Gillian Robinson. Northern Ireland Peace Monitoring Report, Number 5. Community Relations Council, 2018. Harris, Rosemary. Prejudice and Tolerance in Ulster: A Study of Neighbours and “Strangers” in a Border Community. Manchester University Press, 1972. Hayward, Katy and Cathal McManus. “Neither/Nor: The Rejection of Unionist and Nationalist Identities in Post-Agreement Northern Ireland.” Capital & Class Vol. 43, No. 1, 2019, pp.  139–155. doi. org/10.1177/0309816818818312. Heaney, Seamus. “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing.”Selected Poems, 1966–1987. The Noonday Press, 1990, p. 91. Hennessey. Thomas. The Northern Ireland Peace Process: Ending the Troubles? Gill & Macmillan, 1999. Hennessey, Thomas, Máire Braniff, James W. McAuley, Jonathan Tonge, and Sophie A. Whiting. The Ulster Unionist Party: Country Before Party? Oxford University Press, 2019. Hocking, Bree T., Brendan Sturgeon, Duncan Whyatt, Gemma Davies, Jonny Huck, John Dixon, Neil Jarman, and Dominic Bryan. “Negotiating the Ground: ‘Mobilizing’ a Divided Field Site in the ‘PostConflict’ City.” Mobilities, Vol. 13, No. 6, 2018, pp. 876–893. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.201 8.1504664. Jenkins, Richard. Social Identity (3rd ed.). Routledge, 2008. Komarova, Milena and Dominic Bryan. “Introduction: Beyond the Divided City: Policies and Practices of Shared Space.’ City, Vol. 18, No. 4–5, 2014, pp. 427–431. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2014.939480. Lawther, Cheryl. Truth, Denial and Transition: Northern Ireland and the Contested Past. Routledge, 2014. Mac Ginty, Roger and John Darby. Guns and Government: The Management of the Northern Ireland Peace Process. Palgrave, 2002. McBride, Sam. Burned: The Inside Story of the ‘Cash-for-Ash’ Scandal and Northern Ireland’s Secretive New Elite. Merrion Press, 2019. McCrudden, Christopher, Raya Muttarak, Heather Hamill, and Anthony Heath. “Affirmative Action without Quotas in Northern Ireland.” The Equal Rights Review, Vol. 4, 2009, pp. 7–14. McEvoy, K, D. Holder, L. Mallinder, A. Bryson, B. Gormally, and G McKeown. Prosecutions, Imprisonment and the Stormont House Agreement: A Critical Analysis of Proposals on Dealing with the Past in Northern Ireland. Committee on the Administration of Justice, 2020. McGarry, John and Brendan O’Leary. Explaining Northern Ireland. John Wiley & Sons, 1995 McNicholl, Kevin. “Political Constructions of a Cross-Community Identity in a Divided Society: How Politicians Articulate Northern Irishness.” National Identities, Vol. 20, No. 5, 2018, pp. 495–513. doi:10. 1080/14608944.2017.1312325. McNicholl, Kevin, Clifford Stevenson, and John Garry. How the ‘Northern Irish’ National Identity Is Understood and Used by Young People and Politicians.” Political Psychology, Vol. 40, No. 3, 2019, pp. 488–505. doi:10.1111/pops.12523. Murphy, Dervla. A Place Apart. Penguin, 1979. Nagle, John. “‘Unity in Diversity’: Non-Sectarian Social Movement Challenges to the Politics of Ethnic Antagonism in Violently Divided Cities.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 37, No. 1, 2013 pp. 78–92. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2012.01156. Nolan, Paul, Dominic Bryan, Clare Dwyre, Katy Hayward, Katy Radford, and Peter Shirlow. The Flag Dispute: Anatomy of a Protest. Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice, 2014. O’Dowd, Liam and Milena Komarova. “Contesting Territorial Fixity? A Case Study of Regeneration in Belfast.”Urban Studies, Vol. 48, No. 10, 2011, pp. 2013–2028. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098010382678. 121

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O’Leary, Brendan and John McGarry. The Politics of Antagonism: Understanding Northern Ireland. Athlone Press, 1993. O’Leary, Brendan and John McGarry. Understanding Northern Ireland: Colonialism, Control and Consociation (3rd ed.). Routledge, 2015. Shirlow, Peter and Mark McGovern. “Sectarianism, Socioeconomic Competition and the Political Economy of Ulster Loyalism.”Antipode, Vol. 28, No. 4, 1996, pp. 379–398. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.1996. tb00532.x. Shirlow, Peter and Brenda Murtagh. Belfast: Segregation, Violence and the City. Pluto Press, 1986. Shuttleworth, Ian and C. Lloyd. Mapping Residential Segregation on Housing Executive Estates. Northern Ireland Housing Executive, 2018. www.nihe.gov.uk/Documents/Research/Mapping-segregation/Belfastestates-2011-analysis.aspx. Stevenson, C., M. Easterbrook, L. Harkin, N. McMamara, B. Kellezi, and I. Shuttleworth. “Neighbourhood Identity Helps Residents Cope with Residential Diversification: Contact in Increasingly Mixed Neighbourhoods of Northern Ireland.” Political Psychology, Vol. 40, No. 2, 2019, pp. 277–295. doi:10.1111/pops.12667. Stevenson, C, N. McNamara, B, Kellezi, M.J. Easterbrook, I. Shuttleworth, D. and Hyden. “Re-Identifying Residential Mixing: Emergent Identity Dynamics Between Incomers and Existing Residents in a Mixed Neighbourhood in Northern Ireland.” European Journal of Social Psychology, Vol. 49, No. 2, 2018, pp. 413–428. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2529. Sturgeon, Brendan, Neil Jarman, Dominic Bryan, John Dixon, Duncan Whyatt, Bree T. Hocking, Jonny Huck, Gemma Davies, and Colin Tredoux. Mobility, Sharing and Segregation in Belfast: Policy Report. Institute for Conflict Research, 2000. Taylor, Rupert. Consociational Theory: McGarry and O’Leary and the Northern Ireland Conflict. Routledge, 2009. Walker, Graham. A History of the Ulster Unionist Party: Protest, Pragmatism and Pessimism. Manchester University Press, 2004. Wilson, Robin. The Northern Ireland Experience of Conflict and Agreement: A Model for Export? Manchester University Press, 2010.

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Part III

Global Ireland

Introduction: Global Ireland: margadh an domhain nó margadh na saoire? “We are one of the most outward-looking, globalized nations in the world.”

A 2020 post-COVID-19 promotion piece in the Irish Independent expounded Dublin’s allure to foreign direct investment. Not only did the city attract 10.8 million overseas visitors (2019), Dublin, it proclaimed, is home to 1,400 FDI companies, who created 20,000 FDI jobs since 2015. It’s also home to nine of the top ten global ITC companies and nine of the world’s top ten pharma companies (Fawsitt 2020). Dublin hosts 50% of the world’s top banks, and Dublin’s International Financial Services area employs over 30,000 people. Among the city’s attractions is the tenth-largest EU airport, accounting for 32.9 million passengers (2019), with direct flights to 190 destinations (Fawsitt 2020). With large tech companies (Airbnb, Google, and Facebook) all operating here, the city is a vibrant hub where professionals work, socialize, and live. As of Q1 2020, 27% of the city’s households are private renters who can expect to pay anything from around €1,735 to €2,277 per month (average, based on two beds) (Fawsitt 2020). And yet there is a homelessness crisis in Ireland. The State’s public housing system fails to meet its citizens needs and to provide a safety net for families and individuals pushed out of the private rental market due to the high cost of renting or the lack of housing. Almost 1 in 5 households now live in a privately rented home compared to 1 in 10 ten years ago. In the week of May 25–31, 2020, 8,876 people, adults and children, were homeless across Ireland: an increase of 115% since May 2015 (Focus Ireland 2020). Children account for more than 1 in 3 people in emergency accommodation. Such appalling numbers do not include the “hidden homelessness”: “squatters,” “sofa surfers,” women and children staying in domestic violence refuges, and those sleeping rough on the streets (approx. 92 in Nov. 2019) (Focus Ireland 2020). As of May 2020, 1,217 families, including 2,787 children, were in emergency accommodation. At the end of May 2020, there were 709 young people (adults aged under 25) in emergency homeless accommodation (Focus Ireland 2020).

Global Ireland

Globalization, modernity, and neoliberalism account, in large part, for these two radically different realities in the second decade of the twenty-first century. And these figures, grim as they are, do not include the current victims of sex trafficking: the US Dept. of State has rated Ireland, along with Romania, as the worst country in western Europe for tackling the epidemic of human trafficking. A mere 34 cases for sex trafficking, six for labor, and three for forced criminality were prosecuted in Ireland in 2019. And yet 2020 saw Ireland elected for a two-year period to the UN Security Council. Ireland’s election campaign stressed its strong record of promoting the rights of women and girls, its record on peace and security, conflict resolution, reconciliation, climate action, sustainable development, and gender equality. Securing a seat on the Security Council not only placed Ireland on the center of the global stage but achieved a key goal set out in the Irish government’s Global Ireland: Ireland’s Global Footprint to 2025. While acknowledging that Brexit would challenge Ireland to deepen and renew relationships and alliances in Europe and beyond, the glossy report assured that there was no cause for alarm: exports continue growing strongly and Ireland is one of the world’s most competitive locations for inward investment. This, the report informs readers, is “our hour”: Winning our independence was not the end, it was a beginning. Today we can be a voice for peace, multilateralism, security, free trade, free markets, sustainability and social justice in the world. One hundred years ago we were a small island on the periphery of Western Europe. In the next one hundred we will be a nation at the heart of the common European home we helped to build; an island at the centre of the world. (Global Ireland) Invoking Michael Collins and Seán Lemass as paradigms of Irish global engagement, the document recalled Lemass’s assertion that “Irish people are citizens of the world as well as Ireland.” Global Ireland sets out how Ireland plans to take its global engagement “to the next level”: new embassies and consulates (embassies in Chile, Colombia, New Zealand, Kiev, Liberia, and Jordan; consulates in Vancouver and Mumbai; a new flagship Ireland House in Los Angeles and Tokyo); further investment in the IDA, Enterprise Ireland, Bord Bia, and Tourism Ireland; sharing Irish culture more widely around the world and deepening links to our global family; a strengthening of presence in North and West Africa, the Middle East and Gulf region; and promoting Ireland’s values of peace, humanitarianism, equality, and justice, including through its campaign for election to the UN Security Council. The report stresses the importance of the Irish diaspora, the 70 million people, “part of our global family,” who are “enormously important to our global presence.” Other Irish diasporic cohorts, including the “afnity” and “return” diaspora (those who have lived in Ireland for a period before returning to their home elsewhere), “are also potentially influential advocates for Ireland internationally” (Global Ireland). The five chapters in this section address different but interconnected aspects of global Ireland. They incorporate discussions and analyses of Irish identity in the US and Britain as well as globalization in Dublin and how Brexit will impact the Irish global economic relationship. The section begins with chapters that consider the Irish diaspora, as the diaspora, more than any other phenomenon, has produced Ireland as a hyphenated global identity and has fostered Irish Studies programs from Budapest to Boston and Beijing, and from Moscow to Montreal and Melbourne. Mike Cronin’s chapter on Ireland’s global networks outlines the ways in which Ireland marshalled its widespread diasporic communities to help with the country’s economic recovery after 2008. The chapter describes the State’s initiatives to use digital technologies and local records to connect people outside of Ireland to their families’ former local parishes and to 124

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monetize these newly strengthened ties by bringing the diaspora (and their money) “home” for holidays. As the chapter argues, after 2008 Ireland recognized the unique opportunity its diaspora provided to widely disseminate the Irish “brand” and to produce sentimental attachment to Ireland across the world. These attachments, in turn, allowed Ireland to convincingly remake itself as the best place to visit, the best place to do business, and the best place to buy things, and Cronin argues that it is precisely this canny capitalization of diasporic ties that allowed Ireland to recover so quickly from the economic downturn. Liam Kennedy’s chapter examines the contemporary reality and issues involving membership of, and identification with, the Irish diaspora in Britain. Despite 34.7 million Americans indicating an Irish affiliation in the 2010 US census, it is frequently asserted that Irish America is dead or dying. According to this narrative, Irish-Americans, after successfully assimilating, no longer need a distinct ethnic identity. The disintegration of once powerful and influential ethnic networks, organizations, and communities appears to confirm this thesis, but Kennedy argues that nostalgia-tinged laments are premature: Irishness yet persists in various forms as an identity marker in the US. Contemporary Irish-American identity, he concludes, is not a static homogenous identity, nor one that can be associated with a specific set of practices or community formations, but it remains a strong and recognizable set of emotions, affiliations, and values. If the Irish-American identity is documented and celebrated, the same is not true of the Irish in Britain. As Mary J. Hickman’s chapter illustrates, there has never been an (official) way to describe the Irish Briton in Britain. Consequently, the knowledge of Irish-Britain pales in comparison to Irish-America. Identifying key moments that resulted in various forms of invisibilizing or incorporation of Irish migrants and their descendants, she cautions that Irish experiences and identities cannot be understood without acknowledging the British State’s specific nationalizing strategies. She concludes with a meditation of the nature of Irish Studies, highlighting the potential role sociology can play and calling for a concept of Irish diaspora that combines an understanding of the diasporic context of identity formation in different locations. Diane Negra’s and Anthony P. McIntyre’s chapter draws on cultural studies and sociology to plot the cultural coordinates of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland in an increasingly neoliberalized corporatization of society. They detail how governments, closely aligned with élite interests, double down on their commitment to corporate citizenship. With corporatism as its North star, Ireland’s relationship with global corporations is marked by governmental facilitation of tax avoidance. An official acceptance of a capitalist market managerialism, along with an increasingly psychological turn within neoliberalism, results in higher stress levels, a hollowing out of public services, the return of emigration, intensified élite/underclass divisions, an inflation of social inequality, a sense of sovereign diminishment, and a burgeoning housing crisis. In this new Global Dublin, and by extension Global Ireland, reiterated practices of consumption now define what it means to belong to the nation. So internalized is the neoliberal ideology that it permeates all aspects of public discourses and popular culture. The chapter also considers the role of politicians who promote socially liberal policies while simultaneously advancing neoliberal privatization that privileges élite interests and its impact on daily life and popular culture. In conclusion, they posit the 2020 February election result as a possible indication that a political and ideological recalibration may be emerging in Ireland. In the Middle Ages, Irish monks produced world-renowned illuminated scrolls to preserve and spread the sacred word of God; in twenty-first-century Ireland, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Uber use digital industries to propagate a neoliberal gospel. Digitization fundamentally transformed Ireland’s economy, created its global standing, and upended its culture. Money moves in and out of digital Ireland without ever circulating in the domestic marketplace. In a detailed and revealing critique of contemporary digital Ireland, Kylie Jarrett engages with the 125

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policies—corporation tax rates, cultural policies, and urban renewal projects—that made Dublin a global center of digital transformation. She plots the processes through which a country, once dominated by primary industries, became a node in the global flows of digital capital. Echoing Negra and McIntyre, she critiques the social and economic consequences of this rapid shift in relation to the ongoing socioeconomic crises, such as homelessness, rural depopulation, and lack of social housing. In her chapter, Martina Lawless questions how Brexit, having stirred atavistic passions and avid patriotism of the English shires, will interrupt Ireland’s trade. EU membership transformed the Irish economy and as EU and US trade increased, the UK’s proportional importance declined, even as it remains critical for small and medium Irish-owned firms Thus, Brexit could negatively impact the Irish economy, not to mention the stability of the Norther Ireland peace process. Ireland’s role in the world post-COVID-19 and post-Brexit is unclear, uncertain, and unpredictable, but these chapters carefully and insightfully chart the contours of global and globalized Ireland’s fractures and fissures, power and potential.

Works cited Fawsitt, Rachel Taylor. “Ireland’s corporate landscape: Why Dublin Has Become a Hub for Multinational Corporations.” Irish Independent, July 23, 2020. www.independent.ie/storyplus/irelands-corporatelandscape-why-dublin-has-become-a-hub-for-multinational-corporations-39376597.html Focus Ireland. “About Homelessness” 2020. www.focusireland.ie/resource-hub/about-homelessness/ Government of Ireland. Global Ireland: Ireland’s Global Footprint to 2025. www.ireland.ie/media/ireland/ stories/globaldiaspora/Global-Ireland-in-English.pdf US Department of State. Trafficking in Persons Report. 2020, p. 269. www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/ 2020/06/2020-TIP-Report-Complete-062420-FINAL.pdf

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10 Connections and capital The diaspora and Ireland’s global networks Mike Cronin

Ireland is not unique in possessing a global diaspora.1 However, the Irish Republic, through a range of state bodies covering trade and tourism in particular, has perhaps worked harder than many other nations in maintaining ties with its diaspora, the large population of people outside of Ireland who claim an Irish identity or heritage. This chapter focuses on the ways Ireland has capitalized on these ties since the 2008 economic downturn, transforming its centuries-long narrative of abject emigration from a failing island into a story about the value—economic and emotional—of coming home to a place that you’ve always known and that has always known you. Although the recession period saw far more emigration than Ireland had experienced since the end of the twentieth century, the period also saw Ireland discovering ways to marshal technology, sentimental appeal, and local community engagement to draw its growing diasporic community closer, and in drawing it closer, to forge and strengthen new global connections that helped catalyze Ireland’s economic recovery. Irish emigration began its historic pattern during the eighteenth century, following the pathways of the British empire or else across the Atlantic to the US (although movement to and from Ireland has even deeper historical roots) (Delaney; Miller). Emigration surged in the years following the famine of the mid-nineteenth century and continued throughout the twentieth century. The Irish can be found across the globe and especially in certain cities where they congregated in high numbers, such as New York, Boston, Chicago, Liverpool, London, and Sydney. But in the 1990s, as the Celtic Tiger began to roar, net emigration out of Ireland ceased and an historic pattern seemingly ended. With the economy growing as the twentieth century drew to a close, it began to seem like emigration would become a thing of the past. The sense of transitioning demography was heightened in 2004 with the enlargement of the European Union. Not only was the Irish Republic keeping its own population at home and welcoming Irish returnees, it became a favored destination for immigrants from the expanded European Union. The Celtic Tiger and its employment opportunities were highly attractive to those nationals of countries that had recently lived behind the iron curtain and were now Europeans. The Irish Republic attracted high numbers of workers and their families from Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania, in particular.2 Each census from 2006 to 2009 showed a rapidly growing percentage of people living in Ireland who were not classified as Irish born. At the height of the boom, the 2006 census recorded 420,000 people, or 10% of the population, who were non-Irish 127

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nationals. The double headlines of the Irish Republic’s demographics during the Celtic Tiger years—few if any Irish leaving, and tens of thousands of Europeans arriving—signaled an apparently stable and booming economy. However, with the collapse of the Irish economy in 2008 and the austerity that quickly followed, emigration as a fact of life dramatically returned. In 2009, 19,200 Irish people left the country; by 2012, as the recession and the impact of austerity policies deepened, that number had grown to 49,700. The Irish, or so it seemed, had returned to type.3 The national history had been one where emigration was the norm, and with the first recession of the twenty-first century, that historical pattern was quickly reenergized, although with some significant differences. The changing nature of immigration policies meant that the US would not be the favored destination for Irish people fleeing austerity. The nature of the global downturn following the collapse of economic fortunes in 2008 meant that the range of destinations available to those Irish deciding to leave was more limited than it had been in the twentieth century. While the free movement of Irish nationals within the European Union meant that many could look for new opportunities across the Eurozone, others had to look further afield. For some, the familiar, English-speaking nations to which the Irish had emigrated in the past—such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand—proved highly popular, relatively easy to enter, and rife with economic prospects that seemed better than those of many other countries. For others, the severity of the downturn and austerity policies meant seeking new emigrant destinations that were eager for the skills that Irish people could bring. For those with the relevant qualifications, especially in the fields of medicine, nursing, teaching, and finance, the Middle East (places such as Dubai) and the Far East (China, Hong Kong, and Singapore) proved attractive, if more culturally challenging, destinations.4 Following the collapse of the Irish economy, the lack of employment opportunities in Ireland became a scapegoat for stories of families separated by emigration. The media regularly highlighted the sheer numbers of people who were leaving the island, and a range of images, from GAA clubs that could not field teams to shrinking school class sizes, were used to illustrate the human cost of emigration.5 With this new era of emigration at hand, it started to look as though the Celtic Tiger years of net immigration had been outliers in an otherwise steadfast historical model, one which clearly showed that the Irish economy was bound to a pattern of underperformance, could not provide full employment for its people, and therefore forced each generation to join an outward flow of Irish that stretched back across the centuries. As this chapter will argue, however, the post-Celtic Tiger years of emigration do not simply reproduce Ireland’s age-old historical pattern, and the forms that emigration took in these years show a far more complex global dynamic between the Irish Republic and its new diasporic communities. The Irish economy was rebuilt relatively quickly after 2008, the tide of emigration lasted for less than a decade, and the twenty-first-century technologies available to this new group of émigrés differed hugely from those available to people leaving Ireland in the pre-1996 era. At the level of the individual, the experience of emigration (whether permanent or only for the period of recession) was transformed dramatically by digital technology. The historic imagery of the emigrant disappearing—swallowed up by the city to which they had moved, in only infrequent contact with home through letter or phone—vanished into the myriad screens that shrunk the distance between “home” and “away” to a few mouse clicks.6 Whether through direct video calling on platforms such as Skype (which began in 2003) or Facetime (2010), or else daily updates on Facebook (2005) and other social media sites, the channels of connectivity between emigrant and Ireland were well established by the time people started leaving during the recession. Such technology did not necessarily make the full process of emigration, 128

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of seeking employment and economic opportunity overseas, any easier, but the simple fact of regular, free, real-time connections to Ireland was transformative in terms of keeping in touch with family and friends, maintaining mental well-being, and reducing the feelings of loneliness and dislocation. The idea of connectivity was also key to the State’s strategy towards the diaspora. The period of recession would lead the government, and various State agencies, to reach out to the diaspora (whether recent or established) and seek their ongoing engagement with Ireland and the national fortunes. Rather than passively accepting a proportional relationship between the growth of the Irish diaspora and an increasing economic stagnation of the Irish Republic, the government instead chose to see the growing diasporic networks as an opportunity to help the Irish economy flourish. During the years of recession and austerity, the State and a range of bodies across a number of sectors deliberately targeted the Irish diaspora and those of Irish heritage in order to build the Irish “brand” across the world and use a growing awareness of this brand as a means of rebooting the Irish economy.

I. Capitalizing on diasporic homecomings One of the major ways that the Irish State has historically built its profile and its global network with and beyond its diaspora has been through the use of high-profile state visits. This was particularly notable in 2011, at the height of the recession, when Ireland welcomed both Queen Elizabeth II and US President Barack Obama in the space of a few days. While the visit of the Queen had a narrative that was more concerned with Anglo-Irish cooperation around postconflict transformations in Northern Ireland, she did acknowledge the pathways of emigration between Ireland and the UK: “Many British families have members who live in this country, as many Irish families have close relatives in the United Kingdom. . . . These ties of family, friendship and affection of our most precious resource.”7 In addressing a crowd in Dublin, Obama spoke of similar ties that stretched across the Atlantic, alluding to his own Irish heritage and the “proud, enduring, centuries-old relationship” between Ireland and the US. As he warmly told the listening crowd, the pint of Guinness he had in Moneygall, Co. Offlay, made him feel “even more at home” than he already did as one of the “Moneygall Obamas,” and he wanted to offer Ireland “the hearty greetings of tens of millions of Irish Americans who proudly trace their heritage to this small island.”8 While such narratives, presented during state visits, are familiar mechanisms for acknowledging the Irish history of emigration (John F. Kennedy employed such a narrative especially powerfully during his visit to Ireland in 1963), the 2011 publicity shots of the Queen visiting major heritage and tourism sites and of Obama returning to his family’s home town of Moneygall were exercises in promoting Ireland to the world beyond the island. While the creamy pints of Guinness that both leaders were pictured enjoying might comprise a clichéd image of Ireland, the images from those visits of the Queen staring at her pint at the Guinness Store House and Obama drinking his with great enthusiasm at Ollie Hayes’ pub made the front pages of newspapers and were featured on television broadcasts around the world. Although both of these visits had real political functions for each country involved, they were also hugely choreographed to present a particular version of Ireland to the international community. No matter how many speeches during these visits referenced emigration, conflict, and hardship, the clearest message to come out of them was that Ireland had attracted two major international figures to its shores and was open for business. It might be a country in the midst of recession, but it had managed to recast its diasporic past and present as dynamic networks for building strong international coalitions in the future. 129

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The idea that Ireland was a welcoming and highly functioning state, even in the middle of a global recession with the accompanying policies of austerity (and in contrast to the disorderly management of the crisis in countries such as Spain or Greece), became an important message that the State projected to the global diasporic community in order to garner their support in lifting Ireland from its downturn. The first official attempt to marshal the diaspora in order to debate and vocalize strategies for how Ireland could recover came in September 2009 at the Global Irish Economic Forum. The idea, conceived by the economist David McWilliams, was to bring to Dublin successful members of the Irish diaspora and have them discuss ways of reenergizing Irish fortunes. Attendees were drawn from across the world and included a host of Irish entrepreneurs, business leaders, philanthropists, and cultural producers. The topics debated included the development of an Irish smart economy, how to promote Ireland through its global cultural profile, how new media could be harnessed to improve Ireland’s image overseas, and how the Irish diaspora, described as a unique resource, could be mobilized to help Ireland. There was a further Forum in 2011 where similar ideas were discussed. Rather than producing tightly defined ideas and plans for how to move forward, the critical outcome of the Forum was both its engagement with and its exemplification of the value of the global diaspora to Irish fortunes. If Ireland wished to recover economically, it had to use this unique resource. David McWilliams was a strong advocate for this approach, pointing to the strong ties between Israel and its diaspora and arguing that Israel benefited enormously from its meticulous work tracking and maintaining contacts with its people around the world. He noted that while Ireland was good at knowing which Irish people appeared on a Fortune 500 list—what he termed the top of the pyramid—it was bad at knowing those hundreds of thousands of Irish people “around the base of the diaspora pyramid.”9 The project to reach out to the diaspora around the world was initially called “Ireland Reaching Out” and began in 2010. The idea was that parishes across Ireland would use genealogical and other digital records and reach out directly to members of the diaspora who originated in a specific parish. The target number for each parish was to make 44,000 connections with the diaspora. After initial connections had been made, the idea was to invite 25 or 30 people back to their parish of origin in the summer of 2011. The point of the project was to generate excitement about Ireland by fostering a deep interconnectivity between the diaspora and “home,” rather than by simply trying to attract people to Ireland on the basis of a generic tourism campaign. Critically, the interconnectivity of “Ireland Reaching Out” was enabled by digital technology. Parishes no longer had to wait for someone from overseas to come looking for them, but rather could use technology to proactively identify people and make them aware of and interested in their origins. As each parish reached out, awareness of local heritage grew amongst the diasporic community, and from 2011 the numbers of people traveling into Ireland from overseas specifically to make connections with their place of origin grew dramatically. The successful idea underlying the “Ireland Reaching Out” campaign was amplified further with a 2013 project called “The Gathering,” another coordinated global promotion of Ireland to its diaspora. The idea behind “The Gathering” was that local events would be organized across the country, and that through promotion both in traditional media and across digital and social media, the diaspora would be invited to return home. While general tourism would benefit, the concept aimed to energies local communities in Ireland (both in spirit and economically) so that they would invite specific family members, wider social groups, and geographic regions from across the world to visit them and join in a local event. The campaign was focused in large part on the Irish themselves so that the range of events in the Gathering would grow, with the most common messaging asking the Irish “To Be Part of It” or to “Invite Uncle Sam Home.” Across 2013, 5,000 discrete Gathering events were held throughout Ireland and involved 1.5 million 130

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Irish people in their organization and hosting. These events attracted 440,000 tourists to Ireland, who together added €200 million to the Irish economy. This influx of cash from diasporic tourists was particularly remarkable, given that Ireland only spent €3 million on promotion for “The Gathering.” Included among the events was a College Football game between Notre Dame and Navy, at the Aviva Stadium where 15,000 tickets sold in less than two hours. Some 35,000 Americans traveled to Dublin and the US Navy docked a warship in Dublin. In 2014 Penn State defeated UCF at Croke Park before 53,304 fans while in 2016, 40,562 spectators saw Boston College lose to Georgia Tech at the Aviva. Building on the lessons learned from “Ireland Reaching Out,” “The Gathering” relied intensively on close community engagement and on narratives that connected the diaspora back to their deeply local roots. By channeling this message extensively through social media, the campaign successfully reengaged the diaspora with their sense of Irish identity and boosted the Irish economy, all with relatively little financial outlay.

II. St. Patrick’s Day and the Irish brand While events such as “The Gathering” were important in reconnecting with the diaspora and stimulating the domestic tourist industry, Ireland was also engaging in an ongoing and sustained attempt to project an awareness of Ireland outward, even as it also worked to reel the love and dollars of its diasporic community inward. The annual celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, which had always been important in terms of creating an identification with Ireland and Irishness, became an especially valuable tool during the period of downturn. Few countries in the world have an annual saint’s day, or a day of national commemoration, that is celebrated globally (Cronin and Adair). The celebrations of March 17 across the world, although frequently associated with bars and drinking, always also spark an engagement with the idea of Ireland and give the Irish State a unique platform on which to promote itself. For instance, the St. Patrick’s Day tradition of the Taoiseach visiting the White House to present the US President with a bowl of shamrock stretches back to the 1950s. It is quite remarkable to think that while many nations are granted only infrequent access to the higher reaches of US political and business power, the Irish Taoiseach knows that they will be granted an annual audience with the President and that the focus of all on Capitol Hill will be on Ireland, even if only for a few brief hours. The symbolism of US politicians wearing green ties or outfits every year is not only a powerful statement of linkages between those who have Irish origins and the “home” place, but also, even for those with no Irish origins, a public declaration of Ireland’s privileged place in US politics and culture. The annual parades, dinners, and parties around the world each March 17 bring together the Irish diaspora with a wide array of Irish cultural figures and the large number of Irish government ministers who crisscross the world in a few days, attending as many events as possible. Although the extensive travel of ministers to St. Patrick’s Day celebrations across the world is often criticized for its high price tag, this global movement persists because the privileged access to international governments that St. Patrick’s Day offers Ireland far outweighs the cost of travel. What other nations have an annual day where its representatives can visit a foreign country, be feted as the center of attention, and demand the attention of local politicians, business leaders, and influencers? Perhaps the most striking representation of Ireland and its use of its national saint’s day to reach a global audience began during the downturn, in 2010. In that year, Tourism Ireland approached the authorities in Sydney and asked if the iconic Sydney opera house could be lit green to mark St. Patrick’s Day. The Sydney authorities agreed and an annual global tradition was born. In 2020, over 500 buildings across the world, in 50 different countries, were 131

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illuminated green on St. Patrick’s Day. Many of these buildings are iconic global and national symbols and included the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio, the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign, the Millennium Eye in London, Madison Square Garden in New York, and the Burj Al Arab in Dubai. The annual illumination of the world on March 17 has grown each year and is a powerful symbol of a global awareness of a small European island. For the diaspora, the greening of iconic national buildings symbolizes both that they are welcome and at home in the countries in which they live, and that the country from which they originated is worth recognition and honor. For the non-Irish local, whether in Rio, Dubai, Sydney, or elsewhere, the sight of their city’s landmark lit green creates an awareness, even if only fleeting, of Ireland and its national day. The result of such awareness of Ireland, whether through illuminated landmarks, the annual St. Patrick’s Day festivities, or the familiarity of a pint of Guinness, results in an everrenewing connection between Ireland and people living outside the island (whether diasporic or just Guinness-loving) as well as an elevated level of Ireland’s brand recognition amongst the global population. This results in a global network of individuals, businesses, and nations who “know” Ireland, which translates into a desire either to visit Ireland as a tourist, purchase Irish goods, consume Irish culture, trade with Ireland, or establish businesses there. For Ireland in the post-Celtic-Tiger era, global connectivity and capital go hand-in-hand.

III. “The best small country in the world in which to do business” A key part of the Irish government message during the years of downturn was that Ireland was, in Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s often repeated phrase, “the best small country in the world in which to do business.”10 Kenny was a highly vocal promoter of the idea, to the extent that in 2014, in Washington, he told his audience that his phone number was public and that if anyone had a problem, question or anxiety with a business proposition or proposal relating to Ireland that they should call him directly. The idea that Ireland should be the best small place to do business, especially in the technology and digital arenas, had emerged during the Farmleigh House Forum, Dublin, and was yet another way of capitalizing on links between the loyalties of Irish diaspora, the global awareness of the Irish brand, and the need for the Irish economic recovery. Kenny’s message would have gotten nowhere without the historic presence of a global diaspora deeply receptive to Irish economic messaging, or without a long-standing international awareness of Ireland, generated in part by St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, in part by the diaspora’s dissemination of Irish literature and culture to a global audience, and in part by the diaspora’s “memory” of Ireland as a land of lush green beauty and friendly and welcoming people. Whether the messenger was the Taoiseach, a government minister, the IDA, Chambers Ireland, the American Chamber of Commerce or any of the other bodies charged with promoting Ireland as a place worthy of investment, the “best small country to do business in” campaign acknowledged that the historic diaspora and the development of global networks were critical in attracting business to Ireland. The strategy was a success and one of the reasons for Ireland’s relatively quick emergence from recession. In 2014, Ireland was ranked first in the IBM global location trends survey for added value of foreign direct investment projects. In 2015, Ireland was ranked in 13th place out of 189 nations globally by the World Bank as the best place to do business. Also, in 2015, in the Global Benchmark Complexity Report, and only behind Jersey and Hong Kong, Ireland was ranked as third easiest country in the world to do business in because of its low tax rates, its system of regulation and compliance, and its security systems. Such surveys were used heavily in government messaging and by those promoting Ireland as a destination for business and investment. The business environment which the State created has been open to criticism by other nations 132

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and by European Union regulatory bodies, especially in the areas of corporate compliance and taxation. But in terms of employment statistics, the headline use of diaspora linkages, global networks, and the high level of recognition of brand Ireland in the State’s strategy and messaging worked exactly as planned. Unemployment following the downturn peaked in 2012 at 15.45% but by 2019 had fallen to 4.93%. The development of a strategy which treated the diaspora as a global network to support Ireland was formalized in 2014 with the appointment of Jimmy Deenihan T.D. as the first ever Minister for Diaspora Affairs and the evolution and implementation of a strategy which was published in 2015 as Global Irish: Ireland’s Diaspora Policy. The policy document was full of strategies for connecting with the diaspora but was essentially focused on three areas: supporting those emigrants outside of Ireland who were vulnerable, creating cultural connections between Ireland and its diaspora, and mobilizing the diaspora and global networks to create business and investment opportunities. It was a broad plan, which stated that “welfare is at the heart of our diaspora policy. That is the case, but our relationship with the Irish abroad is much more than welfare.” This suggested that the aim of the diaspora policy was to support those of Irish origins who had fallen on hard times (whether financial or in the context of broader issues such as addiction or mental health), but that there was also much more than that to the strategy. The outlining of “much more than welfare” was telling: “many Irish abroad have both the capacity and the desire to contribute to Ireland’s continuing recovery and growth and we want to work with them” (Global Irish 10). Inherent throughout the policy document, and indeed in the global networking of Ireland with its diaspora and beyond, was an element of responsibility (the state would assist its people no matter where in the world they lived), but also a far greater emphasis on how the diaspora could help reboot Ireland during the recessionary years.11 The catch-all approach of the messaging to the global Irish network became clear in 2014 in a Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade of Ireland, and Fáilte Ireland promotional film that was heavily promoted via social media. Titled #InspiringIreland, the three-minute film outlined the multiple attractions and achievements of Ireland since the downturn, combining factual text with a dizzying array of images of Ireland. Packed into three minutes were the messages that: • • • • • • • •

•

Ireland has a population of 5 million, but a diaspora of 70 million. The nation has produced multiple Nobel Prize winners, Oscar winners, and Olympians. It was the first Eurozone nation to exit an economic assistance program. Forbes named Ireland the best nation to do business in. Ireland is a leader in creativity, sustainable food, and scientific research. The Irish workforce is the most adaptable in the world and also the youngest in the EU. Irish people are some of the biggest givers to charity globally. Ireland is home to the European base of 1,033 global firms; eight of the largest global information, communication, and technology firms; nine of the largest pharmaceutical firms; and the top ten online companies. Ireland has excellent surfing, is good at rugby, welcomed 8 million visitors in 2013 (“The Gathering”), and has a diverse range of contemporary musicians who have reached a global audience.12

The film was selling a nation to a global audience, ofering a checklist of good points that had moved Ireland out of recession, listed the various companies and business types that had found a home in Ireland, and ofered a reassuring myriad of images from the West of Ireland (the “real” Ireland) as well as lists of well-known cultural outputs by Irish people across the ages. At one level, the film was confusing. Which Ireland was being promoted? High tech Ireland? 133

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Investment Ireland? Cultural Ireland? Tourism Ireland? The answer, and the underlying message driving the whole post-2008 Irish strategy of outreach to the diaspora and global network, is simple: Ireland is any and all of these things because Ireland is whatever you want it to be. Even more, it’s waiting here for you in all its reassuringly familiar greenness, so please come and invest. The messaging continued through the commemorative year of 2016, when the self-styled foundation point of the modern state was aggressively promoted across the world. Beyond the history being recollected, 2016 was effectively “The Gathering II,” just dressed up in a 1916 Volunteer uniform. By 2018, Fáilte Ireland was recording income from tourism as worth €9.4 billion, which was the product of 10 million people visiting Ireland.13 Coupled with a growing economy, the regular headlines of inward investment (particularly by US firms), and a return of many Celtic Tiger era problems (housing shortages, housing costs, the cost of living and so on), by the close of 2019 it appeared that within a decade of the catastrophic downturn, Ireland’s vigorous pursuit of its diaspora and wider global network had successfully restarted the Irish economy. The trajectory of recovery did not mask the fact that the levels of emigration following the 2008 downturn were high and also disproportionately made up of young people. Estimates regularly hold that of those who left Ireland between 2008 and 2014, 70% were in their 20s. Emigration was a young person’s journey in the 2000s, even if the recovery story of the 2010s positioned Ireland as a place that was open to and welcoming of its returning emigrants. While many of the youthful emigrants of the post-2008 period did return, many others did not, often citing the lack of opportunity or the cost of living. But it was many of these emigrant young people who made their presence felt in Ireland in 2015 and 2018, when the referenda on the legalization of same sex marriage and the referendum to repeal the 8th amendment and end the ban on abortion were held. Both referenda passed with large majorities, and on both occasions, it was temporarily returning emigrants who were a visible demographic in voting and particularly on social media. #HomeToVote was a feature of voting day in both campaigns, used 72,000 times in 2015 and 43,000 times in 2018 (Elknick et al.). The hashtag was used to highlight the journeys that Irish people were making so that they could vote in these referenda. Emigrants, mostly young, returned to Ireland in large numbers to vote in state referenda that would change the laws of a country in which they no longer lived. The return home for voting signaled the wave of support for the social liberalization agenda inherent in both “yes” votes, and a push back against the legislative hangover of the decades of Catholic Church domination. It is significant that while those who traveled #HomeToVote were actively engaged with social media, and had undoubtedly been the recipients of the government’s messaging in the recessionary years, they had not chosen or had been unable to return home to assist in the rebooting of the Irish economy. Instead they were motivated to return home, even for a few hours so that they could vote, so that they could play their part in changing the patriarchal, heteronormative, and Church-based laws that existed on the statute book. Even if these emigrants were unable to permanently return home, they were still invested in shaping the nation’s future.

IV. Pandemic futures A similar return home, for short-term reasons, occurred in March 2020. As the spread of COVID-19 around the world became a reality and Ireland shut down, Minister for Health Simon Harris issued a call for “all hands on deck” and requested that Irish doctors and nurses working elsewhere in the world consider returning home to assist in the fight against the pandemic. Under the campaign banner, “Be On Call for Ireland,” a number of Irish healthcare professionals, including 80 from Australia, returned home to work on short-term contracts that 134

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ended on July 31, 2020. The journey of such healthcare professionals home to Ireland evidenced the pull of home for emigrants, their desire to fight the pandemic in Ireland, and their need to be close to family and friends in a time of crisis. Luckily, many managed to get home before international travel ground to a halt in 2020 and getting “home” became more a more complicated task than it’s been in decades. Although Ireland’s emotional ties to its diaspora can be maintained by technology and social media, its economic ties rely heavily on the international travel that COVID-19 made impossible for most of 2020. It is estimated that the loss of Irish tourism revenue from the pandemic in 2020 will amount to approximately €8 billion, along with the accompanying loss of businesses and jobs.14 The number of people traveling through Dublin airport in June 2020 offers a stark illustration of the downturn in travelers into Ireland as a result of the pandemic. In June 2019, 112,000 passengers passed through the airport every day. In June 2020, the numbers traveling had fallen by 97% and amounted to 9,500 people each day.15 Ultimately, when the pandemic has passed, travel will resume. But the pandemic will have long-term effects on the ways people travel—whether for business, tourism, or return visits home by members of the Irish diaspora—and will thus also have long-term effects on Ireland’s relationship with its diaspora. As the campaigns of 2011 and 2013 demonstrated, the physical experience of being in Ireland is central to reminding the diaspora that Ireland is still home, and that home is a good place to spend money. But the pandemic has rendered the physical relationship between Ireland and its global diasporic network closer to its nineteenth-century post-Famine reality than it has been in centuries, leaving people (at least those without Irish passports) oceans away from “home” and with no way to return. The diaspora is stranded elsewhere in the world and the Irish economy isn’t prepared for its sudden isolation. It is, of course, hyperbolic to suggest that we’ve entirely returned to a nineteenth-century diaspora, as the global Irish network has been sustained through the pandemic by digital technologies that are flourishing in the absence of real travel. Whether through messaging from the State or from local Irish Embassies and Consulates, online and Zoom events staged by business or cultural concerns, or by families simply keeping in touch with their loved ones, Ireland has maintained virtual links with its diaspora and attempted to keep alive, digitally at least, the connections that it made so vigorously in the post-2008 period. The current challenge is to maintain those virtual links, and at some point, in some future, to begin persuading people all over again that Ireland is open for business, worthy of inward investment, and a fantastic place to visit and spend money. In post-pandemic times, Ireland will not be alone in such messaging, as every economy in the world has taken a massive hit and will have to rebuild. As with the downturn from 2008, Ireland will try again to mobilize its key uniqueness and advantage: its diaspora and its global networks. It will once more have to sell itself, to capitalize on the awareness that St. Patrick’s Day stretches across the globe, to draw people home with promises of poetry and a céilí and familiar parishes and perfectly fluffy sheep. Ireland will again need rebuilding, and the Irish diaspora, wherever they are in the world, will be called upon to help. Let’s hope they remain willing to answer.

Notes 1 See Kenny for a nuanced discussion of the term. In this chapter the term is used broadly to encapsulate anyone who self-identifies as Irish or having an Irish heritage, and as per the work of O’Toole acknowledges that the diaspora must be constructed and considered broadly beyond being white and heteronormative, and must include LGBTQ and other identities. 2 For a discussion of the process see Loyal. 3 See Glynn, Kelly and Mac Éinrí, 15. 4 For an ongoing overview of the Irish abroad see the Irish Times Generation Emigration Project, www. irishtimes.com/life-and-style/abroad/generation-emigration (Accessed July 30, 2020). 135

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5 One example was the selection, by Kilmovee Shamrocks of Mayo, of an entire GAA team of 15 that had emigrated in the wake of the downturn. See www.the42.ie/gaa-emigrants-15-kilmovee-shamrocks984936-Jul2013/ (Accessed July 30, 2020). 6 See Gray for a critique of the heteronormative assumptions made within the social media/emigration space. 7 “Full text of speech by Queen Elizabeth II,” Irish Times, May 18, 2011. www.irishtimes.com/news/ full-text-of-speech-by-queen-elizabeth-ii-1.876770 (Accessed July 30, 2020). 8 “Never has a nation so small inspired so much in another . . . There’s always been a little green behind the red, white and blue,” Irish Times, May 24, 2011. www.irishtimes.com/news/never-has-a-nationso-small-inspired-so-much-in-another-there-s-always-been-a-little-green-behind-the-red-white-andblue-1.580123 (Accessed July 30, 2020). See also Chris Colin, “Rediscovering Obama’s Irish Roots,” The New Yorker, December 10, 2016. www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/rediscovering-obamasirish-roots (Accessed July 30, 2020). 9 “David McWilliams: Harnessing diaspora will help us rebuild economy,” Irish Times, October 27, 2010. www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/david-mcwilliams/david-mcwilliams-harnessing-diasporawill-help-us-rebuild-economy-26693338.html (Accessed July 30, 2020). 10 See, for instance, “Ireland really is the best small country in the world to do business*,” TheJournal.ie, October 29, 2014. www.thejournal.ie/foreign-direct-investment-ireland-1751213-Oct2014/ (Accessed July 30, 2020). 11 For a critique of the policy see Boyle and Kavanagh. 12 The film is available here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMBTcx4_1Ew 13 For tourism numbers and income see Fáilte Ireland’s annual facts, www.failteireland.ie/FailteIreland/ media/WebsiteStructure/Documents/3_Research_Insights/Key-Tourism-Facts-2018.pdf?ext=.pdf (Accessed July 30, 2020). 14 “Tough times for tourism trade as it absorbs coronavirus shock,” Irish Times, June 10, 2020. www.irishtimes. com/business/transport-and-tourism/tough-times-for-tourism-trade-as-it-absorbs-coronavirusshock-1.4274902 (Accessed July 30, 2020). 15 Dublin Airport Authority figures, www.dublinairport.com/latest-news/2020/07/08/june-passengernumbers-down-97-due-to-covid-19 (Accessed July 30, 2020).

Works cited Boyle, Mark and Adrian Kavanagh. “The Irish Government’s Diaspora Strategy: Towards a Care Agenda.” Rethinking the Irish Diaspora. Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship. Edited by J. Devlin Trew and M. Pierse. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Cronin, Mike and Daryl Adair. Wearing the Green: A History of St Patrick’s Day. Routledge, 2002. Delaney, Enda. Irish Emigration since 1921. Dublin: Economic and Social History Society, 2006. Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). Global Irish: Ireland’s Diaspora Policy. DFAT, 2015. Elkink, Johan, David M. Farrell, Theresa Reidy, and Jane Suiter. “Understanding the 2015 Marriage Referendum in Ireland: Context, Campaign, and Conservative Ireland.” Irish Political Studies, Vol. 32, No. 3, 2017, pp. 361–381. Glynn, Irial, Tómas Kelly, and Piaras Mac Éinrí. Irish Emigration in an Age of Austerity. Émigré, 2013. Gray, Breda. “Irish State Diaspora Engagement: ‘The Network State’ and ‘Netizens’.” Éire-Ireland, Vol. 47, 2012, pp. 244–270. Gray, Breda. “Generation Emigration: The Politics of (Trans)national Social Reproduction in Twenty-First Century Ireland.” Irish Studies Review, Vol. 21, No. 1, 2013, pp. 20–36. Kenny, Kevin. Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2013. Loyal, Steve. “Welcome to the Celtic Tiger: Racism, Immigration and the State.” The End of Irish History? Critical Reflections on the Celtic Tiger. Edited by Colin Coulter and Steve Coleman. Manchester University Press, 2018, pp. 74–94. Miller, Kerby. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. Oxford University Press, 1985. O’Toole, Tina. “Cé Leis Tú? Queering Irish Migrant Literature”, Irish University Review, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2013, pp. 131–145.

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Writing in 1972, the Irish-American politician Daniel Moynihan asserted “It is, or ought to be, clear that there is no possibility—not the most remote—that a distinctive Irish identity can be re-created in the United States” (Moynihan xvi.). Writing in the same year, the Irish-American sociologist Andrew Greeley argued that the Irish in America were very fully assimilated: The American Irish had the shortest way to come of any of the immigrant groups—for all the impoverishment of the Famine, the Atlantic crossing, and the early years in the slums. . . . The only thing they have lost is their explicit sense of distinction as a group and their consciousness of a heritage—and, necessarily, any consciousness of goals for the future. (Greeley 1972, 258) Moynihan and Greely’s judgments are far from the only declarations that Irish America is dead or dying, usually based on a presumption that it has been assimilated to a point of irrelevance as a salient ethnic identity. To be sure, there are sociological and demographic pointers to that demise, including degeneration of once strong ethnic networks, organizations, and communities, while Irish leadership in urban and national politics appears spent and unlikely to return. And yet, these last hurrahs for Irish America have been premature in presuming its terminality, for Irishness persists as an identity marker in the US in many forms. One of the most striking, though also misleading, is the claiming of an Irish identity in the national census—in the 2010 census 34.7 million indicated Irish afliation. Of course, such a figure is skewed, most obviously by the subjective indexing of those who self-identify as Irish, and limited as a meaningful index of identity. It tells us nothing about what being Irish-American means to those people who tick the Irish heritage box on the census; are they indicating a core sense of identity, or some vague, if strongly, felt afnity? And yet, what are we to make of this claim to identity as a signifier of the persistence of “Irish-America,” not to mention the myriad ways in which Irishness is activated, produced, and performed as an identity in the US today? In the twenty-first century, Irish America has entered a late, though not necessarily terminal, stage of ethnicity, wherein ethnicity is largely sublimated as a lived experience, reflecting the irreversible decline of the ethnic habitus, yet there is continuing investment in ethnic identifications. “Irish-America” today names a somewhat ephemeral identity formation that 137

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can be challenging to pin down for analytical or policy purposes.1 Drawing on recent research (involving national online surveys and field interviews in Chicago and New York city) as well as broader cultural analysis, this chapter focuses on the lateness of contemporary Irish-American ethnicity to consider how and why it persists and how it is implicated within broader dynamics of identity politics in the US.2

Late generation ethnicity Declarations of the death of Irish America are often symptomatic of a particular moment in the history of this ethnic grouping. Even as Greely pronounced the demise of Irish-America, he ruefully remarked this was ironic at a time of intense ethnic revivalism in the US: In the midst of all this resurgence of ethnic pride, the state of the Irish is distressful . . . indeed. At long last it would be legitimate for them to act like they were Irish. Only they’ve forgotten how. The legitimation of ethnicity came too late for the American Irish. They are the only European immigrant group to have over-acculturated. They stopped being Irish the day before it became all right to be Irish. (Greeley 1972, 263) The irony appears rich but the purported symmetry of death/regeneration narratives is sophistical and not the paradox Greely implies. What he elides is this moment’s cultural and political logic, for it is precisely because it is so “diminished” that white ethnic identity is revived and celebrated in this period. The “legitimation of ethnicity,” which Greeley refers to, is a complex phenomenon of cultural and sociopolitical capitalization that sought to distinguish white ethnicity in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. As he more pointedly remarks in 1971, “What the blacks have done is to legitimate ethnic self-consciousness” (Greeley 1971, 18). The ethnic revivalism of the 1970s is logically concurrent with the death throes of a certain formation of Irish America as it came to terms with its advanced assimilation. This revivalism was dramatized in the battles over public school desegregation in Boston which was enjoined by Irish communities in the city and the resistance to integration in Irish neighborhoods in major cities across the US. It was also evident in the boom in heritage and ethnic narratives in popular culture: the recourse to historical memory of immigrant ancestors, and the telling of narratives of ethnic passage functioned to explain both Irish diference and primacy in America (Frye Jacobson 2008). The paradox of this moment is important to understanding the trajectory of Irish America in the past 50 years, as an ethnic group that had “made it” in America at the same time as it appeared to lose its ethnic specificity. As Greeley, somewhat poignantly, asked in 1972: “What happens to a group which, having invested all its resources and energies into making it finally succeeds? In other words, what do you do for an encore?” (Greeley 1971, 18). The answer is you invest in the symbolic ethnicity of your group, endorse the values that this investment psychologically underwrites, and enjoy the relative comforts of late ethnicity. And this is what sociologists and other analysts found when they studied white ethnicity in the later part of the twentieth century. Throughout the 1980s a series of studies of white ethnic America concluded, by and large, that there was little left to study. Mary Waters’ influential research, published in her 1990 book Ethnic Options, on suburban third and later generation white ethnics argued that their ethnicity was symbolic, intermittent, and selective and had little socioeconomic or political effect on integration in the US. Waters later reflected on the robustness of these findings: 138

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In late 20th- and early 21st-century America, most later-generation whites are of mixed ethnic ancestry, choose easily among the available ethnic options they have and do not appear to be subjectively or objectively shaped by those ethnic choices in any measurable way. (Waters 2009, 130–135) In these views, later white ethnic generations were more or less fully assimilated due to social mobility, intermarriage, and suburbanization. In the twenty-first century, there has been very little empirical analysis of white ethnicity in the US. Writing in 2014, the sociologist Herbert Gans noted that “researchers have more or less stopped studying the descendants of the European immigration, and paid only minimal attention to the newest European immigrants who arrived here in the last half century” (Gans 2014, 757). Gans wrote several short pieces to argue the value of studying “late-generation ethnicity,” a term he used to designate an ethnic formation that reaches back many generations in the US and is not being replenished from the country of origin (Gans 2015, 418–429). He proposes that the study of late generation ethnicity today will mean determining “what patterns and lines, now of decline and disappearance rather than acculturation and assimilation, can be found” (Gans 2014, 763). This refocusing of attention continues to draw on his influential concept of symbolic ethnicity that posits white ethnicity as a matter of choice (Gans 2014, 758).3 Methodologically, he recommends distinguishing between “ethnic structure,” the organizations and institutions that work to maintain and promote ethnicity, “private ethnic practice,” the group rituals and conventions, and “ethnic identity” (Gans 2014, 758). This is a promising typology for research on lategeneration ethnicity, including Irish-American, though it has notable limitations, particularly in how Gans frames the study of ethnic identity and in his inattention to broader contexts of identity formation and expression. With reference to Irish America today, patterns of “decline and disappearance” are readily evident if we look to ethnic structures and practices that have sustained culture and identity over time for Irish communities, as well as to the basic demographics of Irish-America. The demographics can throw up large numbers of Irish-identifying Americans but also indicate a general population decline. The 2010 national US census recorded 34.7 million Americans indicating Irish ancestry, a relatively high number that is often cited by ethnic boosters. This number, however, is reduced from 40.2 million in 1980, the first national census to record ancestry or ethnic origin (US Census Bureau 2010). The Census Bureau’s 2017 American Community Survey (ACS) records 31.4 million Irish-Americans (ACS 2017). The number of Irish-born American citizens is startlingly low compared to those claiming Irish heritage, and it is declining. In 2016, the ACS registered 125,840 Irish-born in the US, down from 250,000 in 1980 (ACS 2016). The numbers of Irish immigrating to the US has decreased to a relative trickle. This decrease is due in large part to the heightened immigration sensitivities and restrictions, especially following 9/11, which make it more difficult to obtain work permits and adjust to legal status. It is also due to the improved economic opportunities in Ireland. In 2015, just 1,607 Irish-born people obtained legal permanent residency (Lumley 2017). Census data also shows that Irish-Americans are older than the US population as a whole. In 2015, the ACS shows the median age of those claiming Irish ancestry was 40.5 years old versus a median age of 37.7 for the whole population. The survey also showed that 78.8% of the IrishAmerican population was over 18 years old (US Census Bureau 2015). This ageing of IrishAmericans and the reduction in numbers emigrating to the US from Ireland provides a basic demographic snapshot of late-generation ethnicity.4 Having once heavily populated northern and mid-western American cities, Irish-Americans are now very widely spread out across the US with the largest clusters to be found in suburbs and 139

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further reaches of metropolitan areas rather than in central city areas. The patterns and volumes of settlement are different in each area, but there is a similar underlying narrative of population decline and assimilation. Taking New York city, for example, we see a steady decline in the Irish population from the late nineteenth century through to the present. In 1890, the Irish made up approximately 22% of the population of New York. In the twentieth century, many of their descendants moved to the suburbs and interiors of the tri-state area. Today, the number of Irish people claiming Irish descent in New York has fallen to 4.3%, reflecting the interlinked assimilation and suburbanization processes and also the relatively fewer new emigrants from Ireland. Only a few city neighborhoods registered substantial Irish populations in the recent census figures, with the largest being Breezy Point/Rockaway Point in Queens with a 54.3% Irish population—the only neighborhood in the US that has a majority-Irish population (Irish Central 2019). Woodside in Queens and Woodlawn in the Bronx have also maintained significant Irish presence and identity into the present day. The 2017 ACS showed the largest concentrations of Irish in the New York metropolitan area were settled in Suffolk County in Long Island, followed by Nassau County, also in Long Island, New Jersey’s Bergen County and Monmouth, and New York’s Rockland and Westchester. While these areas have the largest Irish populations and the Irish presence is made visible in the numbers of neighborhood bars and shops, they are also racially and ethnically diverse. In many instances the signs and landmarks of Irishness in urban environments are substantially erased as ethnic secession has resulted in areas once Irish now populated by Hispanics, African Americans, and other incoming groups. A similar point may be made about ethnic structures that retain some visibility but show many signs of decline. The history of Irish settlement in American cities and their passage into the mainstream of American life is one of networking and association, both within the ethnic group, the city of settlement, and with the old country. Diaspora networks and organizations have existed since the first Irish emigrants settled in the US, providing communication and community. Once strong organizations and networks can become weakened over time as the conditions of ethnic urban settlement and identity change. The role of the Catholic Church was steadily weakened throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first and the diminishment of this key anchor of ethnic identity has been of immense importance to the character and community of Irish America.5 A Chicago Irish interviewee observed: “Years ago the church was community and religion but now it’s just religion—the parishes are gone.” Prime examples of the diminished organizations that were once driving forces of Irish community in urban America are the county associations and the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Both were formed in the nineteenth century, they became hugely popular sites of ethnic gathering and sociality throughout much of the twentieth century, and aided emigrant communities with reorientation in the alien American metropolis. In recent years though their memberships have been rapidly dropping. A service provider interviewed in Chicago commented that the associations “went from dinner dances to lunches,” signifying the ageing and slow passing of this cohort of the diaspora.6 Among the later generation Irish Americans surveyed there was limited interest in ethnic association as a form of networking. The research among young (aged 18–30 years) people of Irish descent in New York revealed even greater distance from Irish organizations and networks, with only 15% of respondents indicating membership. A key reason in relation to the more traditional organizations and networks is that they do not offer meaningful forms of community to younger Irish Americans. Several interviewees spoke of lack of interest in joining their parents’ organizations, described as peopled by “older, Catholic, white, middle-class people.” The weakening and dissolution of once strong organizations and institutions of Irish life do not alone mean the demise of Irish America, but they do reflect the “late” stage of ethnic passage and feed into narratives of decline. In our interviews, we heard many stories of cultural loss and 140

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community diminishment, often laced with some anxiety about the future of Irish America. The following comments are from second- and third-generation Irish Americans in Chicago: Through my father I was exposed to Irish culture and sport . . . I played Irish sport, none of my children do. At the St Patrick’s night [get together] my kids know a few of the songs, my brothers and our friends know them all, my grandkids will know none of them . . . you’re kind of losing that part of your ethnicity. Irish culture was just something that was typical. . . . Now I’m seeing kids being put into Irish dancing . . . the kids are Americanized . . . people are trying to keep the Irish traditions alive but I think it is more forced than in the past . . . that’s the difference between when I was a kid and now. Feeling connected to Ireland was a much bigger thing in my childhood than it is for my children right now. My grandparents were born in Ireland and we saw them all the time and heard their stories. Kids from Northern Ireland stayed in our house in summer . . . Ireland was in the news. . . . You were always being reminded of your connection to this ethnicity. This sense of a falling away of ethnic cultural identity was expressed by many middle-aged and older interviewees of second and third generations, often as a progressive process, a sense that with each generation there is another gradation of loss or assimilation. Such expressions reflect the state of late-generation ethnicity that Irish America more generally finds itself in. In Chicago as elsewhere, this is enhanced by the lack of new immigrants. An unsurprising result of the patterns of settlement, assimilation, upward mobility, suburbanization, and restricted emigration is that Irish America is ceasing to exist as a coherent territorial or sociological community. The disappearance of a material ethnic habitus appears to have confirmed the full assimilation of the Irish in the US in the sociological imagination. Gans’ approach promises to identify and decode key elements of what remains of an ethnic habitus, yet it elides broader and deeper vectors of white ethnic identity formation. Studying the “terminality” of white ethnic identity today also requires attention to the pervasiveness and salience of claims to this identity within the socioeconomic, political, and cultural environments of national and local identity politics. With respect to contemporary Irish America, such claims sharpen the issue of “late” ethnicity in terms of the cultural and political narratives that support it as an identity formation, reminding us that Irishness is at once a relatively privileged narrative of identity in the US today—often signaling personal resilience and tribal success—but also diffuse and conflicted. More particularly, Irish-American identity is caught up in the current (re)politicization of white racial identity in the US. There are some echoes of the 1970s, with an intensified national identity politics roiling the body politic, exacerbating polarization and partisanship, and challenging the sureties of ethnic and racial allegiances. In this context, “Irish-America” may be understood in relation to the syntax and identity claims of nationality and what it means to be American.

Politics Irish America was once perceived as a powerful ethnic block in American politics, especially at urban and metropolitan levels from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, and also with intermittent national impact, most obviously with the election of John F. Kennedy to the presidency in 1960. Their power and influence in both dimensions of political power have greatly waned, though not quite disappeared, and are another area in which we can discern patterns and markers of lateness in Irish-American ethnicity.7 141

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There is a common perception that Irish America has become steadily, if unevenly, more conservative in sociopolitical terms over the last several generations, broadly in line with a general shift in white voters in the US from the Democrat to Republican parties over the last 50 years (in part, a movement triggered by white unease with the claims and gains of the AfricanAmerican Civil Rights Movement). As if to underline this trend in recent years, many have observed the seemingly large presence of Irish names among President Trump’s advisors and Fox News pundits. Much of this presumption of Irish-American conservatism remains anecdotal though, lacking empirical evidence.8 With this in mind, in our surveys and interviews, we included questions and developed conversations on sociopolitical perspectives. In the first Irish Central survey in 2017, conducted shortly after the divisive election of Trump, political perspectives trended broadly towards Democrat/liberal. In the 2016 presidential election, 92% of respondents voted: 47% voted for Clinton, 27% for Trump, and 20% did not indicate their vote. More generally, 41% signified as Democrat while 23% selected Republican. The preferred news sources were more liberal than conservative; for example, of those who got their news from television, 45% used NBC while 36% used Fox. Among the younger cohorts surveyed and interviewed in New York city in 2019 the responses were starker, with strong trends towards Democrat/ liberal. Several survey questions asked for views on domestic politics and respondents’ political perspectives—the great majority proved to be progressive in their views, with 69% registering as either “leaning liberal,” “liberal,” or “very liberal.” The question of how salient these identifications are in terms of ethnicity remains an open and complex one (asked if Irishness influenced their political views, they responded 31% somewhat, 29% not at all, 18% very little) but there is certainly a strong liberal/progressive presence in this young generation of Irish-America. Similar perspectives emerged in relation to questions about immigration. In interviews, there were many comments on immigration, both with reference to the history of Irish arrival and settlement in the US and the present political turmoil around matters of immigration. For many, there was a clear correspondence between being Irish and viewing the US as a welcoming nation of immigrants. In relation to this link, several interviewees made explicit reference to what they perceived (negatively) as a growing conservatism in older generations of IrishAmerica. One observed that Irish-Americans “have forgotten their history . . . of oppression,” and another commented that “people in America use the historical plight of Irish-America to say Irish people are oppressed too.” Among the older cohort of respondents to the Irish Central survey, the signals on immigration were notably mixed, with 68% in favor of immigration reform to support the undocumented Irish in the US, while 40% wanted tougher restrictions on immigrants to America. This split is a response that, perhaps, speaks to the tensions in Irish American perceptions of immigration. While such views were rare in those engaged by this research, they signify as do the more progressive views indicated earlier that the pronounced political tensions in the US in recent years have impacted on how Americans articulate their Irish identity, calibrating it in relation to broader concerns. In this context, for younger Irish-Americans in particular, a progressive sensibility seems to accentuate the self-consciousness about Irish identity, sometimes leading to tensions, but only rarely to disavowal, rather a synthesis is often expressed, a recombinant identification that fuses disparate social and political values and perspectives. A few interviewees talked about the tensions—“How to square progressive identity and Catholic identity,” for example, or on growing up gay and Irish—but none had out rightly refuted their Irishness. Rather, several spoke of understanding Irishness as a supple identity that should not be essentialized in terms of a singular value or political perspective. 142

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Tensions are especially pronounced around the issue of undocumented Irish in the US, a grouping around which circulates cultural and political myths and uncertainties that reflect class and generational differences within Irish America today. The undocumented Irish, who are “late” in a very particular, politicized way, trouble and illuminate the narratives of IrishAmerican privilege. They are the subjects of lobbying efforts in Ireland and the US to achieve immigration reform that will provide a pathway to citizenship and end their insecurity. Yet, as many acknowledge, their race affords them a relatively privileged form of illegality, less visible to the authorities than the large numbers of undocumented peoples of Hispanic heritage. At the same time, they are viewed with mixed feelings by Irish communities in the US. The uncertainty of settled Irish-American communities regarding immigration reform reinforces the sense of vulnerability felt by undocumented Irish, so that many feel isolated and even more reluctant to raise their voices in public. Several interviewees stressed the irony of this during the St. Patrick’s Day period, including an Irish priest in Chicago: I feel for the undocumented youth who says what do I do, show up and get my Shamrock Shake at McDonalds and go get my Guinness and what does that even mean to me when no one will listen to my voice even though we stop everything to honour my culture. This diference in perspectives on the undocumented and immigration reform speaks to a schism between settled and sojourner Irish in the US that signifies some ways in which ethnic identity sublimates diferences of race and class. In this regard, the undocumented Irish take on a symbolic resonance as an ethnic revenant that does not fit into the common ethnic success narrative of how the Irish “made it” in the US. This is not to suggest that all settled Irish-Americans would comfortably fit into that narrative, but there is no doubt that contemporary Irish America has moved into a late stage of ethnicity wherein the struggles for identity are perceived to be behind them. As a veteran IrishAmerican alderman in Chicago observed: Being Irish-American has become a benefit to the Irish, in the past being Irish-American was something you had to overcome . . . you don’t have to stay in shape if you’re not going to fight anybody. This is the perspective of late-generation ethnicity and indicative that Irish ethnic identity in the US is increasingly symbolic, a matter of choice rather than need or circumstance. It is, for settled Irish-Americans, an identity that is no longer associated with immigrant trauma or oppression but with pride and distinction, and that is less directly associated with the country of origin.

The next generation9 Our survey of young people of Irish heritage in New York reflected this aging of Irish-America, with 67% of respondents third generation or older and only 3% born in Ireland. The younger generation of Americans of Irish descent that we studied are also “late generation” in historical terms. Their Irish identity is somewhat attenuated as a result of historical distance but also due to the inevitable and complex patterns of dispersal and intermarriage across the generations, reshaping their sense of ethnic identity. The late generations’ distance from Ireland is not only temporal but also spatial—over 50% of those surveyed have not been to Ireland. And yet 37% identify as Irish-American, another 24% identify as Irish and another ethnicity, and 55% indicated their sense of Irish identity was very strong or strong. These figures underline both the 143

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constancy of an Irish identity through the generations but also signify its profoundly symbolic nature. Young Americans do not need to have any material ties with or have visited Ireland in order to claim an Irish identity and at same time many see it as but one strand of a multiple ethnic identity. Many of the interviewees were conscious of this multiplicity and flexibility of identity. Asked how they choose to identify in ethnic or national terms, we found a range of claims among survey respondents—37% Irish American, 31% American, 24% Irish and another ethnicity, and 7% Irish. The responses are suggestive of an array of ethnic identity choices for people of Irish descent and the differences both indicate and conceal some of the complexities of choosing an identity. Perhaps the most significant figure here is the large number, almost a quarter, who chose “Irish and another ethnicity,” reminding us that boundaries and overlapping of identities grow more complex as the US becomes a “minority majority” nation. One of them referred to his “four ethnic heritages, Irish, French-Canadian, and Hungarian . . . when I go to Montreal I feel French, when I go to Ireland I feel Irish.” For these young Americans, Irishness is only one of many vectors or facets of identity. On the one hand, they have multiple ethnicities, ancestries, stories of origin, and ethnic connections that can lay some claim to their contemporary sense of identity. On the other hand, Irishness is rarely lived as an everyday, communal or collective identity for these later generations, nor does it have an urgent claim on them as an identity under pressure or in peril. Rather, it is an identity of choice, though that term can mask less conscious drives in the formation of identity. Yet, this is not to say that ethnic identity is not felt as a given, a birthright based on ancestry. Ancestry and identity, however, may have become more divergent due to the complex interconnections of ethnic lineages in the US. Consequently, this is why it is useful to consider late generation Irish America in terms of “symbolic ethnicity,” no longer a primary feature of lived experience but a nonetheless significant investment—psychological, affective and ideological—in Irishness as an element of identity. Such an investment can be powerful but also somewhat tenuous and wax and wane in intensity. In the survey, only 27% of respondents indicated they identify “very strongly” as IrishAmerican, a ratio that points up the factors of choice and complexity around ethnic identity already mentioned (as well as the reluctance of some to accept the moniker “Irish American” while still identifying as Irish). At the same time, 70% of interviewees feel more strongly about their Irish ancestry than other available ancestries. Taken together, these responses serve as a reminder of the contingencies of choice. The survey and interviews were sensitive to the ephemerality of late generation ethnicity and approached matters of identity via questions that explored the contexts, triggers and conduits of identity formation and performance. The underlying question, occasionally asked bluntly in interviews, was “Why do you choose to be Irish?” In the survey, responses were restricted by the rather instrumental nature of questions on matters of identity. In the interviews, the question “Why do you identify as Irish?” received some similar stock responses but more commonly elicited lengthy, sometimes insightful, sometimes rambling comments and occasionally abashed bemusement. Interviewees were being pressed to be more reflective about the matter than in filling in a survey, and the responses were both allusive and revealing. When it comes to my identity, I don’t really know if I’ve ever felt that things were permanent. I kind of always feel like I’m always in a state of fluctuation. . . . Where am I? Where do I fit? . . . I look forward to setting roots somewhere and really investing in a community. [Irishness is] something felt viscerally . . . that beats in your heart and moves in your blood. I guess I’ve become more aware of what an Irish identity is but I guess less secure in . . . I don’t know if that really describes me because I feel so disconnected from Ireland. 144

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. . . for me identity isn’t something you can choose on a whim. It’s something that you can I guess sort of accept. Accept your role in it, plot your place on the chart. Irishness . . . makes me different . . . more specific . . . part of the type of American I am. I haven’t arrived to what Irishness means to me. . . . Like what does it mean in the feelings I can’t express in words? It’s not, I don’t know. I haven’t reached the place there. Such articulations express both the ephemerality and potency of Irish identifications. Many interviewees told stories of growing up in terms of their memories of what it was in their childhoods that signified an Irish identity. And just as many indicated that in adolescence or/and early adulthood, often as students, they were in search of a stronger or alternative sense of identity, and Irishness ofered this identity. Several spoke in more explicitly racial terms about how Irishness ofered a sense of identity that diferentiated their whiteness: I think at a certain point, it does get to become a choice because you have assimilated into the US and now are considered white. And so you don’t really have to identify that way if you don’t want to. I think that people are feeling that they don’t want to be lumped into this generic form of white. I could see that as a result of that, people might reach out to reconnect with their heritage. . . . I am not interested in having no culture and having no attachment to an identity according to my heritage. I don’t want the clichéd American white identity. Choosing Ireland . . . means that you are not another white American . . . it makes you interesting. All the above comments underline the significance of symbolic ethnicity in the choice and maintenance of late generation Irish identity in the US. These last comments also underscore the complex intersectionality of ethnicity and race in Irish-American identity, wherein ethnicity encodes or refracts particular connotations of whiteness, diferentiating it and making it salient. Choosing to be Irish is not necessarily a conscious choice (though it is clearly articulated as such above), but it invariably triggers or entails race consciousness.10

Conclusion Irish America is at a stage of late generation ethnicity, no longer refueled by new emigrants. It is a singular though not at all homogeneous entity, more dislocated from the home country and more distant from its roots. It is not a terminal state of affairs, but it is a transitional one, and we need to recognize and understand its features and implications. In twenty-first-century America, late generation ethnicity has become sublimated and rendered largely invisible, with specific practices forgotten and once sustaining institutions eroded. As such, it becomes associated less with practices and institutions and more with emotions and values; less material but not necessarily weaker. This seeming paradox, a divergence between irreversible decline of the ethnic habitus and continuing investment in ethnic identifications, characterizes the lateness of Irish-American ethnicity today. It may be that the ethnic structures and practices of Irish America today perform not so much a boundary-marking role as a preservation role, postponing the end of Irish-America. But such a finding would ignore the play and pull of ethnic identifications, for these persist as a sense of belonging in conscious and unconscious ways. As one of our interviewees observed, “What the parent forgets, the child remembers,” a comment that indicates the complex ways in which ethnic memory can function to maintain or reinvent ethnic attachments. Ethnic identity can 145

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endure long after ethnic structures and practices have dissolved, and we know all too little about how this works among late generation Irish-Americans.

Notes 1 For the Government of Ireland, and more particularly the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, “Irish America” is an object of policy, sometimes termed “diaspora engagement.” As such, it is challenging to measure while it remains of significance for diplomatic and development goals. See “Ireland and America: Challenges and Opportunities in a New Context—A Five Year Review” (2014), Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFA&T), www.dfa.ie/irish-embassy/usa/our-role/ireland-us-relations/ ireland-america-five-year-review/. 2 This chapter draws on recent research initiated by the Clinton Institute at University College Dublin that seeks to analyze the identity formations of contemporary Irish America. The research has several strands and utilizes both online surveys and fieldwork. The first, in collaboration with Glucksman Ireland House at New York University and Irish Central, the largest and most prominent Irish American website in the US, involved two online surveys sourced via Irish Central, the first in February 2017, which had 3,100 responses, and the second in September 2017, which was aimed at “adults under the age of 45,” and had 1,368 responses. See: www.irishcentral.com/news/community/what-do-irishamericans-want-read-our-exclusive-survey; www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/facebook-mostpopular-way-for-young-irish-americans-to-explore-identity-1.3262240. The second and third strands involved not only online surveys but also interviews and extended field research among selected Irish communities in the US. The second was focused on individuals and organizations supporting the Irish community in Chicago, including civil society organizations, service providers, politicians, and other stakeholders. We conducted 83 semi-structured interviews within the Irish community in Chicago between February and June 2017. In addition to the interviews, we designed and distributed an online survey (in collaboration with Chicago Irish Immigration Service and Dominican University) that received 330 responses. The survey was designed to capture aspects of identity, political views, health and well-being of the community and has been analyzed using statistical software once data collection was completed in June 2017. The third strand, in collaboration with Glucksman Ireland House, conducted research on young people (18–30 years old) of Irish descent in the New York metropolitan area. This research project was initiated in January 2019 and completed in October 2019. The primary aim of the research project was to advance analysis of the identity formations of this “next generation” of Americans of Irish descent. It involved primary data gathering via an online survey and interviews in the field with individuals and focus groups. In all, 781 survey responses were submitted and 41 interviews recorded and transcribed. Portions of this research were supported by funding from the DFA&T via its Emigrant Support Program. 3 “I think of terminal ethnic identity as a partially self-constructed one that people can create on their own from a variety of social sources” (Gans 2014, 758). 4 Our research surveys all tally with these broad indicators. For example, 51% of respondents to the Irish Central survey were third generation and beyond, and their levels of education and income were well above the American medians—all of which reinforces the late ethnicity perception of this ethnic grouping. 5 See McCaffrey et al. The Irish in Chicago, and McMahon, What Parish Are You From? A Chicago Irish Community and Race Relations. 6 While traditional ethnic organizations are clearly experiencing significant decline, others have emerged to appeal to newer constituencies, particularly among young professional Irish emigrants. Irish Network USA, which began in Chicago in 1998, now has 21 chapters across the US and a membership of approximately 5,000. It was created in dialogue with Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and with early funding support from the Industrial Development Agency Ireland, with a view to providing a network for Irish-born or new emigrant professionals in the US. More recently, Digital Irish, which is New York based and holds regular networking sessions in the city, has been steadily building a network of young professionals in the digital sector; the organization membership is 70+% Irish-born and 20+% Irish-American, with most aged 27–40. There is evidence these initiatives are of value to those involved, facilitating job-finding, peer-mentoring, and also social connectedness among highly educated and mobile young Irish in the region. 7 At a national level, there have been Irish American lobbies in Washington that have intermittently flexed considerable political muscle, often in line with perceived crises or challenges in Ireland. The 146

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conflict in Northern Ireland gave rise to several significant groupings, such as The Congressional Friends of Ireland, created in 1981, pressing for US intervention, with President Bill Clinton leading this into the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. More recently, Brexit has galvanized Irish America and reenergized Washington lobbying, with consistent messaging around the need to defend the Good Friday Agreement in relation to any post-Brexit trade deal between the UK and the US. Former members of Congress and US ambassadors to Ireland and the leaders of major Irish American organizations now belong to the Ad Hoc Committee to Protect the Good Friday Agreement, created in January 2019. See: Bruce A. Morrison and James T. Walsh, “Protecting the Good Friday Agreement,” and “Ad Hoc Group Forms to Protect GFA,” Irish Echo (Feb. 19, 2019), and Kennedy, “How Brexit is Leading a Resurgent Irish-American Influence in US Politics.” 8 These current discontents have occasioned many commentaries on the growing conservatism of Irish America. See, for example: Siobhán Brett and Van Gosse. 9 While the term “next generation” is used here as a notional category of young (18–30 years old) people in the US who claim Irish descent, it is also a term inflected by policy discourse, particularly that of Ireland’s DFA&T and its diplomatic missions in the US, where there is interest in identifying future leaders to the benefit of Ireland-US relations. 10 In one of the few empirical analyses of white ethnics in recent years, Jason Torkelson and Douglas Hartmann found no determinate relation between racial attitudes and ethnic identity; however, they note: While whites’ racial attitudes are unrelated to ethnicity in our data, white ethnicity does appear to be related to the extent to which whites are aware of their racial identities. Our findings show that white ethnic identification affects racial identity more than non-white ethnicities affect identification with other racial (or pan-ethnic) categories. In other words, ethnic affiliation appears to uniquely influence how whites view their race. This is a significant finding, indicating that ethnicity filters or refracts racial identity for many white Americans. See Jason Torkelson and Douglas Hartmann.

Works cited American Community Survey 2017 (ACS 2017), https://www.census.gov/acs/www/data/data-tables-andtools/data-profiles/2017/. Brett, S. “Conway, Flynn, O’Reilly, McMahon and More: Introducing the Alt-Irish Americans.” Indepednent.ie, March 19, 2017. www.independent.ie/world-news/north-america/president-trump/conwayflynn-oreilly-mcmahon-and-more-introducing-the-altirish-americans-35539379.html. Frye Jacobson, Matthew. Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America. Harvard University Press, 2008. Gans, Herbert. “The Coming Darkness of Late Generation European American Ethnicity.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 37, No. 5, 2014, pp. 757–765. Gans, Herbert. “The End of Late-Generation European Ethnicity in America?” Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 38, No. 3, 2015, pp. 418–429. Greeley, Andrew M. Why Can’t They Be Like Us? America’s White Ethnic Groups. E.P. Dutton, 1971. Greeley, Andrew M. That Most Distressful Nation: The Taming of the American Irish. Quadrangle Books, 1972. Gosse, Van. “Why Are All the Conservative Loudmouths Irish American.” Newsweek, October 24, 2017. www.newsweek.com/why-are-all-conservative-loudmouths-irish-american-691691. Irish Central. “Where Are the Most Irish Cities and Towns in the USA?” www.irishcentral.com/roots/ genealogy/most-irish-cities-usa (Accessed October 11, 2019). Irish Echo. “Ad Hoc Group Forms to Protect GFA.” www.irishecho.com/2019/02/ad-hoc-group-formsto-protect-gfa/ (Accessed February 19, 2019). Irish Government. “Ireland and America: Challenges and Opportunities in a New Context: A Five Year Review.” Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFA&T), 2014. www.dfa.ie/irish-embassy/usa/ourrole/ireland-us-relations/ireland-america-five-year-review/. Lumley, Rebecca. “Number of Irish-Americans in the US is Fading Fast, with Further Drops Expected.” Independent.ie, May 17, 2017. www.independent.ie/world-news/north-america/president-trump/conwayflynn-oreilly-mcmahon-and-more-introducing-the-alt-irish-americans-35539379.html. Kennedy, Liam. “How Brexit Is Leading a Resurgent Irish-American Influence in US Politics.” The Conversation, August 6, 2019. https://thehill.com/opinion/international/378056-protecting-the-good-fridayagreement-is-essential. 147

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McCaffrey, Lawrence, Elaine Skerrett, M.F. Funchion, and Charles Fanning. The Irish in Chicago. University of Illinois Press, 1997. McMahon, Eileen M. What Parish Are You from? A Chicago Irish Community and Race Relations. University Press of Kentucky, 1996. Morrison, Bruce A. and James T. Walsh. “Protecting the Good Friday Agreement.”The Hill, March 15, 2018. https://thehill.com/opinion/international/378056-protecting-the-good-friday-agreement-is-essential. Moynihan, Daniel P. “Foreword.” That Most Distressful Nation: The Taming of the American Irish. Edited by Andrew M. Greeley. Quadrangle Books, 1972. Torkelson, Jason and Douglas Hartmann. “White Ethnicity in Twenty-First-Century America: Findings from a New National Survey.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 33, No. 8, 2010, pp. 1310–1331. Waters, Mary. “Social Science and Ethnic Options.” Ethnicities, Vol. 9, No.1, 2009, pp. 130–135. United States Census Bureau. 2010 Census of Population and Housing. US Government Printing Office, 2010. United States Census Bureau. 2015 Census of Population and Housing. US Government Printing Office, 2015.

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12 Irish Britain Mary J. Hickman

Titling a chapter in this way feels unusual. There has never been an (official) way to describe yourself as an Irish Briton in Britain (understood here as England, Scotland, and Wales) in the same way as “Irish American” is available as a self-descriptor both officially and popularly in the United States (USA). Maybe this is one of the reasons for the relative lack of knowledge about the Irish in Britain (Irish Britain if you will) in Ireland, especially when compared with the coverage, information, and analyses of Irish America that circulate in Ireland. To the extent that the Irish in Britain are signified in public discourse in Ireland, it is largely as “the (impoverished) forgotten Irish” who have been less successful than their American cousins (although there are many forgotten Irish in the diaspora).1 In Britain, beyond the experiences of the Irish in Britain, there is an Irish dimension to Britain and British life that goes largely unacknowledged and is either suppressed or incorporated as “British.” For example, so much that originates in Ireland or is a product of Irish diasporan culture is labeled “British” or “English,” including actors such as Michael Fassbender or Saoirse Ronan, sportsmen, and second-generation Irish musicians.2 And even after 30 years of coverage during “The Troubles,” knowledge of Northern Ireland is sketchy at best. As the United Kingdom (UK) government negotiated a deal to achieve Brexit, many people in England, in particular, were surprised at the ways in which Ireland had an impact on BritishEuropean Union (EU) relations. The surprise is often based on a profound ignorance about Ireland and British–Irish relations. Ireland is invisible to Britain/England in a way that Britain/ England can never be invisible to Ireland. For example, the British press is read widely in Ireland, while in Britain most people would probably struggle to name any Irish publication. Many in Britain are either unaware that Ireland is a separate country to the UK or that Northern Ireland is part of the UK rather than Ireland. One impact of Brexit has been to increase “pressure” on Irish migrants both to justify their presence here in Britain and to explain the context of the Northern Ireland backstop. In the words of comedian Peter Flanagan, “As an immigrant here, the regular task of having to explain the geography of their own country to British people, while simultaneously trying to sound like a grateful, ‘good’ immigrant is getting exhausting” (Flanagan n.p.). For many Irish migrants in Britain, another impact has been to make them feel insecure about their position here. These concerns were prompted not only by the referendum result in 2016 but also by the 149

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accompanying rise in comments telling Irish people to “go home,” and by worry about the fate of the Common Travel Area (CTA) during Brexit negotiations. The preceding examples indicate some of the specificities of Irish experiences and positionings in Britain. I have argued over a long period of research about the Irish in Britain that these specificities can only be fully explained, given the longevity of Irish emigration, in terms of the national formation in Britain and the particular ethno-racial regime that developed. In this short chapter, I can only provide some illustrations of the strategies, processes, and practices of national formation in Britain that have had a particular bearing on Irish migrants and their families and point to the place of the Irish in the hierarchy of belonging, instituted and reformulated over the past two hundred years, in Britain. Discussing national formation and its accompanying nationalizing strategies entails historicizing the present. Examining the nationalizing strategies of the British state, it is clear that there have been two hegemonic projects, that of the multinational state and of an empire, both of which involved processes of racialization.3 Ireland is complicated for these discussions, evoking as it does both the domestic arena and the colonial arena. This ambiguity can be traced in British–Irish relations— the longevity and extent of Irish migration has been a central part of these complex relations. For many academic studies, including those by Irish Studies scholars,4 Irish migrants and their descendants, compared with other migrant groups, were easily absorbed in Britain; that is, they were assimilated. I have always contended that the absorption of the Irish in Britain (to the extent it has happened) is, at least in part, the result of specific incorporating strategies of the British State. These have changed over time. They have also been largely ignored by mainstream Irish Studies, especially within history, which has contented itself with a form of ethnic historiography based on an assimilatory paradigm (Hickman 1999). In the main body of this chapter, I discuss some strategies and moments that have been key for the experiences and positionings of the Irish in Britain over time and help explain some examples mentioned in this introduction. In a final section, I look at the implications for Irish Studies and the diaspora/Irish Britain.

Nationalizing Britishness, domesticating the Irish in Britain: transhistorical strategies By national formation, I am referring to the creation and articulation of shifting and contingent borders, the constitution of specific social relations, and the generation of processes of inclusion, exclusion, and subordinated inclusion that characterize nation states. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were a period of “forging the nation” in Britain (Colley passim) while the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen various significant reconfigurations of the nation (Brexit being the latest). Next, I outline notable moments or strategies which involved and/or focused on the Irish in Britain and resulted in various forms of invisibilizing or incorporation of Irish migrants and their descendants. My point is that Irish experiences and identities in Britain (and especially England) cannot be understood outside of the parameter of specific nationalizing strategies.

i) 1830–70s: education and generic social legislation In the nineteenth century, religio-ethnic definitions dominated determinations of cultural “otherness” within the multinational domestic polity. As a result of the 1801 Act of Union, Irish migrants were citizens of the state as well as subjects of the monarch; however, they were consistently treated in discriminatory ways. A popular discourse of the Protestant nation intersected 150

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with racialized discourses about the Irish and defined for many where the danger to the nation lay. The manifestation of these fears were Irish Catholic working-class immigrants (Cohen; Hickman 1995). Efforts to deport Irish migrants and to exert social control over them (both fueled by fears of social contamination and disorder) largely relied on the differential implementation of generic legislation aimed at the working class as a whole (Jones). However, recognition of the need for Irish labor especially in certain sectors and regions combined with the influx at the time of the Famine led to the development of incorporatist strategies. The State utilized the services of an already existing institution, the Catholic Church, eager in the mid-nineteenth century after Catholic Emancipation to prove its respectability and loyalty. The political and cultural characteristics of the Catholic Church at the time were “reliable” (in class and ethno-national terms) compared with those of the “problematic minority population.” Educational policies were a key component of the response to Irish migrants. The origin of state funding for Catholic schools in Britain lies not in the extension of rights but in the wish to segregate Irish Catholic children from other working-class children. Although beginning as an agent of segregation, the Church became one of incorporation. These strategies were directed towards the denationalization of the children of Irish Catholic working-class immigrants—when they were the only large settlement of labor migrants in British cities—and their incorporation as future appropriate citizens.

ii) Twentieth century: the Common Travel Area (CTA) After Irish independence, it is possible to consistently track the spatialized, incorporatist imagination of the British state at work, with consequences for relations between the two states and for people immigrating into Britain from Ireland. The establishment of the CTA in 1923, and its re-establishment in 1952, is one such instance. With the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922 the (British) Home Office formed a view which became the predominant ethos as regards movement between Ireland and the UK: that passports would not be required for travel but this could only be the case if the Free State agreed to participate in the British system of immigration controls. Irish officials readily agreed. Unrestricted movement continued until the outbreak of World War II. Irish neutrality led to the imposition of immigration controls, including work permits, for travel from Ireland to Britain by the British authorities. Work permits were dropped in 1947 but immigration controls remained. The need for these controls was repeatedly questioned by Northern Ireland Unionists as they involved constant checks on those traveling between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. The State’s response was that they could only be abolished if the Irish Republic joined in working a common system for the control of aliens. The Irish government agreed, and this decision gave rise to the renewal of the CTA, with Britain abolishing all controls in April 1952. The key reasons for the absence of immigration controls between Britain and Ireland, from the perspective of the British State were, first, partition in 1920 and the peculiarities of the Irish border, and second, the need to facilitate travel by Irish workers to Britain. The origins of the current CTA lie therefore in Irish agreement to keep to an immigration policy similar to that of the UK back in 1952. In response, the UK abolished immigration controls on travel to Britain from the island of Ireland through the repeal of the requirement for aliens to obtain leave to land if their journey was from Ireland. This was when Britain was keen for Irish immigration to help post-war reconstruction, and the Irish State in practice wanted to facilitate emigration to Britain due to rising unemployment and a difficult economy. The longlasting nature of these arrangements is due primarily to the specific difficulties of policing the border, and operating immigration controls, between Ireland and Northern Ireland. There has therefore been no need to carry a passport when traveling between the UK and Ireland. 151

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The CTA created an area of inclusion but also of confusion: partly as a result of it, Irish migrants were not always seen as “proper migrants” in Britain (nor in Ireland). Immigration from Ireland in the post-war period involved the entry of people who were foreign nationals after the declaration of an Irish Republic in Ireland in 1949. Following on from this decision, the Ireland Act was put through the Westminster parliament. It confirmed that an Irish citizen entering Britain was to be treated “as if he were a British subject” (Attlee n.p.). It was more in Britain’s interests (as it was in the Irish government’s interest, which was concerned to maintain an outlet for a “surplus” population, although not at the cost of retaining Commonwealth membership) not to treat the Irish as aliens. It was viewed as impossible to treat Ireland as a foreign state because of the possible protest within the Commonwealth, just as it was impracticable to establish immigration control along the Northern Ireland border under peacetime conditions or to distinguish Irish citizens from British citizens on the electoral role throughout the UK. However, it is important not to construe inclusion as necessarily ruling out ethnic disadvantages or ensuring acceptance. Until recently, what the CTA enabled was not only unidirectional flows of labor, but also the processional shuffling of unwanted populations between Britain and Ireland. In Britain, for example, there has been a long history of deporting/transporting unwanted people back to Ireland: from the Poor Law of 1834 to the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act (deportation powers under this Act were used against the Irish more than any other group), and then again under the Prevention of Terrorism Act from 1974 onwards. At the same time, in Ireland it was a common practice for magistrate courts in the 1950s and 1960s to agree that a custodial sentence could be waived if the offender (Irish citizen) was removed to Britain.

iii) 1950s and 1960s: reconfiguring Britain as homogenous The 1950s and early 1960s was a period in which policy discussion, often in closed cabinet debate, charted a tortuous path of decolonization in which the introduction of immigration controls was to be a staged culmination. A strategy of strong, racialized immigration controls developed, which effectively altered the concept of a British citizen, alongside a dual policy of social problematization and incorporation of immigrants “already here.” In Catherine Hall’s phrase “when colonials came ‘home’ in the 1950s it unhinged English national identity” (Hall). In the public sphere, this led to the production of the myth of the homogenized insider, including a specific state strategy of re-racializing the Irish (Hickman 2005). In order to achieve what it wanted concerning immigrants from the New Commonwealth, the State had to address the issue of Irish immigration—undertaken in a proactive manner, as cabinet papers demonstrate. This decision led to a reformulated British claim about the cultural homogeneity of the “British Isles” and effectively the “forced inclusion” of the Irish within the parameters of the nation. Consequently, the major immigrants of the 1950s and 1960s were rendered invisible within official discourse about immigration. The normative boundaries established in the 1950s and 1960s constructed social differences around notions of “race” and nation and consequently, they simultaneously constructed English/ British society as a unified whole. This “myth of homogeneity” had to entail the denial of differences amongst the white population and was aimed at reconstructing a binary divide of “white islanders” vs. “the coloureds.” Cabinet papers record that the Irish were declared the “same” as the inhabitants of Great Britain (England, Wales, and Scotland) whether “they like it or not.”5 This moment, therefore, was not only a moment of re-racialization of a nation, and a particular minority within it, but of masking the ethno-religious divisions (Protestant-Catholic) which 152

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had been formative of the nation’s creation. This masking process was so successful that when similar fissures cracked wide open in 1968 in Northern Ireland it could be treated as having nothing to do with Britain other than in a legal/constitutional sense. It is hard to overstate the significance of this reconfiguration of the nation’s boundaries in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s during a period of heavy immigration. In that period Britain, the nation, was reconfigured as white and homogenous. In order for this to occur, a history of hostility and prejudice towards a particular migrant stream, the Irish, had to be downplayed, and the contemporary discriminations they experienced had to be masked within official immigration policy. And yet, despite this authorizing of a new discourse about the Irish—in tandem with a problematizing discourse about “colored immigrants”—anti-Irish sentiments continued to surface regularly in popular discourses and parliamentary debate alike. Apart from “No Irish” signs, racialized representations of the Irish as socially undesirable continued in popular discourses and practices: for example, anti-Irish jokes, the continuing salience of the stereotype of “Paddy,” and in MPs’ comments in the debate on the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act (Hickman and Walter 1997; Hickman 1998). Whiteness was a factor in this repositioning of the Irish, but the assumption that a “simple” color divide fully explains the reconfiguring of the nation in this period masks the subtleties of the processes of (re)racialization which were invoked. When the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act was debated in Parliament, the Irish were the most reviled immigrant group even though it was agreed that they be exempt from most (though not all) of the controls on immigration that the legislation introduced. The “we” of whiteness masked suppressed ethnicities, hidden racializations and preexisting hierarchies, and set the Irish in Britain on a path of relative invisibility. Reconfiguring Britain as homogenous was an incorporatist exercise.

iv) 1980s–2010s: struggles for visibility and public expressions of Irish identities Since the 1980s, in part as a response to the widespread riots/uprisings in 1981, the term “ethnic minority” has signified groups of citizens of immigrant origin likely to experience disadvantages due to their ethnicity (a surrogate for race/skin color). British immigration legislation, by progressively redrawing the lines of demarcation between ex-colonial subjects who could, or could not, make a claim for full citizenship/subjecthood, established the juridical framework within which a move from “immigrant” to “ethnic minority” could be accomplished. In this way, black and Asian people became encompassed within the field of governmentality (Lewis 36–7). This is in my terms an incorporatist move. The Irish in Britain—defined in these same moves as culturally “the same” or ignored because assumed to be culturally similar—having previously been defined and imagined as different and requiring separate institutions, were now to have any cultural specificity in service provision denied and resisted. Thus, in the 1980s/90s Irish community and welfare groups struggled to claim “ethnic minority” status in order to gain recognition of ongoing but hidden disadvantages and discrimination, masked by a myth of white homogeneity. In June 1997, the Commission for Racial Equality published a report on discrimination and the Irish community in Britain which raised question marks over the reported easy assimilation of the Irish in Britain (Hickman and Walter 1997). Irish community groups mounted considerable pressure on the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which was responsible for the Census, to include Irish as a category in the Census ethnic origin question in 2001. The option of ticking “Irish” was omitted from the first formulation of this question in the 1991 Census, as the question’s inclusion was originally justified by a need to monitor ongoing disadvantages of ethnic minorities. 153

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An Irish category was conceded reluctantly and appeared on the 2001 Census form, although not in the form advocated by most community groups. “Irish” was included as a subset of the overall “white” classification. The categories were White (choose between British, Irish, Other), Mixed, Asian or Asian British, Black or Black British, Chinese or Other Ethnic Group. In the majority of tables released by the ONS after each Census, the white category is presented as one bloc, so the specific data on the Irish in Britain becomes harder to disaggregate. Incorporation was achieved again, and the black/white dichotomy for understanding ethnic relations in Britain held fast. The introduction of the Census category did acknowledge the presence of an Irish diaspora in Britain, but it excluded the possibility of hybrid identities by insisting on an either/or framing of the question and wording that pitted two national identities, British and Irish (to both of which people of Irish descent might have allegiances), against each other: by using the either/or binary, the question effectively reinforced a migration/assimilation model for the Irish population, heavily weighting the process towards the assimilation response through layout and wording. Obstacles placed in the way of recording difference by second-generation Irish people could be seen as a continuing stage in the process of incorporation (Walter 192). The absence of a hyphenated category that those of Irish descent could select on official forms (including the Census) reflects the incorporating strategies of the British state. It tolerates cultural identities flowing from both hegemonic projects as long as state power is not challenged. However, when people do challenge such power, there is a pragmatic response: repression followed by concession and incorporation. Immigrants are typically understood to hail from beyond the naturalized boundaries of the nation. Therefore, there continues to be an understanding of social and geographical space as the natural home of a native population (defined in terms of biology or culture) and possessed of finite resources (Pitcher). The backlash against multiculturalism, which predated the financial crisis of 2008–2010 but which has accelerated since, has been accompanied by a re-emphasis on the integration of immigrant and minority ethnic groups (social cohesion) and/or greater hostility towards them. The Irish in Britain in this context are both “insiders” and “outsiders”: not seen as quite the same as other migrants, but with their relative privileges offering little protection during the period of “The Troubles” when they were a “suspect community” or during the ongoing upheavals caused by the transition to leaving the EU (Walter, Hickman and Ryan 2020). Research on the second-generation Irish in England (those with one or two Irish-born parents) found that the points of identification articulated by children of Irish migrants were principally framed by the discourses of two hegemonic domains: England and Ireland. There is substantial and consistent evidence that the second-generation Irish in England are positioned as having to defend charges of inauthenticity both from those pressuring them to be English and from those in Ireland denying their Irish identifications (Hickman et al. 2005). One domain (England) is incorporating, denying the difference of “Irishness”; the other domain (Ireland) is differentiating, denying commonalities with people of Irish descent. Ireland rejects these “hybrids” as not Irish, as in fact English, and England cannot countenance any dilution of whiteness or weakening of the hegemonic subject and thus also insists on their Englishness. Notably, since the 2016 referendum, there has been a significant increase in applications for Irish passports from people living in Britain. This is assumed to be a mainly instrumental response to the loss of the maroon EU passport and free movement around Europe. However, recent research indicates that strongly mixed with these instrumental motivations, the process of applying for an Irish passport is a way of making sense of family history. The researcher, Marc Scully, points out that “it is not about people adding on a whole new identity. Most of them already had a strong sense of their Irish identity and are formalising that now” (n.p.). He 154

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discovered that many had been young second-generation (whose parent/s were born in Ireland) during “The Troubles” and had played down their Irishness at the time because of all the negativity the Irish in Britain experienced (Scully n.p.). The space to be both Irish and British which expanded after the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) appears to be narrowing. he choice to be Irish, British, or both in Northern Ireland was seemingly guaranteed under the GFA, but that is now challenged by the Home Office, who interpret the terms of the Agreement as meaning people in Northern Ireland can opt to be British or Irish.6 Such a stance is completely in line with British nationalization strategies.

Implications for Irish Studies Irish Studies, although a multidisciplinary field, is heavily dominated by two disciplines—History and Literary Criticism—both of which lay claim to the study of the Irish diaspora. There has been little shift in this dominance for the past 50 years, and the financial crash and emergency measures in Ireland of 2008–2010 arguably made no dent in this dominance. Somehow Irish Studies continues to make “grand claims to understand contemporary Irish culture and society through the lens of history and literature, primarily—while occluding Irish sociology and other social science disciplines in the process” (Connolly 238). Irish Studies, especially when addressing British–Irish relations and/or the diaspora, shies away from overt political commentary, reflecting the central political stasis that has characterized Ireland for many decades and has ensured a revolving door between Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil in government. This was disrupted significantly for the first time in the 2020 general election when Sinn Féin emerged with the largest proportion of first preference votes in the Irish election. Will the more radical economic and social analysis of Sinn Féin and the other small parties that increased their vote in the same election herald a greater interest in social scientific inquiry about Ireland and its diaspora? Irish Studies has, however, been a site of fierce intellectual debates: between revisionists and nationalists, a surrogate for politics during “The Troubles”; and between an empirical-based history and postcolonial theory. These debates waned after the signing of the GFA in Belfast. Subsequently, feminist theories and studies have had a strong influence within the field of Irish Studies and in Irish politics (Connolly, Mullaly). In a recent discussion heralding 25 years of the publication of Irish Studies Review, the main Irish Studies journal produced in Britain, Neil Sammells and Gerardine Meaney claimed that Irish Studies has always had a productive slipperiness at its heart. Is it the study of an island, a culture, an ethnicity, a diaspora or a people, one history or many? British Irish Studies is of course above all about a relationship—a stormy, complicated, intriguing relationship. (433) Is Irish Studies any study of Ireland, or is it essentially generated by scholars of Ireland and the Irish diaspora who are based in the diaspora? This could be a lively debate. One of my aims in writing about the Irish in Britain has always been to consider a historical perspective within the social sciences in order to produce understandings of structures, processes, and categories which are currently taken for granted. Just as there are specific cultural memories of different groups, so there are also proactive processes of “forgetting,” often the consequence of incorporatist strategies. Much of what I have written about the Irish in Britain is either “forgotten” or presumed secure in the repository of history. But qualitative research reveals that many of the contemporary everyday experiences reported by members of minority ethnic groups in Britain—e.g. Irish, African-Caribbean, Pakistani—are threaded with the vestiges of complex 155

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colonial/domestic encounters of the past and the present, as are their interpretations of their experiences. In this chapter, I have attempted to provide illustrations of the strategies, processes, and practices of national formation in Britain that have had a particular bearing on Irish migrants and to point to the place of the Irish in the hierarchy of belonging instituted and reformulated over the past two hundred years in Britain. Discussing national formation and its accompanying nationalizing strategies entails historizing the present, and it is the meta-level at which productive comparison across the diaspora can be accomplished. Place, and specific national context, remains important when exploring the significance of identifications in a globalized world, as are the historical particularities of ethnic and national belongings. There are very different imaginings of being “Irish” or “of Irish descent” held by members of the Irish diaspora in different places of settlement. These patterns of settlement in different national contexts are what have to be understood “to know” the Irish diaspora. Ironically, to develop a fuller knowledge of Ireland and its diaspora, it is necessary to acquire a deeper knowledge of other national contexts. In 2002, I wrote that I wanted to develop a concept of Irish diaspora that combines an understanding of the diasporic context of identity formation in different locations with the concerns of empirical (materialist) accounts of the socio-historical context of migration and settlement. If diaspora as a concept is addressing the key concerns of culture, identity, subjectivity, and difference, a main strength of the materialist position has been to place on the social map such issues as the social reproduction of racist ideology, state regulation of migration, public policy and ethno-racial, class, and gender differentiation, and processes of cultural inclusion and exclusion (Hickman 2002). We need, therefore, to locate analysis of the Irish diaspora as part of a wider exploration, constructing an explanatory framework that allows for the impact of the presence of diasporic groups on what I would term the formatory moments/processes of particular nation states as well as the framing these processes gave/give to the trajectories of diasporic groups in individual countries of settlement (Hickman 2012). Some historians and literary critics of the diaspora are beginning to break free from traditional ethnic historiography to provide wider contexts:7 this development is good news because interdisciplinary approaches will reinforce the explanatory power of Irish Studies. At a more localized level, it is arguable that Brexit is likely to have a bigger impact on the study of Irish Britain than any event since the signing of the GFA. The CTA has been renegotiated: before it was not necessarily fully protective of Irish migrants and their families, but it does now ensure that in a post-Brexit world there will be few legal or bureaucratic obstacles to the recruitment of labor from Ireland. Whether a downturn in the Irish economy and less than full employment will prompt Irish migrants to readily cross the Irish sea and make Britain their main destination, as they have done since the mid-twentieth century, is quite another matter.

Notes 1 2 3 4

See, for example, Shiels. See O’Reilly and Campbell. For a more in-depth discussion of these two projects, see Hickman (2005). For example, see many contributions to a series of books on the history of the Irish in Britain edited by Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley, including the one listed in the Works Cited list in which I have an essay (1999). 5 For further discussion of this extraordinary phrase, see Hickman (1998). 6 See the “We are Irish too” campaign: www.weareirishtoo.com/about 7 See especially Delaney and Wills.

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Works cited Atlee, Clement. “Second Reading of the Ireland Bill.” Hansard, Vol. 464, Col. 1859, May 11, 1849. Campbell, Sean. “What’s the Story?: Rock Biography, Musical ‘Routes’ and the Second-Generation Irish in England.” Irish Studies Review, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2004, pp. 63–75. Cohen, Philip. “The Perversions of Inheritance: Studies in the Making of Multi-Racist Britain.” MultiRacist Britain. Edietd by P. Cohen and H.S. Bains. Macmillan, 1988. Colley, Linda. Britain: Forging the Nation 1707–1837. Yale University Press, 1992. Connolly, Linda. “A New Vision of Irish Studies.” Are the Irish Different? Edietd by Tom Inglis. Manchester University Press, 2004. Delaney Enda. The Irish in Post-War Britain. Oxford University Press, 2013. Flanagan, Peter. “I’m Exhausted Explaining to British People the Geography of Their Own Country.” Irish Times, February 19, 2019. www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/abroad/i-m-exhausted-explaining-tobritish-people-the-geography-of-their-own-country-1.3797959 (Accessed March 2, 2020). Hickman, Mary J. Religion, Class and Identity. Aldershot, Hants, 1995. Hickman, Mary J. “Reconstructing Deconstructing ‘Race’: British Political Discourses about the Irish in Britain.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2, 1998, pp. 288–307. Hickman, Mary J. “Alternative Historiographies of the Irish in Britain: A Critique of the Segregation/ Assimilation Model.” The Irish in Victorian Britain: The Local Dimension. Edited by Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley. Four Courts Press, 1999. Hickman, Mary J. “Locating the Irish Diaspora.” Irish Journal of Sociology, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2002, pp. 8–26. Hickman, Mary J. “Ruling Empire, Governing the Multi-National State: The Impact of Britain’s Historical Legacy on the Contemporary Ethno-Racial Regime.” Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy in the US and UK. Edietd by Glenn C. Loury, Tariq Modood, and Steven M. Teles. Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 21–49. Hickman, Mary J. “Diaspora Spaces and National (Re)Formations.” Éire-Ireland, Vol. 47, No. 1, 2012, pp. 19–44. Hickman, Mary J., Sarah Morgan, Bronwen Walter, and Joe Bradley. “The Limitations of Whiteness and the Boundaries of Englishness: Second-Generation Irish Identifications and Positionings in MultiEthnic Britain.” Ethnicities, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2005, pp. 160–182. Hickman, Mary J. and Louise Ryan. “The ‘Irish Question’: Marginalizations at the Nexus of Sociology of Migration and Ethnic and Racial Studies in Britain.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 43, No. 16, 2020, pp. 96–114. doi:10.1080/01419870.2020.1722194. Hickman, Mary J. and Bronwen Walter. Discrimination and the Irish Community in Britain. London, Commission for Racial Equality, 1997. Jones, Catherine. Immigration and Social Policy in Britain. Tavistock Books, 2020. Lewis, Gail. “Race,” Gender, Social Welfare: Encounters in a Postcolonial Society. Polity Press, 2000. Mullally, Úna. “Ireland’s Social Revolution Sparked Change Election.” The Irish Times, February 17, 2020. www.irishtimes.com/opinion/una-mullally-ireland-s-social-revolution-sparked-change-election1.4175517 (Accessed March 2, 2020). O’Grada, Cormac. “A Note on Nineteenth-Century Irish Emigration Statistics.” Population Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1, 1975, pp. 143–149. O’Reilly, Séamas. “How Can You Tell That an Irish Person’s Successful? The Media Start Calling Them British.” New Statesman, July 24, 2019. www.newstatesman.com/world/2019/07/how-can-you-tellirish-person-s-successful-media-starts-calling-them-british (Accessed January 9, 2020). Pitcher, Ben. The Politics of Multiculturalism. Palgrave, 2009. Sammells, Neil and Gerardine Meaney. “Irish Studies Review at 25.” Irish Studies Review, Vol. 26, No. 4, 2018, pp. 431–435. Scully, Marc. “Are Irish Passport Applicants in Britain Becoming ‘More Irish’?” The Irish Times, May 4, 2018. www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/abroad/are-irish-passport-applicants-in-britain-becoming-moreirish-1.3484245 (Accessed March 2, 2020). Shiels, Damien. The Forgotten Irish. The History Press Ireland, 2016. Walter, Bronwen. Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women. Routledge, 2001. Walter, Bronwen. ‘Invisible Irishness: Second-Generation Irish Identities.” Association of European Migration Institutions Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2004, pp. 185–193. Wills, Clair. Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain. Penguin Books, 2018.

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13 Ireland Inc. Diane Negra and Anthony P. McIntyre

This analysis of the cultural coordinates of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland explores how a government closely aligned with élite interests has doubled down on its commitment to corporate citizenship. Despite the depredations of this era being directly attributable to the irrational exuberance of the boom time Celtic Tiger period and well-documented lapses in financial regulation, Ireland post-2008 is marked by a radical forgetfulness (O’Gorman) and defined by public policies reminiscent of Naomi Klein’s account of “Shock Doctrine” that have installed corporatism at the heart of everyday life. Key features of the current landscape include ongoing (and well-established) governmental facilitation of tax avoidance by multinational corporations, the hollowing out of public services, the return of youth economic emigration, intensified elite/ underclass divisions, and a burgeoning housing crisis.1 In order to map the shifting coordinates of what Randy Martin aptly termed “the financialization of daily life” as it manifests in contemporary Ireland, this chapter offers two case studies that exemplify how the values of capitalist market managerialism are crowding out other values: the post-crash Irish banking sector and property market; and the persona of the current Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar as a very public embodiment of the confluence of corporate and civic citizenship. We begin by surveying key scholarship on some neoliberal sociocultural recalibrations as they pertain to Irish life and then show how neoliberal logics increasingly underpin a new set of diffuse cultural, political, and affective norms within the nation state. The chapter concludes with some final reflections on the ideological contours of life in a country where social and individual well-being is increasingly side-lined in favor of corporate interests.

Affective/cultural recalibrations in the neoliberalized state “Austerity” and “resilience” are watchwords of post-recession public culture, and citizens are endlessly exhorted to cultivate “entrepreneurialism” and “innovation” in an era in which corporate “disruption” agendas hold sway. The condition of austerity, promoted not only in Ireland, of course, but elsewhere, has been usefully defined by Mark Blyth, who argues that it comes into being “when those at the bottom are expected to pay disproportionately for a problem created by those at the top, and when those at the top actively eschew any responsibility for that problem 158

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by blaming the state for their mistakes” (15). Managerialist rhetorics and actions pervade Irish life and corporate profit is surging while real wages stagnate. Julie Wilson writes that “When market competition is generalized across the social field, all dimensions of life become defined by self-enterprise and the appreciation of our human capital” (117). This characterization is highly applicable to a post-global financial crash Ireland which has intensified productivity imperatives and fortified top-down corporate decision-making while upping the ante on the affective regulation of workers as in the form of compulsory professions of “excitement” on the part of employees. In February 2019, it was reported that based on OECD data, Irish workers were now ranked as the most productive in the world (BurkeKennedy 2019). Meanwhile, according to the Economic and Social Research Institute, “Irish workers’ stress levels soared fastest out of 10 EU countries in the wake of the economic crash” more than doubling in a seven-year interval (Walsh). Both Melissa Gregg and Nick Srnicek offer accounts of platform capitalism (by Gregg’s definition “an economy and a society increasingly built by software engineers”) that usefully contextualize the intense productivity regimes and dramatic escalation of stress that characterize post-financial crash Ireland (19). For Srnicek, “The digital economy is becoming a hegemonic model: cities are to become smart, businesses must be disruptive, workers are to become flexible, and government must be lean and intelligent” (5). This new ethos solicits a kind of ideal personality: someone who is indefatigable, restless, and flexible, always ready to accommodate the shocks of the global economy and the more mundane disruptions of working life, from unpredictable scheduling in service work to reduced parental leave and the outsourcing of more and more tasks to fewer and fewer employees. (Leary, 4) Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad have persuasively argued for the emergence of “an increasingly psychological turn within neoliberalism, intensified by austerity, in which new ways of being, relating, and apprehending the self are being produced” (478). Even though an accumulating body of evidence attests to the inefectuality of such programs, recent years have seen a notable increase in the co-optation of mental health initiatives and practices focusing on “wellness” and “mindfulness” by Irish and Ireland-based corporations which increasingly deploy them in the service of productivity (Abelson). Such initiatives are part of a shift documented by Carl Cedarstrom and Andre Spicer in which wellness becomes a “moral imperative,” part of a “biomorality that necessitates individuals strive relentlessly for health and happiness” (4–6; see also Purser). Zala Volcic and Mark Andrejevic have usefully demonstrated a set of conditions under which citizens “are socialized in new forms of national belonging that rely upon the dynamic of consumption: national belonging is not just the locus of a particular form of imaginary identification but of reiterated practices of consumption” (6). In line with their notion of “commercial nationalism,” we seek to analyze a representational climate that cues citizens to misrecognize the national in the commercial. In order to examine contemporary shifts within an increasingly neoliberalized Irish society, we parse a set of advertising and television media texts and sites of material and political culture. On this basis we show how in “Ireland Inc.” the ideological contours of a neoliberalized political class have come to permeate public discourses and popular culture. One sign of this permeation is the proliferation of dense rhetorical systems of privilege and the use of “complex language that increases the status of the users and denigrates those who don’t ‘get it’” (Spicer 41). This chapter employs the protocols of Cultural Studies and sociology to analyze the corporatization of Irish affective life at a time when citizens are regularly cued to believe that they are owed neither fairness, decency, or proficiency from either their elected representatives or from 159

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companies to which they provide custom. Affect theory facilitates the “rethinking and privileging [of] the felt aspects of every day life, social change and durable structures of power in their (in some ways) non-representational aspects” (Rentschler 12). Our analysis seeks to show how moments of national affective release encapsulated in events such as the 2015 marriage referendum are counterbalance to a daily life indelibly shaped by a deleterious inflation of social inequality and a pervasive sense of sovereign diminishment. Indeed, in our view, it is difficult to overstate the disorienting effects of an era in which, as William Davies has characterized it, elite power operates in a “post-juridical” fashion “outside of any norms of discourse or conduct” (229).

Post-crash norms: banking and property in an era of predatory capitalism Indicative of the particular intensity of these conditions of elite hegemony is the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA), the “bad bank” set up after the global financial crash to sell the properties of bankrupt individuals and entities as a means of stabilizing public finances but which, it is now widely understood, has operated chiefly for the benefit of US hedge and equity funds and high-level Irish insiders (see Connolly). The effrontery of the Irish banking sector, bailed out by Irish taxpayers, has been to escalate a series of hostile maneuvers toward their customers under new service protocols that see them interrogated about their intentions if they visit a branch, prohibited from conducting a variety of transactions except online, and subject to ever-increasing fees.2 When these conditions are noted in the press, it is unfortunately the case that critique is often undercut either by a suggestion that the Irish banks have always been this way (see Ferriter 2018) or through tabloid treatment that injects an unproductive comic tone (see Pope 2017). Nevertheless, the intensive automation and sweeping staff cuts that have characterized the sector since 2008 are noteworthy. As Peter Hamilton observes, Over 26,000 jobs across Irish banks have been lost in a decade of unprecedented restructuring as bailed-out lenders’ businesses contracted, overseas-owned lenders such as Bank of Scotland, Danske Bank and ACCBank retreated from the market and Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide imploded. In 2008, Ireland’s largest bank, Bank of Ireland, was rated an astonishing 496, four places from the bottom in an index of 500 global banks assessing quality and sustainability, receiving marks of zero for culture, customer focus, and staf investment (J. Brennan). Provocatively highlighting the diminishing capital of Irishness, Fintan O’Toole recently described an Ireland that has “lost the allure of the exotic but failed to replace it with the attraction of efficiency.” Ireland, in this regard, exemplifies a broader global phenomenon in which market-dominant companies increasingly deliver poor quality goods and services while concealing their oligopolistic and protected positioning. Key to this shift as we’ve suggested has been a diminishing commitment to customer service and concomitant replacement of staff with automated technologies. Indeed, post-Celtic Tiger Ireland is marked by a dramatic proliferation of forms of consumer labor or what Craig Lambert has deemed “shadow work,” which he defines as “all the unpaid tasks we do on behalf of businesses and organizations” (1), as we explore further following. The post-2008 Irish economy has proved increasingly susceptible to new tactics of financial engineering associated with the influence/involvement of private equity. The role of private equity is particularly apparent in the rise of international “vulture funds” that have sought advantage and opportunity amidst a widespread mortgage crisis. Indeed, bird of prey metaphors 160

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are a common trope in Irish public discourse as various neoliberal profit extraction techniques have proliferated. Accordingly, the term “cuckoo funds” designates a now common practice whereby entire property developments are bought out by large firms, ensuring that potential owner-occupiers are in effect locked out. Such cuckoo funds now reportedly make more money in Dublin than Los Angeles, with an executive at US property giant Kennedy Wilson notably upbeat in her assessment of potential for further growth as a “rental philosophy grows in Dublin.” Characteristically, government Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe defended such funds, arguing they drive property growth in the city (Mulligan). Such a “rental philosophy” is further imposed on Irish citizens by the “magpie” strategies of Irish local authorities and taxpayer-funded housing bodies who compound the lack of accommodation for first-time buyers by purchasing new build homes directly for their social housing remit, rather than developing properties as had been previous common practice (Weston 2019). While there has been considerable consternation over the cut-throat tactics of these, for the most part, outside financial players, rather more dispiriting in terms of public mood was the revelation that the main Irish banks, many of whom were the beneficiaries of the 2008 public bail-out, had for several years systematically overcharged customers on tracker-mortgages. Such mortgages keep the rate of interest aligned with the ECB borrowing rate. When that borrowing rate dropped to zero percent in the wake of the financial crash, many banks operating within Ireland attempted to move their revenue-pressed customers to temporarily shift to fixed-rate loans (customarily set for 3 years) on the understanding that this move would guarantee against fluctuations in the interest rate. The illegal actions arose when banks failed to return the interest rates to the tracker level after this set period, resulting in customer overcharge ranging between €100 and €60,000. The number of households affected has been estimated as potentially topping 40,000 (Weston 2017), and a significant number of repossessions occurred as a result of this action. The entire debacle forced Donohoe to call in the major banks (AIB, Bank of Ireland, KBC, Permanent TSB, and Ulster Bank) in October 2017 to “admonish” them over their actions as well as subsequent heel-dragging when it came to compensating affected customers (Cox). Perhaps unsurprisingly, an Irish media establishment that finds it difficult to maintain a critical stance against financial elites managed to spin this negative story, with the Irish Times telling of a couple unaware of their bank’s unscrupulous actions receiving a “windfall” check for €36,000 (Pope 2018). Possibly sensing this misstep in terms of public sentiment, the following day the same paper published an article entitled “One Good Tracker Tale Doesn’t Wipe out Torment of Thousands” that checked the rather light-hearted tone of the earlier piece (Cantillon). The Irish banking system’s disconnection from the needs, interests, and general positioning of noncorporate clients was put across in a stunningly tone-deaf series of adverts run by AIB beginning in 2017 featuring a mature couple reflecting with satisfaction on having paid off their mortgage.3 Warmly reminiscing about their hard work over decades raising a family in their comfortable house, attractive sixty-somethings Kate and Mick O’Sullivan are centralized in a long-running series of television and pre-feature cinema spots and print adverts under the AIB tagline “We Back Belief ” (see Image 13.1). Widely disparaged and mocked as a slap in the face to the large numbers of Irish people who don’t qualify for a mortgage as the gap between property prices and salaries widens, the campaign bespeaks the contempt customarily exhibited by the banking sector toward ordinary customers. Moreover, its tagline, in a classic neoliberal formulation, disingenuously suggests that self-will is the only necessary credential for success. The presentation of the O’Sullivans strikingly accords with a complex of broader discourses that “seek to elevate the individualized, mobile and self-possessed ‘resilient family’ as the neoliberal solution to inequality” (Jensen 77). Moreover, it operates as a stark illustration of what David McWilliams has identified as property-based “generational inequality.” 161

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Image 13.1 AIB’s “We Back Belief” mortgage campaign suggests self-will is the primary requirement to securing one’s own home at a time when rapid escalation is pricing huge swathes of the Irish population out of the housing market Source: Anthony P. McIntyre

Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland insulates banks, builders, and bond-holders from the consequences of their financial actions while disregarding citizen-consumers who are adversely (sometimes ruinously) impacted by them. In a climate of light to no regulation, caveat emptor prevails but also proves insufficient for those instances in which the taxpayers’ interests are misrepresented in government. Factionalization among citizens is promoted (notably in the form of resentment toward the civil service) and flash points of social unity (around issues such as equal marriage) celebrated as a form of symbolic redress for growing inequality. In the period after 2008, the tax parasitism of global companies who set up operations (either actually or nominally) in Ireland has proved unassailable even while austerity violence toward Irish citizens has surged. Under global capitalism, Irishness shifts to a “handmaid” national category that is placed to provide affective cover for the brutalities of an intensified order of economic inequality. Exemplary in this regard is the rise of Irish reality television shows (ranging from Dragon’s Den [see Kiersey’s trenchant analysis] to Irish in Wonderland) that celebrate the authority and entitlements of the wealthy and model positions of emulation and facilitation on the part of Irish people toward the global elite. Programming of this kind helps to render injustice and exploitation mundane. It bears further noting that the most popular television programs in Ireland have a habit of showcasing consumer aspirationalism (as in Christmas perennial The Late Late Toy Show which commands an astonishing market share and is considered obligatory annual viewing, as well as the renovation program ratings leader Room to Improve). Together with Eleanor O’Leary, we have argued elsewhere that the Irish post-recession broadcast environment is notable for a flurry of reality and lifestyle programs (such as Better Off Abroad, Making It Down Under, and Tastes Like 162

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Home with Catherine Fulvio) that put a positive gloss on emigration and in so doing urge viewers to reconcile themselves to Ireland’s place in the global capitalist order (see Negra et al.).4 Any account of the Post-Celtic Tiger corporatization of Ireland must take note of the explosive growth of the International Financial Services Center (IFSC) alongside the underfunding of poor and precarious public transport and overtaxed medical service provision. As Ireland leaves the most acute years of recession behind, employment in technology fields has surged, up a dramatic 57% between 2011 and 2016, the largest rise in any sector (Taylor 2017). However, as political economists Aidan Regan and Samuel Brazys demonstrate, such developments have led to “an increasingly segmented labor force, with the top quintile earning high and increasing wages in the FDI sectors, and a mass of low wage to medium wage workers who have seen limited improvement in their economic situation” (224). In recent years, the government has studiously maintained a posture of passive observation while the housing bubble reinflates, fueled in no small part by the needs of internationally mobile, high-earning tech workers. Its energies have been concentrated instead on initiatives like Creative Ireland which attest to the creativity’s emergence as a new knowledge economy buzzword and seem largely designed to neoliberalize the concept. As the State increasingly makes moves to take ideological and financial possession of the creativity of citizens, it simultaneously abandons its commitment to health and well-being in a society that is ever more precisely stratified by social class. Initiatives like Creative Ireland function in part to police “outlier identities” potentially threatening to the ideal of “a new kind of self-optimizing ‘entrepreneurial citizen-subject’ accommodated to life in the world of deregulated market freedoms” (Cherniavsky, 2). The notion that Irish society maintains a divide between striving professionals and abject others was showcased in 2017, when the young, consummately neoliberal Fine Gael politician Leo Varadkar launched his campaign to become Taoiseach stating that he wanted to lead a party for “people who get up early in the morning” (Bardon).5 The discourse on post-recession Irish “resilience” is flagrantly contradicted by rampant underemployment, tenaciously high rates of emigration, a sharp spike in homelessness, and a broad failure to acknowledge/address a culture of despair which has seen a notable rise in suicide rates. The ways in which the disruptive efects of technological dispersion and corporate eforts to render it compulsory intensify inequality have seldom been examined but are the subjects of apocryphal concern “on the ground.” Increasingly compelled to perform the work of corporations to whom they direct their business, Irish customers are subject to “self-service protocols” that represent significant financial savings for corporate entities. Emblematic of this shift is the rise of online banking which has doubled in Ireland in the last decade (Taylor 2018). As Diane Negra has argued elsewhere, encounters with corporations play out in a new antagonistic customer service culture in which frustrated, beset customers are compelled to undertake work previously performed by employees: this economy is marked by a transfer of work from organizations to their supposed customers, technology platforms with high failure rates, deep devotion to Byzantine bureaucratic procedures, and the conspicuous and constant valuing of high status customers over low status ones. In the post-Celtic Tiger economy, it is increasingly common practice to contrive employment arrangements that suppress wages and benefits and outsource hiring to a third party. (Facebook, for instance, does this with its Dublin content analysts.) Employers have become increasingly adept at externalizing costs once intrinsic to their operations onto workers and the notable rise of co-working spaces such as those under the WeWork brand are in part a function 163

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of these shifts. Companies like WeWork (installed in Ireland in a showplace building in Harcourt Street)6 also take up the psychological slack for the abandonment of workers by triumphantly reclassifying precaritization as self-optimization using slogans like, “Do What You Love.” The sloganizing around such new ventures well reflects a new discourse on self-responsibilized happiness.7 As Julie Wilson notes “Through honing one’s mind for happiness, individuals come to actively embrace the hardships of precarity as an opportunity for self-appreciation and emotional enterprise” (168). The broader employment landscape of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, then, features sharply reduced wages for entry level workers, diminished working conditions, and a reduction in pension-eligible employees alongside pervasive neoliberal hype and a focus on occupational healthism presented as a manifestation of employer care rather than a by-product of the foregoing developments.

Renovating Irish leadership: Leo Varadkar’s socially progressive neoliberalism As indicated, a key figure in the increased neoliberalization and corporatism evident in Irish public life is no doubt Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. One of a current crop of youthful, male, media-savvy national leaders such as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron, Varadkar, in a similar manner to these other progressive centrists, espouses socially liberal policies in some quarters while doubling down on fundamental neoliberal doxa of privatization and the privileging of elite interests over those of the working poor. For Varadkar, these twin tendencies were clearly evident at earlier stages in his political career and have continued apace during his premiership. Varadkar seems to sense that renovating the role of Taoiseach through a marriage of social progressivism and economic conservatism is a winning formula in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. While this sort of positioning is common to an emergent cohort of national leaders, it is also a uniting feature of the big tech corporations who regularly emphasize their social progressiveness through overt alignment with annual events such as Gay Pride (see Nagle). (Such seeming altruism on the part of these corporations is undermined though by their increased reliance on low paid contract employees who are denied the security and benefits of high-skilled staff.) However, our argument with regard to Varadkar is not that he constitutes a new development in statesmanship, rather, we seek to highlight how his policies and representational strategies are fully congruent with a shift in Irish public life, evident in such disparate sources as banking advertisements and reality television shows. The 2015 Marriage Equality Referendum provided Varadkar, then Minister for Health, with an opportunity to showcase his progressive credentials, as he was a prominent presence during the public celebrations once the “Yes” vote for marriage equality prevailed. The referendum itself was a rare instance of post-2008 afective exuberance within the nation, as an almost unanimous decision to allow gay couples to marry meant that Ireland was the first country to extend this right to its citizens through a national vote. As both an openly gay man, and the mixed-race son of an Indian immigrant, Varadkar arguably embodies a new sense of national identity that manifested during the referendum, one that extends beyond the Catholic, white identity formations of previous generations. Indeed, the politician is just one of a number of high-profile Irish public figures of mixed-race origin who, as Negra, McIntyre and O’Leary have argued, “symbolize a particular Irish adaptability and [showcase] new identity hierarchies based on the hybrid, fully commercialised self.” (858). In contrast to his progressive positions on identity politics, is Varadkar’s reactionary economic positioning. Notably, while Minister for Social Protection in April 2017, he presided over the 164

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controversial “Welfare Cheats Cheat Us All” campaign (Image 13.2), which urged members of the public to inform on those they suspected of committing welfare fraud. A key claim made as part of the initiative was that in 2016 the Ministry saved €500 million through fraud detection measures, a figure hotly disputed in a Thejournal.ie “fact-check” article, which concluded the real amount saved to be closer to €82 million (C. Brennan). While the emotive nature of the campaign language was later recognized to have been a misstep by his Ministry colleagues, Varadkar, as we have noted earlier, continues to deploy meritocratic discourse that rhetorically constructs an Ireland divided into the workshy and the aspirational, a mainstay of neoliberal politics that, as Jo Littler argues “promises opportunity while producing social division” (3). Varadkar’s divisive rhetoric has not been without its critics. Notably, a month after the “welfare cheats” campaign, a political advert widely deployed throughout Dublin parodically defaced the official poster (see Images 13.2 and 13.3), changing the message to “vulture funds cheat us all.” The advert, funded by an independent group of parliamentarians known collectively as the Independents Against Austerity (and, in particular, T.D. Mick Wallace), provocatively calls out the hypocrisy of a government targeting those on the lowest rungs of the social ladder while presiding over the large scale extraction of wealth from its own citizens, as NAMA sold on indebted properties to financially robust international asset managers (“vulture funds”) specializing in such “distressed debt” (Mooney). We close this section by emphasizing another facet of Leo Varadkar’s neoliberal self-positioning— his status as an advocate for neoliberal lifestyling and self-presentation as an exemplary and fit citizen—and a recent moment of contestation to that positioning. In line with this dimension of his signification, Varadkar agreed to appear in February 2019 on RTÉ’s body modification

Image 13.2 Leo Varadkar, then Minister for Social Justice, launching the controversial Welfare Cheats campaign Source: Irish Post, February 2020

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Image 13.3 “Vulture Funds Cheat Us All” parodies the Welfare Cheats campaign, calling out the hypocrisy of targeting the poor while international investment funds strip Irish citizens of their assets Source: Anthony P. McIntyre

reality show Operation Transformation to have his metabolic age assessed. Known for his sangfroid, Varadkar was evidently dismayed and perhaps a little outraged when it was revealed that though he is 40 his metabolic age is 53. Grumpily professing himself to be “kind of wondering about the science behind it, to be honest,” the Taoiseach’s incredulity and pique were markedly out of sync with his standard self-presentation (C. Ryan). The moment proved a revealing refutation of the credos of neoliberal healthism and demonstration of the fact that health is not purely a product of fitness or diet; it was, in effect, a performance of biomorality gone wrong.

Conclusion The attempt to collectivize responsibility for the financial recklessness of elites was established early in the Irish recession in Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan’s infamous remark “we all partied” as a characterization of Celtic Tiger exuberance. Writing about the UK context, but in terms that are equally applicable to Ireland, Vickie Cooper and David Whyte note that “This façade of ‘togetherness’ has played a key part in the ideological making of austerity. Not only did it help organize consent and support, but it helped deflect the blame for the deficit away from the businesses and private sector, framing it as a problem of the public’s making” (7). Lenihan’s disingenuous statement prefigured a broader matrix of actions designed to redirect the traditional protective stance by government toward citizens, prioritizing instead a protective relation toward corporations. A review of key elements of Irish public culture in recent years illustrates how some national social institutions have been renovated and updated while economic institutions drift further away from notions of the common good. Drawing upon theories of “commercial nationalism,” this chapter has sought to sketch a state of affairs in which corporate interests customarily prevail 166

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over social and individual ones in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. This is not to say that there are no countervailing forces within Irish society and culture that call out the neoliberal tendencies recasting life within the nation. Although, as we have indicated, career politicians have sought to capitalize on the success of the marriage equality campaign and the repeal of the eighth amendment, one can’t overlook the positive social change these votes brought about and the solidarity that manifested across diverse walks of life within and beyond the nation during the campaigns. One might also look, for instance, to a small but robust counter-discursive sphere that includes for instance the podcasts of Blindboy Boatclub, sometime member of comedy duo The Rubberbandits, who decries many of the developments we outline in this chapter, or the output of emerging musicians such as Dublin band “Fontaines D.C.,” whose acclaimed 2019 album “Dogrel,” as Una Mullally lyrically puts it, “speaks to those who reside within the cracks, where the things they value about a place can’t be bought or sold.” The purpose of this chapter is not to deny that there is a space of resistance in existence in contemporary Ireland, but to emphasize how, as we have shown, recent popular culture indexes a shift toward corporate impregnability and a public culture in which individuals absorb greater risk and take up positions of heightened precarity. This shift can be mapped in everything from a cluster of reality television series that glorify emigration as a permanent feature of Irish global citizenship, to bank adverts that tout the good fortune of a small minority of older citizens in a position to have paid off mortgages and in the political persona of a young, dynamic Taoiseach who cultivates good relations with corporate interests while largely ignoring the social problems associated with austerity. Most diffusely and most decisively, the shift is expressed in a self-conscious turn toward affective labor as a way of reinvesting the desire of the Irish population in an emotionally and financially oppressive mode of capitalist valorization, all the while deflecting attention away from questions concerning the responsibility of the institutions of the Irish state to manage the country’s wealth in a just and democratic manner. (Kiersey, 359) In sum, post-Celtic Tiger Ireland exhibits many of the traits Peter Bloom and Carl Rhodes associate with “the CEO Society,” in which “corporate ideals of rivalry, self-interest and even exploitation are spreading so as to transform all areas of human life in its own image” (48). It is a site marked by the proliferation of what Saskia Sassen recognizes as “predatory formations” which have led “to escalated systemic capacities for massive capture at the top, environmental destruction on a scale we have not seen before, and a significant rise in the expulsion of people from reasonable life options even in rich countries” (2). In recent years, Ireland has emerged as a place where “Wolf of Wall Street” Jordan Belfort draws large paying audiences at the Convention Center in Dublin and the Taoiseach appears on a well-watched television program where he defines his job as “chairman and CEO of the organization,” while wage theft and pervasive homelessness are normalized (Crawley). In this new phase of Irish (self-) narrativization, any element of history or cultural identity is seemingly available for brand building and promotion as exemplified by a recent campaign by an Irish advertising agency for an insurance conglomerate that recreates a 1966 speech announcing free secondary education in Ireland and perhaps most astonishingly the name choice of branding agency Workhouse Visual Communication on Dame Street in Dublin (Ferriter 2019). As Ireland settles into what has been characterized as a “jobs-rich but wage-poor recovery” (Burke-Kennedy 2018), the intensity and variety of tactics in play to secure popular acceptance of corporate hegemony can be expected to both solidify and expand. 167

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Postscript The editors of this collection have kindly allowed us to add a postscript written two weeks after the Irish general election of February 2020. In significant ways the affective conditions we outline in this chapter had a large bearing on the polls, with the position of Fine Gael and rivals Fianna Fáil suffering a dramatic loss of support in an election that saw a party outside of this duopoly, Sinn Féin, win the popular vote for the first time in the history of the state. Sinn Féin’s surprise surge capitalized on growing discontent with the status quo, and, in particular, the failure of the incumbent Fine Gael party (with its “supply and demand” partners Fianna Fáil) to tackle the growing housing crisis, a failing healthcare system, and the rising costs of basic provisions such as childcare and insurance. Perhaps complacent due to a growing economy and the sense that the Brexit negotiations of the previous year had gone well for Ireland, Leo Varadkar did not deviate significantly from his corporatist political script throughout the election, even reviving the claim that his party was for “the people who wake up early in the morning.” An IDA reception at the outset of the campaign on January 20, 2020, saw Varadkar present Apple CEO Tim Cook with an award marking 40 years of the multinational’s presence in Ireland. While no mention was made of the ongoing corporate tax dispute between Ireland, Apple and the EU, the Taoiseach drew criticism for politicizing the state event, using the opportunity to take a swipe at political rivals who would, in his words, “tear up the contract” for the national broadband plan (P. Ryan). This strategic placing of Fine Gael as the party of business and Big Tech in particular, was liable to have backfired, however, given that the focus of the election was increasingly defined by felt conditions from “below” and the perception that the traditional parties of power in the state were out of touch and/or cruelly indifferent. The perceived political opportunism at the IDA reception was also a feature of one of the defining events of the election, the serious injury of a homeless man residing in a tent during canal-side clearance works with a mechanical claw in Dublin city center. The brutal incident heightened the significance of homelessness and the housing crisis to the election, while the Taoiseach’s immediate reaction upon hearing of the news—calling out the Fianna Fáil Lord Mayor of Dublin—drew opprobrium from politicians on all sides. Public discontent with the governing party was further manifested in the defacement of posters of Leo Varadkar, many of which lingered on city streets for days after the election. Modifications of this kind included scrawled text (“I don’t care about poor people”) on the posters, drawings on the Taoiseach’s face that gave him ghoulish eyes and an American dollar bill tie, and, in a surreal twist, in Drogheda a spate of altered posters in which he was made to wear a Batman mask and cowl (Brent). Capitalizing on the public outrage that swelled during the election, Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald repeatedly attacked both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil by highlighting the impact of “vulture funds” on the housing market and drawing attention to the fact that while cranes were a common feature of the urban landscape, generally they were being used in the construction of office buildings and hotels, not in service of the housing supply that was urgently needed. While it would be presumptuous to claim that the election of February 2020 marked a turning point in the ideological positioning of Ireland in the twenty-first century—particularly given that there was no outright “winner” of the election and coalition talks are ongoing at the time of writing—it does seem that the old certainties of the twoparty system no longer prevail and the affective conditions of twenty-first century Ireland outlined in this chapter are playing a decisive role in shaping the current political recalibrations under way.

Notes 1 An emergent strain of Irish journalism deplores these changes warning of the “San Francisco-ification” of Dublin (as in Karlin Lillington’s “Silicon Docks are Killing Dublin”) and critically assesses how particular

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2 3 4

5

6

7

industries are being modified to heighten profit extraction at the expense of customers (as in John McManus’ “How Mytaxi Killed Irish Taxis and Now Owns the Future”). The Irish context is also notable for the regularity of bankcard and credit card system failures in its banking sector as well as delayed payments into accounts. As Charlie Weston has noted “This is now happening on a regular basis with banks in this country in the lead-up to bank holidays” (Weston 2019). Illustrating that this was far from an exceptional case, Bank of Ireland produced a tweet in August 2017 advising young couples to move home to their parents in order to save money for a mortgage. The tweet appeared in the same week that it was reported Dublin rents had reached an all-time high (McMahon). While Irish broadcasters have tended to produce programming congruent with the ideologies underpinning contemporary corporate Ireland, there have been a number of recent independent films that have voiced a critique of post-crash Irish culture. These include the housing crisis drama Rosie (2018) and The Lonely Battle of Thomas Reid (2018), an experimental documentary charting a farmer’s battle to retain his land in the face of a compulsory purchase order from IDA Ireland, a semi-state body seeking to strategically absorb Reid’ property adjacent to Intel’s County Kildare microchip factory. Varadkar’s campaign slogan bears some similarity to Irish bank AIB’s 2014 “Backing Brave” marketing campaign that emphasized the various travails of working people, including one ad that depicted people getting up while it was still dark to get to work. Notably the bank utilized tropes of “bravery” and “resilience” as a means of regaining the trust of the Irish people after it had to be bailed out after the banking crash. In recent years the now beleaguered WeWork dramatically expanded in Dublin, signing a twenty-year lease for a building at Dublin Landings (Fagan). The company’s global rise was likewise dramatic. In January 2019, according to The New York Times, it had 425 locations in 27 countries. The company has been characterized as an attempt, among other things, to capitalize on the bruising contemporary ethos of work through compensatory provision of “a work environment remodelled for solace and dignity” (Lewis-Kraus). For an academic discussion of the rise of co-working spaces see de Peuter, Cohen and Saraco. They aptly characterize the practice as inviting “disembedded workers to buy back access to the resources, including workplace community, from which they have been dispossessed” (691).

Works cited Abelson, Reed. “Employee Wellness Programs Yield Little Benefit, Study Shows.” The New York Times, April 16, 2019. www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/health/employee-wellness-programs.html. Bardon, Sarah. “Varadkar Wants to Lead Party for People Who Get Up Early in the Morning.”The Irish Times, May20, 2017. www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/varadkar-wants-to-lead-party-for-people-who-get-upearly-in-the-morning-1.3090753. Bloom, Peter and Carl Rhodes. CEO Society: The Corporate Takeover of Everyday Life. Zed Books, 2018. Blyth, Mark. Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Oxford University Press, 2013. Brennan, Cianan. “FactCheck: Did the Government Really Save €500 Million Due to Reported Welfare Fraud Last Year?” TheJournal.ie, June 18, 2017. www.thejournal.ie/fact-check-leo-varadkar-welfare-cheats3404165-Jun2017/. Brennan, Joe. “Bank of Ireland Trails Quality List of 500 Banks Globally.” The Irish Times, October 24, 2018. www.irishtimes.com/business/financial-services/bank-of-ireland-trails-quality-list-of-500-banksglobally-1.3673251. Brent, Harry. “Leo Varadkar Election Posters Covered in Batman Masks in Drogheda.”Irish Post, February 4, 2020. www.irishpost.com/news/leo-varadkar-election-posters-covered-batman-masks-drogheda-178726. Burke-Kennedy, Eoin. “Is Ireland’s Booming Economy Just an Illusion?” The Irish Times, March 30, 2018. www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/is-ireland-s-booming-economy-just-an-illusion-1.3444645. Burke-Kennedy, Eoin. “Irish Workers Now Ranked as Most Productive in World.” The Irish Times, February 6, 2019. www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/irish-workers-now-ranked-as-most-productivein-world-1.3783173. “Cantillon.”“One Good Tracker Tale Doesn’t Wipe Out Torment of Thousands.”The Irish Times, Februayr 6, 2018. www.irishtimes.com/business/financial-services/one-good-tracker-tale-doesn-t-wipe-out-tormentof-thousands-1.3381211. Cedarstrom, Carl and Andre Spicer. The Wellness Syndrome. Polity, 2015. Cherniavsky, Eva. Neocitizenship: Political Culture After Democracy. NYU Press, 2017.

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Connolly, Frank. Nama-Land: The Inside Story of Ireland’s Property Sell-Off and the Creation of a New Elite. Gill Books, 2017. Cooper, Vickie and David Whyte, Eds. The Violence of Austerity. Pluto Press, 2017. Cox, Aengus. “Explainer: The Tracker Mortgage Scandal.” RTÉ.ie, October 27, 2017. www.rte.ie/news/ business/2017/1025/915149-explainer-the-tracker-mortgage-scandal/. Crawley, Peter. “Leo Varadkar on the Late Late Show: Taoiseach Has Become ‘CEO,’ Ireland ‘The Organization’.” The Irish Times, December 8, 2018. www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio-web/leo-varadkaron-the-late-late-show-taoiseach-has-become-ceo-ireland-the-organisation-1.3725032. Davies, William. “Elite Power under Advanced Neoliberalism.” Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 34, Nos. 5–6, 2017, pp. 227–250. De Peuter, Greig, Nicole S. Cohen, and Francesca Saraco. “The Ambivalence of Coworking: On the Politics of an Emergent Work Practice.” European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 29, No. 6, 2017, pp. 687–706. Fagan, Jack. “Second Phase of Dublin Landings Goes on Sale for €98.8m.” The Irish Times, May 23, 2018. www.irishtimes.com/business/commercial-property/second-phase-of-dublin-landings-goes-onsale-for-98-8m-1.3504208. Ferriter, Diarmaid. “Irish Banks: Making Customers Angry since at Least 1760.” The Irish Times, February 17, 2018. www.irishtimes.com/opinion/diarmaid-ferriter-irish-banks-have-abused-customers-forcenturies-1.3394936. Ferriter, Diarmaid. “Allianz’s Act of Monumental Hypocrisy.” The Irish Times, May 4, 2019. www.irishtimes. com/opinion/diarmaid-ferriter-allianz-s-act-of-monumental-hypocrisy-1.3880119. Gill, Rosalind and Shani Orgad. “The Amazing Bounce-Backable Woman: Resilience and the Psychological Turn in Neoliberalism.” Sociological Research Online, Vol. 23, No. 2, 2018, pp. 477–495. Gregg, Melissa. Counterproductive: Time-Management in the Knowledge Economy. Duke University Press, 2018. Hamilton, Peter. “Irish Banks Have Shed 50% of Staff since Crash.” The Irish Times, March 27, 2018. www. irishtimes.com/business/financial-services/irish-banks-have-shed-50-of-staff-since-crash-1.3441938. Jensen, Tracey. “Against Resilience.” We Need to Talk About Family: Essays on Neoliberalism, the Family and Popular Culture. Edited by Roberta Garrett, Tracey Jensen, and Angie Voela. Cambridge Scholars Press, 2016, pp. 76–93. Kiersey, Nicholas. “Retail Therapy in the Dragon’s Den: Neoliberalism and Affective Labour in the Popular Culture of Ireland’s Financial Crisis.” Global Society, Vol. 28, No. 3, 2014, pp. 356–374. Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Picador, 2008. Lambert, Craig. Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day. Counterpoint, 2016. Leary, John Patrick. Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism. Haymarket, 2018. Lewis-Kraus, Gideon. “The Rise of the WeWork Class.” The New York Times Magazine, January 24, 2019, pp. 40–45, 65. Lillington, Karlin. “Silicon Docks Are Killing Dublin.” The Irish Times, July 4, 2019. www.irishtimes.com/ business/technology/how-silicon-docks-is-killing-dublin-silicon-docks-is-killing-dublin-1.3945722. Littler, Jo. Against Meritocracy Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility. Routledge, 2017. Martin, Randy. Financialization of Daily Life. Temple University Press, 2002. McManus, John. “How Mytaxi Killed Irish Taxis and Now Owns the Future.” The Irish Times, May 15, 2019. www.irishtimes.com/opinion/how-mytaxi-killed-irish-taxis-and-now-owns-thefuture-1.3892979. McMahon, Áine. “Bank Deletes Tweet Advising Young Couples to Move Back in with Parents.” The Irish Times, August 23, 2017. www.irishtimes.com/news/consumer/bank-deletes-tweet-advising-youngcouples-to-move-back-in-with-parents-1.3196367. McWilliams, David. “In Ireland, the Old Get Richer and the Young Grow Poorer.” The Irish Times, March 17, 2018. www.irishtimes.com/opinion/david-mcwilliams-in-ireland-the-old-get-richer-andthe-young-grow-poorer-1.3429463. Mooney, Attracta. “‘Aggressive’ Vulture Funds Swoop in on Irish Property.” Financial Times, February 18, 2017. www.ft.com/content/8d559d8c-f3a3-11e6-8758-6876151821a6. Mullally, Úna. “Dublin Belongs to You, Even if You Can’t Afford a Piece of It.” The Irish Times, April 15, 2019. www.irishtimes.com/opinion/una-mullally-dublin-belongs-to-you-even-if-you-can-t-afford-apiece-of-it-1.3860179. Mulligan John. “Cuckoo Funds Make More in Dublin than Los Angeles.” Independent.ie. May 7, 2019. www.independent.ie/business/personal-finance/property-mortgages/a-rental-philosophy-us-propertygiants-make-more-in-dublin-than-los-angeles-38086501.html. 170

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Nagle, Angela. “How Liberalism is Enslaving Ireland as a Colony of Silicon Valley.”The Irish Times, August 25, 2018. www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/how-liberalism-is-enslaving-ireland-as-a-colony-of-siliconvalley-1.3597453. Negra, Diane. “The Rise of the Antagonistic Service Economy.” Irishhumanities.com, November 3, 2016. www.irishhumanities.com/blog+/the-rise-of-the-antagonistic-service-economy/. Negra, Diane, Anthony P. McIntyre, and Eleanor O’Leary. “Broadcasting Irish Emigration in an Era of Global Mobility.” European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 22, Nos. 5–6, 2018, pp. 849–866. O’Gorman, Francis. Forgetfulness: Making the Modern Notion of Amnesia. Bloomsbury, 2017. O’Toole, Fintan. “Ireland Is Nobody’s Little Darling Any More.” The Irish Times, November 21, 2017. www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-ireland-is-nobody-s-little-darling-any-more-1.3298649. Pope, Conor. “Need Proof the Banks Have It in for Us? Here Are 10 Examples.” The Irish Times, October 23, 2017. www.irishtimes.com/news/consumer/need-proof-the-banks-have-it-in-for-us-here-are10-examples-1.3260578. Pope, Conor. “Couple Receive Surprise €36,000 Tracker Compensation.” The Irish Times, February 5, 2018. www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/couple-receive-surprise-36-000-trackercompensation-1.3379846. Purser, Ronald. McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. Repeater, 2019. Regan, Aiden and Samuel Brazys. “Celtic Phoenix or Leprechaun Economics? The Politics of an FDI-Led Growth Model in Europe.” New Political Economy, Vol. 23, No. 2, 2018, pp. 223–238. Rentschler, Carrie A. “Affect.” Keywords for Media Studies. Edited by Laurie Ouellette and Jonathan Gray. NYU Press, 2017, pp. 12–14. Ryan, Charlotte. “Taoiseach, 40, Learns ‘True Age’ Is 53 on Operation Transformation.” RTÉ News, February 7, 2019. www.rte.ie/lifestyle/living/2019/0207/1028058-varadkar-40-learns-true-age-is53-on-operation-transformation/. Ryan, Philip. “Fianna Fáil Seeks Ethics Probe over Remarks at Apple Event.” Irish Independent. January 21, 2020. www.independent.ie/irish-news/fianna-fail-seeks-ethics-probe-over-remarks-at-appleevent-38880846.html. Sassen, Saskia. “Predatory Formations Dressed in Wall Suits and Algorithmic Math.” Science, Technology & Society, Vol. 22, No.1, 2017, pp. 1–15. Spicer, Andre. Business Bullshit. Routledge, 2018. Srnicek, Nick. Platform Capitalism. Polity, 2017. Taylor, Charlie. “Nearly 60,000 People Are Now Working in IT, Up 56% in Five Years.” The Irish Times, December 14, 2017. www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/nearly-60-000-people-now-working-init-up-56-in-five-years-1.3327172. Taylor, Charlie. “Use of Online Banking More Than Doubled in Ireland in Last 10 Years.” The Irish Times, January 19, 2018. www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/use-of-online-banking-more-thandoubled-in-ireland-in-last-10-years-1.3360346. Volcic, Zala and Mark Andrejevic. “Introduction.” Commercial Nationalism: Selling the Nation and Nationalizing the Sell. Edited by Z. Volcic and M. Andrejevic. Palgrave, 2016, pp. 1–13. Walsh, Anne-Marie. “Stress in Workplace ‘Soared in Wake of Downturn’.” Independent.ie, November 27, 2018. www.independent.ie/business/in-the-workplace/stress-in-workplace-soared-in-wake-of-downturn-37569209.html. Weston, Charlie. “11,000 More Cases Found by Banks in Tracker Scandal.” Independent.ie, December 20, 2017. www.independent.ie/business/personal-finance/property-mortgages/11000-more-cases-foundby-banks-in-tracker-scandal-36423600.html. Weston, Charlie. “Relief for Ulster Bank Customers As ‘Transfer Hitch’ Resolved Ahead of Bank Holiday Week.” Independent.ie, October 25, 2019. www.independent.ie/business/irish/relief-for-ulster-bankcustomers-as-transfer-hitch-resolved-ahead-of-bank-holiday-weekend-38630351.html. Wilson, Julie A. Neoliberalism. Routledge, 2018.

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14 Ireland, Europe, and Brexit Martina Lawless

As close geographic neighbors, Ireland’s economic links through trade, investment, and migration remained concentrated with the UK for many years after independence. During the later decades of the twentieth century, these economic links gradually shifted away from the UK and moved increasingly towards the rest of Europe and the US, as Ireland developed into one of the most open and outward-orientated countries in the world. Ireland’s location as a base within Europe for many US-owned multinational corporations, in particular, offered a bridge between businesses operating in markets on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite this more global orientation, the UK remains a significant economic partner across a range of dimensions, most particularly as a trading partner for domestically owned small and medium enterprises in Ireland. The potential disruption—both economic and more broadly—that the UK exit from the EU might have on these connections is a cause of serious concern in Ireland. This concern is particularly acute in relation to how Brexit could impact cross-border activities on the island. This chapter looks at the evolution of Ireland’s economic relationships with the UK and Europe and documents their shifting relative importance over time. From this base, it then discusses how Brexit could impact on these interconnections under different exit scenarios.

Ireland’s economic relationships with the EU and UK Ireland, when it joined the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973, was a relatively poor country. Economic growth began gradually in the late 1980s before accelerating throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. A considerable recession then hit the county with a double blow as the international financial crisis precipitated and amplified the downturn in the already overextended domestic construction sector. Recovery from this recession took several years, but by 2018 unemployment had returned to below 5% and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth was amongst the strongest in the EU. Figure 14.1 shows the extent of the “Celtic Tiger” catch-up growth by plotting Irish and UK GDP per capita relative to the EU average over time. While the UK position has remained relatively stable—between 15% and 20% better off than the EU average—Ireland transformed from one of the poorer member states in the early years of its membership to one of the highest income countries by 2018. The considerable jump in GDP in 2015 and the extent to which it aligns with real economic activity 172

Ireland, Europe, and Brexit

UK/EU

IRE/EU

1970

116%

83%

1971

116%

82%

1972

116%

83%

1973

117%

81%

1974

112%

82%

1975

112%

86%

1976

111%

83%

1977

111%

86%

1978

112%

89%

1979

113%

87%

1980

109%

88%

1981

108%

90%

1982

110%

90%

1983

113%

88%

1984

112%

89%

1985

114%

90%

1986

115%

87%

1987

118%

89%

1988

119%

90%

1989

118%

93%

1990

115%

98%

1991

113%

98%

1992

112%

100%

1993

115%

103%

1994

116%

105%

1995

116%

112%

1996

116%

118%

1997

118%

126%

1998

118%

132%

1999

118%

140%

2000

117%

146%

2001

118%

148%

2002

119%

152%

2003

121%

153%

2004

121%

157%

2005

121%

159%

2006

120%

158%

Figure 14.1 Irish and UK GDP relative to the EU, 1970–2018

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UK/EU

IRE/EU

2007

119%

157%

2008

117%

147%

2009

117%

145%

2010

116%

144%

2011

115%

146%

2012

116%

147%

2013

118%

148%

2014

119%

158%

2015

118%

192%

2016

117%

196%

2017

116%

203%

2018

115%

211%

Figure 14.1 (Continued) Source: FRED Economic Data

attracted considerable international attention, and FitzGerald (2018) identifies a number of ways in which GDP, and recent changes to national accounting standards, can distort statistics in small open economies such as Ireland. EU membership, not only in terms of direct financial support for increased investment in infrastructure but also in terms of access to a large and increasingly integrated market, played a central role in the economy’s overall transformation. Trade openness and the expansion of several large US multinationals basing their operations in Ireland for access to the EU market is credited with much of the country’s rapid catch-up growth throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, with the result that Ireland is now one of the most prosperous EU countries. With greater international linkages with the EU (and USA), the proportional importance of the UK in Irish trade declined over time, although these linkages remain of importance to the Irish economy. At the time of Ireland’s 1973 membership application of what was then the EEC, the Irish economy was so closely aligned with the UK’s that when a previous British application to join the EEC was vetoed, Ireland immediately withdrew its application. EEC membership without the UK was not regarded as feasible. A similar debate emerged in the 1990s, whether Irish membership in the Eurozone should consider whether the UK also joined, with Barry (1997) suggesting that this factor would increase, rather than reduce, the Irish economy’s exposure to exchange rate shocks. By this stage, however, the balance of trade interests had shifted away from the UK towards the EU, so the UK decision not to join the common European currency did not change the Irish decision. Figure 14.2 shows the extent of this shift in trade orientation over time. In the early 1970s, the vast majority of Irish merchandise exports were destined for the UK with just under 20% going to other European countries. Irish trade diversified in the following decades with the EU making up a gradually increasing share until it stabilized at approximately half of Irish exports, a share maintained fairly consistently throughout the 2000s. The UK share of exports correspondingly declined at a steady pace, reaching a low of 14% of exports in 2018. This reduction in the UK market’s relative importance for Irish exports, however, masks a considerable degree of variation across firms and sectors. Lawless et al. (2017) consider differences in export activity between Irish-owned exporters and foreign-owned multinationals 174

Ireland, Europe, and Brexit

UK share

EU share

1972

66%

18%

1973

61%

24%

1974

64%

21%

1975

61%

28%

1976

56%

31%

1977

47%

29%

1978

47%

30%

1979

47%

31%

1980

43%

32%

1981

40%

31%

1982

39%

32%

1983

37%

32%

1984

34%

34%

1985

33%

35%

1986

34%

38%

1987

34%

39%

1988

35%

39%

1989

34%

41%

1990

34%

41%

1991

32%

42%

1992

31%

43%

1993

28%

39%

1994

28%

41%

1995

30%

56%

1996

30%

54%

1997

30%

52%

1998

26%

53%

1999

26%

51%

2000

27%

49%

2001

29%

46%

2002

28%

47%

2003

21%

50%

2004

21%

52%

2005

20%

54%

2006

21%

53%

2007

22%

52%

2008

21%

51%

Figure 14.2 Shares of Irish exports to the UK and EU (excl. UK), 1972–2018

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Martina Lawless

UK share

EU share

2009

18%

52%

2010

18%

49%

2011

18%

49%

2012

19%

50%

2013

19%

48%

2014

18%

48%

2015

17%

47%

2016

15%

45%

2017

16%

45%

2018

14%

46%

Figure 14.2 (Continued) Source: CSO

located in Ireland and find that Irish-owned firms still rely to a significant degree on the UK market where they sell just over 46% of their exports. In contrast, foreign-owned firms exporting from Ireland are much more broadly internationally orientated, with 26% of their exports going to the US, 22% to Belgium, and only 9% to the UK. This spread reflects the extent to which Ireland’s trade expansion is driven by the presence of foreign multinationals, which account for in the region of 90% of overall Irish export activity. Barret and Morgenroth (2016) point to a number of factors that contribute to Irish domestically owned firms’ greater reliance on the UK market related to the lower costs of entry coming from a “shared language, legal system and culture.” In addition to trade links, population movement between Ireland and the UK is another area of historic importance, but one where the linkages’ relative strengths have also declined over time. Figure 14.3 shows the gradual change in the number of Irish emigrants moving to the UK and the origin of immigrants to Ireland over twenty years. Both cases evidence a gradual decline in the UK’s dominance. In 1989, almost 70% of outward migration from Ireland was destined for the UK; by 2010, this figure fell to around 20%. Similarly, inward migration to Ireland originating in the UK declined substantially over time (although Barrett and Morgenroth 2016, note the importance of remembering that much of this flow in earlier years was due to the return of Irish nationals who had emigrated to the UK rather than being composed of UK nationals). EU membership played a key role in these shifts in the UK’s relative importance, particularly with EU enlargement to incorporate Central and Eastern Europe countries. This enlargement afected both the inward and outward migration numbers given that a substantial proportion of migrants move for a number of years before returning to their country of birth. EU membership is a key ingredient in the Irish economy’s transformation and its increased outward orientation as briefly sketched here. Consequently, it is perhaps unsurprising that public perceptions of the EU in Ireland are amongst the most positive of all member states. The European Commission runs regular opinion polls across all member states (known as the Eurobarometer survey) and Figure 14.4 shows that the share of the population in Ireland surveyed responding that EU membership has been of benefit to the country has averaged 80%, with only a slight reduction even in the years of recession. This is 20% to 30% higher than the average across the EU where positive perceptions average about 50%. 176

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Emigrants

Immigrants

1987

54%

47%

1988

66%

52%

1989

69%

53%

1990

64%

53%

1991

65%

56%

1992

51%

56%

1993

47%

50%

1994

43%

50%

1995

40%

50%

1996

45%

45%

1997

46%

46%

1998

41%

48%

1999

36%

46%

2000

27%

40%

2001

30%

35%

2002

29%

29%

2003

29%

26%

2004

27%

25%

2005

27%

18%

2006

24%

16%

2007

24%

12%

2008

15%

17%

2009

18%

18%

2010

22%

22%

2011

25%

22%

2012

22%

16%

Figure 14.3 Irish emigrants to the UK versus UK immigrants to Ireland, 1987–2018 Source: CSO

The UK referendum result to leave the EU may be foreshadowed in the UK public answering in the same opinion poll; an average between 30% and 40%, almost half that of the Irish perception, felt membership had benefited their country. In understanding Brexit supporters’ motivations, Sampson (2017) summarized that “Support for Brexit came from a coalition of less-educated, older, less economically successful and more socially conservative voters who oppose immigration and feel left behind by modern life” (164). In Ireland, the pooling of sovereignty and economic integration that went along with EU membership were felt to be factors that allowed a small, geographically peripheral country to access opportunities for growth; in the UK, the same features were perceived as major compromises. The expression of dissatisfaction with EU membership in the Brexit referendum has since raised many questions as to 177

Martina Lawless

24/03/1983

EU aggregate

Ireland

UK

53%

56%

33%

13/03/1984

46%

58%

31%

01/10/1984

49%

61%

32%

13/03/1985

49%

63%

31%

07/10/1985

53%

68%

35%

18/03/1986

46%

66%

36%

29/09/1986

51%

72%

35%

16/03/1987

50%

66%

39%

04/10/1987

55%

79%

48%

17/03/1988

52%

73%

39%

16/10/1988

56%

79%

47%

12/03/1989

54%

81%

44%

02/10/1989

59%

72%

47%

18/03/1990

59%

80%

47%

09/10/1990

55%

84%

46%

03/03/1991

59%

83%

47%

14/10/1991

53%

80%

45%

17/03/1992

53%

81%

45%

20/09/1992

49%

77%

31%

12/03/1993

48%

82%

37%

17/10/1993

45%

80%

33%

03/04/1994

46%

81%

41%

27/11/1994

48%

89%

38%

18/10/1995

50%

71%

40%

11/10/1996

42%

86%

34%

25/03/1997

41%

87%

36%

11/10/1997

44%

88%

37%

06/04/1998

46%

85%

39%

11/03/1999

44%

86%

31%

14/10/1999

46%

88%

29%

04/04/2000

47%

86%

25%

13/11/2000

47%

86%

30%

11/04/2001

45%

83%

29%

12/10/2001

52%

89%

36%

28/03/2002

51%

86%

36%

30/09/2002

50%

82%

30%

30/09/2003

46%

82%

30%

Figure 14.4 Satisfaction with the EU across the EU, Ireland, and the UK, 1983–2011

178

Ireland, Europe, and Brexit

19/02/2004

EU aggregate

Ireland

UK

47%

80%

30%

01/10/2004

53%

87%

39%

08/05/2005

55%

87%

40%

10/10/2005

52%

86%

37%

26/03/2006

55%

87%

42%

05/09/2006

54%

87%

39%

09/04/2007

59%

86%

43%

21/09/2007

59%

87%

37%

24/03/2008

54%

82%

37%

05/10/2008

56%

79%

39%

11/06/2009

57%

79%

34%

22/10/2009

57%

82%

36%

04/05/2010

53%

77%

36%

10/11/2010

50%

69%

27%

05/05/2011

52%

78%

35%

Figure 14.4

(Continued)

Source: Eurobarometer

which international relationship model will succeed it. Although this section showed how Irish economic linkages with the UK declined in relative importance over time, the two countries remain closely connected: the UK exit from the EU is likely to have substantial implications for Ireland.

1. Brexit and the Irish border The biggest economic policy risks under analysis in Ireland since the Brexit referendum concern how the UK’s exit might impact the Irish economy; and to what extent the close economic links outlined previously might be disrupted. These economic concerns are also linked to wider political concerns regarding the Northern Ireland peace process and its stability. While there are multiple aspects to Brexit’s impact on Northern Ireland, the eventual trade regime that will replace EU membership will directly affect the extent to which cross-border trade is facilitated, or disrupted, on the island of Ireland: thus the economic, political, and peace risks are closely intertwined. After three years of exit negotiations, the UK officially ceased to be an EU member from January 31, 2020. Despite the detail contained in the Withdrawal Agreement, there is still considerable uncertainty about the path the UK’s exit from the EU will take at the end of the temporary transition phase (up to the end of 2020), and also regarding the nature of the relationship between the UK and EU that will replace full membership. The first step of negotiating withdrawal (sometimes described as the “divorce bill”) concluded in an October 2019 agreement. But this is far from the end of the process; after the exit, there remains a broad range of issues to be negotiated to decide the form of a longer-term relationship. The road to a Withdrawal Agreement was full of drama; an initial version, agreed between the UK and EU in November 2018, suffered defeat on three occasions in the UK House of Commons. The impact on Ireland and the issue of the Northern Ireland border, once it becomes an EU external border, are a 179

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major issue in withdrawal process negotiations. The core issues relate to the incompatibility of the British government’s objectives. Those central objectives are: 1

2

3

To leave the EU customs union and single market in order to be able to negotiate independent trade deals with other countries. Continued membership in the customs union would not allow any change to tariffs to be agreed with other countries as, by definition, the customs union sets a common external tariff for goods entering the EU. Likewise, the single market sets common standards across the EU, which would not allow individual members to enter into trade agreements that did not satisfy EU rules No “hard” border between Northern Ireland and Ireland. The avoidance of border checks on the island of Ireland was made a core objective of the Brexit withdrawal negotiations by both the EU and British sides in order to ensure no disruption to the integration of the economy and society of the island and, in particular, due to a concern that the reemergence of physical checkpoints along the border would undermine the current peaceful situation of the island No separation or checks between Northern Ireland and the rest of Britain. Reassurance was also given to Northern Ireland politicians and businesses that they would not be faced with any restrictions or checks on trade flows between Northern Ireland and Britain

These aims were dubbed the “Brexit trilemma”: it is feasible to achieve any combination of two of these objectives, but only by not being able to deliver the third. In order to leave the customs union and single market without any border checks on the island of Ireland, for example, some checks are necessary on products entering Northern Ireland from Britain; otherwise Northern Ireland could become a backdoor into the EU for products that do not meet EU standards (a concern focused on food standards in the event the UK signs a trade deal with a country whose products the EU restricts). Likewise, for there to be no checks on the Irish border or on goods moving between Northern Ireland and Britain, all goods must be subject to the same standards and have the same tarifs applied so there is no incentive for smuggling or, in order words that the UK be in the customs union and single market. For the UK to leave the single market and customs union without having border checks in Ireland, goods entering Northern Ireland from the UK must be shown to be compliant with EU standards leading to some level of documentation and checking at the Northern Irish entry point. Delivering all three objectives simultaneously is efectively impossible. To solve this impasse, the Withdrawal Agreement, finally reached at the European Council Summit in October 2019, provided a special status for Northern Ireland. Until this compromise, the fundamental incompatibility of achieving all three UK government aims—leaving the EU’s customs union and single market, avoiding a hard border on the island of Ireland, and avoiding checks between Northern Ireland and Great Britain—had seemed all but insoluble, particularly given the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) critical role in maintaining the Conservative party’s majority in the House of Commons. The 2019 December election provided the Conservative party and its new leader, Boris Johnson, a considerable majority and removed their reliance on Northern Irish MP, thus giving greater flexibility in reaching a compromise settlement between the EU and UK. The original 2017 proposed backstop had planned to treat Northern Ireland as entirely within the EU Customs Union and Single Market unless alternative technological arrangements or a comprehensive trade deal made checks on goods crossing the border unnecessary. The later variant of Theresa May’s proposed backstop was to keep all of the UK in EU Customs Union and Single Market if no trade agreement was reached to avoid checks on trade 180

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between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. While the original backstop treated Northern Ireland as entirely within the EU Customs Union and Single Market, the final withdrawal deal is a hybrid approach to customs membership. This deal allows Northern Ireland’s firms to import goods from Great Britain without any tariffs, provided it can demonstrate that these goods will not pass into the EU. While in theory this provision allows firms full access to both customs regimes and holds the potential promise of being the “best of both worlds” for Northern Irish firms, the operational details and administrative cost remain unclear. This factor could have implications both for firms within Northern Ireland and also for firms in Ireland that trade directly with Northern Ireland or those who move goods to Great Britain via Northern Ireland.

2. Estimating the impact of Brexit on the Irish economy At the conclusion of three years of exit negotiations, the UK exited the EU on January 31, 2020. Despite the length and complexity of the withdrawal negotiations, this official exit date is far from the end of the process. Immediately, a new phase of negotiations commenced to decide the longer-term relationship between the UK and the EU. The second stage of negotiations has a wide-ranging agenda from tariffs and product standards to financial services market access to data protection to fishing rights. Although the Withdrawal Agreement took considerably longer to negotiate than initially planned, no change was made to the transition period’s end date. December 31, 2020 is an exceptionally tight timescale in which to negotiate a trade deal of any complexity. Projections about the impact on Ireland have quite wide ranges depending on the assumptions made about the exit negotiations and subsequent agreements on trade and migration. Access to the EU market for non-members can take a number of forms ranging from free trade deals like EFTA, to an individually negotiated deal like the one currently being finalized between the EU and Canada, to the most complete form of exit resulting in the application of the tariff schedule that the EU applies to non-members without a specific trade agreement under WTO rules. On average, the EU’s tariff schedule with the WTO for third countries may not appear overly onerous, but the variation is considerable. As a result, a WTO arrangement would impact trade quite differently across the current EU member states and across different sectors within each country. Lawless and Morgenroth (2019) and InterTradeIreland (2017) examined the over 5,000 individual products listed with the WTO and show the extent of this variation. Figure 14.5 shows that a significant share of trade would face either no tariff or a rate set very close to zero: these include paper products, pharmaceuticals, iron, and steel. Goods in this tariff category account for a considerable proportion of trade between Ireland and Britain, around 45% of trade in each direction. Considerably less cross-border trade is accounted for by this class of tariff-free products however—30% of trade from Ireland to Northern Ireland would be unaffected by tariffs and just 26% of trade from Northern Ireland to Ireland. At the other end of the scale, food and textiles sectors face rates going from 10.2% on footwear to as high as 73.4% on meat products. Meat and dairy are sectors with particularly high tariff rates under the current EU-WTO schedule and are important sectors in cross-border flows. The extent, therefore, to which cross-border trade falls into the highest tariff bands is driven by these sectors and distinguishes it considerably from trade between Ireland and Britain. In this hard Brexit scenario, around 39% of trade from Northern Ireland could face tariffs above 10%; 19% of which would be impacted by tariffs of over 25%. From Ireland to Northern Ireland, a similar 36% of trade would fall into the over 10% tariff range, although the share impacted by the very highest tariff rates is slightly lower at 13%. The dairy 181

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Figure 14.5 Trade between Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Great Britain and the impact of tariffs Source: InterTradeIreland 2017

sector’s contribution to Northern Ireland exports to Ireland accounts for most of this difference in the most exposed group. The type of products traded between the UK and the EU could therefore be subject to very diferent tarif rates, and it is this diference that means the trade impact will vary considerably across the remaining EU member states. Given the current structure of trade between the UK and the EU, the application of WTO tarif rates on exports from the EU to the UK would result in an average tarif of 5.7%. The tarif on Irish exports, however, would be almost double this at 11.7%. This increase is because tarifs are consistently higher on agricultural and food products which account for a much higher share of Irish trade with the UK compared to other EU countries. Figure 14.6 summarizes the results of matching these tarifs to current EU-UK trade by Lawless and Morgenroth (2019) and shows a number of countries would see minimal impacts in total trade—Estonia, Finland, Latvia and Slovenia all have reductions of less than half of 1%. Ireland is the most severely afected with a fall in total exports of 4% (dependent on assumptions about the elasticity of demand response to the tarif-induced price increase). Ireland is followed by Belgium and Slovakia who also see reductions in excess of 3%. The efect on total EU exports is a reduction of 2.13%. The impact on UK exports is much larger with an estimated overall reduction in its exports of 9.8% as it loses access to 27 trade partners. Within Ireland, concern about the distribution of the efects of Brexit is as important as the overall size of the impact. Chen et al. (2018) examined relative diferences in the potential regional impacts of Brexit and found that primary activities—agriculture, forestry, and fishing—are most at risk in the Border, Midland, and Western regions of Ireland. Sectors such as agriculture and food could be most severely afected, partly because the tarif rates on these sectors are amongst the highest on the WTO schedule but also because these sectors additionally tend to be more reliant on the UK as a main export destination. As noted earlier, the exposure of Irish-owned business is much greater than the multinational sector which is less dependent on the UK as a destination market. Such exposure has knock-on implications for the regional spread of Brexit’s impact: 182

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% of total trade

Figure 14.6

UK

9.83%

Ireland

4.17%

Slovakia

3.27%

Belgium

3.13%

Spain

2.87%

Germany

2.54%

Denmark

2.53%

Portugal

2.22%

EU Total

2.13%

Poland

2.08%

Netherlands

1.98%

Romania

1.89%

Czech Rep.

1.67%

Italy

1.65%

Malta

1.59%

France

1.56%

Greece

1.20%

Cyprus

1.14%

Hungary

1.11%

Lithuania

1.05%

Sweden

1.00%

Bulgaria

0.78%

Austria

0.62%

Luxembourg

0.62%

Latvia

0.48%

Slovenia

0.47%

Finland

0.27%

Croatia

0.26%

Estonia

0.19%

Impact of the ending of EU/UK trade on the EU’s nations

Source: Lawless and Morgenroth 2019

Ireland’s more rural areas are most likely to be impacted by reductions in domestic SME exports in the food sector, whereas urban areas, with more substantial multinational presences, will be somewhat more insulated. In addition to the impact on exports, there are important implications for imports. The share of merchandise imports to Ireland originating in the UK is greater than the share of Irish merchandise exports destined for the UK. This is due to Ireland’s heavy reliance on energy 183

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imports from the UK (mainly natural gas and fuels) and retail products. UK retailers have a very significant presence in the Irish market; as the Irish market is relatively small, many products in the Irish retail market are supplied through UK-based wholesalers. Trade barriers would result in higher prices and would thus have an inflationary impact. Customs delays are a central concern for Irish business as not only is the UK a large trading partner, but it also plays a crucial role in the transportation of Irish goods to other markets. Up to half of Irish exports destined for world markets are transported by trucks through the UK “land-bridge” onto Europe, thus administrative costs or clearance delays could impact the same shipment multiple times as it goes from Dublin to Holyhead to Dover, for example. While in the longer-term, technology can keep this type of cost to a minimum, it is hard to see how some level of increase can be avoided, and possibly of greater concern is how quickly such technological solutions can be implemented. The extent to which Northern Ireland’s special status will necessitate new documentation and checks on trade between Northern Ireland and Britain (and for Irish firms trading with Northern Ireland or transiting Northern Ireland to Britain) is also highly uncertain at this stage. Offsetting some of this negative impact, it is possible that Ireland could build on its favorable reputation as a location for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the wake of Brexit. The UK is likely to be less attractive to FDI because of the uncertainty of the Brexit process and reduced access to the EU Single Market once exit is complete. Financial sector activities have been raised as a major issue for post-Brexit negations with the EU as current “passporting” arrangements give financial firms in any member state the right to do business across all of the EU. The loss of, or restrictions on these rights could result in some firms deciding to remove operations from the UK. Some of this FDI may locate in Ireland if EU market access is an important consideration. This upside should not, however, be overstated. The size of the UK’s own domestic market still makes it an attractive location for some FDI projects and, for those that do relocate to a different European destination, Ireland will have to compete with other potential locations. Continuing the government strategy of low corporate tax rates and the cultivation of a business-friendly environment are key to maximizing this potential positive dimension of Brexit as is addressing infrastructural requirements that constrain firms interested in locating or expanding in Ireland. Putting together these different channels of economic exposure, Bergin et al. (2017) estimated that Ireland’s total output could be reduced by 2.3% relative to a no-Brexit scenario under the more benign scenario of the UK remaining in an EEA-type arrangement. But a WTO scenario would result in a relative reduction of output by 3.8%. Other estimates, such as the Copenhagen Economics (2016) suggest possible losses in GDP ranging from 2.8 % under an EEA agreement to 7% under a “No-Deal” simulation. Both the size of the impact and how long it lasts depend critically on assumptions as to how orderly the adjustment process to a new trade relationship is, in addition to the eventual level of trade integration. The “No-Deal” scenarios remain relevant should the second phase of negotiations fail to conclude by the end of the transition period.

3. Brexit and the Northern Ireland economy The main source of apprehension regarding Brexit’s impact on Northern Ireland centers on the peace process: not only that border checks would represent a step backwards but would also undermine the existing progress as well as the extent of integration and cooperation established since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. In addition, this region is particularly exposed to economic risks and disruption of trade flows. Despite Northern Ireland accounting for less than 3% of the UK population, some 10% of Irish trade with the UK goes to Northern Ireland, a simple 184

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indicator of the degree of cross-border economic integration. In the other direction, Ireland is the primary destination for most Northern Ireland exports, accounting for 34% of sales outside of the UK according to the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA 2018). Other EU countries account for a further 23% of exports. Along with this substantial share of trade destined for the EU, InterTradeIreland (2018) research highlights that a very significant share of cross-border trade is accounted for by supply chain linkages where the majority of cross-border trade occurs in intermediate inputs. Unlike the composition of overall UK trade, agricultural products and food make up substantial shares of Northern Ireland exports, particularly those destined for Ireland. As discussed previously, the composition of trade is an important factor in determining the potential impact of trade disruptions. The high share of agriculture and food, therefore, results in a higher exposure of crossborder trade to potential post-Brexit tariffs relative to overall trade between Ireland and the UK. This is due to the EU tariff schedule structure where higher rates apply to trade in agriculture and food than most other sectors. In their examination of cross-border trade using firm-level customs data, NISRA find that standard international classifications of intermediate trade show that 38% of Northern Ireland trade to Ireland is in intermediates, as is 42% of Irish trade to Northern Ireland. These standard classifications, however, tend to treat all food products as being for final consumption, whereas cross-border food product processing is suspected to be substantial. To investigate if this was indeed the case, they examined the product-by-product data of what was traded across the border in both directions by individual companies and thereby broadened the definition of intermediate trade products to include meat and fish, foodstuffs, dairy, and beverages moving across the border for processing. By broadening the definition to account for supply chain integration in the four agri-food subsectors, they found that it increased the size of the contribution of intermediate trade quite substantially. The combined contribution of these supply chain food movements makes up a further 23% of trade from Northern Ireland to Ireland and 31% of trade from Ireland to Northern Ireland. Using this broader definition, intermediates comprise 61% of trade coming from Northern Ireland and 73% of trade from Ireland: reflecting a very high degree of interdependence and multiple movements across the border as part of the production process. Further work by NISRA (2018) demonstrates how Brexit would potentially impact diferent types of firms. They find that a pattern of very high frequency and relatively low value deliveries dominate these cross-border trade and trafc flows. Figure 14.7 shows 33% of all cross-border deliveries are made by firms with fewer than 10 employees; a further 41% of deliveries are by firms with between 10 and 49 employees. This combined group of firms, therefore, represent almost 74% of cross-border movements. These same firms, however, sell just around 20% of the value of cross-border goods trade with average value of the individual deliveries made by the smallest firms being around £2,100. Larger firms, making much larger deliveries with average consignment values of £10,000, account for the majority of trade value despite making just over 25% of the trips.

Conclusions This chapter outlines Irish economic links and how they have gradually re-orientated away from the UK towards the EU since the 1970s as the country became one of the countries most open to international trade and foreign investment in the world. That said, the UK remains a significant economic partner, most markedly for domestically owned small and medium enterprises in Ireland, and also remains a major source and destination of migration. The continuing 185

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Number of deliveries by firm size Firm size group

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2,100

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41%

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16%

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Source: NISRA Cross-border Supply Chain Survey, 2018 Figure 14.7 Value of cross border deliveries and size of company

UK links raise significant concerns as to how Brexit will impact Ireland and, in particular, the cross-border connections. Since joining the EU in the early 1970s, Ireland grew strongly and transitioned from one of the poorer member states in the early years of its membership to one of the highest income countries by 2018. EU membership, together with trade openness, were foundations of an economic model built substantially on the attraction of large US multinationals to establish their EU operations in Ireland for access into the Single Market. In line with this, the balance of Irish trade gradually shifted away from the traditional UK market. Irish satisfaction with EU membership is amongst the highest compared to all other member states partly as a result of this economic success. In addition to political concerns regarding the stability of the peace process, the UK remains a sufficiently significant trade partner for Brexit to have potentially large negative impacts on the Irish economy. The extent of that impact depends of course on the degree of free trade and harmonization agreed to in the negotiations regarding the future relationship’s nature and closeness. The current range of estimates is, therefore, quite wide, although all agree that Ireland, relative to any other EU member state, is the most exposed to a negative economic impact due to the nature and extent of current linkages. Within the UK, Northern Ireland is likely the region most at risk of a negative impact from Brexit given that Ireland is not only the primary destination for most of its exports but also because supply chain integration accounts for a high proportion of cross-border trade.

Works cited Barrett, A. and E. Morgenroth. “Ireland and Brexit.” What to Do with the UK: EU Perspectives on Brexit. Edited by C. Wyplosz, Centre for Economic Policy Research, 2016, pp. 69–77. Barrett, A. et al. Scoping the Possible Economic Implications of Brexit on Ireland. Research Series No. 48. Dublin, Economic and Social Research Institute, 2015. Barry, F. “Dangers for Ireland of an EMU without the UK: Some Calibration Results.” The Economic and Social Review, Vol. 28, No. 2, 1997, pp. 333–349. Bergin, A. et al. “Modelling the Medium to Long Term Potential Macroeconomic Impact of Brexit on Ireland.” The Economic and Social Review, Vol. 48, No. 3, 2017, pp. 305–316. Chen, W. et al. “The Continental Divide? Economic Exposure to Brexit in Regions and countries on Both Sides of the Channel.” Papers in Regional Science, No. 97, 2018, pp. 25–54. Copenhagen Economics. Ireland & the Impacts of Brexit, Strategic Implications for Ireland Arising from Changing EU-UK Trading Relations. Copenhagen Economics, 2016. FitzGerald, J. “National Accounts for a Global Economy: The Case of Ireland.” Trinity Economic Papers No. 0418, 2018.

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InterTradeIreland. Potential Impact of WTO Tariffs on Cross-Border Trade. InterTradeIreland, 2017. InterTradeIreland. Export Participation and Performance of Firms on the Island of Ireland. InterTradeIreland, 2018. Lawless, M. and E. Morgenroth. “The Product and Sector Level Impact of a Hard Brexit across the EU.” Contemporary Social Science, 2019, pp. 1–19. Lawless, M., I. Siedschlag, and Z. Studnicka. Expanding and Diversifying the Manufactured Exports of IrishOwned Enterprises, ESRI, Enterprise Ireland and Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation, 2017. NISRA. Cross-Border Supply Chain Report, 2015–2016. Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency, 2018. Sampson, T. “Brexit: The Economics of International Disintegration.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 31, No. 4, 2017, pp. 163–184.

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15 Digital Ireland Leprechaun economics, Silicon Docks, and crisis Kylie Jarrett

In July 2016, the Irish Central Statistics Office announced that the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) had grown by 26.3% in the previous year. This startling, even absurd, figure was derided by Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman as “leprechaun economics” (Burke-Kennedy 2017a), dismissing it as a farcical representation of reality. Krugman and other economists noted that this growth was driven by one-off events associated with aircraft-leasing industries, but also by the relocation of €300bn of multinational capital assets to Ireland, predominantly in the form of digital intellectual property (IP). While this latter activity registers in GDP, the profits it accrues are mostly exported from the country, offering little gain for the State. Like the leprechaun’s pot of gold, the benefits of Ireland’s economic boom are elusive, if not illusory. Some of the more visible sectors associated with these economics are digital media content production and software development. Led by high-profile, market-leading firms like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Uber, high-tech companies are an unavoidable presence in Ireland, especially in Dublin. How, though, did a country whose economy was once dominated by primary industry exports to the UK become a node in the global flows of digital capital and a hub for such high-tech industries? What have been the social and economic consequences of this rapid transformation? This chapter explores these questions, examining key policy decisions that have shaped the digital media sector in Ireland, ranging from macroeconomic decisions about corporation tax rates to cultural policies, including those reshaping Dublin city. In doing so, it also considers the wider economic and social impacts of digital Ireland’s trickster economics and their origin and role in socioeconomic crises.

From cows to code In the first 30 years of the State, the economy of the Republic of Ireland was notoriously weak. As Cormac Ó Gráda (1) succinctly puts it, “input and incomes grew so little during those decades that for most people in Ireland the economic benefits of political independence must have remained far from obvious.” Based on a primarily agricultural base—most dominantly live cattle exports—and protectionist policies that introduced high tariffs in an effort to build a domestic manufacturing base, the Irish economy stagnated through the early twentieth century. 188

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The country’s take of the post-WWII economic boom was also limited. Unemployment was high, even while offset by the scourge of Irish history—emigration. There are many assumptions about the causes of this economic crisis—continued protectionism, over-reliance on trade with the UK, weak industrialization, dysfunctional labor markets, misguided State fiscal policies—but the effect was that until the 1980s, Ireland remained near the bottom of the table when it came to economic growth in Europe. Beginning in the 1960s, the Irish government began to address this economic crisis by actively pursuing a policy that reduced protections and further opened the economy to global markets, with an additional and specific policy to target inward foreign capital investment. This approach was a three-legged “economic stool” (Shiel 71) involving (1) establishing tax concessions and capital grants to develop the export sector; (2) the institution of the semi-state Industrial Development Authority (IDA) charged with marketing the country for industrial investment; and (3) trade liberalization which manifested in the joining of the European Economic Community (now the European Union (EU)) and its common market in 1973, diversifying trade, and reducing reliance on the UK as a trading partner. The effects of these policy shifts placed Ireland in an excellent position not only to take advantage of the 1990s global economic boom, but also to attract high-technology industries and, in particular, information and communication technology companies. European funding had facilitated development of key infrastructure such as transport but also, and importantly, telecommunications, while European funds and Irish state intervention had also fostered education in technical skills and management, helping to position Ireland for the emerging digital economy. This congruence of policy and targeted interventions crafted a welcoming terrain for many multinationals in the 1990s, but especially for information-intensive companies that could travel the globe seeking favorable taxation arrangements. The relative mobility and lightness of informational and particularly digital products also meant that Ireland did not pay the penalties that have historically accrued to its distance from the continent and its island status. The availability of a skilled, English-speaking workforce and access to the European common market, along with the absence of a cultural overhang (Shiel 74) from previous models of industrialization, further enhanced Ireland’s appeal for high technology investment. Of vital importance in developing the Irish economy, though, was the low corporation tax rate. Introduced in 1980 for manufacturing, the 10% rate was extended in 1987 to companies within the Special Economic Zone established for the finance sector in the Dublin Docklands, later known as the Irish Financial Services Centre (IFSC). The special rate was intended to feed growth by attracting foreign direct investment (FDI). The rate was raised to 12.5% in 2003 but had by this stage been extended to trading income in all sectors, phased in across the country since 1996. The 12.5% corporation tax rate persists at the time of writing and remains a core, but contentious, element of the Irish economic system. One of the first areas targeted by these policies was high-tech manufacturing, including pharmaceuticals but, importantly for the discussion here, also computer chip and microprocessor manufacturing. Emblematic was the building of the Intel factory in Leixlip, Kildare in 1989 which involved a significant degree of capital investment by the State as well as reconstitution of educational programs to generate a workforce suitable for this industry. Prior to the development of the Intel factory, the largest multinational in Ireland had been garment manufacturer Fruit of the Loom. Since then, the range of information-intensive and digitally mediated industries that have been targeted by State policy include call centers, business services, the finance sector (embodied in Dublin’s IFSC), software development, and, more latterly, digital content and social media. These industries are now core within the Irish economy. 189

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The effect of these policy shifts on Ireland’s economic growth was remarkable.1 During the period in which they took effect—dubbed the Celtic Tiger—the Irish economy expanded and changed focus. Between 1993 and 2002, GDP growth of 6.7% per annum was recorded with a decline to 2.5% between 2002 and 2007. Overall productivity increased with output per capita calculated as ninth in the world in 1999. The value of Irish exports expanded by 322% in the 1990s. This expansion was arguably attributable to growth in inward FDI, with foreign-owned multinational companies in the industrial sector responsible for 95% of export growth by the end of that decade. Notably though, between 1998 and 2008, the locus of this FDI-dominated growth shifted to the services sector and, in particular, financial and computer services. Employment also rose during the Celtic Tiger with unemployment almost eliminated between 1993 and 2000, before settling at approximately 5%. This growth was also predominantly in the services sector which accounted for 42% of the total labor force growth between 1989 and 1998. This economic growth and the related increase in living standards produced the country’s long-delayed convergence with the EU-15 countries, the US, and the Asian Tiger economies. Importantly though, this rapid economic transformation was based in digitization, “primarily driven by high-tech multinationals, the vanguard of a major worldwide revolution in information technology” (Donovan and Murphy 17). The 2004 closure of the Fruit of the Loom factories, the symbol of older Irish industry and investment models, poignantly marks the ascendancy of these new kinds of industries. Today, digital technologies are deeply embedded in the economic accounting of the Irish State and in the story of Ireland. The shift in emphasis from agriculture to services based in digitization such as high finance, software, and information-intensive industries throughout the latter part of the twentieth century fundamentally transformed the concept of the Irish economy and the Irish State itself. A nation that began its economic life continuing its status as Britain’s farm is now profoundly shaped by the abstractions of zeros and ones, crisscrossed by lines of code, and immersed deeply in the flows of global digital information. The rapid growth in digital media content industries, and their impacts on the social and cultural landscape, exemplify the qualities of this digital Ireland.

Content, capital, and creativity In 2002, Forfás, the Irish national board responsible for advising the government on science, technology, and innovation policy, released a report on the digital content industry’s potential. Hitherto, the key focus of policy had been Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) more generally, targeting companies building hardware and infrastructure and developing software. This report articulated a new agenda, to cultivate the digital media sector, recognizing the growing scope of the consumer market for digital content in entertainment, education, healthcare, publishing, and financial services. Using a very broad definition of “digital content,” five key sectors were identified: games, digital libraries, e-learning, business and consumer wireless services, and non-media applications for scientific or industrial use. These emerging sectors were differentiated from the established software sector, although this distinction was opaque. The Forfás policy recommended a proactive targeting of these arguably creative digital media content sectors which was to include government sponsorship of strategic projects; providing greater access to finance, specifically by the IDA targeting venture funds for investment in Ireland or by offering state start-up and venture funding; an investment in education in these sectors, especially in technical skills, copyright, and intellectual property processes; an expansion of infrastructure; and by sustaining the commitment to a pro-business environment. 190

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At the time of this 2002 report, the Irish digital content sector was insignificant—employing only 4,500 people—clustered in Dublin, and comprised of approximately 280 companies, of which 238 were indigenous. Most of these were small in scale and had not yet developed large-scale export markets. What was notable about the attempt to expand this sector was the government’s continued focus on supporting technological innovation, advocacy of technical, legal, and business education, and the provision of financial supports; all characteristics of the general FDI-driven economic policy. There was little recognition of the sector’s specificity. In particular, questions about the cultural content of its products, the particular needs of creative labor, and the specific dynamics of the digital content industry’s quite divergent subsectors were not meaningfully considered. The intersection of this policy framework with the macroeconomic agenda of attracting FDI had perhaps unexpected impacts on this arm of digital Ireland. It allowed growth but at the same time limited the capacity of indigenous firms to scale up and become viable in the global marketplace. The digital games industry is an illustrative example. A study of the sector between 2000 and 2009 by Aphra Kerr and Anthony Cawley identified 400% growth between 2002 and 2009, but primarily in outsourced services rather than local, IP-generating activity. They noted a concentration in customer support services for the European market and some software development for North American game companies, with only a small amount of content development, programming, and design. Independent, local game production companies were typically unable to secure the required capital to take on the costs to develop the lucrative, but high-risk, console and PC games, so remained focused on less lucrative mobile and casual games. Consequently, local companies remained small—the majority employing less than 15 people—and precarious, with a high attrition rate. Companies that were able to achieve success in games software development were typically bought out by large multinationals for their IP, resulting in overall limited growth in indigenous content production. This trend also ensured the industry remained concentrated in the hands of a small number of large multinational firms, perpetuating the problems of indigenous competitiveness. More recently, the digital media content sector in Ireland has grown, albeit along the problematic lines identified in the games industry by Kerr and Cawley. Growth in employment and GDP are mostly due to the presence of significant, global leading multinational social media companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, who have been enticed by tax incentives and the positive investment environment to locate their European or global headquarters in Dublin. There are positive spillover effects from the presence of so many digital media companies, and the government continues to develop policy to expand the indigenous sector. Among other supports for research and development in digital technologies, the government provides funding and in-kind support for high-technology start-ups. A €500 million fund to support small-tomedium enterprises to develop “disruptive technologies” was launched in 2018, supporting 27 projects across those fields defined as digital content industries in the 2002 policy. Enterprise Ireland and the IDA work directly to support high potential companies of all kinds prior to seeking seed funding, and in Dublin and key regional hubs there is also a network of commercial and state-run incubators that provide mentoring, office space, and early investment opportunities. In 2017, the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht also produced an Audiovisual Action Plan outlining an investment of €200 million in the sector over 10 years as part of a broader culture and heritage strategy. This strategy includes the animation industry, included as an extension of the film and television sectors, and the games industry. While focused on fields of cultural production, and thus being one of the first to link games creation to questions of culture, the policy continues to emphasize economic supports, with key recommendations for that sector centered on extending financial incentives such as the Section 481 tax relief for 191

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investment in film to the games industry, providing a prototyping fund, as well as targeting a major game studio for relocation to Ireland. Any issues of diversifying ownership and, thus, content are not part of this policy framework. Despite these supports, indigenous digital companies, particularly those involved in digital content creation, still struggle to achieve the scale needed to grow in the global marketplace. They continue to fold while in the start-up phase or are swallowed up by larger companies. Between 2000 and 2015, 215 Irish technology companies were acquired or merged, raising €7.9 million for founders and early investors. However, the relatively small amounts of money involved and the concentration of those funds in a small number of players does not facilitate ongoing local investment and mentoring. Financing remains relatively difficult to come by and concentrated, with the availability of both venture capital and seed funding a continuing concern for companies in the sector. In the absence of adequate domestic development and funding opportunities, being acquired by a larger company is often the only, but typically desired, avenue for indigenous digital media content start-ups and their primary investors. Multinationals thus face few rivals from the local industry. More abstractly, the difficult question of how to define businesses that straddle culture and technology—are they primarily about technology? are they producing cultural content? are they software producers? are they media industries?—mean that supports and policies are often inadequate or inappropriate for the task of growing the sector.

Digital hubs and Silicon Docks Part of the government’s strategy for developing the digital media content creation sector was the implementation of a high technology development zone in Dublin’s city center. While the rest of the country struggled to access adequate broadband infrastructure, the Irish government focused its energies on developing the capital as a center for digital media industries. A key initiative was the Digital Hub project which was expected to draw on the positive effects of clustering similar companies in close proximity by co-locating digital enterprises and education providers. Launched in 2000, but only implemented with the establishment of the Digital Hub Development Authority (DHDA) in 2003, the Digital Hub precinct is located across 9 acres in Dublin’s Liberties, a traditionally working-class area in the inner southwest of Dublin city, with historic links to now defunct textile manufacturing industries, whiskey distilling, and ongoing connections with Guinness’ St. James Gate brewery but which had suffered social and economic decline through processes of de-industrialization and decentralization. The DHDA had three goals: establish a base for digital media enterprises in cooperation with Enterprise Ireland, the IDA, and third-level education institutions; to provide pathways into employment and entrepreneurship; and, with Dublin City Council, to provide adequate infrastructure in the local environment ranging from telecommunications to development of office facilities. The initial plan was for public–private partnerships to develop a mix of facilities with approximately half reserved for digital media companies, a quarter to be residential, and the remainder for education and retail purposes. The anchor tenant, and integral to the project, was Media Labs Europe (MLE), the European base for Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This base was supported by €36 million of government aid, including an annual grant of €1.3 million, supplemented by the private sector, with companies paying an annual fee of €160,000 for access to the lab’s research. The expectation was that research and development would spin off from MLE and fruitful synergies could be created with local companies so that it would serve as a small business incubator. It was also expected that support services and employment would grow alongside these developments, creating positive effects for all residents in the Liberties. 192

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These effects were not to materialize immediately. MLE closed in 2005 after failing to secure enough corporate and state partners to offset its €8 million annual running costs. With the loss of its star tenant, the project was under threat of collapse. By 2007, €70 million of public funding had been invested in the Digital Hub and only two acres of the site had been developed, with further development stalled. At the time, the Digital Hub was defined by geographer Darren Bayliss (1261) as an example of “digital hubris,” focused more on property development than the cultivation of digital talent. Nevertheless, the Hub did slowly grow, and in 2007 was home to over 90 companies, employing 700 people and with a renewed development plan suggesting greater emphasis on including community in the development. Part of the Digital Hub’s woes were rooted in its failure to land Google, the big fish of digital media companies, when the company was actively seeking a European base in the early 2000s. After aggressive targeting by the IDA, a range of delegates from Google visited Ireland in 2002 and 2003, and were shown existing, but empty, data centers in the Dublin suburbs and the Digital Hub. The company’s property advisors, though, flagged a nearly completed development near Barrow Street in the Grand Canal Dock area as an alternative location. The Barrow Street complex was part of the regeneration project lead by the Dublin Docklands Development Agency (DDDA). Established in 1997, the Agency was charged with facilitating and fasttracking development in the 526 hectares of docks in the city’s east which, like the Liberties, was an older industrial, working-class area that had suffered dereliction from de-industrialization. The first plan for the area described a mixed-use development covering 38.2 hectares with 60% allocated for residences, 20% of which was earmarked for social and affordable housing. Physical regeneration of the area, including decontamination, took place between 2002 and 2006 funded by the DDDA, as was the building of infrastructure such as transport links and sewers. Google’s decision to move into Grand Canal Dock, and the phenomenal growth of the company since that time, was considered a game changer. It certainly flagged Dublin’s viability and desirability to other technology multinationals while simultaneously shifting the epicenter away from the Liberties to the Docklands. A raft of digital media content companies, including key players Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, have since taken up residence in the Docklands, alongside a range of financial and legal services companies spilling over from the adjacent IFSC. This concentration of technology companies has earned the area the nickname the Silicon Docks. In 2012, the dissolution of DDDA was announced (completed in 2016) after a report finding irregularities in the handling of major investments, but there remains a dedicated Dublin Docklands office in Dublin City Council and the area continues to grow. In 2013, 66 hectares of the docklands were designated a Strategic Development Zone, facilitating fast-tracking of development approval and targeted investment in the area because of its “potential to kick start Dublin’s ailing economy and revive the frozen real estate market” (Byrne 900). Dublin Docklands reported in 2019 that the docks had attracted over €3.35 billion in public and private investment since the launch of the DDDA in 1997, built 11,000 homes of which 20% are social and affordable, grown the population of the area from 17,500 to 22,000, and created 40,000 new jobs. The ongoing expansion of the area was further signaled in January 2020 by the government committing €150 million to a €1.5 billion technology campus being built by Trinity College Dublin on Grand Canal Quay. What is notable is that both the Digital Hub and the Silicon Docks are strategic, top-down policy initiatives linked to the wider economic agenda of growth through FDI. At the same time, they have had significant effects at the local level as the nation’s capital has been reshaped by digital industries physically, culturally, and demographically. Dublin’s inner city has become younger with the 2011 census registering 48% of the population as aged between 25 and 44 and showing a substantial increase in those occupying professional and managerial class categories. 193

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At the same time, the availability of social housing has declined with housing stock in the new commercial developments centered on one or two-bedroom apartments rather than family homes. Both the Digital Hub and the Silicon Docks schemes have enabled some regeneration of Dublin city’s troubled areas. However, the processes of gentrification with which they are associated, and the patchy commitment to their associated social rejuvenation policies, have meant this influx of corporate money and jobs have not necessarily improved conditions for all citizens. Digital money does not necessarily trickle down, and for the long-term residents of these originally working-class areas, few advantages have been accrued in this digital makeover. Resident groups, in the Docklands and the Liberties, complain of the physical and cultural displacement caused by gentrification processes and the disruption from constant construction, and they continue to fight for the long-promised, but mostly undelivered, social housing and community services.

Digital discontents Arguably, the qualities of the Irish economy that lured companies to Dublin’s docks also fueled the economic crisis that engulfed the country in 2008. The impact of the 2008 global financial crash was exacerbated in Ireland by specific domestic policy failures, causing Ireland’s economy to falter spectacularly. The ensuing recession and the imposition of austerity measures reversed many gains of the Celtic Tiger:2 Irish GDP figures went in reverse, to a per annum decrease of 3.7% until 2011, including an unprecedented 7% in 2009; average annual earnings had dropped 14.9% to €35,905 between 2009 and 2011; unemployment reached 15.9% in January 2012; house prices in Dublin had lost 56% of their peak 2006 value by the final quarter of 2012, leaving just over 30% of properties (or 320,000 mortgages) in negative equity. In May 2013, it was estimated a third of Irish citizens were living in households that had a remainder of only €100 a month after covering the costs of accommodation and necessary bills. Alongside underregulated banks, potential corporate malfeasance, and an overheated and uncontrolled housing market of which the Silicon Docks were exemplary, a cause of this crisis was the reliance upon flows of free-floating multinational “leprechaun” capital of the kind derided by Krugman. These are the flows of money that ebb in and out of the jurisdiction without ever creating jobs, circulating in the domestic marketplace, or increasing the financial security of individual citizens. The effects of these flows in the Irish economy can be seen in the figures for gross national product (GNP), which removes the outflows generated by multinationals. Rather than the 6.7% growth between 1970 and 2011 indicated by GDP, GNP shows only a 2.3% per capita growth. Based on this calculation, Ireland’s living standards arguably failed to be near those of the EU-15 during this period. Adding in the appreciable and dramatic plunge in living standards and economic growth that happened during the crash years, the social impacts of Ireland’s economic revolution seem a lot less positive. Digital Ireland contributed to this 2008 economic crisis in two significant ways. First, digital technologies are what enable the flows of virtual capital between borders that is the Irish economy’s backbone. This flow is engendered in the many shell companies located in the IFSC which is also one of the leading hedge fund services centers in Europe and home to many of the multinationals whose underregulated activity arguably led to the global economic crisis. The second contribution digital Ireland made to the crash is linked to the centrality of foreign-owned multinationals in the digital economy and their exploitation of the light tax regimes which further ensures that capital never appreciates within Ireland to offset economic crises. There are two cases that exemplify these discontents of digital Ireland: the Double Irish tax arrangements (and its variants) and the case of Apple’s preferential tax treatment. 194

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The Double Irish is a tax minimization scheme adopted by some US multinationals trading in intangible goods such as software. The scheme involves the sale, typically at cost, of a piece of IP to a subsidiary company registered in Ireland but controlled in a tax haven such as Bermuda and which, therefore, under Irish law, is considered tax-resident in Bermuda. The IP is then revalued to reflect a market price. It is then licensed at this higher value to a second Irish-based subsidiary of the multinational. This second company then licenses the IP at the same rate in other markets, using those fees to pay back the first Irish company. Important in this chain of transactions is the transfer between two nominally Irish companies which means that the valuegenerating exchange is identified as foreign under US tax regulations and so is not taxable in that jurisdiction. A study of tax havens by Thomas Tørsløv, Ludvig Vier, and Gabriel Zucman estimated that of all the countries enabling such profit-shifting, Ireland attracted the most activity, hosting more than US $100 billion of multinational tax avoidance transactions in 2015 alone. In 2014, the EU cracked down on such tax processes, forcing Ireland to close the loophole of corporate tax residency for companies newly registering in the jurisdiction. For already existing beneficiaries though, the deadline to stop its use was extended to 2020. This means that major multinationals already incorporated in the State were still able to offset their tax liabilities. For example, in 2015, revenue for Silicon Docks anchor tenant Google Ireland was €22.6 billion but it paid only €47.8 million in tax, while in 2016, another Docks’ resident, Facebook, paid only €30 million in tax on revenue of €12.6 billion. Despite increased compliance with global tax avoidance reduction initiatives, there continue to be concerns about the Irish tax regime from the OECD, the EU, and US authorities—President Donald Trump, between 2017 and 2018, repeatedly referred to Ireland as a tax haven. In 2016, the European Commission ruled that Ireland had been granting undue tax benefits to tech company Apple with a particular version of the Double Irish being sanctioned in private rulings. A two-year investigation revealed that two key rulings by the Irish State had substantially lowered the tax paid by Apple since 1991 as they allowed the internal transfer of profits between subsidiaries. This resulted in an effective tax rate for the company of 0.005% in 2014. Such preferential tax arrangements for specific companies are illegal forms of state aid under European law and the Commission ruled that Ireland needed to recover 10 years of unpaid taxation from Apple, totaling €13 billion plus interest—the largest tax bill ever recorded. The Irish government rejected this finding, voting to appeal the decision. In 2018, and after an action was begun by the European Commission in the European Court of Justice, €14.3 billion— the arrears plus €1.2 billion of interest—was deposited in an escrow account awaiting the results of the appeal. The State’s reliance on the digital media industry and its inability, failure, or refusal to collect adequate corporation tax income from the rivers of profit that flow through it implicates it in the crash and its pernicious effects on the social fabric. While these arrangements may attract large digital media multinationals and thus increase, in total, the tax revenue for the state, the movement of paper profit does not generally increase wages or adequately increase local employment. Due in large degree to these favorable tax arrangements, digital media industries in Ireland also weathered much of the financial storm that began in 2008, continuing to grow in size and number. They, and many other private companies, have also seized the opportunity of the downturn in property prices and the ongoing fire sale of distressed assets by the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) to expand further into the Silicon Docks, feeding its growth. While various domestic companies were forced into receivership resulting in layoffs and flow on negative effects for individuals and the local economy, in the high-technology multinational sector “one might have been forgiven for thinking that the Celtic Tiger remained in rude health” (Coulter et al. 7). 195

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After the storm At the time of writing, the Irish economy seemed recovered from the 2000s’ global financial crisis.3 Based on the GDP, the nation was recognized as the fastest growing in the EU in 2018 and had been for four of the previous five years. Multinational technology and digital content creation companies remain central to this renewed growth—the information and communication sector grew 30% in 2018. The country remains a recognized hub for digital companies with 8 out of the top 10 global, and 9 of the 10 top US, hardware and software companies located in Ireland in some form. In 2018, there were 117,600 people employed in the information and communication technology sector and average weekly wages in the sector were rising, increasing 5.2% to €1,196. The indigenous digital sector was also growing, albeit with constraints relating to funding and the capacity to scale. A review of funding by TechIreland noted that €930 million was invested in 223 start-up companies in 2018, although 60% of that was invested in only nine enterprises. The Silicon Docks continues to grow and be favored by the government as an engine of post-crash urban and economic rejuvenation: the Docklands Authority reported that in 2019 over 39,000 people were employed in the area in digital industries, finance, and law. The empty shells of unfinished business complexes left at the time of the crash in both the Docks and the Digital Hub are rapidly being completed, and new developments are underway that will continue to transform the lived environment and demographics of the city. In 2019, digital Ireland is definitely in rude health. However, the recovery led by digital companies has not been universally experienced. The country remains saddled with a €200 billion debt from financial crisis-related bailouts, and a decade of austerity policies continue to impact services and social supports. The ongoing facilitation of tax avoidance by digital multinationals means less revenue to fund policies to offset these dynamics. The digital economy also remains centered in Dublin and a few regional urban centers like Cork, Galway, and Limerick, feeding ongoing rural depopulation and economic decline. National broadband provision is yet to be realized, so rural areas struggle to become part of the ongoing digital boom (although a contract for the four-year rollout of the national broadband plan was finally awarded in late 2019). Migration to Dublin from rural areas and abroad to take part in this digital economy, either directly or indirectly, has exacerbated a growing crisis in housing: the largest in the country’s history. In the middle of 2019, over 10,000 people were registered as homeless across the country with a concentration in Dublin. The number of homeless families has increased 200% since 2015, yet new housing development and design is largely targeting the affluent, youthful “creative classes” of the digital economy. This housing crisis is also beginning to undermine the economy that generated it as high rents and limited housing availability affect the capacity of digital companies to recruit talent from abroad. Whether this will lead to expansion of the digital media content sector outside of Dublin or, of more concern to the Irish government, its migration to other countries with lower costs of living is unknown, but there are looming threats to the country’s capacity to sustain its digital economy. At the time of writing, another economic crisis ensuing from the reliance on digital FDI seems imminent. That digitization of the Irish economy has fundamentally transformed the nation’s economic prospects, its global standing, and its culture is undeniable: twenty-first century Ireland is a digital nation. But it must also be recognized that the mechanisms to achieve this status have had widespread, and sometimes unexpected, negative impacts on people, lived environments, and economic sustainability. Linked inexorably to national economic growth, but also to key moments of crisis, digital Ireland and its trickster economics have been both a blessing and a curse. 196

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Notes 1 Data sourced in Honohan and Walsh, Forfás International Trade and Investment Report, 2000, Purdue and Huang report to National Treasury Management Agency, O’Leary, and Grimes. 2 Data sourced in O’Leary, Donovan, and Murphy, Central Statistics Office, Burke-Kennedy “Rising House Prices . . . .,” and Irish League of Credit Unions. 3 Data sourced in Parliamentary Budget Office, OECD, TechIreland, IDA, and Dublin Docklands.

Works cited “About Us.” Dublin Docklands. www.dublindocklands.ie/about-us (Accessed July 2, 2019). Bayliss, Darrin. “Dublin’s Digital Hubris: Lessons from an Attempt to Develop a Creative Industrial Cluster.” European Planning Studies, Vol. 15, No. 9, 2007, pp. 1261–1271. Bradley, John. “The Irish Economy in Comparative Perspective.” Bust to Boom? The Irish Experience of Growth and Inequality. Edited by Brian Nolan, Philip J. O’Connell, and Christopher T. Whelan. Institute of Public Administration, 2000, pp. 4–26. Burke-Kennedy, Eoin. “Department Warns that Corporation Tax is a Risk.” Irish Times, January 10, 2017a. www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/department-warns-that-corporation-tax-is-a-risk-1.3349751. Burke-Kennedy, Eoin. “Rising House Prices Lift Thousands Out of Negative Equity.” Irish Times, December 18, 2017b. www.irishtifmes.com/business/economy/rising-house-prices-lift-thousands-out-ofnegative-equity-1.3330516. Byrne, Michael. “Entrepreneurial Urbanism after the Crisis: Ireland’s ‘Bad Bank’ and the Redevelopment of Dublin’s Docklands.” Antipode, Vol. 48, No. 4, 2016, pp. 899–918. Central Statistics Office. Earnings and Labour Costs: Annual Data 2011, 2012. www.cso.ie/en/statistics/ earnings/archive/releasearchive2011/ Coulter, Colin, Francisco Arqueros-Fernández, and Angela Nagle. “Austerity’s Model Pupil: The Ideological Uses of Ireland during the Eurozone Crisis.” Critical Sociology, Vol. 45, No. 4–5, pp. 697–711. Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. Audio-visual Action Plan: Creative Ireland Programme Pillar 4, 2018. www.chg.gov.ie/app/uploads/2018/06/audiovisual-action-plan.pdf. Donovan, Donal and Antoin E. Murphy. The Fall of the Celtic Tiger: Ireland and the Euro Debt Crisis. Oxford University Press, 2013. European Commission. “State Aid: Ireland Gave Illegal Tax Benefits to Apple Worth Up to €13 Billion.” Press Release, August 30, 2016. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-2923_en.htm. Forfás. International Trade and Investment Report, 2000, 2000. https://dbei.gov.ie/en/Publications/Publication-files/Forf%C3%A1s/International-Trade-and-Investment-Report-2000.pdf. Forfás. A Strategy for the Digital Content Industry in Ireland, 2002. www.skillsireland.ie/media/forfas021101c_ digital_content_strategy.pdf. Grimes, Séamus. “Ireland’s Emerging Information Economy: Recent Trends and Future Prospects.” Regional Studies, Vol. 37, No. 1, 2003, pp. 3–14. Hancock, Ciarán. “Sales of Irish Tech Companies Create 300 Millionaires in 15 Years.”Irish Times, May 4, 2015. www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/sales-of-irish-tech-companies-create-300-millionairesin-15-years-1.2198821. “Homelessness Data.” Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government. www.housing.gov.ie/housing/ homelessness/other/homelessness-data (Accessed July 4, 2019). Honohan, Patrick and Brendan Walsh. “Catching Up with the Leaders: The Irish Hare.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Vol. 1, 2002, pp. 1–57. “Information Communications Technology.” Irish Development Authority. www.idaireland.com/doing-businesshere/industry-sectors/ict (Accessed Jul. 4, 2019). Irish League of Credit Unions. “ILCU Launch First ‘What’s Left’ Tracker of 2013.” May 30, 2013. www. creditunion.ie/communications/news/2013/title,7511,en.php (Accessed March 2, 2018). Kayanan, Carla Maria, Christian Eichenmüller, and Joseph Chambers. “Silicon Slipways and Slippery Slopes: Technorationality and the Reinvigoration of Neoliberal Logics in the Dublin Docklands.” Space and Polity, Vol. 22, No. 1, 2018, pp. 50–66. Kelly, Olivia. “Dublin’s Docklands: ‘They Call us Silicon Docks, But It’s My Community’.” Irish Times, September 28, 2019. www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/homes-and-property/dublin-s-docklands-theycall-us-silicon-docks-but-it-s-my-community-1.4031376. 197

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Kelly, Sinéad. “The Liberties Transformed: The Emergence of New Commercial and Residential Spaces in Inner Dublin.” Journal of Irish Urban Studies, No. 6, 2007, pp. 89–118. Kelly, Sinéad. “Taking Liberties: Gentrification as Neoliberal Urban Policy in Dublin.” Transformation of the City: Reshaping Dublin. Edited by Andrew MacLaran and Sinéad Kelly. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 174–188. Kennedy, John. “Investment Time Bomb: What Will Ireland Plan Next for Seed Funding?” Silicon Republic, December 10, 2018. www.siliconrepublic.com/start-ups/seed-funding-policy-ireland. Kennedy, Kieran A., Thomas Giblin, and Deirdre McHugh. The Economic Development of Ireland in the Twentieth Century, London, Routledge, 1988. Kerr, Aphra. “Space Wars: The Politics of Games Production in Europe.” Gaming Globally: Production, Play, and Place. Edited by Nina B. Huntemann and Ben Aslinger. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 215–232. Kerr, Aphra and Anthony Cawley. “The Spatialisation of the Digital Games Industry: Lessons from Ireland.” International Journal of Cultural Policy, Vol. 18, No. 4, 2012, pp. 398–418. Lawton, Philip, Enda Murphy, and Declan Redmond. “Neoliberalising the City ‘Creative-Class’ Style.” Transformation of the City: Reshaping Dublin. Edited by Andrew MacLaran and Sinéad Kelly. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 189–202. Lillington, Karlin. “Intel Turned Leixlip Into Ireland’s Silicon Valley.” Irish Times, November 12, 2013. www.irishtimes.com/business/intel-turned-leixlip-into-ireland-s-silicon-valley-1.1593495. McCabe, Conor. The Sins of the Father: Tracing the Decisions That Shaped the Irish Economy. History Press Ireland, 2011. Murphy, Enda, Linda Fox-Rogers, and Declan Redmond. “Location Decision Making of ‘Creative’ Industries: The Media ad Computer Games Sectors in Dublin, Ireland.” Growth and Change, Vol. 46, No. 1, 2015, pp. 97–113. Newenham, Pamela, Ed. Silicon Docks: The Rise of Dublin as a Global Tech Hub. Liberties Press, 2015. Ó Gráda, Cormac. The Rocky Road: The Irish Economy since the 1920s. Manchester University Press, 1997. O’Leary, Eoin. Irish Economic Development: High-performing EU State or Serial Underachiever. Routledge, 2015. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). https://stats.oecd.org/ (Accessed July 4, 2019). Parliamentary Budget Office. Quarterly Economic and Fiscal Commentary-Q1 2019. Houses of the Oireachtas, 2019. Purdue, David and Hansi Huang. Irish Exports: The Facts, the Fiction and the Risks. National Treasury Management Agency Report, 2016. www.ntma.ie/download/publications/IrishExportsFactsFiction AndRisks.pdf. Shiel, Michael. “The Transformation of the Irish Economy: The Role of the Information and Communications Technology Industry and Its Social and Economic Impact.” Humanizing the Digital Age. Edited by Uner Kirdar. United Nations Publication, 2007, pp. 69–81. Stewart, Jim and Cillain Doyle. “The Measurement and Regulation of Shadow Banking in Ireland.” Journal of Financial Regulation and Compliance, Vol. 25, No. 4, 2017, pp. 396–412. TechIreland. Funding Review Edition 2019. www.techireland.org/content/funding-review-edition-2019. Tørsløv, Thomas, Ludvig Wier, and Gabriel Zucman. “The Missing Profits of Nations.” NBER Working Paper Series No. 24701, June 2018. https://missingprofits.world/.

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Part IV

Identities

Introduction: identities, Cé leis thú? The Irish have shed identities like a dog shakes off f leas. ( Titley 2011, 27)

Identity on the island of Ireland, for much of recorded history, was construed as a binary choice: Tuatha Dé Danann/Celt; Irish/Viking; Gael/Anglo-Norman; Old English/New English; Planter/Dispossessed; Catholic/Protestant; Unionist/Nationalist; Pro-Treaty/Anti-Treaty; Culchie/Jackeen. Yet third choices frequently, and usually, existed: Jewish; Quaker; communist; socialist; atheist; Huguenot; Palatine; traveler, islander. Yet not since the destruction of the cottier class during the Famine and the nineteenth-century language shift have identity politics on the island experienced such a rapid and large-scale transformation as occurred during the Celtic Tiger. A booming economy required workers; and for the first time throngs, born elsewhere, arrived not as part of an invading military force, but seeking sanctuary, employment, and social advancement. They arrived just as the Irish for centuries had elsewhere: they arrived seeking a better life, and they arrived as the post-2008 “Lost Generation” of Irish, aged 21–28, headed for Australia and New Zealand, where many stayed. Like the migrants into Ireland, these migrants out of Ireland are often “idir dhá thír . . . ar lorg náisiúin” [between two countries . . . . seeking a nation] (Ó Siadhail 19). Just as Ireland, or any State, may be imagined as “naisiún na mbailte fearann” [a nation of townlands], there are a wide variety of identities available, many of them multifaceted and all of them fluid. The chapters in this section consider how questions of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, migration status, multiculturalism, and biopolitics have transformed both the experience of “Irish identity” and the critical frameworks through which we conceptualize it. The 2004 Citizenship Referendum brought the relationship between race, ethnic heritage, and Irishness into the foreground of debates about Irish identity. By refusing to grant automatic Irish citizenship to everyone born on Irish soil and instead limiting the rights of citizenship to only those born of parents who were Irish citizens, the referendum marked the height of Ireland’s xenophobic response to the change in national demographics brought about by

Identities

Celtic Tiger immigration and globalization. Cultural backlash against the referendum’s implicit insistence that “Irishness” is synonymous with a very narrow definition of whiteness has been fierce, as a short YouTube video from 2018 titled “What Does ‘Irishness’ Look Like?” demonstrates. This video, produced by Ola Majekodunmi, documents the personal stories of 15 young Irish people with a variety of backgrounds and experiences.1 In six minutes, this stunningly simple production deconstructs and interrogates notions of Irish identity, overt and casual racism, language, and nationality. The speakers in the video talk about constantly being asked where they’re from, of being exhausted by having to reply again and again, “I’m Irish” or “I’m from just down the road.” Identity, as one speaker aptly explains, isn’t what other people think you are—“it’s what you perceive yourself to be.” As another of the speakers wryly asks, reflecting on the number of times he’s been told he doesn’t “look” Irish, “What’s the ‘look’ of a nation?” Depsite a Taoiseach of Indian heritage and a number of well-known Black and Asian Irish athletes, actors, and personalities whose celebrity suggests an increasing Irish embrace of diversity as an essential part of its national identit[ies], as this video and countless reflections from Irish people of color on their experiences with racism demonstrate, Ireland has a long way to go.2 The chapters in this section look at the multiplicity of ways that the changing social, cultural, and political makeup of Ireland since 2008 have produced shifts and expansions in the way Irish Studies thinks about the “identity” of Ireland and the effects of “Irishness” on the notion of identity. As Lucy Michaels’s and Sarah L. Townsend’s chapters demonstrate, race and immigration are important aspects of this changing landscape, but they are not the only aspects. Claire Bracken’s and Ed Madden’s chapters outline the complex and often fraught connections between Irish Studies and gender and sexuality studies, while Oliver P. Rafferty’s chapter considers the ways that Ireland and Irish Studies have had to remake their relationships with the Catholic Church. Although each chapter takes up a different aspect of Irish identity in the twenty-first century, taken together they offer a comprehensive picture of the work Irish Studies can do to unmoor the idea of Irishness from a narrow and outdated set of cultural associations. In “Immigration and citizenship,” a broad-ranging, multifaceted chapter, Lucy Michael unpacks the multiple procedures and numerous processes that immigrants to Ireland face, including that social ticking time-bomb of Direct Provision: a twenty-first century Magdalene Laundry. This skillful critique of the trials and tribulations of being a migrant in Ireland today reveals the dire consequences of official policy in terms of integration, discrimination, and racisms (despite Imelda May’s 2020 poem “You Don’t Get To Be Racist And Irish”), as well as the critical issue of access to rights in Ireland. Such processes impact not only immigrants’ mental health but how they identify with Ireland. Sarah L. Townsend’s chapter examines multiculturalism in “The ‘new Irish’ neighborhood: race and succession in Ireland and Irish-America.” Tracing the evolution of Corktown (Detroit, Michigan), she unpacks interlinked histories of race, urban renewal, and upward mobility to critique contemporary Irish multiculturalism and uses that narrative to illuminate contemporary Dublin: Parnell Street and its adjoining areas, in particular. Drawing parallels between Dublin and Detroit, she carefully teases out the conceptual utility of “newness” during the Celtic Tiger, unpacking what the congratulatory narratives of successful multiculturalism enabled and, critically, what forms of social erasure they concealed. Claire Bracken’s chapter outlines the ways gender and queer theorists since 2008 have moved analyses of Irish gender away from postcolonial and symbolic paradigms and towards the physical realities of lives and bodies fighting against the systemic oppressions of Irish neoliberalism. Tracing intersections between gender studies, activist movements, performance studies, transnational studies, and the biopolitics of Irish institutions and austerity measures, Bracken argues that Irish gender studies has become increasingly rooted in the materialities of lived experience. 200

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While demonstrating that Irish Studies scholars and writers are still fighting many of the same battles—canonicity, marginalization, occlusion, and binary thinking—the new materialist turn in Irish gender studies has the potential to foster genuine structural change, both in the field and in the real world that it inhabits. In the aftermath of the Marriage Act (2015) and the Gender Recognition Act (2015) in the Republic and the same-sex Marriage Act (2020) in Northern Ireland, Ed Madden’s chapter questions what “queer” actually means in contemporary Ireland. Resisting the easy selfcongratulatory narrative that these referenda superficially allow, Madden argues convincingly that the narrative of Irish queer acceptance fails to acknowledge those marginalized by economics, migrant status, race, or HIV stigma. Alert to how the political victories of the LGBTQ+ movement may be employed to “pinkwash” other inequalities, Madden probes the role and potential for queer resistances vis-à-vis counternormative behavior. Finally, in “The Catholic Church in Irish Studies,” Oliver P. Rafferty interrogates what a Catholic identity means in twenty-first-century Ireland. Given the historic role Catholicism has played in Irish society, culture, and identity, it is striking that Ireland’s current most successful sportsperson, Katie Taylor, is a devout evangelical Protestant who is candid about her beliefs. Weakened by scandals, undermined by modernity, scrutinized by the increasingly educated folk, and assailed by critics, the Catholic Church can no longer impose a normative cultural narrative on Irish society. Rafferty contends that the Church’s responses to feminism and sexual politics, child abuse, and the “Troubles” utterly changed the relationship of Catholicism to Irish cultural identity. Catholicism may no longer epitomize broader Irish culture, but it remains, nonetheless, part of the warp and weft of Irish identity.

Notes 1 The video is available here: https://youtu.be/EqWKR7eq-CQ 2 Úna-Minh Kavanagh’s memoir, Anseo (2019), offers an especially compelling meditation on racism and multifaceted Irish identity.

Works cited CSO. “Census of Population 2016: Profile 8.” 2016. www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cp8iter/ p8iter/p8e/Journal. “Ireland Lost Generation.” 2014. www.thejournal.ie/the-effects-on-sport-andeducation-without-1305017-Feb2014/. Kavanagh, Úna-Minh. ANSEO: An Unconventional Irish Memoir. New Island, 2019. May, Imealda. “You Don’t Get to be Racist and Irish.” 2020. www.rte.ie/culture/2020/0605/1145651you-dont-get-to-be-racist-and-irish-imelda-mays-stunning-poem/. Ó Siadhail, Pádraig. Idir Dhá Thír: Sceitsí Ó Cheanada. Lagan Press. 2005. St. John, Pete. “Dublin in the Rare Ould Times.” Circa, 1970. Titley, Alan. Nailing Theses: The Selected Essays. Lagan Press, 2011.

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Introduction Since the end of the Celtic Tiger, Ireland has been realized as a long-term immigration destination, and a place where migrations increasingly become part of the wider citizen body. The Migration Nation which welcomed labor migrants and dispersed asylum seekers has been forced to address the implications of long-term exclusions produced by a highly stratified immigration regime. This chapter considers the contemporary, political, and policy context of immigration and citizenship in post-austerity Ireland, and the recent experiences of Ireland’s immigrants, as understood through the lenses of integration, discrimination, and racisms which delineate the broad direction of change in this area. Although immigration dropped dramatically in 2009 and 2010, it has increased steadily annually since, returning to net inward migration in 2016. Immigration numbers in 2019, however, only reached just over half what they were in 2007. The 2004 EU accession states continue to represent around 10,000 incoming migrants annually (after 40,000 left across 2009 and 2010). Non-EU migrants, in contrast, have increased five-fold since 2010, to 32,000, mainly as international students. Asylum seekers made up less than 4% of incoming migrants in 2016 (Gilmartin 2017). The diversity of Ireland’s immigrants is significant—the 2016 census identified migrant communities of more than 10,000 persons from 15 different countries with communities from a further 25 countries of above 1,000 each, many of which have further religious, linguistic, and cultural diversity within them (Fanning and Michael 2019). Migrants’ experiences are diverse and heavily affected by that stratified system of immigration status and rights. Since 2004, Eastern European A81 migrants have settled well in Ireland but initially experienced a considerable degree of downward occupational mobility (Barrett and Duffy 2008). Others, requiring visas from countries such as the Philippines and India, work in healthcare and other sectors and have become Irish citizens in large numbers. Tens of thousands of migrants from places like China and Brazil came as students and have been allowed to work during their stay (Fanning and Michael 2019). Muslim communities, markedly professional two decades ago, have diversified with the arrival of others filling poorly-paid jobs in service industries and other cohorts from African countries who have largely arrived as asylum seekers. Some, arriving as refugees, like the Somali community, have experienced similar barriers to 203

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integration as in other European countries and settled in some of Ireland’s most disadvantaged localities (Moreo and Lentin). Some Africans are far more at risk of growing up as outsiders than others due in large part to employment prospects—stratification along class lines is exacerbated by unemployment and labor market disadvantage, by lesser language fluency and low opportunity for residential and economic mobility, and lower overall capacity to escape effects of institutional and direct racist discrimination (O’Connell). Some groups live particularly precarious lives, like Roma, the migrant group most disliked by the Irish public (McGinnity et al.), as well as experiencing cumulative issues in housing, access to welfare and poverty assistance, education, health, and social and civic participation (Curran et al.). But many immigrants are largely invisible to, and within, the State’s major institutions. The recent visibility of undocumented migrants in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) campaigns sits against a broad disinterest in the academic literature. But visibility is not only about size or immigration status. The second largest immigrant group, according to the 2016 census, were those born in the United Kingdom (UK)—a group hardly remarked upon at all until the recent uptick in citizenship applications. The third largest group, Lithuanians (36,552 in 2016), are also strikingly invisible within both academic research and policy debates.

The Tiger Turns: state racisms and integration European approaches to integration have heavily influenced Ireland: both in the focus in the early 2000s on temporary economic migration from the EU, the neoliberal approach to neoEU immigrant selection, and the economy as the central concern of migration policies. The Irish State’s increasing securitization of integration and immigration approaches through the early 2000s was driven by an increasingly coherent international effort to frame migration and integration as matters of security, and deeply connected with Ireland’s relationships with both Europe and the UK (via the Common Travel Area) (Boucher; Maguire and Titley). Thus, despite the impression of a broadly progressive approach to immigration and diversity in the early 2000s, Ireland has proceeded to treat immigration entirely as a matter of security for the Irish state and its population, and less as an urgent opportunity to usher in the inclusion of immigrants. Twenty years on from the first significant immigration rise, integration policy has barely featured on the political agenda. A bold new integration policy in 2008, “Migration Nation,” was quickly and severely undermined by austerity, and Ireland’s policies have been best described as “fragmented, cost-effective, de facto assimilationist and laissez-faire” (Boucher). An extensive anti-racism infrastructure was assembled in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which included the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism (NCCRI), the Equal Status Act 2000 and the Equality Act 2004, the establishment of the Equality Authority, Planning for Diversity: The National Action Plan Against Racism 2005–2008, and a new Garda Síochána Intercultural Office (Fanning and Michael 2017). But these efforts to address immigration’s future negative effects sat alongside the introduction of the Direct Provision system, which sought to deter and displace asylum seekers, and the 2004 referendum, which removed birthright citizenship: both of which are usefully understood through Lentin’s theorization of the Irish racial state (2007). The 2004 constitutional referendum to remove citizenship for children born in Ireland passed overwhelmingly after a campaign of scaremongering and racialization of migrant parents (Lentin 2004). It was prompted by a series of legal cases which widened the scope of Irish citizenship, particularly in light of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement which gave Irish citizenship to anyone born in Northern Ireland (Fanning and Michael 2017). Asylum seekers, particularly 204

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women, were already being demonized and portrayed as inimical to existing notions of citizenship and a threat to the European Union, reflecting the Foucauldian biopolitics of Ireland’s governance (Conlon). A number of scholars, including Fanning, Lentin, and Gilmartin, have traced the securitization of immigration and integration through statements made by Ministers and by the judiciary about the “problems” increased volume of immigration produced, even as early as 1990, but most visibly represented by the portrayal of “citizenship tourists” in the 2004 referendum (Lentin 2004). The discursive construction of migrant mothers as being incapable of caring for themselves was highly contiguous with that of pregnant Irish women. The referendum result removed the ius soli right of Irish-born children of immigrants to become Irish citizens, significantly reordering Ireland’s immigration regime. White and Gilmartin point to “the existence of a reservoir of contradictory claims, anxieties and ambiguities surrounding the politics of abortion rights, mobility rights and the pregnant body” to explain why an abstract notion of citizenship so quickly gained political traction with the public (2008, 392). The referendum’s impact on the subsequent abuse and violence toward migrant women in public spaces continues (Shandy and Power; Michael 2015). As Ireland entered a period of austerity, Mac Éinrí and White noted the breadth of debate on immigration that focused on asylum and refugee numbers, while attention on labor immigration and long-term questions of integration had only begun to emerge and thus, immigration in Ireland was “predominantly depicted in terms of an asylum-seeker crisis” (Fanning and Mutwarasibo 442). There is a clear attempt, in terms of integration policy, to exclude asylum seekers: from the first policy statement on refugee integration in 1999, to Migration Nation (the 2008 integration policy) (Maguire and Titley), and most recently the 2017 Migrant Integration Strategy. Integration programs for resettled refugees have not been available for spontaneous refugees (Arnold et al. 2018). The Direct Provision system restricts everyday interactions between asylum seekers and local communities. Moreover, integration policy—devised by the Department of Justice and Equality—operates alongside a stratified system of entry and residence that mitigates against social integration (Titley). Before the economic crisis, while immigration was still broadly seen in economic developmental terms, there emerged a plethora of concepts to define Ireland’s nascent approach to integration. Amongst these, “interculturalism, transculturalism, integration and cultural diversity,” the more political terms of “race” and racism were hushed (Lentin 2012). In integration policy, from 2006, Ministers talked of “culture” rather than justice and equality (Maguire and Titley), and the resolution of brief controversies over hijabs and turbans marked Ireland charting a middle way between the failures of European assimilationism and multiculturalism (Lentin and Titley). Neither immigration nor integration policy could be described as coherent, such policies did not yet address civic integration involving orientation and language tuition, and labor market training (Boucher). The State’s first attempt at extensive reconfiguration of the control and deportation of foreign nationals in Ireland, The Immigration, Residence and Protection Bill 2008, was hotly contested (Maguire and Titley). The economic crisis of 2008 prompted a marked shift in the undermining of migrant and minority support policies, although there are continuities visible with the previous approaches described previously. The linking of immigration and diversity with Ireland’s economic and social upheavals was not unforeseeable, given the outcome of the 2004 citizenship referendum and the parallels in other countries (as Gilmartin 2015 notes). The resultant upshot, combined with increasing state discomfort with attention to institutional racism, brought to an end many of the previous government efforts to address integration (Fanning and Michael 2017; Gilmartin 2015). By 2011, 16.9% of the Irish population had been born elsewhere, representing a 6% increase on the 2002 figures (Gilmartin 2013), but the sharp increase in net out-migration from 2009 refocused attention on out-migration after a decade of government concern with 205

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sustained net in-migration to Ireland. Emotional responses to austerity and changing patterns of migration after 2008 made it difficult to clearly identify and acknowledge the realities of migration (Gilmartin 2017). Viewed through Loyal’s account of labor-driven immigration under the Celtic Tiger, we see a shift in the question of permanence—the perception of migrants as longtime residents and future citizens. The crisis also had a lasting impact on how immigration and citizenship were conceived, with diversity becoming less associated with internal diversity and increasingly defined as exogenous and involving policies addressed to those born outside of Ireland. The consequence of this shift places the burden of integration on immigrants (Gilmartin 2015). The redefinition of diversity in exogenous terms, moreover, firmly placed the experiences and treatment of Travelers (as well as indigenous minority religious groups) outside of the scope of integration or diversity policy. As Irish citizens, they nonetheless suffer many of the same exclusions as immigrants. The economic crisis presented many challenges for organizations charged with responsibility for integration in Migration Nation as State funding for migrant-related NGOs and sports bodies was significantly cut (Glynn). Post-2008 efforts to promote anti-racist policy and legislation have nonetheless mostly emanated from NGOs and immigrant-led groups working under the umbrella organization ENAR Ireland (European Network Against Racism, now INAR (Irish Network Against Racism). Other key actors have been the Immigrant Council of Ireland and Migrant Rights Centre Ireland (both also INAR network members). This collective activism has had limited influence upon immigration policy, although it has kept racism in the public eye. Critical insiders, typically former NGO leaders who worked for Department of Justice-funded bodies with an anti-racism remit, walked “a tightrope,” as one put it, between being co-opted and being shut down (Fanning 2012). The model of “integration from below” adopted by the NGO sector in the early 2000s to address gaps in migrant support (De Tona and Lentin) became firmly established in the later State approach to migrant integration which has used funding rather than explicit policy over the last decade to drive a fluid set of policy goals. Immigrant-led organizations are themselves marginal within civil society, mostly unfunded by the State and have largely not been co-opted into institutional consultation processes. Immigrant-led (particularly African) organizations have focused on providing services and promoting integration rather than on anti-racist activism directly, using larger sectoral coalitions to address questions of racism. Similarly, African candidates in local government elections have not stood on anti-racist platforms (Fanning and O’Boyle). Anti-racism activists, in the absence of political clout, have tended to call for the diffusion of good practice from other jurisdictions and adherence to the principles and practices emanating from international agreements on racism and to directives/ agreement (Fanning and Michael 2017). One point of connection between the State and NGOs lies in their visions of integration as the need to avoid European-style “failed multiculturalism,” although in the Irish State’s view this lies in “too much cultural diversity” (Lentin 2012), while it is attributed to the problems of institutional racism and hate crime in the view of NGOs (Fanning and Michael 2019). The former situates immigrants as “bodies out of place,” while the latter addresses—at least in part—the lacuna created by the large-scale dismantling of the State’s former anti-racism infrastructures. The Migrant Integration Strategy launched in 2017, for example, explicitly names amongst its aims the “avoidance of urban ghettoes” and solutions to address African underemployment (Dept. Justice and Equality). The introduction of the 2015 International Protection Act demonstrated the limited agency of both the dominant NGOs acting for migrants and the migrants themselves (Landy 2015) and saw those NGOs sharply criticized by activist groups for doing little to support asylum seekers. Here, Alana Lentin’s 2004 analysis continues to be useful— highlighting how culturalism and human rights agendas 206

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both fail to cope with racism as it has been institutionalized in the political and social structures of European societies because they inaccurately theorize “race”, [treating it] .  .  . as an individual attitude born of prejudice and ignorance and not as a political project that emerged under specific conditions within the context of the European nation-state. (2004, 427) Border control and citizenship restrictions remain areas which migrant-support and anti-racism NGOs are virtually powerless to influence and often fail to even address. Citizenship is key to accessing fundamental rights such as education, particularly higher education, and to enjoy equal access to civil and political rights. The legacy of the 2004 citizenship referendum has been particularly understood through its impact on children born in Ireland who have been denied birthright citizenship, both in terms of lack of access to the same economic and social benefits as other children but also in long-term social cohesion. In addition to security of residence status, access to citizenship is regarded as an essential precondition to achieving integration (Mannion 2016). The most obvious impact—at least in public view—is the deportability of children born in Ireland. Between 2013 and 2018, 134 boys and girls under the age of 18 were deported from Ireland, some born in Ireland, some resident for more than 10 years. There is evidence of changed public opinion on citizenship for Irish-born children (including an increase in local anti-deportation campaigns), but no proposals for legislative change or amnesty (INAR). Since 2011, around 127,000 applicants have been granted citizenship following a major reform of the application system. After the reforms, the number of naturalizations rose sharply, in particular among non-EEA residents (almost a third of whom became naturalized in this time), a mix of migrant workers (mainly Asian) and refugees (mainly African) (Kelly et al.). By 2015, Indians had become the largest group, followed by applicants from Nigeria and the Philippines, but all of these were quickly outstripped by Polish in 2016 and by UK nationals in 2019. Nigerians have constituted less than 10% of those naturalized each year since 2016. Whilst European migrants were amongst the least likely to apply in previous years (O’Boyle et al.), the coming of Brexit appears to have been the reason that Polish and British migrants are in the largest groups now to seek citizenship status (Fanning 2019) The conditions for attaining Irish citizenship by naturalization are set out in Section 15 of the 1956 Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act, which contains no requirement that the applicant demonstrate any knowledge about the State’s history, customs, language, or civic structures. But “[t]he Irish process, strengthened by ministerial discretion, can be seen as restrictive, full of impediments and uncertainty that may not lead to citizenship at all” (Otukoya 215). Furthermore, gaining citizenship does not grant equality. Otukoya points out that while nationals are wholly citizens with legal rights fully protected, the legal rights of naturalized citizens are subject to discretionary intervention, since their citizenship can also be rescinded. Neither does citizenship (or indeed free movement in the EU) protect one from racialized border control—racial profiling at Ireland’s airports and ports has been a consistent feature, making Irish and EU citizens subject to detention and deportation (McGaughey; INAR), and which has increased sharply since the Brexit vote. The changing landscape of Irish–British relations post-Brexit marks this area as one which is likely to warrant further attention in coming years, as well as the possibility of resurgent ethnic nationalism which arises not only in relation to border control, but in broader ideas and practices of citizenship as Irish (bloodline) citizenship is increasingly revalued and reimagined within that landscape (Burke Wood and Gilmartin). 207

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International protection and direct provision One population explicitly excluded from Ireland’s integration policies is that of asylum seekers. Since the late 1990s, amongst all migrants to Ireland, asylum seekers have formed a central concern for government and academics. The State had an unhappy history with refugees generally due to poor treatment (Fanning 2002), and fears of a significant rise in this population resulted in hurried (and poor) State responses, including the establishment of the Direct Provision system. Ireland’s peripheral location has kept applications low compared to many EU states, and primary countries of origin also differ. Ireland received 4,781 applications for asylum in 2019, a sharp rise after almost a decade of rates less than half that, and agreed to accept EU relocation refugees only in similar figures, even at the height of the “migrant crisis.” The system was introduced in 2000 in response to the UK government’s planned dispersal of asylum seekers as an ad-hoc arrangement of reception centers and longer-term accommodation. The for-profit system, directed by the Department of Justice and Equality, has been the subject of multiple human rights investigations, including by the Irish judiciary and international human rights bodies. It remains on a limited legislative footing. The dispersal principle that underpins this system is essential to its operation, meeting “the state’s twin desires to deter the further arrival of asylum seekers and to control and manage those already within its borders” (Loyal and Quilley), and producing a distinct “liminality” which is lived through everyday experiences of its residents (O’Reilly). The public invisibility of the system is broadly in the context of a continuum with the coercive confinement that has been a strong presence in the State since its foundation, constituting workhouses, mental health asylums, mother and baby homes, Magdalene Laundries, and industrial schools (Lentin 2016), many of which were—like Direct Provision—in plain sight. There is much evidence (in contrast) of longstanding asylum seeker resistance to the Direct Provision complex through organizations like the Movement of Asylum Seekers of Ireland and artist Nedeljković, Vukašin—author of Asylum Archive—amongst others, who illustrate the role of residents as “active agents of resistance” (Lentin 2020), although their role has been little acknowledged in the academic literature on Direct Provision. Direct Provision, with its lack of access to a host of everyday life services and amenities (Joyce and Quinn; Filges), has particularly affected parents and families due to the lack of privacy, safety for children, family life, and access to childcare and other barriers to participation in education and community activities (Ogbu et al.). Other groups, such as children aged out of care (Ní Raghallaigh and Thornton), trafficked persons, and LGBT residents (INAR), also experience particular stresses due to lack of suitable accommodation and services. Attempts to improve Direct Provision since the 2018 McMahon Report included the introduction of national standards and extensions of the remit of the Ombudsman and Ombudsman for Children. Outstanding critiques of the Direct Provision system, apart from its very existence as a mechanism for deportation (Lentin 2016), include the length of stay and quality of accommodation. The impact of the 2015 International Protection Act, which reduced processing times while increasing appeals and reducing family reunification rights, remains to be analyzed in detail.

How are immigrants faring? If the Irish State’s appetite for integration is to be measured, it might be in the current level of protections available to migrants and the State’s interest in assessing and addressing a variety of forms of exclusion. Yet what is clear is that there are a wide range of areas in which the State has shown very little interest in assuring access to economic, social, and political rights, even when 208

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confronted with extensive evidence of exclusion. In the next section, we examine migrants’ experiences in Ireland, particularly regarding those rights.

Work Unsurprisingly, given the State’s emphasis on migration for labor, the sharp hierarchy defining the rights of migrants and their families based on their work status, and the importance of work to the viability of migrant lives (as well as to integration), there has been much focus on the structure of the Irish labor market and its relationship with immigration. Across the labor market as a whole, there are recognized barriers to migrant success, such as the historic lack of recognition of qualifications and experience from the country of origin and impact on progression, causing frustration and leading to de-skilling, underemployment, and unemployment among ethnic minority groups (MRCI 2015). There are wide divides between migrant workers in professional jobs and those in highly exploitative low-paid jobs, but a key marker of exclusion overall is in the under-representation of immigrants in the public administration sector (Murphy et al. 2017). Amongst EU migrants, Polish workers have been most studied. As a young (mostly male) mobile workforce looking for opportunities abroad, they were described as “aspirant migrants” more likely to be satisfied with flexible employment, even with employer exploitation (Krings et al.). In sectors like hospitality, they were underemployed and low-paid, but work was easy to access through social networks (Barrett et al.). The Celtic Tiger’s reliance on “immigrant jobs” and a significant wage gap between migrants and Irish provided ample opportunity (Gilmartin 2017). While it was believed that EU migrants would leave once employment dried up, this was not the case (Gilmartin 2015). Most migrants from new EU member states, including Poles, did not leave during the recession because the majority were still employed, able to access welfare in case of unemployment, and social networks heavily influenced decisions to stay or go because migration for them was not just a short-term economic move (Krings et al.). But many immigrant nurses and doctors (EU and non-EU) planned onward migration because of the 2009 public sector moratorium (Gilmartin 2017). African employment in Ireland has been mostly examined through the lens of discrimination and underemployment, particularly to explain how a relatively well-educated group, in prime working age groups, demonstrates low labor market participation. The African population is a diverse mix of Irish citizens, EU citizens, and those with refugee status. Africans suffer much higher rates of unemployment than the national average or other immigrant groups. While the overall rates of discrimination experienced by minority groups declined between 2004 and 2010 in Ireland, the high level of discrimination reported by Black Africans remained persistent (O’Connell). Workers identifying as Black were three times more likely to experience discrimination in the workplace (McGinnity et al. 2018) as well as at the recruitment stage (McGinnity and Lunn), which in the context of a wider examination of the Irish labor market suggests a “racial hierarchy” at work (Joseph). The recession accentuated differences in labor market outcomes between immigrants and natives when the employment penalty was the highest. Recovery from recession has been slow for many migrant groups—in 2012, the foreign-born unemployment rate was four times that of the Irish-born, with little difference amongst EU and non-EU workers. Unemployment figures, however, are still likely to underestimate the number of migrants affected by rising unemployment, since migrants have no entitlement to social welfare, they are not accounted for in the official live register of unemployed persons. This includes migrants, including many Roma, who do not satisfy the requirements of the Habitual Residence Condition (HRC), and who have no entitlement to social welfare payments (Mayock et al.). Post-austerity immigration 209

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policy to attract highly skilled workers to Ireland and to encourage return emigration masks the longer-term patterns of intensifying sectoral concentration, deskilling of immigrants, and deterioration of working conditions (Gilmartin 2017). Even amongst those “highly skilled” migrants coming to Ireland, non-EU students are considerably restricted in their permissions to work, as well as subject to surveillance, racialization, increasing restrictions, and divisive rhetoric (Pan; O’Connor). Migrant workers are overrepresented in the agri-food sector—meat, poultry, pig, mushroom farming, fishing, in hotel and catering, in cleaning and in care. Ireland operates a guest worker model with few rights enshrined in law. Migrant workers experience severe or routine exploitation, aggravated by the intertwinement of employment and immigration enforcement, workers’ lack of awareness of employment rights; the ineffectiveness of labor inspections; the uncertain impact of undocumented status on employment rights; and difficulties with enforcing employment awards (cf. Maher and Cawley). This is “actively produced and institutionalised by employers and the state,” supported by the State’s “deep-rooted resistance” to acknowledging the extent of labor exploitation (Murphy et al. 2019, 4; cf. Daly 2016). Targeted inspection work by the Workplace Relations Commission is limited in car washes, nail bars, and fishing and nonexistent in domestic work. Migrant workers fear the loss of work permits or, if undocumented, being deported. Undocumented workers have no employment rights. Special mechanisms for trafficked workers are mostly unused (Murphy et al. 2019). Deportability creates hyper-precarity. Agri-business, on both sides of the border, for example, has employed migrants from the Baltic States, shipped back-and-forth by recruitment agencies and exploited in both jurisdictions. There are few prosecutions for trafficking (Coghlan and Wylie 2017). Refugees face greater challenges in the labor market than other groups, particularly because asylum seekers in the Republic of Ireland have been prevented from working, with resulting gaps in employment history. These challenges have had a significant impact on this group’s poverty levels (Fanning and Veale). Since the Supreme Court found this bar unconstitutional, from 2017 asylum seekers have been permitted to work under strict conditions which leaves many still unable to do so, although the right to work is at least now established under an EU Directive (Thornton). In addition, they face challenges both as asylum seekers and refugees: this population has distinct language and training needs and face distinct barriers to employment, but mainstreamed services in Ireland do not provide specialist supports. Employment training, such as it is, tends to be concentrated in Dublin or city centers, while this population tends to be much more widely dispersed throughout Ireland and struggles to secure accommodation (Gusciute et al.). Time in Direct Provision is reflected in the poor labor market outcomes of the main groups who have resided there (often for years), even amongst those who have become Irish citizens (Kelly et al.; O’Connell).

Housing Housing is not only an important means of integration but is also a key marker of integration. To date, residential segregation is not particularly evident in Ireland, although there are some concentrating effects. There are a number of areas of Dublin and surrounding counties which have recognizable, if small, African and African-Irish populations, mainly due to the presence of available and affordable housing. In the aftermath of a racist murder in 2010, there were claims that residential segregation was driven by immigrants’ self-segregation, but the housing market has driven much of the pattern emerging (Vang; Gilmartin 2013) and resulted in neighborhoods which reflect superdiversity more than ethnic concentration (Fanning and Michael 2019). Today, immigrants in Ireland are disproportionately concentrated in the private rental sector (Murphy et al. 2017), which has attracted more ethnic diversity and greater integration, but 210

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which is affected by landlord discrimination (Grotti et al.). In Dublin, non-Irish are four times more likely to be in this sector than Irish (Gilmartin and Dagg). Immigrants are concentrated more densely in Ireland’s cities than in rural areas, but there is no strong relationship between immigrant concentration and disadvantage (Fahey et al.). The enduring problem of racism, and poor supports to address it, are key factors constraining spatial assimilation. While migrant groups are distributed across owner-occupier, private rental, and public sector social-housing sectors, it is the latter that apparently have the most protection. Migrants in social housing are already amongst the most economically marginalized of migrants and the most vilified of migrants at the height of a national housing crisis. But their safety is not assured: the mechanisms of public sector authorities to address racial harassment routinely fail them, resulting in some cases in homelessness (Buckowska and Ní Chonail). African refugees’ ambivalence to “place,” suggest Murphy and Vieten, is not only connected to their changing immigration status but intimately connected with their vulnerability to violence.

Education Migrant young people are overrepresented in larger schools, schools located in urban areas, and those with a socioeconomically disadvantaged population; partly as a result of residence patterns and partly because of schools’ admissions systems (Darmody et al.). Twenty-five percent of African children were found to attend a disadvantaged school (compared to 9% for the overall population) and 25% were likely to have limited fluency in English. Schools can do much to support children from culturally diverse backgrounds, but structural issues which reproduce class inequalities for the population have proven difficult to address. Secondary school students face multiple barriers in terms of access to schools: placement in classes, year groups, and types of program. Consequently, they are steered into less academic tracks and lower-ability classes. There is no disaggregated data available on comparative academic progress of migrant students (McGinnity and Darmody). Key groups, such as the Roma, experience very severe difficulties in navigating the education system (Kennedy and Smith). The education policy in Ireland has no explicit anti-racist strategy, and schools decide cultural diversity approaches at a local level. The idea of institutional racism is addressed only briefly by the National Intercultural Education Strategy (DES and OMI) regarding discrimination in school admissions and the issue of patronage. The persistent context of weak state support for teachers and schools results in little active rethinking of the ways in which admissions policy and classroom allocations may recreate inequalities, even in schools with “intercultural” policies (Kitching). Interculturalism as a statutory and educational policy has become, Bryan suggests, “part of a ‘slogan system’ aimed at diffusing social conflict and maintaining social order without challenging mainstream structures” (312). Migrant students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds are viewed through a deficit model (Devine). Still, in general, immigrant children and their parents have largely positive attitudes to school and high aspirations (McGinnity and Darmody), although an increasing awareness of school failures to address racism already affects the second generation (Michael 2015). The differential belonging of African-Irish and European children in relation to their national identities also has an impact on future aspirations (Tyrell). Twice as many migrant students as students with Irish parents leave school early (Byrne and Smyth).

Civic and political participation In explaining the underrepresentation of migrants in Irish electoral politics, Szlovak suggests that neither political parties nor migrants have made a collective and sustained effort to increase 211

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migrant representation in local municipalities, and this effort is an important preliminary step in increasing legislative representation. Residential concentration of migrants (albeit a very diverse mix of migrants) represents a sizeable part of the electorate in some urban districts. There has been extensive involvement of Africans as candidates in elections since 2004 (Okigbo), but despite the fact that many candidates, especially Africans, had strong local networks and organizational involvements that were seen positively by political parties (Fanning and O’Boyle), political parties have become increasingly less inclined, rather than more, to run migrant candidates (Szlovak). Only 3% of candidates and less than 1% of those elected in local elections in May 2019 were of migrant background (ICI 2020). Many immigrant communities have established some degree of infrastructure in the form of places of worship, shops, and community organizations. Some serve specific immigrant origin communities (such as Forum Polonia in Dublin); there are pan-African organizations such as the Africa Centre and single-issue collectives such as AkiDwa which campaigns against female genital mutilation. Whilst Nigerians have demonstrated higher levels of civic participation, Poles in particular have been sought out by political parties and trade unions in ways that Nigerians have not (Molles). Most immigrant communities have not mobilized as ethnic blocs.

Migration and gender A combination of racial and gender inequalities structure migrant women’s lives in Ireland, even while their experiences are diverse and varied. Nonetheless, there are patterns of overrepresentation of migrant women in categories of the lowest paid in employment, in those excluded from education by lack of supports, in reduced access to quality healthcare, precarious access to safe accommodation, and limited access to redress for abuse by public institutions (INAR). Opportunities to access education and the labor market are deeply gendered because of caring responsibilities and because of the significant gap between their qualifications and their labor market position (O’Connell). For migrant women in the domestic sphere, often as carers, there is a significant “decent work deficit”—lack of promotion prospects, no union involvement, precarious hours, lack of avenues for complaint, racial discrimination, and harassment (MRCI 2015). Migrant women who have no access to training opportunities, compounded by lack of access to affordable childcare, are increasingly distanced from the labor market. Filipino-Irish care workers, for example, remain economically marginalized in precarious work and choose residential co-location to meet basic needs like childcare and provide a buffer against isolation and “hyper-precarity” (Rojas-Coppari). The impact of gender is evident in the cumulative and intersecting effects of discrimination experienced by Roma women in their economic (in)activity (Curran et al.). Migrant women, due to dependent residency status and social and economic exclusion, are more likely to become victims of domestic, sexual, and gender-based violence and least likely to have useful social connections when escaping abuse (Mayock et al.). Both emergency accommodation and Direct Provision centers expose women escaping abuse to further risk. Recent legislation on sex work following the “Nordic model” has proved contentious as migrant women are disproportionately arrested and prosecuted (Fitzgerald and McGarry). It is perhaps unsurprising to see migrant women’s sexuality so actively policed, since the discursive portrayal of migrant women as victims reflects a citizenship politics in which sexually active women are “a danger to the state and ‘the nation’” (Lentin 2005). Given their prominence in the years after the citizenship referendum, there is a remarkable gap in the academic literature on migrant women’s particular experiences since 2011. 212

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Hate crime and policing The 1989 Republic’s Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act emerged out of concerns about publication of materials in Ireland by racist organizations abroad. Efforts to invoke the Act to address racist crimes have been largely unsuccessful (Schweppe et al.); as courts do not consider racism as a motivating factor, there has been little impetus for An Garda Síochána (Police) to do so either (Fanning et al. 2011). A two-decades long campaign by NGOs to have the legislation revised to deal with racist violence and crime against migrants has resulted in no adequate solution at the time of publication. There has been little improvement in police responses to the problems of racist crime, harassment, and violence, either in institutional approaches or in improving the quality of life of migrants (Schweppe et al.). Ineffective recording practices by Gardaí and low reporting and trust rates mean that there is little institutional impetus for change (Carr). Anti-racist NGOs have adopted the data collection on racist incidents abolished by the State in 2008 with the NCCRI (cf. Michael 2019). While this has helped drive critiques of policing failures, the focus on violent racism, harassment, and discrimination risks distracting from the problems of institutional racism. The expanding Irish literature on hate crime against migrants constitutes an attempt by scholars and activists to address the systemic nature of these failures and put Irish racist violence into a comparative international legislative and policy context (Schweppe et al.; Haynes and Schweppe; Perry). There is no legislation proscribing racial profiling by An Garda Síochána and other law enforcement officers, mechanism for complaint, nor official data on racial profiling. The relationship between Gardaí and Black migrant youth (Michael 2017) and between Gardaí and Roma have been particularly the subject of attention. Roma have experienced the removal of Roma children from their parents based on racial stereotyping and without adequate investigation as well as extensive stops by Gardaí based on racial profiling (Curran et al.; Kilpatrick). Other migrant groups also suffer as a result of racial profiling and threats of deportation. SubSaharan Africans are routinely stopped by police (EU FRA). Racial profiling of ethnic minority Irish citizens is common in border control (INAR). Symbolic and physical violence against migrants by Gardaí might be viewed both as part of a larger continuum with the policing of working-class areas and communities, and of indigenous Travelers, and as an extension of the immigration system, but it has been primarily understood in terms of police culture and lack of familiarity with cultural and ethnic difference (O’Brien-Olinger).

Hate speech and the far-right: anti-immigrant politics The long absence in the Republic of Ireland of far-right organizations (Garner; O’Malley) has made it relatively unusual in the European context, but this has not meant an absence of violent and periodically organized racism over the last decade. In several high-profile cases of fatal assault in the Republic, racism is acknowledged as a motivating factor (Fanning et al. 2011; Michael 2015). More recently, scholars and NGOs have evidenced a significant rise in arson and criminal damage against buildings associated with asylum seekers, refugees, and Travelers, violent protests against minorities (many prompted by online hate), and the open establishment and operation of racist groups (Michael 2019). The 2018 Presidential election saw a number of candidates who openly declared support for drastic anti-immigration measures and used racist language to describe Travelers, refugees, and migrants. There are also concerns about the migration of far-right discourse into the political mainstream, particularly with respect to the candidacy of far-right parties at 2019 and 2020 general and by-elections, and hate speech by mainstream candidates. Concerns have been raised in particular about hate speech online, and the importation 213

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of racist discourses from other jurisdictions (Siapera). Analysis of these far-right movements in the academic literature has not yet emerged. It is, sadly, unremarkable in Europe today to say that there is extensive evidence of racism in digital, print, and social media against migrant groups, and in particular asylum seekers. It is possible, however, to see an increasingly normalized range of racist discourses employed in the presentation of news and opinion in Ireland, such that the overlaps with extremist discourses can be identified (Michael 2019). The regulatory frameworks which govern Irish print, digital, and broadcast media appear to offer some protection to minority groups but in practice have failed to stem the gross stereotyping of highly disadvantaged groups (including Travelers and Roma) and of asylum seekers and migrants more generally, and these are increasingly touted in media discourses as being beyond regulation. Parliamentary and policy discourses (particularly the range of tolerated racist speech) have an impact on media portrayals of immigrants, as exemplified by the portrayals of migrant workers as a threat during austerity, as do police discourses around cultural attributions of behavior and assignations of deviance to particular groups, as a recent case of racial profiling of Roma parents showed (Haynes et al.).

Migrant belonging The study of immigration and citizenship in Ireland has developed over time. From answering a significant concern (largely State-driven) with the impact of immigration on Ireland, in particular with respect to asylum seekers and large numbers of migrant workers, and the correlated experiences of those migrants within a highly stratified system, to seeking to provide an increasingly nuanced answer to what it means in Ireland today to define diversity and citizenship more with respect to the experiences and treatment of immigrants than of those born in Ireland. This chapter has, admittedly, addressed citizenship primarily through the accessibility of rights of those who live in Ireland without being citizens, of those who may become citizens, and those who have become citizens. As Gilmartin (2015) notes, there are still no adequate policy categories which address migrant status and allow for nuanced policy approaches beyond “Irish” versus “non-Irish national,” and this creates problems both for the analysis of data on the experiences of migrants and policy which addresses the inequalities produced by immigration categories. Acknowledging this is important given questions about the extent to which naturalization improves life chances, or not, in the context of widespread racial and anti-immigrant discrimination, and the perceived benefits of citizenship for migrants who may yet choose onward mobilities or refuse Irish-hyphenated identities. The weight of literature on labor migration, international protection, and integration may dominate this area, but it is complemented by a wide range of studies, particularly in sociology and anthropology, of the ways in which that belonging is both embodied and placed. Migration is an experiential and embodied practice, which means that migrants “constantly negotiate a sense of embodied (be)longing,” in both translocal and transcultural ways (Kuusisto-Arponen and Gilmartin 80). Thus, Brazilian parents in the west of Ireland experience bounded solidarities which are deeply place-connected both in Ireland and in Brazil (McGrath), while belonging for migrant mothers is more connected to the location of family connections than the specific location they find themselves (Gilmartin and Migge), and African Pentecostalist churches embed themselves in place through ritualization (like prayer walks) which both offer valuable resources for engagement with other communities but at the same time raise the visibility of their difference and reinforce an “outsider” status (Maguire and Murphy). Anxiety about integration is increasingly localized and based in the failure to address far-right attempts to create racial tensions in places in key urban sites of superdiversity like Drogheda (Co. Louth) or Balbriggan 214

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(Co. Dublin) as much as in any concerns about racial segregation or downward mobilities. The dominance of state interests in exploitative labor migration, explicit recruitment of “highly skilled” migrants while permitting the large-scale deskilling of certain groups of migrants, and persistent failure to drive integration in any meaningful way have been evident in the preceding discussions. The nature of integration in Ireland has, as a result, largely been driven by the same kinds of questions as we noted earlier are commonly adopted by both the State and NGOs, as to whether Ireland might avoid the segregation and segmentation that other countries, particularly in Europe, have experienced (and, arguably, produced). There are key migrant groups which have markedly different experiences to those of the wider population, deeply connected to the nature of the labor market, housing market, and citizenship regime, as well as to failures by the State to address discrimination effectively. If citizenship alone (Irish or EU) were capable of preventing the emerging divergences that are evident as noted previously, there would be little to be concerned about. However, the combined literatures on immigration and citizenship reviewed here suggest otherwise. Concerns about migrants’ mobility in and out of Ireland in the context of Brexit, and perhaps also in the context of COVID-19, are likely to produce a recognizable body of literature in the coming years, as will the shifting landscape of international protection as Europe increasingly closes her borders. Questions of erasure and nonrecognition are key areas for understanding (Mulhall 2020). The lack of visibility in the academic literature of the experiences of our largest immigrant populations is yet to be addressed, as are the interests of LGBT and undocumented migrants and the emerging Irish-born second generation, and an emergent literature which adequately deals with these questions must confront the exclusion of migrants not just from power in society in general but in the nature of the research itself.

Note 1 A8 refers to the eight Central European countries which joined the EU in 2004.

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Gilmartin, M. “Changing Ireland, 2000–2012: Immigration, Emigration and Inequality.” Irish Geography, Vol. 46, No. 1–2, 2013, pp. 91–111. Gilmartin, M. Ireland and Migration in the Twenty-First Century. Manchester University Press, 2015. Gilmartin, M. “Migration Patterns, Experiences and Consequences in an Age of Austerity.” Debating Austerity in Ireland. Edited by E. Heffernan, J. McHale, and N. Moore-Cherry. Royal Irish Academy, 2017. Gilmartin, M. and J. Dagg. “Measuring Migrant Integration in Ireland.” MUSSI Working Paper Series No. 5, August 2018, Maynooth University, 2018. Gilmartin, M. and B. Migge. “Migrant Mothers and the Geographies of Belonging.” Gender, Place and Culture, Vol. 23, No. 2, 2016, pp. 147–161. Glynn, I. An Overview of Ireland’s Integration Policies, Migration Policy Centre, INTERACT Research Report, Country Reports, 2014/10. Cadmus, European University Institute Research Repository. http://hdl.handle.net/1814/32249 (Accessed July 20, 2020). Grotti, R., H. Russell, E. Fahey, and B. Maître. “Discrimination and Inequality in Housing in Ireland.” The Economic and Social Research Institute and Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, 2018. Gusciute, E., S. Arnold, and E. Quinn. Integration of Beneficiaries of International Protection Into the Labour Market: Policies and Practices in Ireland. European Migration Network and Economic and Social Research Institute, 2016. www.esri.ie/publications/integration-of-beneficiaries-of-international-protectioninto-the-labour-market (Accessed July 20, 2020). Haynes, A., M.J. Power, E. Devereux, A. Dillane, and J. Carr, Eds. Public and Political Discourses of Migration: International Perspectives. Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Haynes, A. and J. Schweppe. “Internationalizing Hate Crime and the Problem of the Intractable State: The Case for Ireland.” The Globalization of Hate: Internationalizing Hate Crime. Edited by Jennifer Schweppe and Mark Austin Walters. Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 157–173. Immigrant Council of Ireland. Strength in Diversity: The Experience of Migrant Candidates in the 2019 Local Election, April 2020. Immigrant Council of Ireland, 2020. Irish Network Against Racism (INAR). Alternative Report on Racial Discrimination in Ireland: Collective Civil Society Perspective: Submission to UN CERD 2019. Irish Network Against Racism (INAR), 2019. Joseph, E. “Whiteness and Racism: Examining the Racial Order in Ireland.” Irish Journal of Sociology, Vol. 26, No. 1, 2018, pp. 46–70. Joyce, C. and E. Quinn. “The Organisation of Reception Facilities for Asylum Seekers in Ireland.” Economic and Social Research Institute, 2014. www.esri.ie/publications/the-organisation-of-receptionfacilities-for-asylum-seekers-in-ireland (Accessed July 20, 2020). Kelly, E., S. McGuinness, P. O’Connell, A.G. Pandiella, and D. Haugh. “How Did Immigrants Fare in the Irish Labour Market over the Great Recession?” OECD Economics Department Working Papers No. 1284, 2016. https://dx.doi.org/10.1787/5jm0v4f4r8kh-en (Accessed July 20, 2020). Kennedy, P. and K. Smith. “The Hope of a Better Life? Exploring the Challenges Faced by Migrant Roma Families in Ireland in Relation to Children’s Education.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 45, No. 15, 2019, pp. 2934–2952. Kilpatrick, A. “A Human Rights Based Approach to Policing in Ireland.” ICCL, 2018. Kitching, K. “Interrogating the Changing Inequalities Constituting ‘Popular’ ‘Deviant’ and ‘Ordinary’ Subjects of School/Subculture in Ireland: Moments of New Migrant Student Recognition, Resistance and Recuperation.” Race Ethnicity and Education, Vol. 14, No. 3, 2011, pp. 293–311. Krings, T. et al. “Polish Migration to Ireland: ‘Free Movers’ in the New European Mobility Space.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1, 2013, pp. 87–103. Kuusisto-Arponen, A.K. and M. Gilmartin. “Embodied Migration and the Geographies of Care: The Worlds of Unaccompanied Refugee Minors.” Handbook on Critical Geographies of Migration. Edited by K. Mitchell, R. Jones, and J.L. Fluri. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019, pp. 80–91. Lentin, A. Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe. Pluto Press, 2004. Lentin, A. and G. Titley. The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age. Zed Books Ltd., 2011. Lentin, R. “Strangers and Strollers: Feminist Notes on Researching Migrant m/Others.” Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 27, No. 4, 2004, pp. 301–314. Lentin, R. “Black Bodies and ‘Headless Hookers’: Alternative Global Narratives for 21st Century Ireland.” The Irish Review, Vol. 33, 2005, pp. 1–12. Lentin, R. “Ireland: Racial State and Crisis Racism.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 30, No. 4, 2007, pp. 610–627. Lentin, R. “Turbans, Hijabs and Other Differences: Integration from below and Irish Interculturalism.” European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2012, pp. 226–242. 217

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Lentin, R. “Asylum Seekers, Ireland, and the Return of the Repressed.” Irish Studies Review, Vol. 24, No. 1, 2016, pp. 21–34. Lentin, R. “Incarceration, Disavowal and Ireland’s Prison Industrial Complex.” The Carceral Network in Ireland. Edited by Fiona McCann. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 259–278. Loyal, S. Understanding Immigration in Ireland: State, Capital and Labour in a Global Age. Manchester University Press, 2011. Loyal, S. and S. Quilley. “Categories of State Control: Asylum Seekers and the Direct Provision and Dispersal System in Ireland.” Social Justice, Vol. 3, No. 4, 2016, pp. 69–97. Mac Éinrí, P. and A. White. “Immigration Into the Republic of Ireland: A Bibliography of Recent Research.” Irish Geography, Vol. 41, No. 2, 2008, pp. 151–179. Maguire, M. and F. Murphy. Integration in Ireland: The Everyday Lives of African Migrants. Manchester University Press, 2012. Maguire, M. and G. Titley. “Introductory Essay: The Body and Soul of Integration.” Translocations: Migration and Social Change, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2009, pp. 1–19. Maher, G. and M. Cawley. “Short-Term Labour Migration: Brazilian Migrants in Ireland.” Population, Space and Place, Vol. 22, No. 1, 2016, pp. 23–35. Mannion, Katie. Child Migration Matters: Children and Young People’s Experiences of Migration. Immigrant Council of Ireland, 2016. Mayock, P., S. Sheridan, and S. Parker. “Migrant Women and Homelessness: The Role of Gender-Based Violence.” European Journal of Homelessness, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2012, pp. 59–82. McGarry, O. “Young Muslims as Insiders and Outsiders.” Immigrants as Outsiders in the Two Irelands. Edited by B. Fanning and L. Michael. Manchester University Press, 2019, pp. 186–200. McGaughey, F. Singled Out: Exploratory Study on Ethnic Profiling in Ireland and Its Impact on Migrant Workers and Their Families. Migrant Rights Centre Ireland, 2011. McGinnity, F. and M. Darmody. “Immigrant-Origin Children and the Education System.” Immigrants as Outsiders in the Two Irelands. Edited by B. Fanning and L. Michael. Manchester University Press, 2019, pp. 173–186. McGinnity, F., R. Grotti, O. Kenny, and H. Russell. “Who Experiences Discrimination in Ireland? Evidence From the QNHS Equality Modules.” Economic and Social Research Institute and Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, 2017. www.esri.ie/publications/who-experiences-discrimination-in-irelandevidence-from-the-qnhs-equality-modules (Accessed July 18, 2020). McGinnity, F. and P. Lunn. “Measuring Discrimination Facing Ethnic Minority Job Applicants: An Irish Experiment.” Work, Employment and Society, Vol. 25, No. 4, 2011, pp. 693–708. McGinnity, F. et al. Attitudes to Diversity in Ireland. Economic and Social Research Institute and Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, 2018. www.ihrec.ie/app/uploads/2018/03/Attitudes-todiversity-in-Ireland.pdf (Accessed July 20, 2020). McGrath, B. “Social Capital in Community, Family, and Work Lives of Brazilian Migrant Parents in Ireland.” Community, Work and Family, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2010, pp. 147–165. Michael, L. Afrophobia: Racism against People of African Descent in Ireland. ENAR Ireland, 2015. Michael, L. “Anti-Black Racism: Afrophobia, Exclusion and Global Racisms.” Critical Perspectives on Hate Crime. Edited by A. Haynes, J. Schweppe and S. Taylor. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 275–299. Michael, L. Reports of Racism in Ireland: 15–16th Report of iReport.ie: January–June 2017. ENAR Ireland, 2018. Michael, L. “Normalising Racism in the Irish Media.” Immigrants as Outsiders in the Two Irelands. Edited by B. Fanning and L. Michael. Manchester University Press, 2019, pp. 140–160. Migrant Rights Centre Ireland (MRCI). Accessing Redress for Workplace Exploitation: The Experience of Migrant Workers. Migrant Rights Centre Ireland, 2012. Migrant Rights Centre Ireland (MRCI). All Work and Low Pay: The Experience of Migrants Working in Ireland. Migrant Rights Centre Ireland, 2015. Molles, E.V. Identity Politics in Local Markets: Comparing Immigrant Integration Outcomes in the “New” Europe. Doctoral dissertation, Boston College, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2015. Moreo, E. and R. Lentin. From Catastrophe to Marginalisation: The Experiences of Somali Refugees in Ireland. Dublin, Migrant Networks Project, Trinity Immigration Initiative, 2010. Murphy, C., L. Caulfield, and M. Gilmartin. Developing Integration Policy in the Public Sector: A Human Rights Approach. Maynooth University, 2017. Murphy, C., D.M. Doyle, and M. Murphy. “Still Waiting for Justice: Migrant Workers’ Perspectives on Labour Exploitation in Ireland.” Industrial Law Journal, November 7, 2019. doi.org/10.1093/indlaw/ dwz023 (Accessed July 20, 2020). 218

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Murphy, F. and U.M. Vieten. “African Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Both Irelands.” Immigrants as Outsiders in the Two Irelands. Edited by B. Fanning and L. Michael. Manchester University Press, 2019, pp. 58–72. Nedeljković, V. “Reiterating Asylum Archive: Documenting Direct Provision in Ireland.” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, Vol. 23, No. 2, 2018, pp. 289–293. Ní Raghallaigh, M. and L. Thornton. “Vulnerable Childhood, Vulnerable Adulthood: Direct Provision as aftercare for Aged-Out Separated Children Seeking Asylum in Ireland.” Critical Social Policy, Vol. 37, No. 3, 2017, pp. 386–404. O’Boyle, N. et al. “‘New Irish’ in the News.” Irish Communication Review, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2014, pp. 3–16. O’Brien-Olinger, S. Police, Race and Culture in the “New Ireland.” Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. O’Connell, P.J. “Why Are So Few Africans at Work in Ireland? Immigration Policy and Labour Market Disadvantage.” Irish Journal of Sociology, Vol. 27, No. 3, 2019, pp. 273–295. O’Connor, S. “Problematising Strategic Internationalisation: Tensions and Conflicts between International Student Recruitment and Integration Policy in Ireland.” Globalisation, Societies and Education, Vol. 16, No. 3, 2017, pp. 339–352. O’Malley, E. “Why Is There No Radical Right Party in Ireland?” West European Politics, Vol. 31, No. 5, 2008, pp. 966–977. O’Reilly, Z. “‘Living Liminality’: Everyday Experiences of Asylum Seekers in the ‘Direct Provision’ System in Ireland.” Gender, Place and Culture, Vol. 25, No. 6, 2018, pp. 821–842. Ogbu, H.U., B. Brady, and L. Kinlen. “Parenting in Direct Provision: Parents’ Perspectives Regarding Stresses and Supports.” Child Care in Practice, Vol. 20, No. 3, 2014, pp. 256–269. Okigbo, E.A. “Immigrant Political Integration in Ireland: Unpacking the Puzzle.” African Identities, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2014, pp. 152–164. Otukoya, B. “Hyphenated Citizens as Outsiders.” Immigrants as Outsiders in the Two Irelands. Edited by B. Fanning and L. Michael. Manchester University Press, 2019, pp. 213–229. Pan, D. “Student Visas, Undocumented Labour, and the Boundaries of Legality: Chinese Migration and English as a Foreign Language Education in the Republic of Ireland.” Social Anthropology, Vol. 19, No. 3, 2011, pp. 268–287. Perry, J. “Ireland in an International Comparative Context.” Critical Perspectives on Hate Crime. Edited by A. Haynes, J. Schweppe, and S. Taylor. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 93–107. Rojas-Coppari, P. “The Lives of Filipino-Irish Care Workers.” Immigrants as Outsiders in the Two Irelands. Edited by B. Fanning and L. Michael. Manchester University Press, 2019, pp. 89–100. Schweppe, J., A. Haynes, and J. Carr. A Life Free from Fear: Legislating for Hate Crime in Ireland: An NGO Perspective. University of Limerick Hate and Hostility Research Group, 2014. Shandy, D.J. and D.V. Power. “The Birth of the African-Irish Diaspora: Pregnancy and Post-Natal Experiences of African Immigrant Women in Ireland.” International Migration, Vol. 46, No. 5, 2008, pp. 119–142. Siapera, E. “Organised and Ambient Digital Racism: Multidirectional Flows in the Irish Digital Sphere.” Open Library of Humanities, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2019. http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.405. Szlovak, P. “Exploring the Reasons for Migrant Under-Representation in Irish Electoral Politics: The Role of Irish Political Parties.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 40, No. 5, 2017, pp. 851–870. Thornton, L. “Ireland to Opt-In to EU Reception Conditions Directive: What Will This Mean for Asylum Seekers?” Research Repository UCD, January 31, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10197/9619 (Accessed July 20, 2020). Titley, G. “All Aboard the Migration Nation.” Ireland under Austerity: Neoliberal Crisis, Neoliberal Solutions. Edited by C. Coulter and A. Nagle. Manchester University Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.7765/978 1784997120.00016. Tyrell, N. “Of Course I’m Not Irish: Young People in Migrant Worker Families in Ireland.” Spacing Ireland: Place, Society and Culture in a Post-Boom Era. Edited by C. Crowley and D. Linehan. Manchester University Press, 2016, pp. 32–44. Vang, Z. “Housing Supply and Residential Segregation in Ireland.” Urban Studies, Vol. 47, No. 14, 2010, pp. 2983–3012. White, A. and M. Gilmartin. “Critical Geographies of Citizenship and Belonging in Ireland.” Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 31, No. 5, 2008, pp. 390–399.

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17 The “new Irish” neighborhood Race and succession in Ireland and Irish America Sarah L. Townsend

Sebastian Barry’s 2007 play The Pride of Parnell Street registers the transformation of Dublin during the Celtic Tiger years with a simple refrain that distinguishes the past from the present: “In them days.” For Janet, a thirty-something mother and domestic abuse survivor, the joys and tragedies of her life unfolded in a very different city than the prosperous, multicultural metropolis she currently inhabits. “In them days” names a time before prosperity and widespread employment, before European resort holidays, and “before the Africans came to Parnell Street . . . and got old shops all new again” (Barry 14). Yet, for all the anticipation circulating in Dublin at the time of the play’s setting in 1999, Janet remains nostalgic for an older Northside neighborhood that may have been wracked with dependency and crime but that belonged unquestionably to her own native-born working-class and underclass community. The African shopkeepers and residents who settled along Parnell Street and the adjoining area during the latter 1990s encapsulate for Barry’s character the disorienting demographic and economic changes that have transpired in her beloved Dublin. But they are merely a local instantiation of migration patterns that occurred throughout Ireland during the Celtic Tiger years. As immigrants and asylum seekers arrived from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere, they came to be referred to collectively as the “new Irish”—though the play never invokes the term—and were associated with the so-called “new Ireland” in complicated and often contradictory ways. Hailed when convenient as emblems of a more prosperous, worldly, and enlightened Ireland, more often the newcomers were systematically neglected and/or scapegoated for the inequalities generated by the economic bubble, as when Janet’s impoverished mother-in-law accuses immigrants of taking “the best jobs off of the Irish and . . . sponging off of the state” (Barry 25). The Pride of Parnell Street reflects upon the conceptual utility of newness during the Celtic Tiger, asking what congratulatory narratives it enabled (like inclusivity and economic progress) and what forms of social erasure it concealed. If Janet conflates the “new Ireland” and the “new Irish,” her estranged husband Joe gleans the vastly disproportionate power of the two, how the one deploys and then disposes of the other in its processes of dispossession and regeneration. The new immigrants, he suspects, are merely the latest pawns in the gentrification of Dublin’s inner city. As Joe puts it, “You know in your heart of hearts that what the big fellas, I mean, the politicians, really want to do, is get rid of you, just clean the shite out of Dublin, like the shite in the Liffey, and have a nice clean fucking perfect Dublin” (Barry 18). 220

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Barry’s play anticipates how the newly multicultural Parnell Street would become an important site in the revitalization and commodification of Dublin city during and after the Celtic Tiger. The initial wave of African-owned shops and restaurants reinvigorated the area, replaced later by Eastern European and Asian businesses. The city has sought to stabilize turnover along the street and to create an international commercial quarter that will enhance culture tourism and connect the O’Connell Street corridor with the North Georgian Core. The precise nature of Parnell Street’s rebranding is still under debate: some have petitioned for its official designation as a Chinatown, while others have called for a more inclusive label, like the “Parnell International NewIrish Town” proposed by Dublin City Councilor Bill Tormey in 2010. Nonetheless, the city’s aims for the area can be seen in planning documents like the Dublin Civic Trust’s 2011 study of Parnell Street East (commissioned by Carroll’s and the Dublin City Business Association) which outlines necessary steps for creating a tourist-friendly commercial district infused with the commodified flavor of internationalism. Atop the list are measures to ensure the safety and comfort of pedestrians, including the eradication of “[a]ntisocial behavior” and the relocation of “drug treatment centres and other facilities . . . which present a threatening atmosphere to city visitors” (Coyne et al. 2011, 19). As Barry’s Joe surmises, optimizing Dublin’s image and profitability takes precedence over providing services and support for the area’s many vulnerable residents, at least as far as the business sector is concerned. Yet, if the 2017 Mulvey Report on the regeneration of North East Inner City Dublin is any indication, the clean-up efforts along Parnell Street and adjoining neighborhoods have done little to stem deprivation and crime. The transfer of urban spaces like Parnell Street from mostly native-born white Irish residents to new immigrant communities provides a lens into broader processes of racial succession that are still unfolding in Ireland. Over the past two decades, considerable scholarly attention has been devoted to interrogating the evolving category of Irishness as it is stripped of its monocultural associations. Meanwhile, policy initiatives and nongovernmental organizations have worked (to varying degrees of success) to put inclusion into practice and to reimagine national belonging for a multiracial, multilingual, and multifaith society. What has received considerably less attention, however, is the changing meaning of Irishness for those who find their nationality suddenly qualified by the implied modifiers “old,” “native,” or “white.” How does the arrival of immigrants alter the racial and civic identities of longtime residents? How does it affect socioeconomic mobility? To what extent does it remap the distribution of Irish space? Although these questions are relatively new in Ireland, they have circulated in the United States since at least the beginning of the twentieth century, when Irish-American urban enclaves that were established in the nineteenth century began to disperse and diversify. This chapter turns to a case study in this history, a period in the 1940s and ’50s when journalists and politicians directed concerted attention to the sizeable population of non-Irish immigrants and minorities residing in the traditionally Irish neighborhood of Corktown in Detroit, Michigan. The stories that Detroiters told about these demographic changes, and the vocabulary they used, furnish an instructive model for examining Irish multiculturalism on both sides of the Atlantic. Irish Corktowners and other mid-century observers considered the neighborhood’s racial and ethnic transformation a natural, if lamentable, consequence of Irish-American upward mobility. As immigrants and their descendants advanced economically and professionally, they also assimilated into a white American race that granted them countless advantages, including the freedom to settle in any neighborhood or municipality they could afford. By tracing the succession of inner-city ethnic neighborhoods like Corktown, we gain new insight into the spatial dynamics of Irish racialization in the US. Pioneering accounts of Irish-American whiteness by scholars like Theodore Allen, David Roediger, and Noel Ignatiev have emphasized the combative nature of race relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Irish, they argue, positioned 221

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themselves firmly within a white America by securing and defending their hold on particular industries and professions, on electoral politics, on forms of cultural representation, and even on physical space.1 Yet, this chapter will show that they also assimilated by relinquishing their ethnically marked enclaves at key historical junctures. As Irish Detroiters moved out of their aging inner-city homes during the early and mid-twentieth century, they ceded the neighborhood to newer groups of immigrants and minorities who, they imagined, would become the “new Irish.” More than a benevolent gesture, this imaginative bequeathal was also a way of signaling their own incorporation into the unmarked territory of American whiteness. ********** In March 1949, the Detroit Free Press published an article by staff writer William Pooler about the growing racial and ethnic diversity of the traditionally Irish enclave of Corktown, which was established on the city’s west side by immigrants during the 1830s and 1840s. Titled “Magic in Corktown,” the article describes efforts made by newer non-Irish residents to honor the neighborhood’s legacy and to maintain its customs, especially around St. Patrick’s Day. “The names have changed,” declares the headline, “but not the spirit” (Pooler 1949, 13). At the center of the spread appears a photo of five 13-year-old schoolchildren standing around a statue of St. Patrick: Black, Chinese, Maltese, Mexican, and Irish children bound together by their love of all things Irish (Figure 17.1).

Figure 17.1 Magic in Corktown Source: Detroit Free Press. © 1949 Gannett-Community Publishing. All rights reserved. Used under license.

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In its tone and tenor, the article bears a striking resemblance to discussions of immigration in Ireland from the early 2000s. Consider the terminology: the author refers to the multiracial schoolchildren as the “new ‘Irish’ Kids of Corktown” and “New Corktowners,” along with quainter euphemisms like the “sunburned,” “dusky,” or “dark-skinned Irish,” phrases meant to distinguish the newcomers from the fairer-complexioned residents who had populated Old Corktown (Pooler 1949, 13). Similar, too, are the emphatic ways that Irishness is ascribed to new immigrants and minorities. Pooler insists that the schoolchildren want to be Irish, writing, “The Maltese brag that they are more Irish than the Mexicans, for they settled [in Corktown] first,” and he marvels that despite their varied backgrounds, the children “have found a oneness in all being Irish” (1949, 13). In its hearty, if strained, celebration of the neighborhood’s diversity, “Magic in Corktown” grapples with changes in the demographic makeup of the neighborhood that had been unfolding for half a century. Starting around the turn of the twentieth century, Irish families in Corktown who had become economically and professionally successful began relocating to other wealthier parts of the city and, later, to the suburbs. The upward and outward mobility of Detroit’s inner-city Irish community mirrored patterns occurring in other US cities. For instance, on St. Patrick’s Day 1907, two nearly identical newspaper articles about the success of Irish Americans appeared, one in the Detroit Free Press titled “Irishmen of Detroit: Sons of Erin and Their Descendants Who Have Made Their Mark on the Pages of the City’s History,” the other in the Chicago Daily Tribune titled “The Irish in America.” Even the layout was similar, each featuring portraits of prominent Irishmen interspersed with a shamrock design. By the mid-twentieth century, the majority of Corktown’s residents were non-Irish. As Pooler describes it, the Irish have left behind . . . a strong tradition. They began moving on 50 years ago— becoming fine judges, merchants, builders. The new, darker “Irish” flowed into their old homes, old church, old school seats.  .  .  . And there today, by some mystical alchemy becoming Irish, Mexicans, Maltese, Syrians, Negro, Filipino—all live in a harmony of brotherhood. (1949, 13) Yet, despite his insistence that the newer residents have become indelibly and harmoniously Irish, the author also admits that certain aspects of the neighborhood have changed. Church attendance for the Feasts of St. Paul and Our Lady of Guadalupe outstrip the turnout on St. Patrick’s Day, the predominantly non-Irish priests now ofer Masses and confession in Spanish, and Pooler concedes, “There’s no denying—so to speak—that the complexion of Old Corktown has changed” (1949, 13). “Magic in Corktown” thrums with nostalgia for a long-lost ethnic enclave that disappeared with Irish-American upward mobility. This nostalgia proved nothing new: as early as the 1920s, residents and outside observers alike sensed that the real Corktown already had become a relic. Each year, newspaper coverage of the annual St. Patrick’s Day celebrations would emphasize how the festivities paled in comparison to the celebrations a generation earlier. For instance, a March 1929 Detroit Free Press article reminisced about the grand parades that used to be held in Corktown, claiming “There is nothing like it left” (“St. Patrick’s Day” 7). The Detroit News was a little more optimistic, describing the Knights of Columbus Hall’s St. Patrick’s Day party as “a somewhat fairy-like and miraculous turning back of the pages of time” (Leduc 1929, 10). A running theme throughout the annual press coverage from the 1920s onward was the fleeting nature of the holiday: the now well-heeled former inhabitants might return once a year, 223

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and the neighborhood might manage briefly to approximate its former glory, but in actual fact, the Detroit Irish had moved on. For proof of this process, Detroiters looked no further than to hometown hero Henry Ford and his descendants, who at times were praised for honoring their Irish heritage, as when the Detroit News photographed Edsel Ford dressed in an Irish costume at the Risko-Heeney boxing match in October 1927 (Figure 17.2), and who at other times were criticized for losing touch with their roots, as in a curious 1947 Detroit Free Press article bemoaning the dearth of green automobiles driven to Corktown’s annual St. Patrick’s Day celebration. “[I]t seems,” the author rues, “that even Henry Ford [II], and he not too far separated from the turf of the County Cork, can’t muster a passable Irish green in the rainbow colors of his cars” (O’Callaghan 1947, 9).

Figure 17.2 Edsel Ford sports an Irish costume at the Risko-Heeney boxing match, 1927 Source: Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.

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The 1920s and 1930s were a period of significant transition not only for Corktown but for all of Detroit’s neighborhoods. The automobile industry drew a host of new workers to the city, including Black laborers from the south and immigrants from Latin America and Europe (especially Mexico and Malta), thereby altering the population of Detroit. At the same time, ethnic neighborhoods were in decline. According to Thomas Sugrue, By the 1920s, the city’s tightly knit ethnic clusters had begun to disperse, and fewer and fewer white neighborhoods were ethnically homogeneous.  .  .  . Residents of Detroit’s white neighborhoods abandoned their ethnic affiliations and found a new identity in their whiteness. (22) This phenomenon was not unique to Detroit; rather, it stemmed from developments at the national level. As Mae Ngai argues, the immigration quota system established by the Johnson– Reed Act of 1924, which remapped US citizenship along racial lines, positioned European immigrants securely within “a white American race, in which persons of European descent shared a common whiteness distinct from those deemed to be not white” (24–25). This is the point at which Irish heritage began morphing in the US from an essential racial identifier into an increasingly optional ethnic afliation. It is this sense of having been absorbed into a white America that contributes to both the Irish nostalgia and alienation that permeates journalism about Corktown in the early and midtwentieth century. In a 1929 Detroit News article, a self-described “prodigal” recounts the changes that have transpired in the neighborhood during his absence, like signs written in Greek, Spanish, Turkish, and other foreign languages, or rows of Chinese shops that cast “an Oriental atmosphere” upon the neighborhood (Rounder 24). Even more unsettling for the author is his interaction with a young Irish woman he describes as “a product of the newer Detroit,” who asks him, “Corktown? . . . And where’s that?” (Rounder 24). Many residents feared that Corktown might disappear altogether, and the 1930s witnessed a number of commemorative efforts. In 1934 the neighborhood’s parish, Most Holy Trinity, marked the centenary of its founding with a celebration the Detroit Free Press dubbed “a cosmopolitan affair” (“Old Corktown” 2), while in 1937 the Old Corktown Club was formed in order to ensure “the salvation of Corktown’s best traditions” (Stark 39). By the 1940s, white nostalgia and alienation had given way to bouts of racial violence in parts of Detroit, most notably the race riot of 1943, where Black residents incurred the vast majority of injuries, casualties, property damage, and arrests. The decade saw a number of public housing experiments aimed at integrating Detroit’s neighborhoods and an even stiffer resistance mounted by white homeowners determined to keep their streets racially homogeneous.2 Amid these developments, Corktown remained a notable exception insofar as it maintained a diverse population throughout the 1940s and 1950s with few documented incidents of racial violence. Media coverage of the neighborhood wavered during these years between celebrating Corktown’s laudable multiculturalism and mourning its long-lost white ethnic identity. “There’s Still a Corktown—with a Latin Air,” declared the Detroit Free Press in February 1948, noting that [w]here once the streets were filled with blue-eyed men and women . . . [now] [b]eauty in Corktown is most apt to be of a different hue. Eyes are dark and flashing and hair is piled high in the manner of Mexico. (Callaghan 1947, 12) 225

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In March 1947, the Detroit News announced, “Mexican and Maltese to Jig for St. Patrick in Corktown,” assuring readers that the annual festivities “will all be in the truest spirit of Old Corktown” (Lochbiler 13). In a similarly laudatory vein, journalists in the 1950s began describing the neighborhood as a “little league of nations,” a “Little United Nations,” and “one of the greatest hodge-podge of nationalities in America” (Manos 1953, 40; Winge 1953, 3; Pooler 1951, B1). Yet alongside these celebrations of diversity, other mournful sentiments appear. Two years before he wrote “Magic in Corktown,” Pooler published a diferent article describing the progress made by the Detroit Irish over the prior century. In Corktown’s heyday “it was all Irish,” he writes, and “the marooned Scotch and few Germans of old Corktown were swallowed in the customs . . . the wakes, the glorious St. Patrick Day parades, the feasting and the fighting” (Pooler 1947, 11). By the 1940s the tables had turned, however, and the neighborhood’s few remaining Irish families found themselves outnumbered. “Corktown now,” he laments, “is Chinatown at one end and factories at the other” (Pooler 1947, 11). The factories would only multiply. Over the next ten years, Corktown was carved up by the development projects of a Detroit city council caught up in the fever of postwar urban renewal. Starting in the early 1950s, homes and businesses in the neighborhood were cleared in order to construct the Lodge Freeway. A decade later, the new Fisher Freeway would cut the neighborhood in two. Even more devastating were the slum clearance projects outlined in the city’s 1951 Master Plan, which sought to capitalize on federal urban renewal funds made available under the Housing Act of 1949. One of the first of these projects, the West Side Industrial Project, called for 75 acres of Corktown to be cleared and rezoned for light industrial use; the area was, according to the Detroit City Plan Commission, “unfit for homes” (3). Although the neighborhood protested the initiative throughout the planning phase, the Detroit Common Council approved the West Side Industrial Project unanimously in 1957. By 1963, after a second wave of demolition, over 70% of the houses in Corktown had been leveled, with hundreds of families displaced. During the same period, the Gratiot Redevelopment Project razed two of the city’s oldest Black enclaves, Paradise Valley and Black Bottom. As June Manning Thomas has argued, by targeting the oldest housing stock in the city, Detroit’s slum clearance projects exacerbated existing racial and economic disparities. Displaced residents struggled to find affordable and adequate housing, especially Black residents who encountered rampant segregation elsewhere in Detroit, and the city’s promises to build integrated low-income public housing on the Gratiot site failed to materialize. It was only after the 1967 riot that the City Planning Commission began to consult with grassroots organizations and affected communities, at which point much of the damage was irreparable and residents’ trust in the commission had eroded beyond repair.3 In Corktown, the departure of Irish-Americans played an important role in how the neighborhood’s redevelopment was imagined and justified. One frequent claim made during the 1940s and 1950s was that the neighborhood had deteriorated precipitously since its heyday. In Old Corktown, wrote Detroit Free Press columnist Anthony Weitzel in 1944, “There were green lawns and cool trees. . . . Now Corktown is shabby, sun-baked, squalid” (16). Weitzel observes “grimy little toddlers,” a “kid [who] was playing on the sloping top of a concrete garbage receptacle,” and a “little gang of teen-agers” with criminal records, commenting wryly that “the cops have to travel through Old Corktown in pairs!” (16). The implication is that Corktown deteriorated into an unwholesome, even dangerous, slum once the Irish left and minorities moved in. Similar moralizing sentiments would appear in official proceedings like Detroit Common Council’s resolution in June 1955, which declares that Corktown “has been blighted by obsolescence, physical deterioration of structures, and other similar characteristics which endanger the health, safety, morals and general welfare of the City of Detroit” (1364). Yet records suggest that Councilors may have seen merit in residents’ claim that their homes, while aging, were well maintained. Just 226

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one year earlier, the Common Council reached out to the city’s legal counsel, who advised them that planning commissioners ought to exercise leeway in classifying Corktown a slum. “Public necessity does not require that the evil be absolute,” counsel cautioned in August 1954. “Whether a housing situation may be deemed to be detrimental to the public safety or morals is a matter of common sense and sound discretion” (Detroit Common Council 2099–2100). The 1940s and 1950s brought about two competing visions for the afterlife of Irish Corktown: the one, a humble enclave for the next wave of immigrants and minorities who replaced the upwardly mobile Irish, and the other, a revitalized urban corridor that would attract industry and garner international prestige. It is little surprise that the latter vision would prevail, given civic leaders’ faith in the power of urban planning. The ambitions of the Detroit City Planning Commission can be gleaned in publications like its 1958 report on the West Side (Corktown) Industrial Project, which depicts a modern, multiuse district encompassing everything from warehousing facilities and cargo terminals to hotels, restaurants, and “landscaped recreation areas with shuffleboard courts, horseshoe pits and benches” (15). A redeveloped Corktown also appeared in a grandiose 1957 Detroit News preview of the 1962 World Trade Fair, which the city planned to hold as a prelude to hosting the 1964 Olympics. According to City Planning Director Charles A. Blessing, the two events (neither of which ultimately came to fruition) presented an opportunity to showcase Detroit’s revitalization efforts and to “lay before the people of the world a new concept for a modern, efficient and beautiful metropolitan city” (qtd. in Wells 1957, 40). In actual practice, the redevelopment of Corktown fell short of what city planners had envisioned. The project, which progressed slowly and at a significant cost, attracted less industrial investment than projected and did little to alleviate land shortages in the city. Meanwhile, the remaining residential portions of Corktown attained historical designation in the late 1970s, ushering in a wave of preservation and gentrification that, according to John Hartigan Jr., steadily diminished the neighborhood’s racial diversity. Nevertheless, during the postwar years when city leaders were still determining Corktown’s future, the multiethnic and multiracial “new Irish” residents played an important part in how the enclave was imagined and how it imagined itself. On the one hand, they demonstrated the neighborhood’s legacy of sheltering the poor and marginalized; on the other hand, they furnished seemingly definitive proof of Irish Americans’ own upward mobility. In July 1957, the Detroit Free Press issued an editorial supporting the West Side Industrial Project, accompanied by a cartoon depicting an anthropomorphized “Old Corktown,” as it is scooped up by the bulldozer of progress. In both items, Irish nostalgia is depicted as a guileless impediment to urban renewal. “Corktown,” the editorial declares, is encased in Detroit’s history as a venerated spot into which flocked the Sons of Erin in the lusty, gusty bygone days. . . . And strong loyalty to Corktown is harbored in many a breast. It is not easy for the old folks to give up a house which symbolizes a lifetime of struggle and dreams fulfilled. Progress is not without its sacrifices. (“Progress” 1957, 8) Already here, Corktown appears not as a living neighborhood but a vestigial memory, a symbol of the Irish-American journey, and most importantly, a sentimental attachment that must be sacrificed in the name of progress. Like many of the other documents discussed in this chapter, the editorial envisions Irishness as a condition of striving that Irish Americans have outgrown by mid-century. The story of Corktown’s “New Irish” is, after all, a story of succession. In handing over the neighborhood, the Irish could imagine that they were bequeathing opportunity to America’s next wave of immigrants and minorities. Even the Detroit Common Council 227

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embraced this narrative, issuing a March 1956 resolution acknowledging the neighborhood’s “honorable” Irish past and its ongoing service as an immigrant enclave: Whereas, With the gradual change of the Corktown population, Most Holy Trinity assumed a new and vital role . . . [as] a Port of Entry and welcome to new or relatively new Americans. . . . Now, Therefore, Be It Resolved, That this Common Council, in commemoration of the Feast of St. Patrick, heartily applaud and commend the Parishioners of Most Holy Trinity. (483) Sixteen months later, those very councilors would vote unanimously in favor of the neighborhood’s demolition. ********** As the case study of Detroit’s Corktown demonstrates, the idea of the “new Irish” may have surfaced during the Celtic Tiger, but it did not originate there. Rather, it derives from an older conceptual vocabulary developed in the twentieth-century US to account for Irish-American upward mobility. By identifying new groups of immigrants and minorities as their heirs, IrishAmericans such as Old Corktowners could furnish seemingly irrefutable proof of their own socioeconomic advancement and assimilation into a white American race. Half a century later, the arrival of non-white immigrants to Ireland would be similarly hailed as evidence of the nation’s transition to a permanent state of multicultural prosperity. Yet, in both instances the imagined metamorphosis entails deep racial mourning and the erasure of those who cannot or will not uphold the official narrative of progress. Mid-century Detroit and Celtic Tiger Ireland are but two sites in a transnational history of Irish racial formation wherein whiteness proves less a definitive destination than an evolving process of differentiation and succession. Together they provide a framework for interrogating the rhetoric of multicultural Irishness and for asking: what spaces do the “old” or “native” Irish imagine they are vacating, what responsibilities are they abnegating, what economic conditions do they hope they are transcending, and what racial echelon do they envision themselves entering when they christen another group their successors?

Notes 1 Legally speaking, Irish immigrants were white upon arrival in the US insofar as they were eligible for citizenship under the Naturalization Act of 1790, which was limited to “any alien, being a free white person” who had resided in the US for at least two years. When scholars discuss the process by which the Irish “became white,” they are referring to immigrants’ cultural assimilation (for examples, see O’Neill), or the way they exercised their already given whiteness to uphold the color line and gain power over their Black counterparts and other immigrant groups (see Ignatiev). 2 The rhetoric of homeownership and property rights anchored anti-integrationist campaigns both within and outside the city. Sugrue explains how Detroit neighborhoods stymied public housing initiatives in the 1940s through the coordinated efforts of homeowners’ associations, realtors, developers, and elected officials. Freund traces parallel efforts in the suburbs, which relied upon zoning ordinances and discriminatory lending practices. 3 On the downfall and legacy of the City Planning Commission, see Phillips.

Works cited Allen, T.W. The Invention of the White Race, Vol. I: Racial Oppression and Social Control. Verso, 1994. Barry, S. The Pride of Parnell Street. Faber and Faber, 2007.

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Callaghan, J.D. “There’s still a Corktown with a Latin Air.” Detroit Free Press, February 22, 1948, p. 12. Coyne, S., G. Hickey, and G. Walsh. Parnell Street East: A Vision for an Historic City Centre Street, 2011. Dublin Civic Trust. www.dublincivictrust.ie. Detroit City Plan Commission. Industrial Development: West Side Development Project. 1958. Detroit Common Council. Journal of the Proceedings of the Common Council, Vols. 1954–1956. Freund, D.M. Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America. University of Chicago Press, 2007. Greusel, J.H. “Irishmen of Detroit: Sons of Erin and Their Descendants Who Have Made Their Mark on the Pages of the City’s History.” Detroit Free Press, March 17, 1907, p. C1. Hartigan, J. Jr. Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit. Princeton University Press, 1999. Ignatiev, N. How the Irish Became White. Routledge, 1995. “The Irish in America.” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 17, 1907, p. J2. Leduc, H. “Old Corktown Lives again at St. Patrick’s Day Party.” Detroit News, March 18, 1929, p. 10. Lochbiler, D. “Mexican and Maltese to Jig for St. Patrick in Corktown.” Detroit News, March 13, 1947, p. 13. Manos, C. “Corktown Needs Safe Playground.” Detroit Free Press, July 20, 1953, p. 40. Mulvey, K. Creating a Brighter Future: An Outline Plan for the Social and Economic Regeneration of Dublin’s North East Inner City. Dublin: Government Publications, 2017. Ngai, M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton University Press, 2014. The O’Callaghan. “Autos Not Wearin’ the Green.” Detroit Free Press, March 17, 1947, p. 9. O’Neill, P.D. Famine Irish and the American Racial State. Routledge, 2017. “Old Corktown Holds a Party.” Detroit Free Press, March 19, 1934, p. 2. Phillips, H.H. “The Fall of the Detroit Plan Commission: A Classic Tragedy, and an Example of Throwing the Baby Out with the Bath Water.” Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 54, No. 2, 1988, p. 163. Pooler, J.S. “Corktown’s Own ‘UN.’” Detroit Free Press, December 9, 1951, p. B1. Pooler, J.S. “Just 100 Years Ago, a Famine Built Corktown.” Detroit Free Press, Februay 23, 1947, p. 11. Pooler, J.S. “Magic in Corktown.” Detroit Free Press, March 13, 1949, p. 13. “Progress Dooms Old Corktown.” Detroit Free Press, July 11, 1957, p. 8. Roediger, D.R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Verso, 1991. The Rounder. “A Prodigal Returns to Corktown.” Detroit News, March 10, 1929, p. 24. Stark, G.W. “Old Corktown Club Formed to Keep Traditions Green.” Detroit News, February 7, 1937, p. 39. “St. Patrick’s Day Parade Past Relic, Say Irish.” Detroit Free Press, March 17, 1929, p. 7. Sugrue, T. Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton University Press, 2004. Thomas, J.M. Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Weitzel, A. “Where the Cops Travel in Pairs.” Detroit Free Press, August 29, 1994, p. 16. Wells, R.L. “Previewing Detroit’s 1962 World Trade Fair: International Exhibit Will Have Its Setting in ‘Revitalized City’.” Detroit News, November 18, 1957, p. 40. Winge, E. “Old Corktown Battles Condemnation.” Detroit Free Press, April 13, 1953, p. 3.

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18 Gender and Irish Studies 2008 to the present Claire Bracken

As a field of study, Irish Studies has always had a gender problem, with paradigmatic frames of the nation eclipsing—indeed marginalizing—the voices of women writers, of feminist scholars, and of discourses of gender, sexuality, and feminism. In her 2004 analysis “The Limits of ‘Irish Studies’: Historicism, Culturalism, Paternalism,” Linda Connolly reflects on the dominance of the postcolonial model in the field of Irish Studies and its relationship to gender and feminist studies scholarship, noting that “When feminism/women’s writing/gender and representation is mentioned in mainstream texts, the strong voice of feminist criticism is somehow silenced” (Connolly 151). Patricia Coughlan, Margaret Kelleher, Gerardine Meaney, and Moynagh Sullivan have voiced similar concerns in their important scholarship, highlighting the mechanisms by which a postcolonial-inflected Irish Studies has systematically excluded and elided the scholarship of feminist criticism.1 As Meaney notes “the work of feminist and queer theory tends to be partitioned from the mainstream, often co-existing within the same academic institutions but publishing and presenting in parallel universes” (Meaney 2010, xx). The paradigmatic terrains of Irish Studies have shifted somewhat in recent years with the postcolonial model somewhat in the wane, as the field’s central locus has re-stratified not least because of pressures placed on it by gender and sexuality studies scholarship. Additionally, the intensification, from the Celtic Tiger onwards, of the cultural contexts of globalization, neoliberal economies, transnational, and European frameworks have necessarily begun to reshape the field. While neo-Marxist postcolonial critiques of modernization theory continue to privilege conceptions of the nation, they have been decentered in a field that is especially marked by what Gerardine Meaney terms a “new Irish cultural studies”—“feminist criticism, queer theory, and migration studies”— concerned to “change consciousness” (Meaney 2010, xi). It is this scholarship that my chapter will focus on here, tracking trends in gender studies publications in the post-2008, post-Tiger period, arguing that this varied, dynamic, and energized work shares an interest in the politics of matter—the importance of lived experience and embodiment, the materiality of structures of control and biopower, affective and emotive sources of being to name just a few—thus marking gender scholarship of the period as being imbued by a new materialist turn. It goes without saying that feminist criticism in Ireland has always been interested in matter and the material realities of lived and embodied lives. In 1991, Patricia Coughlan published a pathbreaking essay on the poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney and the persistence of 230

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a material feminine ground that subtends their work, a corollary of the mother-Ireland, womanas-ground motif that permeates the Irish historical imaginary. In 1999, Moynagh Sullivan points out a similar paradigm at play in a postcolonial rendering of a postmodern “multivalant Irishness” in a Cathleen ni Houlihan figure with a multicolored draped garment highlighting the ways in which a postcolonial inflected Irish Studies operates to figure “woman as the object through which Irish Studies can be validated,” the unacknowledged matter of the field (Sullivan 2000, 249–250). In a 2017 article, “‘Horseman, Pass By!’: The Neoliberal World System and the Crisis in Irish Literature,” Joe Cleary imagines that the Celtic Tiger period, with its conjuncture of peace of a kind in the North and prosperity of a kind in the South[,] lent turn-of-the-millennium Ireland a Cinderella glamour. For a while, at least, one of the more notoriously backward and unsettled regions of Western Europe could exchange its romantic rags for Louis Vuitton and be whirled and twirled at the capitalist ball by the Prince Charmings of the hour. (Cleary 139) In this rendering then, the post-2008 period is a returned-to-rags Cinderella. This construction highlights a continued persistence in postcolonial Irish Studies to gender the matter of Ireland and establish problematic divisions of subject-object binaries with gendered matter as passive ground. The proliferation of an interest in matter and materiality as active and productive in gender and sexuality studies thus efects pressure on the dominant postcolonial model and its gendered underpinnings. The scholarship analyzed in this chapter traverse the subject–object divide, as work engages an interest in the material as a vital subject and object of study.

Austerity, activism, and the neoliberal The scope of this piece is an analysis of gender scholarship in the field of Irish Studies from 2008 to the present moment of 2020. Popularly known as the post-Tiger period, this span of time encompasses economic collapse and “recovery” in a political landscape of austerity policies and intensified competition among left, right, and neoliberal forces. Austerity, described by Sinéad Kennedy as a “term that sanitizes human misery” (Kennedy 91), has been a defining marker of the European cultural landscape since the 2008 crash and refers to a fiscal process that incorporates the imposed austerity of those economies that have received bailout funding from the European Central Bank and other international financial institutions and the austerity measures introduced by national governments in the name of deficit reductions in other parts of Europe. (Bhattacharyya 1) In her thoughtful study, Crisis, Austerity and Everyday Life, Gargi Bhattacharyya lists some of the “deficit-reduction” strategies engaged by EU member states, including the erosion of pension rights, the “scaling back of welfare entitlements and public services,” the “deregulation of labour markets,” and “overall decrease in personal income” (2–3). The dominant efect of this, she argues, is the normalization of precarious life as the general form of living and a sense of diminishing expectations where we are trained to “expect less and less” (4). Ultimately what we are seeing is a “dismantling of systems of support and mutuality without which the most vulnerable 231

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are left to fend for themselves” (7). In this, we can identify austerity as a powerful form of biopower, an exertion of control over bodies and subjects in the world. More precisely, in its diminishing enactments, austerity marks the conditioning of its subjects in terms of Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualizations of bare life and a state of exception. Kennedy describes how a disaster . . . a severe economic crisis . . . allows those in power to create and stage an ‘exceptional’ situation, a situation of emergency in which, somehow, ordinary life is disrupted and what seemed until quite recently inconceivable simply happens. (Kennedy 97) These “terms of exception” explain how the Republic of Ireland’s government made meaning of austerity to the Irish public—it was a time where normal rules were in suspension, as vulnerability and precarity became instituted (via both the 2008 Bank Bailout and the 2010 Bailout) as the mechanistic modes of living. The result was a grueling “wearing down and wearing out” by policies (primarily indirect taxation and public expenditure cuts “that have imposed immense hardship on working people, communities and the poorest and most vulnerable sections in society” (Kennedy 97; 90). Antoin Murphy notes that “Northern Ireland has sufered many of the consequences of the Republic’s financial crisis most notably in banking because of the problems that have arisen for AIB, Bank of Ireland, Northern Bank and Ulster Bank,” structured too by the austerity measures implemented by the UK and the global economic recession (quoted in McGlynn 182). As a disciplinary instrument, austerity functions as a self-evident and unconcealed example of biopower and, more specifically, of “bare life.” Agamben’s argument is that examples of “bare life” are not in fact exceptional, but rather function as the model of the West’s biopolitical body in which distinctions between “law” and “biological life,” “between private life and political existence” have been dissolved (Agamben 187). This dissolution is made clear in the contemporary landscape, in which bodies are visibly dehumanized and entirely reduced to the legal ramifications and control mechanisms of austerity measures. In the Irish context, the stark realities of this are on display, with austerity being presented as a “necessary . . . corrective that ‘we’ all must collectively endure” (Kennedy 86)—a stark revelation of biopower at work “in the context of a US and EU economic recession and putative recovery, more accurately described as a bedding down of permanent precarity” (Mulhall 2016, 32). In this regard, in its paring away of the illusions of both sovereign and subjective power, the age of austerity establishes itself as a visible site through which to explore the specific operations of biopower at work. The economic, social, and cultural contexts of neoliberal austerity policies in the postCeltic Tiger era has generated an increased visibility of social movement activisms in the context of gender and sexuality. The long history of these movements, stretching back through the Tiger and pre-Tiger era, have been explored in a number of key publications, including activist and scholar Ailbhe Smythe’s vital reflections and Tina O’Toole and Linda Connolly’s historical accounting of feminist and queer activisms.2 The increases in visibility of this activism can be linked to the cultural conditions of the post-Tiger era, marked as it has been by a paring back, a stripping away: the austere realities of biocontrol are made more evident, both showing up and intensifying these mechanisms of control. So in the years following the 2008 crash, there is a complex and entwined dualism at work: feminist energies intersect with a more general climate of disenchantment with neoliberalism to reveal the austere forces of gendered control, subtended by the very structural apparatuses of austerity 232

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itself. Suspicion of neoliberal economics and ideologies (governing the policies of austerity) increasingly overhang Irish cultural life of the post-Tiger period, as an energized and popular feminist and queer activism, both on the streets and online, calls for change, responding both to the harshness of the neoliberal landscapes of austerity and the far-right ideological apparatus that police, control, and minoritize bodies. The intensity of this visibility is evident for example in the well populated marches and vigils organized after Savita Halappanavar’s death, with over 10,000 people holding pictures of Savita and banners reading “Never Again.” Such collective forms of togetherness actively seeking change were also evident in the dynamic collective activisms of the 2015 Marriage Equality movement, Waking the Feminists, the movements to Repeal the 8th, and the protests in support of the Belfast rape trial survivor, to name just a few.

Theorizing gender studies: new materialist approaches Feminist and queer scholarship in Irish Studies is responding to these activist energies, manifest in scholarship that is materially invested in lived and embodied practices and experiences. Social and economic disparities, vulnerabilities, and precarities are at the forefront of dynamic intersectional approaches, as scholars consider connections between gender, race, sexuality, class, ethnicity, ability, and age. There is a connection between a post-Tiger cultural milieu and the production of scholarship on gender and sexuality more intensely invested in materiality – theoretically, historically, and formerly.3 Theoretically, this new materialist turn has been registered by Moynagh Sullivan as having moved towards “theories of embodiment and affect” (O’Rourke et al. 44). Extending Noreen Giffney’s arguments in the 2006 influential piece “Quare Theory,” Sullivan discusses the “productive relationship between feminism and queer studies” in Irish Studies, arguing that psychoanalysis is a shared non-foundational ground between the two areas of analysis. Indeed, an enfleshed and affective form of psychoanalysis informs studies of gender and sexuality in Irish Studies. Sullivan’s piece is part of a roundtable published in a 2013 special issue of Irish University Review entitled Queering the Issue, coedited by Seán Kennedy, Sarah McKibben, Anne Mulhall, and Éibhear Walshe, which includes a range of essays interested, in different ways, in material aspects of queer culture—activist, biopolitical, affective, and desiring. In a discussion of the “anti-social thesis” in her introduction to the issue, Mulhall emphasizes a form of queer reading “as passage into life rather than a consignment to death” (Mulhall 2013, 2), stressing the importance of vital energies, something also highlighted by Michael O’Rourke, Maria Mulvany, and Charlotte McIvor in their essays on non-generative vitalities of queer temporalities in the same issue.4 The crafting and curating of seminars and workshops dedicated to queer theory, evidenced in both UCD’s The(e)ories seminar and the transatlantic conference Queering Ireland, initiated by Seán Kennedy in Halifax in 2009, are examples of materialist enactments of theoretical expression in the actualities of place and space. This turn towards affective and materialist inhabitation extends gender analysis beyond constructivism and the linguistic performativity of gendered subjectivity by focusing also on the representative and generative conditions of embodiment. Emma Radley notes that “Masculinity Studies has certainly experienced a dramatic flourishing in Irish Studies in recent years, with a number of monographs and edited collections published in this area since 2010” (Radley 179). Joseph Valente’s important study The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922 integrates psychoanalysis, close reading, and comprehensive historical scholarship to put pressure on constructions of masculinity in the early twentieth century. An in-depth attention to the body of studies of masculinity is an important feature of work of this period, evident for example in 233

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Caroline Magennis’s study of Northern Irish fiction and Cormac O’Brien’s vital studies of representations of AIDS and the male body in contemporary Irish theater.5 In his gendered critique of late capitalist culture, O’Brien notes that [m]ost crucially, the cultural narratives of neoliberal homonormativity do not create any spaces for HIV-positive masculinities. In keeping with the perfect consumership of the neoliberal subject, less-than-perfect health is disavowed and shamed in this culture of the ideal lifestyle and body. (O’Brien 2020, 125)6 Indeed, the areas of theater and performance are an important area of scholarship on gender, sexuality, and the body, as highlighted in Emer O’Toole’s “Panti Bliss Still Can’t get Hitched” which enfolds a theory of afective performativity to engender and reflect on issues surrounding the marriage equality referendum and drag performer Panti Bliss’ role as activist. Theater scholar Fintan Walsh also writes on Panti Bliss in his 2016 book Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation, a powerful study of desire, performance, and embodiment in the contemporary conditions of neoliberal austerity. His theoretical focus is especially on afect and how to “discern queerness” “among those emotions, moods and sensations that tingle with the hope or need for brighter days to come” (Walsh 2). Embodiment is a focus of much of the gender and feminist analysis of the period and is a key paradigmatic frame. Susan Cahill’s work is exemplary in this respect with her book, Irish Literature in the Celtic Tiger Years: Gender, Bodies, Memory, providing a sustained examination of corporeal subjectivity from a feminist perspective.7 Cahill’s subsequent analyses of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century girlhood map affective modes of analysis onto constructions of the feminine that have been marginalized and forgotten in literary accounts of the period.8 Abby Bender’s work on shame and breastfeeding similarly engages affect as a structuring modality of experience and control vis-à-vis women’s bodies in Ireland in an analysis that stays close to the body and its operations.9 Bender’s analysis contains the important dimension of revisiting earlier constructions, as does Valente’s work, and one of the roles of post-2008 gender scholarship has been to help us review texts and historical moments that powerful interests like church, state, and finance would rather have us see as fixed and done with. This important work reminds us that accepted narratives and common sense about earlier eras perform ideological labor, while a rethinking of these through and with affect and the body allow for their creative upending. Emilie Pine’s book on contemporary Irish theater, memory, and pain engages powerful explorations of embodiment, affect, spectatorship, and neoliberal culture,10 while embodiment is also at the forefront of work by Maureen O’Connor and Luz Mar GonzálezArias, both of whom also employ dynamic interdisciplinary methods to consider embodied placements in the world, enmeshed and situated subjects. González-Arias is at the forefront of the emerging field of medical humanities in Irish Studies, as she explores the interweavings of body theory and contemporary poetry in scholarship that examines—among many things— the relationship between pain, health, and creative expression.11 One of the preeminent critics of Edna O’Brien, O’Connor’s eco-critical focus is informed by a gender and feminist focus, considering the intersections of these theoretical frames in work that recuperates fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first century, thinking through the dimensions of materialist ecological subjectivities. This is evident, for example, in a description of the figure of the girl walking through the Irish landscape, a setting against which the girl appears as a “natural” reproductive resource to be cultivated for exploitation and as an 234

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embodiment of the contradictions subtending her position, caught as she is, between constructions of the cultural and the natural. (O’Connor 92) It is such being-in-the-world that Gerardine Meaney considers in her pathbreaking 2010 book Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change: “While this book is informed by postmodern and particularly psychoanalytic feminism, this is tempered by an emphasis on material, social and political conditions” on “real bodies, lived lives” (xvi; xvii). The studies of this book range across twentiethand twenty-first-century Irish cultural life, moving between literary, film, and media analysis in both national and transatlantic frames, providing incisive gendered analysis of the material fabrics of Irish life, past and present, tracing both continuities and change. Meaney notes two “processes” that have impacted her feminist critical engagements, which are the contexts of contemporary immigration and historical institutionalization, respectively (xv), both of which are key structurings of gender studies scholarship of the post-2008 period. Analyses of immigration and race are an important development in Irish cultural studies and its impact on feminist and gender studies scholarship. In “Are We Doing Diversity Justice? A Critical Exchange” published in the Irish University Review’s jubilee issue in 2020, Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi and Emma Penney discuss “how race directly impacts what is valuable in our literary culture” (Enyi-Amadi and Penney 112), the marginalization of black and ethnic minority writing, and whiteness as a structuring principle of racial hegemony. Enyi-Amadi makes the case for affective structures of relationality in her creative process: I think talking is fundamental to the work that goes into decolonising society. The decolonial practice is easier for me when I am in a relational situation with another person rather than alienated in front of the page. Written word is more colonial than spoken word in this way. (Enyi-Amadi and Penney 113) In “The Ends of Irish Studies? On Whiteness, Academia, and Irish Studies,” Anne Mulhall comments on the need to decolonize Irish Studies and the “overwhelming whiteness of the field” which she sees as “coming under increasing pressure to change,” a vital change that her indispensable academic writing and activism is deeply committed to efecting (98). In a piece on women’s writing and the genre of life writing, Mulhall makes the point that Migrant women writers in Ireland face multiple barriers in reaching the “majority” population. These same barriers—constituted by diverse manifestations of systemic racism and marginalization from normative cultural gatekeeping to border securitization and enforcement—explain why the life narratives of migrant women in contemporary Ireland are seldom found outside of publications with social justice and “intercultural” objectives, publications in which the women themselves are rarely credited as authors. (Mulhall 2018, 398)12 Sara Martín-Ruiz’s work on contemporary women’s writing, race, and immigration is also instrumental in constructing space and visibility in the literary sphere, while Ronit Letin and Carla de Tona’s “Building a Platform for Our Voices to be Heard: Migrant Women’s Networks as Locations of Transformation in Ireland” provides an important sociological analysis of networks and collective grassroots organizing.13 Vukašin Nedeljković’s digital art installation Asylum Archive and his book of the same name are vital texts in restructuring what Enyi-Amadi and 235

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Penney crucially term “white heteropatriarchy” and “racial capitalism” in Ireland (112).14 These artists, activists, and scholars foreground the intersectional, reminding us that gender is never free-standing and yet is always present.

Biopolitics: reflecting on regimes of gendered control Nedeljković’s Asylum Archive provides a vital curation of Ireland’s asylum process, the Direct Provision system, institutions that house people seeking asylum as their cases are being reviewed, which, in many cases, takes years. Nedelkovich’s work documents these spaces, describing the dire conditions in these facilities where “Residents live in dirty, cramped conditions, with families often forced to share small rooms. Managers control every aspect of their lives: meals, mobility, access to bed linen and cleaning supplies” (289). He notes the connections between these contemporary institutions and the historical containments: “In historical terms, the scheme continues Ireland’s shameful tradition of confinement, whether through borstals, laundries, prison, mother and baby homes, and lunatic asylums” (Nedeljković 289).15 These insidious continuations of institutionalization via contemporary Ireland’s immigration regime points towards the ways in which the neoliberal present continues and intensifies practices of biopolitical containment and aggression that mark Ireland’s twentieth-century past. On this topic, there has been a significant increase of interdisciplinary scholarship on the Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes in the post-2008 period, stemming from the impact of the manifold reports on the histories of institutional abuses. James Smith’s instrumental publication Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment in 2007 paved the way for much subsequent work, most notably publications by legal studies scholar Maeve O’Rourke, who deploys structures of human rights law to interrogate the biopolitical machinery at work.16 From a cultural studies perspective, Miriam Haughton’s essay “From Laundries to Labour Camps: Staging Ireland’s ‘Rule of Silence’ in Anu Productions’ Laundry” examines the site specific performance of “Laundry” staged at the Seán McDermott Street laundry in 2011, while Mary Burke’s “Tuam Babies and Kerry Babies: Clandestine Pregnancies and Child Burial Sites in Tom Murphy’s Drama and Mary Leland’s The Killeen” engenders vital analyses of literary texts’ prescient and subtle indictments of these regimes. Clara Fischer’s “Gender, Nation and the Politics of Shame: Magdalen Laundries and the Institutionalization of Feminine Transgression in Modern Ireland” deploys an affective theoretical approach to consider shame as a disciplinary technique in the biopolitical apparatus of twentieth-century Irish culture.17 Fischer’s work is an important example of the affective turn in Irish feminist studies, something also evident in her analysis of another register of biopower exerted on women’s bodies in Irish life, the constitutional restriction on abortion, which was successfully repealed in 2018. In this, she argues that “the stubborn persistence of the denial of reproductive rights to women in Ireland over the decades” was effected through “deep-seated, affective attachments that formed part of processes of postcolonial nation-building that relied on shame and the construction of the Irish nation as a particular, gendered place” (Fischer 2019, 33). This publication is part of a larger body of work examining the politics of reproduction in Ireland and the policing of women’s bodies, which includes the 2015 publication The Abortion Papers Volume 2 and the 2018 We’ve Come A Long Way: Reproductive Rights of Migrants and Ethnic Minorities in Ireland to name just an important two.18 Much of this work highlights the history of abortion and reproductive rights in the Irish context, as evidenced in historian Cara Delay’s powerful accounts of the historical discourses surrounding abortion in Ireland and Mary McGlynn’s prescient literary analysis of connections between contemporary neoliberal agendas and conservative traditional ideologies through the lens of reproductive politics.19 Moreover, the 236

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discipline of Legal Studies plays an important role in the terrain of gender politics, rights, and justice in Ireland, evidenced in the 2017 Northern/Ireland Feminist Judgments: Judges’ Troubles and the Gendered Politics of Identity, which provides a structural analysis (and reconfiguration) of the island of Ireland’s gendered biopolitical regime, reviewing a host of gender-troubling Irish cases and presenting feminist judgments as response.20

Transnationalism: moving bodies, traveling concepts The increase of gender scholarship in diaspora studies, transnational analyses, and comparative studies of women’s writing can be linked to the return of high emigration rates in the postTiger period.21 Conceptually, transnationalism accounts for the liminal realities of globalization than postcolonial or Marxist frameworks, and it offers a material way out of the “nation trap” in Irish Studies, thus functioning as an important critical tool on the power and potential of affect, embodiment, and materiality. The materiality of movement is central to this scholarship, something evident for example in Ellen McWilliams’ important 2013 book Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction. More recently, McWilliams has developed this interest into a specific analysis of transnationalism in a forthcoming book Irishness in North American Women’s Writing: Transatlantic Affinities (2021), which includes essays on Maeve Brennan, Mary McCarthy, and Alice Munro. Patricia Coughlan, whose work is so vital to the paradigms shaping and structuring Irish feminist criticism with rigorous analyses of the gendered economies of the Irish canon and a concurrent valuing of women’s writing, also engages an interest in North American women’s writing, evident for example in her essay “Paper Ghosts: Reading the Uncanny in Alice McDermott,” which incorporates her trademark triadic talent of incisive psychoanalytic insight, close reading, and social and cultural analysis. Coughlan also published a powerful piece on the Irish-American writer Elizabeth Cullinan in the Irish Times, as part of an Irish-American women’s writing series, curated by McWilliams in celebration of Maeve Brennan’s centenary and also including essays on Brennan (by Angela Bourke), Mary McCarthy (by Ellen McWilliams), Mary Gordon (by Claire Bracken), and Alice McDermott (by Sinéad Moynihan). Coughlan’s appraisal of Cullinan’s important fiction highlights her various forms of mobility, noting the time spent in Dublin and her friendship with Mary Lavin and a “trans-national bridging of two societies” (n.p.). This important bridging that Coughlan is discussing, the materiality of moving bodies, is something that has had a profound effect on the production of scholarship on gender and sexuality since 2008. Both Patricia Coughlan and Ellen McWilliam’s scholarship on IrishAmerican women’s writing was supported by Fulbright scholarships in 2014 and 2012, respectively. Moynagh Sullivan spent a semester on a Fulbright scholarship at University of California, Berkeley in 2009, while Cormac O’Brien was on Fulbright at the University of South Carolina in 2018. Similarly, Clíona Ó Gallchoir was the Peter O’Brien Visiting Scholar in Canadian Irish Studies at Concordia University in 2018. Thus, there is a connection between scholarship on gendered materiality and the actual movement of scholars. A transnational gender studies paradigm is a key element of current scholarship, which emphasizes the transnational as a guiding theoretical frame. In her essay “The Woman Gardener: Transnationalism, Gender, Sexuality, and the Poetry of Blánaid Salkeld,” Sullivan explores the creative and nonbinary possibilities of the transnational paradigm, connecting Salkeld with writers such as Rabindranath Tagore and Anna Akhmatova and figuring her as “one of those writers whose work does not seek to create or restore a sense of national wholeness or belonging, but aims instead to keep opening out the contradictions and ambivalences that exist between praxis and thesis” (55). Sullivan’s transnational framing moves Salkeld’s work away from the modernist/ national binary that structured early twentieth-century poetics in Ireland. A similar transnational 237

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paradigm is employed by Gerardine Meaney, Mary O’Dowd, and Bernadette Whelan in their interdisciplinary book Reading the Irish Woman: Studies in Cultural Encounter and Exchange 1714– 1960 that explores the contexts of Enlightenment thought and reading, emigration practices, and modernism in terms of the production and experiences of the category Irish womanhood. At the center of this work is the idea of travel—traveling concepts, traveling discourses, traveling bodies—considering as it does the network of influences determining shifting and migrating constructions of gender. Tina O’Toole similarly places constructions of womanhood in a networked frame of gendered discourse in The Irish New Woman, while migration and queer diasporic identity is the focus of her exploration in “Cé Leis Tu´? Queering Irish Migrant Literature,” in a powerful analysis of sexuality, desire, and the matter of movement.

The matter(s) of the work: recovery, anthologies, and digital form An interest in the material of women’s writing and history has always been a key feature of gender and feminist scholarship in Ireland, with recovery projects playing a vital role in the remembering of Irish women, asking questions of the persistent phallogocentrism of the canon and the precarity of voice, staged most powerfully by the monumental Field Day Vols. IV & V.22 The post-2008 period has continued this dedication to the matter of retrieval, with one particular emphasis on the 1916 commemorations. Lucy McDiarmid’s At Home in the Revolution: What Women Said and Did in 1916 (2015), a historical and archival work on women’s stories and involvement in 1916 and the everydayness of their lived embodied lives, is an excellent example of this, as is Senia Pašeta’s Irish Nationalist Women 1900–1918. A more recent piece by Pašeta, “Feminist Political Thought and Activism in Ireland, c. 1880–1918,” considers feminist activism in the early twentieth century, something that connects with Gerardine Meaney’s work on Rosamond Jacob, which contextualizes Jacob’s writing in terms of women’s literary networks, friendships, “literary activity[,] and political activism,” especially her involvement in the Women Writer’s Club (Meaney 2011, 71).23 Anne Fogarty and Paige Reynolds have contributed important studies on women’s contributions to modernist writing in Ireland, while Lucy Collins has been instrumental in providing wide ranging twentieth- and twenty-first-century histories of women’s poetry in Ireland.24 Heather Ingman and Clíona Ó Gallchoir’s A History of Modern Irish Women’s Writing provides the first critical survey of women’s writing in Ireland from the seventeenth century to the present day. As Ingman and Ó Gallchoir note in the introduction to this book, there has been a shift in “Irish literary historiography”: Broadly speaking, whereas a carefully and selectively constructed national canon once functioned to cover or mask the fracturing that frequently characterizes the relationship between place and identity in Ireland, contemporary scholarship now actively explores how writing has grown in these cracks and fissures. (Ó Gallchoir and Ingman 4) Emphasizing these “cracks” and “fissures” as places where scholarship can take up disruptive space in canonical traditions highlights not only the materiality of the canon itself but also its material malleability through feminist forms of inhabitation, expansion, and remolding. Ingman and Ó Gallchoir note the ways in which this process has developed over recent years through building on long-standing traditions of recovery work in Irish feminist criticism. The post-2008 period is without doubt interested in curating material on gender and sexuality in vital spaces and places, with special issues especially becoming material sites of “cracks” and “fissures” in the field. The aforementioned Queering the Issue collates a vital collection on queer theory and Irish 238

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cultural studies, while the 2017 double special issue of Literature Interpretation Theory, entitled Recessionary Imaginings: Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland and Contemporary Women’s Writing and edited by Claire Bracken and Tara Harney-Mahajan, provides a wide-ranging coverage of the dynamic landscape of contemporary women’s writing in the post-2008 period: “an important moment in the history of Irish women’s writing. It is a time marked by increased visibility and publication, dynamic activism and collective engagements, as well as a significant garnering of public recognition to a degree that has never been seen before (Bracken and 2). The materiality of collecting, collation, and recovery is just as pertinent when considering new technologies and women’s writing. Developing from earlier twenty-first-century projects such as The Munster Women Writers Project, The Women in Modern Irish Culture Project, and the Irish Women’s History Project, digital humanities projects in feminist studies have continued to grow. Newer projects (to name just a few) include: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550–1700, led by Marie-Louise Coolahan and funded by the European Research Council from 2014 to 2020; Nation, Genre and Gender: A Comparative Social Network Analysis of Irish and English Fiction, 1800–1922, led by Gerardine Meaney and funded by the Irish Research Council in 2013; Contagion, Biopolitics and Memory Project, led by Gerardine Meaney and Derek Greene and funded by the Irish Research Council in 2017; and the Industrial Memories Project: Data and Digiscapes: Digital Reflections on Ireland’s Institutional Past, led by Emilie Pine and Mark Keane and funded by the Irish Research Project in 2015.25 What these projects reveal is just how integral form is to the research process and how digital technologies help not just to produce new research questions, but to restructure the gendering of knowledge and the knowledge made available.

Conclusion Given all this dynamic work taking place, it is deeply unsettling to witness the continued exclusions of gender and sexuality in Irish Studies criticism, something highlighted in the recent controversy with The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets’ severe underrepresentation of both women poets and academic contributors.26 These absences inspired the response Fired!, a pledge signed by writers and academics asking questions about the persistent phallogocentrism of the canon and the precarity of voice: Critical volumes such as the Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets are presented as surveys of the canon of our national literature, yet they frequently misrepresent our literature by failing to take account of the work of women writers. The absence of women poets from this and other publications leads to a distorted impression of our national literature and to a simplification of women’s roles within it. The implication is that women are a minority in Irish poetry and literary criticism. They are not. In fact, it would not have been burdensome for the Cambridge Companion to more truthfully represent the gender balance in Irish poetry, since women’s contribution to Irish poetry and Irish literary criticism is plentiful and rich.27 As this pledge makes clear, we have been here before, many times: the first three volumes of Field Day in 1991 and then the corollary response of IV&V the most well-known examples of course. But the problem persists, as importantly noted by Emilie Pine in the 2020 editorial for the Jubilee issue of the Irish University Review: On gender, though the journal’s representation of women has improved over the past five decades to the point where we have gender parity of female/male critics, the journal is still 239

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far from gender parity of subject. In the 2010s, only 29% of articles focused on women writers (we want to read essays on these women; we want to publish them; send them in). (Pine 2020, 3) There is clearly something deeper, structural, material at play. This persistence is without a doubt tied to issues of canonicity and the marginalization of voices, as well as to a more general attempt to discredit feminist and queer discourses as complicit with modernization theory. Even in work that focuses on women writers, the repetition of postcolonial paradigms remains. Most recently, this exclusion has been displayed in Emer Nolan’s Five Irish Women: The Second Republic 1960–2016, which, in its account of women’s writing, feminism, modernization, and the nation, does not substantially engage with decades of debates and discourses of feminist critics working in the field of Irish Studies. Nolan’s book discusses feminist politics without any reference to the individual actors involved in second-wave activism, instead rehearsing postcolonial arguments about tensions between tradition and modernity. However, the intensification of a materialist turn in gender and sexuality scholarship, both fueled and inhibited by the environments of austerity that materially structure the post-Tiger period, are putting pressure on such problematic and binary framings. What we can hope for is a re-conception of the groundings of Irish Studies in new materialist feminist and queer approaches that enact deep-seated structural change, accounting for the intersectionalities of power structures and all the while acknowledging that matter matters.

Acknowledgments Huge thanks to Abby Bender, Mary McGlynn, and Emma Radley for their insightful feedback on earlier drafts of this essay.

Notes 1 See Coughlan, “‘Bog Queens’: The Representation of Women in the Poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney”; Meaney, Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change; Kelleher, “‘The Field Day Anthology’ and Irish Women’s Literary Studies”; Sullivan, “Feminism, Postmodernism and the Subjects of Irish and Women’s Studies.” 2 See Smyth, “Haystacks in My Mind or How to Stay SAFE (Sane, Angry and Feminist) in the 1990s”; Smyth, “Momentary Views”; Connolly and O’Toole. 3 In her 2020 essay “The Ends of Irish Studies? Whiteness, Academia, and Activism,” Anne Mulhall puts pressure on the idea of literary activism, making the important point that “The belief that literary criticism is a form of political activism requires much hubris to sustain itself ” (97). The connection I am making here between scholarship and activism is not that the scholarship is activist per se, though critics like Mulhall, Ailbhe Smyth, and Sinead Kennedy are examples of scholars working in both realms, but that there is a connection between these two worlds. 4 See Mulvany; McIvor; O’Rourke et al. 5 See Magennis; Magennis and Mullen. 6 See also O’Brien, “Performing POZ”; Ging. 7 See Cahill. For other work on the body, affect, and feminism in the Celtic Tiger see Bracken, Irish Feminist Futures. 8 See Cahill, “Making Space for the Irish Girl” and “Where Are the Irish Girls?”. 9 Abby Bender has a forthcoming essay entitled “Nursing the Revival: Gender, Revolution, and Biopower” in Revivalism Unbound, in addition to a forthcoming essay “The Biopolitics of the Irish Breast” to be published in Éire Ireland Fall/Winter 2021 special issue on Reproductive Justice and the Politics of Women’s Health in Ireland. 10 See Pine, The Memory Marketplace: Witnessing Pain in Contemporary Irish and International Theatre. Among other things, Pine’s study explores #metoo, something also analyzed in Lisa Fitzpatrick’s essay on #metoo and her book on British and Irish theater and rape. See Fitzpatrick, “Contemporary Feminist Protest in Ireland”; Fitzpatrick, Rape on the Contemporary Stage. 240

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11 See for example González-Arias, “A Pedigree Bitch” and González-Arias, “Ageing Iconography.” The post-2008 period has also seen a flourishing of nonfiction by Irish women writers interested in the body. See Gleeson; Enright; Pine, Notes to Self; O’Farrell. 12 See also Feldman and Mulhall. 13 See Martín-Ruiz, “Literature and Dissidence under Direct Provision”; Martín-Ruiz, “Melatu Okorie”; De Tona and Lentin. For a discussion of race and gender in the 2004 citizenship referendum, see Luibhéid. 14 See Nedeljković, which displays this important photographic curation and critique of Direct Provision. The book also includes essays by Ronit Lentin, Charlotte McIvor, Anne Mulhall, and Karen E. Till. For the Asylum Archive website see www.asylumarchive.com/. 15 Ronit Lentin makes a similar point in “Asylum seekers, Ireland, and the return of the repressed.” 16 See O’Rourke, “The Justice for Magdalenes Campaign”; O’Rourke, “Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and the State’s Duty to Protect”; O’Rourke, “Concluding Observations of the UN Committee against Torture, Recommendation to Ireland Regarding the Magdalene Laundries, 2011.” 17 See Fischer, “Gender, Nation, and the Politics of Shame”; Fischer, “Revealing Ireland’s ‘Proper’ Heart.” 18 On the topic of race and reproductive rights, see also Rivetti. 19 See Delay. McGlynn’s essay “Embodiment, Abstraction, and Hidden Reproductive History” is forthcoming in Éire Ireland Spring/Summer 2021 special issue on Reproductive Justice and the Politics of Women’s Health in Ireland. 20 See Enright et al. 21 Emigration rates, which had been low during the Celtic Tiger period, increased once again after the 2008 economic crash. 22 Bourke et al. 23 Moynagh Sullivan also notes Blanaid Salkeld’s involvement in the Women’s Writers’ Club, “The Woman Gardener,” 53. 24 See Reynolds, “‘Colleen Modernism’: Modernism’s Afterlife in Irish Women’s Writing”; Reynolds, Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture; Fogarty; Collins, Poetry by Women in Ireland: a Critical Anthology, 1870–1970; Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets. 25 See https://recirc.nuigalway.ie/; www.nggprojectucd.ie/; http://contagion.ie/; and http://irish memorystudies.com/index.php/industrial-memories/ 26 See Dawe, and also Grene and Morash The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre, which included 41 essays on Irish theater, of which only two chapters were on Irish women and the theater, and there were no chapters on the many women playwrights but there were specific chapters on Wilde, Yeats, Shaw and others. 27 See https://poethead.wordpress.com/2017/12/16/fired-irish-women-poets-and-the-canon-preambleto-the-pledge/

Works cited Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford University Press, 1998. Bender, Abby. “Nursing the Revival: Gender, Revolution, and Biopower,” in Revivalism Unbound. Edited by Marjorie Howes and Joseph Valente, Notre Dame University Press (forthcoming). Bourke, Angela. “Maeve Brennan Finds a Place at the Table.” Irish Times, January 2, 2017, www.irishtimes. com/culture/books/maeve-brennan-finds-a-place-at-the-table-1.2921506. Bourke, Angela et al. Field Day Anthology: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions: Volumes IV and V. Cork University Press, 2002. Bracken, Claire. Irish Feminist Futures. Routledge, 2016. Bracken, Claire. “Mary Gordan’s Irish-American Fiction: Clean Living?” Irish Times, January 7. 2015. www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/mary-gordon-s-irish-american-fiction-clean-living-1.2926471. Bracken Claire and Tara Harney-Mahajan, “A Continuum of Irish Women’s Writing: Reflections on the Post-Tiger Era. LIT 28.1, 2017: 1–12. Burke, Mary. “Tuam Babies and Kerry Babies: Clandestine Pregnancies and Child Burial Sites in Tom Murphy’s Drama and Mary Leland’s The Killeen.” Irish University Review, Vol. 49, No. 2, 2019, pp. 245–261. Cahill, Susan. Irish Literature in the Celtic Tiger Years 1990 to 2008: Gender, Bodies, Memory. Continuum, 2011. 241

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Cahill, Susan. “Making Space for the Irish Girl: Rosa Mulholland and Irish Girls in Fiction at the Turn of the Century”. Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840–1950. Edited by Kristine Moruzi and Michelle J. Smith. Palgrave, 2014, pp. 167–179. Cahill, Susan. “Where Are the Irish Girls?: Girlhood, Irishness and L.T. Meade”. Girlhood Studies and the Politics of Place: Contemporary Paradigms for Research. Edited by Claudia Mitchell and Carrie Rentschler. Berghahn Books, 2016, pp. 212–227. Cleary, Joe. “Horseman, Pass By!: The Neoliberal World System and the Crisis in Irish Literature.” Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture, Vol. 45, No. 1, 2018, pp. 135–169. Collins, Lucy. Poetry by Women in Ireland a Critical Anthology, 1870–1970. University Press, 2012. Collins, Lucy. Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement. Liverpool University Press, 2015. Conlon, Catherine et al. The Abortion Papers Ireland (Vol. 2). Attic Press, 2015. Connolly, Linda. “The Limits of ‘Irish Studies’: Historicism, Culturalism, Paternalism.” Irish Studies Review, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2004, pp. 139–162. Connolly, Linda and Tina O’Toole. Documenting Irish Feminisms: The Second Wave. Woodfield Press, 2005. Coughlan, Patricia. “‘Bog Queens’: The Representation of Women in the Poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney.” Gender and Irish Writing. Edited by Toni O’Brien Johnson and David Cairns. Open University Press, 1991, pp. 88–111. Coughlan, Patricia. “Paper Ghosts: Reading the Uncanny in Alice McDermott.” Éire-Ireland, Vol. 47, No. 1, 2012, pp. 123–146. union.primo.exlibrisgroup.com. doi:10.1353/eir.2012.0005. Coughlan, Patricia. “Elizabeth Cullinan: Through a Lace Curtain, Darkly.” Irish Times, January 4, 2017. www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/elizabeth-cullinan-through-a-lace-curtain-darkly-1.2924699. Dawe, Gerald, Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets. Cambridge University Press, 2017. Delay, Cara. Manchester University Press: Irish Women and the Creation of Modern Catholicism, 1850–1950. Manchester University Press, 2019. De Tona, Carla and Ronit Lentin. “‘Building a Platform for Our Voices to Be Heard’: Migrant Women’s Networks as Locations of Transformation in the Republic of Ireland.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 37, No. 3, 2011, pp. 485–502. Enright, Anne. No Authority: Writings from the Laureateship. University College Dublin Press, 2019. Enright, Máiréad et al., Eds. Northern/Irish Feminist Judgments: Judges’ Troubles and the Gendered Politics of Identity. Hart Publishing, 2017. Enyi-Amadi, Chiamaka and Emma Penney. “Are We Doing Diversity Justice? A Critical Exchange.” Irish University Review, Vol. 50, No. 1, 2020, pp. 112–119. Feldman, Alice and Anne Mulhall. “Towing the Line: Migrant Women Writers and the Space of Irish Writing.” Éire-Ireland, Vol. 47, No. 1/2, 2012, pp. 201–220. Fischer, Clara. “Gender, Nation, and the Politics of Shame: Magdalen Laundries and the Institutionalization of Feminine Transgression in Modern Ireland.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 41, No. 4, 2016, pp. 821–843. Fischer, Clara. “Revealing Ireland’s ‘Proper’ Heart: Apology, Shame, Nation.” Hypatia, Vol. 32, No. 4, 2017, pp. 751–767. Fischer, Clara. “Abortion and Reproduction in Ireland: Shame, Nation-Building and the Affective Politics of Place.” Feminist Review, Vol. 122, No. 1, 2019, pp. 32–48. Fitzpatrick, Lisa. Rape on the Contemporary Stage. Springer, 2018. Fitzpatrick, Lisa. “Contemporary Feminist Protest in Ireland: #MeToo in Irish Theatre.” Irish University Review, Vol. 50, No. 1, 2020, pp. 82–93. Fogarty, Anne. “Women and Modernism.” The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism. Edited by Joe Cleary. Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 147–60. Ging, Debbie. Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Gleeson, Sinead. Constellations. Pan Macmillan, 2019. González-Arias, Luz Mar. “‘A Pedigree Bitch, Like Myself ’: (Non)Human Illness and Death in Dorothy Molloy’s Poetry.” Animals in Irish Literature and Culture. Edited by Borbala Faragó and Kathryn Kirkpatrick, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 119–131. González-Arias, Luz Mar. “Ageing Iconography: Non-Normative Representations of the Irish Maternal Body.” Nordic Irish Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2018, pp. 175–192. Grene, Nicholas and Chris Morash. The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre. Oxford University Press, 2016. Haughton, Miriam. “From Laundries to Labour Camps: Staging Ireland’s ‘Rule of Silence’ in Anu Productions’ Laundry.” Modern Drama, Vol. 57, No. 1, 2014, pp. 65–93.

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Kelleher, Margaret. “‘The Field Day Anthology’ and Irish Women’s Literary Studies.” The Irish Review (1986), No. 30, 2003, pp. 82–94. Kennedy, Sinéad. A Perfect Storm: Crisis, Capitalism and Democracy. Manchester University Press, 2015. Lentin, Ronit. “Asylum Seekers, Ireland, and the Return of the Repressed.” Irish Studies Review, Vol. 24, No. 1, 2016, pp. 21–34. Luibhéid, Eithne. Pregnant on Arrival: Making the Illegal Immigrant. University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Magennis, Caroline. Sons of Ulster: Masculinities in the Contemporary Northern Irish Novel. Peter Lang, 2010. Magennis, Caroline and Raymond Mullen. Irish Masculinities: Reflections on Literature and Culture. Irish Academic Press, 2011. Martín-Ruiz, Sara. “Melatu Okorie: An Introduction to Her Work and a Conversation with the Author.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, Vol. 28, No. 2, 2017, pp. 172–184. Martín-Ruiz, Sara. “Literature and Dissidence under Direct Provision: Melatu Okorie and Ifedinma Dimbo.” Irishness on the Margins: Minority and Dissident Identities. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. McDiarmid, Lucy. At Home in the Revolution: What Women Said and Did in 1916. Royal Irish Academy, 2015. McGlynn, Mary. “Things Unexploded: The Calculus and Aesthetics of Risk in Two Post-Boom Irish Novels.” Boundary 2, Vol. 45, No. 1, 2018, pp. 181–200. McIvor, Charlotte. “‘Albert Nobbs’, Ladies and Gentlemen, and Quare Irish Female Erotohistories.” Irish University Review, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2013, pp. 86–101. McWilliams, Ellen. Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. McWilliams, Ellen. “Unsettling Irish America: Mary McCarthy and the Cure for Nostalgia.” The Irish Times, January 2017. www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/unsettling-irish-america-mary-mccarthyand-the-cure-for-nostalgia-1.2924300. Meaney, Gerardine. Reading the Irish Woman Studies in Cultural Encounters and Exchange, 1714–1960. Liverpool University Press, 2013. Meaney, Gerardine. Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change. Routledge, 2010. Meaney, Gerardine. “Rosamond Jacob and the Hidden Histories of Irish Writing.” New Hibernia Review, Vol. 15, No. 4, 2011, pp. 70–74. Migrants and Ethnic Minorities for Reproductive Justice, Ed. We’ve Come a Long Way: Reproductive Rights of Migrants and Ethnic Minorities in Ireland. Editora Urutau, 2018. Moynihan, Sinéad. “Alice McDermott: ‘The Green Breast of the Old Country’.” The Irish Times, January 6, 2017. www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/alice-mcdermott-the-green-breast-of-theold-country-1.2927672. Mulhall, Anne. “Introduction: Queering the Issue.” Irish University Review, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2013, pp. 1–11. Mulhall, Anne. “Mind Yourself: Well-Being and Resilience as Governmentality in Contemporary Ireland.” The Irish Review, Vol. 53, No. 1, Cork University Press, 2016, pp. 29–44. Mulhall, Anne. “Life Writing and Personal Testimony, 1970–Present.” A History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature. Edited by Heather Ingman and Clíona Ó Gallchoir. Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 382–408. Mulhall, Anne. “The Ends of Irish Studies? On Whiteness, Academia, and Activism.” Irish University Review, Vol. 50, No. 1, 2020, pp. 94–111. Mulvany, Maria. “Spectral Histories: The Queer Temporalities of Emma Donoghue’s Slammerkin.” Irish University Review, Vol. 43, No. 1, Edinburgh University Press, 2013, pp. 157–168. union.primo.exlibrisgroup. com. doi:10.3366/iur.2013.0062. Nedeljković, Vukašin. Asylum Archive. Asylum Archive, 2018. Nedeljković, Vukašin. “Reiterating Asylum Archive: Documenting Direct Provision in Ireland.” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, Vol. 23, No. 2, 2018, pp. 289–293. Nolan, Emer. Five Irish Women: The Second Republic, 1960–2016. Manchester University Press, 2019. Ó Gallchoir, Clíona and Heather Ingman. “Introduction.” A History of Modern Irish Women’s Writing, Cambridge University Press, pp. xii–xvii. O’Brien, Cormac. “Performing POZ: Irish Theatre, HIV Stigma, and ‘Post-AIDS’ Identities.” Irish University Review, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2013, pp. 74–85. O’Brien, Cormac. “HIV and AIDS in Irish Theatre: Queer Masculinities, Punishment, and ‘Post-AIDS’ Culture.” The Journal of Medical Humanities, Vol. 41, No. 2, 2020, pp. 123–136. O’Connor, Maureen. “Green Fields and Blue Roads: The Melancholy of the Girl Walker in Irish Women’s Fiction.” Critical Survey, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2017, p. 90. O’Farrell, Maggie. I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death : A Memoir. Alfred A. Knopf, 2018.

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O’Rourke, Maeve. “Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and the State’s Duty to Protect.” Hibernian Law Journal, Vol. 10, 2011, pp. 200–237. O’Rourke, Maeve. “The Justice for Magdalenes Campaign.” Implementing International Human Rights: Perspectives from Ireland. Edited by Suzanne Egan. Bloomsbury Professional, 2015. O’Rourke, Maeve. “Concluding Observations of the UN Committee against Torture, Recommendation to Ireland Regarding the Magdalene Laundries, 2011.” Women’s Legal Landmarks. Hart Publishing, 2018. O’Rourke, Michael et al. “Roundtable: Are We Queer Yet?” Irish University Review, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2013, pp. 12–54. O’Toole, Emer. “Panti Bliss Still Can’t Get Hitched: Meditations on Performativity, Drag, and Gay Marriage.” Sexualities, Vol. 22, No. 3, 2019, pp. 359–380. O’Toole, Tina. “Ce Leis Tu? Queering Irish Migrant Literature.” Irish University Review: A Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2013, pp. 131–145. Pašeta, Senia. Irish Nationalist Women, 1900–1918. Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pašeta, Senia. “Feminist Political Thought and Activism in Revolutionary Thoughts and Activism in Revolutionary Ireland, c. 1180–1918.” Royal Historical Society (London, England): Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 27, 2017, pp. 193–209. Pine, Emilie. Notes to Self. Tramp Press, 2018. Pine, Emilie. “Criticism, Diversity, Openness: Irish Studies Now.” Irish University Review, Vol. 50, No. 1, 2020, pp. 1–5. Pine, Emilie. The Memory Marketplace: Witnessing Pain in Contemporary Irish and International Theatre. Indiana University Press, 2020. Radley, Emma. “Masculinity and Irish Popular Culture.” Estudios Irlandeses, No. 10, 2015, pp. 179–181. Reynolds, Paige. “‘Colleen Modernism’: Modernism’s Afterlife in Irish Women’s Writing.” Éire-Ireland, Vol. 44, No. 3, 2009, pp. 94–117. Reynolds, Paige, Ed. Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture. Anthem Press, 2016. Rivetti, Paola. “Race, Identity and the State After the Irish Abortion Referendum.” Feminist Review, Vol. 122, No. 1, 2019, pp. 181–188. Smyth, Ailbhe. “Haystacks in My Mind or How to Stay SAFE (Sane, Angry and Feminist) in the 1990s.” Feminist Activism in the 90s. Edited by Gabriele Griffin. Taylor & Francis, 1995, pp. 192–206. Smyth, Ailbhe. “Momentary Views: A Personal History.” The Irish Review (1986), No. 35, July 2007, pp. 7–24. Sullivan, Moynagh. “Feminism, Postmodernism and the Subjects of Irish and Women’s Studies.” New Voices in Irish Criticism. Edited by P.J. Mathews. Four Courts Press, 2000, pp. 243–254. Sullivan, Moynagh. “The Woman Gardener: Transnationalism, Gender, Sexuality, and the Poetry of Blanaid Salkeld.” Irish University Review, Vol. 42, No. 1, Edinburgh University Press, 2012, pp. 53–71. Valente, Joseph. The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922. University of Illinois Press, 2011. Walsh, Fintan. Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation, 2017.

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at its best, queer theory has always been somewhere else. Michael O’Rourke (2013, 17)

1 In 2012, when Sinéad De Búrca was crowned Alternative Miss Ireland, Irish theater scholar Fintan Walsh called her win “an affirmation of difference in a very queer rather than gay way,” gesturing toward a critical distinction between gay and queer.1 For 25 years, the HIV fundraiser and parodic beauty pageant promised no boundaries of gender or taste, though it was mostly won by gay men in drag. De Búrca, later Burke, took the stage as Minnie Mélange, a Disneyesque name that marked her as a little person, a person with achondroplasia. When the lights came up onstage to reveal an abnormally tall woman, an announcer began, “Once upon a time, in a land far away, lived a little girl who wasn’t actually gay,” foregrounding her anomalous status in an event dominated by gay men. “But why did she enter,” he continued, “I hear you all say.” As if in answer, seven dancers appeared and tugged down the long skirt to reveal 3’5” Minnie on a platform in the emblematic costume of Disney’s Snow White. “Is she alternative?” he continued, “Why yes—she was born this way.” The crowd erupted in cheers as she and her “dwarves” of average height began to dance to Lady Gaga’s essentialist anthem, “Born This Way.” Five years later, Burke would convince Foras na Gaeilge to add duine beag (“little person”) to the Irish-language dictionary, since the only option in the Irish language was abhac or dwarf, a word she would never use to describe herself in English.2 This assertion of self-definition and agency is also implicit in her AMI stage name, which embraces a cultural icon of smallness (Minnie Mouse) but also cultural bricolage as a strategy of resilience. Mélange suggests Judith Halberstam’s description of queer methodology as a “scavenger methodology,” using mixed, even incongruous methods to reveal information about those otherwise excluded or misrepresented in dominant culture (13).3 Explicit in that 2012 performance was a crip feminist critique of gender and body norms enforced by conventional beauty pageants, enacted within a pageant that had already positioned itself, as Walsh notes, in a “subversive relationship to all things considered normatively ‘Irish’” (2009a, 204).4 Since the stage name suggests both identity and methodology, 245

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Walsh’s description of Minnie Mélange as a queer winner invites careful thought about what queer means in the context of Irish Studies. The term queer functions in popular discourse as an umbrella term for LGBTQ+ identities,5 though in queer studies it also functions as a placeholder for a flexible resistance to cultural and social norms. To queer is to render something strange, to dislocate or misuse. As it has developed from feminist and lesbian and gay studies, queer theory is a form of cultural critique based on four primary insights: (1) the critical and structural relation of the sexual binary homo/hetero to forms of modern Western culture, even as sexuality is more accurately understood to be a spectrum; (2) the irreducibility if not misalignment of gender, sexuality, and sexual desire, or more precisely a recognition that the presumed alignment of these elements (gender identity, sexual orientation, sexual object choice) is neither natural nor inevitable; (3) the performative rather than essential nature of gender and sexual identity formations; and (4) an ongoing resistance to and interrogation of heteronormativity or compulsory heterosexuality and reproduction as pervasive social norms—a counternormative or antinormative impulse that extends beyond the ambit of queer sexuality to other cultural and social norms.6 Because a queer critical project extends beyond the very sexuality that seems to have grounded it, a vacillation or even tension may develop between sexuality (especially as sexuality grounds an identity-based or rights-driven agenda) and broader antinormative imperatives, as it has in Irish Studies. Over the last two decades, as Joseph Valente incisively argued in 2019, “The project of queering has shifted . . . between a center defined by normative sexual practices . . . and a circumference defined by normativity in general.” He explained: In the interplay between these two ideological frames of reference, queering has advanced a self-expanding agenda, where the struggle against normative constraints continually finds new, if secondary, fronts to engage. However, queering has also proven a self-consuming movement, whose advocacy on behalf of particular non-traditional subjects, practices, or states of being inexorably tend, if successful, to normalize those subjects, practices, and states in some measure. Valente points to the 2015 constitutional referendum for marriage equality as a “paradoxically normalizing” story of queer politics, by which homosexuality, “the epicenter of the queering project,” was joined to marriage, “the single most normative of sexually informed institutions” (Valente 2019, 1). Valente first addressed this tension in his foundational 2010 essay, “Self-Queering Ireland?” which, along with Anne Mulhall’s 2011 essay, “Queer in Ireland” (in which she traces a normalizing impulse in Irish gay politics around formations of family and race) is essential reading for Irish queer Studies. There Valente explored the apparent incompatibility between queer theory’s vertiginous and expansive antinormative drive and the “recuperative dictates” (37) of national or other forms of communal belonging, including communities organized through the otherwise marginalizing and disassociative effects of shame (31, 37–40).7 This tension between queer sexualities and antinormativity registers in the way Irish Studies scholars deploy the word queer as both an umbrella term for sexual dissidence and a placeholder for a broader antinormativity, as when Patrick Mullen defines queer “both as a capacious index for a series of non-normative desires, sexualities, people, politics, and cultural expressions and as a term that maintains specific relations, at times contradictory and elusive, with the homosexual and the homoerotic” (6).8 Just as Burke’s stage name asks us to think about the relation between identity and method, her presence at AMI literally staged the question about the relation of queer sexuality to a broader antinormative project. “But why did she enter, I hear you all say,” the announcer asked 246

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to and for the mostly gay audience: why is she here? The opening song reinforced a common appeal to sexual orientation’s putative biological origins—as if gay men, like little women, were born that way. Yet the performance as a whole surely rejected identity as the answer to the question, pointing instead to the ways that queer resistance to sexual norms may enable, inflect, or impel other forms of counternormative resistance, as well as toward the queer value of alliance among marginalized communities.9 What queer means and does would be contested at the moment of the economic crash in Ireland, in part because the meaning of queerness had to be reassessed against a lesbian and gay political narrative driven toward inclusion and normalization, in part because queer sexuality had to be disarticulated from Celtic Tiger narratives that linked social and economic progress, and in part because in the wake of the crash, the Irish LGBTQ+ community began to reassess its relation to the past and the future, history and the state. Looking back over recent history in Ireland, it is tempting to write a chapter here that traces a liberatory progress narrative that begins, just before the launch of the Celtic Tiger, with the 1993 decriminalization of male homosexuality, proceeds steadily and inexorably through a series of legal reforms—including the creation of civil partnerships just after the crash, which guaranteed forms of economic and social stability for same-sex partners—and then ends with the 2015 marriage referendum, or perhaps the 2017 election of openly gay Leo Varadkar as Taoiseach. Indeed, it is tempting to say that Ireland has become very queer, if by queer we simply mean the nation has become visibly, legally, and nominally hospitable to LGBTQ+ people. Such a narrative, however, convincing though it may be, fails to acknowledge voices and communities left out of that story, such as those marginalized by economics, migrant status, race, or HIV stigma. Such a narrative fails to recognize how mainstream lesbian and gay culture itself reinforces the marginalization of others. Such a narrative also fails to comprehend the transformative promise of early queer work in Ireland, grounded in intersectional contexts. Such a narrative, that is, fails to address what might still be really queer about queer. In what follows, this chapter explores how Irish queer studies has had to redefine itself in the wake of the economic crash, both in relation to what seems to be a dominant cultural narrative of lesbian and gay progress and in relation to queer theory’s anti-normative imperatives. Threaded through this work is an attention to the importance of situated analysis, the idea that the use of queer must be grounded in its cultural contexts, which inevitably and in unacknowledged ways determine use and meaning of the word.10 After summarizing the history and parameters of Irish queer studies after the crash, I end with a brief reading of two contemporary artifacts, a lesbian marriage poem and a small saucer. Both remind us to be attentive to cultural contexts. Both examine the complex and sometimes complicit relations between sexual identity and cultural norms. With the saucer, our focus turns away from the usual textual and performative subjects of queer analysis to instead examine material culture, thus raising questions about the objects and methods of our study—what counts as queer, how and why may something be queer(ed)? In the context of Irish Studies, what does queer mean, and what can queer do? As we will see, even as we attend to the sexuality that centers and grounds queer work, we may also think more expansively about what queer, as an antinormative cultural and political project, means and does.

2 In June 2009, in the midst of Dublin’s gay pride festivities and just after the crash, theater artist Phillip McMahon defined queer for the Irish Times: “Gay is the present and Queer is the future.” His collaborator, Jennifer Jennings, offered instead: “Gay is a sexuality and Queer is a sensibility” 247

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(Crawley n.p.). In 2009, homosexuality had been legal for 16 years, leading the Gay Community News to publish a retrospective “coming of age” issue. Civil partnership legislation for lesbian and gay couples was working its way toward being signed into law, ironically making visible gendered and generational rifts within the LGBTQ+ community about strategy, ideology, and state sanction of relationships.11 Panti Bliss’ one-woman show A Woman in Progress premiered that year at the Dublin Theater Festival—a play that reserved its strongest criticism not for the church or state but for the “commercially obsessed and politically indifferent” gay community (Walsh 2010, 13). Walsh differentiated queer performance that year from the broader gay culture in which it was located by its resistance to “sanitation, commodification, and the active generation of other forms of social exclusion” (2009b, 69 n.2). At that moment in Ireland, it seemed, you could be gay or lesbian and not very queer at all. Despite legal progress for lesbians and gays in Ireland,12 at the moment of the crash there was an increasing sense that gay and lesbian politics had lost its radical potential, that it was marked by a politics more homonormative than transformative, and that the community had embraced an “assimilative conservative drive toward respectability,” as Anne Mulhall would later write of the marriage movement (2015, n.p.).13 Directing queer toward the future and expressing dissatisfaction with the present state of things, McMahon echoed simultaneous claims in queer theoretical work, as when Noreen Giffney insisted in 2009 that queer held “the promise of a future not destined in terms of the past” (2009, 9), and Cuban-American theorist José Esteban Muñoz argued, “Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world,” “something that is not quite here” (1, 7). If the crash of 2008 occasioned a desire for a different future, it was also the moment that Irish LGBTQ+ culture repositioned itself in relation to the past. That summer, the Irish Queer Archive, long a community-based archive, moved to a new home in the National Library of Ireland, a move as much symbolic as literal given the legitimacy granted by the institutional home. As novelist Colm Tóibín said, the transfer made it clear that the National Library “understands the importance of our story as part of the national story” (29). Tóibín’s emphasis on inclusion within the national narrative marks the kind of normalization that Valente describes; an awkward fit with the insistent antinormative emphasis of queer studies. Before the archive’s move from community to institutional space, queer studies had been developing in intellectual community spaces within larger institutions.14 Queer and feminist intellectual work found a home in the Women’s Education, Research and Resource Center (WERRC), founded in 1990, at University College Dublin (UCD) and through the The(e) ories research series, founded in 2003, at Dublin City University and moving later to the UCD Humanities Institute. A significant body of work also developed over the course of a series of biannual Queering Ireland conferences 2009–2019, and across a number of special issues of journals, including a 2010 issue of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, a 2013 issue of the Irish University Review, and 2017 issues of Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies devoted to psychoanalysis and to intersectionality. At the turn of the last century, Éibhear Walshe, Emma Donoghue, and Siobhán Kilfeather had begun to trace a lesbian and gay literary canon,15 and Walshe, Margot Gayle Backus, and Kathryn Conrad established the groundwork for queer Irish Studies projects, but the crash occasioned reflection on the developing political and cultural narratives. Performance culture was a site where the contestation of what queer is and does was most visible,16 but both inside and outside the academy, there was increasing awareness that new forms of marginalization might develop in a political movement insistent on identity, visibility, and rights, and thus there was also an increasing need to (re)turn to the work of intersectionality, alliance, and antinormativity. * 248

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First published in 2007 and revised and republished in 2013, Noreen Giffney’s “Quare Theory” might be said to frame the impact of the crash by demanding our attention to the specificities of Irish culture—to the distinct “epistemology, ontology, methodology and pedagogy” of Irish queer work (2013, 201), which she registers in her use of quare as a specifically Irish variant for queer. Giffney’s work, as Walsh remarks, teaches us “the value of doing queer in context” (2009b, 56). Defining “quare theory” as a methodology and “a culturally-situated and historicallycontingent analytical tool” (2013, 243), Giffney argues that queer theory in Ireland develops at the intersections of queer, feminist, and lesbian theory. Though Giffney refers to the use of quare in Joseph Valente (1998) and E. Patrick Johnson, I would deepen Giffney’s genealogy by suggesting that quare was a term already in use in Irish LGBTQ+ cultures to mark both Irish and intersectional difference. In 1992, Northern Irish migrant writer Cherry Smyth dedicated her study of queer theory and activism in London, Lesbians Talk Queer Notions, to “all the quare women in Ireland who stayed” (n.p.)—an affectionate paratextual moment, almost unnoticeable, that deploys quare to name the difference of Irish lesbians who stayed in Ireland rather than migrating, as many did, to England. That she tucks this into the opening pages of a study of queer activism in London suggests a relation with an Irish difference, a gesture toward the possibilities of queer life there (Ireland and Northern Ireland) before her analysis of queer politics here (in London). About a decade before, April 1983, the Dublin Gay Collective published Qare Times (their spelling), a community newsletter with a feature article on the recent Stop Violence Against Gays and Women March (March 19, 1983), the first major gay public protest in Ireland, which was organized with a range of political partners including the Women’s Right to Choose Campaign and the Socialist Workers’ Movement. As a more radical organization than other gay organizations of the moment (Casey 221), the Collective emphasized coalition building: The Collective regards the very real success of this march as a complete vindication of their basic approach to join with other radical groups in fighting oppression [in] this society. Of looking outwards rather than regarding gay rights as a simple issue. (“March to Fairview Park” 6) This is not to suggest that such alliances were either easy or permanent; indeed, many gay men resisted alliance with the Right to Choose campaign (Casey 223). It does, however, point to the deeply interconnected and intersectional contexts within which gay liberation emerged.

3 Before the crash, the gay Irish man was a symbol of Celtic Tiger modernity. Michael G. Cronin argues that the gay male figure served as an icon of Irish liberalism in the usually yoked narratives of social and economic progress. Gay liberation, he says, was increasingly represented as the result of modernization and global capitalism, not political action, and gay identity thus emptied of any radical social or sexual politics (252–255, 261). Similarly, Fintan Walsh says homosexuality in Irish film functioned as a symbol of either Ireland’s traumatic past or progressive future—the gay figure “oddly evacuated of sexuality, torn between his function as a symbol of national dystopia and utopia” (2008, 17). Even after the crash, according to Susanna Bowyer, the gay male continued to serve as an emblem of socially liberal and sexually liberated Ireland, an effective secularizing counter figure, after the clerical abuse scandals, for the priest (803). That is, in the dominant cultural narrative of mutually constitutive economic prosperity and social 249

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progress, gay liberation had become a synecdoche for the triumph of global capitalism and later of secularization. Given a long tradition of using familial and sexual figures to allegorize national material, it is perhaps not surprising that the gay man could be so easily deployed as a figure for progress. Moreover, this particular figuration was part of a larger narrative distortion Peader Kirby identifies that linked economic growth with social well-being, or worse, equated the economic profits of the few with the good of the many (28, 32–33). As Eamon Maher and Eugene O’Brien point out, this collapse of cultural and social interests into the economic narrative was “a dangerous development, as it largely deprived dissenting voices of any real forum” (6). Excluded from that braided cultural, economic, and social narrative are the economically disenfranchised, the migrant and the asylum seeker, the sexual radical, and the seemingly invisible lesbian. As Tina O’Toole noted in 2005, even though lesbians were active in many political liberation campaigns, little is known about the history of lesbian activism in Ireland, and the lack of research only “adds to the general invisibility of lesbian lives in contemporary Ireland” (Connolly and O’Toole 172), a gender imbalance largely continued in academic work. Central to queer work is a need to disentangle sexuality from the processes of neoliberalism and capitalism and the normalizing narratives—economic, social, and legal—that made queers, especially gay men, visible during the Celtic Tiger. Over a series of articles, Mulhall has offered the most sustained critique of the progress and normalizing narratives, and the homonormative and homonational complicities couched therein. Before the crash, she pointed out how “queer emancipation” may be employed “to bolster and rationalize the inequities of the neoliberal racist state” (2007, 214) and how the political victories of the LGBTQ+ movement may be used by officials to “pinkwash” or obscure other inequalities. A particular focus of Mulhall’s earlier work was, of course, the movements for civil unions, adoption rights, and marriage, which depended on normative (if not exactly heteronormative) versions of family: state-sanctioned tolerance of lesbians and gays in these forms, she pointed out, “reinscribe[d] the family as the central unit of society” (214). Mindful of the complex and nuanced effects of the marriage campaign, Mulhall admits that marriage might well be transformational for gay and lesbian lives, but she insists that as a structure of state sanction, entitlements, and legibility, marriage may also (re)establish new zones of legitimacy and illegitimacy (2015).17 Attentive as well across her work to “racialization and migration as symbiotic operations” (2014), Mulhall draws on Jasbir Puar’s understanding of sexuality not as identity but as “assemblages of sensations, affects, and forces” (2013, 24), sexual queerness not a simple category of counternormative resistance but a process of identity formation and belonging that is inevitably contingent and possibly complicit with normative economic or political formations (2007, 205). “Homonationalism,” as Puar defines it, is fundamentally a critique of how lesbian and gay liberal rights discourses produce narratives of progress and modernity that continue to accord some populations access to cultural and legal forms of citizenship at the expense of the partial and full expulsion from those rights of other populations. (2013, 25) In Mulhall’s critically important 2011 essay “Queer in Ireland,” she offers a clear representation of these dynamics in a revelatory moment at the 2005 Dublin Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, where African mothers and children protested the appearance of an anti-immigrant Minister for Justice, Equality, and Law Reform. The festival took place in the midst of ongoing work toward civil partnerships but in the wake of the 2004 citizenship referendum, which removed 250

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citizenship rights from the Irish-born children of non-national parents. The “overwhelmingly white queer community,” Mulhall remarks, attended films on the theme of family values, while their leaders explicitly disavowed any connection between LGBTQ+ politics and the politics of migration and citizenship, between queer families and migrant families, both seeking state sanction. Drawing on Puar, Mulhall describes that moment as a “zone where queer citizen and racialized non-citizen meet,” and any “solidarity with the economically and ethnically peripheral” was foreclosed as “re-formed queers” assumed their role as the “ideal multicultural subjects” of the nation (106–107). As Mulhall indicates, at that moment queer was welded (wedded?) to an old and exclusionary, deeply normative, version of nation. Tina O’Toole and Eithne Luibhéid similarly examine the complex relations between queer politics and migration, O’Toole exploring how queer kinship unsettles “fixities of family and place” (2013, 132). Like Mulhall, Luibhéid uses the example of Ireland to show “how nationalist sexual norms . . . shape formations of migrant legality and illegality, but also become redefined through concerns about illegal immigration in a context of neoliberalization” (192). In 2013, Mulhall urged a reorientation of queer work away from nation and toward biopolitical analyses of migration, global capitalism, and precarity (2013, 8–9). With the formation of Black Pride Ireland in the summer of 2019, queers of color critiques will surely find stronger purchase in Irish queer work. Gay rights are not the endpoint of queer activism, especially when the inclusion of gay and lesbian citizens, as Mulhall indicates, is used to buttress or expand exclusionary systems of family, race, or nation.

4 Arguably, given the critiques of marriage—“the most normative of sexually informed institutions” as Valente reminds us—there is nothing queer about a wedding poem. Yet Annemarie Ní Churreáin’s “Weir View,” from her collection Bloodroot (2017) directs our attention to the complicated relationship between sexuality and cultural norms. There are two wedding poems in the book, “Weir View” directly following “Florida Wedding,” both poems situated on waterways and both offering seemingly natural landscapes shaped by human activity. As Michael G. Cronin trenchantly observed, the Irish marriage referendum was both “a victory and a defeat,” creating a more inclusive society but at the cost of the more transformative elements of early lesbian and gay politic (in Mullally 216). Ní Churreáin’s poem allows for inclusion and transformation, yet it refuses to ignore the ways that queer fluidities may be channeled into conservative structures. In writing about Ní Churreáin’s poetry, I am mindful that male voices dominate LGBTQ+ organizations, history, and representation in Ireland—as they do the structures of the publishing and cultural industries.18 Giffney and others remind us of the centrality of lesbian feminist work to the development of queer studies in Ireland, so I focus here in my conclusion on works by women. I am also mindful that work in Irish queer studies overwhelmingly focuses on fiction and performance, not poetry. So the choice of a poem is not only a question of representation and genre but also a question of method—of what we read and how. A love poem for Ní Churreáin’s partner, the artist Niamh McCann, “Florida Wedding” takes place on a boat trip on the St. Johns River in Florida, where, “As a symbol of commitment, I give you/an island // built by hand for the Seminole dead” (61, lines 1–3). A site strikingly marked by historical trauma, the island is a man-made structure that has become a natural(ized) feature of the landscape. Though the poem enacts a ritual of love and commitment, such imagery forces us to ask the question what histories are embedded (what stories interred) in the structure? In an email, Ní Churreáin described the Florida boat trip as “a wedding of sorts,” but she resists the institution. “I think that Niamh and I are meant to be connected in love to that 251

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sort of wild landscape,” she wrote, “Maybe this is as ‘traditional’ as we get.” White birds “scatter” in the poem “like papers thrown into the air outside a church,” the church not a building or an institution but an invisible architecture of sound over the water. Instead of a minister proclaiming vows, “the river declares/finally you may swim” (lines 15–16), fluidity being the key to the imagery and the cultural imagination of these poems.19 Ní Churreáin says “Weir View” was also written as a love poem to McCann. Like the moment on the Florida river, she says a moment at dawn beside the Irish weir “felt ceremonial.” Natural and cultural categories slip and shift in the poem: geographies imbued with human emotion, human ritual grafted onto natural landscape.20 In addition, the poem is recontextualized in the book by its dedication to a gay couple, “for Alan & Noel,” to whom Ní Churreáin says she later “gifted” the poem as a wedding present, so that the moment of natural beauty is refigured as a human institution. This dedication allows for a shifting perspective: “Here I stand with you,” the poem begins, “and not only because of love,/but because we have allowed it” (62, lines 1–2). The speaker addresses her partner, but the poem also imagines one man speaking to the other (the poem itself a kind of wedding vow), and the poem functions as a voice of witness, that inclusive and expansive “we” pulling into its compass the voters of the 2015 marriage referendum, which “allowed” this marriage. Shifting from lesbian affection within and with the natural landscape into a gay male ceremony, the poem displaces the erotic into the conventional. In doing so, it echoes both James Liddy’s “Epithalamion” for his parents’ wedding and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Epithalamion” for his brother, poems that seem to be about heteronormative weddings but are really about the poets’ own homoerotic pleasures, symbolized in Whitmanian images of swimming, adding resonance to the “finally you may swim” on the preceding page.21 With a title punningly suggesting “rear view,” the poem’s landscape is not natural but produced by human agency over time: “The weir was constructed over time by hand,/the flow is made possible by a verge,/the verge was once a dream. // When we dream of the river, the river comes” (lines 8–11). The chiastic turn at the end to dream—”once a dream // when we dream”—points toward possible futures, like Muñoz’s “horizon imbued with potentiality” that might “allow us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present” (1). The use of a weir as a metaphor in a wedding poem perhaps draws on sexological models of desire as hydraulic flow and force, but it also draws on a tradition in Irish literature representing desire through damned water and release—as in the poetry of Austin Clarke or the end of Tom Lennon’s novel, Crazy Love, where coming out is “like a logjam has been cleared and the river is flowing along at the pace it ought to flow at” (240). More importantly, as with the island “built by hand” in “Florida Wedding,” the seemingly natural landscape is one formed at least in part by human agency. What seems natural is, in fact, man-made, cultural, and artificial—whether that is a weir or the institution of marriage. What seems queer may be both resistant and complicit. * Both Irish Studies and Queer Studies have been arguably uneasy with material things.22 “Queer theory has had very little to say on the subject of things,” Mark Graham asserts in “Method Matters,” since queer works, he says, “routinely neglect materiality in favor of textual and linguistic attention to objects of study” (2016, 183, 185). Performance, discourse, representation, text, ephemera: these are the objects of queer analysis, not material objects. Advocating a focus on material culture in Irish Studies in Éire-Ireland in 2011, Paige Reynolds said cultural binaries collapse “when tethered to material culture” (18)—our theoretical categories dissolve—but that very material tethering may be part of the problem. In a 2016 special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly devoted to “Queer Methods,” editors Matt Brim and Amin Ghaziani questioned the use of tethering, or fastening analysis to specific objects or data, as a queer methodology: “What 252

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methods of/as tethering are possible for the research with queer investments in mobility, the undefinable, the affective, and the ephemeral” (22)? Though material concerns and material conditions remained part of the study, the question of tethering disappeared when the volume was republished as a book in 2019. To focus, then, on a material thing may cause us to think more carefully and maybe less predictably and more expansively about queer methods—about what counts as the object of queer study, about how we read an object as queer and why. I want to tether these questions to a specific queer Irish thing—a secondhand decorated saucer I purchased in 2017 at a queer feminist crafts’ fair held at Jigsaw, a small bare social space on Belvedere Court, just north of Mountjoy Square Park in Dublin, a queer Irish thing. (See Image 19.1) I purchased the plate, that is, in the context of queer place-making, queer and feminist artistic practice, and queer community. A garland of green leaves circles the saucer’s border, and in the center, in the depression where a teacup would rest, Dublin artist and performer Sarah Devereux, an organizer of the queer cabaret series Glitterhole, affixed a decal, a transfer image of a drawing of an anus (her own, she would later say in e-mail). She laminated the human onto a material object. As a saucer for a teacup with a decorative border, it is domestic, ritualistic, and perhaps socially gendered feminine. At the same time, I am aware of the saucer’s shock value, the juxtapositions of clean and dirty, proper and improper, decent and defecatory, ritual and raunch. Both a bit of cultural detritus repurposed as feminist art and a material object glazed with affect, the saucer is also emphatically partial, an incomplete thing, ever marked by its lack of teacup. A saucer sans teacup marks an incomplete relation. The single and defective saucer is marked as waste in the precise place it registers the wish for relation; that central depression for the placement of a cup physically registers the cultural expectation of a couple, a pair. An object

Image 19.1 Anus Plate, ca. 2018 by Sarah Devereux Source: Ed Madden, photograph by Forrest Clonts

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without its mate, the teacup seems to mark the failure of sociality—even though purchased in the context of queer community—suggesting to a queer scholar Leo Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave,” in which sex is understood to be “anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving” (215), dissolving rather than instantiating social relations. As an aesthetic object, the saucer is in conversation with a history of aesthetic objects that trouble the boundaries of human and inhuman, animate and inanimate, social and antisocial— such as Irish artist Dorothy Cross’s “Dish Cover” (on the cover of that Éire-Ireland special issue on material culture), a silver dish cover on a cow’s udder, which references Swiss surrealist Méret Oppenheim’s “Le Dejeuner en Fourrure.”23 Oppenheim’s work, a teacup and spoon wrapped in fur, is “useless” as object, but “useful because its aesthetic value renders strange a whole constellation of human and inhuman elements enmeshed around utensils, desire, consumption, gender and labor in the domestic economy, the uncontemplated rituals by which we structure our day” (Cohen 363). These objects disorient us because they ask us to see the familiar as strange, the normal as queer. They queer use. “When things are used for purposes other than the ones for which they were intended,” as Sara Ahmed writes, that queer use still refers to the intended use or qualities of a thing—“queer uses may linger on those qualities, rendering them all the more lively” (2019, 26)—as the anus in the center of the saucer causes me to linger on the absence of the cup. Queer use may also restore the material and cultural historicity of things. “To re-encounter objects as strange things,” Ahmed writes in Queer Phenomenology, “is hence not to lose sight of their history but to refuse to make them history by losing sight” (64), “How did you get here?” “How did I come to have you in my hand? How did we arrive at this place where such a handling is possible?” (164) The saucer itself is inscribed as a product of international commerce: “Made in England” impressed on the bottom, a fixed part of the object’s design and a reminder that, as Reynolds notes, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, inequitable trade laws saturated Ireland with English commodities (12). Devereux buys plates mostly at a charity warehouse in Carlow or at Dublin’s flea markets, enacting Halberstam’s queer scavenger methodology, but also suggesting Elizabeth Freeman’s description of queer practice as the curation of a culture’s abandoned objects (xxiii). Marketing her work under the moniker Dirtbird (slang for a promiscuous woman), Devereux often chooses floral designs in order to subvert ideas of the proper feminine. Devereux first began decorating plates after visa issues forced her return home from New York. Faced with combined nostalgia and trauma, Devereux says she started to think about how other generations had idolized America through plates with images of JFK (alongside the pope and the sacred heart), so she began painting plates with “new idols” (Sudocream, street food, newscaster Anne Doyle). To adapt Walsh’s analysis of queer performance, Devereux’s plates are a kind of performative archive of migration and displacement, a “homing device” by which “forms of belonging are tested and forged” (2016, 20). She first used the image of an anus in an invitational art show devoted to fears, in which she was assigned “I’m scared I will shit my pants,” a fear corporeal, affective, and social. It has since become her favorite design, she says, because it reminds people “that we are all humans in bodies.” Where I was inclined to read queer negativity, she conceived the image as deeply and empathetically social. So much, then, is collected and congealed in this Irish thing—migration, historicity, sexuality, sociality, feminist critique, queer identity, and queer community formation. It reminds us that queer things have histories both personal and cultural, and that normative cultural objects can be queered. The saucer queers the domestic and refuses our predictable theoretical expectations. It centers our focus on the body, puts the sexual back at the center, even as it enacts a broader antinormative imperative. It almost literalizes Valente’s description of a sexual center surrounded by “a circumference defined by normativity in general”—that ring of decorative 254

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leaves that signifies expectations of social use. Where Valente finds a sexual center tending toward the normative, however, Devereux’s plate offers a counternormative image, a sexual and excremental emblem that disavows the desired couple—whether hetero- or homonormative in design—for a broader emphasis on a potential for the communal, for a sociality that resists fear, loss, migration, poverty, and social expectations. The saucer still suggests investments in mobility, affect, and ephemerality that Brim and Ghaziani see indicative of queer work, but the saucer also orients us, as Mulhall urges, toward migration, global capitalism, and precarity. How did you get here, we ask? Where are you from? Or, why did she enter? Whether a rescued plate, a (re)gifted poem, or a revelatory performance, queerness provokes questions. What does queer mean—identity or method—and what can queer do? As a scholar who has written about and worked in queer archives, I am mindful of queer counter-archival practices that value personal, ephemeral, and material objects as records of queer lives. I am conscious of how mundane things may offer “meaningful traces of intimacy” (Dever 85) and of the affective power of queer things in institutional archives—or a queer souvenir of Dublin sitting on my desk. But I am also mindful here of how this object raises questions of method for queer studies—both the queer(ed) object itself and my queer attention to that object. In a chapter on Irish queer studies, a saucer with an anus on it may not be so odd a place to end.

Notes 1 I would like to thank Renée Fox for comments on an earlier version of this chapter, as well as participants at the 2019 Queering Ireland conference who discussed the Devereux plate with me. I am deeply grateful for the Queering Ireland conference series and the ongoing trans-Atlantic conversations about queer work that these conferences have fostered. Walsh quoted in Madden (45). 2 See Niamh Drohan. 3 On queer methods as scavenger methods, see also Ghaziani and Brim, Queer Methods (14–15). 4 On crip critique, see Robert McRuer, who argues that “compulsory able-bodiedness, which in a sense produces disability, is thoroughly interwoven with the system of compulsory heterosexuality that produces queerness” (2). On Burke’s critique of pageant norms, see her blog post, “Alternative Miss Ireland XVIII.” 5 LGBTQ+ designates lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer identities, the plus acknowledging a diversity of sexual and gender expression and identifications, including, for example, nonbinary, intersex, asexual, and others. From the beginnings of queer theory, despite the tendency to focus on queer identities, queerness has always been disassembled and multiple. Though we would now likely drop the gender binary, Eve Kosfosky Sedgwick defined sexuality in her foundational Epistemology of the Closet as “the array of acts, expectations, narratives, pleasures, identity-formations, and knowledges, in both women and men, that tends to cluster most densely around certain genital sensations but is not adequately defined by them” (29). 6 In Judith Butler’s oft-cited formulation, queer must be “always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes” (1993, 288). In Michael Warner’s apt phrase, queer is “a thorough resistance to the regimes of the normal” (xxvi). 7 Sally Munt argues that Irish national identity and belonging, like forms of sexual belonging, are “sometimes . . . intractably linked to feelings of shame” (55). To recognize the role of shame and other negative emotions in the formation of queer identity and community is to acknowledge that a history of social damage and trauma “continues to structure queer experience in the present” (29). 8 See similar formulations in Walsh 2010, 4; 2016, 2. 9 On “queer alliance” as “solidarity with those populations whose lives are not considered liveable,” see Judith Butler in McCann. The other songs in Burke’s performance—Rihanna’s “Love in a Hopeless Place” and the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling”—emphasize connection, affect, and community. 10 On the importance of historical and cultural contexts to the development of queer work, see Kadji Amin, who argues that attention to alternate cultural contexts may generate “divergent queer epistemologies and affective histories” and “[allow] queer to come not only to mean but also to feel differently than it does now” (284, 289–290). See also Michael O’Rourke (2011, xiv, xvii). 255

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11 See Mullally, In the Name of Love (2014). 12 There was significant legal progress, including a series of laws banning various forms of discrimination and incitements to hatred. See Fergus Ryan (2014). 13 A homonormative politics “does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them,” resulting in a gay community that is demobilized, privatized, depoliticized, and “anchored in domesticity and consumption” (Duggan 50). 14 On the history of queer studies in the Irish Studies academy, see Kennedy, Quilty, and Sullivan, as well as Giffney’s “Quare Éire” and “Quare Theory.” 15 See Emma Donoghue, “Lesbian Encounters” and Siobhán Kilfeather and Éibhear Walshe, “Contesting Ireland: The Erosion of Heterosexual Consensus, 1940–2001,” in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. 16 See, for example, David Cregan’s Deviant Acts (2009), as well as Walsh’s Queer Notions (2010) and Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland (2016). 17 See Mulhall’s “Queer in Ireland” (105) and “Republic of Love”; see also O’Toole et al., “Intersects Roundtable—Queering Ireland.” (185–187). On this point, see also Butler (2004, 105–109). 18 The 2015 #WakingTheFeminists campaign brought the underrepresentation of women in Irish theater to public attention. (See www.wakingthefeminists.org.) A 2018 study of the Irish poetry profession found a similar gender imbalance, which the Irish Times awkwardly reported by interviewing mostly male publishers. See Sinéad Gleeson, Christine Murray, Deirdre Falvey and ‘Does Poetry Have a Gender Issue?” 19 Centering on the river, the poem may evoke Irish writer Mary Dorcey’s landmark lesbian short story, “A Noise from the Woodshed.” This seems likely since a lover makes “plenty of noise / in the garden shed” in the preceding poem, “Fantasies” (60, lines 9–10, 14). 20 On the relation of place and emotion in Ní Churreáin’s work, see Ní Churreáin, “I was raised.” 21 On Liddy, see Arkins 44. 22 On the status of material culture in Irish studies, see Reynolds, also Caffrey. Fintan O’Toole’s (2013) history may mark a significant turning point. On the relation of queer studies to material culture, see Graham and Ahmed, cited here, but also the recent Queer Objects (2019), edited by Chris Brickell and Judith Collard. 23 See Reynolds (7–8, 17). The anus drawing also echoes, for me, Galway artist Cathal Kelly’s abstract painting “Passage,” which appeared on the cover of the 2013 queer studies issue of the Irish University Review—an abstract image evoking both the narrow entrance of a Neolithic passage tomb and the interior of the rectum. See Mulhall’s Introduction (2013, 1).

Works cited Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press, 2006. Ahmed, Sara. What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use. Duke University Press, 2019. Amin, Kadji. “Haunted by the 1990s: Queer Theory’s Affective Histories.” Imagining Queer Methods. Edited by A. Ghaziani and M. Brim. New York University Press, 2019, pp. 277–293. Anon. “The March to Fairview Park.” Qare Times, April 4, 1983, IQA National Library of Ireland, Ms 46,052/3. Arkins, Brian. James Liddy: A Critical Study. Arlen Academic, 2006. Backus, Margot. The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order. Duke University Press, 1999. Bersani, Leo. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism. Edited by D. Crimp. MIT Press, 1988, pp. 197–222. Brickell, Chris and Judith Collard, Eds. Queer Objects. Rutgers University Press, 2019. Burke, Sinéad. “Alternative Miss Ireland XVIII.” Minnie Mélange, April 8, 2012. minniemelange.com/ alternative-miss-ireland-xviii/ (Accessed May 30, 2019). Bowyer, Susannah. “Queer Patriots: Sexuality and the Character of National Identity in Ireland.” Cultural Studies, Vol. 24, No. 6, 2010, pp. 801–820. Brim, Matt and Amin Ghaziani. “Introduction: Queer Methods.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, Vol. 44, Nos. 3 & 4, 2016, pp. 14–27. Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. Routledge, 2005. Butler, Judth. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. Routledge, 2015. 256

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Caffrey, Paul. “Irish Material Culture: The Shape of the Field.” Circa Art Magazine, March 1, 2003, article C103. Online at Circa Archive (Accessed June 1, 2019). Casey, Maurice J. “Radical Politics and Gay Activism in the Republic of Ireland, 1974–1990.” Irish Studies Review. Vol. 26, No. 2, 2018, pp. 217–236. Cohen, Jeffrey J. “An Unfinished Conversation about Glowing Green Bunnies.” Queering the Non/Human. Edited by N. Giffney and M.J. Hird. Ashgate, 2008, pp. 363–376. Connolly, Linda and Tina O’Toole. Documenting Irish Feminisms: The Second Wave. The Woodfield Press, 2005. Conrad, Kathryn. Locked in the Family Cell: Gender, Sexuality and Political Agency in Irish National Discourse. University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Crawley, Peter “This Is Theatre, Baby.” The Irish Times, June 5, 2009. www.irishtimes.com/culture/this-istheatre-baby-1.777903 (Accessed May 30, 2019). Cregan, David, Ed. Deviant Acts: Essays on Queer Performance. Carysfort Press, 2009. Cronin, Michael G. “‘He’s My Country’: Liberalism, Nationalism, and Sexuality in Contemporary Irish Gay Fiction.” Éire-Ireland, Vol. 39, Nos. 3 & 4, 2004, pp. 250–267. Dever, Maryanne. “Papered over, or Some Observations on Materiality and Archival Method.” Out of the Closet, Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories. Edited by A.L. Stone and J. Cantrell. State University of New York Press, 2015, pp. 65–95. Devereux, Sarah. Email interview. Conducted by Ed Madden, August 8, August 13, and September 23, 2019. “Does Poetry Have a Gender Issue?” The Irish Times, August 21, 2019. www.irishtimes.com/opinion/ letters/does-poetry-have-a-gender-issue-1.3992049 (Accessed August 30, 2019). Donoghue, Emma, Ed. “Lesbian Encounters, 1745–1997.” The Field Day of Anthology of Irish Writing, Vol IV: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions. Edited by A. Bourke et al. New York University Press, 2002, pp. 1090–1140. Dorcey, Mary. “A Noise from the Woodshed.” A Noise from the Woodshed. Onlywomen Press, 1989, pp. 1–22. Drohan, Niamh. “Watch: Irish Woman Tells Inspiring Story of Getting a New Word Into the Irish Dictionary.” Irish Mirror, March 6, 2017. www.irishmirror.ie/whats-on/arts-culture-news/watch-irishwoman-tells-inspiring-9977445 (Accessed May 30, 2019). Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Beacon Press, 2003. Falvey, Deirdre. “Two-Thirds of Published Poets Are Male, So Does Poetry Have a Gender Issue?” The Irish Times, August 17, 2009. www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/two-thirds-of-published-poets-are-maleso-does-poetry-have-a-gender-issue-1.3984922 (Accessed August 30, 2019). Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke University Press, 2010. Ghaziani, Amin and Matt Brim, Eds. Imagining Queer Methods. New York University Press, 2019. Giffney, Noreen. “Quare Éire.” Journal of Lesbian Studies, Vol. 11, Nos. 3–4, 2007a, pp. 275–289. Giffney, Noreen. “Quare Theory.” Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture. Edited by W. Balzano et al. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007b, pp. 197–209. Giffney, Noreen. “Introduction: The ‘q’ word.” The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory. Edited by N. Giffney and M. O’Rourke. Routledge, 2009, pp. 1–13. Giffney, Noreen. “Quare Theory.” Theory on the Edge: Irish Studies and the Politics of Sexual Difference. Edited by N. Giffney and M. Margrit Shildrick. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 241–257. Gleeson, Sinéad. “A Profound Deafness to the Female Voice.” The Irish Times, April 28, 2018. www.irish times.com/culture/books/a-profound-deafness-to-the-female-voice-1.3467144 (Accessed October 1, 2019). Graham, Mark. Anthropological Explorations in Queer Theory. Routledge, 2014. Graham, Mark. “Method Matters: Ethnography and Materiality.” Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research. Edited by K. Browne and C. Nash. Routledge, 2010, 2016, pp. 83–194. Halberstam, Judith (Jack). Female Masculinity. Duke University Press, 1998. Johnson, E. Patrick. “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother.” Text and Performance Quarterly, No. 21, 2010, pp. 1–25. Kennedy, Seán. “Review Essay: Queer Ireland.” Éire-Ireland, Vol. 48, Nos. 3 & 4, 2013, pp. 289–302. Kilfeather, Siobhán and Éibhear Walshe, Eds. “Contesting Ireland: The Erosion of Heterosexual Consensus, 1940–2001.” The Field Day of Anthology of Irish Writing, Vol IV: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions. Edited by A. Bourke et al. New York University Press, 2002, pp. 1039–1089. Kirby, Peadar. “Contested Pedigrees of the Celtic Tiger.” Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society, and the Global Economy. Edited by P. Kirby et al. Pluto Press, 2002, pp. 21–37. 257

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Lennon, Tom. Crazy Love. The O’Brien Press, 1999. Liddy, James. “Epithalamion.” Collected Poems. Creighton University Press, 1994, pp. 167–178. Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Harvard University Press, 2007. Luibhéid, Eithne. “Nationalist Heterosexuality, Migrant (Il)legality, and Irish Citizenship Law: Queering the Connection.” South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 110, No. 1, 2011, pp. 179–204. Madden, Ed. “The Last Alternative Miss Ireland Is Crowned.” Gay and Lesbian Review, Worldwide, July– August 2012, pp. 44–45. Maher, Eamon and Eugene O’Brien. “Introduction.” From Prosperity to Austerity: A Socio-Cultural Critique of the Celtic Tiger and Its Aftermath. Edited by E. Maher and E. O’Brien. Manchester University Press, 2014, pp. 1–18. McCann, Marcus. “Lives Less Livable: Judith Butler on Expanding Queer Solidarity beyond Sexuality.” [interview] Briarpatch, May 6, 2011. https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/lives-less-livable (Accessed May 30, 2019). McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York University Press, 2006. Mulhall, Anne. “Camping Up the Emerald Aisle: ‘Queerness’ in Irish Popular Culture.” Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture. Edited by W. Balzano et al. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 210–223. Mulhall, Anne. “Queer in Ireland: ‘Deviant’ Filiation and the (Un)holy Family.” Queer in Europe: Contemporary Case Studies. Edited by L. Downing and R. Gillett, Ashgate, 2011, pp. 99–112. Mulhall, Anne. “Introduction: Queering the Issue.” Irish University Review, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2013, pp. 1–11. Mulhall, Anne. “Dead Time: Queer Temporalities and the Deportation Regime.” Periscope Dossier, Social Text, July 10, 2014. socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/dead-time-queer-temporalities-and-thedeportation-regime/ (Accessed May 1, 2019). Mulhall, Anne. “The Republic of Love.” Critical Legal Thinking, June 23, 2015. criticallegalthinking.com/ 2015/06/23/the-republic-of-love/ (Accessed May 30, 2019). Mullally, Una. In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland, an Oral History. The History Press Ireland, 2014. Mullen, Patrick. The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History. Oxford University Press, 2012. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York University Press, 2009. Munt, Sally R. Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame. Ashgate, 2007. Murray, Christine. “Tackling the Catastrophic Canonical Neglect of Irish Women Poets and Writers.” The Irish Times, September 27, 2019. www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/tackling-the-catastrophiccanonical-neglect-of-irish-women-poets-and-writers-1.4031397 (Accessed October 1, 2019). Ní Churreáin, Annemarie. Bloodroot. Doire Press, 2017. Ní Churreáin, Annemarie. “I Was Raised in the Shadow of Men Who Wanted to Conquer Wildness.” The Irish Times, October 26, 2017. www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/i-was-raised-in-the-shadowof-men-who-wanted-to-conquer-wildness-1.3268313 (Accessed July 1, 2019). Ní Churreáin, Annemarie. Email interview. Conducted by Ed Madden, August 2 and August 6, 2019. O’Rourke, Michael. “‘Europe’: Faltering Project or Infinite Task? (Some Other Headings for Queer Theory).” Queer in Europe: Contemporary Case Studies. Edited by L. Downing and R. Gillett. Ashgate, 2011, pp. xiii–xviii. O’Rourke, Michael. “How Queer Is Now.” in “Roundtable: Are We Queer Yet.” Irish University Review, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2013, pp. 13–17. O’Toole, Fintan. A History of Ireland in 100 Objects. Royal Irish Academy, 2013. O’Toole, Tina. “Cé Leis Tú? Queering Irish Migrant Literature.” Irish University Review, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2013, pp. 131–145. O’Toole, Tina, et al., Eds. “Intersects Roundtable: Queering Ireland.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2010, pp. 163–191. Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press, 2007. Puar, Jasbit. “Homonationalism as Assemblage: Viral Travels, Affective Sexualities.” Jindal Global Law Review, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2013, pp. 23–43. Quilty, Aideen. “Naming a Politics of Place on a Queerly Irish Landscape: Remembering WERRC.” in “Roundtable: Are We Queer Yet?” Irish University Review, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2013, pp. 17–23. Reynolds, Paige. “Editor’s Introduction.” Éire-Ireland, Vol. 46, Nos. 1 & 2, 2011, pp. 7–19. Ryan, Fergus. “‘We’ll Have What They’re Having’: Sexual Minorities and the Law in the Republic of Ireland.” Sexualities and Irish Society: A Reader. Edited by M. Leane and E. Kiely. Orpen Press, 2014, pp. 55–100. 258

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Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. University of California Press, 1990. Smyth, Cherry. Lesbians Talk Queer Notions. Scarlet Press, 1992. Sullivan, Moynagh. “A Quare Pair: Feminist and Queer Ecologies in Irish Cultural Criticism’ in Roundtable: Are We Queer Yet?” Irish University Review, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2013, pp. 12–54. Tóibín, Colm. “Hidden History.” Gay Community News, No. 224, August 2008, pp. 28–29. Valente, Joseph, Ed. Quare Joyce. University of Michigan Press, 1998. Valente, Joseph. ‘Self-Queering Ireland?’ Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2010, pp. 25–43. Valente, Joseph. “Neuroqueering Ireland.” Queering Ireland 2019: Queer Intersections/Queer Abilities, September 27–28, 2019, Kingsburg, Nova Scotia. Conference. Walsh, Fintan. “Cock Tales: Homosexuality, Trauma and the Cosmopolitan Queer.” Film Ireland, No. 120, January/February 2008, pp. 16–18. Walsh, Fintan. “Homely Sexuality and the ‘Beauty’ Pageant.’” Crossroads: Performance Studies and Irish Culture. Edited by S. Brady and F. Walsh. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009a, pp. 196–209. Walsh, Fintan. “Touching, Feeling, Cross-Dressing: On the Affectivity of Queer Performance: Or, What Makes Panti Fabulous.” Deviant Acts: Essays on Queer Performance. Edited by D. Cregan. Carysfort Press, 2009b, pp. 55–71. Walsh, Fintan, Ed. Queer Notions: New Plays and Performances from Ireland. Cork University Press, 2010. Walsh, Fintan. Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Walshe, Éibhear, Ed. Sex, Nation, and Dissent in Irish Writing. St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Warner, Michael. “Introduction.” Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. Edited by M. Warner. University of Minnesota Press, 1993, pp. vii–xxxi.

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It is a commonplace to say that Ireland has experienced a breakdown in its cultural grand narrative which was its relationship with Catholicism. There are varying opinions as to when this process began. Louise Fuller has drawn attention to the fact that the day when Noël Brown resigned from the government in June 1951 over the Mother and Baby scheme, he sent to the newspapers copies of the correspondence between himself, the Catholic bishops, and other members of the government. “This was a revolutionary move, which meant that for the first time in the history of the independent state the role of the Church was under public scrutiny” (Fuller 2015, 310). In a sense, perhaps, this was the beginning of the end of the Catholic Church’s overweening position in Irish life, although no one at the time realized it. That scrutiny of the early summer of 1951 has since then become more intense and more critical. In the past, Catholicism had been fundamental to Irish identity and for a time the winds of change which had dethroned Catholicism’s place in the wider world seemed to bypass Ireland (Inglis 2004, 60). Now Catholicism as an institutional influence on Irish life appears to be at an end. Although this may have been a feature of Irish life for quite some time, the referendum on marriage equality (2015) and the similarly decisive vote to repeal the 8th Amendment prohibiting abortion (2019) definitively proved that the Catholic Church wields little influence on Irish society. At the same time, Catholicism remains part of the fabric of Irish identity. The census of 2011 indicated that 80% of the people in the Republic of Ireland self-identify as Catholic, and when Pope Francis visited Ireland in 2018, the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, called for a new relationship between Church and state (O’Hanlon 127). The fact remains, however, that Catholicism no longer epitomizes broader Irish culture. The picture has been utterly transformed since the nineteenth century. Then it could be asserted with firm conviction: Take the average Irishman—I don’t care where you find him—and you will find that the very first principle in his mind is “I am not an Englishman because I am a Catholic.” Take an Irishman wherever he is found all over the earth, and any casual observer will at once come to the conclusion “Oh, he is an Irish man, he is a Catholic.” The two go together. (quoted in Kearney 284) 260

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It is doubtful that these words of Fr. Tom Burke O.P. were true even when he uttered them in 1872. Today they simply seem absurd. Burke did, however, hit upon an idea that has for several hundred years conditioned at some level the Irish psyche, the association between national self-identity and Catholicism. Catholicism as an identity marker diferentiated the Irish in their struggle with perceived English and British oppression. Brendan Bradshaw insisted that the most important element in immediate post-Reformation Irish Catholicism was the creedal aspect of group identity. Catholicism was a collective identity for the community on the basis of the profession of the faith. In the nineteenth century, at least by the time of the “devotional revolution,” we have a move to the idea of the practice of Catholicism as the factor which marks an individual as a Catholic (Bradshaw 110–11). The point is reiterated with bravura by Kevin Whelan who argues that such practice hardened into a rigid cultural formation that would last until at least the 1960s (Whelan 2004, 138). Among the consequences of this transformation was that it gave the Church a greater say in the lives of its adherents. It also made of Church leaders political figures in their own right who honed their skills in negotiation with a Protestant British government. Irish Catholicism became “more public, more assertive, more Roman in character, as the institutional church eclipsed its vernacular predecessor” (Whelan 2004, 139). This newfound confidence had enormous consequences for the future of Catholicism’s functioning in Ireland. There is little doubt so far as independent Ireland was concerned that the ethos given to society was provided by Catholicism. Catholicism needed the state and the state needed Catholicism. State support was perhaps, as Whelan has suggested, in function of a reaction of the failure of the British to completely cede this in the period since the Union of 1801 (Whelan 2019, 228). The Church was also self-consciously determined to assert what it took to be its absolute prerogatives in post independent Ireland. Cardinal Michael Logue, the archbishop of Armagh, wrote to Patrick McKenna, bishop of Clogher, in March 1922 concerning the drafting of the constitution for the Irish Free State: Those engaged in drawing up the Constitution should remember that it is being drawn up for a Catholic country not the Soviet of Russia. . . . Hence it must be submitted to the Bishops and a committee of theologians aided by a lawyer should be appointed to examine it and see that it is in accordance with the principles of Christianity and with Catholic principles so far as we are concerned. (Archives of the Archdiocese of Armagh) Catholicism gave to Ireland in the twentieth century not only its sense of itself as a society distinct from Britain, but it also informed the law and the political constitution of the state. The Free State’s ideology was both nationalist and Catholic, it had a romantic view of family life and glorified rural Ireland (Hug 77). Strangely, with respect to the latter, this was a view also shared by W.B. Yeats. The Church saw itself, in the words of Ailbhe Smyth, as the “last bastion of moral and sexual purity and of the traditional family . . . [against] the global wave of depravity which threatens to engulf it” (Quoted in Nolan 2007, 358). From the perspective of twenty-first century Ireland, all this seems like another world. Today so far as the 26 counties are concerned, Northern Ireland will be considered later in this chapter, the Irish no longer measure themselves either culturally or religiously by the standards of Britain. While transnational comparisons will always be a feature of the study of Irish Catholicism, alien Protestant Britain is no longer the object in contrast to which Ireland must be identifiably Catholic. Was the issue facing Irish Catholicism in the last 20 years simply a question of its inability to come to terms with modernity, or perhaps more exactly post-modernity? The marks of modernity were certainly manifested in recent Irish history: distrust of tradition and authority, a spirit of 261

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revolution with regard to social norms, the “privatization” of faith, its exclusion from the public square, and the recourse, in a relatively minor way in Ireland’s case, to atheism. Alternatively is Irish society marked by post-modernity in which we have a culture that has fallen into isolation, fragmentation, and narcissism? (Gallagher 1996, 73). Michael J. Cronin has asserted that Irish Studies as a discipline has its origins as a means of investigating “Ireland’s uneven or delayed modernization” (Cronin 243). So far as Catholicism as a whole is concerned, from at least the time of the French Revolution the Church has set its face against modernity, both at an ideological and practical level. Pope Gregory XVI (1830–46) forbade railways in the Papal States because he believed them to be the work of the devil (Duffy 2014, 281). His successor Pope Pius IX (1846–78) issued the encyclical Quanta Cura and with it the Syllabus of Errors. These two documents represent the most formidable rejection of modernity produced in the nineteenth century. Pius refuted the idea that the pope could or should reconcile himself with “progress, liberalism or modern civilization” (Papal Encyclicals). The impact of this démarche on relations between the papacy and the modern world was profound. As late as 1903 Georges Clemenceau, the future French Prime Minister, declared that the Syllabus was “counter-revolutionary” (Rasi May 13). In contemporary Irish society, we are witnessing the working out of a quintessential tension between Catholicism and modernity. The clash is predicated on contrasting understandings of what it is to be human (Maignant 64). As Francis Oakley has written “the stubborn fact of change is everywhere apparent” (Oakley 351), and yet the Church is not able to respond to that change in a way which makes sense in people’s lives. This issue is a problem for the Church universal and not simply for the Irish Church. We must, however, avoid a too simple dichotomy that would have us believe that to be “modern” one must embrace gay marriage, divorce, abortion, transgenderism, and the corollary that to be anti-modern is to reject all these. It is difficult to envision a Catholicism which for example will acquiesce in abortion on demand. Such a Church, whatever its other claims, would have moved beyond the parameters of Catholic identity. It is equally true that Catholicism itself is also wrought with tensions, individuals believe different things in the era of “cafeteria Catholicism.” This is, however, not as modern a phenomenon as we might think. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) did not believe in the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, now an article of faith (Summa Theologicae). Less abstractly, Fr. James Martin S.J. has written a book which appears to argue that it is possible to be a practicing homosexual and a Catholic (2018). On September 30, 2019, Martin had an audience with Pope Francis to discuss this and related issues (America Magazine). Even in the highly controverted area of abortion things have not always been absolutely clear. Pope Callistus I (217–22) not only permitted aristocratic Christian women to marry Christian male slaves, a practice forbidden by Roman law, he seems to have turned a blind eye to the fact that such women did not want to have the children of their slave husbands. In many instances, they tried to procure abortions which the pope did nothing to prohibit. A rigorist moral group even elected their own pope in opposition to Callistus, and thus Pope Hippolytus (217–35) became the first in a long line of anti-popes (Hippolytus).1 At the same time, it is quite wrong to maintain, as some Irish journalists and commentators have asserted, that the present position of Catholicism with relation to abortion originated with Pius IX in 1869. The issue here is one of “ensoulment.” Some of the giants of Catholic theology, such as Augustine and Aquinas, following Aristotle, have maintained that the soul does not enter the fetus until sometime after conception. Are abortions carried out before ensoulment permitted? Pope Gregory XIV issued Sedis Apostolicae (1591) in which he lifted the excommunication for abortions carried out before ensoulment. Nevertheless, as is clear from the document he regarded even pre-ensoulment abortions as a serious sin. Pius IX re-imposed excommunication for all abortions (McGarry 2013; Pierson 2018). 262

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In the Irish context are Catholicism and the necessary conditions for human flourishing inherently in conflict? Are the claims of the Church to transcendent values concerning human happiness simply irrelevant in today’s Ireland? Although Catholicism appears as monolith, it is clear from its history that it has periodically been subject to great debate about the nature of belief and the values that it holds. The Church’s refusal to dialogue with modernity gave rise to the “Modernist Crisis” in the years 1890–1910. There were those in the Church at the time who believed that the Church’s response to the religious problems of the modern age could not simply be an automaton reiteration of formulae that had been systematized in the thirteenth century (Rafferty 2010, 24).2 Much the same is happening in the present circumstance of the Irish Church. A splendid paradigm for interpreting the Irish situation has been suggested by Eugene O’Brien. Drawing on ideas articulated by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacon, he constructs a highly speculative but intellectually stimulating dynamic with which to explore contemporary Irish history and Catholicism’s place in it. Lacon recast the Cartesian “I think therefore I am” to discern that it is desire which is at the basis of self-discovery and identity (O’Brien 2018, 139). This does fit with a rejection in Ireland of the Catholic emphasis on renunciation and asceticism. Furthermore, it is in direct confrontation with a distrust of desire in traditional Catholic moral theology, although there has been some work in more recent years on a more positive attitude to human desires.3 In an older understanding, the Church has seen unrestricted desire as the basis of all human wrongdoing, leading to the destruction of the self. Desire, long equated with sin, and sinful desire if it became part of self-identification would end up destroying God’s purposes for the world. This made the obvious self-indulgence as seen for example in the work of James Joyce so shocking to early twentieth-century Irish society. In Joyce’s writing, there was little of the self-transcendent that one would expect from an individual who had been head of Our Lady’s Sodality at Belvedere College, and who was once considered a candidate for the Jesuit order. Emer Nolan is convinced that the Irish state could not accommodate the cultural capitalism of Joyce because his work was seen as irreligious and obscene and because of the sexual candor of the writing (Nolan 351). Equally, Eugene O’Brien can point out that by contrast for contemporary Ireland the respectability of a book like Ulysses is symbolic of the changed temper of Irish culture. Joyce’s work can be seen “as an inverse chiasmus of the fall from grace of the Catholic Church: culture is now in the ascent over religion” (O’Brien 149). A question arises: are the contentions of Lacon and O’Brien about the role of desire valid? It was precisely the failure and inability of sections of the clergy to resist their criminal and sinful desires that has brought Irish Catholicism to its present pitch in Irish society. This was matched by the bishops and religious superiors in their desire to conceal, for whatever misguided reason, which added to the scandals in the Irish Church and which occasioned misery and suffering on a wide scale and has caused Catholicism to be relegated from the daily discourse and experience of many Irish people. The Catholic experience for numerous individuals is simply either meaningless or hateful. Perhaps Catholicism has meant different things to the Irish people at different stages of their history. Is it better to speak of Irish Catholicisms? What we see at present is not so much the undoing of a culture (Fuller 2002) but an instance of a periodic transformation of Irish cultural history in which Catholicism’s role has not been completely written out but rather has begun to conform to the general picture of the Church’s role in other parts of the Catholic globe. Of course, it is possible to look at Irish Catholicism and not see much hope for the future. There is, however, some naive opinion that things might improve. D. Vincent Twomey has gone beyond his widely read 2003 work to paint a picture of renewal and revival among Irish Catholics.4 The evidence he gives for this is to point to the growth of small, dynamic, and highly 263

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conservative groups and institutions within the Irish Catholic Church, including the Dominican Tallaght Institute, Youth 2000, and the Neocatechumenal Way (Twomey 2017, 96). These are not groups that want to be in dialogue with developments in Irish society but simply to be dismissive of contemporary culture and look to the past as a guide for the present. Twomey also demonstrates a less than vigorous view of present Irish realities when he calls for the establishment of a concordat between Ireland and the Holy See (Towmey 2017, 97). The fact remains that from the perspective of the Catholic Church Ireland has changed beyond recognition. It is not too much to say that by the turn of the twenty-first century the authority of the Catholic Church in Irish civil society has been completely destroyed (Cleary 6). Some commentators are of the opinion that the decline of institutional Catholicism as an influence in Irish society long predated the scandals of the 1980s and 1990s. As early as 1980, Fr. Peter Connolly predicted that Catholicism would disappear within 20 years. He also claimed that John Paul II had been “sent for” by the Irish bishops to arrest the decline in vocations (Kiberd 2013, 56). Others believe that the Papal visit was designed to resist liberalizing trends in Irish society brought about by the feminist movement. Certainly in his Limerick address John Paul delineated a role for women in society which owed more to the vision of Pius X (1903–14) than that of the Second Vatican council (1962–65) (Holland 1426; Ó Corráin 753). One effect of the visit as Stephen Collins points out was simply to encourage the Irish bishops to ignore the problems already facing the Irish Church and to “continue to behave as if [the Church] still had the power to impose its will on the political system” (Collins 195). In analyzing this transformation and its implications for the study of Catholicism within Irish Studies, I would like to look briefly at three broad categories which have helped to change utterly the relationship of Catholicism to Irish cultural identity: Feminism and sexual politics; the issue of child abuse; and the Church and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the most under researched of these areas.5 From the beginning of the state, the Church has held the position as the arbiter of sexual morality (Cronin 2012, 2). It sought to ensure that Catholic moral values were enshrined in law. This was to some extent a legacy of the “Devotional Revolution” of the nineteenth century which was accompanied by “a new emphasis in moral theology on sexual restraint” (Nic Ghiolla Phádraig 1995, 595). It is equally clear, however, that “all the evidence for varieties of sexual activity point to a society where the expression of sexuality was less inhibited than historians believed” (Barr and Ó Corráin 359). By 1973, the Irish bishops conceded that there were many aspects of Catholic teaching which could not be enforced by law. A point the bishops reiterating in their submission to the new Ireland Forum in 1984. Despite the bishops’ denial, it is clear that clerics from Edward Cahill S.J. (1868–1941) to Bishop Jeremiah Newman (bishop of Limerick 1974–95) emphasized the role of the law in enforcing Catholic morality. Newman explicitly stated that the government had a duty to Ireland’s Catholic majority to “enforce public morality” (Fanning 49). There was also some suggestion that canon law took priority over civil law. This was exactly the problem from the perspective of Irish feminists beginning in the early 1970s for whom the election of Mary Robinson as president in 1990 (Foster 2008) represented a watershed in women’s achievements. The fact that Robinson had been involved in early attempts to decriminalize homosexuality and to make contraceptives legally available, made her a particular type of cultural icon. The feminist narrative rejected as inappropriate state law as a means of regulating issues of sexuality and reproduction. The 1983 abortion referendum, for example, “provoked a vehement ideological confrontation, which opposed Catholic and conservative social forces to an emerging sense of moral pluralism and individual freedom” (Burke and Wills 1414). The role of women in Irish society had been firmly enshrined in the 264

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1937 Constitution, which portrayed women’s roles as primarily confined to the home raising children for the state. Even at the time this view did not go unchallenged. Dorothy Macardle wrote in robust terms at the time the Constitution was made public that as it stood: “I do not see how anyone holding advanced views on the rights of women can support it . . . it is a tragic dilemma for those who have been loyal and ardent workers in the national cause” (Quoted in Meaney 53). The Constitution’s views on women broadly reflected the ideas of the Church with regard to the role of women in society. As the twentieth century wore on this could not be sustainable. One problem for Catholicism with the emergence of the feminist movement is that the Church for the most part simply does not understand it. This is despite an enormous literature on feminist theology.6 In Ireland, the Church resisted the feminist movement and its dynamic implications for the state and the culture of Catholic Ireland. This puts the Church in a severely restricted space when dealing with feminists’ critiques of the social and political realities of Ireland. Institutional Catholicism’s failures to understand feminism is caught up with some fundamental ideas of what it is to be Catholic. The rejection of divorce, contraception, abortion, and the idealization of the Blessed Virgin Mary as the model for how women should live their lives, all militate against a sympathetic hearing for feminists from institutional Catholicism. The fact of the feminist movement and the growth in feminist studies has led to the assumption that the enhanced role of women would function to make Ireland a better, more tranquil, and a more equal and caring society. All this was shattered by the revelation that some women, in the shape of nuns, were also among the sadistic degraders of women and children. This “is especially troubling for feminists who believe that the voluntary association of women offer a positive social model” (Butler Cullingford 56). The convent no longer provides a paradigm which enabled women to escape circumscribed gender roles and which gives them a position in which to help transform Irish society.7 Instead the convents, the Industrial schools, Magdalene laundries, and Mother and Baby Homes attached to them, became in many instances places where: “The most unfortunate—the indigent, orphans, unmarried mothers, illegitimate children, the disabled came under church authority, they were subjected to the full coercive face of its carceral institutions in ways that the better off were largely spared” (Cleary 2017, 218). The institutions run by nuns and brothers represented not so much places of safety where Christian love and charity were exhibited but rather as James Smith has written they were “the nation’s architecture of containment” (2007) where the undesired and unwanted were kept out of sight and subjected in many instances to a ruthless regime little changed since Victorian times. Church and state embarked on a systematic program of concealment. To take but one example, the Department of Health knew in the years 1946–47 that twice as many children were likely to die in the Tuam Mother and Baby Home as in any other publicly funded care facility. It also knew that 21 children died of malnutrition in the institution in those years. It chose not to act.8 The repeated denials that bishops did not realize the full implications of child sex abuse was part of a more general attempt to protect the “good name” of the Church which was regarded as more important than the damage done to children and young people. The Dublin/Murphy report of 2009 was especially condemnatory of this aspect of the Church’s procedures: The Dublin Archdiocese’s pre-occupations in dealing with cases of child sexual abuse, at least until the mid-1990s, were maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the Church, and the preservation of its assets. All other considerations, including the welfare of children and justice for victims, were subordinated to these priories. (Commission of Investigation) 265

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One of the problems in all this was that the Church saw issues of child abuse purely in terms of sinfulness. This needed the possibility of repentance, counselling, and forgiveness. Rather than see child abuse as a crime and an utter violation of the dignity of children which needed punishment, the Church preferred to deal with the matters by its own procedures and was somewhat supercilious with respect to the institutions of the state. The enormous resentment aimed at the Church has built up a residue in the spirit of the Irish people which will take a long time to dissipate. By contrast Pope Benedict XVI in his letter to the Irish people in March 2010 not only recognized the abuse as a crime but firmly laid responsibility for the whole catastrophe on the Irish hierarchy (Pope Benedict XV paras. 1 and 2). Some commentators have accurately observed that he evaded placing any responsibility on the Roman Curia or on himself and his predecessor, Pope John Paul II (Egan 34). Among the other groups in Irish society that the Church contended with were gays and lesbians. In November 1994, Catholic Ireland was again shaken from its complacency by the fact of a priest dying in a gay sauna in Dublin. A spin was put on an otherwise difficult situation by the fact that the owners sent for two priests to anoint the dead man. In the retelling, it seemed that the two priests in question were also patrons (Ferriter 2005, 735–736). It is also the case that groups like Gay Health Action, founded in 1985, helped create the circumstances that made condoms more widely available. In the face of the AIDS crisis, the Irish government had to treat the matter of condom availability as a public health issue rather than a question of morality (Kerrigan 245). In the light of the Health and Family Planning Act 1992, the bishops gave no concession to the health aspect of the AIDS issue, saying that the Act had “serious implications for moral behavior. As pastors, we feel obliged to recall the moral law for those entrusted by God to our pastoral care” (Fuller 2002, 246). Yet again we witness a clash of cultural perspectives: a refusal of institutional Catholicism to express its beliefs in other than abstract terms. At the same time, it had been clear since the early 1970s that the Irish government was not prepared to evaluate questions such as the availability of the pill and condoms, and indeed divorce, solely from the viewpoint of the Church (Ferriter 2009, 408). Of all the problems that rocked Irish Catholicism in the last 50 years, none was more pressing than the Troubles from 1969 to 1998. At the very heart of the confrontation between the Catholic community and the British state in Ireland was the question of authority. Many in the Catholic community simply rejected the ecclesiastical analysis of what was happening in the North. This led to a refusal to listen to the authoritative pronouncements of priests and bishops. The IRA blamed institutional Catholicism for assisting “British oppression” in Ireland (Rafferty 2008, 112). They saw Cardinal Cathal Daly in particular as an ally of the British government and Norther Ireland Unionists (Scull 158). Even the intervention of Pope John Paull II could not bring terrorists who were Catholic to a sense of obedience to the highest authority in the Church (The Pope in Ireland, 21 & 56). Republican leaders would decry the fact that the Church had a tendency to act as an oppressor rather than a liberator of people (Adams 2003, 9). Dissent between ecclesiastical authority and militant Irish nationalism was not without precedent in Irish history. These confrontations during “the Troubles” coming as they did in the context of a cultural shift; growing skepticism; and the calling into question of all sources of authority in the 1960s and 1970s, had dire consequences for the role of the Church. Descent from episcopal authority on political and social issues had the potential to give rise to distrust on moral and theological matters (Rafferty 2015, 27). At the beginning of “the Troubles” many of those involved in violence were practicing Catholics. Furthermore, given the peculiar circumstances of Northern Ireland, people rarely differentiated between their religious and nationalist identity. As the campaign of violence intensified, the hierarchical Church and the nationalist community began to reassess the nature of the 266

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relationship between Church and people. Lay Catholics became more assertive and more critical of the Church and churchmen became more hesitant about the historical identification with a by now violent and murderous nationalist ideology.9 There was, however, a problem in all this, and that was the question of control. The desire on the part of institutional Catholicism to shape, form, and exercise authority over every aspect of its members lives was subject not only to scrutiny by the increasingly educated Catholic community, but this was carried on against the background of dissent on the use of violence for political ends. As one astute Northern Ireland civil servant could write in 1977: The realization of our political objectives would result in a pluralist state in which the Catholic Church’s influence would have to compete with denominational or plainly philistine trends; this would pose a threat to its control over its flock which it jealously guards. (The National Archives CJ/1546 (90)) The Troubles raided questions for the Church which had quite profound impact for how Catholicism operated on both sides of the Irish border. This challenge was not always recognized or acknowledged by churchmen. There is some suggestion that by the mid-1990s many Irish bishops regarded the Northern conflict as of less importance than the problems of liberalism and material and moral relativism in the Republic (Andersen and Lavan 190). As early as 1977, Cardinal William Conway had told Bishop William Philbin of Down and Connor that any response from the northern bishops to the proposals of the secretary of state, Merlyn Rees, to reform the law in the north in a more liberal direction with respect to divorce and homosexuality would have to be delicately handled so that the bishops’ position “could not be distorted in a debate in the Republic” (Archives of the Diocese of Down and Connor). Above all, the Catholic ethos of the Republic had to be maintained whatever developments might take place in Northern Ireland. That institutional Catholicism in Ireland has exhibited high levels of corruption cannot be denied. A once dominant institution has been humiliated and its leaders subject to varying degrees of contempt. All this was of the Church’s own making. Whether it has learned from the painful lessons of the past remains to be seen. Irish Catholicism at this stage of the twenty-first century operates at two distinct levels. In many ways it continues to inform how the Irish think about themselves. So much of Irish culture is bound up with Catholicism that it is difficult, at times, to separate out the discrete characteristics that combine to give life and identity to what it is to be Irish. This is not true for all Irish people, but it is for very many. For others in Irish society we have moved to a position of “believing but not belonging.” Official Catholicism if not quite “with O’Leary in the grave” struggles to make itself heard in a society which has grown distrustful of its claims. There are, however, Catholic religious figures who continued to command respect, one thinks of individuals such as Fr. Peter McVerry and Sr. Stanislaus Kennedy, who serve to remind the country in its post-Tiger economy that Ireland has, at times, a tendency to neglect the poor and downtrodden. That the Church did not always respond with love and humility in dealing with such groups is to its eternal shame. Not everything, however, in Irish Catholicism’s past was marked by ill-treatment, sadism, sexual exploitation, and crusades of personal power.10 Jacinta Prunty has made a valiant attempt to portray an alternative account of the raison d’etre of the Magdalene Laundries, not everyone will be satisfied with the story she tells (Prunty 2017). Other Catholic institutions in Irish life continue to provide caring service to the needy. It is not without significance that among the places Pope Francis visited on his trip to Ireland in August 2018 was the Capuchin Day Center, Dublin. 267

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The culture wars of the last 20 years which resulted in the introduction of same-sex marriage and abortion will cast a long shadow over Catholic Ireland’s future. The reason for such wars were complex and involved a tangled struggle about values in Irish life. This in turn gave rise to “a significant distinction between today’s moral politics and earlier varieties of moral regulation” (Hunt 202). The problem for Catholicism is its inability to move beyond past regulations and systems. To do so would involve a complete alteration in its mindset the likes of which we have not seen since the Christianization of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, the reforms of Vatican II notwithstanding.

Notes 1 See also J. J. I. von Döllinger, Hippolytus and Kallistus. 2 Tyrrell, an Irishman, was a member of the English Jesuit Province. He was excommunicated in 1908 for his “Modernist” views. 3 See, for example, Philip Sheldrake, Befriending our Desires. 4 D. Vincent Twomey, The End of Irish Catholicism? The book was not always closely read. R.F. Foster excoriated it for not having a single word about the sexual scandals rife in Irish Catholicism. Cf. Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change, (62). In fact there is a disappointingly and egregiously brief reference to the scandals on page 33 of Twomey’s work. Foster here gives an account of what it is to be a Protestant which would be unrecognizable to either Luther or Calvin. This is a general failing as identified by Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. 5 Some amends have been made in this regard with the appearance of Margaret M. Scull, The Catholic Church and the Northern Ireland Troubles, 1968–1998. Thomas Paul Burgess’ edited collection, The Contested identities of Ulster Catholics has, strangely, little to say about the interrelationship between the nationalist community and institutional Catholicism. 6 Some samples of which are Shelia Biggs and Mary McClintock Fulkerson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theology and Susan Abraham and Elema Procorio-Foley, Frontiers in Catholic Feminist Theology. In addition, since 1992, the journal Feminist Theology has been issued three times a year by the Britain and Ireland School of Feminist Theology. 7 Mary Peckham Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion, & Culture Change in Ireland, 1750–1900 is still probably the best book on the subject. 8 James M. Smith, “Knowing and Unknowing Tuam: Ireland’s past Ireland’s present.” I am grateful to my colleague for letting me see his unpublished paper. 9 As Declan Kiberd has trenchantly observed, the language of patriotism was “so drained of meaning by the IRA outrages and by the revisionist journalism of the 1980s and 1990s that it is not now available to commentators or politicians” (56). 10 Diarmaid MacCulloch is convinced that one of the motivations in the sexual abuse crisis was “the exercise of power” which can be very emotionally consoling (206).

Works cited Abraham, S. and Procorio-Foley, E. Frontiers in Catholic Feminist Theology. Fortress Press, 2009. Adams, G. A Farther Shore: The Road to Peace in Ireland. Random House, 2003. Andersen, K. and A. Lavan. “Believing in God But Not Obeying the Church: Being Catholic in Ireland and Poland in the 1990s.” Changing Ireland in International Comparison. Edited by B. Hilliard and M. Nic Ghiolla Phádraig. Liffey Press, 2007, pp. 191–220. American Magazine, 2019. americamagazine.org/faith/2019/09/30/pope-francis-meeets-father-jamesmartin-private-audience. Archives of the Archdiocese of Armagh, Logue papers, Logue–McKenna, March 22, 1922. Archives of the Diocese of Down and Connor, Philbin Papers, EP6/5 Conway–Philbin, February 23, 1977. Bartlett, T. et al. Irish Studies: A General Introduction. Gill and Macmillan, 1998. Barr, C. and D. Ó Corráin. “Catholic Ireland 1740–2016.” The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland. Edited by E.F. Biagini and M.E. Daly. Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp. 68–87. 268

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Biggs, S. and M. McClintock Fulkerson, Eds. The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theology. Oxford University Press, 2019. Bradshaw, B. “The English Reformation and Identity Formation in Ireland and Wales.” British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533–1707. Edited by B. Bradshaw and P. Roberts. Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 43–111. Burgess, T.P., Ed. The Contested Identifies of Ulster Catholics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Burke, U. and C. Wills. “The Republic of Ireland and the Politics of Sexuality, 1965–2000.” Field Day Anthology, Vol. 5, 2002, pp. 1409–1415. Cleary, J. “The Catholic Twilight.” Tracing the Cultural Legacy of Irish Catholicism: From Galway to Cloyne and beyond. Edited by E. Maher and E. O’Brien. Manchester University Press, 2017, pp. 209–225. Cleary, J. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture. Edited by J. Cleary and C. Connolly. Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 1–25. Collins, S. “After the Visit: Re-learning Our Past.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 1089, No. 430, 2019, pp. 195–202. Commission of Investigation (Murphy Report). Report of the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin, July 2009. Cronin, M.G. Impure Thoughts: Sexuality, Catholicism and Literature in Twentieth-Century Ireland. Manchester University Press, 2012. Cronin, M.G. “Irish Studies between Past and Future.” Are the Irish Different? Edited by T. Inglis. Manchester University Press, 2014, pp. 241–250. Cullingford, E.B. “‘Our Nuns Are Not a Nation.’ Politicizing the Convent in Irish Literature and Film.” Irish Post-Modernisms and Popular Culture. Edited by W. Bolzano et al. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 55–73. Duffy, É. Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (4th ed.). Yale University Press, 2014. Ferriter, D. The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000. Profile Books, 2005. Ferriter, D. Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland. Profile Books, 2009. Egan, K. Remaining a Catholic after the Murphy Report. Columba Press, 2011. Fanning, B. “A Catholic Vision of Ireland.” Are the Irish Different? Edited by T. Inglis. Manchester University Press, 2014, pp. 44–53. Foster, R.F. Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change. Oxford University Press, 2008. Fuller, L. Irish Catholicism since 1950: The Undoing of a Culture. Gill and Macmillan, 2002. Fuller, L. “Identity and Political Fragmentation in Independent Ireland, 1923–83.” Irish Catholic Identities. Edited by O.P. Rafferty. Manchester University Press, 2015. Gallagher, M.P. “Post-Modernity: Friend or Foe.” Faith and Culture in the Irish Context. Edited by E.G. Cassidy. Veritas, 1996, pp. 71–82. Gregory, B. The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. The Belknap Press, 2012. Holland, M. “Mary the Mother and Her Impact on Irish Politics.” The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vol. 5, Irish Women’s Writing and Tradition. Edited by A. Bourke et al. Cork University Press, 2002, pp. 1426–1429. Chrystel, H. The Politics of Sexual Morality in Ireland. St Martin’s Press, 1999. Hippolytus. Refutation of All Heresies, Book IX, c. VII. The Ante-Nicene Fathers. Edited by A. Robert et al. Christian Literature Publishing, 1886. Hunt, A. Governing Morals: A Social History of Moral Regulation. Cambridge University Press, 1999. Inglis, T. “Religion, Identity, State and Society.” The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture. Edited by J. Cleary and C. Connolly. Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 59–77. Kearney, H. The British Isles: A History of Four Nations. Cambridge University Press, 1989. Kerrigan, P. “OUT-Ing AIDS.” Media History, Vol. 25, No. 2, 2019, pp. 244–258. Kiberd, D. “Ireland 2012: Excavating the Present.” The Irish Review, Vol. 46, 2013, pp. 52–59. MacCulloch, D. Silence: A Christian History. Viking, 2013. Magray, M.P. The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion, & Culture Change in Ireland, 1750–1900. Oxford University Press, 1998. Maignant, C. “Church and State in Ireland (1922–2013): Contrasting Perceptions of Humanity.” Études Irlandaises, Vol. 39, No. 2, 2014, pp. 63–77. Martin, J. Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter Into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion and Sensitivity (renewed ed.). HarperOne, 2018. May, A.R. Patriot Priests: French Clergy and National Identity in World War I. University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. McGarry, P. “Catholic Church Teaching on Abortion Dates from 1869.” Irish Times, July 1, 2013. 269

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Meaney, G. Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change: Race, Sex and Nation. Routledge, 2010. National Archives CJ/1546 (90) August 2, 1977. Nic Ghiolla Phádraig, M. “The Power of the Catholic Church in the Republic of Ireland.” Irish Society: Sociological Perspectives. Edited by P. Clancy et al. Dublin, Institute of Public Administration, 1995, pp. 593–619. Nolan, E. “Postcolonial Literary Studies, Nationalism, and Feminist Critique in Contemporary Ireland.” Éire-Ireland, Vol. 42, Nos. 1 & 2, 2007, pp. 336–361. O’Brien, E. “Kicking Bishop Brennan Up the Arse: Catholic Deconstruction and Postmodernity in Contemporary Irish Catholicism.” The Reimaging Ireland Reader: Examining Our Past, Changing Our Future. Edited by E. Maher. Oxford, Peter Lang, pp. 135–156. Ó Corráin, D. “Catholicism in Ireland 1880–2015.” The Cambridge History of Ireland (Vol. 4). Edited by Thomas Bartlett. Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 726–764. O’Hanlon, G. “After the Pope: The Catholic Church in Ireland.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 108, No. 430, 2019, pp. 126–137. Papal Encyclicals, Papalencylicals.net/pius09/p9syll.htm (Accessed November 1, 2019). Pierson, Claire. “Rights Versus Rites? Catholic Women and Abortion Access in Northern Ireland.” The Contested Identities of Ulster Catholics. Edited by Thomas Paul Burgess. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, 51. Prunty, J. The Monasteries, Magdalen Asylums and Reformatory Schools of Our Lady of Charity in Ireland, 1853–1973. Dublin, Columba Press, 2017. Oakley, F. “Epilogue: The Matter of Unity.” The Crisis of Authority in Catholic Modernity. Edited by M.J. Lacey and F. Oakley. Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 349–356. Pope Benedict, XV. “Pastoral Letter of the Holy Father Benedict XV to the Catholics of Ireland, 19th March 2010.” paras. 1 and 2. W2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/letters/2010documents/hf_benxvi_let20100319_church-ireland.html (Accessed November 4, 2019). The Pope in Ireland: Addresses and Homilies. Veritas, 1979. https://www.catholicbishops.ie/wp-content/ uploads/images/stories/cco_publications/other/veritas%20content%20of%201979%20-%202004%20 book.pdf. Rafferty, O.P. “The Catholic Church in Ireland and Vatican II in Historical Perspective.” Ireland & Vatican II: Essays Theological, Pastoral and Educational. Edited by Niall Coll. The Columba Press, 2015, pp. 13–32. Rafferty, O.P. “The Catholic Church and the Nationalist Community in Northern Ireland since 1960.” Éire-Ireland, Vol. 43, Nos. 1 & 2, 2008, pp. 99–125. Rafferty, O.P. “Tyrrell’s History and Theology: A Preliminary Survey.” George Tyrrell and Catholic Modernism. Edited by O.P. Rafferty. Four Courts Press, 2010, pp. 21–37. Sheldrake, P. Befriending Our Desires. Darton, Longman & Todd, 1994. Scull, M.M. The Catholic Church and the Northern Ireland Troubles, 1968–1998. Oxford University Press, 2019. Smith, J.M. Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment. University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Smith, J.M. Knowing and Unknowing Tuam: Ireland’s Past Ireland’s Present. Unpublished paper. Summa Theologicae III: 27 art. 1–6. Twomey, D. Vincent. The End of Irish Catholicism? Veritas, 2003. Twomey, D. Vincent. “Contemporary Irish Catholicism: A Time of Hope!” Tracing the Cultural Legacy of Irish Catholicism: From Galway to Cloyne and beyond. Edited by E. Maher and E. O’Brien. Manchester University Press, 2017, pp. 89–102. Von Döllinger, J.J.I. Hippolytus and Kallistus. Regensburg: G. J. Manz, 1853. Whelan, K. “The Cultural Effects of the Famine.” The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture. Edited by J. Cleary and C. Connolly. Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 137–154. Whelan, K. Religion, Landscape and Settlement in Ireland: From Patrick to Present. Four Courts Press, 2019.

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Part V

Culture

Introduction: culture This section deals broadly with key elements of Irish culture, encompassing categories like sport and language as well as literature and the arts. We use the word “culture” not only in its most conventional sense as shorthand for artistic, intellectual, and popular production but also, to borrow from Stuart Hall, as a term that “treats the domain of cultural forms and activities as a constantly changing field” (514). In this context, we understand culture as an always mobile interchange between past and present, tradition and modernity, and individual and collective: “Irish culture” is far more a marker of the volatility and contingency of Irish identity than it is a static representation of Irish identity at any given moment. If the chapters included in this section share one primary concern, it is that they all approach culture as a malleable and relational phenomenon, where meaning inheres in the ways forms adapt across time and ideology rather than in individual representative objects or experiences. In other sections of this volume, historians, political scientists, sociologists, economists, and other scholars chronicle the dramatic economic, political, and social changes Ireland has undergone since 2008: Parts Two and Three, in particular, analyze the direct effects of austerity and recovery on national policies, populations, and Ireland’s international relationships. The chapters in this section, in contrast, discover other ways that such national and global reorientations affect how people imagine, intervene in, and reshape the world around them. That is, these chapters all take the 2008 crash as their starting point, but for the most part are not about cultural representations of the Irish economic crisis or even about the ways the crash materially damaged the cultural sector (although some, like Laura Farrell-Wortman’s chapter on theater, do address this point). Instead, they trace the new artistic forms, the more diverse modes of critical inquiry, and the shifting ideologies of “Irishness” that have transformed not only the conduits between Irish culture and Irish society, but also ideas about what constitutes Irish “culture” in the first place. The first two chapters in the section deal with Irish literature and literary studies (although many other chapters in the Handbook also take up these areas in relation to specific theoretical or historical topics).1 Renée Fox’s chapter on fiction investigates how scholars since 2008 have redressed the colonial politics of Irish literary history, not simply by insisting that “peripheral” colonial literary forms need to be taken as seriously as metropolitan forms but by fundamentally

Culture

overhauling the very terms by which we define form. The first half of her chapter focuses particularly on the work that scholars of nineteenth-century Irish fiction have done to reevaluate the forms of British realism that so long excluded Irish novels: work that not only resituates Ireland in a more expansive and transnational literary history but that also fundamentally changes how we understand even the most canonical nineteenth-century British novels. The chapter’s second half then turns to an analysis of contemporary Irish neo-historical novelists, arguing that these writers’ exchanges with and revisions of the nineteenth century work in tandem with contemporary scholarship to produce new ways of reading and making meaning out of the literary past. Eric Falci’s chapter on poetry similarly addresses how the narratives that literary criticism has produced about contemporary Irish literature have constricted our sense of the island’s diverse literary output: in this case, Falci argues that criticism has shaped Irish poetry into a “tradition” that is primarily lyrical, male, and focused on a narrow understanding of Irish identity. His chapter advocates for new narratives that can account for the vibrantly expanding Irish experimental poetry scene, the prominence of an ever-growing cohort of powerful women poets, and the oblique—or sometimes even nonexistent—place of Ireland in many poets’ work. In considering the influence that critical narratives have on the Irish poetry scene, the chapter also makes a case for the crucial role of narrative in Irish poetry, arguing that the most productive narrative of contemporary Irish poetry might be a story about poetry’s capacity to use its lyric forms to actually create new genres of narrative. The next two chapters in the section outline how the arts have evolved in the wake of the crash, both in the kinds of artistic productions that have emerged and in the ways critics and arts institutions have begun to reconsider what sorts of arts, artists, and collaborations might best speak to a changing Ireland. Laura Farrell-Wortman’s chapter about contemporary performance addresses not only how Irish funding bodies have increasingly turned their attention towards collaborative “theater-makers” and productions—while turning away from the twentieth-century culture of superstar Irish playwrights—but also how theater itself has diversified into a number of small, collaborative companies whose shows can reach wider and more heterogeneous audiences. Farrell-Wortman pays particular attention to the relationship between performance and social change in Ireland, mapping the intersections between widespread political activism and the growing representation of women’s and LGBTQ+ voices in the Irish theater community, while simultaneously advocating for a continued expansion of mainstream theater to include more diverse Irish identities and experiences. Kelly Sullivan’s chapter on material and visual culture also offers a series of examples of important experimental work that visual and performance artists have produced since 2008, but does so in order to unfold connections between artists’ increasing fascination with material objects and the necessity for Irish Studies to open itself more fully to the critical study of material culture. The argument of the chapter is two-fold. First, it reveals how more sustained attention to material culture can uncover the often oversimplified and objectifying ways in which scholarship has assumed certain subject–object relations in its approach to understanding Irish identity, the Irish colonial condition, and rural culture. And second, it traces how visual artists and museums during and after the Celtic Tiger have been especially attentive to a fetishization of objects associated with Ireland’s transformation from colonial possession into neoliberal capitalist economy. Taken together, these two halves of the chapter show that a critical turn to material culture is a fundamentally ethical turn, one that unsettles and reconfigures historical, aesthetic, and scholarly narratives of nineteenth- to twenty-first-century Irish development. Méabh Ní Fhuartháin’s chapter on Irish music addresses the impact of the post-crash experience on more “traditional” Irish culture, demonstrating, to borrow again from Hall, how little the value of tradition rests on “the mere persistence of old forms” and how much it emerges 272

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instead from the multiple and continuously changing ways its “elements have been linked together or articulated” (516). Ní Fhuartháin’s chapter begins by tracing recent intersections between Irish Studies, music studies, and a number of other fields (including sound studies, literary studies, and dance studies), outlining how scholarly approaches to Irish music have expanded from primarily folkloric interests into more theoretical investments in gender, geography, and interdisciplinarity. To show this transformation at work, the chapter turns to an analysis of “Mise Éire,” following the piece’s movement across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from poem to film score to large-scale performance piece for the Decade of Centenaries. In her reflections on “Mise Éire”’s malleable cultural and national affiliations, Ní Fhuartháin demonstrates the ways in which music can be a cultural idea as much as a sonic experience, as well as the power of Irish music to challenge conventional ideas of Irish nation and statehood. The section concludes with Paul Rouse’s chapter on Irish sport, a chapter that reveals how often Irish Studies forgets the essential role that sport plays (and has historically played) both in the construction of Irish national culture and in the day-to-day lives of Irish people. Rouse’s chapter describes the complicated balancing act between national and international demands in major Irish sports like hurling, soccer, and rugby, contrasting the forms of Irish national identity produced by the inward-looking GAA with the ideas of Irish sporting culture that emerge in successful outward-facing sports like rugby. As the chapter shows, though, “national” and “international” are complicated distinctions when it comes to Irish sport, as the border, the diaspora, the rules about who counts as “Irish” on the island and in the sporting world, and the increasing commercialization of sport all contribute to a complex politics about the degree to which sporting events and the athletes who participate in them can or should represent any coherent idea of “Ireland.” Rouse’s conclusion focuses not on major and commercial sport in Ireland, however, but on the relationship between sport and the everyday lives of the Irish people: the dangers of gambling, the decreased participation of children in physical activities, and the extent to which our increasingly digital and smartphone-centered lives inhibit our physical participation in the actual world. If the majority of the chapters in this section focus on how cultural products synthesize, represent, imagine, and critique the state of the world around us, this conclusion reminds us that “culture” also refers to our myriad experiences of living in the world, and is always as quotidian as it is transformative.

Note 1 In Part 1, see John Waters; in Part 2, see Guy Beiner; in Part 4, see Claire Bracken, Ed Madden, and Sarah L. Townsend; in Part VI, see Maureen O’Connor, Elizabeth Grubgeld, and Seán Kennedy; and in Part VII, see Kathleen Costello-Sullivan, Margaret O’Neill and Michaela Schrage-Früh, Margot Gayle Backus and Joseph Valente, and Malcolm Sen.

Works cited Hall, Stuart. “Notes on the Deconstructing ‘The Popular’.” Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. Edited by John Storey. Routledge, 2013, pp. 508–518.

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21 Reading outside the lines Imagining new histories of Irish fiction Renée Fox

I lean in to hear the words, a few whispers, but something else, some other noise is distracting me. It is, after all, 1858 and suddenly the open page is the page opening . . . . . . you will not like it, Clio, this menial task I have in mind for you: speak for me, say history say famine say fever say Trevelyan. But you are speechless: it is too late . . . —Eavan Boland, “Reading the Victorian Novel” (69–70)

This is less a chapter about Irish fiction itself than it is one about how we read Irish fiction, and about invocations by recent scholarly work in Irish Studies and beyond to reassess and relinquish many of the canons, genres, and narratives that have coalesced as Irish literary history: to “lean in and hear the words,” as Eavan Boland writes in “Reading the Victorian Novel,” but to hear them differently. The vastness of a category like “Irish fiction” makes any comprehensive survey of the field an exercise in futility, and even the category itself founders under the politics—national, colonial, gendered, and global—that have shaped and reshaped its boundaries across the last four centuries.1 Several volumes published since 2018 have traced how the terrain of Irish literary studies has shifted over the last two decades, both in its objects of analysis and in its approaches to its material: as the canon has expanded to include writers outside the white male Irish patriarchy, so have feminist studies, queer theory, environmental studies, critical race studies, disability studies, and memory studies joined postcolonial theory as key critical frameworks for re-examining Irish literature.2 Other chapters in this volume turn to contemporary Irish novels to explore how these theoretical interventions force us to take seriously literary forms, archives, and identities that assert themselves against the monoliths of twentieth-century Irish fiction3—twenty-firstcentury novels by women, queer writers, and crime writers make multiple appearances in the 275

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volume, for instance, while James Joyce and the Irish short story hardly get a mention, despite retaining pride of place in Irish literary studies and serving as important interlocutors in the theoretical expansion of the field.4 Reading beyond the canon—producing new canons, recombining old canons, kicking the very notion of canons to the curb—makes us read books and national literary “traditions” differently. It makes us ask new questions. What kinds of vast theoretical, cultural, or aesthetic potential might Irish novels suddenly acquire when we don’t pick them up expecting them to fit into a pre-mapped literary cartography, especially one that uses Joyce as its key? When, instead of reading novels with the grain or against the grain of literary convention, we idealistically abandon the idea of grains entirely? Such reading often requires looking backward in order to look forward: actively deciding, to borrow Boland’s words from the epigraph of this chapter, that it isn’t yet too late to reread the literary past into a language of and for the future, that the “other noise” muffling a text’s old-fashioned dialogue isn’t a distraction but an opportunity to hear an alternative story. Like Boland’s poem, this chapter asks whether the twenty-first century can look back to the nineteenth-century novel and find a language for Irish experience and possibility in it. Unlike Boland’s poem, it argues that the “speechlessness” of Ireland in the nineteenth-century novel tradition doesn’t mean we need to close these books; instead, it insists that this speechlessness has little to do with the books themselves and much to do with how literary scholars have been trained to read them (or not read them). The chapter turns to the nineteenth century because twentieth-century Irish fiction has long “loom[ed] large” both in Irish Studies and in the canon of Western literature more broadly (Mullen 14), while nineteenth-century Irish fiction has been labeled a failure since before the nineteenth century even ended. “Another year has come and gone without bringing us the novelist we are hoping for, whom we are in need of, to show us ourselves as we are,” Rosa Mulholland wrote in the Irish Monthly in 1891 (368): “Irish literature does not become enriched as time goes on, and we shall have little to show for the work of our period at the close of the nineteenth century” (369). Mulholland’s criticism of the nineteenth-century Irish novel reverberated through literary criticism for the next hundred-plus years, creating a trajectory of Irish literary history in which nineteenth-century fiction could be rescued only by understanding it as a precursor to the much greater successes of Irish modernism.5 However, in the last 15 years both Irish Studies critics and Irish novelists have turned back to nineteenth-century fiction to explore the ways that entrenched reading practices, rather than the novels themselves, have produced a story of Irish literature full of nineteenth-century novelistic failures eclipsed by later experimental modernist heroes. Nineteenth-century Irish fiction has become a case study, even a catalyst, for analyzing the prejudices and historical contingencies that generate self-fulfilling literary histories: histories that create rather than simply corroborate the truth of W.B. Yeats’s 1895 claim that nineteenth-century Irish prose never quite reached its “maturity” (Yeats 276). The aim of this chapter isn’t to produce its own new readings of nineteenth-century Irish novels, but rather to analyze how scholars and fiction writers since 2008 have looked to nineteenthcentury fiction to question the critical frameworks of Irish Studies, to imagine new Irish literary histories, and to expose the assumptions and habits with which we read Irish novels. The chapter falls into four parts. The first offers an overview of recent literary studies scholarship both within and adjacent to Irish Studies that pushes back against narratives of nineteenth-century Irish failure by revealing the cultural and imperial politics that inhere in critically valuing some forms over other forms. The next three parts explore contemporary novels by Tana French, Emma Donoghue, and Joseph O’Connor (The Likeness, The Wonder, and Shadowplay) that transform nineteenth-century Irish history and literature from static objects of knowledge into openended questions about reading practices, literary desires, and the futures of Irish fiction. It is no 276

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accident that a detective novel, a novel by a lesbian writer, and a novel about popular horror fiction comprise this chapter’s primary objects of study: as canons of Irish literature expand and disperse, as critics and writers alike show us the damage that hidebound reading can do to both past and future, the very sorts of novels that the Irish literary canon once excluded become sites for the new forms of imagining that a more open sense of history can offer us.

I. Canons, genres, forms It is often women writers who push back against the authority of Irish literary canons, as they have historically been missing from those canons. In the introduction to her 2015 anthology of Irish women writers, Sinéad Gleeson argues that established canons interfere with our ability to discover alternative literary trajectories and historical networks alongside the ones we assume as fact. The stories in her collection and the collection itself, she writes, are “about figuring things out, exploration and questioning ourselves and all around us” (6)—this is what she tells us fiction “encourages us to do,” but so too is this what dismembering canons encourages us to do: to question what we think we know and to render visible the hidden institutional structures that created this so-called knowledge in the first place. This is hardly a new practice: the dismembering and re-membering of canons has been at the festering core of Irish Studies since the three-volume 1991 Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing created a tradition for us but forgot to remember that women write sometimes, too: “I am free from the unease” created by any anthology’s “necessary incompleteness,” Seamus Deane wrote in Field Day’s general introduction, arguing that the project was “engaged in an act of definition rather than in a definitive action” (xx). In answer, Angela Bourke, Siobhan Kilfeather, and the other editors of Field Day’s 2002 fourth and fifth volumes dedicated to women’s writing reminded their colleagues and readers that Irish literature, history, and culture are human constructs, not natural phenomena: their presentation in print has usually been conditioned by . . . generations of scholarship, and the underlying presumption of most of that scholarship has been that both reader and writer are male. (xxxii) Any act of constructing a literary canon will emerge from such underlying presumptions, whether of gender, class, nation, culture, or race: scholarship produces canons, canons produce more scholarship, and disciplinary authority implants itself in the deeply cut grooves of this mutually constitutive project. The construction of a nineteenth-century canon of Irish fiction has been a particularly fraught effort, guided by Mulholland’s and Yeats’s laments about the lack of worthwhile material to include and shadowed by the monolithic place English Victorian realism holds in nineteenthcentury literary studies.6 Recently, however, in Irish Studies and beyond, critics have begun to resist the longstanding presumption (introduced by Mulholland)7 that Ireland’s lack of a George Eliot means it has a second-rate nineteenth-century literature. We have started to pay more careful attention not just to who (and what) has been left out of nineteenth-century canons (and to the reparative work of putting them back in), but to how our reading practices themselves produce the stories we tell ourselves about Irish literature’s relationship to nineteenth-century literature more largely. Unlike work from the early 2000s, in which postcolonial critics like David Lloyd and Joe Cleary made compelling cases for re-valuing the genres of Irish and other “peripheral” literatures that had (have) been pushed aside by the privileging of metropolitan realism in nineteenth-century British literary studies, in the last few years critics have been more 277

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attentive to the ways in which imperially produced and institutionally reified modes of reading have produced our understanding of genre itself. If “Irish Victorian novels became invisible in literary histories,” as Raphaël Ingelbien argues, it isn’t because of quality, quantity, or even a failure of mimetic representation; it’s because institutionalized reading practices from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century haven’t had the elasticity to accommodate Irish forms in their “normative definitions” of genre (241). This is a different kind of argument from the insistence that decolonizing our canon-building practice can replace realism’s monolithic place in nineteenth-century fiction with a sense of generic plurality. Rather, critics like Ingelbien focus specifically on the ways that conventions of reading have dictated our understanding of form, rather than the more intuitive opposite principle: that form itself shapes how we read. Ingelbien, for instance, argues that nineteenth-century Irish fiction’s chance at being understood as European realism disintegrated against realist fiction’s supposed foreclosure of “the allegorical mode of reading and writing associated with medieval and Renaissance cultural forms” (245): “The idea that a novel could combine a convincingly realist marriage plot with an allegory of union remains counter-intuitive for many scholars of the Irish Victorian novel” (246). In other words, reading allegorically precludes a novel from being realist—it’s not just that if a novel invites you to read allegorically it must not be realist, it’s that scholars of Victorian realism have developed no reading practice that can accommodate both mimesis and allegory in a single representational text, and so the Irish novel can’t be realist. Mary Mullen makes an even stronger case for the ways Irish fiction has been read out of Victorian genre categories, arguing in her book Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels, and Nineteenth-Century Realism that “the stories we tell about novels are actually stories about the cultural institutions that study novels” (40). Again, rather than building an argument about the value to literary history of texts and genres that often get short shrift in Victorian Studies, Mullen focuses her attention on how scholarly reading practices have written Ireland out of realism, and how unsettling these ways of reading will fundamentally transform our understanding of realism’s formal possibilities. She entreats us to “consider how the institutionalized practices of literary study mediate our approaches to realism” (M. Mullen 13) and to recognize in doing so that reading Ireland out of realism also blinds us to formal aspects of English realism that fall beyond the parameters of our institutional stories about fiction. If we learn to read differently, our ideas about form will change fundamentally. If we turn away from Irish Studies and towards Victorian Studies, invocations for decolonized reading that rely less on changing what we read than on changing how we read (although the two necessarily have similar end results) have even more purchase as the field searches for methodologies that can accommodate an expansive nineteenth-century global network, of which England, and English fiction, is only one node. Elaine Freedgood’s book Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel offers one of the most polemic of these interventions, seeking to find out how a literary-historical undoing can liberate the now-normative nineteenthcentury British novel from its heavy centrality in Anglophone novel history and explore what we can read if we read against the grain of our entrenched sense of its “realism” and formal coherence. (xii) Genre is a nationally and historically contingent phenomenon, she argues, and “so is its criticism” (Freedgood xi). The novel, in fact, “may not have a history at all; instead, it might have a history of readings” that have produced genres, forms, and standards of aesthetic value that are as “arbitrary” as they are taken for fact (xviii). Freedgood’s aim, like Mullen’s and, to a lesser extent, 278

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Ingelbien’s, is to focus attention on the idiosyncrasies of fictional form that emerge when we step back from the ways we have been trained to read, and to understand these idiosyncrasies not as peripheral to (or as failures of) genre, but rather as constitutive of it. Realism in particular, for these critics, but also genre more largely, exists because we read for it. If genre categories are fantasies of formal coherence across time and space, and yet every novel we read seems to be an exception to these coherent rules, then it is our job as critics to learn to read differently: more expansively and more radically, jettisoning narrowly metropolitan narratives of generic failure in favor of more careful attention to the intricate transnational, transtemporal, and fluidly political networks that emerge when we stop reading for form and instead let form guide us towards new ways to read. “[F]orms try to contain and control us,” Caroline Levine writes in Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, but they are always “overlapping and colliding with other forms, and sometimes getting in one another’s way” (xi). They are “the stuff of politics” because their job is “to make order” (Levine 3), and yet if we pay attention to the “affordances” of form rather than to its constraints we can discover the “potentialities [that] lie latent . . . in aesthetic and social arrangements” rather than relying on the historically contingent modes of interpretation that have limited forms to singular meanings or ordering principles (6–7). If we think of form as a complex plurality of organizing forces working against or in convoluted relationships with one another rather than as one monolithic ordering principle, then an attentiveness to form should be an act of reading capaciously rather than a foreclosure of aesthetic and political possibility. This chapter is neither an invocation to read for form nor, precisely, to find new forms for reading, but is instead a consideration of how some contemporary Irish novels written in the last decade intervene in the ways that institutionalized or conventional reading practices have ossified the story of literary history that we’ve been telling about Irish fiction from the nineteenth century forward: that Ireland only found a realist tradition belatedly in the 1930s,8 that we should understand any formal innovation in nineteenth-century Irish novels as “protomodernist” because the genius of Irish fiction truly begins with James Joyce (M. Mullen 14), and that Irish literature in Joyce’s wake, as Paige Reynolds argues in the introduction to Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture, demonstrates “a refusal to relinquish modernism” because “the modernist project is not complete . . . in a present-day Ireland marked by its formidable commitment to nostalgia, to memory, to commemoration” (4).9 This is, of course, a deliberately and provocatively simplified version of a complex literary history, but it is exactly the purview that critics across nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish literary studies are working to trouble and expand. The recent 6-volume Irish Literature in Transition series collects much of this work in one place, responding to what series coeditor Marjorie Howes describes in the 1880–1940 volume as “a sense that current developments in Irish Studies are continually producing new versions of the literary past” (Howes 1). Howes articulates the aim of the series as an effort of terminological defamiliarization, “a focus on transitions in literary scholarship and transitions in literary history” that together offer “remappings” of literary periods “while maintaining an awareness that still other remappings will become possible as the scholarly landscape continues to evolve” (1). This evolutionary process continues to dismember the critical categories that delimit the boundaries of Irish literature. Whether rethinking the defining traits of these categories to open them to new forms, new intersections, and new writers; digging more deeply and reading more expansively in the archive to discover forgotten voices; or queering canonical texts through new reading practices that unsettle the national, formal, and historical frames that have leant them their importance in the field,10 Irish literary studies in the last decade has relinquished its tight 279

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grip on definitions of Irishness in order to more fully imagine the capacious global,11 racial,12 technological,13 political, and aesthetic networks in which Irish literature thrives.

II. Tana French: beyond genre Like many of the literary critics I have mentioned, several contemporary Irish novelists have turned their gazes back to the nineteenth century to examine the historical assumptions and ways of reading that underpin the stories we’ve told about Irish literature across the last two centuries. While, as Howes suggests, even the most lauded periods of Irish literature need critical reevaluation in order to maintain their relevance and vibrancy, the turn in Irish fiction to the nineteenth century bespeaks an urgency to shed old systems of aesthetic value: to resituate the pasts of Irish literature in new contexts and new pluralities that make them differently meaningful to the present. Writers like Tana French, Emma Donoghue, and Joseph O’Connor put pressure on how we read both nineteenth-century fiction and the nineteenth-century inheritances of twenty-first-century Irish life and literature, challenging us to envision alternative literary histories even when they’re unwilling to tell us exactly what these histories might look like. Novels by these three writers question how Ireland has narrated the nineteenth century to itself: what archives it chooses to mine, what genres it does and doesn’t lay claim to, what historical trajectories it has found the most purchase in, and what intersections between history and fiction it has raised above others. In doing so, these writers ask far more “What if . . .?” questions than they offer answers to, but such boundless questions open Irish fiction to new imaginative possibilities—however abstract, however inconceivable—that are only just beginning to unfurl. It may seem strange to include Tana French’s work in a group of otherwise explicitly neohistorical novels, but a novel doesn’t have to be set in the nineteenth century to critically engage with its lasting reverberations.14 French’s popular Dublin Murder Squad series is set in the brittle years of Celtic Tiger and post-crash Ireland, and fully imbricates its plots in the economic conditions and psychological frenzies of Ireland in the 2000s and 2010s. Yet despite these novels’ obsessively of-the-moment stories, which feature road works and ghost estates and child abuse and middle-class warfare, they are equally obsessed with the frantic heartbeats of history pulsing below their surfaces, whether this history is as recent as unresolved childhood mysteries or as ancient as the archaeological remnants of Irish kings. In the second of the Murder Squad novels, The Likeness (2008), French plays not only with her characters’ explicitly nineteenth-century legacies, but also with two genres that contemporary Irish fiction inherited from the nineteenth century: detective fiction and the gothic.15 French herself has said that she “aim[s] to write mysteries that take genre conventions as springboards, not as laws,” and in the years since The Likeness was published a number of critics have argued that the novel blurs the boundaries between orderly procedural fiction and unruly gothic irresolution (French, “Secret History” 572).16 If, however, as I argued in the first section of this chapter, genre is as much a roadmap of codified reading practices as it is a convenient way to categorize fiction, then The Likeness does more than simply blur the boundaries between genres. It resists the constrictions of genre altogether by deliberately refusing to fulfill the expectations of either detective fiction or the gothic, and in this refusal invites us to experiment with how capacious and pleasurable reading can be when we free fiction from the ways genre has conditioned us to read it. The Likeness sets its murder and mayhem against the backdrop of a ramshackle Anglo-Irish big house called Whitethorn House. Its narrative follows detective and first-person narrator, Cassie Maddox, as she assumes the identity of newly murdered Lexie Madison (impossibly, they look enough alike to be twins) and takes her place amongst the strangely tightknit group of friends that own Whitethorn House. The novel’s plot begins and ends with Cassie amongst 280

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her fellow detectives, first practicing to be Lexie and later reintegrating into the banal world of modernity with a boring engagement to a boring coworker. The actual text of the novel, however, refuses to relinquish the melancholic hold that Cassie’s anachronistic time in Whitethorn House has over her, beginning and ending with Cassie’s wistful and disconcerting dreams of a Big House that has since burned to the ground and an uncanny doppelganger who has long since turned to dust. The novel is strewn with remnants of the nineteenth century: Lexie bleeds out in the ruins of a famine cottage, Whitethorn House is mired in a living history of colonial and class violence, and the five Ph.D. student friends who inhabit the house deliberately live like Victorians, throwing aside contemporary conveniences like television and computers to hold themselves aloof from the machinations of Irish modernity—as Cassie tells us, “their free time involved stuff like Rafe playing piano and Daniel reading Dante out loud and Abby restoring an eighteenth-century embroidered footstool” (French 82); a life, we are explicitly told, like something out of nineteenth-century fiction, which also happens to be the subject of Lexie’s Ph.D. thesis. The novel, and its characters, hold tight to the vicious nineteenth-century histories feeding inexorably into the violence against Lexie and Whitethorn House that are its greatest contemporary tragedies: as Cassie says midway through the novel, “The past was the dark conjoined twin wrapped around [the] future, steering it, shaping it” (280). It is no stretch to imagine that while Cassie refers here to the colonial and sectarian ghosts that haunt any Big House, French is talking about the ghosts of past genres that steer and shape the ways we read fiction. This line acknowledges that our expectations of The Likeness are molded by the patterns of novels that have come before it, and our approaches to reading it will always be conjoined with the ways of reading that other novels have trained us to rely on. As one reviewer in the New York Times wrote of the novel, French “resists genre conventions [so] defiantly” that what should have been a “tightly edited” detective novel is instead a “long, rambling book” that doesn’t pay enough attention to “‘Aha!’ moments about the plot” (Maslin n.p.). The reviewer is looking for tight plotting and “aha!” moments because that’s what she expects from detective fiction. But what if French’s investments in this text aren’t its “aha!” moments, but precisely the gothic elements that might seem most extraneous to a detective novel: inconceivable doubles, richly descriptive language, dreams that confuse rather than solve mysteries, the precarious intimacies of friendship, and the spiritual relationships between a house and all of the people that once and still live in it? How does our evaluation of what does and doesn’t matter to this novel—of what this novel is about—change when we read it according to the differing demands of different genres? And how might our ability to see the epistemological possibilities of the novel expand if we jettison the idea of genre altogether and instead let the text itself guide our reading—if we don’t ascribe value to things (like those elements I list previously) in the ways that their associations with certain genres tell us to? The Likeness brings its nineteenth-century traces (generic, architectural, or anachronistic) to life in the present without allowing them to determine the present’s shape, and in doing so invites us to apprehend history not as a story already told but as an ecology of unexpected relationships, outcomes, and affective connections that the novel has endless space for when we don’t read within the lines of genre.

III. Emma Donoghue: reimagining realism Emma Donoghue poses similar questions about the limitations of reading for genre in her 2016 novel The Wonder, about an English nurse named Lib watching over a so-called “Fasting Girl” in a small Irish village in the 1850s. Even more explicitly than French’s, Donoghue’s novel engages with the ways literary genres train us to read and interpret both literature and the world around us. In pitting an Englishwoman, whose view of the world has been molded by the plots 281

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of Victorian English fiction, against an Irish town that understands the unfolding events in the village through the language and stories of Irish Catholicism, Donoghue reflects not only on the nineteenth-century national politics that poison such English–Irish interactions but also on the ways that reading practices produced by nineteenth-century literary forms and literary history help to shape and exacerbate such politics. The novel frames its story of a distinctly Irish set of traumas—the repressive presence of the Catholic church and its silence about child rape, the ongoing legacy of the Famine, and the reverberations of British colonialism, among others—through Lib’s point of view, and from the very beginning of the novel, she tries to comprehend the alien Irish world around her by filtering it through canonical Victorian novels. When she arrives in the village and learns that she isn’t there to help or treat little Anna O’Donnell but only “to watch,” to see whether the child truly is subsisting on prayer rather than on food, Lib thinks to herself, “A curious verb. That awful nurse in Jane Eyre, charged with keeping the lunatic hidden away in the attic. ‘I’ve been brought here to . . . stand guard?’” she asks. “No, no, simply to observe,” the doctor tells her (Donoghue 12). This is the first of several explicit references to canonical Victorian British fiction in The Wonder—fiction by Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, specifically, as well as to All the Year Round, the popular journal that Dickens conducted in the 1850s. More than just peppering the text with literary allusions, the novel presents all of this fiction as a frame of reference for a scenario that literary history tells us would never, ever find its way into Victorian realist fiction: a scenario involving a devoutly Catholic child, the victim of explicit incest, living in a peasant village in the middle of Ireland, surrounded by people who believe it’s possible for a child who won’t eat to turn into either a saint or a metabolic lizard. Lib is mired in what, in the twenty-first century, has become a quandary of literary history: is there a space for Irish experience in the story we tell ourselves about the conventions of nineteenth-century realist fiction? In this moment when Lib recalls “that awful nurse in Jane Eyre” and tries to understand her role in The Wonder through the lens of another novel, she invites readers to think about how we understand genre: in broad terms, how we recognize the continuities between texts that allow for generic categorization and the discontinuities that defy them; and in far more specific terms, how we “read” nineteenth-century Ireland within and against the genres of nineteenth-century British literature. This is a novel in which an English nurse travels to the middle of Ireland to observe and evaluate the truth of a fundamentally Irish story. Is Anna O’Donnell a “living marvel” (Donoghue 30) or a “spoiled miss” (24), an “extraordinary wonder” (9) or a “swindler” (37)? These are the rhetorical poles between which Anna O’Donnell is caught: either she embodies the language of religious and folkloric superstition that comprises the worldview of her fellow Irish villagers, or she is a hoax, a transgression against the realities of science and common sense that circumscribe Lib’s view of the world. In other words, Anna is either an Irish story or an English story, and Lib’s responsibility is to watch her and find evidence to prove one story or the other is the right way to categorize Anna. Donoghue does not put this task in the hands of an Irish observer—this is not a novel about whether we believe or don’t believe, about the space and power of the fantastic in nineteenth-century Irish culture. Rather, placing Lib and her evaluative powers as a Crimean nurse and as a reader of English fiction at the center of the novel makes it clear to us that this is a novel about how we read: about how we craft the information in front of us into narrative, about all of the possible shapes this narrative might take, and about the mediating models we use to enable this process of shaping. The Wonder situates its plot at exactly the mid-nineteenth-century historical moment when, according to Katharine Tynan in The Cabinet of Irish Literature (1902–3), “there was not much doing” in the way of Irish novelists, while English novelists like the Brontës, Dickens, and Eliot 282

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were hugely popular (qtd. Kelleher 193). As the first section of this chapter discusses, however, critics in recent years have pushed back against literary histories of Ireland that agree with Tynan, instead arguing that it is our own imperialist and Anglocentric definitions of realism rather than an actual absence of mid-century Irish novels that have created this apparent gap in Irish literary history. What happens to Irish fiction when we liberate our understanding of realism from these narrow English confines and expand it so that it can include representations of Irish experience? This is the question that Donoghue poses as an English nurse makes her way from the metropole of London into “the dead centre” of Ireland to evaluate the reality of Anna O’Donnell’s miraculous existence (Donoghue 5). What are the terms by which English Lib is supposed to understand this Irish girl, this Catholic phenomenon? How valuable, how useful, will her English realist reading be in the face of a scenario that is unlike any she has experienced, or read about, before? What happens most precisely in this moment when Lib recalls Jane Eyre and its awful nurse is that Brontë’s novel fails to account for the situation that Lib has fallen into: when Lib asks whether she has been “brought here to . . . stand guard?” the doctor tells her no, she’s not here to do what Grace Poole does in Jane Eyre—she’s here as an observer, not a prison warden. The world of Victorian fiction often fails in this novel—“Mr. Eliot’s moralizing” in Eliot’s novel Adam Bede becomes too “tedious” for Lib to bother with (Donoghue 99) and “Madame Defarge’s nefarious doings” in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities occupy Lib only briefly before she finds herself “losing track of the plot” of novels as her fascination with Anna grows (73, 103). The Wonder makes an explicit point that the world of the Irish fasting girl is not the world of Victorian realist fiction and not commensurate with it—the more wrapped up Lib gets in the strangeness of Anna’s condition, the more she finds herself unable to read the novels of Dickens and Eliot and Brontë as she once did. But Anna isn’t an Irish miracle, either: as much as Victorian English fiction can’t account for her condition, neither can it be understood through the legends of nineteenth-century Irish stories. The Wonder, which at its beginning seems set on pitting Lib’s English rationality against peasant Ireland’s religious superstition in order to see which will ultimately triumph, resolves itself instead into an invitation for paradigm shift: for both English and Irish modes of thinking to fluidly influence one another in order to create an alternative, redemptive version of the real in which both Lib and Anna can emerge as completely new people—and I mean this quite literally, as at the novel’s end they become characters with new names, new histories, new futures, and new bonds between them. The Wonder unfolds into a meditation on how and why we read the world the way we do: how our prejudices and our presumptions, our long-held beliefs and our ethical expectations, our national affiliations and our spiritual desires, mediate the forms through which we narrate the world we inhabit. “I don’t think you understand our stories,” an Irish nun tells Lib towards the novel’s end (Donoghue 188), dismissing Lib’s refusal to believe in the miracle of Anna specifically as a problem of untranslatable national genre, rather than as an instance of ordinary cultural difference. Moments in the novel in which aesthetic representations of reality—like photographs, diary entries, old wives’ tales, and sleights of hand, in addition to Victorian fiction— are stripped away to expose actual realities (dead and dying children) signal the novel’s insistence that we learn to see and to read beyond our conventional expectations, whether those expectations have been shaped by English forms or by Irish forms. Ultimately, if Anna is to live until the novel’s end, her story can be neither an English story nor an Irish story. Instead, it has to be a story that weaves together the most useful parts of both: to save her, Lib has to find another way of reading, another way of story-telling, another way of narrating Anna out of the perils of a nineteenth-century Irish world that nearly kills her and a nineteenth-century English perspective that nearly lets her die. “[W]e’d rather our days be unwritten,” Lib says in The Wonder’s last 283

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pages (291), suggesting that literary history still has work to do to read, and write, a generative story of nineteenth-century Irish fiction.

IV. Joseph O’Connor: against biographical reading The idea that nineteenth-century Irish fiction is an ongoing story, retold and remade in the minds of readers, is a central preoccupation of Joseph O’Connor’s novel Shadowplay (2019), a fanciful narrative of Bram Stoker’s life as he imagines Dracula into being amidst the madness of managing the Lyceum Theatre in late Victorian London. O’Connor’s version of Stoker’s life flows between fact and fiction, moving back and forth in time and weaving together the voices of Stoker, the actor Henry Irving, and the actress Ellen Terry in phonograph recordings, diaries, letters, and newspaper stories. Although the basic outlines of Stoker’s life in the novel have been taken from biographies and from Stoker’s own Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906), in his ending “Caveat” O’Connor is very clear that he’s taken many liberties with the story: that “[a]ll sequences presenting themselves as authentic documents are fictitious” and not “reliable” (O’Connor 309). This fragmented narrative structure isn’t unusual for O’Connor, but in this particular novel he clearly models his faux-authentic form on the similarly piecemeal structure of Dracula, whose fictitious editor organizes and “place[s] in sequence” the same kinds of “authentic” documents into the world’s most famous vampire story (Stoker 28). O’Connor’s “Caveat” to Shadowplay directly alludes to Dracula’s prologue, in which an “editor” introduces both the novel’s obsessive attention to collecting, reproducing, and editing documents and its resistance to objective storytelling and objective reading practices. Dracula’s prologue ostensibly makes a case for the truth and authenticity of the story at hand, while simultaneously admitting that the tale has been mediated by a subjective editorial consciousness and offers “facts” only insofar as the authors of the individual documents can understand them: How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made manifest in the reading of them. All needless matters have been eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities of later-day belief may stand forth as simple fact. There is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them. (Stoker 28) “Simple fact,” in the case of Dracula, is anything but. Someone has decided that some parts of the story matter enough to be included and some don’t, that history and belief oppose one another in the battle for factuality, that a “range of knowledge” will inevitably be limited and incomplete, and, perhaps most importantly, that the meaning of the narrative will only cohere “in the reading” of it: a point that entrusts readers, rather than writers, with subjective power over the text they are reading. Countless critical histories of Dracula and critical biographies of Stoker have taken this power to heart, re-shaping Stoker’s life, loves, and feuds into the story of his vampire until it becomes difficult to untangle the supernatural fiction from the biographical origin stories that critics want to find in it.17 At the heart of Shadowplay lies a critique of this impulse to read a writer’s biography into and out of his most famous work—to use biography as the novel’s key to all mythologies, and to see the novel as the apotheosis of a writer’s meaningful life. Instead, Shadowplay deliberately and dissemblingly reverse-engineers Dracula’s origin story by peppering Stoker’s imagined life story with fictional Dracula-related details that refuse to map neatly into 284

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and onto the novel. O’Connor writes for a readership of Dracula readers: he includes a transgender set-painter named Jonathan Harker, a theater ghost named Mina, a superstitious theatrical tradition of hanging garlic flowers around doors and windows to keep infection at bay, references to women getting staked by Jack the Ripper, dreams about the plot of Dracula that aren’t the actual plot of Dracula, and countless oblique references to the critical tradition of seeking Stoker’s dangerous vampire in the queer men he knew, like Oscar Wilde, Henry Irving, and Walt Whitman.18 One can read Shadowplay without knowing Dracula and thoroughly appreciate it as a queer neo-historical novel full of rich detail and compelling characters, but reading it as a reader of Dracula makes these details and characters jump from the pages as we inevitably look for the story of Stoker’s novel in the story of his life. These details are complete invention on O’Connor’s part, appearing in Shadowplay as Easter eggs for a particular kind of reading practice that wants a novel and a life to make meaning out of one another. The text invites us to mine each of these details in the narration of Stoker’s life for connections to Dracula, while self-consciously ensuring that these details add up to something far more complicated and far more personal than a then-unpopular novel about a monster. While offering us, on the one hand, an interpretation of Dracula that emphasizes the queer anxieties of Stoker’s novel (doing so by exaggerating and inventing queer aspects of Stoker’s life interleaved with Stoker’s thoughts about what shape his novel might take), O’Connor on the other hand also refuses to let his version of Stoker’s queer complexities be reduceable to elements of Stoker’s novel. Shadowplay’s Jonathan Harker, for instance, who Stoker tells us has “something quite kissable about him” and who the text later outs as biologically female with an unremarkedupon pronoun shift (O’Connor 104, 127), bears little relationship to Dracula’s Jonathan Harker, except that literary criticism predating O’Connor’s novel has read Jonathan as a character who occasionally “identif[ies] across gender lines” (Fox 599).19 O’Connor’s trans Harker has the potential to embody multiple interpretive possibilities: he could be a genderqueer interpretation of Stoker’s Harker and O’Connor’s attempt to lead his readers down the theoretical path that understands the first Harker in this way; he could be a cipher for the fictional Stoker’s own fluid queerness, also signaled through multiple dreams of trans bodies and references to Stoker as “Auntie” and “girl” (O’Connor 116); and/or he could be a red herring to those of us looking for Dracula in Stoker’s unfolding life, as Shadowplay goes to great lengths to make clear that, aside from his name, this talented, smart, cheeky, and gregarious Jonathan Harker bears absolutely no resemblance to the mealy character Stoker writes. The myriad ways that Harker might signify calls attention to reading as an interpretive rather than an objective practice—what he means for Dracula, and for Shadowplay, rests in the choices O’Connor insists we make about how and to what ends we read him. That only a cognizance of the stakes and desires with which we read allows us to hold onto all of these choices simultaneously—that with a little bit of intellectual effort we can make Harker mean all of these things at once—demonstrates how important reading as an active and self-aware practice is to any relationship Shadowplay enables between Stoker and Dracula. O’Connor’s novel asks us to think about why we’re so invested in imagining that the fabric of Stoker’s life gives privileged meaning to Dracula. It asks whether we’re capable of reading this life without searching for Dracula in all of its threads, and, with the text’s strangely anticlimactic indications three-quarters of the way through that Dracula has been finished, published, and dismissed as trash,20 it asks us whether we’re willing to see the proliferation of Stoker’s sexuality, his passions, his disappointments, and his heartbreaking losses as more than a roadmap to and from a single novel that only became famous after he died. As one reviewer describes Shadowplay’s fluid movement between Stoker’s biography and his subconscious creative inspirations, “all the time Count Dracula is waiting in the wings—or we are waiting for him” (Jones n.p.). This question 285

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of who, exactly, is doing the waiting in Shadowplay is at the heart of the text’s exploration of the value of literary history and critical biography as interpretive reading practices. Is this a novel about an 1897 vampire story impatiently waiting for Stoker to finish translating his queer experiences into its central monster? Or is it a novel about the expectations of twenty-first-century critically literate readers, eagerly waiting for the “clues” O’Connor drops to resolve themselves into a new queer reading of that 1897 story? Is Shadowplay a novel about Dracula and the unbearable longings and losses of its nineteenth-century creator, or about contemporary readers of Dracula and the revelation—or frustration—of our own interpretive longings? At the novel’s end, 60 pages and 15 years after Dracula comes unobtrusively into the world and stagnates there, O’Connor’s Stoker reaches the end of his life, welcomed by Walt Whitman into a phantasmal house filled with all the dead people who have ever mattered to him, real and literary, from across centuries: His sisters. His parents. A brother he never knew. Ophelia is here, with Desdemona and Juliet, conversing with Wilde about Paris. Prospero and Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw are clinking slim glasses of bubbles. Macbeth is showing Jane Eyre a portrait of Mary Shelley. (O’Connor 304) If the publication of Dracula ultimately fails to make climactic meaning out of Stoker’s life in Shadowplay, this house that erases all distinctions between fact and fiction, writer and character, past and present, and embodied love and literary love ofers him an alternative apotheosis: a safe harbor of unarticulated entwinings, a story free from the pressures of telos, a “fragile, impossibly beautiful” world in which human life and literary life mean everything and nothing to one another. Most obviously, the house is a theatrical idyll, the reverie of a man who has given so much of himself to the Lyceum Theatre that characters feel as real to him as the people who create and play them. But the house is also an interpretive alternative to biographical reading, to the calculated mapping of life onto text and vice versa: it’s an ecstatic dream of reading as immersive entanglement, in which established relationships and categorical boundaries fall away to produce new imaginative kinships and connections. Like The Likeness and The Wonder, Shadowplay’s ending asks how novels might be liberated if we read without prescription, without expectations, without an insistence on reason—if, rather than looking for the kinds of order, the conventional narrative developments, and the interpretive connections that prior knowledge of novels teaches us to find, we instead discover how to lose ourselves in the expansive, otherworldly constellations of meaning and possibility that Irish fiction has always been waiting for us to discover.

Notes 1 See Seamus Deane’s general introduction to Volume 1 of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. 2 See collections/volumes edited by Connolly and Howes (esp. Vol 3–6), Pine, and Reynolds (2020). 3 See chapters in this volume by Kathleen Costello-Sullivan, Ed Madden, Claire Bracken, Sarah L. Townsend, Maureen O’Connor, Elizabeth Grubgeld, Margot Gayle Backus and Joseph Valente, Margaret O’Neill and Michaela Schrage-Frueh, and Malcolm Sen. 4 John Waters’s and Malcolm Sen’s chapters in this volume include brief discussions of Joyce. For compelling new Irish Studies work on Joyce, as well as on the short story, see, for instance, P. Mullen, Mahaffey, Scheible and Culleton, Gleeson, and Valente (1998). 5 See M. Mullen 14–16 and Fox (2019) 567–569. 6 See Murphy for an archival recuperation of Victorian Irish novels that canon-formation had long forgotten about. 286

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7 “Would we had a George Eliot to give us of Irish life scenes and characters corresponding to those in Silas Marner and Mill on the Floss” (Mulholland 370). 8 See Mulholland, Kelleher, Hand, Murphy, Fox, M. Mullen, and Howes. 9 Reynolds (2016) makes this argument about modernism’s persistence to counter arguments that Irish literature from the mid-late twentieth century was paradigmatic of Ireland’s parochialism, national insularity, and patriarchally oppressive culture, suggesting instead that revealing the modernist traces and recapitulations in later twentieth-century work shows Ireland participating integrally in international artistic networks, embracing modernity and formal innovation, and finding forms for feminist resistance. 10 Although I use “queer” here to mean “defamiliarize,” I also use it to gesture specifically toward the work that has been done over the last decade by the Queering Ireland working group in a series of conferences, special issues of journals, and books to open “up to scrutiny some of the hetero-normalizing codes of Irish Studies” while also calling out “the provincialism of existing ways of discussing Irishness” (O’Toole 166). See in particular Kennedy’s Queering Ireland issue of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies and Anne Mulhall’s Queering the Issue issue of the Irish University Review, as well as Ed Madden’s chapter in this volume. 11 For a stunning example of recent Irish fiction that encapsulates this point, see Edna O’Brien’s (2019) novel Girl, about a young Nigerian woman abducted by Boko Haram. In Anne Enright’s words in the Irish Times, O’Brien’s choice to set this novel in Nigeria rather than in her usual Ireland demonstrates a deliberate movement away from the rich textures of Irish national insularity and towards a story that can “enlarge humanity’s understanding of itself ”: “She has come out the other side of her own story, perhaps and the world has opened up again” (Sept. 7, 2019). 12 See Sarah L. Townsend’s Chapter 17 in Part IV of this volume. 13 For an excellent example see Conrad, Parsons, and Weng’s edited volume on science and Irish modernism. 14 See Molly Clark Hillard for the value of replacing the postmodern term “neo-Victorian” with the more expansive term “contemporary Victorianisms” to describe fiction that engages with the persistence of the nineteenth century in twenty-first-century institutions, imaginaries, and global crises. See also Anna Kornbluh and Benjamin Morgan, “Manifesto of the V21 Collective” for more on the idea of “strategic presentism” in our approaches to reading and teaching nineteenth-century fiction in the twenty-first century. 15 See especially Miller and McCormack. 16 See especially Cliff 207–208, Johansen, and Johnson. 17 See especially Belford and Murray. For a far more theoretically nuanced and critically rigorous analysis of how Dracula’s form and politics refract Stoker’s complex Irish heritage, see Valente. 18 See, for instance, Schaffer and Belford. 19 See Fox (2016) 597–599. 20 See O’Connor 216–235.

Works cited Belford, Barbara. Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula. Random House, 1996. Boland, Eavan. A Woman Without a Country. W.W. Norton, 2014. Bourke, Angela et al., General, Eds. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vols. IV-V: Women’s Writing and Tradition. Field Day Publications, New York University Press, 2002. Cleary, Joe. “The Nineteenth-Century Irish Novel: Notes and Speculations on Literary Historiography.” The Irish Novel in the Nineteenth Century: Facts and Fictions. Edited by Jacqueline Belanger. Four Courts Press, 2005, pp. 202–221. Cliff, Brian. “Genre and Uncertainty in Tana French’s Murder Squad Series.” Twenty-First-Century Popular Fiction. Edited by Bernice M. Murphy and Stephen Matterson. Edinburgh University Press, 2018, pp. 205–216. Connolly, Claire and Marjorie Howes, General Eds. Irish Literature in Transition (6 vols.). Cambridge University Press, 2020. Conrad, Kathryn, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng, Eds. Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism. Syracuse University Press, 2019. Deane, Seamus, General Ed. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (3 vols.). Field Day Publications (W.W. Norton), 1991. 287

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Donoghue, Emma. The Wonder. Little, Brown and Company, 2016. Fox, Renée. “Building Castles in the Air: Female Intimacy and Generative Queerness in Dracula.” Dracula (Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism). Edited by John Paul Riquelme. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016, pp. 59–607. Fox, Renée. “Realism’s Irish Forms: Queering the Fog in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Emily Lawless’s Grania.” Victorian Studies, Vol. 61, No. 4, Summer 2019, pp. 559–581. French, Tana. The Likeness. Penguin Books, 2008. French, Tana. “The Secret History by Donna Tartt (1992).” Books to Die For: The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on the World’s Greatest Mystery Novels. Edited by John Connolly and Declan Burke, Hodder, 2012, pp. 567–572. Freedgood, Elaine. Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel. Princeton University Press, 2019. Gleeson, Sinéad, Ed. The Long Gaze Back: An Anthology of Irish Women Writers. New Island Books, 2015. Hand, Derek. A History of the Irish Novel. Cambridge University Press, 2011. Hillard, Molly Clark. “Victorianism and Contemporary Literature.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (online). Oxford University Press, 2020. Howes, Marjorie. “Introduction.” Irish Literature in Transition, 1880–1940 (Vol. 4). Edited by Marjorie Howes. Cambridge University Press, 2020. Ingelbien, Raphaël. “Realism, Allegory, Gothic: The Irish Victorian Novel.” Irish Literature in Transition, 1830–1880 (Vol. 3). Edited by Matthew Campbell. Cambridge University Press, 2020. Johansen, Emily. “The Neoliberal Gothic: Gone Girl, Broken Harbor, and the Terror of Everyday Life.” Contemporary Literature, Vol. 57, No, 1, Spring 2016, pp. 30–55. Johnsen, Rosemary Erickson. “The House and the Hallucination in Tana French’s New Irish Gothic.” Domestic Noir (Crime Files). Edited by L. Joyce and H. Sutton. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 221–238. Jones, Sadie. “Love, Greasepaint, and the Writing of Dracula” (Shadowplay by Joseph O’Connor, Review). The Guardian, Saturday, June 15, 2019. www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/15/shadowplay-byjoseph-oconner-review (Accessed August 1, 2020). Kelleher, Margaret. “‘Wanted an Irish Novelist’: The Critical Decline of the Nineteenth-Century Novel.” The Irish Novel in the Nineteenth Century: Facts and Fictions. Edited by Jacqueline Belander. Four Courts Press, 2005, pp. 187–201. Kennedy, Seán, Ed. “Queering Ireland.” Special Issue of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1, Spring 2010. Kornbluh, Anna and Benjamin Morgan. “Manifesto of the V21 Collective.” http://v21collective/org/ (Accessed August 1, 2020). Levine, Carolyn. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton University Press, 2017. Lloyd, David. “Afterword: Hardress Cregan’s Dream for Another History of the Irish Novel.” The Irish Novel in the Nineteenth Century: Facts and Fictions. Edited by Jacqueline Belanger. Four Courts Press, 2005, pp. 229–237. Mahaffey, Vicky, Ed. Collaborative Dubliners. Syracuse University Press, 2012. Maslin, Janet. “The Case of the Dead Doppelgänger Turns a Detective’s Life Inside Out.” The New York Times, July 17, 2008. www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/books/17masl.html (Accessed August 1, 2020). McCormack, W.J. “The Irish Gothic and after.” The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vol. 2. Field Day Publications, W.W. Norton, 1991, pp. 831–854. Miller, D.A. The Novel and the Police. University of California Press, 1989. Mulhall, Anne, Ed. “Queering the Issue.” Special issue of the Irish University Review, Vol. 43, No. 1, May 2013. Mulholland, Rosa. “Wanted an Irish Novelist.” Irish Monthly, July 1891, pp. 368–373. Mullen, Mary L. Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels and Nineteenth-Century Realism. Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Mullen, Patrick. The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History. Oxford University Press. Murray, Paul. From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker. Pimlico, 2004 Murphy, James P. Irish Novelists in the Victorian Age. Oxford University Press, 2011. Pine, Emilie, Ed. Golden Jubilee: Irish Studies Now (Special Issue of Irish University Review), Vol. 50, No. 1, May 2020. O’Brien, Edna. Girl. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019. O’Connor, Joseph. Shadowplay. Harville Secker, 2019. 288

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O’Toole, Tina et al. “InterSects Roundtable.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1, Spring 2010, pp. 163–191. Reynolds, Paige. “Introduction.” Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture. Anthem Press, 2016, pp. 1–8. Reynolds, Paige, Ed. The New Irish Studies. Cambridge University Press, 2020. Schaffer, Talia. “‘A Wilde Desire Took Me’: The Homoerotic History of Dracula.” ELH, Vol. 61, No. 2, Summer, 1994, pp. 381–425. Scheible, Ellen, and Claire Culleton, Eds. Rethinking Joyce’s Dubliners. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Stoker, Bram. Dracula (Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism). Edited by John Paul Riquelme. Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2016. Valente, Joseph, Ed. Quare Joyce. University of Michigan Press, 1998. Valente, Joseph. Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood. University of Illinois Press, 2002. Yeats, W.B. “Irish National Literature II: Contemporary Prose Writers.” The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol IX (Early Articles and Reviews). Edited by John. P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre. Scribner, 2004, pp. 270–276.

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22 Lyric narratives The experimental aesthetics of Irish poetry Eric Falci

This chapter aims to lay down two tracks for thinking about Irish poetry in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. First, I will elaborate several of the major critical and scholarly narratives that have been offered to situate and illuminate this work and its place in Irish and global literary culture. And then I’ll launch a new critical narrative of my own, one that focuses on the role of narrative itself within a body of poetry that has, in so many ways, remained committed to the traditions and conventions of lyric. That is, one of the significant tendencies of much of the most intriguing contemporary Irish poetry is its attention to and experimentation with narrative forms and gestures within the space of lyric, which ends up both torquing narrative possibilities via lyric forms and generating new narrative capacities within the space of poetry. There is no shortage of narratives upon which one might repose an account of poetry in Ireland in the twenty-first century. One might emphasize the ways that Irish poetry has moved from strength to strength, continuing to occupy a crucial position within the field of Anglophone poetry, within the flows and institutions of global literature, and as a key force in Irish culture. Poets whose reputations burgeoned in the 1980s and 1990s—such as Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and Paul Muldoon—became even more well known in the opening decade of the twenty-first century; writers like Michael Longley, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and Louis de Paor gained international renown; and poets whose careers began in the 1990s or early in the new century, such as Sinéad Morrissey, Vona Groarke, and David Wheatley, quickly rose to prominence. Heaney in particular became a literary and cultural institution after winning the 1995 Nobel Prize, a process that has intensified since his death in 2013, with the quick establishment of the Seamus Heaney Home Place in Bellaghy and “Listen Now Again,” an exhibit about Heaney’s life and work currently installed at the National Library of Ireland, only the most visible signs of the scope and influence of his posthumous life. Along with The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast, and the Ireland Chair of Poetry, an all-Ireland post established in 1998, explicitly in the wake of Heaney’s Nobel Prize, these newer institutions suggest just how quickly a single—though, perhaps, singular—figure has been centralized within the larger economies of Irish literary culture, alongside longstanding programs like the Yeats International Summer School and more recent ventures like Belfast’s new Poet Laureate position. 290

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If Heaney’s beatification is the surest sign both of contemporary Irish poetry’s global clout as well as the key place—perhaps unique among Anglophone cultures—that poetry and poets hold in Irish culture, then it also indicates the ongoing centrality of Northern Irish poets within the larger field and the continuing conservatism of Irish poetry. Indeed, another narrative, and one that is surely spurred by the continued hyper-prominence of a handful of figures in the field, has to do with the ongoing hegemony of a fairly narrow band of poetic practice, one that remains committed to the traditional lyric forms and modes.1 The well-made poem—with a stable lyric “I” and a tendency towards the anecdotal and the epiphanic—remains the dominant form, while more experimental practices have either been curtailed (Randolph Healy), sidelined by the mainstream (Catherine Walsh, Maurice Scully), or so completely attached to a single poet (Muldoon’s extravaganzas, Medbh McGuckian’s hermetic recessions) that they seem more like signature styles than usable modes for wider practice. There is, to be sure, a vibrant though small group of experimental or innovative poets who depart from the typical paths of Irish poetry, but the fact that this group has remained quite stable over several decades is suggestive of the lack of traction these formations have gained over the past several decades. If, sometime in the 1990s, one attempted to identify the most significant Irish experimental poets—as Romana Huk did while organizing the 1996 “Assembling Alternatives” Conference at the University of New Hampshire, at which several of these poets met one another for the first time—one would most likely have named Trevor Joyce, Catherine Walsh, Billy Mills, and Maurice Scully. If one underwent the same exercise in 2020, one would most likely come up with the same list of names. This indicates, on the one hand, the continuing importance of these figures but also the ongoing marginalization of experimental work more broadly, such that younger poets who work in such formations either don’t exist in critical mass or have not been able to fashion viable poetic careers. Most of the major outlets and platforms for poetry in Ireland—whether publishers like Gallery and Salmon Presses, periodicals like Poetry Ireland Review, or institutions like the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s—have continued to favor work that falls within a recognizable band of lyric practice, both in terms of its formal commitments and its thematic tendencies.2 Another aspect of Irish poetry’s conservatism is the continuing force of a patriarchal literary establishment, which has had clear and adverse effects on the visibility of women poets and their actual presence and force within the institutions of literary culture—anthologies, periodicals, publishing lists, universities, syllabi—and in the ways that writing by women and issues surrounding gender, sexuality, and representation are incorporated into critical accounts of Irish poetry. In certain ways, things are better than they were in the latter decades of the twentieth century, when just a few female poets had risen to prominence and when the overall bent of Irish criticism was such that the editors of the three-volume Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991) could overlook or ignore so much literary and cultural production by women writers. The intense critical response to the limitations of the first three volumes led to the publication of an additional two volumes, under different editorship, a decade later: The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions (2002). And much more than in previous decades, women poets are at the center of the canon of contemporary Irish poetry, have won many of the most prestigious awards in recent years, and hold influential literary and academic posts. Nonetheless, inequities and imbalances remain, as evidenced by the overwhelmingly male-centered Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets (2017) and the swift reaction against the volume’s retrograde presentation, culminating in Fired!, a formation of Irish women academics and poets who have organized readings, events, roundtables, and discussions about gender and canonicity in Ireland and who drew up an online pledge geared to foster more inclusive and diverse representation within the institutions and cultures of contemporary Irish poetry.3 Fired! can be seen as both a continuation (or, an unfortunately necessary repetition) of the modes of 291

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resistance to and critique of the male-dominated literary culture in the 1980s and 1990s—as in the responses to the Field Day Anthology—and as indicative of the much wider participation of writers and artists within contemporary activist culture in Ireland, especially concerning issues around sexuality and gender. In both their poetic texts and their public work, Irish poets have reckoned with the legacies of abuse, inequity, and mistreatment that inhere within Ireland’s modern history and have sought to reroute the traditions and tendencies of Irish lyric so that they might be fit to depict experiences, world-views, and social practices too-long occluded within a male-dominated poetic culture. Lines of feminist thought, critique, and aesthetic practice begun by poets such as Boland, Ní Dhomhnaill, and Paula Meehan have been extended by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh, Ailbhe Darcy, and others.4 A third narrative that might shape an account of twenty-first-century Irish poetry is its turn away from Ireland as an organizing frame and Irishness as a dominant concern.5 That is, a good deal of Irish poetry in this period—which is to say poetry written by people from Ireland (whether they live there or not) or poetry written by people who live in Ireland (whether they are from there or not)—became less interested in, or vexed by, its own relation to the repository of political, cultural, historical, and spiritual ideologies bundled within the concept and place of Ireland. Such a narrative is underwritten by two large-scale developments: the end of the Troubles in Northern Ireland with the ratification of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement (which of course did not bring about the end of cultural divisions nor usher in an age of smooth cross-sectarian cooperation) and the radical expansion and globalization of the economy of the Republic in the 1990s and early 2000s, along with its swift collapse in 2008. The cessation of large-scale violence in the North, alongside the Republic’s enthusiastic participation in the full project of the European Union and the neoliberalization of the global economy, have encouraged poets to frame local and seemingly Ireland-specific concerns—about ecological disaster, socioeconomic inequality, or political precarity—within a transnational or planetary perspective. As Justin Quinn puts it, describing the last chapter of his Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800–2000 (2008), titled “The Disappearance of Ireland,” “with a wave of the wand—Ireland vanishes into other concerns, such as city-writing, cosmopolitanism, and the sea” (6). As I’ll go on to discuss, Quinn’s assessment hasn’t entirely held up, but the notion that Irish literature has moved beyond the nation as its governing frame has been an influential one, as seen in the titles of a recent volume published by Wake Forest University Press, PostIreland? Essays on Contemporary Irish Poets (2017) and in the final volume in Declan Kiberd’s trilogy on Irish literature, After Ireland: Writing the Nation from Beckett to the Present (2018). Whether lamenting the abandonment by writers of a project of nation-making and cultural vivification, or celebrating poets’ necessary adoption of a transnational perspective that is able to think localities via the prism of global concerns rather than through the exclusive perspective of the nation (or nationalism), such critical turns have been both important and somewhat off-the-mark. On the one hand, this refocusing has made visible and legible poets whose work doesn’t lend itself to being read in a national or postcolonial frame, whether the reevaluation of earlier figures such as Denis Devlin, whose work was primarily in dialogue with mid-century European modernists and American New Critics, or the growing appreciation of Harry Clifton, who lived for long periods in Africa, Asia, and Europe before settling back in Dublin in the 2000s. This isn’t to say that Irish criticism has been unable to incorporate writing by exiles or emigrés: Boland spent much of her career at Stanford and Muldoon has been at Princeton for the past three decades, and they have remained at the heart of the canon of Irish poetry and critical accounts of it. It is rather to suggest that it has been difficult for critics to reckon with poets from Ireland who both leave Ireland and stop writing about it, as well as poets who remain in Ireland but whose work 292

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isn’t geared to address concerns particular to Ireland and Irish culture. Boland’s poetry and prose continued to be about Ireland and in dialogue with Irish literary traditions, and even though Muldoon has written many poems about other parts of the world and engaged with histories other than that of the island of Ireland, his work consistently bends back towards Irish material, often refracted through his own biography. At the end of “Rita Duffy: Watchtower II,” itself a poem that glances backward to an earlier Muldoon text, he figures this continued attention to and enmeshment in the stuff of the past via the practice of smuggling diesel fuel that has been dyed green across the border into the North: We run it through cat litter or fuller’s earth to absolve it of the dye. By far the biggest hassle is trying to get rid of the green sludge left over from the process. It infiltrates our clothes. It’s impossible to budge. (31) The symbolism is distinctly, knowingly unsubtle. The mess and weight of the past, and the implications of the long trajectories of colonialism and nationalism, remain substantive and inescapable concerns. Contra Quinn, it isn’t as though “Ireland vanishes” within the tumult and thrill of contemporary life and the seeming weightlessness of its digital, globalized surfaces. Rather, “Ireland,” as Muldoon figures it here, remains. This is especially the case at a moment when Ireland is so assiduously glancing backward as part of the “Decade of Centenaries,” a long period of commemoration of and reflection upon that crucial decade in the history of Ireland from 1912 through 1922. As Muldoon writes elsewhere in the same volume: “In Ireland we need to start now to untangle/the rhetoric of 2016” (74). The “rhetoric of 2016” is not only that of Ireland’s “Decade of Centenaries,” in which celebrations and reconsiderations of the 1916 Easter Rising have been the central features thus far. Muldoon’s reference to the “rhetoric of 2016” also refers to the reemergence of nationalisms around the globe, most often connected to right-wing ideologies and emblematized in the 2016 presidential election in the United States. Compared to the US, the United Kingdom, and many parts of Europe, right-wing nationalist parties have not developed much political clout in the Republic of Ireland, but the still uncertain implications of Britain’s exit from the European Union and its ramifications on the long-term relation between the Republic and the North has meant that the status of these two jurisdictions—and therefore an understanding of nationality, nationalism, political belonging, and sectarian and socioeconomic identities—remains a significant and open question on the island of Ireland. The three narratives that I’ve adduced here are certainly not the only ones that catch the general drift of poetry in Ireland over the past few decades, but each of the three does have significant explanatory power. And other critical narratives—say, about the rising importance of ecocritical thought among Irish poets, the ways in which poets have responded to a more diverse citizenry in the wake of increased inward immigration during the Celtic Tiger years and (though at lower levels) afterwards, the nascent role of queer theory within Irish poetry criticism and the ways that LBGTQ poets have made places for themselves within the culture of poetry, or the centrality of particular forms or modes (the sonnet, the elegy) within contemporary practice—might be thought of as elaborations or aspects of the three that I summarized previously.6 And each of these narratives could be routed through a consideration of the two primary linguistic traditions on the island, Irish and English, and the mediations and translations between them. Running beneath or laced within each of these critical narratives is a more diffuse but no less important narrative about the role of narrative itself within contemporary poetry, and for the remainder 293

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of this chapter I’ll sketch the lineaments of this narrative about narrative, and then examine a particular example of this phenomenon. One of the significant narratives surrounding Irish poetry of the last several decades has to do with an increased interest in the dynamics and potentials of narrativity within Irish poetry. This is to say neither that this is an utterly new feature of poetry in Ireland nor that the largely lyric tendencies of Irish poetry have attenuated. What is distinctive in this case is the variegated intensity with which contemporary Irish poets from across the aesthetic spectrum are repressurizing lyric forms by submitting them to narrative tactics, and, concomitantly, how these generic and modal interminglings disclose new sorts of narratives. At some level, of course, a great deal of poetry partakes of at least some of the gestures and entailments of narrative, even if its major discursive investments are lyric or meditative. And there are many examples of narratively-driven texts within the body of modern Irish poetry, whether one thinks of Yeats’ early narrative poems, such as The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), Patrick Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger” (1942), or Muldoon’s madcap “The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants” (1983). The differences in more recent poetry’s narrative adventures are threefold: poets are much more likely to gear their forms to take on narrative freight outside of the realm of the poet’s own history and biography; they are interested in problematizing or dismantling the conventions and mechanics of narrative and novelistic forms within the crucible of lyric; and recent Irish poetry is much more likely to aspire to prose. In practice, these three dynamics often overlap or appear together in particular poems, and so more important than treating each as though it were a discrete analytical category is grappling with the more tangled question of how contemporary Irish poets are participating in what Jahan Ramazani has described as “a dialogic poetics” (15). “Dialogic poetics” names what many poetry critics (and poets) have long felt: that Mikhail Bahktin, who famously argued that the novel is a discourse of heteroglossia and dialogism whereas poetry is fundamentally monologic, was wrong. Ramazani’s main interest lies in unfolding a “dialogic understanding of genre,” one in which a text “is infiltrated by and infiltrates its generic others” (5). He argues that while poems are “immersed in the welter of myriad cultural forms,” they remain—at heart—poems: “At the same time that poetry incorporates various genres and discourses, it puts on display the compression, metaphoric density, self-reflexivity, sonic self-awareness, visual form, and other shifting features by which it differentiates itself from the others it internalizes” (15). I am tracking a somewhat shifted version of this question in relation to compositional practices in contemporary Irish poetry: not only how poems can absorb certain features of other discursive genres while submitting them to the demands and affordances of lyric, but also how those demands and affordances rewire the other genres and modes that lyric pursues. There may be no better place to consider these complex narrative capacities than the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, whose body of work has been shaped by a continual tendency toward what we might call occluded narration. Much more than other Irish poets in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Ní Chuilleanáin has mobilized features of novelistic discourse within her poetry, which in many other ways is lyrically minded: her texts tend to be brief, stanzaic, imagistically rich, figurally complex, and often meditative. At the same time, her poems often resemble hermetic novelistic stubs: they present a brief diegetic scenario, often via a style of third-person narration and featuring a central character, but because they occur within the brief space of lyric, they are necessarily stripped of the larger novelistic context that would motivate the presented details. It is as though Ní Chuilleanáin uses the generic conventions of poetry in order to decouple novelistic detail from its usual role within the construction of plot. In her poetry, we are often given precise and quite granular accounts of a particular character’s surroundings, movements, and motivations, but they are unattached to any broader fictional or 294

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narrative world: novelistic poems whose poetic and lyric features are not simply in dialogue with the generic codes of prose narrative but that actively capsize those codes. The title poem of Ní Chuilleanáin’s The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (2003) is a particularly rich example of this chimeric form. Divided into four sections, “The Girl Who Married the Reindeer” is modeled on and resembles various folkloric narrative patterns, although it doesn’t seem to be based on any particular story.7 The poem’s ostensible narrative is quite straightforward. The first part introduces the titular girl gathering sloes and her encounter with the reindeer: The reindeer halted before her and claimed the sloes. She rode home on his back without speaking. (15) Part two recounts her journey back “thirteen months after she left home” for her sister’s wedding (15). It is clear that she has given birth (“her breasts were large from suckling”), but the child is not with her, and her extended family—in particular “the old queen . . . the bridegroom’s mother”—decide that she can’t return to “that strange beast” and so give her a potion that makes her forget “her child, [and] her friend” (15, 16). The third section tells of the reindeer’s death “when his child was ten years old,” and the reindeer’s transformation into a man, with a young’s man’s body and “an old man’s face” (16). The reindeer’s death is accompanied by his curse on “the old woman” (presumably the girl’s sister’s mother-in-law, “the old queen” mentioned in the previous section), and it ends with the girl’s child returning: “the child from the north was heard at the gate” (16). The final part fills out details surrounding the child’s return, the main one being that he is accompanied by a “wild reindeer” (17). He sees “the woman in wide trousers” come out of the house and shell “dried broad beans”: the woman sees the child watching but does not seem to recognize him (“her face did not change”) (17). The poem’s final stanza describes the moment of recognition, which occurs just as the old woman dies, presumably as a result of the reindeer’s curse, in the tower above. Up until this point, the texture of the poem is much closer to discursive or narrative prose than figurally and sonically dense lyric, but the final five lines, which limn the moment when the titular figure sees her son, unspool a profusion of similes: His body poured into her vision Like a snake pouring over the ground, Like a double-mouthed fountain of two nymphs, The light groove scored on his chest, Like the meeting of two tidal roads, two oceans. (17) It is a stunning series of figural comparisons, and the sheer power of the images that are generated brings the poem to what, on one level, feels like a quite galvanizing conclusion. A deeply embedded narrative and folkloric topos—the reunification of parent and child— becomes the space of intense and riotous troping, and these final five lines constitute an extended and compound example of what Christopher Ricks, drawing from William Empson, has suggested is a particularly prevalent metaphorical pattern in Irish poetry: the “self-inwoven simile.”8 In this case, the figure unfolds like this: the woman’s visual recognition of the child as her son is compared to the process of a liquid “pouring,” which is then compared to a snake moving on the ground, an image that is itself figured as another form of pouring, which is then 295

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compared to a further species of pouring, water pouring out of the stone or marble mouths of a “double-mouthed fountain of two nymphs.” So, on the one hand, Ní Chuilleanáin stacks water metaphors, and on the other, she leverages the nature of that metaphor—its liquidity—so that it might toggle between tenor and vehicle: the boy’s body is figured as a liquid that pours into the woman’s body, which is compared to another kind of body (the snake) that is itself liquidated (“pouring”) and then transposed into another figure in which it is now the tenor for the vehicle of another mode of pouring (from the fountain), which solidifies into the description of the fountain, which then introduces two further bodies (the nymphs’) that metonymize the pouring. The line about the fountains itself has to function doubly, as both an extension of the initial figural chain and as a proleptic comparison in relation to the line that follows, which re-centers the boy’s body. The two-mouthed fountain, which emanates figurally from preceding figures, generates the tenor of the following chain of similes: it is like the “light groove scored on his chest,” which is finally said to be like the “meeting of two tidal roads,” a kenning-like figure that is resolved in “two oceans.” Just as the earlier figures were motivated by state-changes—the solid body figured as liquid which then figures her visual recognition of him—so do figural metamorphoses drive the final lines: the putative tenor of the final cluster is the appearance of the boy’s chest, in which either something like a scar (earlier it is said that his skin was “blistered”) is compared to a “light groove scored on his chest” or in which a literal ray or beam of light is visible on his chest. In either case, state-changes sponsor the metaphorics. The bodily mark is troped as a form of light, which becomes both the agent and object of a particular kind of manipulation of a solid (the boy’s skin), one that has a groove that has been scored into it; or, the ray of light is figured as spatial configuration (a “light groove”) and then as a kind of solid that can score such a groove. Or, “light” is simply adjectival and so modifies “groove,” although by this point in the passage a reader has been conditioned to find figures wherever possible. All of these figural torsions are twined together in the final line, in which once again and on multiple levels figures are generated by crossing states of matter. A “tidal road” is, most literally, a causeway: a passable track on an elevated stretch of land that is set low, at or even below the water level, and so subject to tidal flooding. But it is also, figurally, the meeting of two tides, the pouring together of “two oceans,” which returns us to the start of the passage in which the boy’s body pours into his mother’s: two oceans, two like substances, meeting in a moment of recognition. Considering that this poem so assiduously crosses the folkloric, magical world with something more like ordinary reality—for instance, in part two, when the girl returns to her family to attend the wedding she is given a magical powder that causes her to forget her reindeer lover and child, but she travels to the wedding quite prosaically, “on the deck of a trader”—we might understand the complex figural crossings of the final five lines as emblematic of the poem’s general thematic drift. And we wouldn’t be wrong. But it is also crucial to notice how this final set of intensely lyric maneuvers at once runs counter to the texture of the rest of the poem and can be seen as the apogee of Ní Chuilleanáin’s strategy of slowly unbuilding the narrative that she putatively presents. Even though we understand her to be harnessing modes of narrativity and story-telling, we also apprehend that those modes are curtailed via the gambits of lyric or decoupled from the more straightforward narrative scheme. This scheme seems archetypal: a girl meets a strange figure and goes away with him where they become lovers; the girl returns to her family, who then use illicit means to keep her away from “that strange beast,” “her friend” (16); the strange figure dies and curses the woman who caused his separation from his beloved and their child, which spurs the child’s return to his mother; in a final stroke, justice is meted out—the “old queen” dies alone—and mother and son are reunited. Throughout the poem, this folkloric arc is filled out with occasional bits of novelistic detail, and together these two discursive features thicken the poem’s narrative texture. And yet, Ní Chuilleanáin simultaneously 296

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works against the poem’s narrative drift by only allowing threshold or transitional moments to be told: the initial meeting, the girl’s return, the reindeer’s death, and the child’s return. If “The Girl Who Married the Reindeer” is a novelistic poem in that it follows a large-scale narrative arc, then it also subverts that narrative motion by removing everything but the pivots. It is as though Ní Chuilleanáin allows the poem to take on some of the freight that we associate with narrative genres, but only if other features of such freight are rigorously excluded, such as characterological interiority, narrative consequence, and the “middles” of every bundle of plot. We can see this play out at the largest level when we think back to the title. Based on the text that we are given, we can grant most of the poem’s central actions: the meeting of the girl and the reindeer, the existence of a child, the separation of the girl from the reindeer and her child, and the final reunification. What we can’t grant is the action named in the title: it is not at all clear that the girl and the reindeer marry. If they do, this occurs well beyond the limits of the diegesis. We might even understand that something like the opposite has occurred: not a marriage following the meeting, but the girl’s abduction and capture by the reindeer, which would recast the family’s intervention in section two, undercut the ethical tow of the reindeerman’s deathbed curse in section three, and make the recognition scene at the end of part four something else entirely. The lines in which the initial meeting is detailed, quoted above, give no sense of whether she had any agency within the encounter. He confronts her and demands that she hand over what she has gathered. The line break holds an aporia. The next thing we know is that she is on his back, hanging on to his antlers, as they go “home”—which names his home, not hers (the next section begins, pointedly, by underlining the distinction: “thirteen months after she left home/she travelled” south for her sister’s wedding [15]). What happens in the line break is unavailable, and so—considering that there are some aspects of the poem that ask us to read novelistically and to see the figures as characters—we have no sense of the girl’s desire, actions, or will within this moment of encounter. In which case, the entire import of the poem and its narrative arc have been subverted, with the final figurally elaborate lines indicating not the overwhelming feeling that might accompany the reunification with one’s child but the differently overwhelming feeling of trauma at seeing the boy and his companion, “a wild reindeer staggered by sunlight” (17). The set of nested similes that end the poem are, then, both the lyric overturning of the poem’s narrative engine and the apotheosis of its presumed narrative force. Rather than, or, much more significantly than, a dialogue between lyric and narrative, Ní Chuilleanáin demonstrates how the inevitable generic mixing and embedding that occurs in literary works—no poem is pure poem, no novel is entirely novel—makes for strangely fused texts fractured along the same lines upon which they are constructed. Such a demonstration does not lead inevitably toward ceaseless deconstruction but towards a style of intrinsic, immanent critique, one that is mobilized by the ways that juxtaposed, compounded genres are selfvexing. Which is to say, in the case of “The Girl Who Married the Reindeer,” that the poem’s lyrical tactics, most flagrantly the concluding passage’s cascading figures, demand that a reader reconsider its narrative energies. Fully unpacking the mobius of tenors and vehicles in the finale’s string of similes, all of which are premised upon a species of transgressive or impossible encounter, requires us to reread the narrative encounter that generates the poem. Considering this poem’s thematic focus on illicit marriages, possible abductions and assaults, multiple forms of capture and confinement, and the separation of mother and child, as well as its publication early in the twenty-first century, it is not too difficult to see the poem’s larger social and political context and its ideological import. Without addressing directly (or even indirectly) the revelations about widespread sexual and psychological abuse by Catholic priests and in Catholicrun schools and institutions, such as Magdalene Laundries and mother and baby homes, Ní Chuilleanáin constructs an allegorical anatomization of the process of historical and narrative 297

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misunderstanding and reconsideration. A reader who sits with the poem long enough eventually learns to un-read its narrative surface and so locate the formal and substantive uncertainties that arise within its generic torsions. I have spent such a long time on this single poem not only because it is a particularly significant example of the way in which contemporary Irish poets have been experimenting on narrative modes via lyric forms, but also to suggest that what is often needed within criticism of Irish poetry is much closer reading—both at the surface of the text and in its (albeit, metaphorical) depths. While scholars of Irish poetry have expanded their scope and reach in a number of ways, which largely and understandably follow on the three narratives about Irish poetry that I outline at the start of this chapter, it often seems that individual poems or collections serve as either pretext or confirmation: a text is adduced in order to catalyze a larger theoretical or critical question and is quickly sidelined, or one is brought into a discussion of a given poet’s style or work, or of a particular theme, as a static illustration of a topic rather than the crystallization of a process of affective and intellectual engagement in which the concrete features of poetic writing—lines, stanzas, rhymes, rhythms, modes, genres, figures, forms—operate as affordances and capacities within a complex aesthetic enactment. One of the new narratives about contemporary poetry concerns the propensity of poets to experiment with narrative modes within forms that remain, in many other ways, largely committed to lyric. I’ve spent all my time discussing a single poem, but in a rangier version of this argument there are a number of other texts that one would want to place alongside of Ní Chuilleanáin’s, such as Trevor Joyce’s “Hopeful Monsters” (1998) and the hybrid narrative-collage block text “Stillsman” (2007); the title sequence of Caitríona O’Reilly’s The Sea Cabinet (2006); Ciaran Carson’s double series of long-lined couplets that recounts a love affair and that moves among perspectives and between Troubles-era Belfast and Europe in For All We Know (2008); the novelistic scattering that comprises Catherine Walsh’s Astonished Birds Cara, Jane, Bob, and James (2012); the historical vignettes in Sinéad Morrissey’s Parallax (2013); or the exceedingly long-lined poems that spill into prose in Caoilinn Hughes’ Gathering Evidence (2014), especially those that detail episodes in the history of science, such as “King of the Castle” and “Rational Dress.” Despite their very different formal and aesthetic commitments, what brings together such works is a shared idea that poetic forms, rather than being unconcerned with or irrelevant to questions about narrativity, are vitally productive spaces in which to scrutinize the ideological work narratives do. As such, they both reveal and reimagine how poems can model new ways to understand what we think are the stories that we know and to display the ramifications of narrating differently.

Notes 1 This is of course a generalization and it doesn’t fully account for the complexities and granularities of actual poetic practice. For a more focused unpacking of this generalization, see Falci, “Contemporary Irish Poetry.” 2 For a critique of these formal conditions, see Lloyd. On Irish poetry and the construction of canons, see Keating, and Longley. 3 The pledge can be found at https://awomanpoetspledge.com [accessed 10 August 2019]. 4 Key accounts include Collins, Ní Fhrighil, and Wills. Also see essays in Gilsenan Nordin. 5 For two different approaches to this broader theme, see De Angelis, and McDaid. 6 On these topics, and on contemporary Irish poetry more generally, see Brearton and Gillis, Campbell, Falci, Goodby, Hanna, McConnell, Obert, and Potts. 7 On some of the possible folkloric analogues for the poem, see Boyle Haberstroh 72–74. 8 See Ricks 34–59.

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Works cited Boyle Haberstroh, Patricia. The Female Figure in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Poetry. Cork University Press, 2013. Brearton, Fran and Alan Gillis, Eds. The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry. Oxford University Press, 2012. Campbell, Matthew. The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Collins, Lucy. Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement. Liverpool University Press, 2016. De Angelis, Irene. The Japanese Effect in Contemporary Irish Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Falci, Eric. “Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Problem of the Subject.” Post-Ireland? Essays on Contemporary Irish Poetry. Edited by Jefferson Holdridge and Brian Ó Conchubhair. Wake Forest University Press, 2017, pp. 55–75. Falci, Eric. Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, 1966–2012. Cambridge University Press, 2012. Gilsenan Nordin, Irene. The Body and Desire in Contemporary Irish Poetry. Irish Academic Press, 2006. Goodby, John. Irish Poetry since 1950: From Stillness Into History. Manchester University Press, 2000. Hanna, Adam. Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Keating, Kenneth. Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Canon: Critical Limitations and Textual Liberations. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Lloyd, David. “Introduction: On Irish Experimental Poetry.” Irish University Review, Vol. 46, No. 1, 2016, pp. 10–19. Longley, Edna. “Altering the Past: Northern Irish Poetry and Modern Canons.” Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 35, 2005, pp. 1–17. McConnell, Gail. Northern Irish Poetry and Theology. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. McDaid, Ailbhe. The Poetics of Migration in Contemporary Irish Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Muldoon, Paul. One Thousand Things Worth Knowing. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan. The Girl Who Married the Reindeer. Wake Forest University Press, 2002. Ní Fhrighil, Rióna. Briathra, Béithe agus Banfhilí: Filíocht Eavan Boland agus Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. An Clóchomhar Tta, 2008. Obert, Julia. Postcolonial Overtures: The Politics of Sound in Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry. Syracuse University Press, 2015. Potts, Donna. Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition. University of Missouri Press, 2011. Quinn, Justin, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800–2000. Cambridge University Press, 2008. Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres. University of Chicago Press, 2014. Ricks, Christopher. The Force of Poetry. Oxford University Press, 1984. Wills, Clair. Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry. Clarendon Press, 1993.

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23 The crisis and what comes after Post-Celtic Tiger theater in a new Irish paradigm Laura Farrell-Wortman

Theater of the post-Celtic Tiger period in Ireland reflects and questions the simultaneous states of economic disarray and cultural possibility that were inherent to the end of the boom. Artists pointed to the contradictions of the Celtic Tiger—such as Ireland’s period of greatest economic production also being a period of high unemployment for many, and a period of mass immigration into the country coming at the same time as the 2004 citizenship referendum that strictly defined and limited Irishness—in works of the period. After the crash of 2008 and the austerity budgets that followed, Irish theater entered a period of more truncated economic resources but of radical possibility in terms of form and subject matter. The move away from playwrightcentric theater of the late 1990s and early 2000s blossomed into a rich period of devised work as “theater-makers” became the hallmark of financial crash-era Irish performance. Queer theater offered new modes of considering not only LGBTQ+ theater but of personal and political intersectionality and the future of Irish notions of sexuality, gender, and how we perform what used to be considered binary and fixed identities. The Waking the Feminists movement, along with movements such as the Repeal the Eighth campaign, argued forcefully for the long overdue institutionalization of women’s equality, in theater and in Irish public life. While there is no doubt that the financial crisis of 2008 and the end of the Celtic Tiger caused enormous political, personal, and economic upheaval for Ireland, particularly in the Republic, we can also see it now as an event that allowed for boundary redefinition and sometimes boundary elimination. Such openness has produced a diverse and artistically significant body of work that may help inform artists and citizens in the next series of crises to impact Ireland and Irish theater: Brexit and the global COVID-19 pandemic.

“Theater-makers” For decades, Irish theater had been known primarily as a writer’s theater. Playwrights such as W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel, Thomas Murphy, Marina Carr, Martin McDonagh, and Conor McPherson have become so strongly affiliated with Irish theater that it is nearly impossible to disentangle the Irish dramatic canon from the broader history of Irish theater. While there was never a strict division of labor relegating artists solely to one role, categorization of theater artists into discrete labor functions tended to prioritize the lionization of 300

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playwriting, in terms of both cultural capital and state funding. One of the lasting innovations of the Celtic Tiger and post-Celtic Tiger periods in Irish theater, however, was the rise in significance of the “theater-maker” as a central role in the theater development process. Distinct from the discrete categories of director, writer, performer, etc., the theater-maker embodies a more ensemble-based approach to the creation of new works, and the rise in artists referring to themselves in this way parallels the decline in prominence of the playwright that had been a hallmark of twentieth-century Irish theater. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the playwright was undoubtedly the driving creative force in Irish theater. Playwrights have gained the greatest level of prominence globally of any artists associated with Irish theater (barring certain Irish actors who have made successful commercial bids in the UK and United States), and the preeminence of text as the guidepost of theatrical creative work in Ireland was nearly unrivaled until the beginning of the Celtic Tiger in the mid-1990s. While Irish theater has always been reliant on companies, such as the Abbey, the Druid, the Gate, etc., such companies had historically operated with more or less traditional divisions of labor, purchasing or commissioning a completed playscript, hiring a director or assigning one from amongst their in-house staff (or from amongst the acting company), and working with a design team who were either contract-based or worked specifically for the theater in relatively discrete roles (e.g., lighting design, costume design). This is not to say that ensemble-based work was unheard of prior to the Celtic Tiger or that theater artists did not operate in multiple artistic roles in Irish companies; certainly, W.B. Yeats comes to mind as an early example of a proto-theater-maker: artistic director of the Abbey, prolific playwright, poet, and performer in multiple formats. Despite early examples, however, the widespread embrace of “theater-maker” as an artistic self-identity was a hallmark of the 1990s, and it is a marker of a certain brand of collaborative original artistic development that continues into the twenty-first century. “Theater-maker,” more than “director,” “performer,” or “playwright,” implies an artist who contributes to an ensemble creation of performance in which there can be multiple authors and multiple creative perspectives. This is inclusive of devising, but suggests a broader range of possible methods, including solo shows in which there is only one theater-maker. The dominant creative forces in early twenty-first century Irish theater are nearly all self-identified theatermakers: Louise Lowe (ANU Productions), Grace Dyas (THEATREClub), Feidlim Cannon and Gary Keegan (Brokentalkers), Shaun Dunne (Talking Shop Ensemble), Noeline Kavanagh (Macnas), as well as many others. Though artists across generations have used the title, it has been most swiftly adopted amongst those who came of age during and after the Celtic Tiger. In the latter 1990s—and particularly in the early twenty-first century—Irish theater began an aesthetic move towards a more collaborative approach to theater-making; methods such as devising and immersive performance began to appear more frequently in fringe theater in Ireland, as well as in Britain and on the European continent. The figure of the playwright as primary to the growth and maintenance of Ireland’s theatrical legacy has in many ways been replaced by companies of great import, groups of people who create works in which text, movement, site, and performer are merged in such a way that to restage them would shift the meaning of the work in fundamental ways. Works of this type include THEATREClub’s Heroin (2010), ANU Productions’ Laundry (2011), Brokentalkers’ The Blue Boy (2011), Sonya Kelly’s How to Keep an Alien (2014), and Talking Shop Ensemble’s Rapids (2017). Talking Shop Ensemble (TSE) especially embodies the “theater-maker” philosophy and its aesthetic. Established in 2008, just prior to the financial crisis, TSE is comprised of theater artists Shaun Dunne, Oonagh Murphy, Aisling Byrne, and Lisa Walsh. The group’s work varies in form and content, but their productions consistently speak to the material circumstances of 301

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contemporary Ireland, particularly the ennui and confusion felt by the young and by those at the margins of society. I am a Homebird (It’s Very Hard) (2012) approaches the issue of the newly reemergent trend of emigration from Ireland from the perspective of young adults who choose to, or are compelled to, remain in their home country. The Homebird development process incorporated many interviews with impacted populations, followed by a devising process by the company, with the production script finalized by Dunne. With Rapids (2017), the company followed a similar process, addressing AIDS in Dublin as a community issue and incorporating the voices of those living with the disease. ANU Productions, one of Ireland’s most critically lauded theater companies of the 2000s, uses a similar devising practice based in deep research. The company was founded in 2009 by visual artist Owen Ross, directors Louise Lowe and Sophie Motley, producer Hannah Mullen, and lighting designer Sarah Jane Shiels. The company describes their approach to theater as “devoted to an interdisciplinary approach to performance/installation that cross-pollinates visual art, dance and theater in an intensely collaborative way” (ANU Productions). The intensity and emotional resonance of ANU’s work is their hallmark, bringing history to powerful life. Their 2016 production Sunder, an immersive, site-specific performance staged in and around Moore Street, brought audience members in very small groups into the performance itself, tasking them with acting as participants in the 1916 Easter Rising. The play occurs in the same space as the events 100 years prior, and was developed using eyewitness testimony of those present for the final hours of the Rising, in which Irish Republican Brotherhood soldiers tunneled through Moore Street buildings to escape the British blockade surrounding the occupied General Post Office. Utilizing dialogue, movement, and the immediacy of Moore Street itself, ANU and director Louise Lowe achieve a level of immersion with both space and content distinct from what is typically achieved in traditional theater performances. There has been a minor backlash to this new categorization amongst some older artists and critics, as evidenced by writer-performer Pat Kinevane’s rejection of the term (“I respect people who call themselves theatre-makers today, but I don’t get it . . . it’s almost a dismissal of the delineation of different roles in the making of theatre. . . . Maybe it’s just a redefinition of what was there already but I don’t think it needed to be redefined”) and the shared rejection of the term by critic Fintan O’Toole and former Gate Theatre artistic director Michael Colgan on O’Toole’s television special Power Plays (Kinevane, interview with Etienne, 160). A significant shift in the position of the playwright in Irish culture occurred with the elimination of the Arts Council’s Playwright’s Commission Scheme in 1999. The funding mechanism had long been a means by which playwrights were granted the ability to develop new works and by which the state signaled its support for a type of artist that has long been fundamentally associated with Irish cultural production. The Arts Council did not unilaterally eliminate these funds, however; the Playwright’s Commission was replaced with the Theatre Bursary Award, but even this replacement is illuminating in terms of the shift in importance of the “theater-maker” versus the playwright. The Theatre Bursary Award is available to “professional theatre artists,” whom the award guidelines define as a “playwright, theatre-maker, director, actor, designer, and/or producer” (Arts Council, “Theatre Bursary Award”). Thus, the funds that used to support playwrights are now spread more widely, perhaps acknowledging the more variegated means by which theater is created in Ireland and the more complex notion of authorship in the twenty-first century.

Financial crisis The economic highs of the Celtic Tiger were followed by a period of austerity beginning officially in 2008, with social and artistic ramifications lasting long beyond its official end in 2014. 302

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The financial crisis saw the return of net emigration from Ireland and amplified inequities in access to housing, income, and employment. Just as theater responded to the Celtic Tiger both in form and content, Irish performance was transformed by the financial crisis. Theater artists returned to overtly political themes, as well as to highly personal narratives performed by the theater-makers themselves. Whereas Irish plays had often featured relatively large casts in the twentieth century, theater of the mid-to-late-2000s typically feature quite small casts and easily moveable technical features. Successful shows would often tour for months, sometimes years; small casts and small sets made such mobility possible. Ultimately, theater of the crisis and postcrisis eras is defined by the indefatigable resolve of theater-makers to speak anger and grief to power and to use theater as a site for community catharsis. The financial crisis under consideration here is specific to the Republic of Ireland; though the political fates of Northern Ireland and the Republic are linked, Northern Ireland’s economic tie to the United Kingdom meant that it was largely spared the worst of the Republic’s crisis. The political theater of the financial crisis period is part of a long history of Irish performance that specifically engages with the social issues of the day, particularly regarding socioeconomic conditions. The late 1800s saw the development of highly political theater movements, such as St. Enda’s School and the Abbey Theatre, both of which were concerned with a return to Celtic definitions of Irishness. Irish playwrights at midcentury were often concerned with the issue of emigration, such as in The Wood of the Whispering by M.J. Molloy and Conversations on a Homecoming by Tom Murphy. With the advent of the Celtic Tiger, Irish theater again became concerned with issues of identity, but with wider notions of European and global identity rather than the Celtic or pre-Christian identity markers of turn-of-the-century playwrights. Writers such as Conor McPherson, Marina Carr, Martin McDonagh, and Enda Walsh wrote plays that were unmistakably Irish but that were also free to explore the new possibilities of Irish life. The generation that came of age during the 1990s and early 2000s were the first Irish generation to grow up without net emigration, with tuition-free university education, and with the expectation that they would enjoy one of the highest qualities of life in the OECD in their adulthood. This was the promise; it was not the reality. With the collapse of Anglo Irish Bank and subsequent government guarantee of all Irish bank deposits in September 2008, followed by the November 2010 EU “Troika” bailout that led to austerity budgets being enacted until 2015, what ended was not just the economic boom of the Celtic Tiger but the seismic shift in what it meant to be Irish. But whereas identity exploration had been a core thematic element of previous generations of Irish drama, post-crisis theater does not center its issues of identity on what “Irishness” means; rather, its primary questions are who amongst the Irish are allowed to be at the center, who must remain at the periphery, and, often, who must leave Ireland entirely. Theater of the crisis offered mostly small, intimate reflections on the personal impacts of austerity and emigration, though a few companies did mount larger cast productions exploring the crisis’ fiscal origins. Among the earliest was Fishamble’s Guaranteed! (2010) by Colin Murphy, followed by Murphy’s companion piece Bailed Out! (2015). Guaranteed! dramatizes the night of the government’s fateful decision to guarantee Irish bank debt. Bailed Out! functions similarly, with a script crafted from documentary sources. The action jumps from Brussels to Ireland to help explain the complicated “Troika” bailout of the Irish economy. Both were made into TV movies which aired on the independent channel TV3. The explanatory quality of these plays is critical; these productions operated as means of demystifying fiscal mechanisms that are often deliberately obscure and allowed the public to access the “how” of what happened, if not the “why.” Whereas Murphy’s plays focused on the figures at the center of the financial and governmental sectors, most works that explored the crisis considered those who were personally affected 303

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but not politically connected. As the economic impact of the crisis caused significant impacts in employment, housing, and funding for government mechanisms such as the Child Benefit payment, the impacts of austerity on the lifestyles, demographics, and mental health of the Irish people cannot be overstated. Freefall (2009) by Michael West, devised and produced by Corn Exchange, depicts the last days of a man’s life in the waning Celtic Tiger period, using the protagonist’s lifelong passivity as a substitute for Ireland in the age of recession and the Ryan Report. Pat McGrath’s Small Plastic Wars, part of Fishamble’s 2013 Show in a Box series, is a monologue that encompasses a variety of characters in the life of Joe, an unemployed teacher and model tank enthusiast. Joe’s experience as an unemployed, middle-aged, middle-class man was a common one, particularly given the impact of the crisis on the building sector which was heavily male-dominated. Jacinta Sheerin and Georgina McKevitt depicted the lives of women living in poverty in Dublin at the end of the Celtic Tiger in Waiting for IKEA (2007); the Wicked Angels production had a touring life of nearly a decade, indicative not only of the play’s biting humor but of the appetite for women’s perspectives in urban drama. The lengthy touring life of Waiting for IKEA was a reality for many small-cast, low-tech productions of the period. As a consequence of the government’s austerity budgets, arts funding was significantly reduced, with Arts Council funding for theater reduced by 35.2% over the period 2008–2013.1 Whereas the Arts Council had previously funded theater companies by the season, they moved to a production-by-production funding scheme for all but eight companies.2 This caused many companies to reduce the overall number of productions staged per year, including Galway’s Druid Theatre and Dublin’s Rough Magic; both changed their approach to production after 2008 due to funding issues.3 Specific academic work on theater and the financial crisis is still emerging. Many scholars have contributed a great deal towards understanding the complex and interdisciplinary issues of crisis-era Ireland. Ursula Barry and Pauline Conroy’s work on gender and austerity in Ireland illuminates the important ways in which the crisis was gendered, and disproportionately impacted women. Simon Carswell’s economic journalism, both in short form for the Irish Times and in his book Anglo Republic: Inside the Bank that Broke Ireland, provide a clear through line of the crisis from its beginnings through today. Theater researchers such as Ondřej Pilný, Patrick Lonergan, Brian Singleton, and Siobhán O’Gorman working on Irish theater from the Celtic Tiger period through the post-crisis period provide a necessary and thorough investigation into work being done in both the Republic and Northern Ireland and their social and economic contexts.

Waking the feminists In October 2015, the Abbey Theatre announced their upcoming season, a special retrospective of Irish theater to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, called “Waking the Nation.” The season of works in both the Abbey mainstage space and the Peacock included only three women—two directors and one playwright.4 All other directors and playwrights featured were men. Where, theater critics and artists wondered, were the women? Lian Bell, a set designer and arts manager based in Dublin, took this question to social media, engaging the Irish theater community (and, eventually, world theater and performance communities) in a grassroots protest movement that would come to be known as Waking the Feminists. On October 28, 2015, Bell wrote in a public Facebook post: Just did a quick tot up of the Abbey Theatre’s 2016 programme ‘Waking the Nation’ launched moments ago. 304

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Of the 10 listed productions on the website there are: 9 male and 1 female writers (of Me, Mollser—which is already touring in 2015) and 7 male and 2 female directors (again, one is of Me, Mollser). . . . Happy to be proven wrong, if I’ve missed something major in my flurry of righteous indignation. But, like, REALLY?5 On November 2, 2015, she announced (via another public Facebook post) the creation of the hashtag “#wakingthefeminists” (coined by Pan Pan associate producer Maeve Stone) to aggregate news and discussion of the brewing controversy over the Abbey’s programming. By November 8, Waking the Feminists had presences on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, with Bell sharing coverage of the movement and encouraging a letter writing campaign to the Abbey requesting a public forum to address community issues with the “Waking the Nation” program. On November 9—one week after Bell’s first post that sparked the controversy—a public meeting with the Abbey Theatre was announced. The tickets for the meeting were booked out in less than 10 minutes.6 The November 12, 2015 meeting held at the Abbey Theatre was a watershed moment in the formation of Waking the Feminists, with the massive crowd who attended attracting international news coverage and further evidencing the wellspring of support for greater gender parity in the arts. In response to the movement, the Abbey Theatre assembled a gender equality subcommittee.7 The Abbey released it’s “eight guiding principles” on gender equality, developed by the subcommittee, on August 30, 2016; they focus on a commitment to greater focus on gender parity in hiring and production opportunities, as well as an update to the theater’s mission statement.8 Waking the Feminists continued to work as a platform for amplifying the issue of gender inequality in Irish theater, producing research on the gender breakdown in the field and inspiring further events such as the 2016 Feminist Midsummer series of women-focused theater events in Cork, Dublin, Galway, and Belfast. After an anniversary meeting at the Abbey in November 2016 titled “One Thing More,” Waking the Feminists officially disbanded (and as of mid-2020, references to the movement on the still-functioning movement website are in the past tense), though this disbanding should not be viewed as a capitulation or a cessation of efforts. Though “Waking the Feminists” has officially ended, the feminists remain very much awake. Waking the Feminists were responding not to a specific circumstance of the mid-2010s Irish artistic landscape, but rather to the continued and normalized diminishing of women’s achievements and possibilities in Irish theater over a much longer period of time. The “Waking the Nation” season was a rallying point, as opposed to a single and isolated event. Feminist responses to periods of austerity have historically had a similarly wide-ranging focus, but unlike the high-profile nature of Waking the Feminists, women’s political work in Irish theatrical movements has often been sublimated to that of men’s. Though academics have made efforts to counter the denial of women’s contributions to both theater and political movements (particularly during the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising in 2016, when scholarship on women’s contributions to the revolution and its performative elements were highlighted), Waking the Feminists brings to light the extent to which political progress has in many ways failed to bring about equity in the artistic sector.

Queer performance The social and political climate of the Republic grew increasingly liberal during the Celtic Tiger period, particularly with the wane in the Catholic Church’s influence in daily life. As Ireland 305

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emerged as an economic powerhouse in the region, the nation grew into a more “European” identity, with citizens viewing their status as members of the European Union community as more important than ever. A European Parliament survey showed that 55% of Irish citizens viewed their primary identities as both European and Irish, compared to 42% who viewed themselves as Irish only (European Parliament). Divorce was legalized by referendum in 1995, only ten years after the legalization of birth control. Although the 2004 citizenship referendum, in which 79% of voters approved new constitutional language conferring Irish citizenship only on those born to Irish citizens (as opposed to citizenship by birthright to those born on Irish soil), evidenced a growing xenophobia during the height of immigration into the Republic, the first decades of the 2000s generally saw a broadening of rights in Ireland. One of the most significant civil rights victories of the 2000s was the 2015 same-sex marriage referendum. Over 62% of voters approved the proposal to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples; the Republic became the first nation to enact same-sex marriage laws by popular vote.9 Same-sex marriage had been legal in Northern Ireland since 2005. Earlier that year, Minister for Health and future Taoiseach Leo Varadkar publicly announced that he is gay.10 Such steps were major advances for Ireland’s civil rights liberalization and its identity as a modernized European society, which was further cemented by the legalization of abortion in the Republic in 2018. Such changes in social policy reflect a growing liberalization of attitudes towards sexuality in Ireland, and with it has grown an interest in queer performance as an important subset of Irish theater. Queer theater is somewhat distinct from what we may think of as “LGBT theater” or “gay theater,” although the two are linked in important ways. While queer theater can encompass the narratives and histories of LGBT people, “queer” indicates a broader concept of the role of sexuality, gender identity, and the performance of both. “Gay theater” suggests performance that is by, for, and about gay people, and this remains an important means of representation; “queer theater” broadens these identity categories and explores a wider variety of lived experiences. Queer theater also often considers the intersections between identities—such as the experience of being both LGBTQ+ and Irish, or the role of gendered performance in notions of homophobia and belonging. As Moynan King has written, “Queerness is in the interstices” (120). Fintan Walsh writes, I locate queerness where subjectivity exceeds a single, knowable and commodifiable identity position (including male, female, Irish or even LGBT, for example), and identity is revealed as both performative (an effect of discourse and culture, as in Judith Butler’s work) and intersectional (interactive with multiple positions and categories including gender, sexuality, migration, religion, place, age, class, ethnicity, nationality etc.) . . . Understood in this braided way, queerness undermines presumptions of stability and certainty, and at its boldest aspires to alternative ways of being, doing, feeling and knowing. (2) Sexuality and gender are inherently part of queer identity, but queerness (and therefore queer theater) often performs explorations of the radical freedom allowed by the dismantling of discrete or binary categories of identity. Queer theater enacts the same conscious staking of space that LGBT artists have long claimed in Ireland; the genre assumes the right to tell one’s own story (or the story of one’s own community) and to expect it to be heard. An important performative moment in contemporary Irish queer theater was Panti Bliss’ Noble Call at the Abbey Theatre on February 1, 2014. Following a performance of James Plunkett’s 1958 play The Risen People, drag queen Panti Bliss addressed the audience, having been invited by Abbey artistic director Fiach Macconghail. Bliss spoke of a recent controversy 306

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arising from her appearance on RTÉ’s The Saturday Night Show, hosted by Brendan O’Connor on January 11, 2014, in which she referred to anti-LGBT behavior by journalists John Waters and Breda O’Brien and conservative Catholic think tank the Iona Institute as “homophobia.” Waters and O’Brien took offense at the characterization and threatened to sue RTÉ for defamation. RTÉ relented, paying an undisclosed settlement amount to the accused. The controversy quickly became known as “Pantigate” (O’Toole 106). Bliss’s Abbey speech addressed this controversy but expanded upon it to describe the ways in which she (and the man who portrays her, Rory O’Neill) has internalized the homophobic society in which she lives and the multiple layers of performance necessary to move safely through the world. Bliss addresses the audience directly, asking them to empathize with situations of selfdoubt and self-policing experienced in particular by those who are gender non-conforming, telling her stories with the expectation that the audience will not only hear these experiences but will attempt to imagine how these experiences feel and how they shape Bliss’ (and other queer people’s, by extension) performance of their own selves. The rhetorical strategy both offers catharsis to the speaker and places the onus of change on the audience. Bliss admits to internalized homophobia and to rage and humiliation at having her humanity debated in public forums, giving the speech a confessional quality even while it calls for societal change. It is this personalization, connecting these everyday indignities to her lived experience and her performance as a gay Irish person, that gives the speech its power and its longevity in the national discourse. The speech, recorded and disseminated on YouTube and social media, was a viral sensation with global reach; the Oireachtas and the European Parliament held discussions about it, and in 2019 the dress that Bliss wore during her speech was archived in the National Museum of Ireland.11 Panti Bliss’ Noble Call was not specifically about theater, but it is an excellent example of the ways in which performance and theater have provided a space for queer people to express and explore their lived experiences in Ireland, as well as a forum in which the debate that Bliss mentions—which is dominated by straight voices—can be reclaimed by the communities in question. Queer theater in Ireland has been represented in such theater companies as Belfast-based TheatreofplucK. Established in 2004, TheatreofplucK is Northern Ireland’s first publicly-funded queer theater company.12 Previous works include Automatic Bastard (2006), We Always Treat Women Too Well (2008) and Tuesdays at Tescos (2014). In 2017, the company collaborated with playwright Shannon Yee and LGBT organization the Rainbow Project on Multiple Journeys, an immersive performance through the streets of Belfast. Utilizing contemporary postdramatic techniques of site-specificity and ambulatory audiences, Multiple Journeys offered an “audio tour” of LGBT lives in Belfast. Stories were recorded and replayed to the audience during their walk, mapping the lives of queer Northern Irish people onto the physical space of the city.13 A second “audio tour” was produced in 2018, again with Yee and the Rainbow Project, titled So I Can Breathe This Air; this production utilized similar techniques but focused the narrative on the experience of LGBT immigrants to Northern Ireland, further expanding and complicating the notion of “belonging.” The work of Caitriona Mary Reilly offers an excellent analysis of TheatreofplucK and their productions. Dublin’s THISISPOPBABY, founded in 2007, describes itself as “a theatre and events production company that rips up the space between popular culture, counter culture, queer culture and high art” (THISISPOPBABY). The company’s productions are hybrids of theater, nightclub acts and drag performance. Works from THISISPOPBABY have ranged from Landfall (2020), a video and sound installation at the Project Arts Centre exploring Dublin’s night culture across several St Patrick’s Days; Lords of Strut: Absolute Legends (2017), a theater for youth production featuring acrobatics, dance music, and over-the-top choreography in conjunction with Britain’s Got Talent semi-finalist duo Lords of Strut; and The Year of Magical Wanking (2010), a solo 307

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verse performance in which Neil Watkins plays a gay Jesus figure, careening from topics such as gay nightclub culture to the Catholic Church. THISISPOPBABY produces Dublin’s Queer Notions theater festival, which it launched in 2008, though the company does not relegate queer performance to the festival alone. In 2020, THISISPOPBABY was chosen to produce the stage show for Lesley Roy’s “Story of My Life,” Ireland’s entry in the Eurovision Song Contest, moving the company towards the mainstream of Irish popular culture but also indicating how Irish popular culture continues to incorporate notions of queerness.14 Among THISISPOPBABY’s most critically acclaimed productions of the 2010s was Mark O’Halloran’s Trade (2011). An intimate two-character play about the ways in which economic and class dynamics intersect with sex and secrecy, Trade was staged in a real Dublin bed and breakfast; this site-specificity limited the audience size and placed the spectators in extremely close proximity to the characters—a young male sex worker and his middle-aged client. In contrast to many of THISISPOPBABY’s brighter, more eclectic productions, Trade exposes the darker nature of masculinity in the financial crisis period and of the repercussions of living in the closet. The older man is a closeted, unemployed dock worker who has hired the younger man for the evening; he notes that the younger man is, in fact, young enough to be his son, their ages becoming over the course the play both a moral quandary and a shifting power dynamic. The intimacy of the bedroom space heightens the audience’s sense of being given a rare glimpse into the raw truth of the duo’s brief but significant encounter. O’Halloran depicts the challenges of human connection during the crisis period, intertwining economic need and loneliness, and centering the voices of the marginalized using site-specific drama.

Conclusion The Celtic Tiger era was undoubtedly a time of great possibility and reimagining for Ireland, and perhaps because of its unusual nature in Ireland’s economic and cultural history, the period following it is often defined by how it differs from those boom times. But the financial crisis and post-crisis/pre-COVID-19 period should be viewed as its own distinct and culturally rich era in Irish theater. The “Europeanization” of Ireland that began during the Celtic Tiger was heightened during and after the financial crisis, both in terms of individual identities and theatrical techniques. Companies such as ANU, Talking Shop Ensemble, THISISPOPBABY, and even stalwarts such as the Abbey Theatre utilized techniques of site specificity, immersive theater, and devising. These techniques offered a new perspective on performance and on authorship, with the rise of the “theater-maker” and the modest decline of the primacy of the playwright. A radical openness to new techniques was concomitant with a broadening of issues of identity in Irish theater, long an important thematic element but now encompassing more queer and intersectional identities on stage and, with the Waking the Feminists campaign, a reckoning of the gendered aspects of the Irish theater industry. Ireland’s financial crisis delineated the country into the haves and have-nots, those inside the inner circle and those outside of it; such divisions and the frustrations, grief and trauma that they bred were front and center on Irish stages. As we look towards the complicated formal and economic landscape for Irish theater of the pandemic and post-pandemic, the rich and eclectic performance history of the financial crisis and its aftermath offers an important lens.

Notes 1 See Slaby 79. 2 These companies were the Abbey Theatre (Dublin), Druid (Galway), Blue Raincoat (Sligo), Rough Magic (Dublin), Pan Pan (Dublin), The Gate Theatre (Dublin), Fishamble (Dublin), and the Dublin 308

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Theatre Festival. Regular funding is also provided to Project Arts Centre (Dublin), Macnas (Galway), and the Galway Arts Festival, which, while not entirely theater-focused, are important generators of Irish performance. Of the €9.3 million disbursed by the Arts Council for regular funding to theater companies and festivals in 2017, €5.8 million (or 62%) went to the Abbey Theatre alone. For these statistics and more information, see Arts Council, Who We Funded. See Madden for further discussion of the relationship between funding and shifts in production. See Keating. See Bell, “Just did a quick tot up . . . .” All Facebook posts referenced are publicly available on Lian Bell’s Facebook page at the time of writing. See Bell, “TICKETS GONE! IN LESS THAN 10 MINS! [. . .].” See “Waking the Feminists welcome Abbey equality plans.” For more, see Haughton. See McDonald. See D’Arcy. See O’Toole 106. See Coffrey 226. See Hans-Thies Lehmann for more on postdramatic theater. The 2020 Eurovision Song Contest was cancelled on March 18, 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic (Savage).

Works cited ANU Productions. About ANU. http://anuproductions.ie (Accessed July 11, 2020). Arts Council. Theatre Bursary Award. www.artscouncil.ie/Funds/Theatre-bursary-award/ (Accessed July 9, 2020). Arts Council. Who We Funded. www.artscouncil.ie/Who_we_funded/ (Accessed July 11, 2020). Bell, Lian. “Just Did a Quick Tot Up .  .  .” Facebook, October 28, 2015. www.facebook.com/lianbell (Accessed July 11, 2020). Bell, Lian. “Tickets Gone! In Less Than 10 Mins! [. . .].” Facebook, November 9, 2015. www.facebook. com/lianbell (Accessed July 11, 2020). Carswell, Simon. Anglo Republic: Inside the Bank That Broke Ireland. Penguin Ireland, 2011. Print. Coffey, Fiona Coleman. Political Acts: Women in Northern Irish Theatre, 1921–2012. Syracuse University Press, 2016. Print. D’Arcy, Ciaran. “Leo Varadkar: ‘I Am a Gay Man,’ Minister Says.” The Irish Times, January 18, 2015. www. irishtimes.com/news/politics/leo-varadkar-i-am-a-gay-man-minister-says-1.2070189 (Accessed July 12, 2020). Dunne, Shaun. I Am a Homebird (It’s Very Hard). Talking Shop Ensemble. Dublin, 2012. Theatrical script. Etienne, Anne and Pat Kinevane. “Interview with Pat Kinevane.” Perspectives on Contemporary Irish Theatre: Populating the Stage. Edietd by Anne Etienne and Thierry Dubost. Cham, Switzerland, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 153–164. European Parliament. “Ireland: Socio-Demographic Trendlines: EP Eurobarometer (2007–2015) Identity and European Citizenship.” Directorate-General for Communication Public Opinion Monitoring Unit, March 2016. www.europarl.europa.eu/ireland/resource/static/files/Eurobarometer%20surveys/identity-andcitizenship_ie-march-2016.pdf (Accessed July 3, 2020). Haughton, Miriam. “‘Them the Breaks’: #WakingTheFeminists and Staging the Easter/Estrogen Rising.” Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 28, No. 3, 2018, pp. 345–354. Web. Keating. “Beyond the Abbey: The Trouble for Women in Theatre.” The Irish Times, November 7, 2015. www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/beyond-the-abbey-the-trouble-for-women-in-theatre-1.2419983 (Accessed July 11, 2020). King, Moynan. “Twenty-Six Observations on a Queer Theatre Conference.” Canadian Theatre Review, No. 171, Summer 2017, pp. 120–121. doi:10.3138/ctr.171.022. Madden, Christine. “Curtain Up on a New Theatrical Era?” The Irish Times, January 21, 2010. www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/curtain-up-on-a-new-theatrical-era-1.1242086 (Accessed July 11, 2020). McDonald, Henry. “Ireland Becomes First Country to Legalise Gay Marriage by Popular Vote.” The Guardian, May 23, 2015. www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/23/gay-marriage-ireland-yes-vote (Accessed July 3, 2020). 309

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McGrath, Pat. Small Plastic Wars. Bigger Picture Projects, 2015. Theatrical script. Murphy, Colin. Guaranteed! Fishamble: The New Play Company. Dublin, 2013. Theatrical script. O’Halloran, Mark. “Trade.” This Is Just This: It Isn’t Real: It’s Money: The Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Irish Plays. Oberon, 2012, pp. 47–82. Print. O’Toole, Emer. “Guerrilla Glamour: The Queer Tactics of Dr. Panti Bliss.” Eire-Ireland, Vol. 52, No. 3/4, Fall/Winter 2017, pp. 104–121. doi:10.1353/eir.2017.0024. Savage, Mark. “Eurovision Song Contest 2020 Cancelled over Coronavirus.” BBC News, March 18, 2020. www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-51870325 (Accessed July 6, 2020). Sheerin, Jacinta and Georgina McKevitt. Waiting for IKEA. Irish Playography, 2007. Theatrical script. Slaby, Alexandra. “Whither Cultural Policy in Post Celtic Tiger Ireland?” The Canadian Journal Irish Studies, Vol. 37, No. 1/2, 2011, pp. 76–97. Web. Sunder. By ANU Productions. Dir. Louise Lowe. ILAC Centre, Dublin, April 28, 2016. Performance. Thisispopbaby. Home. https://thisispopbaby.com (Accessed July 11, 2020). “Waking the Feminists Welcome Abbey Equality Plans.”RTE.ie, August 31, 2016.www.rte.ie/entertainment/ 2016/0830/812963-abbey-theatre/ (Accessed July 11, 2020). Walsh, Fintan. Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland Dissent and Disorientation (1st ed.). Contemporary Performance InterActions, 2016. Web. West, Michael. Freefall. Methuen Drama, 2010. Print. Yee, Shannon. Multiple Journeys. TheatreofplucK. Belfast, 2017. Performance. Yee, Shannon. So I Can Breathe This Air. TheatreofplucK. Belfast, 2018. Performance.

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24 Material and visual culture in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland Kelly Sullivan

In 2013, five years after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, Fintan O’Toole published A History of Ireland in 100 Objects. A collaboration between the Irish Times, the Royal Irish Academy, and the National Museum of Ireland, the book covered Irish history from circa 5000 BC to the present through micro-histories of objects ranging from a Mesolithic fish trap to St. Patrick’s Bell to a Conestoga Wagon. The study of material culture is not altogether new in an Irish context; the folklorist Henry Glassie published a groundbreaking field study of the material and social practices in a rural northern Irish town, Passing the Time in Ballymenone in 1982, and material culture plays a central role in cultural anthropology of Ireland. Glassie asserts that “history and art connect in the study of material culture,” which he defines as a something we live with and in, the product of “human intrusion in the environment,” and the mark of how we “rebuild nature” to fit our own visions (1999, 1). Yet prior to the shifts in Irish Studies during the Celtic Tiger and after it, the study of material objects as historical evidence or as aesthetic mediator was by and large relegated to the disciplinary fields of archeology, social-cultural anthropology, and folklore. Shifts in economic and political valence during the boom years of the 2000s, and a reorientation of Irish Studies—along with many other academic fields—toward new and sometimes interdisciplinary approaches to research opened humanities scholarship and aesthetic work to material culture. O’Toole’s 100 Objects captured the public’s imagination at a time of economic contraction, but it also represents a popular cultural response to a change in what constitutes material for research. A shift toward studying and interrogating material culture in an Irish context, and a concurrent attention to the everyday object in contemporary visual art, complicates and broadens the narrative we tell about Irish and diasporic cultural history post Celtic Tiger. Curators in several groundbreaking exhibitions in Ireland and the United States staged in the years immediately after the Celtic Tiger have reconsidered the overlooked materials of an Irish past in order to reassess contemporary Ireland in the aftermath of financial collapse. These retrospective and responsive exhibitions looked back to material culture and to civic practice, reassessing the cultural legacies of rural life and democratic and civil processes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contemporary artists working in the shadow of escalating consumption and the subsequent economic collapse similarly turn to objects of the everyday to critique economic and institutional failure. In work by contemporary artists like Aideen Barry, David Creedon, Alison Lowry, and Vukašin 311

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Nedeljković, the material objects of everyday life take on new significance and formulate a critique of both out-of-control capitalism and the abuse and failure of cultural institutions. The rapid shift in economic valence and the small nation’s sudden ranking in global terms during the Celtic Tiger triggered a shift in Irish Studies both inward, to an interrogation of material culture and the presence of the everyday in art, and outward, to Ireland’s democratic and civic role and its place in global cultural practice. Major exhibitions and critical studies reflected these shifts, focusing on previously overlooked aspects of Irish culture and civic responsibilities: day-to-day rural life, the artisan industries, and the national agenda of the Arts and Crafts Movement. As scholars of the so-called New Materialism and Thing Theory attest, a shift toward reconsidering objects or “things” in relation to the human contributes to a significant reorientation of subject-object relations. In an Irish Studies context, the sudden rush into neoliberal, global “modernity” created an opportunity to reconsider the object of study— Ireland—and our subject positions in relation to it. Positioning things at the center of research helped Irish Studies as a field reorient toward new perspectives on the thing—Ireland—that remained stubbornly at the center of work. By no means intended as a comprehensive survey of visual culture post-Celtic Tiger, this chapter instead highlights a few key exhibits and artists to suggest a trend toward new engagement with the material and to show how such a shift allows groundbreaking reorientations around what it means to be Irish or to engage with the Irish nation as subject and object.

Material culture as methodology: thinking with things Convening a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies on culture in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, Kieran Bonner and Alexandra Slaby argue that the financial crisis presented an opportunity to shift to a “new area of investigation” for scholars considering cultural forms (24). Visual arts, art history, literature, sociology, and cultural economies contribute to an ever-changing “ambiguous object” of study: the concept of Ireland itself (Bonner and Slaby 24). In their particular focus on visual arts culture, the editors manifest one of the first waves of responses to economic collapse and a changed way of life that places art, art practice, and material culture at the center of its focus. Similarly, in a special issue of Éire-Ireland on “Irish Things,” Paige Reynolds argues not that Ireland becomes the object of study through the material, but rather that ordinary Irish objects help us “unsettle our assumptions about Irish culture and practice” and reconsider a range of scholarly and social concerns, from immigration to economics (8). Reynolds suggests that a consideration of “things” helps disrupt usual subject–object relations in the study of a nation and its culture. Material objects help disrupt “binaries” so often present in Irish Studies, forcing us to reconsider the individual’s stance not in relation to other individuals but to physical matter, the objects that, alone, have no agency yet are imbued with cultural and political meaning (18). This, in turn, opens up the field of Irish Studies to approaches that displace national identity as the central issue of our work, and instead help us consider the Irish state as a subject beyond the individual, one we can more fully critique. As Bill Brown theorizes, objects become “things” to us when our relationship to them shifts— when they stop working, for example—so that their thingness “really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation” (4). To offer a contemporary Irish example of this transition in practice, sculptor, video, and installation artist Aideen Barry’s work emphasizes the “thingness” of the everyday material object when these things morph with the human, causing us to question whether we use the object for work or the object works upon us. In Barry’s 2015 short film Not to be Known or Named, black vacuum cleaner tubes snake wildly from the long, black hair of the film’s protagonist as she sits at a kitchen table. The tubes seemingly clean the room—performing 312

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their usual function—and also appear beyond control, writhing from the woman’s hair like a Medusa, making us question where her subjectivity ends and the material objects of domestic work begin. In another meditation on the blurry relationship between humans and their objects, stop-action film clips for Barry’s Strange Terrain (2014) visually recall the Victorian travel writer Lillias Campbell-Davidson’s advice that women bring a portable bath with them; she pulls a full clawfoot bathtub from a suitcase, fills it with water, bathes, and then slowly shoves the tub back into the small leather suitcase. Barry’s artistic process reveals the true engagement with thingness: these stop-animation films use no special effects or digital manipulation. Instead, she painstakingly cut up the bathtub with a power saw, taking an image every few centimeters as the tub “disappeared” into the suitcase (Barry). The uncanny and comic experience of watching a bathtub disappear into a space clearly too small for it, augmented by knowledge of the production process, makes viewers aware of the sheer physicality of the extensive material infrastructure scaffolding our lives. It also makes vivid Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s declaration that “the body is a thing among things,” and calls attention to the structures and limitations placed on the human body, socially, physically, and in relation to other things (quoted Brown 2001, 4). In an early assessment of the field that would become New Materialism or Thing Theory, Brown articulates a series of questions that ask not whether things exist, but what work they do; questions that decenter focus on objects—“things themselves”—and instead reframe the focus around subject–object relationships and “precipitate a new materialism that takes objects for granted only in order to grant them their potency” (Brown 2001, 7). Brown concludes his 2001 essay with a meditation on the connection between “things” and modernity, arguing that objects illustrate the fundamental human sensation of belatedness (16). These questions, and their significance to a proliferation of literary, art history, history, and cultural studies scholars working in new materialism in the 2000s, fundamentally link to the continued relevance of the problem of “relating human and non-human worlds” (Hicks, 26). But almost 20 years on from Brown’s first work on things, the popularity of “new materialism” in the academy offers both challenges and opportunities in an Irish Studies context. Maurizia Boscagli proposes a salient new approach to the intellectual tradition of studying things, arguing for a political materialist turn that emphasizes the “hybrid materiality” of the field which brings material culture into the realm of the everyday, emphasizing ordinariness and common practices (5). Boscagli uses the term “stuff ” to differentiate what she sees as a new radical materialist approach from reified, scientific, or culturally elitist practices. This approach, she argues, pushes us toward study of objects that are simultaneously obsolete, yet imbued with nostalgia. This stuff, “what’s left in the aftermath of (now waning) cultures of abundance,” becomes, in an Irish Studies context, particularly charged in the post-Celtic Tiger era, where the accumulation of material objects under a neoliberal capitalist agenda morphed to a cultural interrogation of subject–object relations between the nation itself, its institutions, and its citizens (Boscagli 11). Thus “things,” in an Irish Studies context, allow us to interrogate the simplified way that scholarship has, in the past, figured the subject–object relationship between Irish identity and the postcolonial condition. An attention to material culture allows us to consider and critique the Irish fetishization of objects in a neoliberal context—through acquisition and consumption—as Ireland emerged from its position as a colonial “possession.”

Material culture and the Celtic Tiger: reassessing the subject? In Irish Studies, the analysis of material culture was slow to gain prominence in fields beyond folklore and archeology. However, in 2004, Toby Barnard’s Making the Grand Figure: Lives and Possessions in Ireland, 1641–1770 reconsidered social and cultural life in Protestant Ascendency 313

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Ireland through examination of surprisingly everyday objects like linen sheets, spoons, and wigs. Then, in 2005, his A Guide to Sources for the History of Material Culture in Ireland, 1500–2000 explicitly marked a shift in interdisciplinary Irish Studies in the Celtic Tiger, with both volumes emphasizing Ireland’s participation in networks of trade and commerce and the significance of individual material possessions in understanding social and political conditions in Stuart and Hanoverian Ireland. Claudia Kinmonth’s Irish Country Furniture, 1700–1950 (1993) and Irish Rural Interiors in Art (2006) also highlight the significance of ordinary everyday objects in the lives and art of the rural Irish over three centuries. The latter study was groundbreaking for its connection of material objects and their embedded cultural histories with their depictions within what were often sentimental and romantic paintings. In the field of literature, an increasingly interdisciplinary approach saw scholars integrating visual arts and film into their work, broadening out what was material for study even if not fully embracing a materialist turn (Gibbons; Connolly and Cleary; Lloyd; Allen). New work in an interdisciplinary and art historical context emphatically embraces new materialism (Reynolds; Sisson and King; Brück and Godson; Corporaal, Frawley, and Mark-FitzGerald). Despite these significant shifts toward visual and material culture, in 2005 Barnard could still claim an unfortunate lack of Irish scholarship studying things. He points to a long history of poverty in Ireland as the cause of a resistance to considering the material as evidence of culture; Reynolds expands on Barnard’s claims, pointing out that material objects in a colonial context had conflicting ideological valence and that Irish Revivalists “invoked antimaterialism” in their efforts to counter colonial rule (Reynolds 11–12). If material objects are “possessions” in Irish culture, their presence or absence highlighted not just poverty but also the country’s own position as a British colony. Aideen Barry’s stop-animation film Possession (considered following) brings such questions into the post-Celtic Tiger context, suggesting the materialist desire for everyday objects as a gothic specter haunting consumers, with the objects shape-shifting and possessing their human owners. A turn to the material in scholarly work and in visual arts practice signals a shift from a postcolonial paradigm to a consideration of the Irish state and its institutions, simultaneously granting Ireland autonomy and critiquing that power. In shifting a critical and aesthetic view from Ireland as an object possessed by external powers to Ireland as self-possessed and therefore subject to scrutiny, this move to the material provides a cogent way to view the Irish state and its practices as the acting subject of power rather than the object of control. Possession encapsulates what Reynolds describes as the post-Tiger anxieties around the ethical and dehumanizing aspects of consumption (12). Reynolds concludes her essay with the provocative idea that “new materialism” might push scholars towards questions of subjectivity, usefully “troubl[ing] our accepted notions of the relationship between subject and object,” and thereby moving Irish Studies away from a fixation on binaries and identity (18). The several exhibitions considered here demonstrate how the short-term material gain and subsequent economic uncertainty of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland allowed artists and critics to move their attention away from an Irish history of impoverishment, emigration, and dispossession, and towards a visual and material world rich with stories of aesthetics, networks, and survival.

Art exhibitions and the materialist turn During the early 2000s, increasing scholarly attention to ordinary life and everyday activity in eighteenth and nineteenth century Ireland led to significant Celtic Tiger-era exhibitions framed around these topics. For instance, the 2006 Whipping the Herring: Survival and Celebration in Nineteenth Century Irish Art at the Crawford Gallery in Cork featured vernacular and realist paintings 314

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grouped around themes including festivals and fairs, famine and emigration, social occasions, working life, and others (Murray 64–67). The paintings in this exhibition, staged at the height of Celtic Tiger prosperity, throw into sharp relief the struggle of everyday people a century or two before. Yet framing essays in the exhibition catalogue emphasize the material lives of the Irish depicted in these genre paintings and engravings drawn from the Illustrated London News. The essays, and the artworks themselves, highlight material objects like petticoats and hats, spinning wheels, cooking pots and turf baskets, country furniture, traveling cases, carriages, and musical instruments. This rich vernacular accumulation further emphasizes the barrenness in scenes of eviction or destitution, like Francis William Topham’s realist watercolor Cottage Interior, Claddagh, Galway (1845), in which the only objects—aside from human figures themselves—are fishing nets in need of mending (image in Murray 183). The absence of material objects at all, or the presence of things long since extinct, points to the significance of Whipping the Herring in showing us, as Claudia Kinmonth argues in her catalogue piece, “how valuable art was as evidence for material culture” (2006b, 37). Another 2006 exhibit, A Time and a Place: Two Centuries of Irish Social Life at the National Gallery of Ireland, similarly focused on daily activity and everyday life in an Irish context with a further emphasis on entertainment and recreation and with works by twentieth century artists. If the Celtic Tiger boom, with its overall sense of material gain, made Ireland’s history of material culture easier to contemplate, this shift continued in the post-Celtic Tiger years in exhibitions that emphasized a continuity through materiality. Gain and subsequent loss marked Irish life in the past and in the contemporary moment. Aware of a shifting economic reality in the present, post-Celtic Tiger exhibitions served as a reminder of other narratives and other kinds of cultural “wealth.” The most significant postCeltic Tiger exhibition, Rural Ireland: The Inside Story at Boston College’s McMullen Museum in 2011, for instance, resurrected material artifacts cast off by a modernizing nineteenth-century Ireland to highlight the aesthetic and material richness of rural life. The Inside Story directly engaged with a materialist turn in scholarship and assessed not just artwork depicting interiors of rural Irish cottages and houses in the nineteenth-century but also the material objects themselves, including súgán chairs, dressers, political pamphlets, settle beds, cradles, hen coops, earthenware crockery, and domestic shrines. Framed as a response to Kinmonth’s Irish Rural Interiors in Art (2006), the planning stages of the show spanned the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy and the first years of the recession. Thus the attention to a more modest and largely rejected nineteenth-century material culture grew in critical significance. The challenges in collecting suitable artifacts for display in the exhibition highlights a renewed appreciation for objects long since cast off as remnants of a premodern culture (Larsen); as Vera Kreilkamp explains, these vernacular beds, dressers, and benches “have survived by happenstance rather than through decades of preservation in museums or through traditions of connoisseurship” (Kreilkamp 2012, 8). Yet for tenants in even the poorest of nineteenth-century cottages, the few material objects they had constituted not just utilitarian but also decorative functions. Emphasizing the aesthetic choices and pleasing domestic arrangements and highlighting the skilled furniture made from scant resources, The Inside Story sought to counter an existing narrative of the pre-modern Irish peasant as “an abject figure living in squalor” (Kreilkamp 2016, 8). By positioning the material objects in proximity with paintings in which they are often subject, this exhibit troubled the line between representation and reality, asking viewers to confront what gives a thing aesthetic or cultural value. In making the everyday object the subject of study, Rural Ireland: The Inside Story solidified a significant shift in material and visual culture studies in Ireland. At the same time, in pairing objects only with artwork through which they have been displayed as significant things, useful and used even as they are arrayed and admired, the exhibition moved us away from fetishizing the object as historical record or museum piece 315

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(Sullivan 2012, 126). It instead spoke to the political and ethical work new materialism can do in making us aware of the hierarchies and potentially violent distinctions we impose in treating others as objects of study. Pairing things with paintings, Fintan O’Toole argues in a review of the exhibition, shows us that the subjects of these artworks—rural Irish in the nineteenth and early twentieth century—were not “mere objects of someone else’s gaze” but “had their own aesthetic taste and their own pride in a well-made object” (O’Toole n.p.).

Abstract made concrete: troubling the thing In her 2011 performative stop-action film Possession, Aideen Barry intercuts scenes of a woman in a suburban home with a seemingly endless scroll of unfinished, eerily similar doorways and garages from ghost estates. The central figure, a woman in possession of a finished home and the requisite material objects to fill it, seems herself possessed by those objects: the remote-control garage door serves as a bread slicer, the woman turns herself into a lawnmower, swimming face down across endless manicured grass with chomping scissors in her hair. Conceived as a response to the rampant materialism of the Celtic Tiger, Possession also speaks to the deadening control consumerism exerts—an ongoing sense of being haunted—still present, perhaps most significantly in the physical presence of ghost estates. In a 2012 editorial, O’Toole likens Barry’s preoccupations to the centuries-long Irish gothic trope of the haunted house, suggesting it is as apt for what he terms the “gothic realism of the here and now” as it was for stories of dispossession and emigration in the past (n.p.). O’Toole connects Barry’s work to the photography of another contemporary Irish artist, David Creedon, whose Ghosts of the Faithful Departed (2012) depicts the decaying rooms of abandoned cottages where objects like airmail letters, rotting but unworn dresses, and baby prams lie under the dust and shards of falling plaster. What makes Creedon’s photographs more than simply studies of rural vernacular decay, and further links them to Barry’s scathing cultural critique, is the overwhelming presence of things—clearly prized possessions—abandoned within these modest homes. The objects he highlights with richly saturated color photographs include ubiquitous framed images of the Sacred Heart and Child of Prague statues, tattered American flags, delft, bicycles, pianos, framed family photographs, and clothing. Although these photographs invite comparison with John Cooke’s early-twentieth century images of the interiors of Georgian Dublin slums displayed in Phoenix Rising, here the feeling of decay and squalor comes from years of abandonment. It is evident these cottages, although never opulent, had a plenitude of cherished everyday objects. Yet Creedon’s images are not simply nostalgic; instead, they create a sense of the uncanny. The things he highlights in cottages across rural Ireland were significant, cared for, valued: how have they been abandoned as if in a moment of great haste? Ostensibly a commentary on mass emigration from the 1950s through the 1980s, Ghosts of the Faithful Departed also reminds us of the current immigration crisis in Ireland and the housing crisis affecting thousands in cities across the country. Hundreds of thousands of people left Ireland in those three decades, and Creedon’s images of what they left behind serve as a reminder of the dispossession asylum seekers to Ireland now face. The crisis and dispossession experienced by people arriving to Ireland in search of protection shapes the work of several contemporary Irish artists and fits with a focus in visual arts and academic work on interrogating institutional failure in twentieth- and twenty-first century Ireland. Vukašin Nedeljković’s ongoing digital project Asylum Archive chronicles the experiences of people seeking international protection in Ireland held in Direct Provision centers across the country. The archive’s collection of found objects provides an especially striking echo of Creedon’s abandoned cottage interiors. Nedeljković’s photographs depict remnants of 316

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balloons, a bicycle handle, a clock, toys, and more, placed against a stark white background. These unadorned images present us with the reality of life in Direct Provision, where asylum seekers can wait years for a ruling on their status and live with the constant precarious reminder that they may be deported. “Found objects” like half of a plastic school bus are evidence of the contained lives people lead in Direct Provision, where ordinary objects of day-to-day life including cooking utensils, bedding, and toys have to be purchased on the meager 38.80 euro per adult per week the Irish state grants them (increased in March 2019 from the previous 21.60 per week) (Nedeljković, “Found Objects”; Ombudsman 6–7). Until a Supreme Court ruling overturned the prohibition in 2018, the Irish state denied asylum seekers the right to work while waiting for their papers to be processed. The material evidence of what one reporter calls “a system that is perhaps unique in its daily cruelty” is displayed as unadorned, unscripted things with the most rudimentary of captions: “Clock, found object in Gardiner House, 2012” (Gessen; Nedeljković, “Found Objects”). Another gallery contains images of Direct Provision centers organized by county location and name, with images depicting details like water stains from drainpipes, surveillance cameras, and the facades of new-built but soulless buildings like “Riverbed Hostel” in Longford. These objects and spaces speak to the restrictions and poverty of daily life for residents and support what Emilie Pine succinctly summarizes as a system through which people “have been rehoused, but not rehomed” (5). Nedeljković’s depiction of still landscapes and broken, worn objects set against white backgrounds creates an unsettling feeling of provisional existence, an apt evocation given the system’s official moniker—Direct Provision. Yet the government’s term for these privately run housing centers also signals a cruel irony; Direct Provision surely implies the immediate supply of the most basic goods needed for life, but the word carries the meaning of preparation made in advance for an unknown future. Nedeljković’s photographs attest to the uncanny sense of living without any sense of futurity, the cruelest fact of this system that “robs [people] of the essential human ability to imagine the future” (Gessen). The 2012 exhibit Irish Rural Interiors’ material objects displayed alongside paintings of impoverished rural interiors shifted subject–object relations in the study of Ireland and highlighted aesthetic pleasures and the cultural significance of even the most basic of things. By contrast, Nedeljković’s collection of starkly isolated, often battered and easily overlooked things becomes, through the near-scientific way they are displayed, mere objects. This shift, devoid of nostalgia yet shot through with social meaning, forces viewers to understand the isolation, containment, and material deprivation asylum seekers experience in Ireland today. Translating objects through the impersonal, harsh lens of Asylum Archive makes us understand the human subjects in this story have been treated as if they are objects. Nedeljković’s ongoing Asylum Archive is one of many contemporary responses to Ireland’s system of Direct Provision and to a global shift, after the economic collapse in 2008, to insularity and nationalism. Indeed, Pat Cooke argues visual arts in Ireland offered some of the most immediate and pointed critique of the “crisis” of 2008, especially because visual artists were most attuned to the global aspect of the crisis which could not “be credibly bounded by national or nationalist modes of interpretation” (96). Cooke points to an early exhibition in response to the collapse, The Prehistory of the Crisis (I and II), which featured work by international and Irish artists displayed at Project Arts in Dublin and at Belfast Exposed. German artist Susanne Bosch’s “Ourselves Alone” made the material shockingly present in a series of photographs of Ireland in which she physically cut out things not originating in the country. Street scenes eerily show blanks instead of cars, shop signs and goods removed, and the bodies of some people cut from the arms of others (Bosch). Dublin-based photographer Anthony Haughey completed several collaborative and photographic projects directly linked to the question of citizenship 317

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and migration. In “How to be a Model Citizen” (2009), the artist partnered with the Global Migration Research Network to create site-specific media projects including staging citizenship tests for visitors who entered the Atrium of the Dublin Civic Offices (Haughey). Not only did this project physically recreate the experience of applying for citizenship (in most cases for those who never had to go through the process), but also the project’s design motif recalls ethnographic work in Ireland and elsewhere that sought to measure and record human traits, categorizing people based on the measurements of their face, for example: a reminder of Ireland’s own colonial history in which humans were treated as objects (Haughey). Perhaps the most direct commentary on Ireland’s institutional failures in material form comes through Alison Lowry’s striking glass sculptures for (A)Dressing Our Hidden Truths, a 2019 exhibition at the National Museum of Ireland in response to the legacy of mother and baby homes. Lowry’s work remakes the most ordinary of material objects, transforming a child’s red cardigan by encasing it in glass; repairing a shattered glass dress model with the Japanese process of “Kinsugi” or mending with gold, and covering its head and shoulders with a leather shroud; casting sculpted glass high-heel slippers for a performance piece about domestic violence (Whitty, idem). In the absence of the bodies that suffered institutional abuse and even death, these ghostly material objects gesture to both resiliency and fragility. Central to the exhibition was Home Babies (2017), nine christening robes made of pâte-de-verre (glass plate made in a nineteenth-century process) and nylon fiber suspended in a darkened exhibition space as a voice recording recited the names of the 796 children who died at the Tuam Mother and Baby Home. The technical skill evident in Lowry’s aesthetically sublime pieces speaks to the intersection of art and craft in glasswork, a conjunction further signaled by the exhibition’s staging at the National Museum Collins Barracks, a space dedicated to decorative arts and history. But Lowry’s technical and aesthetic skill serves to emphasize the horror of her subject matter (Stern); her choice to encase in glass and recreate—in a stiffened, ungiving, and fragile form—what feel like ordinary material objects stresses the way these state-supported religious institutions stripped women of their possessions, their identities, and in some cases, their lives. Casting and coating such humble material objects in glass calls attention to their presence as evidence of institutionally-enforced impoverishment. Like reassessments made by The Arts and Crafts Movement: Making It Irish, the presentation of such compelling aesthetic and political work in a space reserved for the decorative forces us to reconsider the significance of objects—decorative and functional alike—and the embedded histories they signify. The most ordinary objects in (A)Dressing Our Hidden Truths are several shears cast in clear glass and suspended from rosary beads above a pile of human hair. The work’s title signals transformation and punishment: Instead of the fragrance, there will be stench; instead of a sash, rope; instead of well-dressed hair, baldness; instead of fine clothing, sackcloth; instead of beauty, branding (Isaiah 3:24) (2019). Lowry’s glasswork fittingly transforms the everyday material objects central to the lives of women and children incarcerated in Magdalene laundries and mother and baby homes, troubling the line between hardness and softness, between resilience and vulnerability. The suspended glass scissors threateningly point at the pile of human hair beneath them, vividly recalling violence and punishment against women. Yet they also hang like bodies would, implicitly signaling legacies of lynching elsewhere. And yet the glass casting process renders the shears both ineffective as instruments (they cannot open) and reminds us that were they to fall from the thin strands of rosaries they might shatter. The ordinary things of institutional life take on voluminous meaning in this work, much in the way found objects in Nedeljković’s Asylum Archive do, showing how profoundly contemporary Irish visual artists recognize the cultural and political significance of the material. Both artists’ work transforms the material objects of the everyday to provocatively question who gets to be a part of Ireland, and at what cost. In post-Celtic Tiger 318

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Ireland where institutions have failed citizens, ordinary things become a powerful symbol of human vulnerability and of human outrage.

New materialism and the decade of commemorations An increased attention to Irish institutions, and to the Irish state itself, marks visual and material studies around Ireland’s decade of commemorations. In the build-up to the Decade of Centenaries of the Irish revolutionary period, Irish Studies further assessed that “ambiguous object”— the Irish nation—in the context of its postcolonial past, but also of a post-austerity, post-bailout present. Material culture studies undergirded some of the most innovative approaches to date in this period. In their collection on the material culture of Easter 1916, Joanna Brück and Lisa Godson propose that considering the material and visual “rework[s] the meaning and significance of the Rising for different audiences” and reveals contemporary perspectives on nationalism and identity, as well as changing political debate around the event (1, 2). Echoing the critical work of new materialism across the disciplines, the editors argue that changes in ontology make the object itself ambivalent; the “expanding” virtual worlds we inhabit have led to a “fetishisation of the tangible” even as an increasing awareness of the physical and ecological effects of human life through the climate crisis brings about awareness of our relationship to the nonhuman (Brück and Godson 7). Two exhibitions approached the Decade of Centenaries by offering new perspectives on Irish cultural and civic heritage. The Dublin City Gallery’s Phoenix Rising: Art and Civic Imagination (2015) was a direct response to Dublin’s 1914 Civic Exhibition and the work of urban planner Patrick Geddes who imagined Dublin as the “‘Phoenix of cities’ during a period of economic, social and political strife” (Phoenix Rising Newsletter I, 1). Phoenix Rising both asked contemporary artists to make art on the theme of civics in this new moment of economic, social, and political upheaval and presented historical perspectives on urban culture through different media, including film screenings, a walking tour, and most notably a series of accompanying pamphlets published over a year. These quickly reproduced documents call to mind the pamphlet culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century politics and hint at new hope for civic engagement in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland as they gesture to expanded networks of communication and artistic dissemination. The 1914 Civic Exhibition introduced Dublin to the then new practice of urban planning. The House/City exhibit—organized by the Dublin School of Architecture/DIT as part of Phoenix Rising—explored the “symbiotic relationship between house and city” through a study of the way Dublin had been mapped and dwellings surveyed across the twentieth century (Ward, Phoenix Rising Newsletter 2, 1). This aspect of the exhibition encapsulates a sense of architecture and the city itself as a material thing and deliberately emphasized the “slippage” between scales of house and city in historical planning and today (Ward, Newsletter 3, 2). A final exhibition in Phoenix Rising displayed John Cooke’s photographs of the squalid living conditions in Dublin slums in the first decade of the twentieth century alongside a “moving panorama” of archival records of Geddes’ 1914 Town Planning Competition presented on film (Newsletter 6; Cargo Collective). Architecture students built the large panorama for the event, and the rotating projector displayed images of South William Street—just outside the City, Assembled exhibition space—through archival footage, asking viewers to reconsider the physical spaces and material interactions they have with their city. A second exhibition, staged in the United States, posited Ireland’s Arts and Crafts Movement as a significant materialist corollary to the celebrated Irish Revival of the early twentieth century. The Arts and Crafts Movement: Making It Irish (2016) offered an alternative to 1916 commemorations of rebellion and political fighting, instead highlighting a long-overlooked 319

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period of artistic and material foment that contributed to and sometimes challenged cultural nationalism. The Boston exhibition was the only show in history dedicated entirely to Irish Arts and Crafts (outside of the Arts and Crafts Society’s contemporaneous exhibitions). If shows like Irish Rural Interiors and Whipping the Herring emphasized everyday life and the aesthetics of the ordinary material, Making It Irish highlighted the philosophical and material significance of the Arts and Crafts movement at the time of Ireland’s radical revolutionary nationalism. Artists and craftworkers involved in this movement themselves focused on aestheticizing the utilitarian; at its most basic, the Irish Arts and Crafts movement sought a visual continuity with pre-conquest Ireland for decorative and applied arts objects that expressed the modernizing and pressing social and political issues surrounding the ever-ambiguous subject of the Irish nation (Krielkamp 9; Sullivan 2021). As Marjorie Howes notes in her essay for the catalogue, the Irish Arts and Crafts movement often functioned as a visual and a material corollary to the Irish Revival, and both worked toward resurrecting Irish tradition in the name of modern Ireland: “modernity and tradition were natural allies” (46). Howes and the curators and scholars who contributed to Making It Irish position the applied art objects of the exhibition as material artifacts we can read for both aesthetic and cultural/political meaning. Framed in relation to the Arts and Crafts-inspired Honan Chapel, built in Cork in 1916, this 2016 exhibit deliberately placed visual arts practice in the conversation around Irish revolution, independence, and identity.

Conclusion: framing the future The course of Irish Studies has altered since its inception, but impossible to avoid is the central “thing” about which all study turns: the nebulous concept of Ireland itself. The last decade shows a marked increase, however, in attention to the confluence of “thingness (material or immaterial)” and physical objects themselves (Brown 2015, 19). The (immaterial) “thing” that is the Irish State is a modern concept, perhaps the unseeable thing at the center of myriad perspectives, the conceptual blank around which many of these exhibitions and artworks turn. Although the Dublin City Gallery exhibition on the 1914 Civics Institute did not explicitly treat the question of who gets to be a citizen of Ireland and exercise civic responsibility, it becomes clear that Direct Provision and institutional incarceration of women further complicate everyone’s relationship to this thing about which we are implicitly talking: nationhood or home, belonging or modernity. Reynolds calls on Irish Studies scholars to use new materialism as a way of pushing back against neatly proscribed conversations about (national) identity. As Brown argues, thingness and objects productively and critically converge when they are mediated through art forms: literature, photography, sculpture, and film (2015, 19). Rampant mass consumption and out-of-control, state-sponsored corporate and financial sector growth during the Celtic Tiger certainly contributed to a recognition of the centrality of material objects in modern life. But during this period of public and private economic growth—where value did not always align with our perception of the object itself, resulting in the surreal experience of extreme housing bubbles, financial speculation, and sale of junk bonds and debt—Ireland also experienced a growing confidence in the value of thingness, an appreciation for the durable legacy of material culture. As Ireland continues to embrace significant social change, the effect on culture will be pronounced. Add into the mix the increasing threats of the environmental crisis, and it becomes clear that the way we study and respond to Irish culture and history must reflect these changes. As Irish Studies scholars continue to embrace the material turn, a consideration of visual arts practices must be a central part of this work. In particular, contemporary artist’s work should 320

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form a greater part of our critical conversation, especially as visual artists respond to political and institutional failures, critique longstanding inequalities, and engage with the question of who exactly gets to be a part of Ireland.

Works cited Allen, Nicholas. Modernism, Ireland, and Civil War. Cambridge University Press, 2009. Barnard, Toby. Making the Grand Figure: Lives and Possessions in Ireland, 1641–1770. Yale University Press, 2004. Barnard, Toby. A Guide to the Sources for the History of Material Culture in Ireland: 1500–2000. Four Courts Press, 2005. Barry, Aideen. Strange Terrain. (book to accompany the exhibition Strange Terrain for Changing Tracks an EU Public Art Commission). Oonagh Young Gallery, 2014. Barry, Aideen. Classroom Visit and Conversation with the Author. Glucksman Ireland House, New York University, October 29, 2019. Barry, Aideen. “‘Not to be Known’, ‘Changing Tracks’, ‘Spray Grenades’, ‘Possession’.” [online] Studio Aideen Barry. aideenbarry.com (Accessed November 17, 2019). n.d. Bonner, Kieran. and Alexandra Slaby. “An Introductory Essay on Culture in Post Celtic Tiger Ireland: A Floating Anchorage of Identities.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 37, No. 1/2, 2011 (Culture and ‘Out of Placeness’ in Post Celtic Tiger Ireland, 2008–2013), pp. 23–34. Boscagli, Maurizia. Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism. Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. Bosche, Susanne. “Ourselves Alone” as Part of the Exhibition Prehistory of the Crisis (II) at Project Arts Centre/ Belfast Exposed Photography, 2011. http://susannebosch.de/33.0.html (Accessed November 19, 2019). Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 1, Autumn 2001, pp. 1–22. Brown, Bill. Other Things. University of Chicago Press, 2015. Brück, Joanna and Linda Godson, Eds. Making 1916: Material and Visual Culture of the Easter Rising. Liverpool University Press, 2015. Cargo Collective. “City, Assembled.” 2015. https://cargocollective.com/cityassembled. Cleary, Joe and Claire Connolly, Eds. The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture. Cambridge University Press, 2005. Cooke, Pat. “Crisis and the Visual Arts in Ireland.” Etudes Irlandaises Vol. 40, No. 2, 2015 (La Crise? Quelle Crise?), pp. 91–108. Corporaal, Marguerite, Oona Frawley, and Emily Mark-FitzGerald, Eds. The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Cultures. Liverpool University Press, 2018. Finn, Daniel. “Ireland on the Turn? Political and Economic Consequences of the Crash.” New Left Review, Vol. 67, January/February 2011, pp. 5–39. Gessen, Masha. “Ireland’s Strange, Cruel System for Asylum Seekers.” The New Yorker, June 4, 2019 [online]. www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/irelands-strange-cruel-system-for-asylum-seekers (Accessed November 17, 2019). Gibbons, Luke. Transformations in Irish Culture. Critical Conditions: Field Day Essays and Monographs. Notre Dame University Press, 1996. Glassie, Henry. Passing the Time in Ballymenone. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. Glassie, Henry. Material Culture. Indiana University Press, 1999. Hicks, Dan. “The Material-Cultural Turn: Event and Effect.” The Oxford Handbook of Material Cultural Studies. Edited by Mary C. Beaudry and Dan Hicks. Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 25–98. Howes, Marjorie. “The Arts and Crafts and the Irish Literary Revival.” The Arts and Crafts Movement: Making it Irish. Edited by Vera Kreilkamp. McMullen Museum of Art, distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 2016, pp. 45–56. Kenneally, Rhona Richman. “Introduction: Visual, Material, and Spatial Ireland.” The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 38, No.1&2, 2014 (Text Beyond Text: New Visual, Material, and Spatial Perspectives in Irish Studies), pp. 47–55. King, Linda and Elaine Sisson. Ireland, Design and Visual Culture: Negotiating Modernity. Cork University Press, 2011. King, Linda and Elaine Sisson. “Visual Shrapnel: Rethinking Irish Studies Through Design and Popular Visual Culture.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies Vol. 38., No. 1/2, 2014 (Special Issue: Text and Beyond Text: New Visual, Material, and Spatial Perspectives in Irish Studies), pp. 56–83. 321

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Kinmonth, Claudia. Irish Country Furniture 1700–1950. Yale University Press, 1993. Kinmonth, Claudia. Irish Rural Interiors in Art. Yale University Press, 2006a. Kinmonth, Claudia. “Rural Life Through Artists’ Eyes: An Interdisciplinary Approach.” Whipping the Herring: Survival and Celebration in Nineteenth Century Irish Art. Edited by Peter Murray. Crawford Gallery and Gandon Editions, 2006b. Kreilkamp, Vera, Ed. Rural Ireland: The Inside Story. McMullen Museum of Art, distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 2012. Kreilkamp, Vera, Ed. The Arts and Crafts Movement: Making it Irish. McMullen Museum of Art, distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 2016. Lloyd, David. Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity Field Day Files 4, Notre Dame University Press, 2008. Murray, Peter, Ed. Whipping the Herring: Survival and Celebration in Nineteenth Century Irish Art. Crawford Gallery and Gandon Editions, 2006. Nedeljković, Vukašin. “Direct Provision Centres.” “Found Objects,” n.d. [online] Asylum Archive at asylumarchive.org (Accessed November 17, 2019). Office of the Ombudsman, Ireland. “The Ombudsman & Direct Provision: Update for 2018.” 2019. www. ombudsman.ie/downloads/Direct-Provision-2018.pdf. O’Toole, Fintan. “Gothic Realism in the Here and Now: Haunted Houses of a Dead Boom.” The Irish Times, Saturday, September 1, 2012a. O’Toole, Fintan. “The Home Place: Review of Rural Ireland: The Inside Story.” The Irish Times Saturday, April 21, 2012b. O’Toole, Fintan. A History of Ireland in 100 Objects. Royal Irish Academy, 2013. Phoenix Rising Newsletter. Vols.1 through 6. The Hugh Lane Gallery, 2015. Pine, Emilie. “Introduction: Moving Memory.” Irish University Review, Vol. 47, No. 1, 2017 (Special Issue: Moving Memory), pp. 1–6. Reynolds, Paige. “Editor’s Introduction.” Éire-Ireland, Vol. 46, No. 1 and 2, 2011 (Special Issue: Irish Things), pp. 7–29. Sisson, Elaine. “Dublin Civic Week and the Materialism of History.” Making 1916: Material and Visual Culture of the Easter Rising. Edited by J. Brück and L. Godson. Liverpool University Press, 2015. Stern, M. “A Memorial to Crimes against Women and Children in Ghostly Glass.” Hyperallergic, 2019 [online]. https://hyperallergic.com/511345/a-dressing-our-hidden-truths-alison-lowry/. Sullivan, Kelly. “Materials for Composition: Gerard Dillon’s Modernist Interiors.” Rural Ireland: The Inside Story. Edited by V. Kreilkamp. Boston: McMullen Museum of Art, distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 2012, pp. 121–128. Sullivan, Kelly. “Modernist Heresies: Irish Visual Culture and the Arts and Crafts Movement.” The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism. Edited by Maud Ellman and Siân White. Edinburgh University Presss, 2021. Ward, Brian. “What Is House/City?” Phoenix Rising Newsletter 3, The Hugh Lane Gallery, 2014. Whitty, Audrey. Alison Lowry: (A)Dressing Our Hidden Truths, an Artistic Response to the Legacy of the Mother and Baby Homes and Magdalene Laundries. National Museum of Ireland in association with the exhibition of the same name, 2019.

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25 “Mise Éire” (Re)imaginings in Irish Music Studies Méabh Ní Fhuartháin

Music is not only sounded and heard as a representation of Ireland and nation, but music is also symbolically imagined and referenced in non-sonic ways, as a powerful demarcation of Irish identity. In 2007, Gerry Smyth urged scholars to “listen” to what music could offer to the field of Irish Studies. This call to action was made in a survey of Irish Studies in which editors Liam Harte and Yvonne Whelan sought to “assess the current state of Irish Studies” in addition to setting themselves the task of identifying “recent critical trends” that might offer research potential (4–5). In the area of music, Smyth’s fillip marks a convenient starting point for this chapter which makes two specific contributions to this most current almanac of Irish Studies. In the first instance, this chapter offers a response to Smyth’s earlier assessment of Irish Studies and music by way of a review of music scholarship from the demise of the Celtic Tiger to now. Though Ireland’s most recent story is most often articulated through narratives of austerity and recovery, overlapping with much of that period is what is recognized nationally and internationally as the Decade of Centenaries. It too has distinguished Irish cultural and public life since it was launched in 2012 and for the broader scholarship in the field of Irish Studies has proved to be a rich motivator. To that end, the second part of the chapter considers a particular moment during the centenary years and explores music and its identity making capacity in that context. Notwithstanding the niche interest of Irish Music Studies, in the context of significant challenges to the field of Irish Studies nationally and internationally (significant contraction in the traditional diasporically motivated student base; increasing pressure on arts and humanities funding streams in third level institutions worldwide; and a correlative dismantling of administrative support structures around arts subjects for study in universities), broader recognition of Irish Music Studies research bolsters and strengthens the field of Irish Studies at a time when it is most needed.

Irish Music Studies: notes The post-Celtic Tiger collapse impacted Ireland, and the Irish experience, in both predictable and unforeseen ways. Many effects still resonate and have been subject to scrutiny (Maher and O’Brien; Keohane and Kuhling). Coinciding with this period of economic collapse and subsequent recovery is a relative flowering of scholarship which can be categorized as falling under the 323

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umbrella of Irish Music Studies, an interwoven and overlapping area of study with Irish Studies writ large. Irish Music Studies can also be situated as a cognate field of study, which shares with Irish Studies an interdisciplinary basis and draws on a wide range of disciplines, methodologies, and interests. To wit, some of the output of the past decade discussed here as Irish Music Studies is generated by authors who frequently identify (primarily or indeed exclusively) with other disciplines (musicology, ethnomusicology, and anthropology most commonly), still, many of the abiding questions and critical concerns examined are fundamentally of concern to Irish Studies. By the new millennium, the historical-literary axis of Irish Studies had expanded to include music as an area of research in survey volumes (Donnelly; Cleary and Connolly; Harte and Whelan). When music infiltrated Irish Studies, traditional music and latterly rock music genres formed the basis of scholarship. During the past decade, while interest in those areas continues to generate research, the interstitial spaces of music sounds and genres have garnered increased attention (O’Flynn; Fitzgerald and O’Flynn). Smyth’s entreaties have been answered productively in monographs and edited collections (Boydell and Houston; Campbell; Commins and Ní Fhuartháin; Cooper; Crosson; Dowling; Fitzgerald and O’Flynn; Hall; Houston, McHale and Murphy; Kaul; McLaughlin and McCloone; Murphy; Ó hAllmhuráin; O’Flynn; O’Donnell; O’Shea; Smith; Smyth; Vallely; and, White and Williams). Integrative disciplinary tools, drawing variously on ethnomusicology, cultural history, literary/cultural studies, anthropology, and musicology among others, allow Irish music in all its complex manifestations to be liberated from the constraints of a musical folklore paradigm, and a number of broad thematic interests (and methodologies) have strengthened or newly emerged. While not within the remit of this chapter, it is also worth noting the significant increase in Irish dance research (and output) since the beginning of the new millennium (Foley; Wulff; and O’Connor). This is a welcome development which adds a complicating dimension to any assessment of representing the Irish experience. Curiously, in subject matter and content, music scholarship of the post-Celtic Tiger period is not especially concerned with the collapse of the economy and the attendant societal crises which ensued (a brief discussion in Smyth’s 2017 publication notwithstanding). A key site of inquiry over the past decade, author-identified as the work of Irish Studies, is that of literary studies and music. This is acknowledged most obviously in consecutive awards of the American Conference of Irish Studies’ Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books on Language and Literature to Harry White’s Music and Irish Literary Imagination in 2008 and Smyth’s Music in Irish Cultural History in 2009, respectively. In both cases, the authors develop and substantially expand work long-incubated. Smyth returns again to the themes of identity making, music, and literature, one in which he is a (if not the) key architect, in his more recent Music and Irish Identity: Celtic Tiger Blues (2017). White and Smyth both excavate English language material, but this draws attention to the broader challenge of Irish language poetry (and literature) and its intersection with music in the discourse of Irish Studies. Where this is found most often is in the explicit sphere of Irish language singing (Williams and Ó Laoire; Motherway). Work on Irish language poetry and its alignment with expressions of identity in musico-social and musico-cultural ways have only barely been explored (Crosson; Ní Shíocháin). In contrast, an unanticipated focus of research during this past decade reconsiders the harp, its sounds and cultural meanings (Lawlor; O’Donnell; Joyce and Lawlor; and Hurrell). Likewise, the relative wealth of inquiry in music of Northern Ireland now available is noteworthy (Vallely; Ramsey; and MacDonald). This research is largely conducted through the disciplinary prism of cultural musicology and/or ethnomusicology but is rich with concerns and considerations central to Irish Studies. All warrant inclusion in widening discourses of Irish Music Studies. The enterprise of Irish Studies is one which in name and practice is fundamentally concerned with place, in-placeness, and indeed, out-of-placeness too. Discussions of music and 324

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place therefore are central to the concept and development of Irish (Music) Studies. Building on previous work (Ó Laoire), particular monographs published in the past long decade are essential in their contribution to new ways of thinking about and writing on music in Irish Studies: Helen O’Shea’s The Making of Irish Traditional Music (2008); Adam Kaul’s Turning the Tune: Traditional Music, Tourism, and Social Change in an Irish Village (2009); Sean Campbell’s Irish Blood, English Heart: Second Generation Irish Musicians in England (2011); and Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin’s Flowing Tides: History and Memory in an Irish Soundscape (2016). Music and place are examined in each, with Campbell the exception in deconstructing place beyond Ireland (in his case, a diasporic place). Campbell also differs in that the other three have Irish traditional music as their site of inquiry. The earlier point made of traditional and popular genres prevailing in Irish Music Studies discussions is still the case. Another observation is that all four monographs, regardless of place under discussion, were generated through academic sites outside of Ireland, and three owe a particular disciplinary debt to anthropology and ethnomusicology (O’Shea; Kaul; and Ó hAllmhuráin). Predicting research trends is a difficult task; however, a significant area of expansion in Irish Music Studies is and will be, I believe, in the field of gender and music (Slominski). This is underway already in Ireland and internationally (at conferences, in working papers and work under consideration for publication), and promises a rich seam of scholarship to come.

Decade of Centenaries Begun in 2012, the Decade of Centenaries is an Irish government coordinated program of national events (as well as innumerable locally organized ones) which commemorate “the significant events in Irish history that took place between 1912 and 1922 . . . a decade of great change” (Decade). The range of events marked are extensive, from “the campaign for Home Rule, through World War One and the Easter Rising of 1916 to the foundation of the Free State. . . . Campaigns for social reforms—highlighted by the suffrage movement and the 1913 Lockout, for example—also went hand in hand with political events.” Furthermore, this series of events needed to be mindful of the complex interface of nation, individual, and identity/identities administered in a “tolerant, inclusive and respectful way.” Alison O’Malley-Younger observes that “national remembrance can be a powerful tool in constructing cultural identity” but is fraught with contested legacies vying for representation (456), and questions of who selects what events are for commemoration loom large (Cowgill; Laird). In this Decade of Centenaries, how are nation and identity (or identities?) represented and, more importantly for this chapter, is music deployed as a vehicle for national identity in those events? If so, what are the sounds and ideas utilized and relied upon? At the heart of any negotiation of the identity of a nation is the intrinsic duality of looking to the past and future simultaneously. Music provides a powerful (and familiar) cultural space in which that casting back and looking forward can be sounded and experienced (Cowgill). This is demonstrated by the ubiquitous sound of music during the centenary commemorations, whether it be army bands at commemorative events, themed concert series at the National Concert Hall (“Composing the Island: A Century of Music in Ireland, 1916–2016”), or CD releases (O’Doherty; Mac Mathúna). Music, similar to literature, theater, and other cultural realms, is also a space into which cultural tropes can migrate, bringing an additional “pastness” to a new, sounded representation. With pastness a defining characteristic of folk and traditional musics, Irish traditional music and its many mediated relations are particularly open to this phenomenon. As a cultural trope or idea moves from one realm of representation to another, it is revised and renewed, gathering and sloughing off meaning, glacier-like. It can become a cultural container, one into which meaning is poured continuously to such an extent that it can be both meaningless and 325

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meaning-full at the same time. This chapter explores one such cultural container as a way of investigating the layered capacity of music performance to connect cultural ideas and identity over time and across cultural realms. This chapter examines the process(es) by which a specific cultural trope can become a cultural container, with wider resonances and seemingly infinite malleability, being filled and refilled with meaning. It examines how particular tropes become catch-all cultural containers of identity, facilitating fluidity between cultural platforms, moving for example from poetry to music, to film and sometimes back again, in a constant process of re-signification. It recognizes and reasserts Smyth’s more recent proposal that “music is as much an idea as it is a sound” (2017, 2) by exploring the animatory role traditional music (or ideas of traditional music) as sounded or ventriloquized play in this process. Specifically, this chapter will explore issues of identity and the (re)imaginations of nationhood through the diffuse cultural container of “Mise Éire,” which begins its cultural life as an early twentieth century poem and meanders through the past long century gathering meaning along the way as a documentary film score, and most recently, in a newly composed and arranged song performance as part of the Decade of Centenaries commemorations.

Centenary A number of key events during the Decade of Centenaries were coordinated and produced (either solely or in part) by the Irish national broadcaster, RTÉ. One such flagship broadcast event was Centenary, a large-scale stage production, telling Ireland’s story from “the dawn of the twentieth century” to 2016 “in song, dance and poetry” and funded by the Department of Arts, Heritage and Gaeltacht. Events such as this “attempt to create an effective encounter” for the public in the commemorative sphere (Dean et al. 3). Produced by Cillian Fennell and broadcast on Easter Monday, that most auspicious of days in Irish commemorative history (March 28 in 2016), it was a musical and choreographic climax to what had been a weekend of wall-to-wall Rising related commemorative activities, from parades to wreath laying to flag lowering ceremonies (“A Day”). The show was broadcast (mostly) live from the filled-to-capacity Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin, with a number of prerecorded scenes interspersed through the show (two performances shot at Kilmainham Jail and the Garden of Remembrance, and a global diaspora reading of the Proclamation). It was reported that almost half a million people watched the show, live or via digital streaming, with 39% of those streams from overseas viewers (“Half ”). There are a total of eighteen chapters (or scenes) in the eponymous production, sequenced chronologically. Chapter names are variously song titles, such as the traditional “Mo Ghile Mear” (no. 2) and an arrangement of U2’s “One” (no. 17), historical moments such as “Executions” (no. 8) or phases “Emigration and Renewal” (no. 13). Noteworthy is the use of active chapter headings throughout the program beginning with the introductory “Awakening” (no. 1), later “Grieving” (no. 9), and finally “Building” (no. 12). Notwithstanding its centenary chronology, prehistory in the guise of Cúchulainn makes an early appearance (no. 3) together with Morrigan “the raven of divination, the death spirit” (Dorgan), acknowledging the ongoing presence of folklore and legend in the Irish present. Skillful use of archive and newly produced still images and film clips as stage backdrops during the 85 minute show, in conjunction with impressive stage design, made the overall effect more artistic than cabaret. The production had 450 on-screen performers including 21 choirs, 24 dancers (including six aerialists), and ten actors, together with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra (Finn; “Half ”). This headcount also included representative voices from across music genres in Ireland with Irish popular music artists such as Jack L and Danny O’Reilly, Irish country music icon Philomena Begley and those from the traditional and folk music worlds such as Sharon 326

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Shannon, Iarla Ó Lionaird, and Dónal Lunny. Hugh Linehan remarked that “As Centenary unfolded . . . the online response swelled from positive to enthusiastic to ecstatic”; the public reaction is a measure of the show’s resonance with personal and collective identities.

“Mise Éire”: performance While there are a number of chapters identified as highlights in reviews of the show, “Mise Éire” (no. 6) is consistently referenced (McManus; Linehan). A musical setting of Pádraig Mac Piarais’ (1879–1916) proto-poem, the music is composed and scored by Patrick Cassidy for solo voice and concert orchestra. Cassidy has a substantial body of work, much of it for film (for example John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary). However, an over-arching interest and broader theme in his composition is that of Irish legend, myth, and history as heard in The Children of Lir and Famine Remembrance. The “Mise Éire” Centenary chapter opens with a brief on-screen transcription of an exchange between rebels William [Bill] O’Brien and James Connolly: “‘Where are we going Jim?’ ‘Bill, we are going out to be slaughtered,’” with the location and day (Easter Monday, O’Connell Street) identified beneath. Four substantial grey pillars fill the stage (they descend mid-scene from above in the previous “Foggy Dew” chapter) and as the camera angle widens across the full stage, the singer Sibéal Ní Chasaide is spotlit from above. The text introducing the chapter, the pillars, and the background set design locate the viewer-listeners at the GPO, where Mac Piarais read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic on Easter Monday, 1916. Stylistically the melody and its arrangement draw on a number of musical genealogies. It is supported by sonorous (Western) orchestral strings. Harp, the potent Irish national emblem, is also heard (O’Donnell, Ruan; O’Donnell, Mary Louise). The non-diegetic sonic cue of the

Image 25.1 Sibeal Ni Chasaide performs Mise Éire Source: RTE 2016.

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harp in the musical score animates the visual idea of the harp as a thick symbol of Irish identity and nation. The final instrumental element is a subdued horn line, filled with musical and cultural meaning through its deep-rooted historico-cultural associations with nature, nobility, and the heroic (Cooper 2006, 107) but also with conflict and burial. These three musical elements accompany the solo female voice which leads and dominates throughout, metrically tempered to give what Irish sean-nós singer Sarah Ghriallais in another context has called “time, to time.” The arrangement, and performance by Ní Chasaide, opens unexpected apertures, allowing the melody to breathe in its funereal, but never lugubrious pace. The vocal melody is less complex than many traditional sean-nós melodies, nonetheless it is definitively expressed and heard as “Irish.” The ornamentation, in particular the beginning of musical (and textual) phrases, together with repeated ornaments (most often used on the second half of unaccented beats) are deliberate, essentialized musical references to sean-nós as an older style of traditional Irish language singing. In her full-length white dress illuminated on stage, the performance derives meaning too from the 1990s generated Celtic world music category (O’Donnell, Ruan; O’Donnell, Mary Louise), one which relies heavily in sound on the female voice and in image on the female body. Ní Chasaide’s articulation of the opening phrase of the eponymous poem, “Mise Éire” [“I am Ireland”] is made all the more commemoratively powerful through literal meaning but also symbolically through the Irish language itself. The Irish language operates in this commemorative space as an “organic connection” (Schwartz 238) between 1916 and 2016. Staging historical moments depends upon imagination and memory working together (Keightley and Pickering) and the phrase “Mise Éire” articulates Ireland past and present, or a broad aspiration of an Ireland, suitably vague, to which all listeners can belong. No translation of the poem is projected on stage or screen, assuming a viewer-listener understanding of some broader idea of Ireland and Irishness. Barry Schwartz writes that “When commemorative symbols are combined, they convey meanings that differ from those borne by any one symbolic object” (236) and the combination of language, Mac Piarais’ words, staging, and female voice activate “memories that include but extend beyond the persons and events commemorated” (236). Voicing Mac Piarais, Ní Chasaide is slightly elevated, which in combination with uplighting, suspends her ready to be assumed into the heavens as (young) Mother Ireland (Figure 25.1). She is an avatar of Hibernia too, in close proximity as the middle of three statues which sit atop the GPO, and her costumery reemphasizes that imagery (Curtis). As the lights come up, rebels, weapons, and makeshift barricades become visible and Ní Chasaide sings of her/Ireland’s shame, “Mór mo náire” [“Great my shame”], her loneliness, “uaigní mé” [“more lonely am I”] and her sadness, “Mór mo bhrón,” [Great is my sorrow], while the image of the Proclamation printing press rolling appears in the background. Resplendent in quasi-wedding garb, as young, virginal bride she is in complicated juxtaposition to the Cailleach [hag] of the lyrics as she ventriloquizes Mac Piarais’/the Cailleach’s despair. In the final section of the scene, crackling flames are seen and heard, as the destruction of the city and the failure of the rebellion is realized on stage. The final section of the scene has the choreographed character of Nurse Elizabeth O’Farrell raising the flag of surrender at the end of Easter week and to finish, W.B. Yeats’ damning line “A terrible beauty is born” is projected on the stage floor. With an eye to Lillis Ó Laoire’s careful application of Paul Ricoeur to contexts of sean-nós traditional Irish language singing, a process of making and understanding new horizons of interpretation is also relevant to the continuing transformations of “Mise Éire” as it winds its way through the long centenary of Ireland’s modern history. This was not the premiere of Cassidy’s composition. Ní Chasaide was heard (though not seen) singing “Mise Éire” in the soundtrack of the documentary series 1916 The Irish Rebellion broadcast earlier in 2016 and was also heard on 328

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the occasion of an edited version of that documentary’s live streaming to Irish embassies globally to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in 2016 (1916). On Christmas Eve (December 24) 2015, a trailer released on the government’s “Ireland 2016” YouTube channel used Ní Chasaide’s “Mise Éire” as its soundtrack. It was titled “Mise Éire” with the motto for 2016 “Cuimhnigh, Smaoinigh, Samhlaigh—Remember, Reflect, Reimagine” emblazoned at the end (“Mise Éire”). The effective (and affective) cultural resonances of these items across cultural platforms, as well as their referents, are building blocks in a complex network of paths (Schwartz) which culminate with the climactic performance in Centenary.

“Mise Éire”: referents and pathways “Mise Éire” was first published in 1912 by Mac Piarais and appears in his 1914 collection of poetry Suantraidhe agus Goltraidhe which “personifies Ireland as a mother who has given birth to greatness, but has been betrayed by her own offspring” (Cooper 2006, 100). Mac Piarais, an educator and language activist “as well as a poet, dramatist and short story writer in Irish and in English” (de Paor 32), was a signatory of the Proclamation and ultimately, was executed for his part in the 1916 Rising. His was a principal modernizing voice in Irish language literature then developing. Mac Piarais’ literary works, and his critical writing, look to European models in an effort to create a corpus of modern Irish language literature that was simultaneously rooted, symbolically and imaginatively, in a Gaelic past (de Paor; Ó Coigligh). “Mise Éire” explicitly demonstrates this, with its narrator announcing herself as Éire, she who is older than “an Chailleach Bhéarra.” The complex folkloric figure of the Cailleach Bhéarra with “clusterings of cultural meaning” as the divine hag, mother goddess, and “supernatural wilderness figure” among other manifestations (Ó Crualaoich 154, 164) is both a sacred and profane symbol used by many Irish poets in both the Irish and English languages, but the imagery dates to a ninth century poem (158). In Mac Piarais’ interpretation, the feminine Éire catalogues her feelings in stark, evocative terms, her glory, her shame, her pain and sorrow, and finally her loneliness, greater than even the Cailleach’s. As Catríona Clutterbuck notes in another context, the poem relies upon the “pervasive use of female figures to defend the essence of Irish identity and the national project” (289), with the trope of Mother Ireland powerfully invoked. Not unlike traditional music itself, the poem’s pastness, for Mac Piarais, is essential to its moving towards and construction of a modern future. But the poem also relies heavily on the identity bequeathed upon it by virtue of the Irish language which was then, and still is, a potent signifier of nation itself. “Mise Éire” is reimagined in 1959 for George Morrison’s film of the same name, Mise Éire, one of the most important Irish documentary films of the last century. The documentary was the first in a trio of films, all conceived as new reflections on the revolutionary period as part of the 50 year commemorative celebrations in 1966 (Saoirse? was released in 1961 and An Tine Bheo in 1966). As part of the Ireland 2016 program, Morrison’s Mise Éire was shown with live symphony orchestra at the National Concert Hall. The use of Mise Éire as the film title is a convenient and efficient signifier of the world of Mac Piarais and the nationalist 1916 Rising writ large. In title alone, Mac Piarais’ stark poetic opening tightly packs a host of significations in just two words and it also stretches its signifying muscles much further back through the deployment of Gaelic historical and mythological tropes. Critically, “Mise Éire” as film title is decoupled from the rest of the poem. The idea of “Mise Éire”/Mise Éire is animated instrumentally through another political song melody, “Róisín Dubh” (Ó Tuama and Kinsella), the sean-nós song on which the film’s theme music is composed, arranged and orchestrated by Seán Ó Riada. The “Róisín Dubh” melody is unattributed in the film and without text, but the use of the melody 329

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instrumentally is sufficient to retain the poetic allegory of Róisín Dubh as Ireland (who in the poem drives the narrator mad with love, but he cannot forsake her). John O’Flynn writes that “As much as the 1966 film itself, Mise Éire’s soundtrack captured the national imagination” (“More”). The theme music in particular, with French horn(s), lush strings, harp, and percussion, became a sonic cultural container, a vessel for ideas of Ireland and nation, past, present, and (potentially) future. But of course, this is greatly facilitated by the cultural container of Mac Piarais’ poem “Mise Éire” which by 1959 was sufficiently filled with meaning in the nation’s consciousness. Contiguously, “Mise Éire” is open to being filled with additional meanings and interpretation. The texts of the two poems recede in referential primacy and what remains is the titular vestige of Mac Piarais’ “Mise Éire” and the sean-nós “Róisín Dubh” melody without its lyrics, together recast as Mise Éire sonically in film, signification animated through sound alone. Such is the sustained success of the theme music of the film in the national sonic consciousness, that the melody and the film scoring of it (Mise Éire) are inseparable in the mind of the public and though close to 50 years after the rebellion, it became a de facto anthem of that period (Ní Chonghaile 2, 3). Not coincidentally, Ó Riada’s Mise Éire theme, generated as part of the midcentury commemorations, is used in Centenary as the musical introduction to the Proclamation chapter, reinscribing the abstract idea of “Mise Éire” with another layer of meaning. In so doing, “Mise Éire” threads a connection from 2016 to mid-century to 1916 “giving the past back its own present” (Dean et al. 7). The opening line of “Róisín Dubh” is also used as the opening line in the first chapter of Centenary and sung by Ní Chasaide acoustically weaving another filament into the web of signification. A number of other encounters with “Mise Éire” as cultural container are tension filled, resonating with and responding to the original poem (Ní Mhoráin). The poet Eavan Boland rails against the Ireland of Mac Piarais’ that she inherited, insisting in her “Mise Éire” (1987) that she “won’t go back to it,” vituperative in her response to women’s experience in independent Ireland where “time is time past.” Louis de Paor, the contemporary Irish language poet, also revisits the theme in his 2013 bilingual poem “An Glaoch.” The poem was commissioned by the (then relatively new) President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins as part of Glaoch—The Calling, an initiative to “demonstrate through conversation and performance the depth and breadth of our island’s cultural richness” (Glaoch). De Paor responds to the idea of “Mise Éire” and reimagines a collective voice in twenty-first century realpolitik of post-crash Ireland. The singular “Mise Éire” [“I am Ireland”] becomes the plural “Sinne Éire” [“We are Ireland”]: “Sinne Éire, sine sinn ná Cúchulainn is an Chailleach Bhéarra . . . Sinne Éire, óige sinn ná an Piarsach is Ó Conghaile . . . [We are Ireland, we are older than Cúchulainn and the Cailleach Bhéarra . . . We are Ireland, we are younger than Mac Piarais and Connolly]. In an act of reclamation in the crash years, he writes that “We are those who went away and those who remained, those who came and stayed. The sons and daughters of all the dreamers.” In the latter part of the twentieth century and indeed the first decades of the new millennium, “Mise Éire” is a cultural conceit open to robust reinterpretations. It is also open to what Laird terms “Rising kitsch” (75), with Mac Piarais’ original poem on T-shirts now available (Spailpín). “Mise Éire” operates both as an abstraction and per contra as an essentialism, unavoidably referencing its past manipulations and meanings, while remaining an open topped cultural container, ready for more or fewer meanings to be invoked and read.

Conclusion To finish, I return to where I began, coming full circle. The 2016 performance of “Mise Éire” by Ní Chasaide is yet another rebirth of “Mise Éire” through its continued reimaginings. The 330

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original poem is fully heard in the Irish language, without translation, but the performance does not assume or may not need translation. “Mise Éire,” which is intoned at the beginning of four couplets (two are repeated couplets) encodes meaning for the listener and is both empty, waiting to be filled with meaning, and full already, at the same time. It connects with Mac Piarais’ Gaelic Ireland (or an idea about that), and it is animated through a newly composed melody resonating with signifiers, sonic and cultural, of pastness and future. The essentialized title “Mise Éire” is not simply an “emblem of remembrance” (Cowgill 76). Over the course of a long 100 years it becomes a code for Irishness and nation, weaving its poetic, musical, visual, and symbolic way, not always smoothly, through the twentieth century and into the very center of the construction of Irish commemorative identity in 2016. Connecting these selected moments of coded identity negotiation and representation across time (Mac Piarais’ poem in 1912, Ó Riada’s film score in 1959, and the 2016 Centenary) is that they all enter the public domain at transformative, pivotal moments or periods in Irish social history, when the past and the future are in a heightened state of flux: increasing political and social tensions in 1912; 1959 when “the currency of dogmatic nationalist aspirations was being quietly traded for a new accommodation with capital” (Merriman 34), and the 2010s when the effects of the trough of the boom and bust economic cycle are still being felt. All too are heightened commemorative moments/periods. Most recently, in May 2020, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra together with Ní Chasaide recorded the Centenary “Mise Éire” from home and released it online to mark the relaxing of COVID-19 lockdown restrictions in Ireland (RTÉ Concert Orchestra). At these junctures, the cultural container of “Mise Éire” offers an essentializing of identity commemoration and representation of identity, rooted in the past but allowing for the possibility of recasting, however incremental, of itself each time signifying a malleability of form, exploited and sounded across time and across performance platforms.

Works cited 1916: The Irish Rebellion. Coco Television, 2016. Boland, Eavan. Outside History: Poems, 1980–1990. Norton, 1991. Boydell, Barra and Kerry Houston, Eds. Music, Ireland, and the Seventeenth Century. Four Courts Press, 2009. Campbell, Sean. Irish Blood, English Heart: Second Generation Irish Musicians in England. Cork University Press, 2011. Campos, Calvo and Javier Sotelo. “I Celti, la Prima Europa: The Role of Celtic Myth and Music in the Construction of European Identity.” Popular Music and Society, Vol. 40, No. 4, 2017, pp. 369–389. Cassidy, Patrick. The Children of Lir. Celtic Heartbeat, 1993. CD. Cassidy Patrick. Famine Remembrance. Windham Hill Records, 1997. CD. Cleary, Joe and Claire Connolly, Eds. The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture. Cambridge University Press, 2005. Clutterbuck, Catríona. “Mise Éire: Eavan Boland.”Irish University Review, Vol. 39, No. 2, 2009, pp. 289–300. Commins, Verena and Méabh Ní Fhuartháin, Eds. “Nótaí/Notes: Music and Ireland.” special issue ÉireIreland, Vol. 54, Nos. 1 & 2, 2019. Cooper, David. The Musical Traditions of Northern Ireland and Its Diaspora. Ashgate, 2009. Cooper David. “Seán Ó Riada and Irish Postcolonial Film Music: George Morrison’s Mise Éire.” European Film Music. Edited by Miguel Mera and David Burnand. Ashgate, 2006, pp. 100–115. Cowgill, Rachel. “Canonizing Remembrance: Music for Armistice Day at the BBC, 1922–27.” First World War Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2011, pp. 65–107. Crosson, Seán. “The Given Note”: Traditional Music and Modern Irish Poetry. Cambridge Scholars, 2008. Curtis, L. Perry. “The Four Erins: Feminine Images of Ireland, 1780–1900.” Éire-Ireland, Vol. 33 & 34, Nos. 3–4, 1988, pp. 70–102. “A Day to Celebrate.” Special supplement to the Irish Independent, 29 March 2016. Decade of Centenaries. Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. www.decadeofcentenaries.com. De Paor, Louis. Leabhar na hAthghabhála, Poems of Repossession. Bloodaxe Books, 2016. 331

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O’Flynn, John. The Irishness of Irish Music. Ashgate, 2009. O’Flynn, John. “More than Mise Éire: The Film and TV Music of Seán Ó Riada.”Brainstorm. RTÉ, 2019. www.rte. ie/brainstorm/2019/0701/1059419-more-than-mise-eire-the-film-and-tv-music-of-sean-o-riada/. Ó hAllmhuráin, Gearóid. Flowing Tides: History and Memory in an Irish Soundscape. Oxford University Press, 2016. Ó Laoire, Lillis. Ar Chreag i Lár na Farraige. Cló Iar-Chonnachta, 2002. O’Malley-Younger, Alison. “A Terrible Beauty Is Bought: 1916, Commemoration and Commodification.” Irish Studies Review, Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 455–467. O’Shea, Helen. The Making of Irish Traditional Music. Cork University Press, 2008. Ó Tuama, Seán and Thomas Kinsella. An Duanaire: Poems of the Dispossessed, 1600–1900. Dolmen Press, 1981. Ramsey, Gordon. Music, Emotion and Identity in Ulster Marching Bands. Peter Lang, 2011. Smith, Thérèse, Ed. Ancestral Imprints: Histories of Irish Traditional Music and Dance. Cork University Press, 2012. “RTÉ Concert Orchestra and Sibéal Perform Mise Éire From Home.” https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=3JdEKOlpHqg. RTÉ. “Sibeál Ní Chasaide Performs ‘Mise Éire’.” RTÉ, 2016. Slominski, Tes. Trad Nation: Gender, Sexuality and Race in Irish Traditional Music. Wesleyan Press, 2020. Smyth, Gerry. “Listening to the Future: Music and Irish Studies.” Ireland Beyond Boundaries: Mapping Irish Studies in the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Liam Harte and Yvonne Whelan. Pluto Press, 2007, pp. 198–214. Smyth, Gerry. Music in Irish Cultural History. Irish Academic Press, 2009. Smyth, Gerry. Music and Irish Identity: Celtic Tiger Blues. Routledge, 2017. Spailpín. www.spailpin.com/en/. Vallely, Fintan. Tuned Out: Traditional Music and Identity in Northern Ireland. Cork University Press, 2008. White, Harry. Music and the Irish Literary Imagination. Oxford University Press, 2008. Williams, Sean and Lillis Ó Laoire. Bright Star of the West: Joe Heaney, Irish Song Man. Oxford University Press, 2011. Wulff, Helena. Dancing at the Crossroads: Memory and Mobility in Ireland. Bergahn Books, 2007.

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26 Sport and Irishness in a new millennium Paul Rouse

1 The Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) is essential to any consideration of the relationship between sport and Irishness. The fact that the largest, most successful sporting organization on the island is one which promotes the “native” games of hurling and Gaelic football (along with sister organizations which promote “ladies” Gaelic football and camogie) is a clear marker of Irish national identity. The presence of GAA clubs across Irish diasporic communities further underlines the centrality of the association and its games to the Irish. In post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, Croke Park (the GAA’s main stadium) remains a symbol of the status of the GAA, its sheer scale almost entirely at odds with what an amateur sporting body should realistically have been capable of achieving in the modern era of sport. At every level of the organization, the facilities of the GAA have been revamped and extended in recent decades, and what now exists is a remarkable physical manifestation of the importance of the Association to life in Ireland. That the progress of the GAA has been dependent on exceptional levels of volunteerism to sustain the territory-based club and county structure has facilitated a sense of identity that is local, as well as national. This is something that is used to underpin almost all of the GAA’s marketing campaigns and is key to its self-image. Also essential to its self-image is the GAA’s expressed commitment to the amateurism of its elite players. The structure of the Association, the level of television money earned, the distribution of the Irish population and the lack of a credible international outlet has ensured that the GAA could not pay full-time professional players unless it entirely redrew its structures by disbanding the majority of its county teams. Tradition has left such a prospect unworkable, at least to date. Short of full-time professionalism, the best hurlers and Gaelic footballers, in the years of the crash and immediately afterwards, have shared in gate money, sponsorship details, and media income by enjoying a greatly enhanced expenses scheme and by receiving appearance money for certain events. Many team managers at inter-county (and indeed at club) level have received under-the-counter payments for training teams. Around them, backroom teams have grown exponentially with doctors, physiotherapists, statisticians, psychologists, media managers, and others paid for their services. In essence, at the highest level, the GAA has professionalized in every aspect except in the contracting of players as fulltime professionals. 334

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Although the GAA carries all the trappings of elite modern sport, its history has led to it carrying into a new millennium the rhetoric of another era, particularly in its avowal of an identification with Irish nationalism and Irish national identity. The GAA’s Official Guide is absolutely clear that such a relationship continues to exist and, indeed, is fundamental to the GAA. Further, it is adamant that the GAA is much more than just a sporting organization. On the first page of that Guide—in what amounts to a three-paragraph “mission statement”—it is claimed that those who play its games and who run the organization see the GAA as “a means of consolidating our Irish identity.” More than that, it sees the “primary purpose of the GAA” as being “a means to create a disciplined, self-reliant, national-minded manhood.” And more than that again, all of this amounts to “the expression of a people’s preference for native ways as opposed to imported ones.” The Official Guide then moves on to note that, because of partition, “Ireland’s claim to nationhood is impaired” and concludes: “Today, the native games take on a new significance when it is realised that they have been a part, and still are a part, of the Nation’s desire to live her own life, to govern her own affairs.” Finally, in the appendices, there are short portraits of the men who founded the GAA, in which they are lauded for the commitment to the creation of a “Free and Gaelic Ireland,” and there is a reprint of Archbishop Thomas Croke’s letter, written in support of the GAA in December 1884, in which he pledges his support for the GAA against the “degenerate dandies” of the Empire and their games which were mere “effeminate follies.” It is one thing, of course, to have a mission statement and to pay rhetorical homage to the past, but altogether another to have actual rules that give meaning—or attempt to give meaning— to these broader ambitions. And the GAA does have a slew of rules which are framed around these ideas of Irish nationhood. For example, the GAA commits itself to “actively support the Irish language, traditional Irish dancing, music, song, and other aspects of national culture.” It also commits to “use all practical endeavours to support Irish industry, especially in relation to the provision of trophies and playing gear and equipment.” There are precise rules around the use of Irish in official documentation, and the flying of the flag and anthem (hurlers must remove their helmets, for example). But there is a limit to the importance of such rules. The reality, of course, is that the GAA is almost entirely consumed with the practical operation of a modern sporting organization and, in its day-to-day endeavors, the sentiments expressed in the Official Guide are broadly irrelevant. It is the case that many GAA members are extremely proud of their games. Part of that pride comes from the fact that these games are Irish games and are a badge of distinction. But it is not sustainable to believe that the great majority of GAA members agree that their involvement in the GAA is, ultimately, the expression of their preference for “native ways” over “imported ones.” Nonetheless, the ambitions set out in the Official Guide and the practicalities of past inheritances mean that the GAA’s communities in Ireland essentially exclude all unionists. Allowing for its intimate identification with expressions of Irishness, what the GAA does not have, notwithstanding its International Rules matches against Australian Footballers and the Hurling-Shinty internationals against Scotland, is meaningful international competitions in which to compete. By contrast, its major field sports competitors in soccer and rugby have a significant advantage in terms of expressions of Irishness. It is not an untrammeled advantage, however; both sports must navigate their own complex legacies. The border ensures that Irish sporting bodies operate on an island where there are two jurisdictions. This presents obvious challenges in the formulation of policy and it has particular resonance in the operation of international sport. That organized sporting organizations predate the border has presented challenges, complications, controversies, and a marked contrast in how to accommodate the political settlement. 335

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With respect to soccer, the border quickly brought the establishment of rival governing bodies, north and south, and in the new millennium these governing bodies remain in place. Both bodies field representative teams in international competitions—Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland—and both organize domestic leagues and cups. But this apparently neat divide is routinely undone by the realities of the wider context of life in Ireland, by the postGood Friday Agreement, and by the rules that govern international eligibility in modern soccer. In the past decade, a series of players born in Northern Ireland have played for the Republic of Ireland team. Indeed, James McClean, Shane Duffy, and Darron Gibson all played underage soccer for Northern Ireland before shifting their allegiance to the Republic. This exodus led Jim Shannon, a DUP MP, to table a motion in the House of Commons in London which read: That this House expresses concern over the pursuit of Northern Ireland born football players by the Football Association Ireland; and calls for the chief executive of the FAI, John Delaney, to send out a clear message that there will be no poaching of NI players, that the boundary lines will be respected and honoured, and that the game will be played fairly and within the rules. (Irish Independent, March 22, 2018) It was an impotent motion, one certain to be ignored both in terms of its existence and its substance by ofcials south of the border, but its importance lies in the fact that it was tabled at all. The controversy over attempts to attract the best players seems certain to continue. There is no suggestion that a United Ireland soccer team is likely to be formed in the foreseeable future. Both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland have reached the finals of major championships in the past decade. The Republic of Ireland reached the European Finals of 2012 and 2016, while Northern Ireland reached the finals of 2016. The achievement of the Republic of Ireland team in reaching the finals in 2012 was greeted as a welcome diversion from the unrelentingly dismal economic news that continued to fill the post-Celtic Tiger years. It also led to comparisons with the achievement of the first Irish teams to reach European and World Cup finals in the years between 1988 and 1994. Reaching those finals had led glib commentators to blithely attribute the birth of the Celtic Tiger to the success of the soccer team and its contribution to restoring the national psyche. This was patent nonsense, but there is no denying the rolling party that for six years echoed to an ‘Olé! Olé! Olé!’ chant, as men and women beat bodhráns and battered each other with inflatable plastic hammers as pints spilled all around them. An attempt to recreate that atmosphere in 2012 (and supposedly restart an economic miracle!) was somewhat undone by the fact that the team was soundly beaten in all of its matches in Poland. Nonetheless, in a nod to the economic context of the competition and the presence of the Troika as the Irish state languished in a bailout program, an Irish banner which proclaimed “Angela Merkel Thinks We’re At Work” made the front page of Germany’s best-selling newspaper, Bild. Relative success on the international stage has not brought prosperity to Ireland’s elite domestic leagues, north and south. Neither league is sufficiently strong to progress to a meaningful stage in the Champions League and Europa League competitions. Clubs in Northern Ireland have tended to reflect the divides of wider society. And, in a further complication, since the 1980s the Derry City Football Club have competed south of the border in the domestic league of the Football Association of Ireland. All suggestions that the two leagues should merge were resisted. There were, however, a number of post-Troubles initiatives at shared competitions. These initiatives have been limited by the capacity of professional and semi-professional league clubs in Ireland. For decades, Irish soccer clubs failed to invest in adequate facilities. Gate 336

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money from matches was used, largely, to pay players. This pay was almost never adequate to allow for broad-based, fulltime professionalism, but the best players could significantly enhance their income by playing soccer. In the new millennium, the illusion of economic miracle in the Republic of Ireland convinced some soccer clubs to pay large wages to players who now became fulltime professionals. This money was not drawn from increased gates or from large piles of television money. Usually, it was provided by benefactors or borrowed. The dream was to make the group stages of the Champions League. It was an unsustainable dream. Venerable clubs were shattered in the wake of Irish economic collapse and the burden of debt forced a disbandment of fulltime professionalism. In Northern Ireland, the global prosperity of soccer was also little in evidence and the financial struggles of clubs were legion. Again, the population in the area governed by the league was unable to sustain a fully professional game. The fact that so small an island should remain sundered into two leagues further limited the prospects of professional soccer in Ireland. By the end of the second decade of the new millennium, renewed attempts were being made to revive the idea of an all-island league—the reality of the economics of soccer suggest that this idea will eventually be realized. While soccer has struggled to build on its successes in the last dozen years of the twentieth century, rugby has enjoyed unprecedented success. The international team won two grand slams in the Six Nations Championship, while the Leinster Rugby Team has won four European Cups, building on previous successes for Munster and Ulster. The fourth province—Connacht— has also enjoyed its own success, winning a Pro12 championship in 2016 and developing a broader support base for the game in the province. Unlike soccer, rugby did not split its governance in two in the wake of partition. The structure of Irish domestic rugby facilitated this as the large-scale independence enjoyed by the provincial branches provided a marked autonomy to those in Ulster who might otherwise have considered establishing a separate governing body for the game in Northern Ireland. Where this unity within rugby has come under strain is in respect of the symbols of international rugby. For unionists, the idea of playing under the tricolor and standing for Amhrán na bhFiann has created obvious difficulties. In 1987, the inaugural Rugby World Cup saw the Irish rugby team stand for the playing of “The Rose of Tralee” as the team’s anthem. By 1995, a new song was commissioned from the Irish musician Phil Coulter, “Ireland’s Call.” It would be wrong to suggest that the song was welcomed. Nonetheless, a new political dispensation (notably the IRA’s cessation of violence and the establishment of a power-sharing executive after the Good Friday Agreement which promised peace on the island) lured those who were less than enamored with the tune into a grudging recognition. The song was subsequently adopted by the all-island Irish hockey and cricket teams—though not by the partitioned soccer teams, or by the GAA. A new tradition has been established whereby for Irish home matches Amhrán na bhFiann and “Ireland’s Call” are both played in Dublin, but just “Ireland’s Call” is played at away matches. With the passage of time and the rise of a generation who do not recall a time before it was played, “Ireland’s Call” has gained a certain acceptance, one more likely born of familiarity than love. It is now sung with ardor by the tens of thousands who now attend Irish rugby matches played overseas and at World Cups. The flexibility of Irish rugby in accommodating both traditions on the island extends, also, to prodigious use of eligibility rules to improve the quality of the Irish team. Eric Hobsbawm once wrote that a nation could be most easily understood through its sporting teams. The flags, the anthems, the emblem, the dignitaries in the soft seats, the national outpouring of joy in victory, all appear to underline his point. But Hobsbawm’s assertion is true only to a point. Sports people have long accepted the notion of making compromises that allow them to compete on a global stage regardless of birth or heritage or expressed nationality. The supporters of the Irish rugby team have proved willing to accept anybody who will improve the fortunes of that team, 337

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regardless of birth or heritage. Basically, such supporters want the national team to be successful and they don’t get overly caught up with the ethics of how that happens. This can be seen in the reaction to the manner in which Irish rugby has used International Rugby’s residency laws to recruit players who were not Irish. South Africans, Australians, and New Zealanders have been identified and brought to Ireland. Having spent three years living in the country, these “project players” have then been introduced to the Irish national team—and the team has won as never was possible before. The context of rugby across the past decade underlines the extent to which this conduct is commonplace. At the 2015 Rugby World Cup, some 40 players born in New Zealand played for other countries in the course of the competition. Some of them played for Ireland, of course, but they also played for seven other countries: Australia, Scotland, England, France, Romania, Tonga, and Japan. For their part, the All-Blacks had five players in their squad who were actually born in American Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, and Australia. It is a reminder that the key to understanding how international sport works is to accept that in a professional environment, identity is only part of the question.

2 Beyond the major field sports, Irish identity is manifest in sport in many different ways. The most obvious is through the multiple sports where Ireland fields teams and individuals who are seeking to reach Olympic standard. In many instances, these competitors have been born in Ireland and have spent the entirety of their sporting careers striving to make it to the Olympic Games. The obvious personal pride, ambition, sacrifice, and ability that is manifest in the achievement in becoming an Olympian—or in seeking to become one—is welded into to the nationalist imagery of flags, emblems, and anthems that is essential to the Olympic arena. When he won the Irish free State’s first Olympic gold medal in Amsterdam in 1928, the hammerthrower, Pat O’Callaghan, said: I am glad of my victory, not of the victory itself, but for the fact that the world has been shown that Ireland has a flag, that Ireland has a national anthem, and in fact that we have a nationality. (qtd. Cronin 53) O’Callaghan was an ardent nationalist speaking in the first decade after the establishment of an independent Irish state. More recent Irish medalists have not expressed their sentiments in such terms, but, for some at least, the pride taken in representing Ireland (and their own local area) adds a further dimension to their experience. This can be seen, for example, in the sentiments expressed by Paul and Gary O’Donovan when they won silver at the Rio Olympics in 2016— and the manner in which they were photographed draped in the tricolor. But this is not a straightforward story. There are others for whom Olympic involvement demands choice between competing identities. The brilliant golfer, Rory McIlroy, grew up as a Catholic in Northern Ireland but confessed an ambiguity around his identity. He said: “Not everyone is driven by nationalism and patriotism.” McIlroy essentially postponed a decision on whether to represent Ireland or the United Kingdom at the Olympic Games by declining to compete at all at the Rio Olympics in 2016. He said later: I resent the Olympic Games because of the position it put me in. . . . If I had been on the podium (listening) to the Irish national anthem as that flag went up, or the British national anthem as that flag went up, I would’ve felt uncomfortable either way. I don’t know the 338

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words to either anthem. I don’t feel a connection to either flag. I don’t want it to be about flags; I’ve tried to stay away from that. (Sunday Independent, January 8, 2017) McIlroy’s subsequent commitment to represent Ireland at future Olympic Games did not bring any clarification around the ambiguity of his identity, nor did he seek to couch this commitment in any nationalistic or patriotic framework. For other competitors in Olympic sports, the choice of Ireland was rooted in the pragmatic ambition to facilitate a desire to compete at the very highest level. In sports such as diving and beach volleyball, competitors who seek to compete at the very highest level have opted to represent Ireland, having failed to make the senior elite teams of their countries of birth.1 In most cases, these people have competed at junior level for countries other than Ireland. The manner in which immigrants have changed sport in Ireland over recent decades continues to manifest itself. New sports have grown in popularity, beyond the confines of traditional sporting activity on the island. Kite surfing, for example, has become one of the fastest growing water sports in Ireland. The season runs March to November, but these are nominal limits. If the weather is in any way suitable, kite surfers take their kits and their boards to Dollymount Strand in Dublin. The sport grew out of surfing, windsurfing, and other adventure sports enthusiasms in the last decades of the twentieth century. The arrival of major windsurfing manufacturers into the sport around the turn of the millennium saw it move towards the mainstream and within a decade the sport had spread to coastal areas around the world. On Dollymount, there are Poles and Lithuanians, Germans and Brazilians, as well as a scattering of Irish men and women who have taken up the sport in recent years. The sport of kitesurfing is part of a wider global trend that is helping to transform the “adventure sports sector.” The spread of such sports as surfing, whitewater rafting, kayaking, caving, and many more across Ireland is evidenced, among other things, by the development of a series of third-level courses to train people to work in this area. This, in turn, underlines the relentless—apparently boundless—growth in the commercialization of sport (and sport as a leisure exercise). By 2008 more than 38,000 people were employed in sport in the Republic of Ireland, amounting to 2% of the workforce. In that same year, Irish households spent a total of €1.9bn on sport and sports-related goods, equivalent to 2% of all consumer spending in the Irish economy. The state exchequer received €922.7m in taxes generated by sports-related activities and the overall share of sport in the economy’s GDP was 1.4%. In tandem with international trends, this represented a dramatic increase in the economic importance of sport. A study published by the Department of Education in 1994 put the number of sport-related jobs at just 18,200. Similar studies in Northern Ireland reveal the same trend; by 2008 sport was generating 17,900 jobs and £688 million in consumer spending.2 Overall, in the years 2009–2010, the spend on sport per household in Ireland was €14.40 per week, but this had increased to €17.85 in 2015–2016.3 The ultimate example of the commercialization of Irish sport involves the Mixed Martial Arts fighter, Conor McGregor, whose blend of patriotism and wealth-conspicuity was presented as a new type of Irishness. McGregor made himself extremely rich, as he became one of the few people for whom it can be said that they became bigger than the sport in which they competed. At the heart of this was his ability to sell a fight. In the modern world, this means being able to attract subscribers on pay-per-view TV, where the big money is to be made. If his use of social media was novel, the techniques he practiced were well-rehearsed. Most notably, he relied heavily on the tried and trusted method of wrapping oneself tightly in the flag. This had an obvious appeal in Ireland—but it was also a valuable tool in courting support among Irish-Americans. 339

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Fighting in Boston in 2013, McGregor said: Boston is a fantastic city. The people are phenomenal out there. It’s a true Irish town. It was crazy going out there the first time, it really was a crazy experience for me because you always hear about the Irish Americans, even when I’m in America it’s like everyone is Irish. Every fight became an opportunity to make an expression of “Irishness.” “I will raise the tricolour high every single time!!!” said McGregor in January 2015 when he fought Dennis Siver. When he entered the ring to fight Chad Mendes in July 2015, Sinéad O’Connor—surrounded by smoke and lights—sang the old Republican ballad “The Foggy Dew” as the huge traveling Irish support roared their support and waved tricolours.4 By November of that year, McGregor was talking about how he would “unify my belt for Ireland.”5 Fighting “for Ireland” is a tradition as old as professional fighting, itself—it was something that was claimed, for example, by Dan Donnelly in the early nineteenth century and Jack Doyle in the middle of the twentieth century. Where McGregor brought a new dimension was in the wealth-narcissism which he paraded. No display was too brash, no words too crass.6 But in the commercialization of sport, no area was left untouched even in the worst years of the recession. For example, when GAA ticket price increases were introduced in 2011, the rate of unemployment reached 15.9%, accounting for more than 300,000 of the workforce. Later, in 2014, in the month when the GAA first put its championship games behind a paywall on Sky Sports, the unemployment rate was some 12.4%—more than 280,000 people and their families.7 This is ordinarily how organizations change—not by any big-bang moment, rather by a series of small decisions heading always in one direction; it marked a fundamental shift in the commercialization of “amateur,” volunteer-driven sport in Ireland. Most insidious of all, in terms of the commercialization of sport in Ireland, was the culture of gambling. There is, of course, a centuries-old culture of gambling on sport on the island in which people bet money on horseracing and cockfighting and handball and, indeed, anything that involved a contest to which a discernible winner might be found. But the nature of gambling has undergone a revolution in the post-Celtic Tiger years that has enormous implications for Irish society. It is true that the more than 1,000 Irish betting shops remain the focus for the great bulk of business and surveys have shown that 12% of Irish adults bet with a bookmaker every week. The growth of online gambling offers an entirely new dimension, however. It is a dimension that means that, if you own a smartphone, every room, every public space is a betting shop. For the perhaps 40,000 Irish people who have a gambling addiction this presents endless ruinous possibilities. The growing popularity of gambling online is readily apparent by the rising profits made by companies in this area: Paddy Power, for example, saw 77% of its overall profits generated online in 2014. Irish people contributed handsomely to these profits, to the extent that Ireland is said to have the highest gross gambling revenue per capita in Europe. Indeed, by 2015, two-thirds of Irish people were regularly gambling.8

3 The power of the state is manifest in how it approaches sport. The modern state can see in sport the potential for nation-building, for improving public health, for combatting social exclusion and, indeed, as a panacea for any number of ills. In Ireland in the years after the Celtic Tiger, the limitations of public policy—as well as a love of sport—were abundantly clear. The raw facts of surveys of sports participation in Ireland—for example, the Irish Sports Monitor 2015 Mid-Year Report completed for ‘Sport Ireland’, reveal a huge interest in sport. In this respect, the report 340

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shows that what it calls “social participation in sport” is strong, through club membership, volunteering, and attending sporting events. In passing, it should be noted that the Irish are also world-class talents at watching sport on television and superb at drinking sport-related pints and buying sporting merchandise. But, when it comes to actually doing something actively sporting, much less enthusiasm is on display. Only one in three adults meet the (very basic) National Physical Activity Guidelines through sport and recreational walking. These guidelines say that adults should be active for at least 30 minutes a day of moderate activity across five days of every week (or for 150 minutes a week). The Sports Monitor report shows that the participation of children in sport is actually in decline—just as is the case with adults. This is a picture of sedentary behavior that is repeated time and again in survey after survey. Studies on childhood behavior, for example, show that only 19% of primary and 12% of post-primary school children meet basic physical activity recommendations and these proportions have not improved since 2004. It is a not unrelated fact that Ireland’s incidence of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, and colonic cancer (to name just three) is far above the European and global average. Indeed, the percentage of people over 15 who were classified as overweight or obese was 60% in 2015, but this rose to 62% in 2017.9 The state has attempted to use schools (while at the same time largely ignoring the disparity of infrastructure which are a marker of educational privilege in Ireland) to address issues around obesity and inactivity. Students are now studying Physical Education (PE) for their Leaving Certificate. Every student taking the subject is to become “an informed, skilled, self-directed and reflective performer in physical education and physical activity.”10 This is something that is to benefit them in school but also to provide skills that they can carry with them for the rest of their lives. Those skills will center on performance in physical activity and on an appreciation of the benefits of physical activity for lifelong health and wellbeing. Despite all the initiatives undertaken, the number of people engaged in sport in Ireland continued to fall in the post-Celtic Tiger years. The percentage of individuals aged 15 years or older who had taken part in sport in the seven days previous to data being collected fell from 47.2% in 2013 to 45.0% in 2015. The “sport” included in this data extends far beyond the realms of competition and across into recreational activities such as walking, cycling, and dancing. Across the spectrum, all available data makes clear that evidence of participation in sport is directly linked to educational attainment and level of income. In other words, those who leave school early and who are unemployed are much less likely to pursue active sporting interests than those who go to university and secure a good job.11 As well as spending money on a “Sport for All” policy, the state also gave money to other sports, for a variety of different reasons, through “Sport Ireland,” or directly from government departments. For decades, the state has worked for the improvement of racing and of breeding in Ireland and to improve the export trade in horses. All the while, horseracing has drawn enormous financial support from the state, including the provision of huge sums of prize money. The scale of state support for horseracing in the past-Celtic Tiger years was apparent at meetings such as the Leopardstown Christmas Racing Festival which received funding from Dún LaoghaireRathdown Council of €50,000 and €30,000 in 2013 and 2014, respectively. The racecourse was also funded by a series of other state bodies, including Fáilte Ireland, Dublin City Council, the Irish National Stud, and Irish Thoroughbred Marketing.12 The state continues to provide support for athletes competing in international sport. By 2013 the state was providing €800,000 funding for Athletics Ireland alone to support its elite athletes. This money was provided as part of an International Carding Scheme that was introduced in 1998; it was a key part of efforts to develop a high-performance system in Ireland. The stated objective of the Scheme was to help support athletes who were considered to have the potential to deliver Olympic and Paralympic final place finishes. The performance of the athletes was to be measured 341

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in world rankings and time and place-finishing improvements. As well as financial grants, athletes were also to receive ancillary sports science and other supports. The great success of this program was unquestionably the Irish boxing team who brought home medals from the 2008 and 2012 Olympic games. Further, a special scheme allows tax refunds to professional sports people based in Ireland on their retirement from sport. Professionals were allowed to claim back a 40% tax deduction on their gross earnings from sports activity over a 10-year period. By 2015, 271 elite athletes were refunded a total of €1.8m in money paid.13 Money was also provided to fund the state’s athletes competing on an international stage. The inherent logic is that triumph—or at least respectability—in international sporting competitions is important to a nation’s sense of identity.

4 The very fact of writing about sport has deepened understanding of Irish history and its modern culture. Over the past decade, work in universities by academics and post-graduate researchers including historians, sociologists, political scientists, geographers, and economists have explored aspects of Irish sport from class to gender, and from identity to commerce.14 Longform explorations of sport have also been undertaken by traditional media and by new internet-based sites.15 All of this has been accompanied by publications from state and semi-state bodies, including the Economic and Social Research Institute, the Central Statistics Office, and Sport Ireland.16 Writing on sport in Ireland remains in its infancy, however. There is, for example, no full academic history of any Irish sporting organization. In this context, it is somewhat invidious to map out any particular area of study and elevate it above all others. The need for incisive analysis is clear across the board. Allowing for that, the ubiquity of the smartphone in everyday life is fundamentally shifting engagement with sport. Indeed, there is no aspect of the modern world that has not been reshaped—in whole or in part—by the revolution that is taking place all around us. Whether one laments the manner in which the smartphone has changed the way people relate to each other, or whether one—by contrast—celebrates the possibilities created by their apparently boundless capabilities, there can be no denying the transformation that is being wrought on social life. At the extremes of this phenomenon, online addiction does not wreak the immediate and apparent physical toll that, say, addiction to alcohol or drugs or food usually does. But there is nothing benign about its danger: at its worst, it colonizes human interaction with a compulsion to sacrifice everything to immersion in online activity. The content that flows from such immersion can range from shopping to gaming to celebrity fixation and much else. It is partly the fact that there is at least the illusion of there being no end to the possibilities of things that can be found on the internet that makes it so attractive. The manner in which so much of modern society—both in terms of popular social communication and, even, economic affairs—now revolves around smartphones leaves it very difficult to live a life entirely offline. And whatever prospect for such a life there is for people who have experienced a world before smartphones, there is none for those who have been born into this digital revolution. No understanding of the place of sport in modern Irish life will be complete, or even meaningful, without considering its relationship with smartphones.

Notes 1 See Niamh Griffin, “From Bettystown to Tokyo: Irish beach volleyball dares to dream,” Irish Times, May 23, 2019 (www.irishtimes.com/sport/other-sports/from-bettystown-to-tokyo-irish-beachvolleyball-dares-to-dream-1.3901009) and Anon., “The accent is usually the big thing. There will 342

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2 3 4 5

6 7

8 9 10 11 12

13

14 15 16

always be people who have something to say about it,” The42.ie, May 26, 2019 (www.the42.ie/ clare-cryan-swim-ireland-4652090-May2019/) See Rouse. See The Wellbeing of The Nation. For references in this paragraph, see Paul Rouse, “Conor McGregor: Smart business or reheated patriotism?” Irish Examiner, December. 24, 2015 (www.irishexaminer.com/sport/other-sports/conormcgregor-smart-business-or-reheated-patriotism-373091.html Posted on McGregor’s Instagram account (@thenotoriousmma), November 22, 2015: “Leaving Ireland today for the West Coast. To unify my belt and spearhead the unprecedented $90–100million dollar UFC 194 event . . . ” (www.instagram.com/p/-aq4serzhb/). See Rouse, “Jack Doyle was notorious long before Conor McGregor,” Irish Examiner, August 11, 2017 (www.irishexaminer.com/sport/columnists/paul-rouse/jack-doyle-was-notorious-long-before-conormcgregor-456788.html). See Rouse, “The founding principle of the GAA has been increasingly neglected,” Irish Examiner, January 25, 2019 (www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/sport/columnists/the-founding-principleof-the-gaa-has-been-increasingly-neglected-899984.html). See the Department of Health’s 2015 report on gambling for these and other statistics. See the Central Statistics Office’s report 2017, The Wellbeing of the Nation. See the Introduction to the Senior Cycle Physical Education Specification of the Irish Curriculum (www. curriculumonline.ie/Senior-cycle/Senior-Cycle-Subjects/Physical-Education-Specification/Introduction/). See The Wellbeing of the Nation. See Fiona Gartman, “Call for review of council funding to Leopardstown Christmas racing festival,” Irish Times, January 2, 2015 (www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/call-for-review-ofcouncil-funding-to-leopardstown-christmas-racing-festival-1.2052281). See Michael Brennan, “Retired sports stars getting up to €100,000 in tax refunds,” Irish Independent, January 3, 2014 (www.independent.ie/irish-news/retired-sports-stars-getting-up-to-100000-in-taxrefunds-29884738.html). See especially Cronin (2005, 1999), O’Sullivan, Gratton and Kokolakis, Rouse, Sudgen and Bairner, Moorhouse, O’Carroll, Bairner (2004), Garnham, Harding, Reid, Billings, Hassan, and Mandle. See Cronin et al. (2009), and Cronin et al. (2009). See especially reports from the Department of Health, Indecon, the Central Statistics Office, and Sport Ireland.

Works cited Bairner, Alan. Ed. Sport and the Irish: Histories, Identities, Issues. UCD Press, 2004. Billings, Cathal. Athbheochan na Gaeilge agus an Spórt in Éirinn, 1884–1934. PhD thesis, UCD, 2015. Central Statistics Office. The Wellbeing of The Nation. Dublin, 2017. Cronin, Mike. “The Irish Free State and Aonach Tailteann.” Sport and the Irish. Edited by Alan Bairner. University College Dublin Press, 2005, pp. 53–84. Cronin, Mike. Sport and Nationalism in Ireland: Gaelic Games, Soccer and Irish Identity Since 1884. Four Courts Press, 1999. Cronin, Mike, Mark Duncan, and Paul Rouse. The GAA: A People’s History. Collins Press, 2009. Cronin, Mike, William Murphy, and Paul Rouse. Eds. The Gaelic Athletic Association, 1884–2009. Irish Academic Press, 2009. Department of Health. Prevalence of Drug Use and Gambling in Ireland and Drug Use in Northern Ireland 2014/15 Drug Prevalence Survey: Gambling Results. Dublin, 2015. GAA. GAA Official Guide. Dublin, 2019. Garnham, Neal. “Rugby and Empire in Ireland: Irish Reactions to Colonial Rugby Tours Before 1914.” Sport in History, Vol. 23, No. 1, 2009, pp. 107–114. Gratton, Chris and Themis Kokolakakis. Assessing the Economic Impact of Outdoor Recreation in Northern Ireland. Belfast, 2013. Harding, Timothy. “A Fenian Pastime’? Early Irish Board Games and Their Identification with Chess.” Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 37, No. 145, May 2010, pp. 1–22. Hassan, David. “Still Hibernia Irredenta? The Gaelic Athletic Association, Northern Nationalists and Modern Ireland.” Culture, Sport, Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2003, pp. 92–110. 343

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Indecon. Assessment of Economic Aspect of Sport in Ireland. Dublin, 2010. Mandle, W.F. The Gaelic Athletic Association and Irish Nationalist Politics, 1884–1924. Gill and MacMillan, 1987. Moorhouse, H.F. “One State, Several Countries: Soccer and Nationality in a ‘United’ Kingdom.” Tribal Identities: Nationalism, Europe, Sport. Edited by J. A. Mangan. Routledge, 1996, pp. 55–74. O’Carroll, Ross. The Gaelic Athletic Association 1914–1918. MA thesis, UCD, 2010. O’Sullivan, Sara. Ed. Contemporary Ireland: A Sociological Map. University College Dublin Press, 2008. Reid, Sean. “Identity and Cricket in Ireland in the Mid-Nineteenth Century.” Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2012, pp. 147–164. Rouse, Paul. Sport and Ireland: A History. Oxford University Press, 2015. Sport Ireland. Irish Sports Monitor 2015 Mid-Year Report. Dublin, 2010–2020. Sugden, John and Alan Bairner. Sport, Sectarianism and Society in a Divided Ireland. Leicester University Press, 1993.

Newspapers Irish Examiner Irish Independent Irish Mail on Sunday Irish Times Sunday Independent The42.ie

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Part VI

Theorizing

Introduction: theorizing In 1990, Seamus Deane collected Field Day pamphlets by Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said into a slim volume entitled Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, and began his introduction to the book by insisting that “we need a new discourse for a new relationship between our idea of the human subject and our idea of human communities” (3). Field Day, as Deane explains, was formed explicitly in response to what he defines as the “colonial crisis” in Northern Ireland (6); among the tripartite project’s “particular aims” was a reinterpretation of Irish culture that could uncover the insidious political mechanisms at work in the very idea of culture as a distillation of national essence. Seeking a new discourse with which to enact this reinterpretation was one way “to expose the history and function of that [political] idea and to characterize its disfiguring effects” on Irish experience (7). For Deane, the Field Day project more largely, and Irish Studies as a whole during this key period of its formation (~1990–2005), postcolonial theory became this “new discourse” and the interdisciplinary field’s primary theoretical tool for articulating the political refractions of Irish art, history, and culture. Although Irish Studies couldn’t ignore poststructuralist, feminist,1 and queer theory2 (not, however, for a lack of trying), and embraced Marxist and psychoanalytic theories primarily in their capacity to offer alternative means of disclosing the complicated reverberations of Ireland’s ongoing colonial condition,3 postcolonial theory remained the foremost theoretical discourse for locating Ireland within a global framework of uneven development, political violence, and the aesthetic innovation that emerges from these deep cultural and social fractures.4 While postcolonial theory remains an important interlocutor for Irish Studies, the field no longer sees Ireland’s colonial crisis isolated from the multiple global crises—like climate change, systemic racism, gender violence, and economic inequality—in which Ireland is an inevitable participant. The rise of the Celtic Tiger, which marked Ireland’s full emergence into Western neoliberal capitalism; its fall, which revealed the extent of Ireland’s obligations to the European Union; and the tides of social change in Ireland and beyond that emerged during the global recession and its uneven recovery have all necessitated new ways of thinking about Ireland’s global imbrications and have thus diversified the kinds of theoretical discourses that seem most

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pressing for Irish Studies to embrace. Although this section is the only one titled “Theorizing,” the Handbook as a whole demonstrates the ways in which Irish Studies since 2008 had become a more heterogeneously theoretical field: besides the chapters included in this section, chapters in the “Identities” section address intersections between Irish Studies and feminist theory, queer theory, and critical race studies,5 while chapters in the “Legacy” section approach the inherited crises of Irish history through the lenses of trauma theory, psychoanalysis, and eco-theory.6 But the chapters in “Theorizing” focus specifically on how the shape of the field might change if Irish Studies scholars commit to inhabiting theoretical perspectives that reshape the relationship between the human and the world: theoretical perspectives that Irish Studies is only nascently exploring, like animal studies, disability studies, and environmental studies. Several of the chapters here are structured as critical surveys rather than as theoretical disquisitions, introducing new scholarly archives and speculations that have the potential to open Irish Studies in different directions. Others demonstrate how deep theoretical investments can serve either as new aesthetic and ethical lenses through which to see Irish culture embedded in national, global, and planetary concerns, or as ways to hide from these very same concerns. But all of the chapters in this section expand the theoretical possibilities for Irish Studies and widen the scope of a field that sometimes struggles to look outward rather than inward. The section begins with two chapters that investigate the ecocritical turn in Irish Studies, both of which demonstrate the ethical value of rethinking Irish culture and history outside of an anthropocentric framework. Nessa Cronin’s chapter on Irish “environmentalities” serves as a call to action across disciplines, outlining the perils of an anthropocentric imaginary in our time of climate crisis. As she demonstrates, eco-criticism and the environmental humanities demand a radical reconfiguration of the relationship between people and the planet, one in which a capitalist, species-centric, extractivist perspective gives way to other structures of coexistence that no longer narrate the environment as external or subject to the human. Cronin argues that the arts and humanities are essential to this ontological project because their speculative and intersectional capacities open new ways of thinking across different communities and disciplines—the chapter’s concluding analysis of recent ecocritical work by Irish artists and Irish Studies scholars imagines the potential for Irish Studies to participate more fully in the projects of environmental and social justice that are the only things standing between the present and mass extinction. Maureen O’Connor’s chapter on Irish animal studies reiterates this call for Irish Studies to embrace the ethical and social mandates of the environmental humanities, but focuses specifically on the place of human/nonhuman animal relations within ecocriticism. The chapter looks both backwards and forwards, tracing the belatedness of Irish Studies’ engagement with animal studies to the centuries-long derogatory association of Irish people with animals and bestiality, while also revealing how essential animal studies is for challenging the terms of such an association. O’Connor delineates the connections between animal studies, gender studies, and queer theory, arguing that intersectional work across these three theoretical areas allows Irish Studies scholars to unmake binaries between self and other, nature and culture, and subject and object—binaries that have so often been violently invoked to the detriment of Ireland. As she suggests, a refusal to normalize the categorical distinction between human and animal enables a new ability to recognize that we are all part of a porous, dynamic, and relational planetary system, every aspect of which is necessary and valuable. The chapter ultimately demonstrates that such a reorientation enables both a renewed scholarly relationship with Irish art and literature and a more open engagement with the world around us. Elizabeth Grubgeld’s chapter on disability studies similarly argues that Irish Studies scholarship still has much to do in opening itself to diverse world perspectives: in this case, the diverse physical, aesthetic, and political experiences of the disabled community. She offers a precis of 346

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Irish Studies work that has approached the disabled body as symbolic or symptomatic of Ireland’s colonial condition, especially in relation to Irish modernism, but insists that disability needs to be understood as something beyond national allegory. Rather than using non-normative bodies to represent national narratives that ultimately exclude the lived experiences of such bodies, Grubgeld argues that embracing the concerns and theoretical interventions of disability studies will allow for revisionary scholarship that rethinks the archives, structures of institutional power, xenophobic rhetorics, and aesthetic forms that so often demarcate Irish Studies. As her final analysis of Christopher Nolan’s Under the Clock demonstrates, reading non-normative experience as aesthetically generative and powerfully subversive can fundamentally transform the way we understand language and its representational capacities. While the first three chapters in the section advocate for specific kinds of theoretical approaches to Irish literature and culture, Emma Radley’s chapter on Irish film and media studies traces a number of new theoretical trends that have changed the way scholars analyze media and the industries around it, including ecocriticism, biopolitics, memory studies, and media activism. The chapter argues that these new theoretical interventions have moved film and media studies away from a longstanding nationalism/transnationalism debate about how to define “Irish” in Irish cinema, and towards a broader set of questions about how Irish cinema can and should address the inequalities, ecological crises, and new histories that have emerged in the wake of the failure of Irish neoliberalism. Although the issue of “Irishness” has not vanished from cinema and media studies, Radley shows that it has been uprooted from the problematics of national identity and dispersed across the many social, economic, and political reverberations of the post-crash Irish state. Ultimately, the chapter reveals that Irish media studies’ long investment in the local/global binary has been subsumed into more pressing concerns with urban and rural ecologies, financial inequity, gender, race, and the ethical role of the film industry itself in this changing world. If each of these chapters argues for the potential for theory to produce genuine social change in the world, the final chapter of the section positions itself as a cautionary tale about the ways in which the seductions of theory can also blind us to the material economic and social realities of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. Seán Kennedy’s chapter on Donal Ryan’s 2012 novel The Spinning Heart uses psychoanalysis like sharpened needles, unpicking the economic pretenses of Ryan’s novel to reveal the Freudian hollows beneath them. Kennedy argues that while Ryan’s novel was lauded for perfectly encapsulating the trauma of the crash, it roots this trauma in an ageold, shame-filled crisis of Irish masculinity and misogyny rather than in an astute contemporary critique of Irish complicity in the neoliberal capitalist economy that actually caused the crash. In psychoanalytic terms, the novel is symptomatic of Ireland’s unwillingness to confront the real causes and repercussions of the crash, instead offering a familiar and, as Kennedy argues at the chapter’s end, fundamentally useless psychosexual drama in place of exposing and working through the real economic, cultural, and political conditions of twenty-first-century Ireland. In Kennedy’s reading, the novel’s outsized popularity reveals nothing about the crash itself and everything about Ireland’s resistance to real forms of accountability for it; it substitutes sin for economic crime, and the novel’s positive reception shows how happy the Irish public was to accept that substitution and call it “passionate” and “perceptive.” The force of Kennedy’s analysis lies in its capacity simultaneously to use the tools of psychoanalysis to uncover the novel’s repression of economic trauma and to identify the narratives of psychoanalysis as national impediments to any real economic and cultural transformation in the wake of the crash. Even if this final chapter maligns The Spinning Heart’s own “shameful” retreat into the dramas of psychoanalytic theory, it nonetheless masterfully demonstrates the power of theoretical thinking to reveal the complexities, traumas, and crises that it’s finally time for all of us to confront. 347

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Notes 1 Most famously, volumes 4 and 5 (Irish Women’s Writing and Tradition) of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing were produced in protest against the exclusion of much women’s writing (and section editing) from the original three volumes of the anthology. See Angela Bourke’s The Burning of Bridget Cleary (1999) for one of the foremost feminist interventions into the gender relations underpinning both the Irish historical record (oral and written) and the biases of Irish Studies and folklore studies. See Elizabeth Cullingford for an analysis of gender, class, and ethnicity in Irish literature and culture that she describes as a book that “makes use of theory but is not a book of theory” (3): “My Old Historicism,” she writes of her critical approach, “proved perfectly compatible with my new feminism” (4). See Patricia Coughlan for a comprehensive early twenty-first century analysis of the difficulty of locating space for feminist criticism within Irish postmodernity as well as the “troubled relationship between gender and canonicity” in Ireland and Irish studies (195). 2 See, for example, Nora Giffney and Anne Mulhall for pre-2008 assertions of the necessity to bring Irish Studies and queer theory into conversation with one another. 3 See especially Claire Connolly’s edited collection. For intersections between Marxist and postcolonial theory, see David Lloyd and Joe Cleary. For excellent examples of intersections between psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory, see Gerardine Meaney (feminist psychoanalysis, in particular) and Joseph Valente. 4 As Wanda Balzano, Anne Mulhall, and Moynagh Sullivan succinctly describe Irish Studies’ resistance to theory that isn’t Marxist or postcolonial (particularly feminist theory, queer theory, and postmodernism), “To embrace ‘theory’—issuing as it does from a Western epistemology that is the conceptual engine of imperial expansion—is to embrace the enemy, to bend yet again to an external authority” (xvii). 5 See chapters by Claire Bracken, Ed Madden, and Sarah L. Townsend in Part IV of this volume. 6 See chapters by Kathleen Costello-Sullivan, Margot Gayle Backus and Joseph Valente, and Malcolm Sen in Part VII of this volume.

Works cited Balzano, Wanda, Anne Mulhall, and Moynagh Sullivan, Eds. Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture. Palgrave, 2007. Bourke, Angela. The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story. Penguin Books, 1999. Bourke, Angela, et. al., General Eds. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vols. IV-V: Irish Women’s Writing and Tradition. Field Day Publications (New York University Press), 2002. Cleary, Joe. Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland. Field Day Publications, 2006. Connolly, Claire, Ed. Theorizing Ireland. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Coughlan, Patricia. “Irish Literature and Feminism in Postmodernity.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1/2, Spring/Fall 2004, pp. 175–202. Cullingford, Elizabeth. Ireland’s Others: Ethnicity and Gender in Irish Literature and Popular Culture (Critical Conditions 10). University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. Deane, Seamus. “Introduction.” Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature. Edited by Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward W. Said. University of Minnesota Press, 1990, pp. 3–19. Giffney, Nora. “Quare Theory.” Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture. Edited by Wanda Balzano, Anne Mulhall, and Moynagh Sullivan. Palgrave, 2007, pp. 197–209. Lloyd, David. Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment. Duke University Press, 1993. Lloyd, David. Ireland After History (Critical Conditions 9). Cork University Press, 1999. Meaney, Gerardine. Gender, Ireland, and Cultural Change: Race, Sex and Nation. Routledge, 2011. Mulhall, Anne. “Camping Up the Emerald Aisles: Queerness in Irish Popular Culture.” Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture. Edited by Wanda Balzano, Anne Mulhall, and Moynagh Sullivan. Palgrave, 2007, pp. 210–224. Valente, Joseph. Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood. University of Illinois Press, 2002. Valente, Joseph. The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1890–1922. University of Illinois Press, 2011.

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27 Environmentalities Speculative imaginaries of the Anthropocene Nessa Cronin

The “environmentality” problem In her essay, “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown,” Virginia Woolf famously commented that “on or about December, 1910, human character changed” (320). In October 2018, the timeline regarding the future of the human species, earth ecologies, and our planetary home dramatically contracted, and a more existential date was set for changing the future of planetary life. The landmark report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change set forth the reality of global warming that had been identified 30 years earlier and which now condensed the window of action to halt ecological catastrophe to 12 years. After 2030, the report stated, it would be difficult to contain, let alone reverse, the global heating of the planet and acidification of the earth’s oceans. In Spring 2019 another landmark report, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, was published by the United Nations which outlined that nature’s dangerous decline is “unprecedented” and that species extinction rates are “accelerating” with over 1 million animal and plant species threatened with extinction. Between the publication of these two reports we also saw the fast acceleration of public awareness on the issue of the climate and ecological emergency with the global spread of climate strikes (as inspired by the Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg) along with increased activities of environmental and climate action groups such as Extinction Rebellion.1 While Virginia Woolf ’s date of December 1910 signaled her marking of the beginnings of a revolution in modern literature, 2018–19 may soon be seen as the critical tipping point in which the climate and ecological crisis started to feel intensely personal for many citizens around the world. In 2018, Ireland became the first country in the world to divest from fossil fuels, and in 2019, Ireland became the second country internationally to declare a Climate Emergency. The argument that the Irish government was declaring an emergency solely in symbolic terms was one that resonated with the visual image of a near empty parliamentary chamber and did not go unobserved by commentators. In keeping with the Irish Free State’s narration of World War II as, “The Emergency,” the twenty-first-century response was a declaration of climate emergency and ecological collapse to an empty Dáil chamber consisting of only six members of the national parliament. The following week the Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil minority government issued two exploration licenses for fossil fuels in Ireland.2 349

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The history of the Irish landscape and its multifaceted environments is as long as it is contested. The deep history of geological time in Ireland has lent the island varied ecotopes, and its Atlantic position has bestowed it with a temperate climate (courtesy of the Gulf Stream) that belies its northerly latitude. Within a more recent timeframe, the complex history of being an island on the periphery of Europe, while also immediately neighboring a larger island, has always meant that Ireland has been an island-space that looks north-south as well as maneuvering east-west. Its foundation myths are full of conflicting and highly gendered narratives of “natives” and “newcomers” who made their homes on the island; with histories of settlers (the Milesians that arrived to displace the Tuatha Dé Danann who then sought refuge underground), migrants (St. Patrick the slave-savior coming to Ireland from Wales), and adventurers (St. Brendan leaving the island to discover other ones along the way to the New World). The human history of the Irish environment and its natural resources is one that has also been critically shaped, if not over-determined, by the history of colonialism from the late 1500s. This is a history that now occupies a haunted present with the neocolonial expressions of global capital that can be found across the country from family farms to city apartments facilitated by the financialization of Irish space that has accelerated since the 2008 global financial crisis. Research for this chapter began with an invitation to write about the Irish “environment,” but rapid challenges to our environmental future as witnessed throughout 2018–19 brought me to a sharp realization that a different kind of contribution and, indeed, a different kind of thinking was needed. The more international scientific reports and online critical commentaries I read, the more I became convinced that what was needed was not a discussion of the environment in Ireland, but an exploration of what I call “the environmentality problem.” What follows, then, is something that might sit more comfortably in a “field guide” rather than a “handbook”—as it seeks to keep a reflexive pivot open in terms of how we think, act, and live within Irish and planetary environments in the age of the Anthropocene. With this, I am reminded of Tim Robinson’s insistence that “ecocriticism should come into the academy with mud on its boots; otherwise it would be false to its axioms of personal and participatory openness to the natural world” as stated in his interview with Christine Cusick (210). This chapter therefore argues that a key issue at stake with our current planetary, climate, and ecological crisis is not the question of the “environment” per se, but rather of environmentalities. By this term I mean how we think about and have historically narrated the environment, as category, place, medium of living, and how this in turn has shaped our current social, cultural, and political mentalité. By “environmentality” I mean very simply how we frame and narrate both the concept and category of the environment. Ireland offers a useful site through which to rethink planetary environmentalities more generally, as it bears the legacy of a European tradition of externalizing the human relationship to the natural world, in addition to the colonial experience of displacement and eco-social dislocation. The 2008 global financial crisis brought with it a crisis of modernity, a crisis of identity, and the crisis of uncertain futures. A sovereign state, Ireland, had been brought to its knees and the International Monetary Foundation was called in to “rescue” it through a series of shock and awe tactics to help stabilize the eurozone and save the Irish body politic. The rest is now recent history as observed by David Lloyd in his comparative study of the representation of the PIIGS of the crash—Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain (Lloyd 137). After this, a new politics was promised, and part of this project to restore trust in the national body politic was the idea of envisioning a new relationship between the citizen and the state and so the idea of the Citizens’ Assembly was born. In 2011, Dr. Clodagh Harris of UCC developed an “academic experiment” entitled “We the People,” inspired by the work of Professor David Farrell at UCD. Out of this came the Irish Convention on the Constitution (2012–14) and The Citizens’ Assembly 350

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(2016–18).3 Issues discussed included, “How to plan for an aging population,” Marriage and LGBTQ Rights, “The Eighth Amendment,” and following an intervention by Green Party TD Eamon Ryan, a proposal was accepted to table the issue of “How the State can make Ireland a leader in tackling climate change.” Meetings for the Irish Climate Change Assembly took place in late 2017 with the final report and recommendations of the Assembly being laid before the Houses of the Oireachtas on April 18, 2018. An additional consideration to foreground here is the series of events initiated by the Irish Government to mark the Irish Decade of Centenaries that commenced in 2012 to publicly mark the politically significant events from the period 1912–22 that shaped the foundation of modern Ireland. This initiative set in train the idea of a “national conversation,” a conversation that would address the challenging and contested foundations of modern Ireland.4 Academic and political discussions as to the “origins” of the modern Irish state quickly became an opportunity for local communities and civic culture to both commemorate and critically interrogate a contested past, as evidenced by the 1916–2016 commemoration events in particular. The recent results of the Marriage and Repeal referenda (2015 and 2018, respectively) demonstrate how public discussion led the political debate, and I would strongly argue that the role of narrative (personal testimony, storytelling, and the reclaiming of individual, forgotten, and embodied pasts) was absolutely key to unlocking the experiences of many Irish citizens. The referenda results, in many ways, demonstrated the unintended outcomes of a different kind of “national conversation” that had perhaps been intended solely for more ideological purposes, and relied in no small part on transgenerational conversations about what it meant to be Irish today. In considering the Irish contemporary relationship to the environment (whether on local, national, or global scales), we therefore need to be mindful not just of the longer history of Irish “environmentalities” but also to be active earwitnesses to the current “national conversation” and to recognize the powerful, political agency of narrative across various visual, textual, and digital media. A reconfiguration of the relationships between people, place, and planet will demand new kinds of thinking and action to challenge received ways of being so that a post-carbon world can be created. This is a dance macabre of two dancing partners, where the urgency of the planet has to keep in step with the needs of particular peoples and places, and vice-versa. This chapter explores the relationship between climate, capital, and culture through the contemporary expression of “environmentalities” in twenty-first century Ireland. It firstly argues that the problem of “species thinking” (which is not just thinking as a species, but thinking around and of species) has been key in shaping a western ontological relationship to the environment. It then moves to an exploration of the problem of “scale jumping,” of the difficulty of thinking on large scales as Timothy Morton has argued in Hyperobjects, and how the problem of psychological and behavioral bias also makes it difficult for us to imagine the end of our species, let alone understand what we can even do about it. Finally, building on insights from speculative design practices and speculative fiction, the chapter argues for the need for “speculative imaginaries,” of new ways of thinking about the “wicked problem” of the climate and ecological emergency. It argues that critical arts and humanities’ scholarship is needed now more than ever to help create new imaginaries and new modes of thinking that are vitally needed to address the emergency in which we all now live.

Species thinking “Experimented all day; the subject is completely in my hands!”- John Tyndall, May 18, 1859, Basement Laboratory, Royal Institution, London. 351

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On September 10, 2018, the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres argued that climate change is “the defining issue of our time.”5 Slavoj Žižek argues that one can solve the universal problem (of the survival of the human species) only by first resolving the particular deadlock of the capitalist mode of production. . . . The key to the ecological crisis does not reside in ecology as such. (Žižek 334) The problem then, as Žižek observes, is not just about world ecology, environments, or climate, but in calling out the system that creates the problem in the first place, and in particular the narrative surrounding these categories and epistemes. It’s not the environment that is the problem per se, but western, neocolonial environmentalities—the modes in which we think, narrate, and relate to our environments. Here, I’m expanding on the work of South East Asian scholar Arun Agrawal who interrogates the making of environmental subjects and the production of technologies of power and self in Kumaon, India. As Agrawal explains: I use the term “environmentality” here to denote a framework of understanding in which technologies of self and power are involved in the creation of new subjects concerned about the environment. There is always a gap between efforts by subjects to fashion themselves anew and the technologies of power that institutional designs seek to consolidate. The realization of particular environmental subjectivities that takes place within this gap is as contingent as it is political. (166) The term environmentality is used here to describe both the process and efect of a Eurocentric and capitalogenic way of understanding and relating to the environment. The emphasis therefore lies in the discourse around the environment, rather than on the category of environment per se. I’m also using the term “environmentality” with the critical inflection informed by Michel Foucault’s ideas on governmentality and the development of the modern sovereign self, so that thinking about environmentalities is always already grounded in the assumed bifurcation of “society” versus “nature,” and in a problematic subject–object relationship. It is also instructive at this point to remind ourselves of the work of Nigerian writer and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who fought against the petrocapitalist power of Dutch Shell and argued how ecological degradation was connected to a form of eco- and ethnocide—he was primarily concerned with the future of Ogoniland and its then immanent eco-social ruin in the 1980s-90s. For Saro-Wiwa, environmental rights were inextricably connected to human rights and ideas of social justice. As Rob Nixon observes, Saro-Wiwa’s actions were “indicative of myriad non-Western environmental campaigns, locally motivated, locally led, and internationally inflected” (Nixon 2005, 243). Ireland has witnessed its own locally led and internationally inflected environmental campaigns, from the controversy over the building of the M3 motorway through the sacred landscape of the Tara complex, to the ongoing damage experienced with the Shell Corrib gas refinery in North West Ireland in Bellnaboy, County Mayo, to recent concerns about the importation of fracked gas at the Shannon LNG terminal between Tarbert and Ballylongford in County Kerry. Other kinds of non-western environmentalities are of course possible, as evidenced from indigenous ways of being and relationships to the world, particularly those that foreground a more stewardship-based model of an eco-social coexistence. The environmental crisis is not just a question of public confidence in climate science but is ostensibly also a crisis in relation to the value-system of a world that has increasingly 352

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instrumentalized limited planetary resources, whether they are natural, territorial, or biological. The crisis can therefore be seen as one expression of the death drive, signaling a potential demise that is already driving us towards ecocide as argued in Elizabeth Kolbert’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning work, The 6th Extinction: An Unnatural History, where she argues that the Earth is in the middle of an accelerated, human-made, mass extinction event. Kolbert’s observations on mass species extinction translate to the effects that the climate crisis has for the human species in terms of food security and global geopolitics, thereby predicting a type of ecologically related genocide later in this century, as seen with the 2015 migrant crisis, the deeply troubling subsequent narrative of “lifeboat economics,” and the uneven distribution of power and resources to different populations.6 This is not just then a question of science or epistemology, but rather an ontological, first order question of rethinking our relationship to ourselves, other species, and the planet. With this, it could be argued that we are on the cusp of a new age of ontological transitioning, of rethinking human subjectivity and the “self ” in relation to “nature” and the perceived externality of “environments”—from microbiotic levels, to emergent AI technologies, scaling all the way up to interplanetary considerations. With this, we also have to take into account how the contemporary environments in which we live operate as “exoskeletons,” as observed by environmental lawyer Jed Britton-Purdy.7 In his book, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, Britton-Purdy argues that we are an “infrastructure species,” a category he uses to describe our physical and technological relationship to the world we have created and live in. The debate about the Age of the Anthropocene, since the term was first introduced in 2000, has been much discussed in the public arena by scientists, writers, and public commentators such as Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, George Monbiot, and David Attenborough, amongst others. Even Pope Francis has entered the fray with his Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality: On Care for our Common Home, urging the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics to address the environmental crisis in 2015. More recently, however, the debate has taken a turn to critically interrogate the human-centered aspect of the debate as currently formulated. Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel argue that the first task to address is that of conceptual rigor, and that the term should be reframed as the “Capitalocene,” as “anthropos” assumes a universality that is highly problematic, particularly when “humankind” as a geological epoch-forming force ostensibly translates as European man during the age of capital.8 While Andreas Malm was the first to originate the term, and others such as Donna Haraway have engaged with it to develop her own terminologies such as “Chthulucene,” Moore is the first scholar to fully explore its implications in terms of world-systems theory and challenging the accepted now dominant status of the term “Anthropocene” in scholarly and popular discourse. In his earlier work, Capitalism in the Web of Life, Moore argued that constitutive historical relations have brought the planet to its present age of extinction (Moore 2015). In anthropocenic thought history is often the first casualty, and what Moore calls the “Popular Anthropocene” (“a way of thinking the origins and evolution of modern ecological crisis”) is but “the latest of a long series of environmental concepts whose function is to deny the multi-species violence and inequality of capitalism and to assert that the problems created by capital are the responsibility of all humans” (Moore 2016). The politics of the Anthropocene, he asserts, “is resolutely committed to the erasure of capitalism and the capitalogenesis of planetary crisis” (Moore 2016). Capitalism, in this formulation, operates as a world-ecology of power, capital, and nature. To further problematize the concept of the Anthropocene, Moore acknowledges and draws on the work of feminist scholarship in particular that seeks to interrogate the foundational enlightenment duality of Nature (Nature without “us”) and Society (“us” without Nature). Critiques by scholars ranging from Bruno Latour’s work on the sociology of science to the philosophical enquiries of Isabelle Stengers foreground the idea that humans, as a planetary 353

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species, are part of the eco-social story. In Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, Ursula K. Heisse similarly argues that the conceptualization of the human species as the agent of deep history is “an essentialist misconception on the part of natural scientists” as it “merely obfuscates the operations of economic power” (222). While the science on climate change “is in,” it is argued here that science alone can’t make change happen, which is why a critical, reflexive, and socially engaged approach is needed to address this existentially “wicked problem.” As historical geographer David N. Livingstone observes, “statistics don’t bleed” (304), and so more immediate ways of thinking and engaging are required. Moore and Patel argue that we can learn much from social justice movements and indigenous rights activism that search for equality and reparation for historical violences and injustices. They argue that if change is to come it “will come through the struggles of people on the ground for which they fight,” and “if politics are to transform, they must begin where people currently find themselves” (Moore and Patel 2018), thus advocating a place-based environmental ethics and politics.

Scale jumping If the structural relations between climate, capital, and culture created the environmentality problem, then what is required is a recalibration of the language surrounding those relationships. Key to understanding this is the problem of scale. As humans, however, we tend to think in more limited and finite terms. Timothy Morton has talked about the impossibility of understanding or apprehending what he calls “hyperobjects,” entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place, such as geological time, with climate change being the most dramatic example of a hyperobject in our time. Related to questions of scale are questions of speed, and as Timothy Clarke has noted in his now seminal work on “Derangements of Scale,” it is very difficult to feel something that is beyond our scale of immediate cognitive awareness and mode of thinking. Studies exploring the psychology of climate change denial by the Australian Psychological Association demonstrate the problem of how we are hard-wired as a species to react fast to things that happen quickly (fight or flight) and react slowly to things we cannot see or perceive (climate change).9 In her recent work, In Catastrophic Times, Isabelle Stengers argues that we are living with the looming ecological crisis produced by the status quo, and that we have created a new global apartheid where the worlds’ poorest have been disproportionately affected by climate change. Yet somehow, we feel paralyzed and unable to do anything about it, living instead in a state of “cold panic” (32). These cognitive biases manifest themselves in terms of subjective, spatial, and temporal scales—“I can’t see it,” “It’s too far away from me,” or, “That happened a long time ago and has nothing to do with me in the here and now.” One of the issues has been the flattening of earth narratives and globalizing of spaces. Visually this performs a kind of shutterstock effect where one flood event comes to stand in for all flood events, one wild fire disaster zone becomes a metonym for climate catastrophe everywhere. The “Anthropocene” begins to mean the same thing everywhere, rather than having particular affects due to local conditions and experiences, with particularities pertaining to specific histories, geographies, cultures, and societies. This has the additional “cold panic” and disturbing effect of spatially distancing experience and temporally paralyzing action at the same time. Such problems of scale manifest themselves in three distinct ways. Firstly, climate change can often seem distant in space. Most people tend to see the worst environmental problems as being global or far away from them (Leviston et al., 35). However, as David Uzzell observed, people’s feelings of responsibility for the environment are greatest at the local or neighborhood level. Secondly, people can also see climate change as being distant in time. The worst impacts 354

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are often seen to be “far off ” in “another time” so it feels distant from everyday or immediate concerns. In such scenarios, individuals are less likely to take action to protect themselves and their environments as they are unable to process the connection between their lifeworld and the world of global heating. Finally, climate change can also feel politically and culturally distant, not a problem that individuals can easily solve from where they are currently situated unless they are being directly affected. As a global problem that requires global solutions, and with the radical compression of a time-scale in which we can do anything to change the trajectory to under 10 years, the responsibility for collective change has to rest ultimately with world leaders, national governments, global organizations, and multinational corporations that have the most responsibility for doing something about it, and not just citizens at an individual level.10 The problem then is will the change that is radically needed come, and if it does, will it come fast enough? The answer lies somewhere, I would argue, in a form of intersectional thinking that is critically informed feminist, postcolonial, and multispecies ontologies. This intersectional thinking would allow us to reconfigure inter-species relationships to reconsider a new way of “being and belonging with” and how we live on a planetary basis, and even possibly with intra-planetary translations across space and time in the future as speculated by Michael Cronin in Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene. What I argue here is not just an epistemological readjustment in thinking above and beyond the human, but is ostensibly a radically different ontological shift sideways, to think with and through different scales of time and space, as forms of inter- and intra-species ontologies, relationalities, and ways of being and belonging. And so, a new vocabulary and imaginary is needed, fusing the knowledge of science with the critical insights of the arts and humanities, to explore what a more ecologically secure world might look, sound, and feel like. This is the need to create speculative imaginaries to deal with the environmentality problem; new forms of knowledge and new modes of enquiry that bear witness to the past and honor the present which have the imaginative force to shape our shared planetary futures.11

Speculative imaginaries: the art and science of climate change “The crisis of climate change calls on academics to rise above their disciplinary prejudices, for it is a crisis of many dimensions.” (Chakrabarty 215)

Environmental Humanities research in Ireland has been shaped largely through the lens of literary ecocriticism and historical scholarship and is primarily seen as an anglophone endeavor. In his review of the 2014 joint conference of the American Conference of Irish Studies and Canadian Associations of Irish Studies, Malcolm Sen queries whether post-crash Ireland would lead to questions as to how existing ecocritical vocabularies and theories “fit” within an Irish context. Sen notes that Ecocriticism, as a term, is already prone to evoke images of universal and personal harmony with ‘nature,’ images more suitable to the counter culture of the 1960s than to a quickly warming planet plagued by rising sea levels, widespread deforestation, escalating hunger, and a future where futurity itself is under doubt. In their introduction to a special issue on Irish Environmental Humanities in the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Maureen O’Connor and Derek Gladwin observe that the ways we perceive and imagine our environmental futures depends on who controls the social narrative of our time, or the “zeitgeist”. The arts and humanities, including poetry, 355

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photography, cultural geography, and history, have the power to change such perceptions and influence environmental policy. (39) In a recent survey of Irish Studies scholarship dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the journal Irish Studies Review in 2018, Gerardine Meaney observes that, “The threads that weave the future can connect apparently incommensurate pasts. Irish Studies has always had a productive slipperiness at its heart,” and that “There is still a role for productive haunting” (433, 434). On such productive hauntings she maintains that, “Writers and artists do not speak for nations, but they do speak to them in ways which get beneath and beyond ideological reflexes” (434). Finally, she argues that, In the age of anthropocene studies, we can imagine Irish Studies scholars of the future collaborating much further across disciplines to track the environmental history of Ireland and the Irish and its relationship to cultural, economic, social, and political developments. (434) The recognition of the need to move across and beyond academic disciplines to examine such interconnected ecologies and how these may be reconstituted to sustain alternative futures in an Irish context is what is demanded of an engaged Irish Studies scholarship in this time of planetary crisis. Questions, then, about what is adequate, what is necessary, and what is relevant, come to the fore. As Sharae Deckard has astutely observed, the economic regime of capitalism in the Irish context has followed a trajectory “from farming to pharma to financialization” (148). But, as Michael Paye notes in relation to Irish Studies scholarship, “ecocritical engagements have been less likely to tackle the latter two phenomena [pharma and financialization], with notions of pastoral, land-ownership, urban poverty and colonialism the main drivers in Irish ecocritical engagement” (199). The key point to note here is that Irish artists since the Celtic Tiger period have already been actively engaging with Deckard’s trilogy of farming, pharma, and financialization, in critically examining a post-pastoral vision of Ireland but most of this work has initially taken place in the realm of visual and socially engaged arts practice than arguably in the realms of literature, music, theater, or film over the last two decades.12 Visual artists in Ireland were among the first groups to document and reflect on what was happening to Irish communities and landscapes during and after the Celtic Tiger period and have been remarkably prescient in many ways in foregrounding the relationship between climate, capital, and culture in their work. The work of Bernadette Keating, Anthony Haughey, Deirdre O’Mahony, Cathy Fitzgerald, Monica de Bath, and Fiona Woods immediately come to mind, considerations of which have been explored by new visual arts scholars such as Jeannine Kraft. Looking back now, it seems from one perspective that visual artists working in Ireland with a place-based arts practice were the canaries in the coal mine alerting us to the degradation of the Irish landscape during the Celtic Tiger period. From looking back to looking forward. In view of the forthcoming 40th anniversary of the establishment of the Field Day Theatre Company (established in 1980), has the time therefore come for a New Field Day for Ireland, one that acknowledges and addresses a scorched, drowned, and toxified earth? Science has given us the data and statistics of earth systems modeling but, as evidenced from the last three decades, this does not seem to have the power on its own to affect real change. This is where the voices from arts and humanities scholars are needed. In an interview with Stephanie Lemanager, Rob Nixon argues that the work of Environmental 356

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Humanities is primarily about “the act of witnessing, in trying to bring a harsh story into the light” (n.p.). He insists on the importance of highlighting how people are engaging with the Anthropocene “curatorially,” and how “creative people are using objects to try to release stories about the Anthropocene that have the capacity to inform and surprise” (n.p.). But such arts practices and scholarship can and, arguably must, do more than just bear witness, inform, and surprise—such work is now freighted with a moral imprimatur to rethink received narratives and create new ones better fitted for a twenty-first century planet in crisis. Since the 2000s, the work of Irish artist, scholar, and curator Fiona Woods has been concerned with “how can change occur and what role can art play in bringing it about?”13 On the ecological aesthetic at play in her work, she writes, I am interested in the idea of a coming politics, one that is not disastrous for non-human life. In an effort to locate alternative places from which to think about the world and its conditions, my work proposes a liminal zone of indeterminacy between the human and non-human worlds. (Woods n.p.) Her 2011 Walking Silvermines project based in County Tipperary engaged with local memory of silver mining in the region and reimagined what it might be to reinhabit or breathe new life into such a postindustrial landscape. In her 2010 work COMMON? Woods explores the implications of interspecies relationships, with photographic images of figures that are part human and part animal framed with species-probing titles questioning what it is to be human and animal at the same time. Her work also brings up the ethics of human and non-human animal relationships (in particular, food production and consumption) and foregrounds an experiential and embodied state of climate change that plays with the “subjective” and the “universal” (bodies in her work are non-human individuated). Such images evoke wider questions of how we treat the “other” within, and human and non-human species as future climate refugees. Another Irish artist, scholar, and curator who has foregrounded place-based practices in her work and has become increasingly concerned with the implications of climate change for rural futures is Deirdre O’Mahony. Her socially-engaged artwork SPUD (2009–19) explores the past, present, and future of the potato in Ireland, Europe, and the Americas through transnational community practices. This work led to a series of collaborative projects, commissioned artworks, and installations in Ireland and overseas involving the planting, growing, and eating of the lumper potato, with some of the artworks being “exhibited” at Strokestown House, “nurtured” in the gardens of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and “consumed” at the Frieze London Artfair (amongst other sites and venues) since the project’s inception in 2009.14 This brought O’Mahony to consider the future of food production in Ireland in relation to food security and sustainability in her more recent work, Speculative Optimism (2017–18).15 Speculative Optimism was produced while O’Mahony was on a Welcome Foundation Livestock Residency in 2017 at the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) and based at the University of Reading. The project began with the question of whether “carbon-neutral” beef is possible. Speculative Optimism is a poetic film essay produced from O’Mahony’s speculative enquiries into this question. Refusing a singular position or narrative, the film relies on visual associations inspired by the imagery used to provide unexpected insights into the complexities of global food production and our relationship to resource-intensive farming today. The work of visual artists such as Woods and O’Mahony helps us critically rethink the ecological situation in which we find ourselves at this time. Their work is embedded within a growing international community of artists, activists, and scholars working at the intersection 357

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between relational aesthetics and eco-social art practices. This shifting of approaches to producing and engaging with art and the implications for communities in which such works are situated involves a more democratized vision to appear. As visual arts theorist Grant Kestor posits, An alternative approach would require us to locate the moment of indeterminateness, of open-ended and liberatory possibility, not in the perpetually changing form of the artwork qua object, but in the very process of communication and solidarity that the artwork catalyzes. (90) Such artworks help us to think counterclockwise and challenge received narratives while also fashioning new languages (visual, verbal, virtual) that keep space open for the speculative imaginaries of a more eco-social and equitable future.

Conclusion: challenging climates We are at risk of being blown backwards into a dystopian future of our present creation. The specter of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History haunts our present where the climate emergency can be seen in many respects as being a crisis of the logic of Capital. As Kenneth Boulding stated in the United States Congress as part of the hearings on the Energy Reorganization Act in 1973, “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”16 The risks associated with climate and capital are neatly encapsulated by what Kenneth McLeod termed as “a globalised economic ponzi scheme.”17 Issues of social justice and public policy therefore need to be incorporated into any environmental reformulation, concerns that Jason Moore and Raj Patel have recently championed with their call for ecological reparations for communities suffering disproportionately from the effects of climate change (2017). Following such discussions, the following observations are offered as possible areas to explore and examine at this time of climate and ecological crisis. Firstly, is the need for critical and reflective scholarship, to acknowledge that all knowledge is historically, geographically, and culturally “situated” and has direct implications for climate and environmental narratives. Secondly, building on the insights from Kestor and relational aesthetics, we need to place an increased value on engaged and reflexive scholarship, and to harness the potential of an eco-social arts practice to address issues of social and climate justice in order to build consensual social policy, one that is place-based, community co-designed, and eco-socially inclusive. Finally, and possibly most importantly, we need to make and conserve space for speculative imaginaries and transformative narratives and modes of being—for meaningful transdisciplinary work across the Arts and Sciences, between civil society organizations, communities, and scholars. This entails a radical rethink of our collective environmentalities and our relationships to ourselves and to lives on our planet. But, as we learned in October 2018, we now only have a decade left to get it right before it all goes permanently wrong.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank the staff and students at the Keogh-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies and the Environmental Change Initiative, University of Notre Dame, where an early version of this chapter was given during a Visiting Fellowship in February 2019. Thanks are also due to my second year BA students at NUI Galway where many of the ideas discussed earlier were 358

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road-tested and passionately debated on a weekly basis in my “Irish Landscapes and Literatures” seminar. Comments offered by Professor Gerry Kearns, Dr. Cathy Fitzgerald, and Professor Karen E. Till during the “Art & the Capitalocene” panel at the EUGEO International Conference, May 2019, have also greatly refined my thinking on this subject. Finally, I would like to thank Professor Anna Tsing and her reflections shared with me on different ways of being and thinking through the ecological crises during our roundtable panel, “Multiple Ontologies and Nonscalable Worlds,” at the Art in the Anthropocene international conference at Trinity College, Dublin, June 2019. This research was in part funded by the Research Support Scheme at NUI Galway and the Irish Research Council.

Notes 1 I am here following the style guidelines as issued by The Guardian on May 17, 2019. Damien Carrington, “Why the Guardian is changing the language it uses about the environment”. www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/17/why-the-guardian-is-changing-the-languageit-uses-about-the-environment 2 Kevin O’Sullivan, “Ryan criticises Government for issuing two new fossil fuel exploration licences,” Irish Times, May 28, 2019. 3 On the background and origins to this see www.citizenassembly.ie/about/ 4 See the Decade of Centenaries website, www.decadeofcentenaries.com/. The year-long national commemoration of the 1916 Easter Rising was framed in terms of a “National Conversation” in a series of events hosted by NUI Galway in November 2016. 5 António Guterres, “Secretary-General’s remarks on Climate Change,” September 10, 2018. www.un.org/ sg/en/content/sg/statement/2018-09-10/secretary-generals-remarks-climate-change-delivered 6 As discussed previously by this author and TD Éamonn Ryan at a panel discussion on Environmental Humanities and Climate Action, Panel on Climate Action, Trinity College, Dublin, February 17, 2017, chaired by Dr Derek Gladwin. “Lifeboat economics” refers to the uneven experience of climate change on different populations, with economics and power determining who will survive. 7 “The Green New Deal Is What Realistic Environmental Policy Looks Like”, Jedediah Britton-Purdy. The New York Times, Feb 14, 2019. www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/opinion/green-new-deal-ocasiocortez-.html 8 Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel, “Unearthing the Capitalocene,” January 4, 2018. www.resilience.org/ stories/2018-01-04/unearthing-the-capitalocene-towards-a-reparations-ecology/ 9 See a discussion of this by the Australian Psychological Society, “The Psychology of Climate Change,” in relation to their Resources for Advocacy on Climate Change, www.psychology.org.au/AboutUs/What-we-do/advocacy/Advocacy-social-issues/Environment-climate-change-psychology/ Resources-for-Psychologists-and-others-advocating/The-psychology-of-climate-change-denial 10 This is noted in “The Climate Change Empowerment Handbook,” from the Australian Psychological Society, p. 6. www.psychology.org.au/getmedia/88ee1716-2604-44ce-b87a-ca0408dfaa12/Climatechange-empowerment-handbook.pdf?utm_medium=PromoTile&utm_source=website 11 Such transdisciplinary work is already underway with The Mapping Spectral Traces Collaborative, www.mappingspectraltraces.org/ 12 See Nessa Cronin (2018). 13 See, the artist statement of Fiona Woods, www.fionawoods.net/statement.htm 14 On Deirdre O’Mahony’s SPUD project see, www.deirdre-omahony.ie/biog/42-artworks/2000-s/61spud.html and a review of her work in, Frank McNally, “The Art of the Potatoes—An Irishman’s Diary,” Irish Times, May 25, 2016. 15 On Speculative Optimism see, www.deirdre-omahony.ie/works-and-projects/2000s/42-artworks/2000-s/ 143-speculative-optimism.html 16 Attributed to Kenneth Boulding in United States Congress, House (1973), Energy reorganization act of 1973: Hearings, Ninety-Third Congress, first session, on H.R. 11510, p. 248. As cited in Kenneth McLeod, “Learning to Think Like a Planet”, Anthropocene Transitions Program Discussion Paper, October 2018, p. 5. https://iiraorg.com/2018/10/21/learning-to-think-like-a-planet/ 17 Kenneth McLeod, “Learning to Think Like a Planet,” Anthropocene Transitions Program Discussion Paper, October 2018, p. 1. 359

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Works cited Agrawal, Arun. “Environmentality: Community, Intimate Government, and the Making of Environmental Subjects in Kumaon, India.” Current Anthropology, Vol. 46, No. 2, April 2005, pp. 161–190. Attenborough, David. “The Garden of Eden is No More.” World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, January 21, 2019. www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/david-attenborough-transcript-from-crystalaward-speech/ As (Accessed June 19, 2019). Boulding, Kenneth. Energy Reorganization Act of 1973: Hearings, Ninety-Third Congress, first Session, on H.R. 11510, p. 248, as cited in Kenneth McLeod, “Learning to Think Like a Planet.” Anthropocene Transitions Program Discussion Paper, October 2018, p. 5. https://iiraorg.com/2018/10/21/learning-to-think-likea-planet/ (Accessed June 19, 2019). Britton-Purdy, Jedediah. “The Green New Deal Is What Realistic Environmental Policy Looks Like.” The New York Times, February 14, 2019. www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/opinion/green-new-deal-ocasiocortez-.html (Accessed June 19, 2019). Carrington, Damien. “Why the Guardian Is Changing the Language It Uses about the Environment.” The Guardian, May 17, 2019. www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/17/why-the-guardian-ischanging-the-language-it-uses-about-the-environment. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 2, Winter 2009, pp. 197–222. DOI: 10.1086/596640 Clarke, Timothy. “Derangements of Scale.” Telemorphosis Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1. Edited by Tom Cohen. Open Humanities Press, An imprint of MPublishing, University of Michigan Library, 2012, pp. 148–166. http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/download/Cohen_2012_Telemorphosis. pdf (Accessed June 19, 2019). Cronin, Michael. Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene. Routledge, 2017. Cronin, Nessa. “Archaeologies of the Future: Landscapes of the new Ireland in Gerard Donovan’s Country of the Grand.” The Irish Review, Vol. 54, Spring 2018, pp. 80–93. Cusick, Christine. “Mindful Paths: An Interview with Tim Robinson.” Out of the Earth: Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts. Edited by Christine Cusick. Cork University Press, 2010, pp. 205–211. Deckard, Sherae. “World-Ecology and Ireland: The Neoliberal Ecological Regime.” Journal of WorldSystems Research, Vol. 22, No. 1, 2016, pp. 145–176. https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2016.641. Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Edited by Graham Burchel, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller. University of Chicago Press, 1991. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. University of Chicago Press, 2012. Gladwin, Derek and Maureen O’Connor. “Irish Studies and the Environmental Humanities.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 40, 2017, pp. 38–49. Guterres, António. “Secretary-General’s remarks on Climate Change.” United Nations, September 10, 2018. www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/statement/2018-09-10/secretary-generals-remarks-climate-changedelivered (Accessed June 19, 2019). Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities, Vol. 6, 2015, pp. 159–165. Heisse, Ursula K. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. University of Chicago Press, 2016. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Special Report on Global Warming.” October 2018. https://report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_spm_final.pdf (Accessed July 15, 2019). Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform. “Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Report.” May 2019. www.ipbes.net/global-assessment-report-biodiversity-ecosystem-services (Accessed July 15, 2019). Kester, Grant. Conversation Pieces. University of California Press, 2004. Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything. Penguin Books, 2015. Kolbert, Elizabeth. The 6th Extinction: An Unnatural History. Henry Holt and Company, 2014. Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Harvard University Press, 1987. Leviston, Zoe, Murni Greenhill, and Iain Walker. Australian Attitudes to Climate Change and Adaptation: 2010–2014. Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Canberra, 2015. https://doi.org/10.4225/08/584af21158fe9 Livingstone, David. The Geographical Tradition Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise. Blackwell, 1992. 360

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Lloyd, David. “Of PIGS and Archipelagoes.” Synthesis: An Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies, No. 9, 2016, pp. 137–145. https://doi.org/10.12681/syn.16230. Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Verso, 2016. McKibben, Bill. Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? Henry Holt and Co., 2019. McLeod, Kenneth. “Learning to Think Like a Planet.” Anthropocene Transitions Program Discussion Paper, October 2018. McNally, Frank. “The Art of the Potatoes: An Irishman’s Diary.” Irish Times, May 25, 2016. Meaney, Gerardine. “Invisible Borders: Irish Studies in its Places. Irish Studies Review at 25.” Edited by Neil Sammells, Irish Studies Review, Vol. 26, No. 4, 2018, pp. 431–435. Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso, 2015. Moore, Jason W. “Name the System! Anthropocenes & the Capitalocene Alternative.” October 9, 2016. https://jasonwmoore.wordpress.com/2016/10/09/name-the-system-anthropocenes-the-capitalocenealternative/ (Accessed June 19, 2019). Moore, Jason W. and Raj Patel. A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature and the Future of the Planet. University of California Press, 2017. Moore, Jason W. and Raj Patel. “Unearthing the Capitalocene: Towards a Reparations Ecology.” January 4, 2018. www.resilience.org/stories/2018-01-04/unearthing-the-capitalocene-towards-a-reparationsecology/ (Accessed June 19, 2019). Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Nixon, Rob. “Environmentalism and Pastoralism.” Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Edited by Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty. Duke University Press, 2005. https://doi. org/10.1215/9780822386650-011. Nixon, Rob, interview with Stephanie LeMenager. “The Environmental Humanities and Public Writing: An Interview with Rob Nixon.” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, Vol. 1, No. 2, June 2014, n.p. O’Mahony, Deirdre. “Speculative Optimism 2017–18—Museum of English Rural Life, University of Leeds, and the Welcome Trust, UK.” www.deirdre-omahony.ie/works-and-projects/2000s/42-artworks/ 2000-s/143-speculative-optimism.html (Accessed June 19, 2019). O’Sullivan, Kevin. “Ryan Criticises Government for Issuing Two New Fossil Fuel Exploration Licences.” Irish Times, May 28, 2019. www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/ryan-criticises-government-forissuing-two-new-fossil-fuel-exploration-licences-1.3907390 (Accessed June 2, 2019). Paye, Michael. “Ireland and Ecocriticism: Towards a Trajectory.” Green Letters, Vol. 19, No. 2, 2015, pp. 198–205. https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2015.1024020. Pope Francis. Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality: On Care for our Common Home. Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2015. Saro-Wiwa, Ken. Genocide in Nigeria: The Ogoni Tragedy. Saros, 1992. Sen, Malcolm. “The Future of Irish Studies.” Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies, July 4, 2014. https:// breac.nd.edu/articles/the-future-of-irish-studies/. Siggins, Lorna. Once Upon a Time in the West: The Corrib Gas Controversy. Penguin Books, 2010. Stengers, Isabelle. In Catastrophic Times. Open Humanities Press, 2015. http://openhumanitiespress.org/ books/download/Stengers_2015_In-Catastrophic-Times.pdf (Accessed January 10, 2019). Uzzell, David. “The Psycho-Spatial Dimension of Global Environmental Problems.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, Vol. 20, No. 4, 2000, pp. 307–318. Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays, Volume I. The Hogarth Press, 1966. Woods, Fiona. www.fionawoods.net/statement.htm.

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28 Irish animal studies at the turn of the twenty-first century Maureen O’Connor

Pangur Bán is a famous cat who lived in the ninth century and about whom an Irish monk wrote an eponymous poem.1 The poem shuttles between the cat’s hunting behaviors and the poet’s own intellectual pursuits, activities presented as comparable if not practically interchangeable. Seamus Heaney’s translation of the Old Irish original opens, “Pangur Bán and I at work,/ Adepts, equals, cat and clerk.” Such warm familiarity and respectful honoring of the nonhuman animal has been a part of Irish culture from pre-Christian times when wealth and status were measured in cattle, and the gods regularly assumed the form of deer, hares, boars, ravens, and wolves. However, this close affinity with animals helped rationalize the centuries-long tradition of representing the Irish as themselves not fully human, especially by English occupiers and colonizers. In 1188, an early commentator on the exotic Irish, the clergyman and historian Geraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales), published Topography of Ireland, a chronicle frequently enlivened by fantastic accounts of encounters with imaginary creatures like werewolves and oxen-men, but which was nevertheless considered the authoritative work on Ireland until the seventeenth century. In it, Cambrensis says of the natives that they are “a rude people, subsisting on the produce of their cattle only, and living themselves like beasts,” who are, moreover, “incorrigibly addicted to the sin of carnal intercourse with beasts” (70, 39). The trope of the bestial Irish achieved special urgency during the latter half of the nineteenth century, following the Great Hunger (the famine of 1845–49) and the subsequent rise of the Fenian movement, which agitated for Irish independence, often through acts of violent terror. The Irish terrorist as monstrous ape-creature continued to serve as visual shorthand into the era of the Northern Irish Troubles in the latter half of the twentieth century. Perhaps at least partly for these reasons, the field of Animal Studies has been slow to take hold in Irish academia, while elsewhere in ecocritical studies it was gaining momentum around the time Ireland was visited by that temperamental and rapacious creature, the Celtic Tiger. Animal Studies is a multi- and transdisciplinary area of inquiry that not only interrogates cruel practices of the material abuse and exploitation of animals, but also considers the cultural, imaginary uses to which animals are put, their role in defining and purifying the human animal, and the ramifications of the wider structures and technologies of oppression enabled by a humancentered ethics that denies subjectivity and self-determination to those considered nonhuman. Animal Studies as a distinct and defined yet multidisciplinary field has only developed since the 362

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late twentieth century and has its roots in animal rights advocacy, codified in the Anglophone world since the early nineteenth century; the mid-twentieth-century environmental movement, as well as its associated academic discipline of ecocriticism (a central part of Environmental Humanities); and continental philosophy, especially Jacques Derrida’s twenty-first-century work, written toward the end of his career. The first animal protection legislation, the “Act to Prevent the Cruel and Improper Treatment of Cattle” of 1822, also known as “Martin’s Act,” was largely the work of Richard “Humanity Dick” Martin, a member of British Parliament from Galway, Ireland. He was also active in the campaign against slavery and a champion of the rights of Roman Catholics in Ireland, a promoter of Catholic Emancipation. Martin believed in respecting and securing the inherent rights of animals as well as black Africans and the “native” Catholic Irish, two groups seen in his time as little “better” than animals. Martin is often identified as one of the “fathers” of Animal Studies. Ireland is certainly not the only historical victim of colonialism’s dehumanization of its others, but the longstanding predominance of the rural in defining Irish culture and “authentic” Irish identity has also contributed to the development of a conflicted attitude toward the nonhuman, implicitly associated with both the humiliations of colonial occupation and the embarrassing survival of cartoonish images of thick, bumpkin “Paddy,” who enjoyed suspiciously congenial relations with his pig. Despite the rich and complex possibilities for discursive analysis presented by Ireland’s historical, political, and cultural negotiations of its relationship with nonhuman animals, Animal Studies is an area of inquiry only beginning to emerge as a significant strand of Irish Studies, which itself has only engaged meaningfully in ecocritical work of any kind since the turn of the current century, and then mostly focusing on representations of landscape. Outside of academia, the Irish animal has proven to be of significant interest to the reading public in the twenty-first century. Kieran Hickey’s Wolves in Ireland: A Natural and Cultural History (2011) was a popularly successful study of the history of wolves in Ireland, tracing their appearance in the historical record, the archaeological record, and in cultural productions. Similarly, the bestselling 2018 memoir The Cow Book: A Story of Life on a Family Farm by John Connell, elaborates personal, national, and even international histories, connected through the figure of the cow. Gerry Smyth’s 2000 essay, “Shite and Sheep: An Ecocritical Perspective on Two Recent Irish Novels,” features one of the first instances of Irish animal-centric critical analysis in its discussion of Anne Haverty’s 1997 novel, One Day as a Tiger, but his call in that essay to reinvigorate “established paradigms” by establishing “an Irish ecocriticism” has gone relatively unheeded until recently (163). This is not to say that the animal has not featured as a focus for analyses of Irish culture, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s when postcolonial theory became a dominant framework for Irish Studies research. Early postcolonial discussions of Irish culture, even when including the animal in their ambit, tended towards the anthropocentric; however, adopting this theoretical framework established a foundation for considering the urgent political and ideological relevance of the representation of the animal, not only for the fate of nonhumans, but for the treatment of racial, national, and sexual others whose suffering is often embedded in the systemic hierarchies and injustice that support the disregard for and exploitation of animals. Two important texts published in 1997 could be considered the beginning of what would become the yet-emerging field of Animal Studies within Irish Studies: the reissue of L. Perry Curtis’s groundbreaking 1971 study of nineteenth-century British newspaper illustrations and political cartoons, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, and John Wilson Foster’s edited collection of 32 essays, Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History. The anthropocentrism of Curtis’s survey of visual representations of the simianized Irish in the nineteenth century takes for granted the degradation implicit in a comparison between human and nonhuman animals, an assumption antithetical to twenty-first century Animal Studies, which seeks to 363

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challenge the hierarchical impulse to categorization that derogates the nonhuman. However, no Irish Studies scholar working in the field of Animal Studies can fail to acknowledge the considerable influence of Curtis’s research, a perhaps unintentional source of inspiration for Irish Animal Studies, but an extremely valuable contribution nonetheless toward efforts to unpack the history of animal symbolism across a range of cultural renderings of Irishness. Foster’s essay collection marks the first significant step toward an Irish body of multidisciplinary Environmental Humanities scholarship, providing what Michael Paye has called “one of the early bridging attempts between nature and culture” in Irish Studies (199). The contributions dedicated to animals in the collection tend to focus on the management of food resources and wildlife as well as the history of naturalist practice in the island, rather than considering the cultural representation of animals, as such, despite what expectations might be raised by the striking cover image: Megaceros Hibernicus, Barrie Cooke’s 1983 painting of the extinct Irish elk. Paye’s only real criticism of Foster’s collection is its relative lack of informed theoretical engagement, an observation that alerts the experienced ecocritical scholar to the pace of the development of Environmental Humanities generally in Ireland. Much of the early Irish ecocritical research was generated by Irish Studies scholars in North America, home of ecocriticism, now in its third-wave there, which has developed considerably from the first wave that emerged in 1980s literature departments, especially among American literature critics. Firstwave ecocriticism tended to focus on nature writing and to romanticize its more contemplative elements. Later waves have moved beyond literature and the humanities to acknowledge and integrate relevant work in the sciences, and have complicated the very idea of “nature” as an historical, aesthetic, and even scientific category. The natural history author and artist Michael Viney’s 2003 book, Ireland: A Smithsonian Natural History, serves as an Irish example of first-wave romanticized admiration of landscapes, though the detailed attention he pays to Irish fauna in this text and in his Irish Times “Eye on Nature” and “Another Life” columns provides a valuable range of primary observations for the Irish Animal Studies scholar. The work of another observer and chronicler of Irish natural history, Tim Robinson, writing about the western reaches of the country since 1986 until his death in 2020, could be seen as engaged in a similarly formalist pursuit, but I will return to his books and maps later in this chapter. While North American scholars continue to dominate the field of Irish Animal Studies, significant interventions are increasingly made by academics in Irish institutions. Two interdisciplinary conferences on the topic of “Ireland and Ecocriticism” have been held in the last ten years, the first in 2010 in Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, and more recently in 2014 in University College Cork. Both conferences drew on experts across the arts and sciences and included panels and papers dedicated to Animal Studies topics. A contributor to both conferences, Malcolm Sen, then of University College Dublin, inaugurated a similarly themed interdisciplinary podcast, or “Scholarcast,” series in 2014, “Irish Studies and the Environmental Humanities,” which featured contributors from politics, activism, and academia, and included a talk by Adam Putz on “Labour, Poverty, and the Nonhuman Animal of Joyce’s Ulysses.” The 2014 UCD Scholarcast series was well positioned to take advantage of a developing community of increasingly connected and collaborative Irish scholars and an interdisciplinary body of research being conducted in Irish universities, first made evident in the 2010 meeting at Mary Immaculate College. Other contributors to both conferences include Tim Wenzell, author of Emerald Green: An Ecocritical Study of Irish Literature (2009), featuring considerations of Irish nature writing dating back to early Christian poetry, and Christine Cusick, who edited the first volume of essays of its kind, “Out of the Earth”: Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts, in 2010, which included essays incorporating or centrally featuring elements of Animal Studies in contributions by Eamonn Wall, Donna Potts, Kathryn Kirkpatrick, Maureen O’Connor, and Karen O’Brien. 364

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In 2011, the first International Ecocriticism Conference convened at the National University, Galway, which inspired the 2020 volume of essays, Madness in the Woods: Representations of the Ecological Uncanny, the overall focus of which was neither Irish nor Animal Studies related, but some contributions can be categorized as one or the other. The compendious annotated volume, The Irish Poet and the Natural World: An Anthology of Verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics (2014), edited by Andrew Carpenter and Lucy Collins, includes hundreds of poems by Irish writers about or addressing animals and provides informed, useful historical and theoretical contexts for reading the variety of texts represented, as does the more recent volume edited by Tim Wenzell, Woven Shades of Green: An Anthology of Irish Nature Literature (2019). Other recent, significant publications—the 2013 special issue of The Journal of Ecocriticism, guest-edited by Eoin Flannery and dedicated to “Irish Ecocriticism”; Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce (2014), edited by Robert Brazeau and Derek Gladwin; Eoin Flannery’s Ireland and Ecocriticism: Literature, History and Environmental Justice (2016); Unfolding Irish Landscapes: Tim Robinson, Culture, and Environment, also from 2016 and edited by Derek Gladwin and Christine Cusick; Nature and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by Matthew Kelly in 2019; and, also from 2019, a special issue of Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, guest-edited by Derek Gladwin and Maureen O’Connor, on “Irish Studies and the Environmental Humanities”—pay minimal attention to Animal Studies, which has struggled to achieve prominence in the growing area of Irish Environmental Humanities. When Irish ecocritical work does focus on the animal, however, it is notable how frequently feminist and gender theory provide an important part of the critical framework. The application of gender theory to Animal Studies distinguishes much of the recent work done in an Irish context. The core argument of my 2010 book, The Female and the Species: The Animal in Irish Women’s Writing, suggests some possible reasons for the frequent intersection in Irish Studies between gender and the animal. It is my contention that, against the backdrop of the centurieslong practice of Irishness being appropriated to the “natural” and the “female,” Irish women’s writing participates in a tradition of deploying the figure of the animal not only as a gesture of resistance to the masculinist regulation of female energies, but also as a self-consciously elaborated stage for the performance of Irish identity, so closely associated with the countryside. (27) My study builds on other feminist scholarship, including Julie Anne Stevens’s work, in particular, her book The Irish Scene in Somerville and Ross (2007), on the fiction of Irish cousins and coauthors Edith Somerville and Violet Martin (penname Martin Ross), in which “characters manifest the attributes of animals,” and which Stevens reveals to have been inspired by Irish folklore, especially the tales and legends focusing on animals and animal life (Irish Scene 205–8). Stevens characterizes the women’s work as early examples of ecocritical and ecofeminist fiction. Animals, especially the fox, and humans, like the characters of Mrs. Knox and her androgynous son “Flurry,” in the popular “Irish RM” stories (Irish Scene 210), are on the kind of equal footing enjoyed by Pangur Bán and the monk who immortalized him. Stevens argues that Somerville and Ross acknowledge what Ina Ferris has identified as a specifically “Irish chronotype,” the “unstable mix of Irish temporalities” (Ferris 99) in their representation of the Irish interaction between the human and nonhuman as happening in “carnival time when animals and humans have equal significance, when dogs, horses, and donkeys can almost talk” (Stevens, “Art of Politics” 150). Other feminist critics have noted the signifying power of animals in Somerville and Ross’s work, like Bi-Ling Chen who says of the fox hunt in the fiction that it “exposes the 365

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fatal power of the privileged over the underprivileged” (17), and Roz Cowman who observes that “animals, hunting and countryside are profoundly eroticized” in the Irish RM stories (100), which create a web of attractions and impulses not encompassed by the normative. Just as gender is a social and cultural construct, so is “nature.” Kate Soper has argued that “it is through the idea of ‘nature’ [that] we conceptualize what is ‘other’ to ourselves” (15), including sexual “others,” such as members of the LGBTQ community, whose oppression is justified on the grounds of “acts against nature,” as Karen Barad has noted (30). Like other women writers in my work, Somerville and Martin resisted and even subverted heteronormative expectations. They never married, choosing, in Somerville’s words, “another way,” an alternative chosen when the cousins first met each other as girls: For most boys and girls the varying, yet invariable flirtations and emotional episodes of youth are resolved and composed by marriage. To Martin and me was opened another way, and the flowering of both our lives was when we met each other. (125) The intersection of gender studies, queer theory, and ecocriticism distinguishes some of the most exciting recent work in Irish Animal Studies, including contributions to the 2010 Cusick edited collection and the more recent 2015 essay collection, Animals in Irish Literature and Culture, edited by Borbála Faragó and Kathryn Kirkpatrick. Embodiment as the cultural “other” can enable insight into the nonhuman, as defined by limited, privileged markers of subjectivity, including masculinity, whiteness, able-bodiedness, and heterosexuality. As Kirkpatrick notes, in a discussion of Paula Meehan’s poetry included in the Cusick collection, women are traditionally positioned as being closer to nature because of their reproductive role, and “the appearance of a more bodily body more fully involved for natural processes allows for the displacement by patriarchal systems of dominance all that is troubling about living as a mortal creature on to groups of Others” (117; emphasis in original). Anxieties about embodiment are intensified in cultural constructions of queer others, as Ed Madden has observed in his contribution to the Faragó and Kirkpatrick volume. In heterosexist discourse, the homosexual exceeds the animal, is “not-even-animal” (107), according to Madden, who echoes Soper and Barad in his assertion that “nature or the natural . . . is used to condemn sexual diference and to justify violence against the sexual Other” (105–6; emphasis in original). Ironically, if the materiality we share with the animal has served as a discomfiting reminder of the limitations of embodiment, including, in Kirkpatrick’s words, all that is “troubling about living as a mortal creature,” the most recent work in Animal Studies demonstrates that not only is subjectivity a cultural construct, but notions of the body as bounded, stable, and unified are also nothing more than comforting illusions. Bodies are porous, dynamic, relational, and interactive. The body is always in a process of “becoming,” in the sense articulated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose theory of “becoming animal” is indispensable to Animal Studies and which is used to persuasive effect by Liam Young when he describes the poet W.B. Yeats as deploying the “silent” animal as a figure for the “problem of indeterminacy of linguistic structure,” a problem potentially undermining of “authorial agency and human subjectivity” (151). In the same Faragó and Kirkpatrick essay collection where Young’s essay appears, Tom Herron’s discussion of Paul Muldoon also addresses the ways in which the animal allows for abandonment of “a stable or coherent subject position” (245), energizing and complicating the poet’s use of the figure. These examples indicate the speed with which the field of Irish Animal Studies has moved to the current third wave of ecocriticism and responded to new critical paradigms, including queer theory, feminist theory, new materialism (especially in its feminist formations), 366

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and other posthumanist approaches. My forthcoming essay, “Patterns of Interference: The Ethics of Diffraction in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones,” for example, argues that McCormack’s 2016 novel encourages ethical engagement with the environment and all of its nonhuman elements, including infectious bacteria, via application of the work of new materialist Karen Barad, which accepts the incomplete nature of human knowledge, recognizing and even embracing the unstable, the plural, and the partial. Agency, according to Barad, is not singular, whole, or individualistic, but, rather, a partially experienced phenomenon, distributed and shared among phenomena. The use of innovative critical models characterizes a number of forthcoming edited collections that include or feature research relevant to Irish Animal Studies, such as The Cambridge History of Irish Literature and the Environment, edited by Malcolm Sen, featuring two chapters on animals in Irish literature, and, from Bloomsbury, Flann O’Brien and the Nonhuman: Animals, Environments, Machines, edited by Katherine Ebury, Paul Fagan, and John Greane. Fagan was one of the organizers of the 2019 Vienna Irish Studies and Cultural Theory Summer School on the topic of “Bull Island: The Nonhuman Turn in Irish Studies,” an event that attracted dozens of scholars from around the world, a testimony to international academic interest in the field of Irish Animal Studies. Fagan is also the coeditor, with John Greaney and Tamara Radak, of the forthcoming Bloomsbury volume, Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities, which will include contributions that place Irish modernism into conversation with ecocritical, ecofeminist, and animal studies theory. This developing work revises and refreshes our relationship with canonical Irish writers, such as Flann O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, and Liam O’Flaherty. The introduction of Animal Studies into the field of Irish Studies has provided opportunities to rediscover and reevaluate Irish cultural productions, old and new. One recent example can be found in research on Tim Robinson, whose work was the object of some of the earliest multidisciplinary scholarship that could be identified as ecocritical. His books and maps of the Aran Islands, Connemara, and the Burren in County Clare have generated serious critical consideration in the twenty-first century, mostly addressing his use of folkways and mythology, the cartographic and artistic elements of his publications, as well his attention to language. Most recently, ecocritics have written about space and place in his texts, and the function of geography, landscape, geology, and even gender in positioning Robinson within ecocritical praxis. Moynagh Sullivan, for example, applies Bracha Ettinger’s theory of the “matrixial” to her invigorating reading of Robinson’s work as undermining constructions of self and other, subject and object, human and nonhuman, a reading with potential for considering the presence of animals in his work. There has been very little sustained attention paid, however, to Robinson’s representations of animals, despite their centrality in his books, from The Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, the 1986 text that brought him to popular and critical attention. Many early editions of The Stones of Aran featured dolphins on their covers, drawing on one of the text’s most frequently quoted opening passages about Robinson encountering those animals, a passage that establishes the book’s core concerns. One of the few references to the nonhuman animal in Robinson, fleeting, but insightful, is made by Karen Babine: “Animals and terrain have linguistic agency, both in written form and in storytelling” (100). Babine’s pairing of animals and terrain suggests ways in which his work can be aligned with feminist new materialists like Jane Bennett, Serenella Iovino, Rosa Baidotti, Stacy Alaimo, Ariel Salleh, and Karen Barad, as I argue in my 2019 essay, “‘Informed Love’: Human and Non-Human Bodies in Tim Robinson’s Ethical Aesthetic.” With the help of Sullivan’s earlier reading, I attempt a revision of perceptions of Robinson as essentializing the connection between the “female” and the “natural.” Rather than essentialize that connection, I argue, Robinson uses some of the humblest of nonhuman creatures, including the amoeba and slime molds, to transvalue and re-sacralize that association, reestablishing the 367

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kind of joyful communion between species celebrated by the writer of Pangur Bán. Ecocritical and Animal Studies are ethical pursuits of urgent significance in a time of overlapping global crises that should render impossible disavowal of the interdependence between all forms of life, a disavowal on which the power structures of contemporary life depend and which threatens the future of all life forms. As Serenalla Iovino has suggested, “The fact that literary representations are able to increase our awareness about the relationship between the human and nonhuman worlds, also in terms of moral values, can be understood as a result of such a dynamics of interdependence” (761). Irish Animal Studies, like ecocritical work generally, is poised to renew cultural discourses, to intervene meaningfully not only in academic practice, but also, and more importantly, in the way we engage with the environment and with all our fellow beings.

Note 1 According to Tim Wenzell, animals were not only central to pre-Christian cultural production in Ireland, but also frequently appeared in early Christian lyric poetry. In the ninth-century poem, “The Hermit’s Wish” (“Dúthracar, a Maic Dé bí”), for example, the hermit of the text wishes to be more like a bird, a wish described by Wenzell as an expression of a “spiritual connection” with animals of the wild, “Ecocriticism, Early Nature Writing and the Irish Landscape Today” (11).

Works cited Anonymous. “Pangur Bán.” Translated by Seamus Heaney. Poetry Foundation. www.poetryfoundation.org/ poetrymagazine/poems/48267/pangur-ban. Babine, Karen. “‘If All the Sky Were Paper and All the Sea Were Ink’: Tim Robinson’s Linguistic Ecology.” New Hibernia Review, Vol. 15, No. 4, Winter 2011, pp. 95–110. Barad, Karen. “Nature’s Queer Performativity.” Kvinder Køn og Forskning, Vols. 1–2, 2012, pp. 25–53. Brazeau, Robert and Derek Gladwin, Eds. Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce. Cork, Cork University Press, 2014. Cambrensis, Giraldus. Topography of Ireland. Translated by Thomas Forester. Edited by Thomas Wright. www.yorku.ca/inpar/topography_ireland.pdf. Carpenter, Andrew and Lucy Collins, Eds. The Irish Poet and the Natural World: An Anthology of Verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics. Cork, Cork University Press, 2014. Chen, Bi-ling. “De-Mystifying the Family Romance: A Feminist Reading of Somerville and Ross’s The Big House of Inver.” Notes on Modern Irish Literature, Vol. 10, 1998, pp. 17–25. Connell, John. The Cow Book: A Story of Life on a Family Farm. London, Granta, 2018. Cowman, Roz. “The Smell and Taste of Castle T.” Sex, Nation, and Dissent in Irish Writing. Edited by Éibhear Walshe. New York, St Martin’s Press, 1997, pp. 87–102. Curtis, L. Perry. Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature. Washington and London, Smithsonian, 1997. Cusick, Christine, Ed. “Out of the Earth”: Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts. Cork, Cork University Press, 2010. Cusick, Christine and Derek Gladwin, Eds. Unfolding Irish Landscapes: Tim Robinson, Culture, and Environment. Manchester University Press, 2016. Ebury, Katherine, Paul Fagan, and John Greane, Eds. Flann O’Brien and the Nonhuman: Animals, Environments, Machines. London and Oxford, Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2021. Faragó, Borbála and Kathryn Kirkpatrick, Eds. Animals in Irish Literature and Culture. London and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Ferris, Ina. “Writing on the Border: The National Tale, Feminism, and the Public Sphere.” Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-forming Literature 1789–1837. Edited by Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 86–106. Flannery, Eoin. Ireland and Ecocriticism: Literature, History and Environmental Justice. London and New York, Routledge, 2016. Flannery, Eoin, Ed. “Irish Ecocriticism.” Special Issue of Journal of Ecocriticism, Vol. 5, No. 2, September 2013. 368

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Foster, John Wilson. Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History. Dublin, Lilliput Press, 1997. Gladwin, Derek and Maureen O’Connor, Eds. “Irish Studies and the Environmental Humanities.” Special Issue of Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1, 2018. Herron, Tom. “Strange Becomings: Paul Muldoon’s Maggot.” Animals in Irish Literature and Culture. Edited by Borbála Faragó and Kathryn Kirkpatrick. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 244–258. Hickey, Kieran. Wolves in Ireland: A Natural and Cultural History. Dublin, Four Courts, 2011. Iovino, Serenalla. “Ecocriticism, Ecology of Mind, and Narrative Ethics: An Ethical Ground for Ecocriticism as Educational Practice.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Vol. 17, No. 4, Autumn 2010, pp. 759–762. Kelly, Matthew, ed. Nature and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2019. Kirkpatrick, Kathryn. “Between Country and City: Paula Meehan’s Ecofeminist Poetics.” “Out of the Earth”: Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts. Edited by Borbála Faragó and Kathryn Kirkpatrick. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 108–126. Madden, Ed. “‘Even the Animals in the Fields’: Animals, Queers, and Violence.” Animals in Irish Literature and Culture. Edited by Borbála Faragó and Kathryn Kirkpatrick. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 105–118. O’Connor, Maureen. The Female and the Species: The Animal in Irish Women’s Writing. Bern, Peter Lang, 2006. O’Connor, Maureen. “‘Informed Love’: Human and Non-Human Bodies in Tim Robinson’s Ethical Aesthetic.” Estudios Irlandeses Special Issue, “Gender Issues in Contemporary Irish Literature.” Vol. 13, No. 2, October 2019, pp. 19–29. O’Connor, Maureen. “Patterns of Interference: The Ethics of Diffraction in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones.” Metaphors for Transformative Change. Edited by Edmond Byrne and Ian Hughes. London and New York, Routledge, 2020. Paye, Michael. Review Essay. “Ireland and Ecocriticism: Towards a Trajectory.” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, Vol. 19, No. 2, 2015, pp. 198–205. Pusse, Tina-Karen, Heike Schwarz, and Rebecca Downes, Eds. Madness in the Woods: Representations of the Ecological Uncanny. Bern, Peter Lang, 2020. Robinson, Tim. Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage. Dublin, Lilliput, 1986. Sen, Malcolm, Ed. The Cambridge History of Irish Literature and the Environment. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2021. Sen, Malcolm. “UCD Series Scholarcast. Series 11: Irish Studies and the Environmental Humanities.” www.ucd.ie/scholarcast/series11.html. Smyth, Gerry. “Shite and Sheep: An Ecocritical Perspective on Two Recent Irish Novels.” Irish University Review, Vol. 30, No. 1, Spring-Summer 2000, pp. 163–178. Somerville, Edith. Irish Memories. New York, Longmans, Green, 1918. Soper, Kate. What Is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human World. Oxford, Blackwell, 1995. Stevens, Julie Anne. “The Art of Politics in Somerville and Ross’s Fiction with Emphasis on Their Final Collection of Stories, In Mr Knox’s Country.” New Contexts: Re-Framing Nineteenth-Century Irish Women’s Prose. Ed. Heidi Hansson. Cork, Cork University Press, 2008, pp. 142–60. Stevens, Julie Anne. The Irish Scene in Somerville and Ross. Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2007. Sullivan, Moynagh. “‘An Ear to the Earth’: Matrixial Gazing in Tim Robinson’s Walk-Art-Text Practice.” Unfolding Irish Landscapes: Tim Robinson, Culture and Environment. Edited by Christine Cusick and Derek Gladwin, Manchester University Press, 2016, pp. 202–217. Viney, Michael. Ireland: A Smithsonian Natural History. Washington, DC, Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003. Wenzell, Tim. “Ecocriticism, Early Nature Writing, and the Irish Landscape Today.” New Hibernia Review, Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring 2009, pp. 125–139. Wenzell, Tim. Emerald Green: An Ecocritical Study of Irish Literature. Newcastle Upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Wenzell, Tim. Woven Shades of Green: An Anthology of Irish Nature Writing. Lewisburg, PA, Bucknell University Press, 2019. Young, Liam. “‘Do You Dance, Minnaloushe?’ Yeats’s Animal Questions.” Animals in Irish Literature and Culture. Edited by Borbála Faragó and Kathryn Kirkpatrick. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 149–164.

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29 Contemporary Irish Studies and the impact of disability1 Elizabeth Grubgeld

Disability Studies as an academic area grew out of the political and social activism of disabled people in England and the United States during the 1970s. The disability rights movement gradually spread to Ireland and other nations in subsequent decades and has informed the development of an academic research area incorporating many disciplines and theoretical perspectives. At present, most Disability Studies scholars proceed from an understanding that disability functions less as a descriptor of certain physical traits than as a cultural category reflecting the interplay among the body, the built environment, and social conditions and attitudes. Research on the subject of disability in relation to Ireland has taken hold primarily in public health, public policy, law, sociology, the history of medicine, and education. However, scholarship in the arts and humanities has begun, albeit slowly, to address the history of disabled people in Ireland and the emergence of a disability rights movement, and to consider questions of disability in art and literature. This scholarship has encompassed the history and writings of disabled people, representations of disability, the concept of a disability aesthetic, and, most recently, the intersections of disability with ethnicity, race, class, gender, and sexuality. If the number of recent theses and dissertations in the field is any indicator, we may expect to see a great deal more research on disability and Irish Studies published in the near future. Space prohibits a detailed bibliographical review of the work in this area, but I will sketch some of the ways Disability Studies has entered discussions of Irish literature and identify some possibilities for the future. Concluding with a discussion of the concept of a disability aesthetic, I will take up the question of embodied language in the work of Christopher Nolan as an illustration of how contemporary conversations in Disability Studies can lead to more expansive readings of literary texts.

Recent research and potential new directions We can identify five categories of twenty-first century inquiry into literature and disability in Ireland. The most prominent have been readings of the metaphors by which the British ruling class described and justified its dominance over the body of Irish society. Characteristic of the work in this area, Mark Mossman’s Disability, Representation and the Body in Irish Writing, 1800–1922 (2009) proceeds from Fredric Jameson’s assertion that “the story of the private individual destiny 370

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is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (cited in Mossman 168). Thus, Mossman argues, “in the discursive formations of British imperialism, the body is the index of the nation” (56). Such studies have explored disability in light of emergent theories of race and health in late nineteenth century British culture and often posited the non-normative body as a challenge to British efforts to subject the body of the nation to disciplinary measures, from narrative assimilation and poetic form to more material manifestations of constraint. Other scholars have looked at disabled characters in light of wide cultural movements within European and Anglo-American Modernism. Michael Davidson’s Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic (2019), for example, examines disabled characters in Wilde, Joyce, Beckett, and others in light of early twentieth century developments in health, labor, and the role of the state, both conceptually and in practical application. Maran Linnet’s chapters on Elizabeth Bowen in her Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature (2017) analyze Bowen’s preoccupation with deafness in the context of the Modernist fetishization of language, understood as both writing and speech, and Modernism’s simultaneous devaluation of the visual as a mode of understanding and communication. A limited number of scholarly works have explored Irish writers who identify themselves as disabled. Some of these include Monica Randaccio’s survey of disabled Irish playwrights, actors, and theater groups (2020), which provides an informative and encouraging update to Kate O’Reilly’s Face-On: Disability Arts in Ireland and Beyond (2007); Tom Coogan’s two excellent articles on Christy Brown and Christopher Nolan (2007, 2012); and my Disability and Life Writing in Post-Independence Ireland (2020), which draws particular attention to the relationship between disability and class in autobiographical genres such as the testimony, sports autobiography, self-referential performance art, and blogging, in addition to more traditional literary memoirs. The publication of Marilynn Richtarick’s 2017 edition of Stewart Parker’s unfinished work of autofiction, Hop Dance, has brought forward another important text for consideration. The majority of scholarly work on disability and Irish writing, however, has focused on James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, with varying degrees of direct contextual reference to Ireland. Joyce’s own serious vision impairments come into the discussion of blindness and his devaluation of the visual in favor of a fuller sensory experience; other studies focus on gender, sexuality, and disability, principally in Ulysses. The experimental stylistics of both Joyce and Beckett have been of interest to those who study neurocognitive disabilities such as stuttering, aphasia, speech automatism, obsessive compulsive disorder, and Tourette syndrome. Additionally, Beckett scholarship has acknowledged the extraordinary degree to which his characters move or stand with difficulty and endure chronic pain. Despite the disembodied voices that populate his later fiction and drama, Beckett expressed doubt that language and cognition could be separated from the body, or that language could arise from cognitive intention alone.2 Yet, as Ato Quayson observes in his Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (2007), readings of the body in Beckett’s work have tended to be conceptual and metaphorical, as if cognition held primacy over the body rather than the other way around. “What is quite odd in studies of Beckett to date,” Quayson remarks, “is the degree to which physical disability is assimilated to a variety of philosophical categories in such ways as to obliterate the specificity of the body and to render it a marker of something else” (56). Most scholars and activists in the field of Disability Studies remain committed to the analysis of disability as a political, social, geographical, and economic condition even when exploring the history of its metaphorical usages; it is unclear whether much of the work on Joyce and Beckett has chosen such commitments. If we imagine the next decade in Irish Studies, Disability Studies holds the potential to provide new insights into issues of great concern to the field. Efforts to study Ireland without understanding the experiences of disabled people produces a limited comprehension of a 371

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complex and diverse culture. A thorough reading of a national narrative—whether it be one of piety, obedience, and sacrifice, or of internationalism, consumerism, and technocracy—requires attention to the stories that have been excluded from dominant versions of national culture. The revisionary scholarship that guides multidisciplinary research on Ireland’s history of incarceratory institutions and the often traumatic experiences of those who endured them will be enriched by readings of the history and memories of disabled people confined in the institutions of the past and the nursing homes of the present, as well as by the insights of foundational works such as David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s The Cultural Locations of Disability (2006), which explores the power of institutions to define what is normative and what is not, and to label, sequester, and discipline disabled people. The concept of generative, subversive, and even playful non-normativity that has permeated recent work in Disability Studies can offer theoretical insight into the experiences, writing, and other creative work of women and people of diverse genders and sexualities. Theorizations of the monstrous body informed by Disability Studies are of potential value to the recent explosion of interest in the Gothic nineteenth century, as well as readings of injured bodies and Gothic motifs in the fiction and drama of the late twentieth century Troubles. Studies of how metaphors of health and disease have been weaponized in the past may elucidate some of the rhetoric surrounding Traveler populations and recent immigrants to Ireland. As literary and cultural studies embrace an increasingly wider range of writings, there is work to do in exploring the self-published writing, blogs, and vlogs that provide a medium for disabled writers who often lack access to university programs and creative writing circles. Lastly, Disability Studies invites the exploration of new aesthetic possibilities, from Deaf poetics to disability-centered theater, performance art, and new notions of form and language. It is the latter I would like to take up in a brief consideration of the work of Christopher Nolan, whose novelistic autobiography, Under the Eye of the Clock (1987), was widely reviewed, and always positively, but also subject to patronizing hyperbolic praise and erroneous comparisons to James Joyce. Treated as something of a novelty item—as the miraculous production of a young man heretofore locked in a silent and ungovernable body—the book has received little critical analysis, although it has been reissued in numerous editions and remained consistently in print. If we consider Nolan’s strange sentences in light of recent explorations of a disability aesthetic, is it possible that his language may have little to do with Joyce but very much to do with the material dimensions of his neurological experience and the functional communicative means he developed through the use of his own body? Can style itself incarnate a way of experiencing and understanding the world through one’s particular embodiment? Some disability theorists have thought so. Tobin Siebers offers a “theory of complex embodiments” that takes up the issue of representation, seeing the body and representation as reciprocal agents. Rejecting a view of the body as entirely acted upon by culture, Siebers suggests that the body’s own effects on representation are as important as the question of how representations affect understandings of the body. “The body is first and foremost,” he writes, “a biological agent teeming with vital and often unruly forces. It is not inert matter subject to easy manipulation by social representations. The body is alive, which means that it is as capable of influencing and transforming social languages as they are capable of influencing and transforming it” (68). Siebers maintains that the disabled body changes the process of representation itself. . . . Deaf eyes listen to public television. Tongues touch-type letters home to Mom and Dad. Feet wash the breakfast dishes. Mouths sign autographs. Different bodies require and create new modes of representation. (54) 372

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In Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (2008), Michael Davidson observers, for example, how parataxis and spatial design in the poetry of Larry Eigner derive, at least in part, from Eigner’s self-described compositional practices, developed to accommodate his difculty situating paper in a typewriter due to cerebral palsy (243). From the perspective of the receptor of art, Davidson also observes how Deaf poetry caused him to rethink his emphasis on text and sound and instead, to consider “the visual, spatial, and communal nature of poetic production” (223). Disabled artists, and the presence of disabled bodies in art, he argues, may disrupt language and expectation in potentially generative ways. In her Autistic Disturbances (2018), Julia Miele Rodas argues for a highly specific poetics of autism (what she identifies as ricochet, apostrophe, ejaculation, discretion, and invention), reflecting an intact, functional, and aesthetically resourceful rhetoric of listening and language production. Drawing attention not only to content but also to style and modes of production, Arthur Frank ofers an equally tantalizing suggestion that “Observing what stories say about the body is a familiar sort of listening; describing stories as told through the body requires another level of attention” (2).

Disability aesthetics and Christopher Nolan’s Under the Eye of the Clock Any mention of disability and literature in Ireland will bring forth references perhaps to Christopher Nolan but always to Christy Brown and, in particular, to his first work, the memoir My Left Foot (1954), as well as the highly acclaimed 1989 film of the same name. Brown was a celebrity during the years that followed its publication, with his books drawing reviews in major newspapers and his distinctive appearance a familiar feature of television programming in Ireland, England, and the United States. Although Brown longed to distance himself from what he saw as a highly compromised piece of juvenilia, the book’s plain and accessible prose, chronological structure, and, most importantly, its accordance with certain conventional tropes of disability narratives have secured its enduring popularity and its dominance over a far superior and more stylistically and ideologically challenging later work like his Down All the Days (1970). Although from a disability rights perspective, a contemporary reader of My Left Foot can ascertain the text’s resistance to the conventional notion of both disability and narratives of disability that the book appears to embrace, nevertheless the very traits it chafes against have insured its continuing prominence among a general readership. Christopher Nolan was not yet born when My Left Foot first appeared and was still a child when Brown published Down All the Days to international acclaim. It is unlikely that Nolan knew the latter book, given that his exposure to literature came almost exclusively from hearing books read aloud by his family or in school, and the explicit sexuality and domestic violence portrayed in Down All the Days renders it an unlikely choice for reading aloud, even by his uncommonly literary mother, Bernadette Nolan. Nolan’s own work of autofiction is a very different yet also stylistically challenging book that, like Brown’s, draws the reader inside the lived experience of disability in Ireland. Both writers had athetoid cerebral palsy deriving from birth trauma, produced books that were much admired during their lifetimes, and died of pulmonary aspiration in their forties. Like Brown, Nolan at first communicated with his immediate family through sounds and a few limited gestures. Just as Brown discovered writing as a small child by holding chalk between his toes, Nolan learned at the age of eleven to compose on a typewriter with a touch stick attached to his forehead and later used a computer. Both wrote their most mature works as autobiographies in the third person, although Nolan names his character “Joseph Meehan,” whereas Brown leaves the boy of Down All the Days unnamed. 373

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But there the resemblances end. Nolan never developed intelligible speech and was unable to control his movements beyond facial expressions, head nods, and vibrating his feet. Whereas Brown was a voracious reader, Nolan was unable to turn the pages of books and explains in an early autobiographical sketch that reading was arduous for him because his brain would transpose the letters of a word so that he saw its mirror image; he would then have to mentally reverse that image in order to comprehend the word (Dam Burst of Dreams 11–12). They also grew up in vastly different eras. Christy Brown was already twenty years old when Kathleen O’Rourke and Lady Valerie Goulding established what would become the Central Remedial Clinic, then located in one small room on Upper Pembroke Street. By the time Nolan attended the CRC, it was situated in the comfortable suburb of Clontarf as a full-fledged treatment facility with an adjacent normal school. Although he was one of the most physically impaired children in the school, there was never any question of his not being educated. The Browns and the Nolans were also of distinctly different class backgrounds. Joseph Nolan was a trained psychiatric nurse, and the Nolan family owned a farm near Mullingar. They let the farm in order to purchase a house close to the CRC so that Christy, as he was called, could enroll. Nolan’s mother was an avid reader of literature and had worked as a bookkeeper before her marriage. Most tellingly, the family owned a car and he, his parents, and his sister Yvonne were able to take vacations in Kerry during the summer. When Nolan wanted to continue his schooling beyond the primary level, his mother and father successfully advocated, over considerable opposition, his admission into a local comprehensive. Upon graduation, he gained admission to Trinity College, and they helped him with transportation and with the reading and writing required for the literature curriculum he began but decided not to continue, he explains, because of the labor his studies required of his family. Family provides Nolan his most fundamental identity, and his adoption of his father’s first name, “Joseph,” as the name of his autobiographical protagonist even in the earliest version of the memoir points toward the importance of inscribing himself as his father’s namesake. The CRC school and Mount Temple School, the comprehensive where he came of age “under the eye” of its tower clock, prove more difficult to negotiate than family. His efforts to participate in a wider community bring out his own nuanced concept of normality, a word that appears in many different contexts and with different meanings throughout the book. Because the style he achieved as a writer is so idiosyncratic, so contrary to normalization or standardization, his notions of social normality bear an intriguing relation to his literary work. At times, the word normal pertains to aspects of body and social life that he cannot achieve, while at other times, it is an epithet of scorn for those who mock or isolate him. His parents and sister perceive that he is “tongue-tied but normal-notioned” (84), suggesting that normality reflects an inner moral integrity. His sister, he writes, “challenged her spastic brother to be as normal in his outlook as she was normal in her treatment of him,” (35), suggesting that normality might be also defined as a way of being among others that depends upon inclusivity and even nonchalance. Nolan perennially navigates the distinction between what Erving Goffman, in his classic study of stigma as a social phenomenon, calls virtual and actual social identity. The stigmatized feature dominates virtual identity, here identified as uncontrolled movements and lack of speech, whereas actual identity lies in his inner “normal-notioned” life. However, Nolan never describes a feeling of alienation between an outer and inner self or suggests that he exists as an entity separate from his body; it is others’ perceptions of his body that produce stigma, not the body itself. Most importantly, when he comes to write, it is the distinct features of his physicality and mode of language production that his prose emulates. Intermittently bullied and accepted at school, Joseph feels more acutely “bullied and badgered” by “his need to find time to express his thoughts” (30). The work of composition and 374

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his discovery of a particular kind of language occupy as important a place in Under the Eye of the Clock as do his portrayal of the processes of stigma and his struggle to move past it. Repeatedly, Nolan sees his literary writing as a means to that end. With the discovery of baclofen as treatment for spasticity, Nolan was finally able to communicate in language. The drug allowed his muscles to relax enough that, wearing a head pointer, he could laboriously type while his mother cupped his chin so that his aim might be more accurate. A few years later, a donated computer allowed him to work unassisted and at a much greater speed. The style he achieves flies in the face of ableist notions of order while at the same time expressing vividly what it is to live inside his particular body. His neologisms, compounded nouns, and long strings of alliterative phrases are so idiosyncratic that he seems to create a new language for relating consciousness and embodiment. Nolan’s first communication to the world came in the shape of a poem that even then demonstrated the condensed and alliterative phrasing that his writing would always display. In his first book Dam-Burst of Dreams (1981), a collection of short writings published when he was just 15, conventional letters to relatives and small essays on various topics contrast with the startling imagery, vocabulary, and sound effects of his poems and literary prose. Speaking of himself in the third person, he recalls being asked how he had developed such an arcane vocabulary and “longed to be able to say that he only knew that as he typed thoughts, brilliant, bright, boiling words poured into his mind” (23). “My mind is like a spin-dryer at full speed, my thoughts fly around my skull while millions of beautiful words cascade down in my lap,” he told an interviewer in 1987. “Images gunfire across my consciousness and while trying to discipline them I jump in awe at the soul-filled bounty of my mind’s expanse” (Grimes A18). No drafts of his work remain, and no one has described watching him write. Some of his language is so unusual and so literary that it seems reasonable to imagine that Bernadette Nolan contributed to his phrasings, as well as assisting him with matters of punctuation and organization. If she did indeed partly author his text (and, again, we have no way of knowing this), that would take nothing away from the startling originality of what was published or the value of its perspective. In discussing questions of authorship and ethics in the case of works by those with severe communication impairments, G. Thomas Couser argues that even if specific word choices may be those of a language facilitator, the importance of hearing an otherwise inaccessible perspective outweighs other concerns. He notes the irony implicit in the effect of “translating” a rudimentary language into “a fluent detailed narrative” which simultaneously silences the authorial voice normatizing it (38–39). The contrast between that operation and whatever “translation” occurred with Christopher Nolan is readily apparent. Although readers might wish for greater transparency regarding collaborative authorship involved in the production of Under the Eye of the Clock, any contributions to Nolan’s system of language-making, whether from his mother or someone else, amplifies its strangeness and its effect rather than diminishing it. In Under the Eye of the Clock (1987), he describes the process of composing the writings that became his first book: bibs-bedecked he bashfully brought forth droned, bespoked letters bested onto a page by a bent, nursed and crudely given nod of his stubborn head. As he typed he blundered like a young foal strayed from his mother. His own mother cradled his head but he mentally gadded here and there in fields of swishing grass and pursed wildness. His mind was darting under beech copper-mulled, along streams calling out his name, he hissed and frolicked but his mother called it spasms. Delirious with the falling words plopping onto his path he made youth reel where youth was meant to stagnate. Such were Joseph’s powers as he gimleted his words onto white sheets of life. (26–27) 375

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Having “for years clustered his words” as “hollyberried imaginings” (57), he understood the differences between conventional style and his own methods, but declared in an early poem that I endangered my freedom of expression . . . if I did not disembowel My notorious madness, in impeccable Language, agonizingly written, in numerous Tantalizing, spasmodic-ridden onslaughts, On a rickety, moaning, typewriter. (Dam-Burst of Dreams 109) This strange style, he proclaims in Under the Eye of the Clock, is vital to his freedom and to the creation of a book which, he says, “made sense of his life” and let him see “a reason for his being given a second chance at birth” (97). The relationship of this fiercely defended style to the condition of being that Nolan wished to express provokes the question of what might constitute a disability aesthetic. Might literary language emanate diferently from diferent bodies? Or might the articulation of certain embodied experience require new language and new forms? At the very least, might consideration of the embodiment of both writer and reader lead to fresh understandings of the possibilities of style? In the most material sense, his style is closely related to the specific nature of his disability and his means of composition. For Nolan, learning was almost entirely aural, which most certainly contributes to the tremendous emphasis on sound, especially alliteration, in his literary prose. Those clusters of words, often taking the form of invented compound nouns, may derive from a method of communication that he had used since childhood, that of casting his eyes on two or three objects that, taken together, create a meaning. This aspect of his style has been compared to that of G.M. Hopkins, but Nolan became familiar with Hopkins only after publishing Dam-Burst of Dreams in 1981. Its origins appear to be closer to home; a reporter for The Washington Post provides this description of Nolan’s method of combining nouns to create meaning: Conversing with Nolan is like a complicated game of charades, or 20 Questions. Struggling to control the direction of a random body movement, he gestures broadly to objects around the room that provide clues to his meaning. A correct guess brings an upward movement of his eyes that says “yes.” The listener pieces together a thought from a series of such clues. An electric space heater on the floor, together with agitation of his feet, is part of an answer, “cold feet,” to the question of why he found it difficult to type during his initial attempts at age 11. A fleeting glance toward a hand-drawn greeting card displayed on the mantelpiece, and an invitation to read it, begin another response. Successful interpretation is rewarded with his gleeful laugh. As his clustering of nouns parallels his means of communicating in everyday conversation, the unusual syntax of his sentences may reflect a desire to replicate his neurological sensations. Tom Coogan argues that because of the slowness of Nolan’s typing and the multifaceted physical effort of staying in position and relaxing his muscles sufficiently to strike the correct keys, “his creativity becomes less Cartesian (the mind escaping its prison), and more a living-throughthe-body experience” (“Brilliant, bright, boiling words” 287). In the “staccatoed style” which results, he records how it feels to be Christopher Nolan, suggesting that curious visitors might cup his chin in their own hands and “feel the undercurrents of electricity running and molesting 376

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his attempts to strike a letter. . . . Only thus could he explain why his rhythm of sound was jumpy and jarring on the ear” (Under the Eye of the Clock 90). It is not spasticity that produces this style—he could write conventionally when he chose to—but his style enables him to reproduce the “electric pulses” which governed his body (27) and communicate his thoughts, feelings, experiences and the very physicality of his being. Defining Nolan’s work as having “a distinctive literary style that can best be understood through its origins in his disability experience and identity,” Coogan also contends that “the literariness of Nolan’s writing arises in part from a subversion of ‘ordinary’ ableist language that emerges from Nolan’s disability” (278). He includes as part of this “subversion” Nolan’s rejection of the medical, religious, and social “scripts” which have dominated discourses of disability. He also argues that Nolan pointedly rejects orthodox forms of memoir (and, I would add, the antecedent of My Left Foot). In its place, Nolan offers a third person narration in which he creates, as a literary act, a boy named Joseph Meehan who is nevertheless the subject of a book subtitled The Autobiography of Christopher Nolan.3 The originality of such a project is by his own admission an attempt to subvert the expectations of an uncomprehending world. Listening to a lecture on Joyce while at Trinity, he reflects that he too “nadir-aspired to mould his only gift into briny, bastardized braille so that fellows following never had to nod yes to mankind’s gastric view that man speechless and crippled must forever be strolling as underlings to the yapping establishment” (161). Bristling with energy, sure of its own power, and fending off by its very existence the oppressive force of social stigma, Under the Eye of the Clock takes its place as a work of resistance against not only the silence to which disabled people have been confined but against the constraints of normative prose, creating as it bursts through the “dam” of his inarticulation a newly imagined aesthetic.

Notes 1 Portions of Chapter 29 were first published in Elizabeth Grubgeld, Disability and Life Writing in Post Independence Ireland, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. 2 Laura Salisbury and Chris Code explore in detail Beckett’s theory and practice of embodied language, as well as his experience of what he believed to be psychosomatic illness that nevertheless was as genuine as illness that could be traced to physical causes. 3 Coogan continues, By implying calculating self-consciousness on the part of Joseph the author, Nolan inevitably, and presumably deliberately, invites examination of his own intent. He demonstrates his artfulness and self-awareness, but also his understanding that the reader will be aware of it . . . . He expresses both his individual agency . . . and his grasp of the system within which it must function. . . . He highlights the processes of creation, but also the process of reception in the form of the status accorded to certain elements as “literary.” (“Brilliant, bright, boiling words” 286–287)

Works cited Brown, Christy. My Left Foot. Secker and Warburg, 1954. Brown, Christy. Down All the Days. Secker and Warburg, 1970. Coogan, Tom. “‘Brilliant, Bright, Boiling Words’: Literary Disability, Language and the Writing Body in the Work of Christopher Nolan.” Disability & Society, Vol. 27, No. 2, 2012, pp. 277–290. Coogan, Tom. “Me, Thyself and I: Dependency and the Issues of Authenticity and Authority in Christy Brown’s My Left Foot and Ruth Sienkiewicz-Mercer and Steven B. Kaplan’s I Raise My Eyes To Say Yes.” Journal of Literary Disability, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2007, pp. 42–54. Couser, G. Thomas. Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing. Cornell University Press, 2004. Davidson, Michael. Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic. Oxford University Press, 2019. 377

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Davidson, Michael. Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body. University of Michigan Press, 2008. De Young, Karen. “Christopher Nolan: Beyond the Limits.” The Washington Post, March 31, 1988. www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1988/03/27/christopher-nolan-beyond-the-limits/ 383349ae-82dc-4d45-86eb-344bff9483e6. Frank, Arthur. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. University of Chicago Press, 1995. Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Simon and Schuster, 1963. Grimes, William. “Irish Author Christopher Nolan Dies at 42.” The New York Times, February 24, 2009, A18. Grubgeld, Elizabeth. Disability and Life Writing in Post-Independence Ireland. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Linnet, Maran Tova. Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature. University of Michigan Press, 2017. Mitchell, David T. and Sharon Snyder. 2006. Cultural Locations of Disability. University of Chicago Press, 2006. Mossman, Mark. Disability, Representation, and the Body in Irish Writing 1800–1922. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Nolan, Christopher. Dam Burst of Dreams. Ohio, Ohio State University Press, 1981. Nolan, Christopher. Under the Eye of the Clock: The Life Story of Christopher Nolan. St. Martin’s Press, 1987. O’Reilly, Kate, Ed. Face-On: Disability Arts in Ireland and Beyond. Arts and Disability Ireland, 2007. Parker, Stewart. Hopdance. Edited by Marilynn Richtarik. Lilliput Press, 2017. Quayson, Ato. Aesthetic Nervousness: Disabilty and the Crisis of Representation. Columbia University Press, 2007. Randaccio, Monica. “Disability Theatre in Ireland: A Development.” Sijis, Vol. 10, 2020, pp. 153–164. Rodas, Julia Miele. Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe. University of Michigan Press, 2018. Salisbury, Laura and Chris Code. “Jackson’s Parrot: Samuel Beckett, Aphasic Speech Automatisms, and Psychosomatic Language.” Literature, Speech Disorders, and Disability. Edited by Christopher Eagle. Routledge, 2014, pp. 100–123. Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. University of Michigan Press, 2008.

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30 Irish media and representations New critical paradigms Emma Radley

In an interview with Seán Crosson and Mark Schreiber in Werner Huber and Crosson’s recent edited collection on contemporary Irish film, Lenny Abrahamson and Mark O’Halloran, discussing the question of influence and tradition in Adam and Paul, comment—somewhat archly— on the preoccupation with identity in the academic Irish Studies world: “we very consciously felt that if Irish cinema is going to be really great it has to stop worrying too much about being ‘Irish cinema,’ it just has to be true to its place” (Crosson and Schreiber 141). The riposte cuts through some of the most significant and enduring critical frameworks in both Irish Studies more broadly, and Irish film and media studies particularly; field-building, defining the terrain, establishing a tradition, maintaining cultural distinctiveness are all various ways of expressing a concern that lies at the heart of so much of this discourse: what is an Irish film or media text? What are the key markers of “Irish Cinema” or “Irish Television”—authorship? Narrative? Funding? Or something less tangible? Abrahamson and O’Halloran’s insistence that this line of questioning is redundant, that the answer is “obvious” (141)—they are Irish artists, making a film with Irish actors, set in Ireland, and therefore clearly engaging with national concerns without self-consciously bearing the burden of “representing” Ireland is seductive (139), on one hand, and on the other, belies the complexity of the question. Historically, there has been a clear need to define the space and subject of “indigenous” Irish film and media (and as a postcolonial nation, Ireland—and Irish Studies—is perhaps fated to wrestle with the nation as the defining framework of representation and reception in perpetuity). The work of the so-called First Wave of Irish filmmakers and visual artists such as Bob Quinn, Cathal Black, Joe Comerford, Pat Murphy, Thaddeus O’Sullivan et al. in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the groundbreaking critical work by scholars such as Kevin Rockett, John Hill, Martin McLoone, Ruth Barton, Brian McIlroy, among others,1 plays a vital role in establishing the historical, political, and cultural legitimacy of an indigenous practice of film and media production. It’s not surprising therefore that there is such a wealth of survey approaches in the late twentieth century, most of which have engagement with and development of the concept of a “national” cinema at their core, both taxonomically (determining which productions should be included and excluded in the definition of Irish cinema), and ideologically (determining the critical apparatus of that definition across the spheres of narration and production). And indeed, the survey approach continues to have strong cultural 379

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valency into the twenty-first century, with publications by Barton, John Horgan and Roddy Flynn, and Roddy Flynn and Tony Tracy, edited collections from Huber and Crosson and Barry Monahan, and John Hill’s wide-ranging A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, which includes a significant number of contributions on Irish cinema and most of which are broadly survey or historical in structure. The survey establishes the terrain of a national cinema, but as the concept of national identity and culture itself becomes increasingly indeterminate and contested, how does an approach that privileges the national reconcile itself to the radical challenges to the idea of a fixed or singular definition of the nation? A configuration of the contemporary Irish mediascape as transnational rather than national seems to offer some respite from the “topos,” as Huber and Crosson put it (1), that has historically constructed Irish cinema as a struggle for a local cinema under threat from the colonizing and corrupting global influences of Hollywood, or the “de-nationalizing” of Irish cinema, as Kevin Rockett described Irish filmmaking practices of the nineties (O’Rawe and Rockett 60). The very idea of the transnational itself—a framework which moves beyond the space of the nation to more universal and systemic discourses such as neoliberalism, climate change, migration, and so on—allows for a more diversified and intersectional consideration of the materialities of Ireland’s post-crash cultural, social, and ecological economy. In a contemporary, transnational, globalized, postmodern (however one styles it) media environment which inherently complicates the local/global dichotomy that structures national readings, it is unsurprising that many critics seek to encourage a “diversification of critical perspectives,” as Monahan puts it in his introduction to Ireland and Cinema (3). In what follows, I will discuss some of these diversified perspectives, which frame an examination of Irish film and media in terms of more implicitly “transnational” discourses such as ecocriticism; industry and production; gender studies perspectives; race, ethnicity and migration; media activism; and memory and trauma studies. This doesn’t mean, of course, that the issue of “Irishness” has disappeared from the field entirely, but rather that it has been unpicked somewhat from the ideological apparatus of national identity, and distributed across the social, economic, political, and ecological aspects of the post-crash Irish state. The national remains a key signifier in much of the work in this field, though it manifests in intricate, and sometimes problematic, ways in a field still grappling somewhat with the concept of a “transnational” media—and critical—culture: the question of being “true to one’s place” is a complex and multilayered one.

On being “true to one’s place” The transnational offers much potential for the analysis of Irish film and media production in a globalized environment, as well as for rearticulating the more abstract idea of “Irish” film and media production in and of itself. Martin McLoone for example, evokes the transnational as a conceptual tool in his chapter in Hill’s Companion, discussing the ways in which it is has been mobilized to circumvent the dichotomous structures that are seen to underlie discourses of national cinema: Since at least the 1990s but especially in the 2000s, the term ‘transnational cinema’ has emerged as a way of theorising the complex interchange between the local and the global in cinema and to explain the increasingly labyrinthine relationships that now exist within film production and distribution. The term is also offered as a corrective to what is often seen as the theoretically limiting concept as the national, dismissed as both essentialist and prescriptive and increasingly irrelevant to the nature of contemporary film production, distribution, and consumption (Higson 2000, 2002). Certainly, the notion of transnational cinema does 380

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explain with greater nuance the full cinematic experience of a small country like Ireland, dependent on the international industry for financing and production and whose audiences largely consume the films provided by international distribution. (246) Here the transnational is positioned as a framework that perhaps more efciently captures the threshold, or liminal, nature of Irish cinema and media, which is placed at the interface of the local and the global. While McLoone himself is not particularly approving of the concept, seeing it as inappropriately detached from cultural specificity, many prominent Irish film scholars embrace the transnational, if not necessarily as a corrective to the national, as a way of traversing it. Conn Holohan, for instance, frames his 2010 comparative analysis of Irish and Spanish national cinemas as an exploration of the “complexity of the relationship between . . . the national past and the transnational cultural and economic interactions of the present” (3). Flynn and Tracy, in their annual survey of the field in Estudios Irlandeses, have with increasing frequency over the last decade used the term transnational to describe the direction of both practice and criticism, noting in 2017 the “emergence of what we might now confidently describe as a ‘third wave’ of Irish film, characterised by a shift away from a national towards a transnational mode” (242).2 Tracy, in Huber and Crosson’s volume, likewise argues for an understanding of Irish cinema as transnational and “interstitial” (14), deploying the deconstructive theories of nation and national cinema of Homi Bhabha and Andrew Higson, respectively, in a reading of How Harry Became a Tree (2001) that moves beyond economic and production contexts as a key identifier of the transnational, towards a more generalized transnational thematics: “[the film] is transnational,” he argues, “in its interest in the nation as a non-essential construct: what can be said about one nation can be said about many” (20). This latter may seem an obvious point, and indeed one that is largely uncontroversial, but in fact, it speaks to an anxiety about cultural distinctiveness that sometimes lies beneath the engagement with the transnational in Irish critical discourse. McLoone’s cautionary comment about the potential efacing of the national by a transnational framework demonstrates this anxiety succinctly: Transnational cinema might indeed better describe the total cinematic experience of a small country like Ireland but, as Higbee and Lim point out, the one nuance it does not account for is the imbalance of power—political, economic, and most crucially, ideological— between the local and the global, the centre and the periphery, the coloniser and the colonised (Higbee and Lim 2010, p. 9). In Irish film studies, this is the crucial limitation that the national is often invoked to address. (247) Ruth Barton takes a similar approach to the issue of the transnational in her recently published book, a comprehensive survey of post-Tiger Irish cinema that covers areas of production that have (arguably) not had much critical attention such as animation and horror, as well as the more familiar analytic frameworks of Irish cinema such as documentary, the history film, the representation of trauma, and rural/urban landscapes. While she argues strongly for the consideration of Irish film as an industry framed by global concerns, the issue of the national remains the key signifier in her positioning of the field. She explicitly states in her conclusion that the “intention behind writing this book was to argue for the place of the national within Irish filmmaking” (224), and the book opens with a reevaluation of her own ideas on what constitutes a national cinema that includes a discussion of whether Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2015 film The Lobster can (or indeed should) be considered an Irish film. Barton’s approach, while acknowledging that 381

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questions of nationhood and national identity have undergone significant transformation in the last 20 years, and that the very concept of a defined (or definable) national cinema has fallen out of critical favor, argues that the transnational, rather than eschewing the local, in fact offers a way to re-encode cultural specificity and distinctiveness into a globalized film and media culture: I am not sure that Irish cinema is no longer a national cinema . . . the usefulness of the concept of the transnational, espoused by Flynn and Tracy as best describing the industry, and the possibilities that this term offers for retrieving, rather than dismissing, the national. (19) Within a number of the contemporary critical interventions in the field of film and media studies, then, the question of national specificity remains a dominant touchstone, despite this apparent turn towards the transnational. For the most part, the term transnational is used in an ideological sense, rather than a more broadly theoretical one, and usually as synonymous with globalization and cultural assimilation or convergence. This is a legitimate concern, of course, but this focus on the hierarchical—even predatory—relationship between the global and the local risks becoming a critical roadblock, and the concern with the national can itself be a limitation when it remains enmeshed in debates about definition, classification, and exceptionalism. This is not to suggest that the transnational is ideologically unencumbered, of course. Many transnational critical perspectives seek to interrogate, in various ways, the “neoliberalizing” of Irish society, economy, and culture from the late nineties onward, and a systemic critique of cultural capitalism is arguably the dominant discursive framework in contemporary Irish film and media studies (and indeed, in Irish Studies more broadly). There remains a strong investment in Irish national cinema as an oppositional space—a “Third Cinema” (a term invoked specifically by McLoone in 2004 to articulate a preferred mode of practice for Irish filmmakers (122–130), but which has tended to inform much of the traditional scholarship on Irish cinema as a national cinema), which is politically engaged and critical of dominant cinema cultures, particularly Anglo-American. This often manifests within critical commentary as a discernible valuing of films which might be seen as coming from a European art-house tradition, or films which are explicitly civic in tone or content (overt state of the nation pieces)—films that, arguably, take the baton of the critically venerated First Wave directors of the seventies and eighties.3 Barton, for instance, while arguing that most contemporary Irish cinema is not oppositional enough (she describes it as “too flimsy to bear the weight of analysis” (19)), defines Irish national cinema as “overall an arthouse cinema, however difficult that category is to establish” (36). Artistic sensibility thus remains a key critical marker in surveys of the field, and goes some way towards explaining the particular interest in what might be considered auteur-driven Irish filmmaking as the gold standard of contemporary Irish cinema—the attention given to the work of Lenny Abrahamson is a useful example here.4 This investment in a politicized Irish cinema is understandable, and indeed, necessary, but sometimes risks becoming entangled in the old dichotomies of tradition and modernity, authenticity and legitimacy, as well as creating an index of canonical works of a “new” Irish cinema. As I pointed out in the introduction, there is something very seductive about mobilizing the liminal or the interstitial space as the “proper” space of contemporary Irish cinema and television, but if that space can only be inhabited by a select group of legitimized Irish auteurs with a sufficiently arthouse sensibility, then it becomes a monolithic space, rather than a generative one. Both Díog O’Connell and Luke Gibbons address this concern in different ways, by shifting the focus from an auteur-focused framework to a narratological or formal one—O’Connell with the idea of storytelling and literary history in New Irish Storytellers: Narrative Strategies in Film, and Gibbons with the concept of an “accented cinema,” which he sees 382

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as shifting “the debate on cultural specificity from issues of content or representation—what is depicted—to modes of enunciation: voice, style, tone and conditions of enunciation” (262). Flynn and Tracy discuss the move away from the national as the central structure in Irish film and media studies, somewhat with tongues in cheeks, as the reverberations of “narky postcolonialism” (referencing Bob Quinn) in their 2018 Estudios Irlandeses field review, commenting that “[w]e have, perhaps, been too introspective for too long . . . too focused on cultural production imagined in relation to other, seemingly more ‘United’ Anglophone influences (US and UK) than our own” (295).5 It’s clear, however, that in much of contemporary critical approaches to the field there is a discernible effort to be conscious of the pull towards establishing or codifying the terrain of Irish film and media, and instead, to find alternative perspectives on the subject. These types of interventions use the national in a less regulating manner—the question becomes less “is this film Irish” and more “what does this film tell us about the social, cultural, economic, or ecological experience of Ireland.”

Ecocritism Within the last decade, ecocriticism has become one of the most important and influential frameworks in the study of contemporary literary and visual culture. Ecocriticism is a profoundly interdisciplinary movement, bringing together work in the humanities, the natural sciences, the social sciences, and further afield, but at its heart is a focus on the relationship between representation and the physical environment, a focus which is particularly crucial in an era of globalization, migration, and climate crisis. In some respects, Irish film and media studies has historically been interested in ecocriticism in a very broad sense: visual representation of the landscape is fundamental to much of the critical discourse in the field. In a number of contemporary analyses, however, ecocriticism is mobilized as a way of challenging the manner in which representations of place in Irish cinema tend to become pressed into service as representations of nation. Pat Brereton, for example, presents ecocriticism as an oppositional framework in an essay that posits an Irish ecocinema going right back to Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934) and finishes with Risteard O’Domhnaill’s environmental documentary The Pipe (2010), arguing that this approach allows for reading these texts in a “more productive way than our erstwhile fixation with romantic and nationalistic scholarly tropes” (114). Conn Holohan, in his contribution to Hill’s Companion, also explicitly uses ecocriticism to navigate what he calls the “restrictive geographies of national cinema” (420): his reading of the representation of the urban and rural in contemporary Irish cinema focuses on the way in which many filmmakers explore “the tension between rootedness in the local and a transcendence that connects the particularities of action and place to a more universal human experience” (420). Holohan’s position focuses on paying specific attention to the way in which contemporary Irish film and media represents the material lived reality of post-Tiger Ireland and its inhabitants (recalling Abrahamson’s comment quoted at the beginning of this piece, where he calls for a cinema that is “true to its place,” rather than its nation (Crosson and Schreiber 141)). For Holohan, the spatial turn embedded in ecocriticism allows for a reading of contemporary Irish cinema as one that resists being coopted by postcolonial structures of identity, while “still acknowledging the determining power of place” (421). Certainly, a growing interest in eco or environmental frameworks can be noted in film and media output over the last two decades, with a particular uptick in what might be determined as ecocinema in the aftermath of the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, and the failure of the neoliberal project in Ireland, in 2007. Gerard Barrett’s 2013 Pilgrim Hill, for example, offers a nuanced and profoundly anti-nostalgic exploration of the intersections between neoliberal agricultural system, family tradition, and sustainable rural life. The film, presented in a documentary style 383

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(though it is not a documentary), follows Jimmy Walshe, a farmer living alone with his father, and charts the decline of the family farm in the face of both bureaucratic governmental policy and an ideologically restrictive connection to national and family tradition. Pilgrim Hill certainly allows for—even encourages—the psychoanalytically-inflected postcolonial reading familiar from Irish Studies more broadly: there is oedipal tension, in Jimmy’s poor relationship with his father and his sense of being trapped in his lonely situation by the limiting obligations of family tradition; there is anxiety about masculinity, in his emotional and sexual dysfunction; there is the traumatic legacy of family history and fatalism about futurity. It also, however, offers a resonant critique of neoliberalism and its effects on the natural world and environment. The final sequence, where Jimmy engages in a stand-off with representatives from the Department of Agriculture and local police who arrive to enforce an order to remove his herd following a tuberculous diagnosis, is deeply moving: set to a melancholy score (the only time the film deploys non-diegetic music), Jimmy’s desperation and heartbreak is visceral. His reaction is not merely to the loss of the financial security of the herd. Given the great care taken by the film to show us Jimmy’s deep attachment to his animals and their welfare, it can be read as a mourning of the herd itself. The cattle and farm are not just marketized commodities for Jimmy, and while the ideological dimensions of rural life and cultural traditions are presented as damaging and oppressive, Jimmy’s more ethical relationship with the landscape also has the potential for a sustaining and sustainable effect (though this potential is contingent and ultimately paralyzed). The primary dichotomy in the film is not tradition and modernity in a conventional sense: it’s not about abandoning the “caveman stuff ” and emigrating, as Jimmy’s friend urges him to do, but rather about the need to create a more habitable future. This, the film suggests, is almost impossible for a person caught between the matrices of postcolonial obligation and neoliberal structural bureaucracy, both of which limit any other mode of being (hence Jimmy’s desire for a family, though not, he is keen to specify, a son). Films such as Barrett’s Pilgrim Hill, O’Domhnaill’s documentaries The Pipe (2010) and Atlantic (2016), and Pat Collin’s Silence (2012) are obvious examples of a burgeoning Irish ecocinema, but many other films, while not directly or explicitly about environmental or climate crisis, offer productive readings when considered in ecocritical terms as being about the need to cultivate a more ethical relationship with the landscape: a movement towards what Irish ecocritical scholar Michael Cronin calls a “politics of microspection which seeks to expand the possibilities of the local, not reduce them, and which offers the opportunity to reconfigure positively our social, economic and political experience of the fundamentals of space and time” (quoted in Flannery 2). To these, I would be inclined to add films such as Lenny Abrahamson’s Garage (2007), Conor Horgan’s One Hundred Mornings (2009), and Stephen Fingleton’s The Survivalist (2015), as well as short films such as Foxes (Lorcan Finnegan 2012), The Tree (David Freyne 2013), and Magpie (Fingleton 2013), all of which foreground a concern with the natural environment and our relationship with it in the wake of the Tiger and its collapse, with protagonists “scrambling for a new set of codes by which to live their lives and with which to engage with the altered landscapes of the country” (Flannery 2). All of these films are critical, in various ways, of the effects of global neoliberalism, but steadfastly resist being coopted into a fetishistic or nativist presentation of a sentimental “authentic” local space (a recurring response in Irish cultural ideology to modernity, which tends to lament a lost pre- or anti-modern pastoral Ireland). It’s possible also to read the increasing interest in horror and speculative fiction by Irish filmmakers as frameworks by which to respond to and critique the sociocultural transformations wrought by Ireland’s turbulent encounters with neoliberalism; the latter especially demonstrates an anxiety about environmental and climate crisis, sustainability, and ecological ethics in contemporary culture.6 384

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A more ecocritically-inflected response to urban-based films is less prevalent, primarily since representations of the city in Irish cinema tend to be more rooted in the dualistic ideologies of tradition and modernity in Irish culture. However, analyses of the city from an ecocritical perspective can be found in in two of the recently published collections, including Eduardo Barros Grela’s analysis of “postmodern spatialities” in a number of contemporary Irish urban films in Werner and Huber (273), and Jenny Knell’s discussion of urban gangland spaces in contemporary Irish cinema in Monahan. For the most part, discussions of the city and the urban in film and television are focused on questions of precarity, economic disenfranchisement, and social inequality as part of a broad critique of neoliberalism in post-Tiger Ireland, rather than space and ecology specifically. It’s evident though that this burgeoning, broadly ecocritical perspective will inform many new approaches to contemporary Irish film and media culture.

Industry studies Another of the “diversified” approaches that has a particular resonance in the post-Tiger period is that of industry studies, which might be broadly defined as a study of film and television that prioritizes the analysis of the production, funding, legislation, reception, and distribution of media texts, over the sociocultural interpretation of those texts. Of course, Irish film and media studies scholarship has always been very much alive to issues of production, and this is one of the historical strengths of the field. However, industry studies perspectives have become increasingly important in the broader field of film and media studies to conceptualize issues of power, distribution, audience and consumption, and digital and new media, in a neoliberal, corporate and market-driven media culture.7 Roddy Flynn’s work is fundamental in establishing the subfield of industry studies in Irish film and media scholarship—his recent book Irish Media: A Critical History, coauthored with John Horgan, is a highly detailed and informative look at the historical, political, social, cultural, and above all economic contexts of the development of Irish print media, broadcasting, and radio, covering issues such as content, policy, legislation, corporate ownership, and funding. The industry turn is also a feature of a number of scholarly interventions in the Irish field. Barton’s aforementioned Irish Cinema in the Twenty-first Century, for example, contains discussion of industry and production in most chapters and is especially rigorous in the section on animation. Likewise, Flynn has a chapter on industry and policy in Hill’s Companion, and Connolly’s chapter on the First Wave in that book is also underpinned by an industry studies framework. There, she argues against the understanding of the First Wave as “a monolithic indigenous Irish film culture,” and sidesteps “the value placed on the material object of film” in favor of “the scene of collective film viewing and the social architecture of the cinema” (108). This shifts the focus onto the production, rather than the aesthetic, contexts of the First Wave, and posits a preexisting radical film culture in the sixties and seventies. Edward Brennan’s A Post-Nationalist History of Television in Ireland argues for a similarly alternative perspective on Irish television through the lens of audience reception and memory. Estudios Irlandeses’ annual surveys of the field, again with Roddy Flynn at the helm, always extensively discuss issues of industry and policy. Industry thus has become a particularly important framework for understanding post-Tiger film and television discourse. International co-production has, of course, historically been an embedded feature of the Irish film and television industry, where funding and support for a film or show comes from a variety of production companies and agencies in multiple countries; however, the radical changes in the landscape of media production in the last two decades (for example, the increase in global media conglomerates, and the mainstreaming of digital subscription-based streaming services) means that the question of what constitutes “indigenous” 385

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production has become even more complex. Studies that foreground issues of industry are explicitly rooted in both global and local economic and political structures and add depth and nuance to the more ideologically determined cultural dichotomies of local/global and tradition/ modernity that often underpin analyses of the field.

Mediated identities The subheading here is perhaps a bit jargon, but is useful to differentiate this next discursive framework from the discussion of (trans)national identity in the first section—here, I’m referring to texts which foreground questions of race, class, gender, and sexuality, even as those questions intersect with the broader one of nation. Again, this has historically been a strength of both film and media representation and the critical examination of this representation, especially in the case of gender, and to lesser extent, class; critiques of postcolonial Irish culture from a feminist and Marxist perspective are some of the bedrocks of modern Irish Studies. Following broader trends in Irish Studies scholarship, much of the gender studies scholarship on contemporary Irish film and media has tended to be in the area of masculinity studies. For instance, Debbie Ging’s comprehensive Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema tracks screen representations of Irish masculinity from postcolonial to neoliberal, considering the intersections of gender, nation, and class. There are also productive readings of film and media texts in the numerous collections on masculinity and Irish culture that have appeared over the last decade: essays on Northern Irish post-conflict masculinity and queer masculinities in Magennis and Mullen, and an entire section covering “onscreen masculinity” in Holohan and Tracy, including essays on Northern Irish masculinity, race and masculinity, and crisis masculinity. Certainly, there is much to interrogate, since post-Tiger film and media productions have demonstrated a particular interest in men and masculinity in contemporary Irish culture (though some may argue, of course, that it was always ever thus). Lenny Abrahamson’s What Richard Did (2012), for example, a film loosely based on a real life incident in which four private-school educated schoolboys were tried for the killing of one of their peers in a fight outside a nightclub, is a poignant examination of the intersections of masculinity, class, and violence in contemporary Dublin. The film’s nuanced look at the issues of wealth, privilege, and accountability is underpinned by a critical awareness of the unequal and divergent experiences of recession and austerity in post-Tiger Ireland, deftly bringing together questions of class, national identity, and belonging in a changed (but also profoundly immutable) Irish state. Neoliberal critiques also underpin Gerard Barrett’s 2014 Glassland, about a young man edging into criminality due to economic deprivation and family responsibility (interestingly, the protagonists of both of these latter two films are played by the same actor, Jack Reynor). The intersection of class, socioeconomic disenfranchisement, and criminality is of course also central to one of the most popular texts about Irish masculinity in the last decade, RTÉ’s gangland drama Love/Hate, and this kind of strategy is repeated across much popular media output—examples include RTÉ’s Hardy Bucks (2008-present), Young Offenders (both the 2016 film by Peter Foote, and the ensuing RTÉ series), Cardboard Gangsters (Mark O’Connor 2017), and Frank Berry’s remarkable Michael Inside (2018). This focus is reflected in much of the critical work in masculinity in Irish film and media: Ging, for instance, considers the urban “protest masculinity” to be the hegemonic form of Irish masculinity in contemporary Irish film. It will be interesting to see how this framework develops in a post-recessionary, recovery-orientated culture over the coming years (pandemic notwithstanding, of course): the enormously popular television adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People in 2020, and the ensuing fetishization of silver neck chains and O’Neill’s GAA shorts, perhaps demonstrate an appetite for a more ascetic, taciturn form of rural masculinity in post-post-Tiger Ireland. 386

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It is imperative to challenge the heteronormative, homogenous, and hegemonic structures of Irish national identity and culture, and the fixation on Connell’s pastoral charms may run dangerously close to Fíor-Ghael nostalgia, which is problematic in an Irish society profoundly riven with social inequality. Many of the critical interventions in contemporary Irish film and media highlight the critical lacunae and imbalances evident in the mainstream visualizing of contemporary Irish culture, society, and identity. It is surprising, for example, that the first book-length study of queer Irish identities on screen, Alison Macleod’s Irish Queer Cinema, was only published in 2018. The book maps out a history of queer representation in Irish film from the First Wave right up to the Marriage Equality Referendum in 2015 and is an important and timely critical intervention into the field. Significantly, Macleod’s book explicitly complicates the framework of nation in her positioning of a historical and cultural narrative of queer subjectivity, and directly places itself alongside the “transnational” approaches to contemporary Irish cinema and culture outlined in the first section here. Race is also becoming an increasingly important framework of analysis, and the work of Zélie Asava is foundational here. Her 2013 The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities on Irish Film and Television is one of the few publications with a sustained focus on race and national identity in Irish film and media. Her work is part of a broader attention in Irish Studies in the last decade to critical race studies, which challenges the contemporary neglect of racial and ethnic Irish identities on socio-political and cultural fronts (through critiques of direct provision and Irish citizenship law, and the lack of visibility and representation of minority writers and artists in the mainstream media), as well as the historical construction of “authentic” Irish national identity as monoracial and monolithic.8 Sustained examination of screen femininities is less common, though there is some excellent discussion of femininity in a few of the edited collections, mostly intersectional in approach, considering class, race, and ethnicity as well as gender. This is particularly striking given the critical attention to femininity that has historically underpinned Irish Studies scholarship, though many feminist critics have included film and media in their work on the representation of women in literature and culture.9 A focus on women in Irish film and media is complicated somewhat by the form itself: should it be on the representation of women or on representation by women (and even that is complicated by the trickier question of authorship in this form—women directors, yes, but what about screenwriters, or cinematographers?). It is curious that two of the most critically discussed films about Irish women in the last ten years, for example, are films written and directed by men: Philomena (Frears 2013) and Brooklyn (Carney 2015). Contemporary female directors and screenwriters such as Kirsten Sheridan, Rebecca Daly, Aisling Walsh, and Carmel Winters, all of whom foreground women and femininity in their works, don’t tend to receive as much critical attention in the field as their male counterparts, though they produce some of the most compelling screen representations of post-Tiger Ireland. Rebecca Daly’s 2011 feature, The Other Side of Sleep, for instance, gives an incredibly powerful portrayal of rural Ireland, femininity, memory, and trauma. In the film, a young woman sleepwalks into a forest and wakes up beside the dead body of a missing girl from a nearby town, reawakening childhood memories of the murder of her own mother in similar circumstances. The film’s examination of female intimacy and kinship structures, female embodiment, and most significantly, female trauma is potent, made even more so by Daly’s implicit invocation of the disappearance of a series of young women in Ireland in the nineties as a sociocultural context for her film. This is an extremely important film, though for the most part critically neglected. One thing that is becoming increasingly visible, however, is the juxtaposition of gender and industry studies, with an examination funding patterns, policy, and distribution and marketing to demonstrate deep-rooted inequalities and lack of diversity. Practitioners and artists themselves 387

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are at the forefront of this movement, as demonstrated by experimental filmmaker and visual artist Vivienne Dick’s impassioned critique of the Irish Film Board in 2017: Women have to fight really, really hard to get support to do a feature film. . . . If you just take for example, the Film Board, they’re aware of it, they’re kind of ashamed of it after Waking The Feminists. . . . They know damn well that they fund all these films by young lads that are the same kind of film: horror films or crime fiction. Do we need to see another one of them? Are they that interesting? No, they’re not. They’re actually really boring—I think. There’s other kinds of films out there but they can’t get their heads around it. Maybe if they had a few more women on the panel, things might be different. The establishment of the organization Women in Film and Television Ireland (WFT) has been vital in calling attention to the lack of gender parity in the industry and promoting and curating the work of women in the field. The scholarship of Susan Liddy in particular is key in the interrogation of the representation of Irish women both onscreen and of, and her Women in the Irish Film Industry: Stories and Storytellers is a long overdue and much anticipated foregrounding of women’s critical practice in the field.

New media and media activism This idea of a critical practice in Irish film and media is central to what might be tentatively considered under the framework of media activism. Some of the most powerful work in contemporary Irish film and media production is a variety of short films, advertisements, and art installations that are explicitly commissioned as part of movements lobbying for social change. These critically and politically self-conscious texts are deeply concerned with issues of disenfranchisement, disempowerment, social inequality, and discrimination that are entrenched in the post-recessionary, neoliberal Irish state. The work of Dave Tynan, for example, is especially useful to consider under the broad rubric of “media activism,” particularly his work with actor and screenwriter Emmet Kirwin. Texts such as Just Saying (2012) and Heartbreak (2016) are both spoken word short films that directly address issues of emigration, belonging, alienation, socioeconomic disenfranchisement, austerity, class, and gender in contemporary Dublin. Both of these texts are self-consciously state-of-the-nation pieces aimed at a young demographic, and civic in both content and distribution (released free to access online, and enormously popular). This work tends not to be given much critical attention in mainstream film and media scholarship, which typically privileges the more established media “genres” such as drama, documentary, animation, and so on, and is more likely to appear in scholarly work in the adjacent fields of art and media practice, cultural studies, and digital media. Yet what’s particularly striking about this type of work is the radical challenge it presents not just to the cultural status quo, but also to the formal one: these mixed and new media texts shift the focus from what constitutes an Irish film to what constitutes an Irish film, for the purposes of surveying the field. This offers an interesting counterpoint to the “arthouse sensibility” ethos that underpins hegemonic understandings of the territory of Irish film and media outlined in the first section of this chapter: the highly politicized and democratic nature of this type of media production punctures any possibility of cultural elitism in appraising the state of the field. In fact, it could be argued that the artists and activists employed in this type of critical media practice are the “successors” to the First Wave filmmakers so venerated in Irish film and media discourses: their works are calls to arms which recall the Third Cinema objectives of cinema-as-revolution so often associated with the Irish First Wave. Indeed, Maeve Connolly’s aforementioned discussion of the First 388

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Wave explicitly posits a continuum between Irish filmmakers of the 70s and early 80s and contemporary artists working with film and media in Ireland, such as Jesse Jones, Sarah Browne, and Declan Clarke, a continuum rooted in media and representation as radical sociopolitical critique. The revolutionary potential of contemporary critical media practice is most clearly demonstrated in We Face This Land, the short film Tynan produced in 2017 as part of the Repeal the Eighth movement, in which he worked with prominent feminist activists, artists, writers, and performers to create a powerful and ethical statement on the need for social and political change. Again, the democratic aspect of the creative process is key here: the film is a collective piece of work, overtly politicized, and open access through online release.

Memory studies The final paradigm I see as a significant cluster in Irish film and media, both in practice and critically, is the broad topic of memory studies. While the representation of the past has traditionally been a dominant aspect of the field, both onscreen and on the page, this has become a particularly sensitive issue in the last two decades. This is due, primarily, to the need to respond artistically and culturally to the mounting revelations of historical institutional abuse scandals since the early 1990s; but the memory turn in Irish cultural studies is also connected to a broader cultural commemorative impulse, as Ireland entered its official Decade of Centenaries in 2012 and began to take account of the events that led to the birth of the modern Irish nation a century ago. This need to interrogate the past is overwhelmingly rooted in frameworks of trauma, affect, and ethics, as Emilie Pine notes: We are not who we thought we were, or put another way, we remember ourselves differently now. The consequence of this revisiting the past is that it creates new narratives— alternate and more complex narratives—taking account of memories that were for too long ‘forgotten’, or sidelined, by Irish history and culture. These new narratives expand the traditionally narrow definition of Irish historical identity, and reconfigure this identity through the framework of remembrance and trauma. (3) The field of documentary has been key to this “framework of remembrance.” Louis Lentin’s Dear Daughter (1996), Steve Humphrey’s Sex in a Cold Climate (1998), and Mary Raferty’s States of Fear (1999), to name but a few, were part of a “path-breaking” movement that Carol MacKeogh and Dióg O’Connell posit as a “new culture and civil society,” situating documentary media as an ethical force for change and reflection (3). Mia Mullarkey’s 2017 documentary Mother and Baby continues this work of exposing the raw truth of Ireland’s “architecture of containment,”10 focusing—as many of these texts do—on acts of testimony and witnessing as a critical aspect of an ethical engagement with the past, featuring deeply moving interviews with survivors of mother and baby institutions (including that at Tuam), archive recordings, and reconstructions. Pine, following Ricoeur, calls this type of engagement with the past a “form of justice . . . ethical memory necessitates the creation, or remembering, of a ‘parallel history of . . . victimisation’” (14). This kind of framework also underpins the numerous fiction films and media dealing with these topics, where the foregrounding of personal narrative, experience, and memory is vital to their representative strategies. This is most clearly the case in films such as Stephen Frears’ Philomena (2013), based on the true story of Philomena Lee and her quest to find the son forcibly removed from her and adopted out by the order of nuns running Sean Ross Abbey Mother and Baby Home in the fifties. However, it can also be detected in more 389

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allegorical representations, in John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary (2014), for example, but most powerfully perhaps in Viko Nikci’s extraordinary 2019 mystery thriller Cellar Door. In this film, a young woman, Aidie, is trapped in a temporal crisis, reliving memories over and over as she tries to make sense of a primal trauma from her past, the disappearance of her baby son while she is institutionalized in what appears to be a mother and baby home, or a Magdalene Laundry. This more oblique engagement with Ireland’s architecture of containment is deeply unsettling, and the generic form hovers somewhere between thriller and horror, giving a profoundly visceral and embodied response to a national trauma and repression: at one point in the film, Aidie bitterly comments on her father’s obliviousness, saying that “you could fill a septic tank with what he doesn’t know,” evoking the horrors of Tuam to disquieting efect. Indeed, the persistence of horror as a preferred generic form can itself be read, echoing Pine, as representing a need to find new narratives and structures to approach the traumatic reconfiguration of Ireland’s national memory: films such as Paddy Breathnach’s Shrooms (2007), Aisling Walsh’s The Daisy Chain (2008), and Marina de Van’s Dark Touch (2013) invoke the specter of clerical, institutional, and familial child abuse in terms of a catastrophic “return of the repressed” on a societal level.11

Conclusion I’ve attempted to outline here some of the directions I see as defining the field of Irish film and media studies, both on-screen and on the page, in the post-Tiger period and in the ensuing years of recession and austerity. The “failure” of neoliberalism in Ireland, issues such as economic and social deprivation, migration, and political protest, as well as anxieties about commemoration and remembrance culture, are reflected in the thematic concerns visible in media output during this period. The field of Irish film and media studies has diversified significantly during this period to become much more interdisciplinary in its attempts to account for the changing landscape of contemporary Irish culture. While questions of the nation and national specificity remain central, there is also a discernible attempt to transcend the ideologically-loaded aspects of this debate. Instead, the field is interested in examining the highly mediated, and fundamentally transformed cultural space of post-Tiger Ireland, deploying alternative frameworks of analysis in order to interrogate the way visual representations try to capture their “place.” What does (and indeed should) Ireland look like after the crash? The space is in constant flux, but media practitioners and scholars are responding quickly to this altered terrain.

Notes 1 See Huber and Crosson for comprehensive survey of the pre-2010 critical work on Irish film. 2 The notion of an Irish Third Wave is also discussed in Patrick Brodie’s (2016) article, “Deterritorialising Irish Cinema.” 3 Though see Maeve Connolly for an insightful complication of this critical positioning of the work of these filmmakers as a kind of primal scene of indigenous film culture, in her consideration of the legacies of the First Wave in John Hill’s Companion. 4 See Dióg O’Connell (2010), and Monahan (2016), particularly. 5 See also my work (2013) on contemporary Irish horror cinema as a challenge to “narky” postcolonialism in critical discourses of ‘national’ cinema, in Bracken and Radley, pp. 109–123. 6 I discuss this in more detail in an essay (2020) on the relationship between the representation of apocalypse in post-Tiger cinema. 7 See “IN FOCUS: Media Industry Studies.” for a useful survey of the “industry turn” in contemporary film and media studies. 8 For more on whiteness in and of Irish Studies scholarship, see contributions by Anne Mulhall, and Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi and Emma Penney, in the 2020 special jubilee issue of the Irish University Review. 390

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9 The feminist scholarship of Gerardine Meaney, Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, and Moynagh Sullivan is particularly noteworthy here. 10 This term comes from James M Smith’s history of the Magdalene system. 11 See Radley, “Violent Transpositions,” and Kathleen Vejvoda, for more on horror cinema and trauma.

Works cited Asava, Zélie. The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities on Irish Film and Television. Peter Lang, 2013. Barros Grela, Eduardo. Re-Defining Urban Identities in Contemporary Irish Films. Huber and Crosson, pp. 67–80. Barton, Ruth. Irish Cinema in the Twenty-First Century. Manchester University Press, 2019. Brennan, Edward. A Post-Nationalist History of Television in Ireland. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Brereton, Pat. “Ecological Representations of Irish Films.” Culture and Media: Ecocritical Explorations. Edited by Rayson K. Alex et al. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014, pp. 114–130. Brodie, Patrick. “Deterritorialising Irish Cinema.” Nordic Irish Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2016, pp. 79–96. Connolly, Maeve. Irish Cinema’s First Wave: Histories and Legacies of the 1970s and the 1980s. Hill, pp. 106–126. Enyi-Amadi, Chiamaka and Emma Penney. “Are We Doing Diversity Justice? A Critical Exchange.” Irish Studies Now, special issue of Irish University Review, Vol. 50, No. 1, May 2020, pp. 112–119. Flannery, Eoin. “Ireland and Ecocriticism: An Introduction.” Irish Ecocriticism, special issue of Journal of Ecocriticism, Vol. 5, No. 2, July 2013, pp. 1–8. Flynn, Roddy and Tony Tracy. Historical Dictionary of Irish Cinema. Rowman and Littlefield, 2019. Flynn, Roddy and Tony Tracy. “Irish Film and Television—2017.” Estudios Irlandeses, No. 13, 2018, pp. 238–268. Flynn, Roddy and Tony Tracy. “Irish Film and Television—2018.” Estudios Irlandeses, No. 14, 2019, pp. 294–297. Gibbons, Luke. “Vernacular Visions: Ireland and Accented Cinema.” A Companion to British and Irish Cinema. Edited by John Hill. Wiley Blackwell, 2019, pp. 260–273. Ging, Debbie. Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Hill, John, Ed. A Companion to British and Irish Cinema. Wiley Blackwell, 2019. Holohan, Conn. Cinema on the Periphery: Contemporary Irish and Spanish Film. Irish Academic Press, 2010. Holohan, Conn. “Space and Place in Irish Cinema.” A Companion to British and Irish Cinema. Edited by John Hill. Wiley Blackwell, 2019, pp. 407–422. Holohan, Conn and Tony Tracy. Masculinity and Irish Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Horgan, John and Roddy Flynn. Irish Media: A Critical History. Four Courts Press, 2017. Huber, Werner and Seán Crosson, Eds. Contemporary Irish Film: New Perspectives on a National Cinema. Braumuller, 2011. “IN FOCUS: Media Industry Studies.” Cinema Journal, Vol. 52 No. 3, Spring 2013. Keohane, Kieran and Carmen Kuhling. The Domestic, Moral and Political Economies of Post-Celtic Tiger: What Rough Beast. Ireland, Manchester University Press, 2014. Knell, Jenny. “Gangland Geometries: Space, Mobility and Transgression in the Veronica Guerin Films.” Ireland and Cinema: Culture and Contexts. Edited by Barry Monahan. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 24–34. Liddy, Susan. Women in the Irish Film Industry: Stories and Storytellers. Cork University Press, 2020. MacKeogh, Carol and Dióg O’Connell. Documentary in a Changing State: Ireland since the 1990s. Cork University Press, 2012. Macleod, Alison. Irish Queer Cinema. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Magennis, Caroline and Raymond Mullen. Irish Masculinities: Reflections on Literature and Culture. Irish Academic Press, 2011. Maher, Eamon and Eugene O’Brien, Eds. From Prosperity to Austerity: A Socio-Cultural Critique of the Celtic Tiger and its Aftermath. Manchester University Press, 2014. Maher, Eamon, et al., Eds. Recalling the Celtic Tiger. Peter Lang, 2020. McLoone, Martin. Irish Cinema and International Screen Culture. Hill, pp. 234–259. McLoone, Martin. Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema. BFI, 2000. Monahan, Barry. The Films of Lenny Abrahamson: A Filmmaking of Philosophy. Bloomsbury, 2016. Monahan, Barry, Ed. Ireland and Cinema: Culture and Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Mulhall, Anne. “The Ends of Irish Studies? On Whiteness, Academia, and Activism.” Irish Studies Now, special issue of Irish University Review, Vol. 50, No. 1, May 2020, pp. 94–111. 391

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O’Connell, Dióg. New Irish Storytellers. Intellect, 2010. O’Rawe, Des and Kevin Rockett. “Origins and Orientations: An Interview with Kevin Rockett on Irish Film Studies.” Irish Cinema/Le cinéma irlandes, special issue of Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 29, No. 3, Fall 2003, pp. 57–61. Pine, Emilie. The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Radley, Emma. “Neoliberal Wastelands in Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Irish Cinema.” The New Irish Studies: Twenty-first Century Critical Revisions. Edited by Paige Reynolds. Cambridge University Press, 2020. Radley, Emma. “Violent Transpositions: The Disturbing ‘Appearance’ of the Irish Horror Film.” Viewpoints: Theoretical Perspectives on Irish Visual Texts. Edited by Claire Bracken and Emma Radley. Cork University Press, 2013, pp. 109–123. Smith, James M. Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment. University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Tracy, Tony. Inventing the Past: Perspectives on How Harry Became a Tree. Huber and Crosson, pp. 13–22. Vejvoda, Kathleen. “Beyond Horror: Surviving Sexual Abuse in Carmel Winters’ Snap.” Monahan, Ireland and Cinema, pp. 47–56.

Filmography Cellar Door. Directed by Viko Nikci. Samson Films, 2018. Glassland. Directed by Gerard Barrett. Element Pictures, 2014. Heartbreak. Directed by Dave Tynan, written and performed by Emmet Kirwin. Warrior Films, 2016. Just Saying. Directed by Dave Tynan. Kennedy Films, 2012. The Other Side of Sleep. Directed by Rebecca Daly. Fastnet Films, 2011. Pilgrim Hill. Directed by Gerard Barrett. Blank Page Productions, 2012. We Face This Land. Directed by Dave Tynan, written by Sarah Maria Griffin. Repeal Project, 2018. What Richard Did. Directed by Lenny Abrahamson. Element Pictures, 2012.

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31 Totem and Taboo in Tipperary? Irish shame and neoliberal crisis in Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart Seán Kennedy

Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart created a minor sensation when it was published in 2012. It tells the story of Bobby Mahon, an unassuming hero of his uneventful village, whose life is turned upside-down by the economic crash of 2007. When his boss, Pokey Burke, absconds leaving a mountain of debt, Mahon is left to cope with the collapse, which ushers in financial devastation for him and his colleagues. The story is told from the viewpoint of each of 21 different characters. From them, we learn the secrets of the village, the hopes and fears of its residents, and the overwhelming hopelessness that economic collapse entails. The crisis of the book revolves around the murder of Bobby’s father, Frank, for which Bobby is erroneously blamed. Unable to comprehend or defend his position, Bobby is arrested for the crime. Reviewed in The Spectator as “overwhelmingly impressive” (Watson, np), The Spinning Heart was feted in Ireland as one of the most significant responses to the crisis of 2007: “there will be many novels which explore the effect of the crash on the people of Ireland,” blurbed John Boyne, “but I can’t imagine a more original, more perceptive or more passionate work than this.” For present purposes, Boyne’s claim is at least as interesting as Ryan’s book, the reception of which, I want to suggest, is symptomatic of an unwillingness (perhaps an inability) among Irish people to confront what really happened after 2007. In psychoanalytic perspective, symptoms are compromise formations that express the contradictions of ambivalence. We develop symptoms where we do not want to know what we know. As apportionments of liability, they appeal to an audience, enlisting them to a particular narrative of suffering. They are a means of recruitment (Phillips 33). It is for this “nuisance value,” in Donald Winnicott’s phrase, that we tend to tolerate them (Qtd in Phillips 36). Freud’s discovery of resistance in treatment showed it is possible to prefer familiar pain to the unsettling prospect of a cure. We do not always want to be relieved of our symptoms. When I suggest the reception of The Spinning Heart is symptomatic of Irish resistance to economic realities, I mean to ask: does Donal Ryan tell us a story we can palliate, dispensing familiar pain, while obscuring other less comfortable emphases, such as native greed, elite corruption, and/or the abrogation of Irish sovereignty under neoliberalism? As a perceptive account of 2007, does it matter that the book does not mention neoliberal governmentality (Coulter and Nagle 1–43), or the bank guarantee that brought Ireland to its knees (McCabe 175–218), or the so-called “bailout” overseen by the Troika of the EU, ECB, and IMF to rescue German and French banks (Blyth, 51–93)? How then does it constitute a perceptive 393

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response to the crash? Would the book not need to include some reflections on Irish finance capitalism at the intersection of gender and class (Spillane 151–170), for example, to claim such status? Rather, we get a retelling of J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World for the post-Tiger generation (Buchanan 63). It is a story of drink, despair, and deadly resentment between father and son. And Ireland’s gratitude for this story, it seems to me, is symptomatic of a propensity for “comfortable powerlessness” (O’Toole, np), for the consolations of national fantasy when facing the atomizing realities of neoliberalism. When asked at the end of the book if he has killed his father, Bobby Mahon answers: “I don’t know.” This I take to be symptomatic of “unsolved antagonisms” in the book that return, in line with Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, as “immanent problems of form” (7). Split like all symptoms are, the content of Ryan’s book suggests (somewhat relentlessly) that the Irish suffer from an inability to get away from each other, more particularly from incestuous desire for, and of, their parents, whilst, at the level of form, each of the characters is precisely alone. The Spinning Heart comprises 21 chapters in which individuals speak only to themselves: “I’m stranded, she’s abandoned. She never has visitors. I should go down to her really” (Ryan 42). But she doesn’t. Each chapter takes the name of its speaker, a technique borrowed from Graham Swift’s Last Orders, perhaps, but there is no conversation between any two characters in the book. Here, the individual of the social contract is pitched against the primal needs of our species: for connection, parenting, community (Taylor 187–211). Atomized at the level of form, The Spinning Heart remains Oedipal at the level of content. Or rather, pre-Oedipal, for Ryan’s Ireland is marred both by toxic masculinity and a culture of rampant (s)motherhood that prevents it from moving on: “I expected too much from him; I know that. My John-John, my little man. I destroyed the boy by seeing too early the man inside him,” says Lily the Bike, the village prostitute (Ryan 31). Neoliberalism is not integrated into the content of the story, while the form of the story cannot offer any basis for social connection that might shatter the pre-Oedipal bond. Boys want their mammies, and mammies want their boys, while fathers are condemned to the role of national killjoys. One reason why Ryan’s book has gained so much attention is that it gives voice to the strongbut-silent type of Irish manhood. The book’s hero, Bobby Mahon, “a proper man” (Ryan 96), regresses in the face of changing economic realities: “I couldn’t stand myself. I couldn’t stand her smiling through her fear and having to coax me out of my misery like a big, sulky child” (Ryan 15). After the crash, silence seems less heroic: is symptomatic of unspeakable shame and self-disgust. Feted for years as a local hero, when the moment of truth arrives, and the crash descends, Bobby is incapable of recovering his ground: I should have said I’d been on to the taxman and the welfare inspectors and the unions and they’d soon soften Pokey’s cough, but I hadn’t and I didn’t and I turned away with a pain in my heart for the man I’d thought I was. (Ryan 15) What is at stake in Ryan’s book then, is not the crisis of Irish capitalism but the crisis of masculinity that it occasioned. The book is not about the crash at all. Rather, the extraordinary events of 2007 trigger yet another reckoning with toxic masculinity: with what Karl Figlio terms “phallic masculinity” (“Phallic,” 119–139). When is a penis not a penis? Answer: when it is a phallus. For Jacques Lacan, where “penis” signifies the physical organ in all its variety, “phallus” connotes the fantasy of the penis as projected onto spaces where we expect it to be. Gazing at Michelangelo’s David, for example,

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we confront a penis. Glancing at the crotch of a passerby, we confront (our fantasies of) the phallus. If the penis fantasizes itself a potent presence, the phallus exerts its peculiar fascination when absent. For Lacan, the phallus can only signify when it is “veiled” (581). It is what we imagine to be “there” where we cannot see. Not unlike power itself, the phallus gains scope and significance in the realm of the imagination, whereas the penis loses much of its allure once seen: all-too-often not quite what we had hoped for. The phallus, in fantasy, is also detachable. It can be projected where it is not and found to be missing where it ought to be (Laplanche and Pontalis 312–14). In The Spinning Heart, the phallus has disappeared, owing everybody money. Pokey Burke, the man who has it, is the lost object around which this tale of male rage circulates: “I want my fuckin pension you little prick, Mickey roared and roared” (Ryan 11). Here, the shame of emasculation is displaced as rage. A mixture of grief and grievance. If masculinity entails possession of the phallus, economic castration is what happens when the phallus is lost. In neoliberal Ireland, the phallus has been financialized: man’s value rendered synonymous with his exchange value. Where homo economicus cannot realize his value on the market, he cannot see any value in himself whatever. The phallus is that which, post-Tiger, Irish men no longer have, or have any claim to. It circulates like capital, and like shame, but it circulates as an absence (almost everybody gets not to have it). Hence the predicament of Mickey Briars: “there were tears in his yellow eyes. He was after being shafted. Robbed. And not even by a man, but by a little prick. That’s what he couldn’t get over” (Ryan 11). In the story that Freud tells about castration anxiety, the young boy shrugs off early threats of castration. It is only subsequently, when he confronts the “castrated” female body in light of them, that they have their deferred effect. This notion of deferred action, or nachträglichkeit, was rescued from obscurity by Jacques Lacan, and offers a radical perspective on the temporalities of trauma (Laplanche and Pontalis 56–59). Trauma can occur retroactively. Sexual development is a story told backwards. What things come to mean is not always what they initially meant, or were meant to mean. The Spinning Heart reproduces this logic exactly. When we first meet Bobby Mahon, he has lost his job, his pension, his prowess: “And now I can’t pay for the messages” (Ryan 13). His wife Tríona, modelled on King Lear’s Cordelia, doesn’t mind (how could she), but he does. Ashamed of his inability to recover his debts, he retreats into self-recrimination: “Imagine being such a coward and not even knowing it. Imagine being so suddenly useless” (15). The “suddenly” here indicates the deferred action. For Bobby has been called useless many times, by his father: “I wouldn’t like to see his eyes while I killed him. . . . He’d still be telling me I’m only a useless prick, a streak of piss, a shame to him” (Ryan 16). Bobby can absorb this insult—shrug it off—until the economic crash, when the judgment is internalized, and he feels—suddenly—useless. Ryan does not situate the crash against the broader currents of Irish history. Instead, we get a pathologizing account of transgenerational humiliation that underwrites (but also transcends) history itself. Irish dysfunction is both timeless and inescapable. The crash matters not for what it says about Irish parochialism (de Salazar 90–107), or rural gentrification (Buchanan 69), but because it is when uselessness is internalized as the truth of what Irish men have become and, perhaps, always been. No wonder they are in tears. The Spinning Heart is a moist book. The words “cry,” “crying” or “cried” appear over 60 times. There are tears on almost every page, most often denied, or seen to fall from uncomprehending faces: “lately my hands have been wet with tears when I’ve taken them away from my face. No fucker knows that” (Ryan 95). These Irish eunuchs cry. They blush. They redden. They withdraw. They are silently enraged. They assault women and each other. As Pierre Bourdieu suggests in Masculine Domination, all this is evidence of a disjunction,

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of “internal conflict” (38), between inculcated ideals of masculinity and the sudden, inescapable feeling of uselessness: Daddy done a rudey this morning at breakfast and Mammy went mad . . . told him farting was all he was good for. I felt sad for Daddy then because he looked sad on his face and he went all red. (Ryan 114) It is uselessness as the truth of his condition that menaces the libido dominandi of the Irish male. One is now what one cannot stand to be seen to be, especially as that spectacle is refracted through the eyes of Irish women: “Daddy in the mirror is always smiling when Mammy isn’t with us. Daddy in the mirror is always sad when Mammy is with us” (Ryan 116). Irish women function as the internalized spectators of this humiliating spectacle: objects of the displaced rage of economic castration. They are either idealized foils (Tríona), or the “useless cunt” castrated men secretly feel themselves to be: “Daddy called mammy a really bad word one night” (Ryan 115). Even the murder of Frank Mahon is a direct displacement of rage aimed at Irish women: “I sat there a few evenings picturing myself punching her in the mouth. . . . Then I killed a man” (Ryan 122). Mahon’s murder is triggered by our key word: “useless.” Denis goes looking for Bobby at his father’s house, unaware of what he is doing: “I pushed the front door; it was solid and heavy. I pushed again and it opened. He was expecting his son. I didn’t know until then that I had a length of timber in my hand” (Ryan 124). In the absence of financial reparation, violence promises to restore the phallus to its rightful place: He looked at the timber and then up at me, and he laughed. His laugh reminded me of my own father, the time I came home with my eyebrow split. . . . My father looked at me that day and my face streaked with blood and muck and tears and laughed that same shrill laugh and he told me I was a useless cunt. . . . Are you going robbing me? Bobby Mahon’s father wanted to know. . . . Then he smiled at me and his eyes shone and in a soft voice he said you’re nothing but a useless cunt, and I nearly fell backwards. (124) Here again, we have the deferred action. Triggered by the return of the devastating judgment, Denis kills Frank without even meaning to. “Men have to do what they have to do,” says Lily the Bike, “nature overpowers them. . . . Like big auld babas” (Ryan 28). In The Spinning Heart, men kill their fathers, kill “the Father” then regress to the safety of the maternal body: “I killed Bobby Mahon’s father . . . and I’m lying here ever since, curled up like an unborn child” (Ryan 125). It is not a good sign when one of Ireland’s most perceptive books about the crash reads like Totem and Taboo in Tipperary: when it has nothing to say about neoliberalism, and everything to say about the Irish as primal horde. Notoriously, in Totem and Taboo, Freud described how a horde of sexually frustrated brothers dominated by the primal father conspired to murder him and devour his flesh, before foreswearing incest in a welter of remorse: “In the beginning,” says Freud, “was the deed” (158). Yet in Ryan’s Ireland, as in Synge’s Playboy, this founding crime has not happened. Sons still cower in the shadow of “the Father,” unable to escape his castrating judgment: “Jim Gildea asked him straight out was he after killing me and he told him he didn’t know. I don’t know, he said. Imagine that. What a stupid prick” (Ryan 141). For Freud, the neurotic and the child share with the savage a tendency towards omnipotence of thought: “a wish can kill” (Ellman x). To the extent that he accepts his condition as castrated, Bobby 396

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fantasizes about revenge: “I thought about killing my father all day yesterday” (Ryan 15). This explains his confusion. Like Freud’s savage, he overestimates the power of fantasy. For the Irish man-child of the economic crash, reality and fantasy are no longer distinguishable, so that when the murder does happen, he cannot be sure he didn’t do it. In Ireland, the beginning was the wish, not the deed: a castrating reality that precludes Bobby from the proper path to Oedipal resolution. Did he kill his father? Bobby doesn’t know. Sharing a surname with Christy Mahon, Bobby is his more modest heir, and his ignorance seems less surprising when we remember that he has deposited the task of self-knowledge with his wife, Tríona: “She saw more in me than I knew was there. She made me so she did” (Ryan 13). This might seem benevolent, given the historically misogynist basis of Irish society, but Tríona’s character is an idealization. By dint of the cult of Mariolatory, idealization has long been central to how Irish misogyny functions. For every whore, there is a Madonna. For every Tríona, a Lily the Bike: “Having a wife is great. You can say things to your wife that you never knew you thought. It just comes out of you when the person you’re talking to is like a part of yourself ” (Ryan 20). In psychoanalytic terms, Bobby incorporates Tríona, which suggests he is, in fact, profoundly ambivalent about his need for her. As a defense mechanism, incorporation serves both “to destroy [the] object” and, “by keeping it in oneself, to appropriate the object’s qualities” (Laplanche and Pontalis 212). Ryan’s book is split, disastrously in my view, between idealizations of Woman, as selfless angel, and her utter abjection: as useless cunt, castrating bitch, devouring mouth (Irigaray 41). What does not kill me makes me stronger, we are told. Somehow, in Ryan’s book, Woman manages to do both. This suggests, of course, that she is never really there. In Totem and Taboo, Freud’s preoccupation with the fate of the primal father—his murder by lustful and indignant sons—reduces mother-woman to the status of prize. Symbolically, she is murdered by silence (Ellman vii), obscuring patriarchy’s basis in childbirth, nurture, connection (Irigaray 40–1). For Luce Irigaray, this primordial matricide, which is both “real and cultural” (39), precedes the founding crime of patricide. Against Freud, Irigaray erects a powerful counter-myth. Patriarchy both relies upon and ignores the central role played by women in the production of male libido, life, and culture (40). Fathers “intervene to censor, to repress the desire of/for the mother” (36). The maternal body becomes the site of a split identification: of an ambivalent oscillation between abject disavowal and repressed longing. This necessitates a love/hate relationship with what has been disavowed: “all desire becomes an abyss if the sojourn in utero is censored” (40). Phallic masculinity yearns for what it renders impossible: reproduction of the “living bond” with mother (42). In this way, it precludes the possibility of reciprocity (42). What Irigaray calls “the maternal function” underpins the patriarchal order, but cannot be spoken in the language of the father, mistakenly called “the mother tongue” (43). This conversation between Freud and Irigaray, rather than any contemporary aspect of Irish reality, is the precise terrain of Ryan’s book. As Frank Mahon reveals, the birth of his son, Bobby, alienates his wife, leading to the disintegration of their relationship: “She forgot about me the very minute she squeezed him out of herself ” (Ryan 142). Childbirth is conceived, not as necessary to reproduction of the social order, but as a disruptive force threatening the father’s preeminence. This, in turn, occasions a war of attrition in which he renounces the role of caregiver in order to lay down the Law. It is a world of split identifications and binary logics. “Where light shines a shadow is cast; that’s an elementary thing that every boy must be taught, especially boys that are mollycoddled by their mothers” (Ryan 142). Irish motherhood becomes (s)motherhood, and paternity a sadistic corrective: “His mother had made a fool out of him, kissing him and telling him he was beautiful every two minutes. I was forced to bring balance” (Ryan 142). 397

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Ryan’s book does not reproduce this balance, however, since Bobby’s mother is already silent, already dead, when we meet her and, unlike the Father, she does not speak from beyond the grave. She is murdered by silence. At the time of her death, this returns to haunt the son: The day we buried her I wanted to jump into the ground and drag her back out and scream at her to come back, come back, we’ll walk to the shop and I’ll hold your hand and we won’t mind Daddy and I’ll pick a bunch of flowers for you and if he calls me a pansy we’ll tell him to feck off and we’ll give back all these years of ageing and dying and stupid, stupid silence, and be Mammy and Bobby again, two great auld pals. (Ryan 19) This repressed fixation on the maternal body prevents the resolution of the Oedipal complex even as “pansy” connotes internalization of the masculine ideal. In the world of phallic masculinity, there is no way to need Mammy and be a man. Bobby cannot have her, and he cannot be without her. Having idealized her, he meets Tríona and deposits with her the task of selfknowledge: “I wish to God I could talk to her the way she wants me to, besides forever making her guess what I am thinking. Why can’t I find the words?” (Ryan 15). The problem, as Irigaray suggests, is that the symbolic order of patriarchy overlays, but can never integrate, the reality of man’s desire for woman, or the reality of woman’s desire: “Desire for her, her desire, that is what is forbidden by the law of the father, of all fathers” (Irigaray 36). “There is something unspeakable about the attraction between a man and a woman. It can’t ever be explained,” says Lily the Bike (Ryan 32). This is true, Irigaray suggests, for as long as we are restricted to a paternal language that represses the bodily encounter with the mother (43). In her counter myth to Freud, Irigaray holds out the possibility of a different social order. It would require acknowledgement of the maternal body, of desire for woman, and of woman’s desire, beyond the phallic logic of domination: No longer omnipotent, the phallic erection could, then, be a masculine version of the umbilical cord. It would, if it respected the life of the mother—of the mother in all women, of the woman in all mothers—reproduce the living bond with her. [. . .] This would be a preliminary gesture of repetition on man’s part, a rebirth allowing him to become a sexuate adult capable of erotism and reciprocity in the flesh. (42) Ryan’s book gestures towards this possibility, even as it cannot fully articulate it: “when my grandchild’s eyes first met mine, a powerful weakness overtook me. I caught myself looking. . . . I was afraid to open my mouth for fear my voice would betray me” (Ryan 143). Tríona interprets Frank Mahon’s silence as contempt (Ryan 151), but it is, rather, a debilitating symptom of self-alienation: of dissociation from embodied subjectivity. Nearly all of Ryan’s eunuchs are tantalized by the prospect of connection. Seanie Shaper wants a relationship with his son, but feels he has nothing to ofer: “He’s my young fella too, like. I’m no good to him, though” (Ryan 94). Connection and nurture are what Denis wants, what Bobby wants, what Frank wants, but the wish remains unspeakable in the language of the phallic order. In Karl Figlio’s terms, Irish men are dissociated from the procreative aspects of their own nature: from “seminal masculinity” (“Phallic” 119–139). Phallic masculinity is a war of all against all, with little prospect of final victory or accommodation. The phallus circulates between and among men perpetually: “there is only accretion or depletion, each male is threatened with the loss to the other of this emblem of narcissistic intactness” (Figlio, “Financial” 37). In this 398

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Hobbesian scenario, the nurturing part of man’s potential is foreclosed upon. Inter-generationally, manhood assumes the calamitous status of an either/or struggle: “Father either is eradicated or eradicates the son” (“Financial” 37). This helps to explain the stuckness of the Irish son in relation to the Irish father. They are locked in competition for the same thing: possession of the phallus and the Irish mammy that is its prize (and guardian). This dependency is displaced as rage, “I flipped the lid altogether” (Ryan 96), only to return as depression—as death-wish—as return to the “primal womb” (Irigaray 39): “I took off as far as Castlelough and sat on the low wall in front of the grass before the little pebble beach and looked out at the dark lake and thought about the bottomless hole that’s meant to be out there in the middle of it” (Ryan 96). One of the more confusing aspects of Ryan’s book, an unintegrated aspect of its plot, is the murder of the Cunliffe boy. The details seem loosely based on the death of John Carthy in Abbeylara in 2000. Carthy lived at home with his parents, suffered from depression, and was rumored to have threatened to shoot children, but the local consensus was that he was a troubled young man who lived quietly until his father died and his mother tried to move house. Carthy refused, armed himself with a gun, and was shot on his doorstep by a Garda rapid response unit. It has been described as a case of “blunder, negligence and cover up” (Connolly, np). For Ryan’s purposes, Carthy’s fate is recast as a primal sin against communal obligation. A vulnerable man with mental health issues is hounded to death and his birth right sold to developers: “He got kicked around the place and all I ever did was laugh. He was the quietest boy you’d meet” (Ryan 13). It is the sin of greed, but also of communal betrayal: “that boy of the Cunliffes getting shot in his own yard by the guards. . . . That was no way for the good times to start” (Ryan 26). Already, market forces are at work to destroy Irish society: “We all believed the newspapers, over the evidence of our own eyes and ears and a lifetime of knowing what we knew to be true” (Ryan 13–14). The subdivision of Cunliffe’s farm is proof of society’s disintegration. More than one character attributes the turn in local fortunes to it: “his auld auntie grabbed that land and divided it out among the bigshots, we all thought we were feckin elected” (Ryan 13). The problem for the reader is that this story goes nowhere. Cunliffe disappears. The crime of Irish greed is repressed, to be replaced by the sin of Irish pride. Roman Catholicism suffuses Ryan’s narrative. It is portrayed as a hangover from Ireland’s recent—yet remote—past. Brian’s father cannot even acknowledge the coming out of Donal Óg, for example, suggesting a faith out of touch with changing realities (Ryan 56). Parents seek confession while children sneer at their naivety (Ryan 21). Failure to transmit the faith is symptomatic of the deeper transformation of Irish society. The Irish cling to their faith as to a fetish that no longer functions: “They’d have me right with God in no time. They’d never have me right with myself though” (Ryan 25). Absolution no longer suffices to redeem the sinner of his sins (in this case, preferring one son to another). That said, Ryan’s narrative remains fundamentally indebted to Catholicism, and particularly to Saint Augustine’s doctrine of original sin. In Augustine’s great debate with Julian, there were two methods for the transmission of sin: imitation or contamination (Couenhoven 369). For Julian, Adam set the example that humanity has imitated to its detriment, making sin a function of human conduct. For Augustine, Adam’s sin inheres in the very substance of human existence. Our solidarity in sin “is not merely social, but ontological. Before we could make choices—before we were able to act on our own in any way—we were . . . constituted as sinners” (Couenhoven 369). Sin is inherited as a debt to the father which must be expiated in baptism. For Augustine, the children of Adam do not choose sin, sin chooses them. It persists as a “stain until and unless it is forgiven” (Couenhoven 370). In The Spinning Heart, this provides the logic of contamination that structures the novel’s account of Irish paternity. Josie’s guilt about his son recapitulates the terms of Augustine’s debate with Julian before concluding that, either way, he is to blame: “That’s the thing though. Did 399

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he turn bad or did he start out that way? Either way it’s my fault. . . . He got no badness from his mother, that’s for certain.” (Ryan 25). For Ryan, Irish national character contaminates itself perpetually through the paternal line. It is a Lamarckian fantasy of inherited fault: His auld father is a horrible yoke. He got all his mother’s goodness, that boy. He got no part of his father that I can see. Maybe there’s something inside in him that he got from his father, but he keeps it well hid. (Ryan 31) Sin incubates like a virus: insistent yet unseen. It insists in the faults of the father as they find expression in the faults of the son. This logic of a hidden stain is Augustinian in origin and, as Bourdieu suggests, it serves to both “dehistoricise” and “eternalize” social constructions of Irish manliness (viii). It is an example of the “practical transfer” of metaphor that Bourdieu sees as inherent to the reproduction of habitus (8). The problem is especially pronounced in the case of Lloyd and Trevor, the nominal villains of the book, who kidnap the child, Dylan: the symbol of Irish futurity (Edelman). Lloyd is a self-declared “solipsist”: “the universe is created by me and for me and nothing exists outside of my consciousness” (Ryan 105). But we also learn that his “Dad fucked of when I was a kid” (Ryan 104). His accomplice, Trevor, is schizophrenic. He is split, like the novel, and like his father before him: “Is it hereditary? I could find out, but I don’t want to” (Ryan 66). The final message of Ryan’s book, then, is that the Irish suffer not from neoliberal domination but from misplaced pride, a legacy, perhaps, of colonial domination (Valente 33–36). For Augustine, mankind caused its own downfall because Adam and Eve had already begun to be “proud in their inner hearts.” The beginning of all sin is pride (Couenhoven 364). When the ghost of Frank Mahon speaks, we discover this conviction at the root of Irish history: I learnt my lessons faster than Bobby. My father was a better teacher than me. I ran into the milking parlour straight from school one time when I was only a small boy. I had news bursting out of me that I thought would make him praise me. We were given a test in school today Daddy, I told him. Were ye now? . . . My father still didn’t face me, but he went kind of still and his back straightened and he turned his face a little bit so I could see his red cheek and his glistening eye. So you know it all do you? A lead ball dropped into my stomach. I didn’t know what answer to give to that question. Before I could open my stupid little mouth again my father had a length of Wavin pipe in his hand. . . . I fell out backwards through the parlour door onto the hard, mucky ground and my father was roaring: You. Know. NOTTEN. You. Know. NOTTEN. You. Know. NOTTEN. . . . My father stood back and spat on the ground and admired his handiwork. Bejaysus, you know something now, though. You know something now, boy. You know that pride is a deadly sin. And he threw the Wavin pipe on the ground and walked over me back into parlour, the very same way as your man threw down his plank of wood and walked off after he pole-axed me. (Ryan 143–44) The “sin” of pride is the original sin driving the repetition-compulsion that structures Irish history: The bits of pipe and wood in Ryan’s book are phallic prostheses turned by fathers on their sons, and sons on their fathers, in an endless war of position within a capitalist system that has always already defeated them both. The historical crime of rural gentrification, partially asserted in the Cunlife theme, is displaced by the transhistorical legacy of shameful pride. The “flaking, creaking, spinning heart” on Frank Mahon’s gate condenses the persistence of Catholic beliefs in 400

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the “post-Catholic” mentalité of a broken people. Denis wants to disabuse Frank of any belief that “he had a grand boy for a son whose shit didn’t stink” (Ryan 123). The message is that Bobby is merely one in a long line of useless Irish cunts: “I wonder how is it I was able to do to Bobby exactly what was done to me, even with my useless hands” (145). In The Spinning Heart, the problem of any given son and their father matters less than the structural paradigm. Denis kills an old man, Bobby’s old man, who merges with his old man: “God help me I thought I was killing my own father” (Ryan 125). Having killed the Father, the son retreats to the psychic shelter of the maternal body: “I’m lying here, ever since, curled up like an unborn child” (Ryan 125). Replacing any analysis of neoliberal capitalism with a Freudian psychodrama of shame and castration, The Spinning Heart venerates Irish dysfunction, perpetuates colonial stereotypes of the Irish as savages, and peddles misogynistic tropes of Irish womanhood (angel/whore). All this, rather than confronting the possibility that we allowed political corruption and neoliberal governmentality to bankrupt our country and then rolled over as EU-led austerity decimated the future basis of Irish society. The passivity of Bobby Mahon in the face of accusations of murder in The Spinning Heart mirrors Ireland’s broader passivity in the wake of accusations of fiscal irresponsibility. It seems we are gratified by narratives of helplessness, since they obviate the need for any reckoning with accountability. It is as if Ireland’s postcolonial condition is structured by a kind of moral masochism that allows us to ignore the many ways in which we have facilitated our own dispossession (Kennedy n.p.). Symptomatically, The Spinning Heart places Irish men at the heart of the story, but always as uncomprehending victims, never as architects of their own demise. What Ryan does, instead, is rationalize economic crisis as a function of Irish sexual and social dysfunction. In this sense, the territory of the book is old territory: familiar stuff. The Spinning Heart is a perfectly creditable first novel. But what it is not is perceptive about the crash. If, for Pierre Macherey, the text says what it does not say (85–89), The Spinning Heart says only that it does not know. Nor, I would submit, does it want to know. And its reception in Ireland tells us that we may not want to know either. Boyne’s designation of the novel as the most insightful work on the subject is revealing. The story to which we are being recruited is that the crash of 2008 tells us nothing about who we Irishmen have allowed ourselves to become, and everything about who we have always been: castrated losers. As a response to the neoliberalization of Europe, this is comfortable, disastrous and, in the final analysis, useless.

Works cited Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Continuum, 1997. Altuna-García de Salazar, Asier. “Polyphony, Provincialism, Nostalgia and Involution in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland: Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart (2012).” English Studies, Vol. 100, No. 1, 2019, pp. 90–107. Blyth, Mark. Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Oxford University Press, 2013. Bourdieu, Pierre. Masculine Domination. Stanford University Press, 2002. Buchanan, Jason. “Ruined Futures: Gentrification as Famine in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Literature.” Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 63, No. 1, 2017, pp. 50–72. Connolly, Frank. “John Carthy death: A Tale of Negligence, Blunder and Cover Up.” Magill, August 2, 2006, n.p. Couenhoven, Jesse. “St. Augustine’s Doctrine of Original Sin.” Augustinian Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2, 2005, pp. 359–396. Coulter, Colin and Angela Nagle, Eds. Ireland in the Age of Austerity: Neoliberal Problems, Neoliberal Solutions. Manchester University Press, 2015. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press, 2004. Ellman, Maud. “Introduction: Bad Timing.” On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, Sigmund Freud, Penguin, 2005, pp. vii-xxvii. Figlio, Karl. “Phallic and Seminal Masculinity: A Theoretical and Clinical Confusion.” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 91, No. 1, 2010, pp. 119–139. 401

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Figlio, Karl. “The Financial Crisis: A Psychoanalytic View of Illusion, Greed and Reparation in Masculine Phantasy.” New Formations, No. 72, 2011, pp. 33–46. Freud, Sigmund. On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia. Penguin, 2005. Irigaray, Luce. “The Bodily Encounter with the Mother.” The Essential Irigaray, Ed. Margaret Whitford. Blackwell, 1991, pp. 34–46. Kennedy, Seán. “Fifty Shades of Green? Ireland and the Erotics of Austerity.” Ireland in Psychoanalysis, Eds. Seán Kennedy, Joseph Valente and Macy Todd, Breac, Vol. 8, 2017, n.p. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink, Norton, 2006. Laplanche, Jean and J.B. Pontalis. The Language of Psychoanalysis. Hogarth, 1973. Lazzarato, Maurizio. The Making of the Indebted Man. Semiotext(e), 2011. Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. Routledge, 2006. McCabe, Conor. Sins of the Father: The Decisions that Shaped the Irish Economy. History Press Ireland, 2013. Fintan O’Toole. “We Don’t Believe Enough in the Future Not to Stuff Ourselves Now.” Irish Times, July 22, 2014, n.p. Phillips, Adam. Terror and Experts. Harvard University Press, 1995. Reddan, Fiona. “Number of Irish Millionaires Rises by 3,000 to Nearly 78,000.” Irish Times, November 25, 2019, n.p. Ryan, Donal. The Spinning Heart. Doubleday, 2012. Spillane, Alison. “The Impact of the Crisis on Irish Women.” Ireland in the Age of Austerity: Neoliberal Problems, Neoliberal Solutions. Eds. Colin Coulter and Angela Nagle, Manchester University Press, 2015, pp. 151–170. Taylor, Charles. “Atomism.” Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2. Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 187–210. Valente, Joseph. “Self-Queering Ireland?” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2010, pp. 25–43. Walton, James. “The Spinning Heart, by Donal Ryan—A Review.” The Spectator, 29, 2013, n.p. www. spectator.co.uk/article/the-spinning-heart-by-donal-ryan—review

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Part VII

Legacy

Introduction: Legacy Although memory studies has become an important intersectional field of Irish Studies since the publication of Oona Frawley’s four-volume Memory Ireland series (2011–14), the word “legacy” is often conspicuously absent from the constellation of terms that organize the field’s debates about the cultural, psychological, sociological, and historical means by which the past is constituted in the present. While the volumes in Frawley’s series explore the nuanced capacities of terms like “memory,” “history,” and “tradition” to mediate and unsettle the ways individuals and communities understand their heritage, “legacy,” if the word is mentioned at all, bears none of the theoretical weight that grants these other terms their methodological and ideological substance.1 Yet “legacy” is an equally complex term, implying a more concrete conduit between past and present than these other words do while still relying on myriad and often conflicting forces of interpretation to be constituted as meaning.2 If, in their most basic forms, “memory” and “history” imply conscious or unconscious regenerations of the past, and “tradition” implies the past’s persistence across time, “legacy” stretches across all of these, designating the materially ongoing nature of the past as well as its relationship to present-day experience and identity through which it acquires legible form.3 Simultaneously a lingering inheritance and a perpetual reconstruction, “legacies” are the things that we can’t forget and the stories we tell to make our memories meaningful to who we are. Legacies are at once material and narrative, passed down and refashioned in equal measure to maintain their vitality and necessity in an ever-changing present. The chapters in this section approach the question of Irish legacy from these concomitant perspectives, acknowledging the unresolved and fracturing inheritances of the often-violent Irish past while also focusing specifically on the ways that contemporary Ireland works to process, redress, and assimilate its past into new imagined futures. These are explicitly not history chapters of the sort that comprise the Historicizing section (Part II) of this volume. Although all deal overtly with the narratives and reverberations of history, the investments of the chapters here are less in the methodologies of constructing such narratives than in the ways the inherited past can and can’t be absorbed and repurposed for contemporary ends. Without overwriting the traumatic histories of sexual violence, child abuse, colonialism, and sectarian inequality that remain as much a part of Ireland’s present as its past, these chapters try to discern the intricate new shapes that the present often makes of such histories and to trace the ways these shapes

Legacy

change over time. As these chapters demonstrate, legacy—perhaps more fundamentally than memory, history, or tradition—is a mobile and mutable relationship between past, present, and future, one whose terms become especially critical in moments of global crisis like the 2008 recession and the 2020 pandemic. The section opens with Kate Costello-Sullivan’s chapter on trauma, which argues that Irish fiction in the last two decades has moved away from simply representing and exposing the historical traumas of Irish politics and culture and has moved instead toward theorizing ways of recuperating and moving forward from these traumas. In the case of Enright and many other contemporary Irish novelists, the possibility for recovery lies in acknowledging the materiality and experiential dimensions of family relationships, particularly mother-child relationships, and in allowing the imperfections of lived, physical familial experience to replace the “spectral femininity” of idealized and erased motherhood that has often been Irish fiction’s key symbol for the domestic reverberations of trauma. The chapter’s reading of The Green Road shows Enright tying this notion of idealized maternity to the equally spectral consumerism and real estate fetishization of the Celtic Tiger, and jettisoning both of these representative signs of historical trauma in favor of a return to the material realities of what it means to be a mother. If motherhood, childhood memory, and family history are moved out of the symbolic realms of idealized, home-bound, domestic maternity, and are instead rooted in things like physical touch, in the lasting effects of mothers’ and children’s bodies on one another, and in the embodied memories produced by maternity and child-rearing, then recuperative family narratives are possible. It is this turn to considerations of recuperative maternal materiality that most clearly marks the shift in twenty-first-century Irish fiction away from the lingering ghosts of historical trauma and towards the real possibility for recovery from them. Margot Gayle Backus’s and Joseph Valente’s chapter on Ireland’s state- and church-sanctioned child abuse approaches the question of individual and national trauma from a less optimistic perspective. This chapter uses the psychoanalytic idea of the “enigmatic signifier” as a tool for revealing how the repression of sexuality by the Catholic Irish State produced a sexualization of punishment that was interpolated in the formation of the State itself. The enigmatic signifier, which the chapter defines as a coded message within a text that condenses the complexities of the primal scene, and that always requires interpretation in order to make sense of the larger narrative in which it is embedded, provides a means for Backus and Valente to consider the psychoanalytic mechanisms of narrative in Sebastian Barry’s 2012 novel The Secret Scripture: to demonstrate that the traumas suffered by individual psyches are also socio-political traumas, and to show that ways in which individuals account for and interpret their own sexual traumas expose the abusive apparatuses by which the Irish State narrated itself into being. The foundational claim of the chapter is that by insisting on the active repression of sexuality, the Irish State eroticized the punishments for sexuality. As Backus and Valente argue, “Abused Ireland” is simultaneously an individual and a systemic condition, and their chapter demonstrates that the connective tissue between individual and systemic abuse is mediated especially provocatively by the narrative work that fiction does. If the first two chapters in the section focus especially on the traumatic legacies of Irish childhood, the third chapter by Margaret O’Neill and Michaela Schrage-Früh turns to the complex legacy of the aging body, both as lived experience and as cultural form. Their chapter offers a thorough overview of how Irish essayists, poets, and fiction writers have reclaimed the aging body from myth, disability, and invisibility in order to reveal the myriad ways older people can inhabit and narrate their subjective, vulnerable experiences of the self. As the chapter argues, it is this attentiveness to personal vulnerability that makes texts about aging especially significant in the context of the Celtic Tiger/post-Tiger era, as these texts expose both the ways that 404

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a capitalist neoliberal society erases the subjectivities of aging people, and the ways that new attention to the subjectivities available to the old (and in relation to the old) might offer us all an alternative to the neoliberal “disembodied rationality” that we’ve been indoctrinated to naturalize. O’Neill and Schrage-Früh are particularly mindful of the fact that “aging” is not a singular category or experience, and their chapter separates middle age from old age in order to address the very different social stereotypes and pressures that accompany these different life stages. The chapter ends with a brief coda about how the pandemic has forced the question of aging people’s value (in a number of different senses) into our cultural foreground in a way that few other world crises have or will. The next two chapters move away from the intimate repercussions of national legacies on individual subjectivities to focus instead on national legacy writ large in post-2008 Irish cultural formations. Brian Ward’s chapter on architecture outlines the ways Irish architects during and after the Celtic Tiger have tried to negotiate a number of often conflicting demands: between, for instance, regional allegiances and global trends, nostalgia and futurity, historical inheritance and creativity, community and individual, economy and social need, and design and locale. The chapter moves between books and exhibitions that have produced definitions of and reflections on the crises of Irish architecture since 2008, and architectural phenomena like ghost estates, self-builds, and communityled construction projects that both encapsulate and seek alternatives to the capitalist-driven nature of Irish property development. Ward dwells on the problems of Celtic Tiger architectural developments that emerged from the demands of profit margins rather than from the needs of communities, but also highlights the ways that the crash enabled new architectural sensibilities that privilege the local and the formation of community in their design practices: if the boom served to divide architects from the populace for whom they were supposedly building, the bust offered new opportunities for architects to re-immerse themselves in neighborhoods and communities and to enhance the welfare of the towns and the citizenry to which they belong. Mike Cronin’s chapter on commemorations moves even further outward to focus on the complexities underpinning the very idea of transforming the Irish past into national legacy. His chapter evaluates the state-sanctioned narratives underlying the events of the Decade of Centenaries, arguing that the Irish government’s particular focus on the 1916 Rising allowed it to promote a narrative of national self-sacrifice that could appeal to a nation of people just emerging from a period of economically disastrous austerity. Rather than producing a political lineage that traced the ideologies of the Rising to any particular twenty-first-century party, the 1916 commemorations instead produced a lineage from the Rising’s heroic martyrs to the “heroic” contemporary Irish populace who had similarly sacrificed to save the nation from control by outside economic forces. As Cronin shows, however, this palliative strategy revealed far more about the fragile state of Ireland in 2016 than it did about the historical moment the Centenaries were commemorating, and the State-endorsed commemorative events did little to challenge, expand, or reconsider the narrative of the Rising and its aftermath. Instead, as the State used the commemorations to distract the Irish populace from the very real and ongoing suffering they endured at the hands of the government’s economic policies, the real revisionary historical work of the Centenaries fell to scholars, artists, and archivists, who used the excitement around the Decade to more fully explore the social and cultural life of Ireland in the early twentieth century. Cronin argues that the most lasting and memorable work of the Decade of Centenaries will be these scholarly and artistic efforts to write women back into Irish history, to uncover the multiple forms of distinctly unheroic violence that women and other groups suffered during the period, and to demonstrate how many different perspectives there are to tell the story of this decade. These chapters all analyze Irish legacy as a present-day phenomenon, one in which the manifold meanings of the past collect in new forms in the contemporary moment. The final chapter 405

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of the section, and of the volume, changes tactic and looks forward in order to imagine how the legacy of the Irish present—a present embroiled in a global pandemic, a climate crisis, and a culture of systemic racism—will reverberate in the future. In this chapter on the apocalyptic potential of COVID-19 for Ireland and the planet as a whole, Malcolm Sen describes the power of pandemics to interrupt historical teleologies, to collapse the gulfs between past and present, and to drag into view the ways in which the contemporary moment reproduces the injustices, violences, and dehumanizations that Western capitalism has perpetrated across the global South for centuries. Sen argues that humanist work on COVID-19 is as necessary as medical and epidemiological work, as it serves as an ethical corrective to fields that rely on individuals, numbers, and origin points to make meaning out of the disease. While scientists might seek a single bat, pangolin, or patient zero that set the COVID-19 pandemic in motion, humanists, in contrast, have the power to reveal the historical connections and power structures that have made the pandemic so devastating: to narrate the catastrophic intersections between systemic racism, ecological disaster, capitalist development, and imperialist expansion that together have produced an uncannily predictable global vulnerability to pandemic. The future of Irish Studies, as Sen sees it—and our legacy, as this volume sees it—must acknowledge Ireland’s participation in the world on a planetary scale: must marshal Ireland’s colonial legacy and the field’s particular strengths in memory studies, trauma studies, and aesthetic experimentation to challenge the global oppression of black and brown bodies, the ecologically destructive policies, and the neoliberal capitalist worldviews that COVID-19 has so gruesomely illuminated.

Notes 1 See especially the introduction to the first volume of Memory Ireland (I. xiii-xxiv), which dwells at length on the dynamic between memory, memories, and history but doesn’t mention “legacy” at all. Throughout this first volume, titled History and Modernity, the word “legacy” is only used five times and never as a conceptually nuanced term. Even when “legacy” appears in the occasional title of essays in other volumes in the series, it remains descriptive rather than theoretical. 2 Nothing could make this clearer than the raging debates in the US about toppling statues that embody the “legacy of the Confederacy”—putting aside the heinous arguments about whether or not the Confederate legacy is a racist legacy (it is), what is most profound about these debates is the contention (among those people who want the statues to remain in place) that these statues actually embody and disseminate history, and that history will somehow be forgotten if the statues are removed. Countless memes offer reminders that we can learn history from books without staring at giant monuments to its most glaring cruelties, but the idea that “legacy” is a specifically material formation—that, unlike tradition, it requires an object or a symbol to persist, and also will persist as long as such an object or symbol is present—underlies many of these debates. See, for instance, John F. Harris, “On Monument Avenue, Liberal Illusions About Race Come Tumbling Down,” Politico, June 11, 2020 www.politico.com/news/ magazine/2020/06/11/confederate-monuments-altitude-312532 (Accessed August 1, 2020) 3 Pierre Nora associates “legacy” with what he calls the “immaterial aspects of memory.” “Legacy” in this context, means the inherited customs of the past that are reproduced in the present—the example he offers is “the long-term ‘legacy’ of the monarchy as embodied in lieux such as the anointment ritual of Rheims” (xvi).

Works cited Frawley, Oona, Ed. Memory Ireland (4 vols.). Syracuse University Press, 2011–2014. Nora, Pierre, Ed. Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (Vol. I: Conflicts and Divisions). Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Edited/Foreword (English edition) by Lawrence D. Kritzman. Columbia University Press, 1996.

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32 Trauma and recovery in the post-Celtic Tiger Period Recuperating the parent-child bond in contemporary Irish fiction Kathleen Costello-Sullivan

Throughout the twentieth century, authors ranging from James Joyce to Elizabeth Bowen, John McGahern to Eimear McBride explored narratives of personal and societal trauma in the Irish literary canon. Such representations exposed unpalatable aspects of Irish society that had too often gone unspoken or unchallenged, to damaging effect. With the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy and the advent of various watershed historical moments, scandals, and revelations around the turn of the twenty-first century, however, such representations changed. This chapter traces one way in which the century-long Irish literary engagement with representations of trauma has shifted in response to Irish society’s contemporary political and historical moment. This shift not only reflects the evolving political and social climate after the 2008 financial collapse and subsequent economic austerity, but also a concomitant refocusing on narratives of recovery. Fictional representations of trauma have thus become less centrally focused on exposing previously repressed horrors in Irish culture in favor of also exploring paths to recovery from them. One way in which this shift is evident is in the evolving representation of parent-child relationships in the Irish literary canon. In the recent collection Historical Perspectives on Parenthood and Childhood in Ireland, the editors note that “the history of parenthood and parent-child relationships in Ireland remains underexplored” (13). Literary studies have similarly identified the preponderance of negative representations of the parent-child bond. Recent literary narratives of parent-child interaction, however, reflect the move from a traumatic to a more hopeful form of representation. This is particularly true in the case of mothers and daughters. Against the backdrop of what Anne Fogarty has described as “religious and political discourses . . . [that] have constructed highly ambivalent and restrictive views of maternity,” the materiality of the mother-child bond in recent representations is posited as a private history that overwrites the dislocating—because idealizing—romanticization of the mother (87). This private history, written on and through the body, often affects a concomitant critique of external contexts such as the political milieu or the forgetful irresponsibility and materiality of Celtic Tiger Ireland. In place of the punishing or retributive parental body, then, we find a bodily connection between parent and child which 407

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at the least can offer solace—at most, which proffers an alternative private history to counter broader, negative societal ones. While I will suggest briefly that this pattern can also be traced in relationships between fathers and children, I will focus here on the mother-child dynamic, with particular attention to that of mothers and daughters. I concentrate on Anne Enright’s 2015 novel The Green Road as an example of this alternative history, grounded in the body and its problematic and yet unexpectedly affirming matrilineal ties. The recuperative narrative of the parental body in The Green Road, I argue, acknowledges the legacy of the traumatized body and societal context at once while making room for the nurturing, connected parental body and the private history it embodies. This trend is symptomatic of a wider movement, away from trauma and toward narratives of recovery, which is characteristic of the twenty-first century Irish novel. As is well known, throughout the twentieth century, Irish authors were courageous in representing some of the darkest and most sinister consequences of the decolonizing process of the young Irish nation. As I have noted elsewhere, these authors increasingly confronted fictionally the hazards and crimes of a seemingly all-powerful Catholic Church, the systemic neglect and abuse of children, the suffocating nature of Irish domesticity, and the crippling familial and social silences that perpetuated and tacitly condoned such abuses. . . . Through their fictional representations of trauma, Irish authors made visible .  .  . what had been silent and initiated conversations that Irish society had avoided. As importantly, they provided a means and opportunity to engage with issues of history, memory, and loss. (Costello-Sullivan, Trauma 12) It would be an exhaustive efort indeed to chronicle all such trauma narratives, and that is not my intention here. I will, however, note that, since James Joyce’s 1914 short story collection Dubliners, Irish texts have been pointed in addressing questions of child abuse, emotional repression, and domestic violence in its many forms.1 Authors including John McGahern, Edna O’Brien, Kate O’Brien, Colm Tóibín, Patrick McCabe, and Jennifer Johnston, to name only a sampling, have captured the personal and political costs of the Irish national imaginary and the construction of the Irish family as well as their implications, particularly for women.2 With the turn of the twenty-first century, however, representation in Irish novels began to shift, as novelists began to redirect their attention from trauma to recovery. As a result, Rather than centrally focusing on capturing trauma, many novels from the late 1990s to the current day started to emphasize not only the representation of personal or cultural trauma but also the act of representation itself and the curative power of such representation. This metanarrative engagement with the process of narrativizing mimics the healing function of testimony as awareness of the process of telling empowers the trauma victim to author his or her own life story. (Costello-Sullivan, Trauma 22–23)3 Moving away from the century-long focus on representing trauma, in other words, many more recent contemporary Irish novels redirect their energies away from past trauma and toward a narrative recreation of the process of recovery, with a refocus on recuperative potentialities. While the reasons for this are many, the cultural shifts provoked by the Peace Process, as well as multiple contemporary social and political scandals such as the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, revelations about the Magdalene laundries and industrial schools, and the 408

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Moriarity Tribunal, to name only a few, all catalyzed deep reassessments of Irish social and political structures.4 At the same time, the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy provoked a profound interrogation of societal mores and history—an assessment reflecting willingness to own responsibility for the past and a more temperate and realistic approach toward the future.5 As Laura Sydora argues, With the beginning of the economic boom in the 1990s leading the way into the liberal modernization of the social realm of the state itself, the collective desire to finally put [sic] Ireland’s nationalist past behind it and enter the world stage as a ‘new Ireland’ became a priority. (239–40) All of these factors pushed Irish society—and Irish literature—in the direction of acknowledgment about the past and hopeful but realistic intention for the future. At the same time, this negotiation also opened space for reflection on the contemporary moment—as the explosion of political activism and societal change in the past several years reflects.6 Many representations of trauma in twentieth-century Irish literature reflect the damaging effects of postcolonial state-formation on the nuclear Irish family. As Susan Cahill has argued, “repressive ideologies that resulted from the combination of discourses deriving from Catholic attitudes towards the corporeal and a post-colonial mindset interested in establishing and maintaining an independent Ireland” had particularly profound consequences not only for “the body,” but especially for those “different from the white male heterosexual norm” (Celtic Tiger 15). In particular, because the Irish nation was often symbolized as female, and Article 41 of the Irish Constitution (Bunreacht na hÉireann) effectively conflates “woman” and “mother,” women were habitually reduced to objects or even simply erased from the national narrative. Mothers’ bodies specifically were subjected to what Cahill refers to as the “erasure of the maternal” from both society and literature (“Dislocation” 89).7 As a result, representation of the mother-child bond provides a particularly apt bellwether for representations of trauma in Irish literature. As Hatfield et al. note previously, the relationship of parents and children remains underexplored in Irish history. In 2002, Anne Fogarty broached this very subject from a literary perspective by examining “mother-daughter relationships in Irish fiction.” Following Luce Irigaray, she noted that “the process of reconstituting the voices and histories of mothers and daughters will involve unleashing explosive hostilities as part of the endeavor to discover the reciprocal bonds between them” (86). She did, however, also observe that fictions closer to the turn of the century “make a . . . marked attempt to reenvisage the positive as well as the destructive dimensions of mother-daughter bonds” (111). Sydora, following Heather Ingman, concurs, demurring that “positive mother-daughter stories came late to Irish fiction” (241n2). More recently, Cahill notes, contemporary authors have taken on the mother-child dyad more directly: “Enright, McCann, and Ní Dhuibhne .  .  . all grapple with the issue of the maternal body and the relationship between mother and child” (Celtic Tiger 17). While Cahill’s illuminating reading focuses on the body as national vehicle of racial and ethnic identity, I want to consider how the body-as-subject comes into play. Recent Irish fiction increasingly moves beyond only recreating the erasure of the mother or the damaging consequences of the motherchild bond, which Anne Mulhall so effectively traces in her work on the “spectral feminine.”8 Instead, Irish fiction also seeks to engage the parental body not as a marker of absence or loss— or in its capacity for harm—but rather as a vehicle for connection, remediation, and comfort. For this reason, shifts in the representation of the mother-child relationship are particularly telling in terms of recovery. 409

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Critics often consider Enright’s The Green Road for its commentary on the Celtic Tiger and the implications of globalization for the traditional, nationalist construction of the Irish nuclear family. The novel makes this association clear by tracing the movement of one family over time against the backdrop of an evolving Celtic Tiger Ireland. Such readings thus interrogate how the Madigan children’s global dispersal disrupts received notions of place and the family and of the location of mothers in both. However, Enright not only continues her canon-long contestation of the absented mother in The Green Road. As she did in her earlier, Booker-prize-winning 2007 novel, The Gathering, by deconstructing familiar tropes, she also recuperates maternal physicality as a counterweight to idealized notions of motherhood. Against the backdrop of a rampant consumerism that willfully forgets Ireland’s past history of want and deprivation, the surety and constancy of the familial bond becomes surprisingly comforting and enabling. Rosaleen’s flawed maternity thus provides an alternative history to the untethered materiality and consumption of Celtic Tiger Ireland, yet without reinstating an objectifying maternal ideal. In this respect, the novel is consistent with trends in recent Irish fiction to present a more recuperative narrative on potentially traumatic subject matter. The Green Road follows the experiences of the Madigan family from 1980 to 2005. The first half of the novel, “Leaving,” is broken into chapters focused on individual characters, each titled by a character’s name, location, and the year. The second half of the novel, “Coming Home 2005,” focuses on the children’s return to Ireland for Christmas given their mother’s intention to sell the family home. An argument leads the mother, Rosaleen, to drive off at night; she becomes lost, but is found, and the novel ends with the family’s seeming reconciliation. Given its 2005 setting, its consideration of the family home’s value, and its focus on the international dispersal of the Madigan children, The Green Road offers a biting commentary on the Celtic Tiger and the implications of the economic boom for the traditional, deValerean construction of the Irish family. As Maria Amor Barros-Del Río notes, in the novel, “[s]ocial constructions of belonging, such as family and home, are challenged” through the economic factors’ emphasis on mobility and displacement (39). The novel thus not only critiques Celtic-Tiger sensibilities, as in the oft-cited (and really quite fantastic) scene where daughter Constance sets a personal best for rampant consumerism at the grocery store, in a chapter ironically named “The Hungry Grass” (227–232). It also unsettles the centrality of the Irish nuclear family and the concept of “home” that so often serves as its metonym, by exposing their constructedness and jarring disconnect from both the broader past and contemporary Celtic Tiger sensibilities: [A]ny idea that Rosaleen stood for what was being left is displaced by her own choice to sell up. Rather, what is being left is the temporal and spatial matrix of home, which we can infer, from the steady reflections on modernization in [the novel’s first section] LEAVING, is representative of residual constructions of the Irish family and a model of living that ill suit the ‘cosmopolitan mobilities’ of the new millennium. (McGlynn 41) The novel’s juxtaposition of Rosaleen’s impending sale of the family home, Ardeevin; Emmet’s depression over the “identical” houses in his Dublin housing estate (206); and Constance’s grocery shopping spree juxtapose pointedly with Rosaleen’s night sheltering in a “little famine house” where she fears that “after she crossed the hungry grass then she would be hungry for ever” (278).9 As McGlynn notes, “the economic highs of 2005 contained multiple yesterdays— of the previous decade’s growth as well as the stagnation of the decades prior, not to mention 410

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the deep yesterday of the deprivations of hunger” (45). The novel critiques Celtic Tiger Ireland’s sensibilities as both self-indulgent and forgetful of a particular strand of Irish history.10 At the same time, because it centers around the Madigans, there are clear implications for the traditional Irish family—and, as in The Gathering, where Veronica claims that she “just didn’t buy the whole Hegarty poor Mammy thing” (184, emphasis in original), so too in The Green Road Enright gives the lie to any idealized portrait of the mother.11 In the painfully funny chapter where Rosaleen sabotages Easter dinner by bemoaning favorite son Dan’s decision to become a priest, the omniscient narrator wryly notes youngest daughter Hanna’s skepticism: “there was very little of herself that their mother held back. Her children were never what you might call ‘spared’” (8). Indeed, most of the children’s interactions with their mother are trying. Far from the loving and self-sacrificing cliché, Rosaleen is needy and self-pitying. Although Constance is a constant resource for her, Rosaleen is ungrateful, shouting to her that she ought to “’lose some of that weight!’” and giving “a little two-fisted victory dance” for her unkind sally (160). Although Constance again braves the grocery store—which she describes as “the Apocalypse” (228)—to get brussels sprouts solely because Rosaleen likes them (231), Rosaleen responds, “’No one likes them anyway’” (237). Emmet acknowledges that he is infuriated by his mother, noting he was “already bored by the game. . . . He was trying to expose the foolishness of a woman who was seventy-six years old” (215). Hanna is enraged when her mother mistakenly blames her for breaking a piece of Belleek when she was a child (it was actually Constance)—with Rosaleen refusing to accept her mistake and pointing out that it was her father’s at the placating suggestion the jug could be replaced (218–219). Finally, oldest son Dan, although her favorite, dreads returning home, noting that “he could not go home. Or if he did go, it was not Dan who walked in the door.” (172). That the text insistently invokes James Clarence Mangan’s poem “Dark Rosaleen,” with its representation of a noble and long-suffering “saint of saints” with “sweet and sad complaints,” only heightens the irony.12 Upon receiving a beautiful shawl from Constance, Rosaleen is “cross with herself .  .  . because her children were all looking at her,” and, as the text wryly notes, “because it was Christmas, she started to cry” (235). Far from a noble, aisling-like figure for whom her children are inspired to self-sacrifice, Rosaleen often seems petty, her motivations ungrateful. This challenge to the idealized mother also extends to Hanna, who not only drinks to excess even while tending her child, but who also sees her baby as “[a] fight . . . wrapped in a cloth” (183).13 As Estévez-Saá simply notes, “their experiences of motherhood are . . . narrated in highly ambivalent terms” (50). Because Ardeevin also stands as a metonym for the domestic and by association for the Madigan family, Enright binds her critiques of the idealized mother and Celtic Tiger materialism together. Rosaleen’s meditation on the walls of her home, with its palimpsestic layering of wallpaper and, by association, family history, reintroduces the familiar trope of the ways that the home stands as a physical emblem of family history, often to the exclusion of the mother as subject (145–46).14 As a result, Rosaleen’s scheme to sell the home strikes at both Celtic Tiger materialism and the familial symbolism of the home at once. When Rosaleen tells her children of her plans, they “looked at the plates heaped with food . . ., each of them silently shouting that she could not take it away from them, whatever it was—their childhood, soaked into the walls of this house” (239). The Madigans here mistake the overloaded signifier of the house for their family. They simultaneously rebel against their mother’s potential separation from the building they identify as embodying “home”—rather than attributing their “childhood” to the actual, physical person who generated the family in the first place. The home’s materiality and “value” are doubly reinforced by the “heaping plates”—a reminder of the consumeristic, material context 411

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in which they circulate. Ardeevin comes to represent both the problematic idealization and abstraction of the mother and the rampant consumerism of Celtic Tiger Ireland together—past and present history, equally problematic. Nonetheless, the novel does not rest on critiquing the Celtic Tiger or traditional ideals of motherhood. I have argued elsewhere that, in The Gathering, Enright “seeks to reclaim motherhood as a lived, bodily experience, grounded not in its idealized abstractions but rather in . . . bodily reality and [the] bond between mother and child” (Trauma 68). So too, in The Green Road, Enright uses the physicality of motherhood and its private historical associations as a counterweight to past and present oppressive histories.15 Embodied motherhood counters the Celtic Tiger ethos and clichés of motherhood alike, such that the bodily relationship between parent and child becomes central and recuperative. As in The Gathering, Enright represents motherhood not in romanticized fashion, but rather in all its challenging and sometimes problematic fleshiness. In other words, just as she rejects the romanticized emotional construction of the mother, as we have seen, so, too, does she presence mothers physically but without reducing women to pure, stylized objects. Thus, Constance expresses some alienation from her body. She notes that, after childbirth, her “breasts . . . had done their time” (74). She recognizes that her body is a “fabulous object” and that hers is a “chest [her] husband loves and [her] children will love for a few years yet” because it was “Fun for all the family” (74, emphasis in original; 80). Just as Veronica bemoaned her “child-battered body .  .  . just feeding the grave” (Gathering 79), so too Constance cannot differentiate the boundary between life-giving and potential demise, believing there was “no gap . . . between breast-feeding and breast cancer, between tending and dying” (90). By emphasizing the bodily challenges of motherhood, Enright undermines “the spectral feminine”: “To reify the woman as a flawless icon is to deny and render abject the embodied reality of women and the particular transubjective transitivity that originates in the relation between the becoming-mother and the becoming-infant” (Mulhall 73). Stressing the raw physicality of the maternal body undermines any idealized abstraction as well as her reduction to a romanticized, sexualized object. Perhaps not surprisingly, this intervention also extends to the traditional place (and potential erasure) of daughters within the family. Cahill has observed that the “erasure of the maternal body” often has implications for daughters in Enright’s fiction (“Dreaming” 89).16 The novel makes evident the clear distinctions drawn between boys and girls in the Madigan household by hyphenating the children as “Constance-and-Hanna, Emmet-and-Dan” (10) even when they are adults (238). As in The Gathering, the novel also suggests girls’ invisibility.17 There is, for instance, a recurring subplot that no one can remember Constance’s daughter, Shauna: Dan thinks, “Donal, Rory, and—what was her name?” (172), and shortly thereafter asks, “How’s?” having already again forgotten her (201). Rosaleen also cannot remember her granddaughter, thinking, “Rory was her pet. . . . She would remember the little girl’s name in a minute” (155). As we have already seen, Rosaleen conflates her own daughters, Hanna and Constance, in her memory about the Belleek, dismissing Hanna’s objections with “‘Oh, it doesn’t matter’” when Hanna insists on the difference (218). Such dismissals lead Hanna and Constance half-jokingly to say, “‘And what do you do with girls? . . . Drown them at birth?’”—a sally which “Rosaleen . . . had not heard, or pretended not to hear” (301). Drawing attention to the potential erasure of daughters connects them to mothers in the novel and reminds us that both are subject to erasure and abstraction. Ultimately, this presencing of both maternal and children’s bodies enables Enright to proffer an alternative history. If, as Bracken and Cahill have noted, “trauma [is] felt [in] [the cultural] obscuration of the maternal body,” then Enright’s grounding of the body not only in its sometimes-unpleasant physicality but also in its service as a vehicle to comfort and connect 412

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becomes recuperative, evading false idealizations and reasserting private historical connection at once (“Introduction” 8).18 As we have seen, Constance expresses alienation from her body. She describes her sense that she “never loved it, not much” (80). She calls the small suspicious lump in her breast “a piece of gristle” that “could not feel [because] it was not [her]” (79).19 Nonetheless, the moments of deepest joy for Constance come from her connection to her children—and that connection is through the body. She “remembered the undoing of her own bones as the children were born” but that “there was a pleasure in it, like the top of a yawn” (76). After she is first cleared of cancer, she comforts her daughter, “the pair of them in each other’s arms,” and notes, “[she] could do that much, at least. And Constance was also comforted, . . . with her daughter in her arms” (104–105). After her stressful shopping trip, Constance climbs into bed by her son: “Rory was always easy to hold; easy to carry off and easy to kiss, and there, in the smell of . . . his rude good health, lumpy Constance McGrath fell asleep” (232). Later, at the fraught Christmas dinner, Rory comes to her in the kitchen: [He] came up behind her at the sink and he put his arms round her. . . . He bent to lay his cheek against her shoulder and he swayed from side to side . . . . just the fact of her son made Constance entirely happy. (252–53) In each of these moments, Constance’s bodily connection to her children is sustaining, giving her a sense of well-being and happiness. Importantly, while neither idealized nor romanticized— her son has a “rude good health” and she herself is “lumpy”—these encounters are all framed with a sense of the history of physical contact between mother and child. Ruminating about holding her daughter, Constance thinks about what she can continue to do; lying down by her son, she remembers who and what Rory has always been to her. In each example, Constance takes comfort not only in her physical proximity to and relationships with her children, but as importantly in the history and continuity of those physical encounters. As Enright tellingly observed about why she foregrounds the body, “It’s the problem of the body as it’s experienced rather than as seen” (Bracken and Cahill, “Interview” 22). Hanna has a similarly problematic relationship to motherhood. Having cut her head in a drunken fall, she thinks, “if she did die, it would be the baby who had killed her” (184). In describing the alcohol she abuses, she problematically resorts to language as if it were the baby: “She lifted the glass to her mouth and felt the baby at her lips, warm and baby-smelling, an unexpected yearning as she drank” (253). But Hanna’s best moments are also encoded by motherhood. Taking the baby as she agonizes over her failed acting career, “the skin of her chest seemed to sing; a clamorous want for the baby hit her everywhere the baby would be in her arms. And then she had him, and they were calm” (194). Even for Rosaleen, the memories that seem to be least contentious are grounded in the physicality of her children. Thinking of Dan, she remembers “his smooth eight-year-old cheek against her cheek. Her blessed boy” (146). These examples of mother-child connection give a helpful means to understand Rosaleen’s interactions with her children, as well as the novel’s ending. It is telling, I think, that at the ill-fated Christmas dinner, Rosaleen responds to a query about her own mother, who apparently she has never discussed before—suggesting she, like mothers in general and daughters in particular, has been habitually erased. As her children “were all turned toward their mother now, . . . looking for something from her,” Rosaleen tellingly “did not know what it was,” and she observes, “‘It’s a very hard thing . . . to describe your mother’” (242). Her lame resort to saying she was “lovely” and “did things the right way” gestures back to the kind of idealized 413

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portrait that the text consistently rejects, highlighting the sort of “erasure of the maternal” we have been examining here (Cahill, “Dislocation” 89). Similarly, her complaint that “that is what your babies do, when they grow. They turn around and say it is all your fault” gestures toward the way a woman is often overwritten by her maternal role and the meanings and emotions that cathect it (152). Constance’s disapproving remark, “‘Except that she is your mother,’” similarly signals the ease with which an individual can be overwritten by that label and therefore erased. When Rosaleen has her final tantrum, threatening to sell the house and driving off into the night, the novel simultaneously exposes the flaws in Celtic Tiger sensibilities and the idealized mother at once, only to juxtapose them against the greater, historical power of the maternal body. Interestingly, this is done partly by invoking the precedent of Shakespeare’s King Lear— another text deeply entrenched in the entanglement of materialism, parental relations, and the body. Before she rushes off, Rosaleen indicts her children as ungrateful, declaring, “I gave you everything” (243). This is uncannily evocative of King Lear’s complaint, when he tells his (actually ungrateful) children, “I gave you all” after Goneril and Regan have stripped him of his knights (II:iv, line 286). Just as Lear mistakes objects for love, leaving only Cordelia to “Love, and be silent” (I.i.68.), the Madigan children’s initial misapprehension of Ardeevin as family history, to the abstraction of their own mother, is replaced by an understanding of Rosaleen as embodied subject. When Rosaleen is missing, her children thus think of her as “an elderly woman in desperate need of their assistance” as she “shrank into a human being—any human being—frail, mortal old” (284). This, too, evokes Lear, who, once stripped of his kingdom and knights, declares himself “a poor old man/As full of grief as age, wretched in both” (II.iv, l. 313–14.). Once reduced to raw body—not the body overdetermined by social and nationalist constructions of “mother”—the distractions around Rosaleen, like Lear, fall away. Perhaps tellingly, the children all name their mother differently once she has disappeared: The comedy of it was not lost on them, the fact that each of her children was calling out to a different woman. They did not know who she was . . . and they did not have to know. (284) This speaks directly to the sense of individual connection between parent and each child. At the same time, having Rosaleen shelter in a “little famine house” evokes the primacy of the body in its animal need for shelter and warmth. The physical threat to Rosaleen’s survival uncannily doubles with the history of desperation and need the Famine house represents; her recognition as subject also parallels the reinsertion of the history of want which Celtic Tiger materialism sought to elide. This conjunction overrides the frivolous associations of Celtic Tiger greed and the idealized, objectified maternal at once, juxtaposing them against the abiding histories of the Famine and the mother-child relationship. Just as Constance’s engagements with her children invoke a shared history and common bond, then, Rosaleen’s rescue is a recursive engagement that returns us to the idea of beginnings. While her mother was exercising what Dan calls “the horizontal solution” (13) in 1980, having taken to her bed, she invited Hanna in: her mother—who was warm and actually, beautifully alive—lifted the eiderdown so Hanna could spoon back into her, with her shoes stuck out over the edge of the mattress. . . . [I]t was enough to lie there, and let her arm hang over the edge of the bed. (32–33)20 414

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Tellingly, when Rosaleen is rescued in 2005, it is Hanna—the youngest, most dismissed daughter— who finds and tends her, in a touching and uncanny rehearsal/reversal of that earlier scene: And so the two of them continued, in a kind of bliss, as Hanna opened her coat and spread it on her mother, then laid herself down beside her, drawing Rosaleen’s hands in under her own clothes to get the heat of her bare skin, rubbing along her arms and back, and they stayed like that heedless of everything that happened around them. (286) This return to contact and connection binds mother to child in their raw physicality, but also in their shared history—a history separate from the ideological trappings of nation or economics. Importantly too, this signals a shift of emphasis from trauma to recovery—from what Mulhall describes as a “transgenerational space” reflective of the “transmissability of trauma” to a shared space of connection, warmth, and comfort (79). Just as Lear, when confronting the elements, notes, “O, I have ta’en/Too little care of this” (III.iv.37–38), reflecting his budding capacity for empathy, so too Rosaleen emerges from her trial differently. She says simply, “I have paid too little attention” by way of apology to Emmet once she has been found and returned to the family (310). While it is likely that Rosaleen, like Lear, will always consider herself “more sinned against than sinning” (III.ii.63), these moments remind us of her vulnerable bodily nature, her role as mother, and the connection she and her children share. It is thus upon her return, once she has been stripped of the distractions of Things and her abstracted identity as “mother” and reduced to an embodied woman, that Rosaleen can call Emmet “darling” and be “happy” (290). She delights in Hanna’s baby, “[a]s if life was always worth having, worth reproducing” (291, my emphasis). Emmet now sees his mother differently as well: when brother-in-law Dessie complains about her, he is overcome by “a sharp urge to defend his mother,” and he sees her now as embodied subject, although, “in all fairness . . . she looked pretty bad” (309)—a reminder that, even here, Enright flouts the reduction of woman to idealized type. By reasserting the maternal body as subject and the materiality of the parent-child bond, The Green Road rejects both the frivolous materiality of Celtic Tiger sensibilities and any reductive reading of woman-as-mother ungrounded in shared history and the body. As Constance notes early on, there are “[s]o many different people, and the stories their bodies held” (81). Kristen Ewins has noted that “[w]hat is most puzzling to Enright is the way in which selfhood is rooted in physical being—there is something to be grasped about the self from looking at the body” (131–32). If, as Veronica notes in The Gathering, “There are so few people given us to love” (15), then The Green Road suggests the key to those connections is engagement with the embodied mother as subject. In this way, the novel not only remains true to Enright’s tendency to foreground the maternal and to “turn [her] women into subjects,” but also proffers an alternative history based on matrilineal embodiment and the child-parent connection (Enright cited in Bracken and Cahill, “Interview” 22). While I have only examined The Green Road here, there are other examples that support the argument that not only mother-daughter, but also mother-son and father-child representations are exploring the parental body and physical relationship as a means to solace and comfort. As I have suggested, The Gathering (2007), with Veronica’s meditation on “the person that I built from my body’s own stuff ” (152), serves as a counterweight to the text’s narrative of child neglect and abuse.21 Belinda McKeon’s 2011 novel Solace traces the conflict between Mark Casey and his father, Tom, as both try to cope with the simultaneous deaths of their wife/mother and Mark’s girlfriend. In many respects a novel about intergenerational conflict, it is clear that both men’s 415

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relationship with the baby, Aoife, is their only solace, as her needs and demands become the vehicle for comfort. Thus, when Mark loses his temper with Aoife at the pool—a response to his own pain and despair—her distress grounds and centers him. Mark realised that he was cold, . . . and that Aoife would be even colder. . . . I’m sorry baby, he said, [and then he said it again.] She grabbed him by the cheeks with both hands and dug in her nails. It hurt. He didn’t stop her. He didn’t pull away. His eyes were locked on hers. It was not cold enough for him to shake as much as he did. (260) Mark finds himself wrenched back from grief by a physical encounter with the baby. Perhaps more accurately, her bodily needs and demands, unfiltered emotion, and complete dependence become the lever that enables him to engage his own grief and to channel it into the need to care for her. Like Maryam in Edna O’Brien’s recent novel Girl, Mark finds his way through not via an overly romanticized or abstracted form of parenthood, but through the down and dirty, teary, runny-nosed reality of a little girl whose needs are even greater than his own. Lastly, Anna Burns’ fascinating and challenging 2018 novel, Milkman, also invokes the parentchild bodily relationship as a source of comfort and safety. In a novel about distrust, silences, and even constant tension between mother and child, the key moment of comfort comes through physical contact between parent and child. Thus, while this is no warm and cuddly motherdaughter relationship, Ma offers the narrator the one moment of security and safety she enjoys in almost the entire novel. In a remarkable passage where her body is wracked with pain from poison by a local well-known “poisoner,” the narrator relays, Ma and the neighbors purged me, ma being first to reach me on the landing and to put her arms out and around me but, because of what was happening within me, I hadn’t heard her come up. I felt her strong arms though, felt her warm breath, and knew in that moment that it was good beyond God to have my mother near me. Gripping the hem of her nightdress, then crawling along this nightdress, then inching into the belly of this nightdress, I knew I would be safe, that I would not now be alone. (221–22) This sheltering against the mother’s body ofers the narrator one of her few moments of comfort, and clearly it is no accident that it is to her mother’s “belly” that she “crawls”—words evocative of babyhood and maternity, in a metaphorical return to the womb. Despite their differences, it is clear that this connection remains unbroken, and in a moment of life and death, her mother becomes an anchor and site of succor. Like Claire Keegan’s 2010 novella Foster, which juxtaposes the comforting physicality of a foster father against the threatening presence of a biological parent by citing the narrator’s ability to “feel him, the heat of him coming through his good clothes, [to] smell the soap on his neck,” the narrator in Milkman takes refuge in the parental body for safety and historical comfort. At a time of crisis, it is the interaction between the parent and child’s bodies, with all its historical associations, that ofers relief. All of these examples illustrate the movement I have identified toward the recuperative physicality of the parental body as representations of the parent-child bond trend away from the historically negative renderings traditional in the Irish canon. What we observe centrally here in The Green Road, but also in these briefer examples, is thus consistent with recent trends in Irish literature that seek to recuperate such relationships and to offer more hopeful representations in contemporary Irish fiction. 416

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Notes 1 “Fintan O’Toole [has] argued that, in many respects, James Joyce’s Dubliners set the stage for the interrogations of Irish societal ills that would follow throughout the twentieth century [:] “Dubliners is the first modern text that sets out to portray both the vulnerability and the neglect and abuse of children as a central theme.” Costello-Sullivan, Trauma p. 13. 2 For some representative twentieth-century Irish novelists who represent trauma, see CostelloSullivan, Trauma p. 13–19. Robert F. Garratt provides a helpful overview of what he defines as “trauma novels.” See in particular his “Introduction,” pp. 1–18. 3 Discussions of “testimony” are central not only to Holocaust studies but also to literary trauma studies. For representative discussions of testimony in the process of recovery, see Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness,” or “Truth and Testimony.” On the role of trauma in literary representation more generally, see LaCapra. 4 For a detailed assessment of the social and political forces that triggered the shift from representations of trauma to recovery, see Costello-Sullivan, Trauma pp. 25–28. 5 On accountability in the post-Celtic Tiger moment, see McGlynn, “‘No Difference.” 6 Movements like the “Repeal the 8th” vote, which successfully passed as the 36th Amendment to the Irish Constitution by a considerable majority in May 2018, and the grassroots campaign #WakingTheFeminists in 2016 are two such examples of the very presentist impact of such societal reflection. 7 Many studies have explored the implications of Irish decolonization, particularly for women, in the Irish national imaginary. See Kathryn Conrad, Locked in the Family Cell. On its more sinister structural manifestations, see James M. Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries. Cahill aptly traces the implications for female and maternal bodies and notes that “Catherine Nash . . . [who] has published numerous articles tracing this embodiment of Ireland [as woman] . . . offers a succinct history of the various ways in which Ireland has been symbolized as female.” Celtic Literature 1–26, here p. 15. On the implications of the Irish Constitution and the “limited construction of the Irish subject,” see Costello-Sullivan, Mother/Country pp. 14–19. On the implications of Article 41 of Bunreacht na hÉireann, see Fogarty p. 87. On “the politically motivated construction of female identity as silent, idealistic, and overly generalized [which] rendered women largely invisible within the hegemonic historical narrative of the state,” see Sydora, p. 241. 8 Following Moynagh Sullivan, Mulhall argues that the “hole in the Irish literary tradition where the mother is buried, alive or dead, is the effect in representation of the repudiation of the mother and the repression of the feminine that subtend a phallic symbolic order, where the oedipal relation between father and son is preserved at the cost of the dereliction of the feminine and mother-daughter connectedness.” “Spectral Feminine” 69. 9 Rosaleen’s reference to “Hungry Grass” reminds us of the earlier chapter featuring Constance’s frenetic shopping, which critiques such displays of rampant consumerism and unflatteringly historicizes Celtic Tiger excess. 10 This has been ably traced by McGlynn, Barros-Del Río, and more generally by Estévez-Saá. All three also pay close attention to the structural elements of the novel form, its implications for women authors’ critiques of the Celtic Tiger, and The Green Road’s formal borrowings from the short story genre, but these fall beyond the bounds of this study. 11 On the “impossible otherness of the figure of the mother in Irish culture,” see Fogarty pp. 91–92. On the “idealized concept of the pure, asexual, but reproductive mother,” see Sydora p. 250. 12 John Redmond describes “Dark Rosaleen” by Mangan as “his best-known nationalist ballad, in which the Irish nation is figured as a woman,” which is consistent with the aisling tradition of Irish poetry. James Clarence Mangan, “Dark Rosaleen” Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing Vol 2., ed. Seamus Deane (Derry: Field Day, 1991). 27. 13 In The Gathering, Veronica also wrestles with alcoholism. See Costello-Sullivan, Trauma 99–100. Estévez-Saá suggests that Hanna’s alcoholism may correlate not only to her failed professional ambitions, but also to having “recently experienced maternity”—i.e., post-partum depression. See “Map of Things Known” p. 50. 14 As Bracken and Cahill note, this use of wallpaper as symbolizing “[a]n interest in recovering what has been silenced and repressed structures” appears in The Wig My Father Wore; it is also used in The Gathering, when Veronica imagines pulling down the wallpaper in her grandmother’s house. See Bracken and Cahill, “Introduction” 6. For a reading of the house as metonym in The Gathering, see CostelloSullivan, Trauma pp. 119–122. 15 Sydora notes that “female subjectivity within the Irish state requires the absence of the maternal body in order to sustain its continuation.” I am suggesting that the materiality of the mother’s body can provide an alternate, private history apart from the strictures of economy and state. p. 251. 417

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16 Bracken and Cahill note that “occlusion of the mother from our cultural imaginary [affects] motherdaughter relations and female subjectivity.” “Introduction” p. 8. 17 In The Gathering, Veronica consistently refers to anyone excluded from the national imaginary—including unwanted children, her daughters, and the institutionalized, as a “residue.” See Costello-Sullivan, Trauma pp. 119–20, 127. 18 Enright has observed, “People say I write about the family all the time, but in fact I just put people into that shape . . . I was more interested in separation and connection, disconnection and love.” Enright cited in Estévez-Saá, p. 47. 19 Enright uses a similar tactic of reducing the body to “meat” in The Gathering to work against the romanticization of the female body. See Costello-Sullivan, Trauma, p. 117–18, 123–25. For Enright’s thoughts on her use of “meat” as “overburden[ing] the thing a little,” see Bracken and Cahill, “Interview” p. 23. 20 The reference to her mother “beautifully alive” signals not only Hanna’s imaginings that her mother was dead, since she periodically disappears in her bouts of sulking, but also Enright’s awareness of the historical tradition whereby mothers were often killed off in fiction. 21 For a reading of the recuperative use of the maternal body in The Gathering, see Costello-Sullivan, Trauma pp. 53–72 or Sydora pp. 259–60.

Works cited Barros-Del Río, Maria. “Fragmentation and Vulnerability in Anne Enright’s The Green Road (2015): Collateral Casualties of the Celtic Tiger in Ireland.” International Journal of English Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1, 2018, pp. 35–51. Print. Bracken, Claire and Susan Cahill. “An Interview with Anne Enright, August 2009.” Anne Enright. Edited by Claire Bracken and Susan Cahill. Visions and Revisions: Irish Writers in their Time. Series Editor Stan Smith. Irish Academic Press, 2011, pp. 13–32. Print. Bracken, Claire and Susan Cahill. “Introduction.” Anne Enright. Edited by Claire Bracken and Susan Cahill. Irish Academic Press, 2011, pp. 1–12. Print. Burns, Anna. Milkman. Grey Wolf Press, 2018. Cahill, Susan. “‘Dreaming of Upholstered Breasts,’ or, How to Find your Way Back Home: Dislocation in What are you Like?” Anne Enright. Edited by Claire Bracken and Susan Cahill. Irish Academic Press, 2011, pp. 87–106. Print. Cahill, Susan. Irish Literature in the Celtic Tiger Years 1990–2008: Gender, Bodies, Memory. Continuum Literary Studies Series. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011. Print. Conrad, Kathryn A. Locked in the Family Cell: Gender, Sexuality and Political Agency in Irish National Discourse. Irish Studies in Literature and Culture Series. Series Editor Michael Patrick Gillespie. University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Print. Costello-Sullivan, Kathleen. Mother/Country: Politics of the Personal in the Fiction of Colm Tóibín. Reimagining Ireland Series, Vol. 44. Edited by Eamon Maher. Peter Lang, 2012. Print. Costello-Sullivan, Kathleen. Trauma and Recovery in the Twenty-First-Century Irish Novel. Syracuse University Press, 2018. Enright, Anne. The Gathering. Jonathan Cape, 2007. Print. Enright, Anne. The Green Road. W.W. Norton and Co., 2015. Print. Estévez-Saá, Margarita. “A Map of Things Known and Lost in Anne Enright’s The Green Road.” Estudios Irlandeses, Vol. 11, 2016, pp. 45–55. Print. Ewins, Kristen. “‘History Is Only Biological’: History, Bodies, and National Identity in The Gathering and ‘Switzerland’.” Anne Enright. Edited by Claire Bracken and Susan Cahill, Irish Academic Press, 2011, pp. 127–144. Fogarty, Anne. “‘The Horror of the Unlived Life’: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction.” Writing Mothers and Daughters: Renegotiating the Mother in Western European Narratives by Women. Edited by Adalgisa Giorgio. Berghahn, 2002, pp. 85–118. Garratt, Robert F. Trauma and History in the Irish Novel: The Return of the Dead. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Hatfield, Mary, Jutta Kruse, and Ríona Ni Congáil, Eds. Historical Perspectives on Parenthood and Childhood in Ireland. Arlen House, 2018. Keegan, Claire. “Foster.”New Yorker Magazine, February 7, 2010. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/02/ 15/foster. Accessed 19 July 2019. Online. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Parallax Re-visions of Culture and Society. Series ed. Stephen G Nichols, Gerald Prince, and Wendy Steiner. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Print. 418

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Laub, Dori. “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening.” Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. Routledge, 1992, pp. 57–87. Print. Laub, Dori. “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Edited by Cathy Caruth. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, pp. 61–75. Print. McGlynn, Mary. “‘No Difference between the Different Kinds of Yesterday’: The Neoliberal Present in The Green Road, The Devil I Know, and The Lives of Women.” LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, Vol. 28, No. 1, 2017, pp. 34–54. Print. McKeon, Belinda. Solace. Picador, 2012. Mulhall, Anne. “‘Now the Blood Is in the Room’: The Spectral Feminine in the Work of Anne Enright.” Anne Enright. Edited by Claire Bracken and Susan Cahill. Irish Academic Press, 2011, pp. 67–86. Print. O’Brien, Edna. Girl. Croyden, Faber and Faber, 2019. Redmond, John. “The Man in the Cloak.” Review of Poems by James Clarence Mangan. Edited by David Wheatley. The Guardian, February 6, 2004. www.theguardian.com/books/2004/feb/07/featuresreviews. guardianreview8 (Accessed July 16, 2019). Online. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of King Lear. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. Folger Shakespeare Library. www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/html/Lr.html (Accessed July 16, 2019). Online. Smith, James M. Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment. Notre Dame University Press, 2007. Print. Sydora, Laura. “‘Everyone Wants a Bit of Me’: Historicizing Motherhood in Anne Enright’s The Gathering.” Women’s Studies, Vol. 44, 2015, pp. 239–263. Print.

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33 Abused Ireland Psychoanalyzing the enigma of sexualized innocence Margot Gayle Backus and Joseph Valente

Literature, we contend, has the capacity to form an unconscious reserve of history, what Bruce Fink calls the “censored chapters” of an approved narrative—-in this case, a collective or ethnonational script (6). As we have argued, since the early twentieth century, one literary subgenre— the literary child sex scandal—has played a crucial role in a series of ongoing debates concerning Ireland’s moral priorities by making public the “censored chapters” of the approved or hegemonic narrative whereby the post-Treaty Irish Catholic Imaginary came into being.1 Integral to the otherwise socially proscribed viewpoint this subgenre makes possible is its capacity to stage, once or serially, what Freud terms the primal scene. The primal scene, or originary seduction, describes the moment when an innocent child is traumatically/ecstatically initiated into awareness of adult sexual desire, while knowing, as well, that this new awareness represents forbidden, guilty knowledge the child’s caregivers would vehemently disavow. In our recent study, The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable, Jean Laplanche’s elaboration of Freud’s early seduction theory by way of the enigmatic signifier—wherein the inmixed cathexes and counter-cathexes of the primal scene are internalized as a coded, germinal message—opens the way to a new understanding of modern literature’s specialized contribution to public debates in Ireland relating sexual prohibitions to children’s welfare (Valente and Backus 48–51). Through literary evocations of the enigmatic signifier, this distinct subgenre represents otherwise inaccessible scenes of trauma and thereby makes visible the inter-implicated psychic and social ramifications of systematic forms of abuse. In particular, novels such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), The House in Paris (1935), The Molloy Trilogy (1959), The Country Girls (1960), The Dark (1965), Breakfast on Pluto (1998), The Gathering (2007), Room (2010), and our focus here, Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture (2008), leverage the specialized resources of literary life writing to track modern Ireland’s myriad forms of domestic, communal, and institutional abuse to their point of origin: the shadowy overlapping terrain over which the individual and social unconscious jointly preside. The frequently noted connective relay that renders “abused Ireland” a simultaneously individual and systematic condition has been mediated provocatively by the narrative work that fiction does.2 From James Joyce’s Dubliners stories onward, Irish-born authors have persistently exploited the reality that traumas suffered by individual psyches, including the constituent trauma of the primal scene, are always also sociopolitical traumas. Thus, literary depictions of 420

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enigmatic encounters have made it possible for Irish writers to write the unspeakable: to make visible, in narrative accounts of national consolidation, the abusive apparatuses whereby the modern Irish nation narrated itself into being. Short stories and novels produce this effect by deploying uninitiated, ingenuous, or uncomprehending narrators (usually juvenile), whose perspectives comprehend events that adults are socialized not to see, and reframe them as a darkness visible, as a “something missing,” that both child and reader need to interpret if they are to make sense of the narrative as a whole. This uncanny literary vantage—which is inevitably both psychoanalytically mimetic and historically allegorical—also characteristically illuminates a range of foundational scenes defined by the broader culture as taboo, not only insofar as all knowledge of adult sexuality is taboo to the child, but also insofar as the occlusion of that taboo intelligence forms the structural basis for all social misrecognition, both individual and collective.3 Trafficking in Laplanche’s enigmatic signifier, The Secret Scripture exploits literature’s distinctive capacity to record truths otherwise unavailable to an ongoing communal life history through figural practices that to some degree veil or leaven those truths. These practices allow the novel to serve as a repository for difficult, traumatic, and scandalous historical truths disclosed under the guard of Freudian disavowal, i.e., to answer the knowing/not-knowing of the open secret with the saying/not-saying of muted revelation.4 In particular, through a narrative sequence defined by the traumatic memories of one elderly woman, the narrative spotlights the impact of socio-politically motivated abuse on the formation of the subject. In the interlinked, traumatic memories of Roseanne McNulty, née Clear, sociopolitical trauma infuses, and is informed by, the traumatic/ecstatic message originally implanted in the child’s primal, traumatic/ecstatic apprehension of adult sexuality. In this way, the novel produces an extended narrative cloaking device—systematically admitting and balking identification of its serial objects—thereby writing the (still) otherwise unspeakable terrain of sexualized innocence and eroticized punishment that emerged in concert with the modern Irish nation. The Secret Scripture is narrated contrapuntally, through two sets of journal entries penned, respectively, by Roseanne, an aged patient at the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, and her psychiatrist, the hospital’s director of 30 years, Dr Grene. The novel’s structure produces an unstably opposed relationship between Roseanne and Grene and their respective journals. Roseanne’s writing is done in secret, just as her life, over her many decades of institutionalization, has been lived in secret. It is, indeed, in this secrecy itself, as the site of an unconscious traumatic burden that Roseanne has borne for over 70 years, that the psychoanalytic and the sociopolitical overlap. Conversely, while the formation of Dr Grene’s unconscious by and in relation to the Irish nation state is also made manifest in the notes he keeps in his Commonplace book, his notations are effectively public documents. Whereas Roseanne’s status as a lifetime psychiatric patient de-authorizes her writings, permanently situating them as “censored chapters” of Irish history, Grene’s journal entries have potentially enormous consequences for the hospital’s patients, many of whom are to be released onto the streets in preparation for an impending move to a modern but much smaller hospital.5 Both journals devote considerable space and attention to a sequence of traumatic events relating to Roseanne’s institutionalization, or sectioning, yet they do so from the opposing positions of patient/doctor, subject/king, and, more subliminally, daughter/father. Institutionalized as a young woman after bearing and ostensibly killing an illegitimate infant, Roseanne was originally stigmatized owing to her unsanctioned Irishness. That is, her manifest Irishness, coupled with her sex appeal, rendered her refusal to convert to Catholicism an intolerable affront to her family’s long-time patron/persecutor, Fr. Gaunt. Ultimately, Gaunt avenges himself on Roseanne by permanently confining her to a mental hospital. Grene’s status, on the other hand, aligns him with the state and the heteronormative Irish family. He is the 421

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most powerful figure in the hospital, which, in turn, represents the Irish nation in microcosm. As such, he is a figurative father, or, as he terms himself, a “zoo keeper” at the head of a faute de mieux family (Barry 16). Roseanne’s first description of the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital is as “Dr Grene’s kingdom” (4). Throughout the novel, the king/subject, doctor/patient Oedipality of the Grene/Rosanne relationship parallels the central preoccupations of Roseanne’s entries: her formative relationship with Joe Clear, her actual (and, narratively speaking, good and legitimate) father, and Fr. Gaunt, the priest who repeatedly and traumatically abrogated Joe Clear’s position of paternal care. Roseanne’s “secret scripture,” written on “unwanted paper—surplus to requirements,” is a particularly apt figure for the unconscious (Barry 4). The “brittle and honest-minded history of [herself]” she feels impelled to produce is, in fact, her externalized double, not written to justify herself in the eyes of others but to “imprison . . . under the floor-board” in the room where she has lived, hidden, for most of her adult life, so that she will be able to go “with joy enough” to her “own rest under the Roscommon sod” (5). Roseanne is simultaneously decrypting and literally encrypting “a dreadful and burdening truth” she has been obliged to carry in her “remnant human person after the civic powers have had their say” (135). In a courageous end-of-life effort to divest herself of this unspeakable burden, Roseanne writes the unspeakable so as to externalize it, and not only to hide but also to securely imprison it outside herself, so she may die happily. We can see in this strangely literal encryption (entombencode) precisely the simultaneously personal and social operations of traumatic defense mechanisms. Roseanne is planning to literally imprison, in the room that has held her body, all the proscribed experiences she has involuntarily, corporeally, held and hidden. In doing so, she is, in effect, strictly obeying the prime directive of “abused Ireland”: that she contain these secrets at all costs. At the same time, by externalizing her secrets and leaving them in a room from which death is bound to deliver her sooner rather than later, Roseanne is symbolically divesting herself of their crushing burden, and can envision meeting her own beneficent version of the Christian God free of sin. As she writes, however, Roseanne becomes increasingly curious about her own story; she takes up the position of judge or historian, sifting through what evidence she has in order to better understand the abuse she has suffered. The intellectual curiosity and rigor that afford Roseanne a degree of protective detachment are recognizable extensions of her father’s rationalist Presbyterianism. As an exercise in retrospective empiricism, Roseanne’s “secret scripture” cannot decisively distinguish between objective fact and psychic defense, but in writing it she can, to some extent, separate her own judgments, values, and perceptions from those held by the abusive social order that simultaneously formed and incapacitated her. In the course of the encryption/historical research/self-definition Roseanne undertakes over the course of the novel, she remembers a series of extraordinarily violent, enigmatic encounters, each of which simultaneously builds on and redefines earlier traumatic memories. In this way, key signifiers associated with later, and even geographically distant traumas (such as the nuclear detonation over Hiroshima) reflexively infiltrate and uncannily conjoin Roseanne’s accounts of chronologically earlier trauma. In keeping with Laplanche’s account of the dynamic atemporality of serial traumas, Roseanne’s traumatic memories exist intrapsychically, in a perpetual relay that simultaneously draws upon and reshapes the originary trauma of the primal scene.6 Thus, each of Roseanne’s traumatic journal entries represents an individual switchpoint in a devastating psychosexual trajectory that is shaped by the whole of her life’s aggregated sexual/Oedipal, historical, and transhistorical trauma. That is, each traumatic memory is overdetermined by prior and subsequent personal traumas and also by broader, public traumas ranging from the Famine and British military attacks on secret Catholic gatherings to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Crucially, the public traumas that most insistently bind themselves to the enigmatic 422

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signifier central to Roseanne’s psychoanalytic formation are those relating to the formation of the post-Treaty Irish state. Although Roseanne’s memories, with their dreamlike overdetermination, are sometimes empirically suspect to Roseanne herself,7 all of them can safely be read either as substantively accurate or as encoded accounts of events too traumatic to process. Taken together, these recollections graph a series of points at which predominantly mimetic, intrapsychic trauma and predominantly allegorical traumatic historical transformations intersect. Over the course of the novel, these traumatic touchpoints establish a personal, institutional, and regional counterhistory of the ideological and institutional machinery of the modern Irish nation state. And, as Dr. Grene sadly prophecies in the novel’s final pages, these psychohistorical pressures will continue to perpetuate the nation’s patterns of eroticized abuse, thus precluding any improved “safety for our patients” as Ireland moves out of Celtic Tiger prosperity and into the brave new world of global austerity (Barry 295).

I. “A certain symmetry of things” The specific ideology that drew together the individual psyche and the new Irish nation-state was the anti-sex, anti-body extremism that legitimated a new and morally imperative coimplication of the Irish Catholic Church and the Irish state. As is often the case with religiously motivated anti-sex campaigns, Ireland’s ultra-Catholic stance on sexuality was justified through claims that certain people, groups, and beliefs (e.g., impure women, illegitimate babies, and socialism) morally endanger people, groups, and beliefs (e.g., pure women and children, and Catholicism) deemed metonymic of the nation itself. In what could be termed the first law of psychoanalysis, however, no amount of coordinated social effort is capable of “driving out” human sexuality (with or without a proverbial pitchfork). As we shall see, since sex inevitably remained a radically if problematically constitutive element of Irish subjectivity, it could never ultimately be squelched or purged. Thus, the nascent Irish nation’s attempts to exorcise sex by way of sacramental dispensation, state censorship, vows of celibacy, reproductive imperatives, institutional sanctions, ascetic regimens, and shaming rituals, succeeded only in invisibly fueling, shaping, and solidifying eroticized forms of correction, punishment, and abuse that were, because disavowed, elusive of or resistant to institutional oversight. While any turnabout whereby the shepherd becomes the wolf is ironic, even counterintuitive, from a psychoanalytic point of view, it is also, owing to sexuality’s intrapsychic intransigency, anything but inexplicable. Further, because desire itself is mobilized by the signifier, by the symbolic nexus between subjects and the social order to which they belong, the displacement of sexuality attendant on its suppression affects not only the parties under restriction, but the restricting parties and agencies as well. Hence, we might enter as an indispensable corollary to the first law of psychoanalysis: the policing of eroticism inevitably becomes an erotic and an eroticizing activity all its own, whether voyeuristic, sadistic, or narcissistically self-aggrandizing. Having assumed a nearly absolute, divinely appointed authority, including a pretense of mastery over the vagaries of sexuality itself, certain officials and associates of Irish Catholic institutions wound up eroticizing their own sanctified powers and the entitled sanctity with which they themselves were invested.8 That is to say, even as the authority to protect innocence was consciously “taken” (in the sense of both “construed” and “appropriated”), sexual license and gratification were likewise unconsciously taken (again in both senses) as that sanctified authority’s prerogative. We can see just this sort of reflexive turn illustrated throughout The Secret Scripture. As Roseanne recalls of her time at a convent school, “savage” nuns beat the sexual errancy out of the 423

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poorer girls “with every ounce of energy in their bodies,” a practice that exudes the exorbitant release of libidinal energy (Barry 90). Upon the death of her disgraced father, Joe Clear, the 16-year-old Roseanne is visited by the parish priest, Fr. Gaunt, who proposes to see her provided for by way of an arranged marriage to Joe Brady, a corpulent 50-year-old man who took her father’s cemetery job. To Gaunt’s mind, marrying Roseanne to a Catholic man who now stands in for her deceased Presbyterian father would reflect “a certain [pleasing] symmetry of things” (94). When Roseanne replies, “You’d have me marry an old man?” (94), the priest explains that Roseanne has received a gift from God—her sexual appeal (though he hems and haws about the term and settles on “beauty”)—which allows him to make this advantageous, if precipitous, match. When Roseanne still resists, Gaunt re-casts that same quality, now unnamed, as a danger, a “temptation” to the “boys of Sligo” (93). Thus, Roseanne’s endowments are a supreme good, a “gift from God” so long as Gaunt enjoys the power to dispose of them (the original French meaning of the term of “jouissance” is rights over property), but they deteriorate into evil should he fail to command that power. In other words, Fr. Gaunt seeks to possess Roseanne’s body sexually by a form of remote control that would maintain the appearance of perfect, celibate self-denial. Not surprisingly, the intense malignity animating Fr Gaunt’s efforts to despoil Roseanne’s reputation later in the novel seems inexplicable except as the revenge of the jilted. Likewise, Gaunt’s super-corporeal proxy, Joe Brady, subsequently endeavors to take sexual possession of Roseanne’s body forcibly—by raping her—and then justifies the attempt as vengeance for her refusal of his advances. These and other parallels establish the two men as doppelganger figures, each wanting to control Roseanne in his own way: one through the violence of (theocratic) law, and one with a violence surpassing law altogether; one a priested pimp, one a rapist john; one the image of muscular Christianity (trim, athletic, and self-restrained, “Gaunt” his allegorical name), one a figure of diabolical excess (by way of his corpulent body and “swollen penis”) (105). But most importantly, the one serves the other as his agent, with profoundly allegorical implications: the authoritative figure of sexual repression, in concentrating libidinal energy around his authority to institute such repression, advances the cause, within himself and his circle of sexual violence, against the disempowered. As the Fr. Gaunt/Joe Brady dyad intimates, owing to the political and ideological dominance of the Church in post-Treaty Ireland, Church officers became especially liable to the reflexive turn we have theorized. In representing the always equivocal signifiers of divine law and purpose, in channeling the always projected will of God, the Catholic clergy came to occupy an equivocal position of their own, wherein the ineluctably phantasmatic aspect of religious faith could slip unnoticed into the religious, faith-based legitimation of personal fantasy. Predicated on an identification with the received canons of sanctity, the clerical exceptionalism endemic to the Church-State complex of Ireland could easily induce a sense of exception, or exemption, from the binding force of those same canons. Put another way, the different strains of the church fathers’ (and brothers’ and sisters’) desire could and sometimes did inform and/or distort, infuse and/or contaminate, supplement and/or supplant the particular expressions of the sovereign command they supposedly relay as deputies of the Godhead. Under conditions that exempt religious institutions from any external political or legal restraints or oversight, members of the clergy, in conceiving themselves as representatives and instruments of divine will, in particular run the risk of enlisting the deity, unconsciously or not, as the guarantor of their own occluded desires. By extension—and here is where the real danger lies—they risk positioning their young pastoral wards as instrumental objects of their own disavowed wishes, under color of rendering the wards as instruments of God’s will as well. What is more, the surpassing authority they enjoy for the faithful can (and often does) create a similar confusion on the part of their spiritual followers. 424

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Roseanne’s “secret scripture” bears witness to this synchronization of an eroticized drive to punish sexualized transgressions against an emergent church/state authority as it spread from individual priests like Fr. Gaunt into the Irish lay community over the course of Ireland’s long, turbulent, partial decolonization. As an aged woman whose self-appointed protector/ persecutor, Fr. Gaunt, exposed her to decades of ostracization, incarceration, and rape, Roseanne reflects that though she did not dislike Fr. Gaunt, neither could she (perhaps bear to) understand “what gave him pleasure” (Barry 221). The reader, however, viewing Gaunt through Roseanne’s uncomprehending eyes, is made painfully aware of what gives Gaunt pleasure. The reflexive turn of erotic energy in disavowed jouissance, an enjoyment taken in disgust, are at work throughout the novel: in Gaunt’s judgments concerning Roseanne’s perceived sexual delinquency, in his brutal disciplining of her through internment and sectioning, and in his implicit encouragement of the wider populace to engage in cognate acts of moralizing abuse, from ostracism to confinement. We can also see this sort of reflexive turn in Gaunt’s grooming of Roseanne for a series of explicitly sexual punishments that include not only rape, but also and especially the priest’s astonishing annulment of Roseanne’s marriage, undertaken, as Roseanne bitterly reflects, “for the saving of Tom McNulty” (Barry 219). The severance of Roseanne’s sacral bond with her husband, a local musical celebrity, good Catholic boy, and wannabe fascist, initiates the final dehumanizing phase in Gaunt’s ongoing campaign of sexualized abuse: an extra-juridical lifesentence to perpetual solitary confinement imposed on Roseanne by Gaunt, in concert with Tom McNulty’s family. Through a series of traumatic moments occurring in Roseanne’s many years of enforced isolation in an “iron hut” (233), she is separated, first de facto and, over time, de jure, from her husband, her community, and finally, from her sense of humanity. When Roseanne couples with the only sympathetic human being she has encountered in many years—one of her husband’s brothers, the demobilized Eneas McNulty—the resulting pregnancy retrospectively confirms all of the putative transgressions for which she is being sadistically punished, offenses that ultimately boil down to her refusal to cede control of her sexuality to the Catholic church, in the person of Fr. Gaunt.

II. “The cleanest man in all the Christian world” Roseanne’s personal story begins with her earliest memories of her father, whom she recalls as “the cleanest man in all the Christian world, all Sligo, anyhow” (Barry 5). He seemed to her to be “all strapped about in his [resplendent] uniform,” which, she claims, formalized his position as superintendent of what seems to have been Sligo’s central, municipal cemetery.9 An originary primal scene shimmers behind these first memories, with their defensive fixation on her father’s cleanliness, his meticulous and socially authorizing mode of dress, and his absolute respectability. Joe Clear, Roseanne asserts, was “not in any manner haphazard, but regular as an account book” (5). Thematically, the passage immediately following Roseanne’s general introduction of her father as a man of unsurpassed purity reinforces her claims by detailing the great lengths to which Joe Clear went to keep himself clean. Roseanne recalls her father washing himself with water from “a barrel in the yard . . . every day of the year” (5). Yet, despite this passage’s preoccupation with purity and orderliness, Roseanne’s account of her father’s daily ablutions is imbued with a guilty jouissance, described in evasive terms. Concerning (presumably) her compulsion to sneak glimpses of her naked father, she explains, “I was a dishonest daughter in that way, and couldn’t obey.” And, concerning the pleasure she derived from her part in this daily ritual, she observes, “no circus act could have pleased me in the same way” (5, italics added). 425

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Young Roseanne had understood (through a “clear” if unspoken directive from her “clean” father, Joe Clear) that she was not to see her father’s ablutions. It might be argued, however, that her father could have secured his privacy by some better means than by wordlessly turning “the faces of my mother and myself to the wall of the kitchen,” then bathing outside the room where he had placed them. Indeed, the loving detail with which Roseanne recalls her father’s ritual cleansing testifies not only to her own intense, if uneasy, interest, but also to her father’s lack of shame, or even his unconscious exhibitionism. For, having turned his daughter and wife to face a kitchen wall, Joe Clear, “stripped entirely,” stood outside a kitchen window “without fear of being seen,” and “laved himself mercilessly” while, in the winter at least, “groaning like a bull” (5). Whereas Roseanne’s later traumatic memories, informed by and informing of this classic primal scene in the manner Laplanche anatomizes, are marked by bodies dead or in extremis, the body in extremis in this originary enigmatic encounter is also the living, healthy, well-regulated and tacitly sexualized body of Roseanne’s father. She recalls with a keen interest all the accoutrements of her father’s bathing ritual, for which he used “carbolic soap, that would have cleaned a greasy floor,” and “agitated [it] into a suit of suds, that fitted him well, and . . . scraped at his self with a piece of grey stone, that he stuck into the wall in a particular niche . . . from where it poked out like a nose” (5). The wordless transmission of an erotic/enigmatic message from father to daughter animates all the details Roseanne recalls: the specific words she uses (stripped, laved mercilessly, groaning like a bull, agitated, scraped, stuck in, poked out); their distinctly musical meter; and her simultaneous guilt and pleasure. Yet textual evidence of an enigmatic transmission both sent and received is most palpable in Joe Clear’s wordless turning of his daughter’s face to the wall, and in his inchoate bestial groans. Roseanne describes her riveted emotional response to this message in kind, by simultaneously acknowledging and evading this memory’s central import. That is, she both concedes and conceals in what way, exactly, she was “a dishonest daughter,” and in what way she found, in stolen glimpses of her father bathing, pleasure that no circus act could have aroused (5). Roseanne is particularly enamored of her father’s voice. Following her account of the primal scene in which she recalls her naked father “groaning like a bull,” she describes him as “a singer that could not be silenced,” who is distinguished by his passion for old sermons, which gave him pleasure because “he could imagine [their] words new in the mouths of the preachers” (Barry 5). His “veritable gospel was Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne,” and it is by means of this “little battered volume,” inscribed with her father’s name, that Roseanne has preserved her originary Oedipal bond “in all the flotsam and ruckus” of her life, by affixing it to this external placeholder (6). Here, and throughout the novel, Roseanne ascribes a transcendent quality to vocalizations, words, and writing, all of which she first identifies with her father. Immediately following her characterization of her father as a voice that could not be silenced, as a reader who communed with “preachers long gone” by imagining their words renewed “in [their] mouths,” and a man for whom one revered book has become a surviving extension of himself (6), Roseanne re-tells two of her father’s stories, making his own words live again. These two stories correspond to the dual affective register of Roseanne’s primal scene: devastating guilt and ecstatic pleasure. The first is a ghost story involving a husband whose wife locked him in the basement of their boarding house and left him to starve, a crime so terrible it lives on as a kind of sentient guilt and horror in the abandoned house where it occurred (6). Joe Clear’s second supernatural story turns on “an inexplicable escape,” in which Joe, competing in a motorcycle race, witnesses another rider accelerate directly into “one of those high, thick stone walls built during the Irish famine” and, at the moment of impact, “rising as if on wings, and crossing the huge wall in a swift and gentle movement, like the smooth glide of a seagull in an upwind” (10).10 To have and “nurse” stories, while alive, Roseanne concludes, may keep one from being “utterly lost” to history, or 426

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to the memory of one’s own family. Thus, it is by way of Joe’s voice, his stories, that he remains “even now alive in [her], like a second and more patient and more pleasing soul within my poor soul” (11, italics added).11 Roseanne’s happiest, most sensorily detailed memories of her father involve music or her father’s voice, and, always, her father’s close physical proximity. In particular, Roseanne’s memory of sitting side by side with her father at the family piano features strange elisions. Having described the family piano and even its provenance in detail, Roseanne approaches their shared piano playing obliquely. Characteristically, she leads into an enigmatically charged memory by first remarking one of her father’s intellectual or cultural enthusiasms: He considered Balfe a genius. As there was room for me beside him on the stool I soon by grace of my love for him and my own great joy in his ability began to pick up the rudiments of playing, and slowly progressed to some real accomplishment, without in any way feeling it was an effort or a trial. (Barry 12) This scene is notable for its erasure of both Rosanne’s and her father’s bodies, which we know by implication to be pressed together. Joe Clear played the family piano seated on a stool, as opposed to a bench, a detail that makes clear to the reader that the “room for [Roseanne]” beside her father would have been scant. Furthermore, the sentence in which Roseanne recalls her acquisition of first “the rudiments of playing,” and subsequently, “some real accomplishment,” is notably digressive, with its main subject/predicate (“I soon began to pick up the rudiments and progress”) couched in a series of baroque, purportedly explanatory clauses. These three prepositional clauses: “as there was room for me”; “by grace of my love for him and my own great joy”; and “without feeling it was an efort or a trial” serve the same purpose as do the evasive “in that way” and “in the same way” in Roseanne’s above reflection on her emotional reactions to watching her father bathe. Here too, Roseanne is describing something important using imprecise phrases that might be termed Freudian euphemisms, a particular kind of Freudian slip that points away from rather than toward its suppressed referent. In this case, Roseanne’s account of the transfer of musical knowledge from her father into herself through frequent sessions spent side by side at the family piano specifically suggests, by so elaborately evading, that the transmission of embodied musical knowledge through the media of physical touch and shared afect included something taboo, something precious yet unspeakable. Roseanne’s most flagrantly Oedipal memory, of her father’s nightly bedtime ritual, notably parallels earlier scenes emphasizing her seamless internalization of the enigmatic message her father conveys through his ablutions, his stories, and at the piano. She seems, at one point, to allude to this message directly, as “the strange privacy of my father’s voice” (Barry 13). Roseanne recalls this final enigmatic scene in the midst of what is, effectively, an apologia in defense of her father. At this point in Roseanne’s testimony, her father has been publicly discredited by Fr. Gaunt, who has removed him from his position at the Sligo cemetery and, humiliatingly, assigned him a new municipal job as rat catcher. Unconsciously sensitive to the sectarian nature of Gaunt’s scapegoating of her father, Roseanne is representing her father’s critique of the ways that Protestantism in Ireland was used as a colonial weapon. Here, as elsewhere, she knows that her version of events relating to her father’s public disgrace and death, as well as of her own actions, differ radically from the broader social consensus. She therefore submits, in evidence of her comprehensive knowledge of her father’s most private thoughts, a detail she might otherwise have withheld. She was well aware of all that her father had felt and believed, because she had supplanted her mother’s position as her father’s confidant and even, in a sense, as his bedmate 427

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(62). Her father, she contends, conceived of “the Protestant religion as an instrument as soft as a feather transformed into a hammer . . . and used to batter the heads of those that laboured to live in Ireland, the most of them Catholic by nature” (62). She knows he was highly critical of Protestantism as the English had weaponized it for use against the Irish, she insists, because: every night of my childhood, every night, the last thing he did in the house was come into my narrow bed, shoving me over with his wide hips, so that I lay half on him, my head on his whiskery face, and talked and talked and talked, while my mother went to sleep in the other room. . . . [He was] offering it all as a music quite as desirable to him and therefore to me as the works of Balfe and Sullivan, two of the greatest Irishmen that had ever lived, in his opinion. (62) This memory pushes normative parent-child Oedipality right to the brink of pathology. That is, the ritual here described comes right to the brink, but does not fully move into the terrain of sexual abuse. Rather, at this point extra-familial traumatic violations of Roseanne’s inmost autonomy detectably merge with Roseanne’s unconscious, ecstatic/traumatic internalization of her father’s unconscious sexual desire. Roseanne gives this uncomfortably physical rendering of her father’s nightly verbal emissions immediately following an extremely traumatic episode that Roseanne aptly recalls as “the horror of horrors.” As this phrase suggests, this particular trauma gives rise to all of the interlinked traumas to follow. While at the cemetery, conducting last rites for an anti-Treaty soldier, Fr. Gaunt, Roseanne, and her father are threatened by gun-wielding members of the Free State Army. For our purposes here, it is important to note that this final variant of the father/daughter primal scene occurs in the same journal entry that begins, “yes, how well I remember the day my father was let go from the cemetery, a living man exiled from the dead. And that was a little murder too” (Barry 61). It should also be noted that by the time Fr. Gaunt saw to it that Joe Clear lost his job, Roseanne had endured many whippings at the hands of her mother (20), as well as the previously noted savage beatings at her convent school. She had also herself been wrongly accused (by the brutalized anti-Treaty soldiers) of bringing the Free State soldiers to the cemetery, an accusation that makes her responsible for all the subsequent ills that befall her father. She has also, along with her father, been witnessing her mother’s descent into a frightening and unreachable silence. As we will see, Roseanne’s memories of politically motivated trauma are informed by and even distorted by the originary enigmatic message. What is already observable in the above memory, however, is a new unconscious selection principle reorganizing Roseanne’s memories of her relationship to her father. Earlier enactments of the originary primal scene betray their subliminal, eroticized content despite their inclusion of only the most innocuous details. Here, Roseanne’s memory of the most disturbing and potentially culpable details of a scene that could easily have been handled with equal euphemism and evasion signals the proximity of coadjutant traumas that are beginning to parasitically infest Roseanne’s normative psychoanalytic development.

III. “It is all love, that not knowing, that not seeing” At the point of Joe Clear’s death, the paradoxical knot of guilt and pleasure originally implanted through his silent directive not to look and his equally wordless incitements to disobey that directive, is transformed into “a secret and ruinous burden” at Roseanne’s “very heart” (18). As Dr. Grene characterizes it, Joe Clear suffered a “curious and protracted” death (179). This, however, is true not only in the sense Grene supposes, of Joe Clear’s murder itself as described in 428

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Fr. Gaunt’s deposition, but also in his murder’s extraordinarily curious, prolonged, contradictory, and broadly dispersed incorporation throughout the novel itself. By Gaunt’s account, as it twice recurs in Grene’s notes—in both cases with strange distortions noted in retrospect by Grene himself—Joe Clear’s assailants waylaid him on his way home one night, dragged him to the top of the round tower in the cemetery, beat him with hammers until the hammers were bloody, attempted to shove him out a tower window, and finally “hung him in a derelict house nearby” (Barry 180). Roseanne, who had witnessed her father’s capture and followed his abductors to the tower, stood “below looking up.” When her father’s assailants, in “a desperate rage” hurled the bloody hammers out the tower window; one of the hammers “[struck] Roseanne as she stood gazing up a blow to the head, knocking her out cold” (180). More curious by far than Clear’s death itself are the wildly discrepant guises in which this death appears over the course of the novel. The earliest such depiction gives the reader no reason to suspect that this might be an encoded account of a catastrophic, or even, psychoanalytically, a terminal loss (or knockout blow). Or, rather, the text drops one big hint that can only be caught retrospectively: Roseanne’s first, scrambled account of her father’s death follows a single paragraph, set apart on either side by the glyph whereby Barry differentiates between sub-sections within journal entries, in which Roseanne discloses the devastating impact of her father’s death (Barry 17–8). In the seemingly light-hearted account that follows, occasional trauma references crop up as nonsequiturs, camouflaged in a buoyant memory of the “fit of educating enthusiasm” that inspired Roseanne’s father, when she was “ten or so,” to bring her to “the top of the long thin tower in the graveyard” (18). In a slapstick sequence that surely owes something to Stephen Dedalus’ “Parable of the Plums,” Roseanne’s father escorts his child “to the top of an old tower with a bag of hammers and feathers,” bent on demonstrating in practice the theoretical principle that “all things fall at the same rate” (19). Much bumbling around between father and daughter ensues, as both attempt to stand at the right vantage point so as to see the results of the experiment. Ultimately, it becomes evident that “his experiment was impossible with both of us [at the top of the tower] . . . one or the other of us would miss the outcome.” Roseanne’s father thus sends her “back down on my own by the dank stairway of stones.” Remembering this, Roseanne muses that she can “still feel that wet wall under my hand, and the strange fright that grew in me to be separated from him” (20). Standing alone on the ground, Roseanne recalls, “I was a child on a precipice, that was the feeling” (20). Falling inwardly, she reflects, as one internally falls with Gloucester during a performance of King Lear, outwardly Roseanne stands firm, “peer[ing] up faithfully, faithfully, lovingly, lovingly” (20–1). And at this point, she begins to defend herself against a moral indictment of some kind: It is no crime to love your father, it is no crime to feel no criticism of him and especially so when I knew him into my early womanhood or nearly, when a child tends to grow disappointed in her parents. It is no crime to feel your heart beating up to him, or as much of him as I could see. As she waits for the bag of hammers to drop, Roseanne recalls “he was calling to me, and I could barely catch his words.” Her father calls to her: “Watch, watch,” and she reassures him “Yes, papa. I am watching.” Her father opens the bag he carries and releases a handful of feathers and two mason’s hammers. Roseanne recalls, “I stared and stared,” and that she might have heard “a curious music” (21).12 Beginning with this scene, the structure of enigma is discernably at work not only within Roseanne’s memories, but as a relay, connecting enigmatic signifiers both within Roseanne’s memories and across more or less traumatically garbled versions of the same events as recalled by 429

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others. Having read Roseanne’s account, Dr. Grene is shocked and disgusted to find that he has not only introduced feathers into his own remembered narrative of Joe Clear’s murder, but that his fantastic, recurring distortion of events actually originated in Roseanne’s unconscious. Now sensible of this strange intrusion into his own psychic domain of an enigmatic signifier mediating a trauma suffered by one of his patients, Grene finds it “almost a disgusting thought . . . that I might have intuited this detail out of the aether and supplied it unconsciously, anticipating a story I had yet to read” (Barry 280). Such intuitive knowledge of another person’s encoded, traumatic secrets is, mimetically speaking, impossible, yet it is perfectly plausible as a literary device. Intrapsychically, this is the very structure of enigma—to “anticipat[e] a story one has not yet read” (280). Textually, Barry employs this structure so as to create an enigmatic lens through which the reader re-encounters a modern Irish history in which trauma and its psychosocial effects are not only a factor, but the ongoing and decisive factor. Certainly, this odd early account of a physics experiment undertaken by Roseanne and her father is structured enigmatically, growing clearer and taking on greater emotional intensity over the course of the narrative. The story only begins to strike an ominous chord in retrospect, when Roseanne later describes her father comparing Protestantism to a feather that was turned into a hammer to batter the (Catholic) people of Ireland. And only when Dr. Grene reflects for the second time on Gaunt’s account of events at the round tower, after having read both Gaunt’s and Roseanne’s memories, can the reader truly take in the horror that Roseanne’s memory of the tower both melancholically preserves—as a long, last, loving look—and contains, lest it destroy her. Especially chilling is the comparison between the “curious music” that Roseanne thinks she might have heard, and Grene’s speculation that there must have been “awful noises no doubt of horror from the small room at the top” of the tower (Barry 180). Joe Clear’s death is thus curious and protracted not only mimetically, as a death, but diegetically, operating within the narrative like a traumatic seed that sends out tendrils both forward and backward in time, and both shaping and shaped by each subsequent trauma. Roseanne’s youthful entangled feelings of guilt and pleasure, which she experiences as a lived connection of love between herself and her father, she now experiences “as . . . a huge lump of lead . . . lain over the soul” (Barry 18). The enigmatic message originally conveyed by her father’s naked, unashamed, clean, and regulated body is reactivated and transformed through Roseanne’s subsequent enigmatic encounter with that same body, dead. She first remembers her father’s lifeless corpse, hanging in a “derelict cottage,” as pure, disembodied grief, as “the grief that is always there, swinging a little in a derelict house, my father, my father” (86). Her father, after death, had become “no more than a big pudding of blood and past events,” yet as this utter obliteration takes on a new shape in her memory of her father’s body at the wake, it is clear that her first memory of her father’s ritual bathing is recontoured by, and gives rise to a new enigmatic signifier, in “the long penny-halfpenny coffin with my father’s large nose poking up” (87). It is at this point in her elliptical allusions that Roseanne is doubly undone by the intertwined strands of guilty and pleasurable enigmatic knowing/unknowing that have bound her to her father. Joe Clear’s “remov[al] . . . at the will of the Almighty, or the devils that usurp him,” seems to Roseanne to have represented a devastating and irreparable cutting off of a pleasure so great as to be necessary to her very existence—or, at least, she wishes it had been. Initially, that is, she had felt that she loved her father “so much that [she] could not . . . liv[e] without him,” yet the guilt, interwoven from the first into the oedipal bond, turns even her failure to die of her father’s loss into a further source of pain. The failure of her father’s loss to destroy her paradoxically proves her unworthiness, since her very survival belies her defining profession of filial devotion: “that I loved my father so much that I could not have lived without him” (17). 430

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IV. “Fundamental theorization” In The Secret Scripture, Sebastian Barry retells what is already a familiar story of the rise of a newly intensive and extensive ethno-identification under de Valera that unified the Irish Catholic Church and the Irish state through processes of subliminally eroticized sadism that were consolidated in law (the Constitution of 1937), in actual governance (the partnership of the Church and state apparatus), and in the ideology of the everyday (instilled in practices of childhood education, adolescent supervision, and adult surveillance) (Inglis 10–13). Given the finely calibrated hierarchy of church organization, its circumambient role in normative regulation and the social welfare apparatus of an impoverished nation, and the extremely localized (not to say personalized) exercise of power in the ranks of both the clergy and the laity, Irish theocracy functioned as a network of Foucaultian micro-power, its top-down impetus at once diffused and enhanced via a dense mesh of disciplinary, tutelary, and pedagogical relationships. Like any such microcircuit, in Foucault’s account, this one does not operate on a strictly repressive basis (all appearances to the contrary) but through an alternating and symbiotic current of constraint and provocation, the inhibition and implantation of desire.13 This current manifests itself, of course, in the structural oscillation between scandals of oppression (the Lovett and Kerry baby cases) and scandals of predation (the Brendan Smyth case, and the Ferns Diocese scandal), and in the combination of oppression and predation in single episodes such as the X case. Most tellingly, the Irish theocracy network manifests in the way erotic energies feed on the practices and rituals of correction throughout the entire system. For in the attempt to confine and canalize the unruly longings of its charges and dependents, the regulatory machinery of the Irish church wound up saturating certain sites of disciplinary constraint and purgation— orphanages, industrial schools, convents, rectories, laundries, “homes” both public and private—with the very libidinal stirrings it sought to tame. The recursive arc of this libidinal economy comprehended more than the illicit romances of popular bishops or the serial abuses of rogue priests. Rather, it extended along a continuum that comprised not only these overt sexual acts, but an entire repertoire of avidly punitive cruelty whose erotic undercurrents cannot be ignored. Indeed, these are cruelties often associated with the most infamous sexual predation: the corporal punishment administered to children of industrial schools and the inmates of Magdalene laundries; the long-term forced imprisonment of these same populations, with mandatory labor superadded; forced childbirth, even following rape; the extravagant shaming and ostracization of “wayward” girls; the sexual exploitation of minors of both sexes; the mistreatment of the offspring of unsanctioned couplings—an entire jouissance of coercion enacted under the sign of moral correction. The Secret Scripture elevates to new levels the deployment of Laplanche’s enigmatic signifier to allow the writing down of the otherwise unspeakable. For Laplanche, to be a subject at all is to be the subject of an always traumatic because enigmatic sexuality, and thus for him there always resides a distinct if fugitive mental phase between the traumatic experience and its symptomatic reflexes on one side, and the psychoanalytic interpretation and traversal of the revealed fantasy on the other. This phenomenological interval Laplanche likens to a “fundamental theorization,” an interlude wherein reflection inheres in the very traumatic, enigmatic experience to be reflected on. While such reflection stops short of theoretical analysis proper (what Laplanche christens “metatheory”), which entails the elaboration of a coherent, generalizable paradigm, it does “metabolize the enigma” of the experience by rehearsing it on other terms, representing it anew, and, in thus binding the trauma, it prepares the enigma for interpretive clarification and resolution (Laplanche 1999, 135). 431

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The Secret Scripture reenacts this function on the ethnonational stage, treating the traumatic realities of material dispossession, racial abjection, and cultural deracination in exemplary portrayals that bind the resulting affective distress for critical analysis, and in so doing, offers a still more precise literary version of the “fundamental theorization” delineated by Laplanche. The novel both specifies the universally traumatic nature of sexuality in a series of historically based sexual abuses, and allegorizes historically based sexual abuses in narratives implicating the universally traumatic nature of sexuality. The enabling mechanism of such “fundamental theorization” is the vehicle of traumatic sexualization itself, which Laplanche terms the “enigmatic signifier” (Laplanche 1997, 653–665). Insofar as literary narratives form an unconscious reserve for real-time historical scripts, they remain, of course, a part of those very scripts—interleaved, ambiguously redacted passages in the margins of that history. Occupying such a position denies literature the possibility of distanced reflection on any factual referent of its allegory, precludes it from serving as an analyst of the collective symptoms it surveys. But it does not altogether deny literature—and herein lies a conundrum in need of theoretical elaboration—-the capacity for critical and even therapeutic reflection. Without the power to perform a collective (psycho)-analysis of the national and sectarian pathologies it addresses, modern Irish fiction nevertheless has been able to open and hold open the possibility of such a collective analysis. Through his singular ability to interweave psychoanalysis and history, Sebastian Barry has succeeded in advancing that vital collective analysis.

Notes 1 For a detailed anatomization of the quotidian social and affective dimensions of the post-Treaty Irish Imaginary—or the Irish Catholic habitus—see Inglis. 2 In the foreword to Writing the Unspeakable, Fintan O’Toole describes the enigmatic overlap between societal prohibitions and individual trauma as problematically blurring the line between vulnerable abuse victims and Irish society as a whole. Thus, he argues, “a society that was in fact deeply collusive with the mechanisms of exclusion and cruelty at the heart of [its] abusive institutions” was able “to think itself into the attitude of an innocent child shocked by its encounter with this taboo material” (xiii). Richard Haslam, Declan Kiberd, Luke Gibbons, and Jane Elizabeth Dougherty have explored this metonymic national identification with the abused child from various angles. 3 For a full-length study of the subgenre we term the “literary child sex scandal,” see Valente and Backus. 4 See Valente and Backus 77 5 Grene comments, on occasion, on the paradox that Roseanne’s experiences, which are, quite possibly, unparalleled in their comprehensiveness, are unknown and of no interest to anyone beyond the hospital. He reflects, for instance, that “Roseanne’s life spans everything, she is as much as we can know of our world, the last hundred years. She should be a place of piligrimage and a national icon. But she lives nowhere and is nothing. She has no family and almost no nation. A Presbyterian woman” (Barry 183). 6 According to Laplanche, the enigmatic message is always being relayed both backward and forward in time, as “the [deterministic or] belated effect of the traumatizing event,” and in the [hermeneutic] sense “in which the second event projects, retroactively, what came before” (Caruth 2016, 11–14, italics added). For Laplanche, the enigmatic signifier functions in the first instance as a vehicle of infantile sexualization in response to the implantation of “something coming from outside,” an enigmatic message, that takes on meaning (that is, becomes both sexual and traumatic) only belatedly, when the original seduction is “reinvested in a second moment” (Caruth 2014, 7). The material conductor of messages whose seductive power resides in the confusion of sexual and non-sexual valences, the enigmatic signifier exceeds and yet depends upon its capacity for determinate meaning and range of association. Because this signifier, like any signifier, is inherently iterable, the erotic current with which it is vested at the moment of infantile sexualization remains available to be reactivated under other circumstances, especially those recalling or approximating this traumatic origin, such as subsequent instances of sexual initiation or introduction. As Laplanche explains, the primal scene’s enigmatic message is only activated in psychic response to a later, cognate traumatic scene, so that the enigmatic signifier exists as an intrapsychic, coded message relayed between or among specific sites of cognate trauma (Caruth 2016, 11–14). 432

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7 See Barry 201 for an example of this. 8 It is worth noting that in two of the groundbreaking examples of Ireland’s literary child sex scandal, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist and John McGahern’s The Dark, the protagonist decides against entering the priesthood specifically because he foresees that should he join the priesthood, he would become a sexual predator. 9 Roseanne insists throughout the novel that her father was not in the Royal Irish Constabulary, yet Grene finds documentation of Joe Clear’s RIC service, and Roseanne’s memory of her father’s resplendent uniform (even if she remembers it as blue, rather than the dark green of the RIC uniform, and as worn in connection with his cemetery job), suggests that Joe Clear was probably an RIC officer who “got a job in the . . . cemetery” after the Treaty dissolved the RIC (Barry 179). The mnemonic swerves detectable in this, the earliest of Roseanne’s personal memories, show Roseanne unconsciously retaining her father’s “resplendent” RIC uniform, but changing its color and connecting it to his most respectable position, as the keeper of Sligo’s graves, thereby protecting him from Fr. Gaunt’s version of the events: that her father, as a one-time member of the RIC, was justifiably executed as a traitor to the Irish nation. 10 Both stories, like each of Roseanne’s traumatic memories that follow them, link accounts of personal trauma, or trauma miraculously avoided, to broader historical traumas. Here, both stories invoke the Irish Famine—the details of Joe Clear’s bodily possession in the basement of a Southampton boarding house by the ghost of a man in the process of starving to death irresistibly call to mind the mass starvation suffered by a full quarter of Ireland’s population in the years from 1846–1850, while the near-fatal “domain wall” over which Joe Clear’s fellow rider miraculously sails was, as Roseanne takes care to note, the product of “a sort of useless labour to keep labourers alive” during the Famine (Barry 10). 11 Throughout the novel, Roseanne’s enigmatic association of her father with music and sound profoundly shapes her apprehension of the erotic and the spiritual. For instance, she recalls that when she was 14, with “one foot in childhood still, and one foot in womanhood,” she was “not indifferent to the boys that lurched past the school gates,” and had thought “a sort of music rose from them, a sort of human noise that I did not understand” (Barry 35). She falls in love with Tom McNulty, a jazz musician, blue shirt, and local hero who played music “a dead man would dance to . . . a dumb man would cheer to.” Music “you could play . . . all day and still have things to say with it . . . a speaking song.” (204–5). And, in a pronounced pattern that deserves an article in its own right, the novel as a whole, following Joe Clear’s death, is filled with inchoate noise: “a huh noise,” (160); “roaring” (164); “roars, roared” (173); “roared,” (180); “roaring,” (193); “Whap whap whap” (204); “gghh” (206); “screaming, screaming . . . roaring and caterwauling” (210); “a few little grunts” (214); “screamed and screamed . . . screamed and . . . squawked” (216); “roaring” (220); “growlings” (234); “screaming . . . weeping” (238); “sighs” (239); “roaring” (261); “howled and howled” (264). In an extraordinary passage in which the full sound and fury of the enigmatic signifier pours through Roaseanne’s being in a manner reminiscent of Theresa of Avila’s mystic ecstasies, Roseanne describes herself as “pierced through with kingly joy,” a “sensation of some gold essence striking into me, blood deep,” issuing in a prayer “as wild and dangerous as a lion’s roar” (91). 12 In this densely encrypted memory, Roseanne has, apparently, as Dr. Grene concludes, “for survival’s sake . . . sanitized [the beating of her father in the round tower] completely, even moving the event back to a time of relative innocence” (Barry 279). 13 See especially Foucault 136–145.

Works cited Barry, Sebastian. The Secret Scripture. Penguin, 2008. Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Duke University Press, 1997. Caruth, Cathy. “Traumatic Temporality: An Interview with Jean Laplanche.” Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, pp. 25–44. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Earner-Byrne, Lindsey. Mother and Child: Maternity and Child Welfare in Dublin, 1922–1960. Manchester University Press, 2007. Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton University Press, 1995. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. Translated by Robert Hurley. Vintage, 1990. Inglis, Tom. Moral Monopoly: The Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church in Modern Ireland. Gill and Macmillan, 1998. 433

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Laplanche, Jean. Essays on Otherness. Routledge, 1999. Laplanche, Jean. “The Theory of Seduction and the Problem of the Other.” International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, Vol. 78, No. 4, 1997, pp. 653–665. Mulhall, Anne. “Mind Yourself: Well-Being and Resilience as Governmentality in Contemporary Ireland.” The Irish Review (Biopolitical Ireland special issue), Vol. 53, 2016, pp. 29–44. O’Toole, Fintan. “Foreword.” The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable. By Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus. Indiana University Press, 2020, pp. xi–xiv. Valente, Joseph and Margot Gayle Backus. The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable. Indiana University Press, 2020.

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34 Surplus to requirements? The ageing body in contemporary Irish writing Margaret O’Neill and Michaela Schrage-Früh

Introduction The Celtic Tiger followed by its aftermath of recession provides a pertinent context in which to explore literary representations of midlife and older age. The dramatic rise and fall of Ireland’s economy over the past three decades has brought substantial changes to Irish social life. In the 1990s and early 2000s, with low unemployment rates and rising incomes, many people had more disposable earnings and Irish society was driven by consumerism. However, the growth was disproportionate, exacerbating the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest. With the collapse in 2008, economic recession and austerity programs intensified deeply entrenched inequalities. Against this backdrop, the nature, experience, and representation of ageing have evolved to meet the ideal constructions of contemporary capitalist society. The drive towards production and consumerism elevates the young, fit, and healthy. It gives rise to a certain fetishization of youth in a commodified, sexualized global culture which, in contemporary Ireland, “may have been intensified by a collective sense of liberation from a censorious and highly repressive brand of Catholicism” (Ging 59). Surrounded by images of idealized beauty, women’s social value is often tied to their ability to maintain socially prescribed standards of youthful attractiveness, while men’s experiences of ageing are informed by ideals of activity and performance. Despite representing an increasingly large proportion of the population, “the old” are perceived through narratives of decline (Gullette 1997), facing marginalization, exclusion, and invisibility in a society focused on progress, youthfulness, and consumerism. As we aim to show in this chapter, Irish writing is increasingly speaking back against such ageist social assumptions by foregrounding the subjective, embodied experience of ageing. In a society that emphasizes individualism and competitivity, participants are called upon to manage their bodies and hide their weaknesses. This ideology lends itself to the repudiation of vulnerability and dependency. In contrast, narratives informed by the experiences of growing older often express different kinds of subjectivities through reclaiming personal vulnerability and connection as opposed to the disembodied rationality that underpins the competitive ideals of consumer capitalism. This movement can be observed across genres, and it explores midlife through to deep old age. A critical analysis of recent Irish literature that centralizes ageing helps to unveil the influence of social forces on how the body is perceived and managed. This approach can 435

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unsettle the blueprint of “successful ageing” by illuminating the impossibilities of ideal gender and age performances that we are compelled to pursue but never realize, allowing for a fuller, more inclusive, and autonomous vision of later life.

Reclaiming middle age Irish literature of the last two decades invites a revised consideration of the assumptions of middle age. It queries social stereotypes and refutes the stigmas associated with ageing. It also demonstrates that in a neoliberal climate in which men and women in middle age are expected to live up to gendered ideals of health and happiness, largely through their purchasing power, the pressure to perform can result in experiences of overwhelm and powerlessness. This section reads across a selection of fiction, poetry, and life writing by women and men in which authors are reclaiming middle age, revealing the myriad of ways people can inhabit and narrate the self. Recent years have seen a resurgence of the personal essay in Ireland. The rise of the genre is perhaps connected to social activism underscoring the personal nature of the political, seen in the movement for marriage equality in 2015 and the campaign, in 2018, to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Irish constitution so that Irish women could access abortions. Invoking the persuasive power and visceral force of personal testimony, the essay has become the privileged form to reclaim embodied experience, including the recovery of middle age from narratives of decline and invisibility. Two celebrated collections, Sinead Gleeson’s Constellations (2019) and Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self (2018), explore how life is inscribed on the body, as they also reflect on the politics of the female body in Ireland. They deal with issues of family, fertility, illness, bereavement, and growing older. These collections have important predecessors in Nuala O’Faolain’s memoirs Are You Somebody? (1996) and Almost There (2003), in which, by addressing a number of taboo topics including female midlife, O’Faolain “re-wrote the place of Irish women in the autobiographical canon” (Lynch 161). As O’Faolain claims in Almost There, “Middle age is the least talked about of all seasons of life, and yet it seems to me the most exacting. It is adolescence come again at the other side of adulthood—the matching bookend—in its uneasiness of identity, its physical surprises and the strength it takes to handle it” (28). Her “report on middle age” (2003, 22) in her first memoir is largely a bleak one, chiming in with the cultural narrative of ageing as decline. It also reflects the widely reported experience that women who show visible signs of ageing are rendered “socially and sexually invisible” (Bouson 1). As O’Faolain puts it, “a woman past the age where she might be contemplated as a sexual partner is hardly seen. . . . She could become a ‘character’—in Ireland, anyway. But being avidly watched because you might at any minute make everybody laugh is a parody of being watched because you are desired” (1996, 179–180). O’Faolain wonders whether she might have a more positive attitude towards her physical ageing process if she’d had children or if she had been able to watch her parents grow old and care for them: “Time. I note every day the physical detail of middle age. The transparent polyps that have formed on the skin of my neck. The first white hair in my eyebrows. . . . If my mother had got old and I had been able to love her, would I be able to love my own ageing body now? If I had had children? How do people arrange to love their ageing selves?” (1996, 183). The sense of personal loss experienced by O’Faolain is embedded in a cultural context where in order to be “somebody” women have to be somebody’s daughter, wife, or mother. At the same time, O’Faolain’s considerations document how the ageing body is “fashioned within and by culture” since “dominant culture teaches us to feel bad about aging and to start this early, reading our body anxiously for signs of decay and decline” (Twigg 60–61). 436

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Lending reason as to why women’s experiences of midlife are often grounded in stories of the body, Pine describes an argument with a friend, where he proclaimed his middle age while she denied it. Asking why she defended this position, she considers, “Perhaps because the signs that I am no longer young are unavoidable. Perhaps because the label ‘middle-aged’ was, for him, just a phrase, not an actual bodily change” (107). Pine describes, for instance, the ways her body changed approaching menopause in her late thirties as an “alien” transition (107). In another essay, she however describes 40 as a “positive boundary” following her painful struggle with infertility; a point at which she has chosen happiness and given herself “permission to be someone else, someone other than a mother” (76). The difficult process of breaking down the variety and force of perspectives on ageing that inform society’s as well as one’s personal view, on the route to self-acceptance, is also apparent in the personal essay Four Sides Full (2016) by poet Vona Groarke. By exploring her failed marriage and the breakup of her family home as necessitating her adjustment to a more self-oriented, if lonely life, Groarke lends a personal note to the challenges faced by many women in their fifties. Repudiating essentialist constructions of age, she disrupts the narrative of decline, which is always by definition linear: “I don’t think I want a narrative, however partial or skewed. I am maybe younger now than I was ten years ago” (69). Likewise, she refuses to let herself be defined by her ageing body, instead viewing her body as a “frame” (49) in which she lives, which during menopause “has actively turned on me” (50) and which harbors multiple versions of herself, like a “Matryoshka doll” (69). Reclaiming their experiences of midlife, Pine and Groarke speak back to a culture of silence on the body, sexuality, and desire of a woman beyond her childbearing years. In her prose collection Object Lessons (1995), Eavan Boland decried the “inbuilt resistance to a woman ageing” in the Irish poetic tradition and described her struggle to write poems “to grow old . . . and die in,” as she puts it in her poem “A Woman Painted on a Leaf ” (210). Boland’s poems challenge representations of eternally young goddesses, icons, and heroines in Irish literature and myth by reclaiming the embodied subjectivity of a woman “neither young now nor fertile” (“Irish Goddess” 151). As she writes in “Anna Liffey”: An ageing woman Finds no shelter in language. She finds instead Single words she once loved Such as ‘summer’ and ‘yellow’ And ‘sexual’ and ‘ready’ Have suddenly become dwellings For someone else— Rooms and a roof under which someone else is welcome, not her. (Anna Lifey, 203) Boland’s work prepared the way for the next generation of Irish poets, including Mary O’Donnell, Eileen Casey, and Groarke, whose poems explore both the pressures and pleasures of female midlife in Celtic Tiger Ireland. Seeking to avoid the fate of invisibility (King 2013), middle-aged women are susceptible to the trappings of the anti-ageing industry in a culture that tends to conflate beauty with youthfulness. The cult of youth is critically explored in O’Donnell’s poem “Following Frida,” which addresses the pressure on middle-aged women to adhere to prescribed standards of beauty and youth, even if this requires cosmetic surgery. 437

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Women are enticed to smooth away all signs of their “ups and downs,” the personal life stories inscribed on their bodies: Kiss, kiss! Kiss, kiss! he urges. His short needle makes cushions of our worries. Little prick here, another there, there, there it’s all right darlings, growing old needn’t hurt so badly. (Following Frida, 14) The poem however ends with a fantasy of rebellion against the oppression of the beauty industry, symbolized by a male surgeon, with women expressing their desire to “behold ourselves, mirror-wise, the women we always were/just older, looser, still there” (14). Likewise, in “Subjunctive,” Eileen Casey sarcastically comments on a male doctor’s culturally conditioned assumption that her blood-flooded eye may have a variety of causes ranging from constipation to advanced age, but omitting the more pleasurable possibilities of “Laughter (the belly wobbling kind)/Sex (strenuous)/Dance (Hip Hop, Salsa, Tango)” (97). Finally, Groarke’s middle-aged poetic speakers lay claim to their own physical needs and desires, paying no heed to social views that deem them “too old/for such love songs” (“Love Songs” 49).1 In fiction, Marian Keyes explores the subject of how outwardly successful women deal with, or hide away, their vulnerabilities to meet social expectations at this stage of life. It is an issue that Keyes also considers in memoir. Her works chart the lives of Irish women over the course of the economic boom and the recession that followed. They attend to “the realities of Irish women, postfeminist women who were still living in a patriarchal society” (Keyes in interview with Ingle 2017) and write against the widespread assumption that the goals of feminism are no longer needed (O’Neill, 2020). In an essay entitled “Turning Fifty,” Keyes acknowledges that when she was in her twenties she thought that there was a secret formula for happiness but approaching 50 she accepts “that happiness is simply one of thousands of emotions any person will experience in a life” (2016, 322). Her novel Grown Ups (2020) further explores what it means to “grow up.” It is written from the perspectives of several members of the Casey family, across generations. Sisters-in-law Jessie and Cara both struggle with the pressures of middle age. Jessie is a successful businesswoman who grew a chain of specialist food stores during the boom, but she is struggling to survive the economic downturn, the pressure to look young, and constant feelings of inadequacy: Next month I’ll be fifty and, seriously, what’s the age when a person finally feels safe and secure? Because I really thought it would have happened by now. . . . She’d done a lot with her life. She had. Five children, a happy marriage—it was happy, wasn’t it? Running a profitable company, employing more than fifty people, her life was a success. (206) Compulsive spending provides a welcome relief to her stresses and anxieties. As well as shopping designer fashion online, she insists on treating the entire family to lavish parties and getaways. Cara sufers from a diferent addiction. On the surface happily married and thriving in her role as head receptionist in the most exclusive hotel in Dublin, scenes of secret binging and vomiting reveal that “Her self-loathing was monumental” (165). Cara’s history of issues with eating had been somewhat under control, only to resurface in middle age with renewed dissatisfaction with her body image. When she is finally admitted to hospital for a Bulimia 438

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seizure, “all of her secrets were written in her body” (327). Over the past 20 years, Keyes’ protagonists have grown into middle age with the author, and Grown Ups reveals the intensifying contradictions between personal, embodied life and socially constructed expectations. Keyes demonstrates that the pressure to succeed by midlife, to be “grown up,” takes a mental and physical toll on the body.2 The discourse on middle age in Irish writing has tended to focus on women. As Susan Sontag argues in her landmark essay “The Double Standard of Ageing” (1972), growing older afflicts women more than men, as they are judged more by physical appearance, and as Pine observes, the experience of middle age can be an acutely embodied one for women. However, Irish literature is also increasingly challenging the weary cultural representations and damaging social stereotypes often imposed on men. In doing so, these texts explore the embodied experiences of men in middle age that are frequently at odds with characteristics associated with hegemonic masculinity, such as power, youth, virility, physical strength, and performance (Calasanti and King 10–11). Thus, in Keyes’ Grown Ups, Jessie’s husband Johnny, approaching 50, is exhausted by the constant demands life places on him, as his wife’s second husband and business partner, father of five, and eldest brother in a large and demanding family: “He felt about a hundred and twenty. It never stopped. It. Just. Never. Stopped” (159). He yearns for a lazy Sunday afternoon, a holiday, or a man’s equivalent of a spa break, “Except he suspected that that would probably involve chopping down trees to build his own shelter, which sounded even more stressful” (160). Johnny’s quiet desperation, his feeling of being “hollow” (247; 248; 267) contrasts with clichéd scenarios for male midlife crises.3 The topic of men’s middle age is also explored in fiction and drama by Roddy Doyle, in poetry by Paul Durcan, and in life writing by Michael Harding. Doyle is one of the foremost Irish writers exploring men’s middle age. Across genres, his darkly comic works attend to issues of midlife and mortality, for instance his short story collection Bullfighting (2011), his play Two Pints (2012), and most recently his novel Love (2020).4 As he comments, “It’s interesting getting older, mortality, slowing down, speeding up in some ways. Time, the things it does to you. The sense of redundancy when your children grow up and they don’t need you” (Jamieson 2019). In his novel The Guts (2013), set in a North Dublin suburb during the post-2008 recession, Jimmy Rabbitte, creator of the Irish soul band The Commitments thirty years earlier, is now forty-seven, married, with four children, and bowel cancer. Jimmy’s thoughts, relationships, and experiences are enmeshed in prevailing beliefs about men and their sexual bodies, and conflations of illness with ageing. In one scene, Jimmy decides to have an affair between his chemotherapy sessions in an effort to resist the reality of his middle age, as well as his mortality. Both his mindset and his body have been jolted by his diagnosis and treatment. Seeking consolation, he considers that “A woman fancied him. Simple as that. An attractive—that was the word—an attractive woman looked at him and saw someone, a man, she wanted to ride. It was great” (112). Jimmy here imagines himself to be desired, like a woman or a commodity, buying into established consumerist narratives of successful ageing. The pressures of midlife employment are also foregrounded in The Guts. An economy imbued with “middle-ageism,” Gullette asserts, is “changing what it means to be human” (2015, 25). Ageism effects younger as well as older people, as social narratives inform people’s expectations for their own life course as well as how they value others as they age (21). “The gravest effect on our vision of the lifecourse,” according to Gullette, “comes from destroying the underlying principle of seniority: that people deserve more respect and rising wages—not automatic deflations—as they grow older” (25). During a time when family life is most expensive, “Eliminating midlife workers has become a tacit business practice and a disastrous capitalist trend” (24). In The Guts, his job is an overwhelming concern for Jimmy, who has four teenage children. And yet, Jimmy recognizes that 439

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he is privileged. He hit on the idea of building a presence for forgotten Irish punk on kelticpunk. com. Just before the crash, he sold 75% of the business and paid off the mortgage. His timing was perfect. Three years into a recession that still felt like it was just starting, life was a bit safe—if he forgot that he had cancer for a minute. . . . The world was in shit but shiterock was making money. (47) Jimmy has negotiated the market in a manner which epitomizes the ideal neoliberal subject; he capitalizes on mid-life crisis culture to successfully sell middle-age nostalgia. However, music is his passion, and Jimmy equates his grief at selling the company to that which he will feel when the kids grow up and leave. The pain of selling is to Jimmy so pervasive, “like physical pain, across his head, in his face, in his shoulders, through his stomach,” that “There was once—just once . . . the thought it had kicked of the cancer. He was literally going to end up what he was—gutless. And dead. . . . But bills—fuckin’ money—terrified him” (47). Despite the financial burden of cancer on family, daily life, and well-being, under neoliberalism the question of whether to remain in paid employment is seen as a matter of individual choice, a rational deliberation about costs and gains without reference to constraints such as limited welfare benefits. The Guts demonstrates the realities of an economy in which the pressure to live up to ideals of youth, masculine performance, and the values of entrepreneurship deeply afects individuals’ health, families, and home lives. In contrast to Doyle, Paul Durcan’s poetry in his collection The Art of Life (2004) addresses midlife in terms of a middle-aged man’s loneliness, anxiety, and sense of futility, frequently tempered by a tone of self-deprecating humor. In “Achill Island Man,” the speaker wakes up in Achill to find himself “in the Amusements Arcade of my own body/. . ./Toes! Knees! Elbows! Shoulder-blades!/Everywhere I look, small pink balls of pain” (9). Pondering his possible illnesses and the impending funeral of his seventy-one-year-old neighbor as a harbinger of his own demise, the poem ends with the speaker’s decision to return home and have a number of pints in his local pub: “And after that I will go home and have my dinner/And after dinner I will go to bed and begin/The whole story all over again—isn’t that it?” (10). In another poem, “A Robin in Autumn Chirping at Dawn,” the man is described through the eyes of a robin: “He was middle-aged, overweight, weary, anxious./Quite like myself ” (7). The desolate figure of “the forlorn middle-aged man” (7) evokes protective impulses in the small bird, who is depicted as finding joy in the moment and marveling at the self-pitying attitude of his human counterpart: “Middle age for any creature is a problematic plummet/But why do humans have to be so crestfallen about it?” (8). In his poems ranging from ordinary encounters in shopping malls to celebrations of the birth of his granddaughter, Durcan records the “upbeat, yet melancholy” experience of traversing through what he calls “the autumn of my days” (“Facing Extinction” 118). Harding’s memoir Staring at Lakes (2013) similarly explores illness and depression in middle age. Starting out like a conventional narrative about a married man’s midlife crisis—“By the summer of 2007, I was pushing myself. I was getting old. I sensed time running out. I was in the last-chance saloon” (19)—the memoir soon comes to explore the trauma of sudden physical illness, followed by depression, which gives way to intense physical self-loathing and a sense of emasculation. The insight gained from struggling through his physical and mental illness includes the acceptance of his own vulnerability, which in men is often perceived as weakness: 440

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To be vulnerable is human. And the shame that keeps us silent and makes men wear a warrior’s shield at all times and pretend to be invincible is something less than human. Shame and silence make men into caricatures of humanity that crash in middle age and die alone. I was beginning to read my illness with a new mind. (201) Thus, Harding attends to the institutionalized shame built on gendered expectations of behavior that can cause men to don emotional armor, as well as to the possibility for personal and social change.

Reimagining old age Characters in their seventies or older increasingly populate Irish literature, and not just “as a peg on which to hang observations about social change in Ireland . . . but . . . for their own sake” (Ingman 145). By allowing insight into an interior life often at odds with a character’s outward perception, these texts counterbalance and complicate stereotypes about old age. They also frequently serve to assess social and cultural changes by means of life reviews presented through the characters’ embodied subjectivities. In doing so they give a voice to older characters that traditionally might have been relegated to the margins of literary works or portrayed in stereotypical, mythically elevated or parodist ways. Nuanced approaches are found in Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light (2010), Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart (2012), Anne Enright’s The Green Road (2015), and Anne Griffin’s When All is Said (2019). Steering clear of one-dimensional depictions of old age, they all fashion subjective life narratives that embody the speakers in a specific sociocultural moment in time. In Ryan and Griffin, this is achieved through first-person narration, in O’Connor, unusually, through second-person narration, and, in Enright, by attending to the psychic impact of ageing (Fogarty 2018). O’Connor’s Ghost Light presents a fictional biography of the Irish actor Molly Allgood, who in her old age lives a life of poverty and isolation in 1950s London. Accompanied by her memories, the ghostly presence of her lost love, J.M. Synge, and indeed the reader by way of the “you” narration, Molly, as she traverses the city, extends the perceived limitations of her age and lowly social status (O’Neill 2017). In Ryan’s The Spinning Heart, Lily is one of the characters who gets to tell her story in her own voice. Having raised her five children on her own by prostituting her body, in old age she lives her life as a social outcast, shunned even by her children, who are “pure solid ashamed of me, after all I done for them” (30). Lily is aware that the social perception of herself is that of a “witch” (30). While her precise age remains unclear, she admits: “I haven’t aged well; I look a lot older than I am. I have rheumatoid arthritis. It pains me everywhere” (30). Although it would be easy to turn Lily’s story of a lifetime of abuse into one of victimhood, Ryan avoids this by creating a sense of agency: “sure wasn’t I at least the author of my own tale?” (34). Rosaleen, the ageing matriarch of Enright’s The Green Road, embodies mythical overtones to query them, reminiscent of Boland’s poetic speakers. As Anne Fogarty describes, Rosaleen is at once a Jungian magna mater, a potent symbol of archaic feminine power, a reordered vision of the woman as symbol of Ireland, a flawed novelistic character, a female incarnation of King Lear and a psychologically exact portrait of an ageing woman in modern Ireland. (134) Rosaleen’s journey on the Green Road compels the reader to discard these myths of femininity and ageing and consider the conditions and constraints afecting older women in contemporary 441

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Ireland. Finally, Grifn’s When All is Said centers on a male protagonist, Maurice Hannigan, a wealthy farmer and landowner in his mid-eighties, who spends the last night of his life sitting by himself in a hotel bar and raising five toasts to the five most important people in his life. In the course of the novel, Maurice aligns himself with various stereotypes of ageing masculinity ranging from “the drunk old raving fool” (235) to the “cranky-arsed father” (191), but the novel efectively complicates and challenges these labels by providing insight into his emotional vulnerabilities. These narratives, which situate the reader both within and outside the protagonists’ consciousness, prompt reconsideration of ageist assumptions and revaluation of how we measure personal and social progress, to stimulate an alternative “lifecourse imaginary” (Gullette 2017, 57). Turning to deep old age, in Harding’s second memoir, Hanging with the Elephant (2014), the theme of ageing is explored through the lens of both Hardings’s own midlife and his mother’s old age. The book engages with the author’s grieving process over his mother’s death at the age of ninety-six, with his reflections on his own ageing leading him to imagine his mother’s life, including her loneliness in old age, beyond limiting cultural stereotypes such as the “the eternal mother, the great Mammy” (225). As he notes, “As I get older I come closer to the type of isolation in which my mother had lived for years” (273). The memoir tackles the intricate biological and social factors combining to marginalize and isolate older people, emphasizing that despite the signs of ageing inscribed on the mother’s body, and her increased physical frailty, she inwardly remains the same person: Even in old age, she still had an insatiable desire to connect with other people . . ., which is why it was all so devastating for her in the end. And why the silent doorbell and the phone that never rang broke her heart in old age, and why, when depression came, it came with a vengeance. At ninety, no one called. And she grew bitter. (144) By piecing together his mother’s life story with the help of her curt diary entries—“Stayed up to watch the New Year on television. Nobody rang” (118)—old photographs, memorabilia, items of clothing, and other personal belongings, her son, alongside the reader, comes closer to understanding the mother’s “complex layerings of identity” (Segal 4). In his memoir, Harding pays attention to the material dimensions of a lived life, in this case a life spanning almost a century. As he notes, “Her story was never told. But the interior of her house held it all. The museum of useless stuf she left in her wake was as eloquent as a novel” (160). On his quest for his mother’s story, as well as in his attempt to make sense of his own ageing, Harding suggests that loneliness and depression in old age may not be inevitable but are in a large part caused by social marginalization, poverty, and exclusion: Old people shrink, retreat and dissolve into the bland paintwork of a doctor’s waiting room. And now I see myself dissolving, because I am next in line and young ones are already dancing in spaces where soon I too will not belong. And it’s the cold in an old person’s house that does the damage, when the electricity becomes too expensive and the damp creeps up . . . until the entire house is musty and smells of old age. (245) Discovering his mother’s story in the material objects held by her house, Harding also dwells on the shame he feels for uprooting his mother in her old age. For lack of an alternative, he had to place her in a nursing home, thus depriving her not only of her familiar surroundings but of 442

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her “home” (247). The memoir gestures to the ways in which care is outsourced and vulnerable bodies are relegated to the margins of neoliberal, market-oriented societies, as, with the arrival of the Celtic Tiger, “People became oppressed by mortgages and they couldn’t stay at home and so the old folks went of to nursing homes” (213). Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture (2008) provides insight into an older protagonist’s sense of abandonment and lack of agency in a residential institution. The novel’s main setting is Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, where the protagonist, centenarian Roseanne McNulty, has spent more than sixty years of her adult life. Roseanne represents frail old age, the age group most at risk of “discursive ‘othering’ . . . which excludes the aged person from the everyday life of society and casts him or her into a position defined equally by its alienation and its vulnerability” (Higgs and Gilleard 10). Recalling the story of her youth inevitably brings back memories of her once legendary beauty and causes Roseanne to compare the memory of her younger self to her present aged self, in her own words: “a thing left over, a remnant woman, and I do not even look like a human being no more” (4). Other derogatory self-images she offers include a “songless robin” and a dead, mummified “mouse” (4). Her hands, we learn, “look like they have been buried a while and then dug up” and she tells her reader, “They would give you a fright” (145–146). We also find that she has “not looked in a mirror for about fifteen years” (146). As Victoria Bazin and Rosie White note, “age seems to be the last difference, the unspoken but inevitable site of difference not only between subjects but also a difference within subjects as they are exiled from their younger selves” (ii). Alienated from her own aged body, Roseanne feels that her younger self still resides within her. Recalling her younger and happier days in Sligo she ponders: “Who was I then? A stranger, but a stranger that hides in me still, in my bones and my blood. That hides in this wrinkled suit of skin. The girl I was” (131). Given her extraordinary old age and the mystery surrounding her past, Roseanne might easily be lent to mythic elevation. As her psychiatrist Dr. Grene notes: “Roseanne’s life spans everything, she is as much as we can know of our world, the last hundred years of it. She should be a place of pilgrimage and a national icon” (190). Likewise, Roseanne tries to make sense of her aged existence by turning to familiar images of old age in Irish folklore and myth, for instance referring to herself as the “cailleach, . . . the old crone of stories” (102). Yet as author of her story, Roseanne reclaims her agency precisely by rejecting the timelessness and agelessness represented by such mythical figures, not unlike Boland’s repudiation and reconfiguration of Irish myth. By deciding to leave behind her own testimony, rather than have her story authored by others, Roseanne turns herself, as she puts it, into “the midwife to my own old story” (102). At the same time, the novel troubles official historical accounts of institutionalization, gesturing towards the numerous unheard, forgotten victims of state and church, who were “sectioned . . . for social rather than medical reasons” (17). These include “those fifty ancient women in the central block, so old that age has become something eternal, continuous, so bedridden and encrusted with sores that to move them would be a sort of violation” (16). Given the chance, so the novel suggests, each of these nameless “sisters, mothers, grandmothers, spinsters” (33) would have a story to tell and, like Roseanne, each of them would be found to be “admirable, living, and complete” (309). The discourse of age, Kathleen Woodward observes, “pivots on the blunt binary of young and old” (1999, xvii), an opposition embedded in consumer culture, in which the figure of the older woman is given to represent “the so-called ravages of time” (xvi). Roseanne’s secret scripture is one of several emerging narratives in Irish writing that address this gap in contemporary discourse, to demonstrate ageing as lifelong experience. Bringing nuanced subjectivities as well as acknowledgement of shared frailties, they expose the ways that a capitalist neoliberal society disregards ageing people and other unwanted bodies, and demonstrate how new attention to 443

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these kinds of subjectivities might offer us all an alternative to the neoliberal, disembodied rationality that we have been indoctrinated to naturalize.5

Writing about dementia As life expectancy increases and the experience of dementia is becoming more widespread, this theme is also increasingly taken on by Irish writers. In his collection The Laughter of Mothers (2007), Paul Durcan poignantly addresses his mother’s final years in an Alzheimer’s nursing home, where she is “deprived of her agency and autonomy” (Schrage-Früh 2018, 86). In fiction, Clare Boylan explores the theme in her novel Beloved Stranger (1999), in which, as a demented father’s “increasing violence and paranoia highlight implicit patriarchal family structures, his growing disorientation yet renders him vulnerable and dependent” (O’Neill and Schrage-Früh 2020, 185; cf. also Schrage-Früh 2017). Similarly, in drama, Frank McGuinness’s The Hanging Gardens (2013) centers on the ageing patriarch Sam, a novelist, who seeks reconciliation with his children as he experiences symptoms of dementia (O’Neill and Schrage-Früh 2020, 179–181). These narratives, as they emphasize the ageing journey as personal but also interdependent and nourished by connection, are in keeping with Heike Hartung’s observation that “narratives of dementia mark the limits of development and of age narrative by representing the end of consciousness and the end of the liberal narrative of the autonomous subject,” while simultaneously such narratives also “push against this limit, questioning notions of progress, autonomy and personhood” (3). Dementia is an important theme in recent life writing. In Ian Maleney’s Minor Monuments (2019), it is the grandfather’s retreat into Alzheimer’s disease that forms the central focal point in a personal essay collection exploring questions of home, family, and identity. Maleney records both the everyday challenges facing the family in terms of care work and emotional strain, as well as the personal and cultural implications of a certain form of rural community life slipping away alongside his grandfather John Joe’s mental and physical capacities. And yet, despite the “sense of decline and inevitability” (134), scenes in which John Joe, who increasingly forgets his family members and friends, sings along to the radio are particularly poignant as they gesture towards the personal and cultural archive of emotion that perseveres: He sang old songs, the songs all old people know. . . . He had forgotten most of everything, but scraps of melody remained. They were hidden in that part of the brain where treasures are kept, alongside the name of his wife, Kathleen. (24) In highlighting such moments of recognition, Maleney writes against the notion that a person sufering from Alzheimer’s is “a person who has no value at all” (177). Similarly, one of the essays in Gleeson’s Constellations, “Second Mother,” is about the author’s dearly loved aunt Terry and her slow drift into dementia. Gleeson describes the cruelty of the disease as the stealth by which it takes the body: This illness transforms only the interior. The body becomes less a prison than an aquarium. Visitors, the people you love, looking in, regarding the body-snatched version of your mind. You, looking out, your whole worldview distorted as if by water and that thick, impermeable membrane. (228) 444

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Unlike a physical illness, the exterior may remain the same, but personality alters, and memory deteriorates. There remains however a deep connection between aunt and niece in these years of decline. The tie between them is not diminished, regardless of the space opened out. The way Terry lived her life and stayed true to herself in the face of the restraints that forced generations of women to cede “Love, art or independence” (224) influenced Gleeson in a way that surpasses this gulf. She describes their connection: One of us is in a boat, the other on the land. She is so still these days, so quiet, that it must be her up there on the clifftop looking down. I am the traveller departing, tilting on the riptide. (232) The process of ageing here might be described as one of reorientation, relocating oneself in relation to time, memory, and loved ones. This process engenders pain as well as anticipation. It cannot be separated from sensory perceptions or from memory, as “the story of our lives is still the story of one body” (17).

Ageing futures This chapter has been written during the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, a time during which ageist assumptions have come to the fore in public discussions about older people’s (market) value. In Ireland, at the start of the pandemic, the older population was directed to “cocoon,” separated from everyone else and perceived as society’s most fragile bodies. However, growing older does not justify a loss of bodily autonomy or the dignity of taking responsibility for one’s own choice to protect oneself and others. How society chooses to treat the older population at such a time of crisis is indicative of Ireland’s social future. An age-oriented focus in Irish literature allows us to consider the ways in which writers are presenting the ageing body from the inside out, acknowledging our shared vulnerability, as opposed to the impermeable, eternally youthful self, constructed to meet the ideals of contemporary capitalist culture. As Irish writers and readers continue to embrace new understandings of ageing, there is transformative social potential to be found in this reorientation.

Notes 1 For a detailed exploration of female middle age and sexual desire in Irish poetry see Katarzyna Ostalska and Eileen Casey. 2 For an extended exploration of the narrative roles of middle-aged women in post-Celtic Tiger fiction, with close attention to work by Kevin Barry, Mike McCormack, and Eimear McBride, see Deirdre Flynn. 3 For an exploration of similar midlife fatigue afflicting couples in their forties during the Celtic Tiger, in drama by Marina Carr, see Mária Kurdi. 4 For an analysis of Doyle’s representations of middle age in Bullfighting and Two Pints, see Burcu Gülüm Tekin. 5 For an examination of the fourth age, or deep old age, through the narrativization of individual ageing experiences in Jennifer Johnston’s later fiction, see Carmen Zamorano Llena.

Works cited Barry, Sebastian. The Secret Scripture. Faber and Faber, 2008. Bazin, Victoria and Rosie White. “Generations: Women, Age and Difference.” Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. 39, No. 2, 2006, pp. 1–11. 445

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Boland, Eavan. “Anna Liffey.” Collected Poems. Carcanet, 1995, pp. 199–205. Boland, Eavan. “The Making of an Irish Goddess.” Collected Poems. Carcanet, 1995, pp. 150–151. Boland, Eavan. Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. Vintage, 1995. Boland, Eavan. “A Woman Painted on a Leaf.” Collected Poems. Carcanet, 1995, pp. 210–211. Bouson, J. Brooks. Shame and the Aging Woman: Confronting and Resisting Ageism in Contemporary Women’s Writings. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Boylan, Clare. Beloved Stranger. Abacus, 1999. Calasanti, Toni and Neal King. “Firming the Flopping Penis: Age, Class, and Gender Relations in the Lives of Old Men.” Men and Masculinities, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2005, pp, 3–23. Casey, Eileen. “The Ageing Woman: From Grave (Bone) to Cradle (Blossom).” Special Issue: Women and Ageing in Irish Writing, Drama and Film. Edited by Margaret O’Neill and Michaela Schrage-Früh, Nordic Irish Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2018, pp. 57–75. Casey, Eileen. “Subjunctive.” Reading the Future: New Writing from Ireland. Edited by Alan Hayes Arlen House, 2018, p. 97. Doyle, Roddy. The Guts. Jonathan Cape, 2013. Durcan, Paul. “Achill Island Man.” The Art of Life. Harvill Press, 2004, pp. 9–10. Durcan, Paul. “Facing Extinction.” The Art of Life. Harvill Press, 2004, pp. 117–118. Durcan, Paul. The Laughter of Mothers. Harvill Press, 2007. Durcan, Paul, “A Robin in Autumn Chatting at Dawn.” The Art of Life. Harvill Press, 2004, pp. 7–8. Enright, Anne. The Green Road. Jonathan Cape, 2015. Flynn, Deirdre. “‘Sourness and Truth’: Representing the Post-Celtic Tiger Realities of Female Middle Age in Barry, McCormack and McBride.” Irish Literature as World Literature. Edited by Christopher Langlois. Bloomsbury, Forthcoming 2021. Fogarty, Anne. “Someone Whose Kindness Did Not Matter’: Femininity and Ageing in Anne Enright’s The Green Road.” Special Issue: Women and Ageing in Irish Writing, Drama and Film. Edited by Margaret O’Neill and Michaela Schrage-Früh. Nordic Irish Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2018, pp. 131–143. Ging, Debbie. “All-Consuming Images: New Gender Formations in Post-Celtic-Tiger Ireland.” Transforming Ireland: Challenges, Critiques, Resources. Edited by Debbie Ging, Michael Cronin, and Peadar Kirby. Manchester University Press, 2009, pp. 52–70. Gleeson, Sinéad. Constellations: Reflections from Life. Picador, 2019. Groarke, Vona. Four Sides Full: A Personal Essay. Gallery Press, 2016. Groarke, Vona. “Love Songs.” Spindrift. Gallery Press, 2009, pp. 48–49. Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. “Aged by Culture.” Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology. Edited by Julia Twigg and Wendy Martin. Routledge, 2015, pp. 1–15, 21–28. Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife. University of Virginia Press, 1997. Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People. Rutgers University Press, 2017. Harding, Michael. Hanging with the Elephant: A Story of Love, Loss and Meditation. Hachette Books, 2014. Harding, Michael. Staring at Lakes: A Memoir of Love, Melancholy and Magical Thinking. Hachette Books, 2013. Hartung, Heike. Ageing, Gender and Illness in Anglophone Literature: Narrating Age in the Bildungsroman. Routledge, 2016. Higgs, Paul and Chris Gilleard. “Frailty, Abjection, and the ‘Othering’ of the Fourth Age.” Health Sociology Review, Vol. 23, No. 1, December 2014, pp. 10–19. Ingle, Róisín. “Marian Keyes: There’s an Awful Lot of Riding in My Book.’” Irish Times, September 9, 2017 (Accessed November 5, 2019). Ingman, Heather. Ageing in Irish Writing: Strangers to Themselves. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Jamieson, Teddy. “‘I’ve Always Considered Myself a Political Writer.’ Roddy Doyle on Time, Mortality and Dublin Pubs.” The Glasgow Herald, February 29, 2019 (Accessed April 28, 2020). Keyes, Marian. Grown Ups. Michael Joseph, 2020. Keyes, Marian. Making It Up as I Go Along: Tales from an Eejit Who Was Buying Shoes the Day Life’s Rulebook Was Issued. Penguin, 2016. King, Jeannette. Discourses of Ageing in Fiction and Feminism: The Invisible Woman. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Kurdi, Mária. “‘Old Women Interfere with My Sense of Myself ’: Attitudes to Female Age and Ageing in the Midlands Trilogy and Marble by Marina Carr.” Special Issue: Women and Ageing in Irish Writing, Drama and Film. Edited by Margaret O’Neill and Michaela Schrage-Früh, Nordic Irish Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2018, pp. 113–143. 446

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Lynch, Caire. Irish Autobiography: Stories of Self in the Narrative of a Nation. Peter Lang, 2009. Maleney, Ian. Minor Monuments. Tramp Press, 2019. McGuinness, Frank. The Hanging Gardens. Faber and Faber, 2013. O’Donnell, Mary. “Following Frida.” The Ark Builders. Arc Publications, 2009, p. 14. O’Faolain, Nuala. Almost There: The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman: A Memoir. Riverhead Books, 2003. O’Faolain, Nuala. Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman. Henry Holt and Company, 1996. O’Neill, Margaret. “Marian Keyes.” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 386: Twenty-First-Century Irish Fiction Writers. Edited by Michael R. Molino. Gale, 2020, pp. 143–153. O’Neill, Margaret. “‘This Is How Time Unfolds When You Are Old’: Ageing, Subjectivity, and Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light.” Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture: Reflections, Refractions, Reimaginings. Edited by Cathy McGlynn, Margaret O’Neill, and Michaela Schrage-Früh. Palgrave, 2017, pp. 289–302. O’Neill, Margaret and Michaela Schrage-Früh. “The Aging Contemporary: Aging Families and Generational Connections in Irish Writing.” The New Irish Studies. Edited by Paige Reynolds. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. 177–192. Ostalska, Katarzyna. “‘What Will I Do/When I Get too Old/for Such Love Songs?’: Desire and Midlife Sexuality in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry.” Special Issue: Women and Ageing in Irish Writing, Drama and Film. Edited by Margaret O’Neill and Michaela Schrage-Früh. Nordic Irish Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2018, pp. 31–56. Pine, Emilie. Notes to Self. Tramp Press, 2018. Ryan, Donal. The Spinning Heart. Doubleday, 2012. Schrage-Früh, Michaela. “‘Embarking, Not Dying’: Clare Boylan’s Beloved Stranger as Reifungsroman: Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture: Reflections, Refractions, Reimaginings. Edited by Cathy McGlynn, Margaret O’Neill, and Michaela Schrage-Früh. Palgrave, 2017, pp. 55–71. Schrage-Früh, Michaela. “Reimagining the Fourth Age: The Ageing Mother in the Poetry of Mary Dorcey and Paul Durcan.” Special Issue: Women and Ageing in Irish Writing, Drama, and Film. Edited by Margaret O’Neill and Michaela Schrage-Früh. Nordic Irish Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2018, pp. 77–93. Segal, Lynne. Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing. Verso, 2013. Sontag, Susan. “The Double Standard of Ageing.” The Saturday Review, September 23, 1972, pp. 29–38. https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-Y6o4iGliJNpAyGcb/double-satandard.aging_djvu.txt. Tekin, Burcu Gülüm. “Ageing Men and Therapeutic Pints in Roddy Doyle’s Two Pints.” Estudios Irlandeses, Vol. 12, No. 17, pp. 129–139. Twigg, Julia. “The Body, Gender, and Age: Feminist Insights in Social Gerontology.” Journal of Ageing Studies, Vol. 18, 2004, pp. 59–73. Woodward, Kathleen M. “Introduction.” Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations. Indiana University Press, 1999, pp. ix–xxix. Zamorano Llena, Carmen. “Looking Very Old Age in the Eye: A Nuanced Approach to the Fourth Age in Contemporary Irish Fiction: A Case Study.” The Gerontologist, Vol. 59, No. 5, 2019, pp. 956–963.

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35 From Full Irish to FREESPACE Irish architecture in the twenty-first century Brian Ward

Introduction Originally commissioned during 2005, dePaor Architects’ art-house cinema, Pálás, opened in Galway city in 2018. The design and construction of the building therefore bridged the Celtic Tiger boom years, the crash, and the eventual economic recovery. Despite various funding controversies, Pálás was completed. Indeed its extended time-scale facilitated the building’s delightful resolution of a complex brief into Galway’s tight urban fabric.1 Architectural projects operate at different rhythms; so while some seem to transcend shifts in the economic, social, and cultural contexts from which they emerge, others appear wholly bound up with them. So too with architectural discourses. This chapter surveys a roughly similar time-scale to Pálás’ design and construction. A remarkable phenomenon of this period was an unprecedented external interest in a particular strand of Irish architectural culture—Pálás, for instance, was reviewed internationally during a hiatus in its construction when it was still a concrete shell. With a few exceptions, the chapter’s focus is on the architectural practices that are the object of that interest, but contemporary geographic and sociological studies of Ireland are used to place their architecture in the midst of the country’s broader spatial production.2 The chapter is divided into three sections, each working out from a discrete representation of Irish architecture into a wider discussion. Two of these were carefully curated: the chapter opens with Full Irish, a survey of Celtic Tiger architecture; and finishes with Free Market and Close Encounters, two exhibitions at FREESPACE, the 2018 Architecture Biennale in Venice in which Irish architects played a leading role on the global stage. The third is a looser grouping: starting with imagery of ghost estates (common across a variety of media in the wake of the financial crisis), the central section describes the emergence of a distinct post-Celtic Tiger mode of architecture. While the growing reputation of Irish architecture from Full Irish to FREESPACE seems to transcend the national crisis in the intervening years, the research practices of architects involved in Free Market and Close Encounters register the contrapuntal effect of the 2008 crash when the discipline’s precarious position in Ireland’s open economy was cruelly exposed.

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Place and non-place In the first decade of the twentieth-first century, Princeton Architectural Press published a series of books documenting recent buildings from countries in which a notable contemporary culture of architecture could be observed. SuperDutch: New Architecture in the Netherlands (2000) was followed by Swiss Made: New Architecture from Switzerland (2003) and, in turn, by Full Irish: New Architecture in Ireland (2009). The author, Sarah A. Lappin, presented the work of 16 architectural practices from across Ireland and Northern Ireland, collecting into one volume some of the better buildings produced during the Celtic Tiger. The reimagining, construction, and destruction of Ireland’s built environment was central to the economic, social, and cultural narratives of the period; the building site itself became “part of a national landscape aesthetic, a reassuring sight at the periphery of people’s vision signifying the continued growth and well-being of the Celtic Tiger economy” (O’Callaghan 22). The carefully composed facades and spaces depicted within Full Irish emerged amongst this extraordinary surge of construction. They range in size from an exquisite two-room Palmerston Road extension by Boyd Cody Architects to the expansive urban scale of the mixed-use development, Elm Park, by Bucholz McEvoy Architects. The geographic spread of the book extends from MacGabhann Architects’ Letterkenny Regional Cultural Centre to McCullough Mulvin’s Waterford Library, but it also captures Irish architecture being propelled beyond the confines of the island. Full Irish includes photographs of Grafton Architects’ then newly constructed Bocconi University building in Milan and visualizations of Heneghan Peng’s competition winning scheme for the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza. The authors of SuperDutch and Swiss Made (relatively straightforwardly) located the architecture they reviewed within a wider national culture of design and production. While Full Irish recorded the influence of Ireland’s landscape and historic buildings on architectural thinking on the island, neither Lappin, the foreign observers she quotes, nor the architects presented within the book could make tidy connections between contemporary Irish architecture and an accepted national culture of spatial production. Attempts made in the early 1960s to lay the foundations for such a culture (with the creation of the National Building Agency and An Foras Forbatha) had not been sustained and the contemporary precarity of architects’ professional3 and epistemological4 standing in Ireland was evident in the contrast between the “projects of serious calibre” within Full Irish and the “monster of uncontrolled sprawl” in which they were set (Lappin 10). While the messiness and contested nature of this sprawl sometimes complicated the use of his categorization, Marc Augé’s notion of “non-place” provided a means of theorizing the landscapes emerging in Ireland as standard terms such as “urban” and “rural” lost their “analytical value” during this period (Peillon 172).5 Augé’s thesis was that non-places, those anonymous spaces (not without their own pleasures) normatively produced by “supermodernity,” resist integration into existing geographies; instead they reduce these geographies to “places of memory” (Augé 78). In his contribution to Place and Non-Place: The Reconfiguration of Ireland, the sociologist, Michel Peillon perceived three different patterns in the Greater Dublin Area’s development, all associated with late capitalism and all being created in an “ad hoc” manner: an attempt to create a “Global City” in the “metropolitan core” while “a poly-centred conurbation” and “edge cities” emerged on its periphery (Peillon 178). As these new spaces were formed, latent associations between earlier (and now threatened) places and feelings of belonging became heightened, bringing to the surface “concerns about transformation and the political contexts of corruption, environment, planning and quality of

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life” (Linehan and Crowley 7). While it might have been possible in other realms of national life to maintain the illusion “that the interests of the whole of Irish society [was] equated with the interests of those elites” benefitting from the Celtic Tiger, publications such as Frank McDonald’s and James Nix’s Chaos at the Crossroads suggests that this illusion often ruptured as the country’s space was restructured (Kirby et al. cited in Maher and O’Brien 6). Within the discourse of dissent that accompanied and reflected upon this reconfiguration, the role of architects amongst the complicated nexus of engineers, estate agents, planners, politicians, developers, and financiers that executed and profited from it is ambiguous. For McDonald and Nix, the architect was often (but not always) presented as arguing from the fringes for a planned and equitable mode of development, while for Justin Carville the architect was centrally implicated in the elite’s lucrative reinvention of Ireland.6 In Full Irish, the practice of architecture is proposed as one that simultaneously critiques and engages in contemporary spatial production—maintaining a position within that production such that it can be tempered. Lappin includes three overlapping but distinct architectural generations: de Blacam and Meagher, a late addition to a generation that brought modernism to Ireland during the 1960s and 70s; Grafton Architects, McCullough Mulvin and O’Donnell + Tuomey of the Group ’91 generation who rose to prominence for their work in Temple Bar; and the remaining practices, largely established during the early years of the Celtic Tiger. Although there are differences among them, these three generations generally operate in the slipstream of modern architects such as Le Corbusier, Eileen Grey, and Louis Kahn that Sarah Williams Goldhagen identified as “situated modernists.” Attempting to retain the positive aspects of modernity’s dynamism and rationalism while moderating its sense of disorientation and its “disregard for the phenomenological and the emotive,” these architects “sought to situate the users of their buildings socially and historically, in place and time” (Goldhagen 306). As the search for such an architecture became more acute in the post-modern era, Kenneth Frampton (an early and important champion for the Group 91 architects) identified as “critical regionalist” those who mediated ‘”he impact of universal civilization” on their buildings “with elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular place” [original emphasis] (Frampton 21). Frampton proposed that subtle and indirect strategies of embedding a building within a context could create a situated architecture that avoids a “regression into nostalgic historicism” and therefore (in the best tradition of the modern avant-garde) evades closed interpretations (Frampton 20). Such thinking intersected with an official Celtic Tiger discourse about place-making (informed in part by the popular success of Temple Bar) that awkwardly accompanied the rebranding of Ireland’s cities such that they might attract global tourists and investors.7 To this end the cities were to be remodeled as places that were unique but that also adhered to a standardized “urbane” European model (Lawton 104). For Ellen Rowley, the contradictions within this discourse were evident in a space such as Martha Schwartz’s Grand Canal Square, the forecourt to Daniel Libeskind’s theater and the “centrepiece” of a late Celtic Tiger attempt to distinguish Dublin’s docklands within the “international locational decision-making” of Richard Florida’s “creative class” (Moore 295). Schwartz’s dutiful referencing of the site’s previous existence as a marshland was for Rowley subsumed within a “self-referential” project that, pitched to an international audience, foreclosed any real or embodied engagement with the immediate city or its history (Rowley 292). Grafton Architects’ Department of Finance building on Merrion Row (Figure 35.1) and the discourse around it reveals a search for an architecture capable of obliquely integrating context into buildings in a way that resists the facile historicization of place that Augé identified as a central theme of supermodernity. 450

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Figure 35.1

Department of Finance, Dublin by Grafton Architects

Source: Dennis Gilbert/VIEW

In his account of the building, Robert McCarter notes the importance Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects attach to their daily observations of Dublin when they are designing buildings for the city. Drawing on their descriptions, McCarter explains how passage into and through the building encourages an engagement with both the historical and contemporary city; entered over a bridge akin to the threshold spaces of Dublin’s townhouses, circulation is henceforth pushed to the perimeter to allow views of the urban environment to be woven into the rhythm of walking past its windows. The façade reinterprets in stone the clifface qualities of a typical Georgian façade and is detailed such that its physicality and weight is palpable when standing in one of the windows. Meanwhile, air drawn naturally through louvres in the façade passes vertically through the building to be exhausted through chimneys that evoke the roof-scape of eighteenth-century Dublin. By insistently knitting place through their building in multiple ways Grafton Architects avoid an obvious sign-posting of place. Instead Dublin is read as an embodied historical continuum that can be transcribed into the city’s new buildings. Focusing on how movement through their Lewis Glucksman Gallery is punctuated by its landings and crossings, David Leatherbarrow reveals similar strategies at play in O’Donnell & Tuomey’s first insertion into the University College Cork campus. Like the Department of Finance building it “promotes the slippage of [many] settings into one another” and in the process evades easy categorization as an “object” (Leatherbarrow 185). These buildings are designed to simultaneously engage with and withdraw from their context; for Farrell the Department of Finance is “an episode in the city where you [are] both conscious and unconscious of the building” (McCarter 114); for John Tuomey the Glucksman 451

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is “strangely familiar” (Leatherbarrow 185). As Leatherbarrow points out the creation of this sophisticated flickering in and out of attention and comprehension relies on a calibration of figure and ground; such a building’s identity results neither “from absolute sameness with others in its vicinity, nor from absolute difference, but degrees of both.” Its legibility is therefore dependent upon that of its surroundings: “In the absence of a background no figure could appear” (Leatherbarrow 182). Such an architecture is more challenging in poly-nucleated edge cities under construction than in distinct metropolitan cores or established suburban contexts. While the image of the liveable European city informed the remodeling of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger “global cities,” Philip Lawton suggests that these new peripheral landscapes lacked an agreed “imaginary” (Lawton 107). Full Irish included different approaches to building in this ill-defined context: while FKL Architects referenced the Georgian proportions and planarity of Dublin’s urban core in their software development company headquarters in Leopardstown, MacGabhann Architects composed their Letterkenny Public Services Centre from elements of the fluid suburbia in which it is set.8 The building’s tilted surface car-park narrows to become a ramp as it enters the building and allows access to the Council Chamber before terminating on a sedum roof folding back towards a grassy bank that forms the verge of a road curving towards a roundabout. At the same time the council chamber is oriented towards a view of the town and its church spire. The building reflects a society that constructs buildings and landscapes in contemporary idioms but looks to the past for its civic identity.

Phantom publics Making visible the largely invisible financial forces at play during the boom and bust cycle of the Celtic Tiger, imagery of Ireland’s unfinished and vacant architecture was disseminated widely after the 2008 crash. While Johnny Savage’s eerie photographs of semi-derelict retail units, office buildings, and showrooms were published in the Italian architectural journal, Domus, it was shots of residential “ghost estates” scattered across the country that gained most currency (Johnny Savage: Fallout). The ghost estate “became the material and symbolic apotheosis of Ireland’s economic crisis,” acting as an “empty signifier” within post-Celtic Tiger discourse (O’Callaghan et al. 122). Within the visual economy of ghost estate imagery, some estates were valued more than others; Cian O’Callaghan recalls a team of French journalists being dissatisfied with one in which “children were playing and neighbours chatted to each other” (O’Callaghan 27). Meanwhile, certain juxtapositions became standard; shots contrasting pre-Crash visions of developments on bill-boards with the empty and half-built post-Crash reality became a trope both of journalism9 and photography.10 Given the role of architects in creating some of these promotional representations, a central tension in contemporary architecture’s self-identification (its relationship with property development) and a central precarity (its reliance on the vagaries of the financial markets) were laid bare in the ghost estate billboards. The period of the crash was both psychically and financially devastating for architects—by 2010 61% of Irish architects were unemployed (DKM Economic Consultants). However, after many busy years, it was also a rare opportunity for reflection on the broader context in which architecture is produced. For a “fleeting” moment “the smooth consensus” (that had previously accommodated resistance to the effects of global capitalism) was “disrupted by material and discursive conditions” that profoundly challenged “the coherence of the socio-political reality” As O’Callaghan et al. point out, in the vacuum created by such crises “something does take place” [original emphasis] (124). Necessarily decoupled from property development and finance, 452

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architecture could be reimagined (even if only momentarily) as a more socially-engaged discipline before neoliberal capitalism reasserted its hegemony. This fleeting moment brought to prominence elements of practice pushed to the edge of the profession but evident even during the Celtic Tiger. For instance: O’Donnell + Tuomey working closely with a local community to develop the Furniture College in Letterfrack; Bucholz McEvoy Architects instigating a post occupancy evaluation such that feedback on the performance of Limerick County Hall could be garnered from the staff working within it; and community participation being built into the architectural design processes of Celtic Tiger regeneration programs such as Ballymun and Fatima Mansions. Notwithstanding these examples, in general during the construction boom the public were not consulted on the profound changes occurring in the Irish built environment. Given its central role in people’s lives and identities, this was most striking in the realm of housing, predominantly provided by the market and designed by commercial practices.11 While individual teams within large offices such as O’Mahony Pike could eke out lucid schemes like Fitzwilliam Quay Apartments in Ringsend, on the whole there was little guarantee of quality being produced within a process “biased towards supply-side considerations, e.g. easy delivery at low-cost unaccompanied by any attempt to measure the longer-term value to taxpayers . . . and end-users” (Rabeneck 194). During a period when Ireland had “the highest per capita annual output of new dwellings in the developed world” the vast majority of the populace had, as Mary Corcoran asserted, “absolutely no input” into “envisioning their futures” (O’Toole 77; Corcoran et al. Discussion transcript 193). In the absence of such input, Carville proposes that imagery promoting individual developments held an unrivalled projective force in the creation of an imaginary for the scene of much of this housing construction—Ireland’s suburbia (Carville 252). After the crash, promotional material such as that created for the Gorgeous Living Comes to Dublin campaign was certainly seen to have analytic potency. The uncanny disjunction between the lifestyles of the chimerical publics constructed by and for such imagery, and the everyday lives of the communities subsequently inhabiting ghost estates, such as the Belmayne development in North Dublin for which the campaign was organized, was a “space of complex and ethereal contradictions” (O’Callaghan 29).12 Amongst other things, it suggested that the majority of Ireland’s spatial production was organized around market-driven ciphers rather than the actual populace of the country. A strand of post-Celtic Tiger architectural practice emerged that stressed community over individuality, economy over expense, and the simple over the luxurious; in a country searching for an identity distinct from that constructed during the boom years, it also reasserted contemporary rurality over urbanity. For instance, having designed and built a modest Leitrim home costing €25,000 for himself in 2008, Dominic Stevens, one of the architects featured in Full Irish, made simple instructions for its construction freely available online. The project revived the tradition of self-build to provide a route around mortgage-providers and property developers, promoting in the process a new online “vernacular tradition” (Stevens). Commonage, a project that started as a one-week architectural festival in Callan, Co. Kilkenny in 2010 brought similar pre-modern practices of communal construction beyond the realm of the domestic. Curated by artists and architects Jo Anne Butler and Tara Kennedy (Culturstruction), with art curator Rosie Lynch and art historian Hollie Kearns, the project saw a “meitheal” being assembled to revitalize an old co-op and later build a temporary arena (Murphy, “Commonage” 289). By 2012, a community-led analysis of the town’s public spaces led to the construction of a series of interventions that facilitated access to a river walk for the public and connected the town to a walled garden at Westcourt. Through an ongoing action research project, Nimble Spaces, which included (amongst others) MEME Architecture and LiD Architects, Lynch and (until 2016) Kearns continued their exploration of a democratic design process, involving residents in 453

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Camphill Callan (some with intellectual disabilities) in the design process of housing to be built within the community. Cultivating the rich territory between art and architecture (in the absence of more standard architectural commissions), all the projects above were enabled in part by funding from the Arts Council of Ireland. They drew on discursive art practices that had developed from the 1970s on, shifting emphasis away from the artwork as object towards a consideration of its integration into social, cultural, political and physical contexts.13 In the case of the Forum for Alternative Belfast, a group of architects (Mark Hackett, Declan Hill, Ciaran Mackel) and planners (Karen Keavney, Ken Sterrett) that operated from 2009 to 2015 and exhibited in the British Pavilion at the 2012 Architecture Biennale in Venice, these discursive practices were utilized to fill an administrative void they perceived between the various council and government departments responsible for the city.14 Meanwhile, between 2014 and 2017, Helena Fitzgerald utilized similar practices to help farmers in the Blackstairs Mountains between Carlow and Wexford negotiate “the noncorrespondence between [EU] regulatory frameworks associated with landscape management and the particular qualities of place” (Fitzgerald 137). Such work proposed that the maintenance of a sense of place required a reconception of design such that it engaged more effectively with local communities but also with the “horribly complex ‘dark matter’” of national and supranational government (Vanstiphout quoted in Hill 81). It also raised questions about the centrality of the building as object within architectural discourse.

Market forces Curated by Butler and Kennedy (of Culturstruction), Jeffrey Bolhuis, Miriam Delaney, Laurence Lord and Orla Murphy, Free Market, the Irish pavilion at Venice’s Architecture Biennale, opened on May 24, 2018. A study of Ireland’s small market towns, it simultaneously eulogized their previous bustle; recorded their contemporary neglect alongside the aesthetic pleasures of their everyday qualities; and made proposals towards their revitalization. The exhibition was prescient—while during the Celtic Tiger such towns were bypassed and ringed with shopping centers that endangered their economic viability, they retained a central role in the creation of place within Irish life.15 If the Celtic Tiger’s redistribution of economic activity (both sectorally and geographically) created lacuna, so too did the post-crash recovery from 2013 on. On the one hand, Dublin’s position as a locus for the ICT sector resulted in a new “boom” in office construction; across the city, but in the Docklands in particular, buildings such as Heneghan Peng’s Airbnb EMEA Headquarters attempted to blur distinctions between business and leisure for the mobile workforce of the neoliberal world. Meanwhile the same sector constructed vast data centers along the orbital route of the M50.16 On the other hand, a lack of investment in housing contributed to a homelessness crisis that brought demonstrators onto the streets of the city in 2018.17 The recovery also operated at different speeds across the country—and as Rob Kitchin pointed out in Free Market News (a free newspaper distributed at the pavilion) it was slow to reach rural towns. As Ireland reestablished its financial footing through further tapping of Foreign Direct Investment, Free Market argued that these psychically important territories, increasingly rendered “obsolete” within global networks of exchange, should be regenerated. Positioning design at the center of this process, Free Market contrasted the planned nature of the historic towns it celebrated with the lack of syncretic thinking in the consideration of contemporary public space in Ireland.18 In its handy and illuminating “Map of the Agencies & Policies Affecting Towns in Ireland” it graphically represented the complex institutional and regulatory terrain that has to be negotiated when working at a macro-scale (Figure 35.2). 454

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Figure 35.2

Map of the agencies and policies affecting towns in Ireland

Source: Free Market

The contested nature of this terrain is compounded by a lack of clarity regarding the potential contribution of a variety of disciplines to the planning of the country’s large-scale designed environments.19 The Free Market team projected themselves into this void as bridge-builders between policy makers and townspeople (represented on the map by groups such as Tidy Towns Committees and GAA clubs through which the community self-represents). Declaring in their “Charter for Everyday Practise” that “We are designers and architects, we are citizens and neighbours first,” they strove to collapse rhetorically the figure of the architect into the citizenry they hoped to represent (Bolhuis et al. 36). If such declarations in the national pavilion revealed a persistent search within Ireland’s architectural community for a way to present itself such that it could play an expanded role within Irish culture, the 2018 Biennale was also recognition of that community’s hard-won new position within international architectural discourse. Grafton Architects’ rapturous reception at the opening of Free Market celebrated the prestige of their having curated the overall Biennale. In 2020 they went on to win the Pritzker Prize (commonly described as the Nobel of architecture), securing their position in the architectural stratosphere. When Jean Louis Cohen judged the Architectural Association of Ireland’s (AAI) annual awards in 2001, he suggested that his term of “critical internationalism” rather than Frampton’s more closed “critical regionalism” better captured the work he saw (Lappin 4). While critical internationalists “cultivated a realistic and pragmatic relationship with cities and regions,” they simultaneously, “in an unsolved dialectic,” “made a cautious, calculated decision to respond to the market.” This involved “addressing themselves to the global scene, and inserting themselves into the network of professional and cultural relationships existing between different cities” (Cohen 434). 455

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Practices that managed (through successfully building and disseminating compelling buildings of scale) to establish themselves within this scene during the Celtic Tiger were insulated from the crash’s more deleterious effects. Throughout the recession, time could be devoted to large and important projects abroad, some of which were nearing completion in 2018: Grafton Architects’ university campus for UTEC in Lima, School of Economics in Toulouse, and Institut Mines Telecom in Paris-Saclay; O’Donnell + Tuomey’s Saw Swee Hock Student Centre for the London School of Economics, and Central European University in Budapest; and McCullough Mulvin Architect’s Thapar University in Patiala, India. If Irish architecture was now being built across the globe, it was also drawing on a range of international references. As part of the 2018 Biennale, and in collaboration with Hugh Campbell, Grafton Architects asked 16 Irish architectural practices to interpret and exhibit a building that was important to Farrell and McNamara’s understanding of the potency of architecture.20 Although wide in its geographic spread, their selection was concentrated on a materially robust and munificent architecture mostly from the mid-twentieth century, pointedly omitting any post-modernist work. Apart from Tom dePaor’s contribution to the exhibition, which addressed the multiple media through which architecture is necessarily constructed at a biennale, Close Encounter: Meetings with Remarkable Buildings focused on the role played by architects’ embodied experiences of predecessors’ work in “enriching and extending [their] own critical and creative capacities” (Campbell 4). Close Encounter’s concentration on the momentum created within architecture by individuals’ selective and iterative recycling of the discipline’s own history was set within FREESPACE, the larger theme of the Biennale as laid out in a manifesto by Farrell and McNamara. Their text evoked a generous humanism running through that history enabling architecture, “even within the most . . . commercially restricted conditions,” to make a benevolent contribution to humanity’s relationship with the world (Farrell and McNamara, n.p.). The medium of the manifesto allows latitude denied to architects in the normal course of their business and critics of the Biennale who questioned the “nebulous” nature of its theme generally prefaced their remarks with acclaim for Grafton Architects’ built work (Wilkinson 144). Tuomey’s Architecture, Craft and Culture and O’Donnell + Tuomey’s Space for Architecture present the architectural design process as a practice through which “esoteric” ambitions for architecture are restricted and revised but ultimately refined as a project moves from sketch to realization (Tuomey 9). Such texts contributed to a wider discourse that sought to understand and defend this process. Inspired partly by a frustration that architecture as a discipline increasingly looked beyond itself for legitimization rather than into its own practices, this discourse coalesced into research through design programs in academic institutions. Through theses prepared on a pioneering Ph.D.-through-practice program in RMIT, many of those involved in Close Encounters (Dermot Boyd, Peter Cody, Andrew Clancy, Colm Moore, Alice Casey, Cian Deegan, and Steve Larkin) plus Denis Byrne, Dermot Foley, and Siobhán Ni Éanaigh have provided invaluable glimpses into the internal workings of architectural design and production during the “spatial drama” of twenty-first century Ireland (Linehan and Crowley 5).21 That spatial drama impacted profoundly on the vast majority of Irish practices that were unable to secure work abroad during the recession. If the 2018 Biennale established Irish architecture on the world stage, it did so after “oligopolies of well-capitalised global firms” had been allowed since the 1970s to organize the international construction industry “to their advantage” (Rabeneck 192). While architects’ cultural capital still retains some status, over 50 years the profession has become increasingly peripheral and this marginality progressively sets the context for architectural discourse. Seen together, Free Market and Close Encounters revealed unresolved and rich tensions within Irish architecture as it strove simultaneously to orientate itself within wider society and to uncover and unlock the tacit knowledge embedded within its own practices. 456

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Endeavors to de-couple architecture from the building as object (such that the profession can be more service-oriented within a post-Fordist society) and to emphasize the creativity within the architectural design process (such that the process is distinct from replicable labor) can be seen as twin attempts to adapt the profession to the contemporary political economy.22 Such strategies became necessary internationally as the nation state receded from its midtwentieth century role as “the great and demanding patron” of architecture (Rabeneck, 192). The Irish state was typical in withdrawing from the wholesale construction of housing but other Celtic Tiger public building programs insulated Irish architects somewhat from this process, as is evident in the local government offices, university buildings, and community and cultural buildings in Full Irish. During the lean years of the recession, some of the firms exhibiting in Close Encounters such as Carr, Cotter & Naessens Architects managed to build large public projects (the soaring dlr LexIcon Library, Dún Laoghaire), while others such as Donaghy + Dimond Architects completed medium-scale buildings (the carefully crafted Model School, Inchicore). But many of the practices, just establishing themselves during this period and relying on private commissions, operated solely at the domestic scale and often at that of the house extension. Across the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the annual AAI Awards displayed an immense amount of architectural attention and skill being devoted to such projects.23 Shane O’Toole drew attention to the fact that of the 25 houses winning awards between 2000 and 2007, all but four were designed for the architects themselves, their families, or their extended network of friends—”a tiny niche market” (O’Toole 81). Traditionally such projects have provided an opportunity for young architects to gain experience “before eagerly graduating to larger . . . commissions” (Beaumont 62). However, increasingly risk-averse procurement practices in both the private and public sectors (as the latter returned in its weaker post-Crash state) has excluded a generation of practitioners from larger scale projects; their daily practice of architecture is thus constructed as one devoted to the creation of the beautiful particularity rather than the grand generality. In another instance of architects engaging with the “dark matter” of administrative systems, this generation has conducted a campaign to reform the procurement processes of publicly funded buildings in Ireland.24 As is clear from their selection of projects in Close Encounters, Grafton Architects draw primarily from buildings created during a period when the welfare state’s status as a major client of architecture created a context in which architects were commonly involved in imbuing the values of that state into the everyday built environment of citizens. As those values were problematized from the late sixties on, ecology and environmentalism became important for an increasing number of architects (as evident in the work of Gaïa Ecotecture, Solearth, and Bucholz McEvoy Architects in twenty-first century Ireland). If the historic client of the state was implicit in Close Encounters, one of the concluding lines of the FREESPACE manifesto suggested that the earth had emerged as a conceptual “client” for Grafton Architects. While serving this client enables the articulation of a value system distinct from that of the market, it also requires a rethinking of the relationships between a building, its site, and the wider world, foregrounding concerns about changing environmental and climatic systems over worries of cultural universality. As with the financial crisis before it, the climate crisis will, at multiple speeds, reshape Irish architecture.

Notes 1 See Killip. 2 For an explanation of Henri Lefebvre’s idea of “spatial production” and its application to Celtic Tiger development see Mee. 457

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3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

See Hanly. See The School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, UCD. See Linehan. See Carville. See Corcoran. Lawton posits FKL’s Venice Biennale exhibition and publication Sub-Urban to Super-Rural (2006) as a lone attempt to provide an imaginary for Ireland’s suburban development. See O’Callaghan et al. See Farrell and Anex. Despite an experiment between Grafton Architects and Zoe Developments on North King Street, Group 91 architects and Celtic Tiger developers never created a mutually acceptable apartment block typology for the Irish city. Imagery from the campaign was commonly used in media reports on ghost estates (see O’Callaghan et al.) and is used on the cover of des/IRE—designing houses for contemporary Ireland. See Murphy, “Art/architecture”. See Sterrett et al. See Corcoran, Gray and Peillon. See McLaughlin. See Ó Broin. See Webb. See McGrath. Four Irish practices were also included in the main exhibition of the Biennale—deBlacam and Meagher Architects, Niall McLaughlin Architects, Hall McKnight, and O’Donnell & Tuomey. See RMIT University. See Deamer; and Fisher. See Pike et al. See We Can Build Better.

Works cited Anex, Valérie. Ghost Estates. Les editions d’Uqbar, 2013. Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. Verso, 1995. Beaumont, Eleanor. “Domestic Bliss.” Architectural Review, June 2019, pp. 60–68. Bolhuis, Jeffrey, Jo Anne Butler, Miriam Delaney, Tara Kennedy, Laurence Lord, and Orla Murphy. “A Charter for Everyday Practise.” Free Market News, 26 May–25 November, 2018, p. 36. Campbell, Hugh. “Close Encounter: Acts of Fellow Feeling.” Close Encounter: Meetings with Remarkable Buildings. Irish Architecture Foundation, 2019, pp. 3–4. Carville, Justin. “The Narrow Margins: Photography and the Terrain Vague.” Imagining Irish Suburbia in Literature and Culture. Edited by Eoghan Smith and Simon Workman. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 249–273. Cohen, Jean-Louis. The Future of Architecture. Since 1889: A Worldwide History. Phaidon, 2011. Corcoran, Mary P. “Place Re-Making in Dublin.” Place and Non-Place: The Reconfiguration of Ireland. Irish Sociological Chronicles (4). Edited by Michel Peillon and Mary P. Corcoran. Institute of Public Administration, 2004, pp. 142–156. Corcoran, Mary P., Jane Gray, and Michel Peillon. Suburban Affiliations: Relations in the Greater Dublin Area. Syracuse University Press, 2010. Corcoran, Mary P., John O’Connor, John Sorrell, and Apolinija Šušteršic. “Discussion Transcript #1.” Des/IRE Designing Houses for Contemporary Ireland. Edited by Gemma Tipton. Gandon Editions, 2008, pp. 191–199. Deamer, Peggy. “Work.” Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design. Edited by Peggy Deamer, Bloomsbury, 2015, pp. 61–81. DKM Economic Consultants. The Irish Construction Industry in 2012. Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland, 2012. http://constructionindustry.ie/SCSI%20Report%20-%20The%20Irish%20Construction% 20Industry%20in%202012.pdf (Accessed June 9, 2020). Farrell, David. “An Archaeology of the Present (2010–2013).” http://davidfarrell.org/landscape-as-witness/ an-archaeology-of-the-present-2010-2013/photographs/ (Accessed June 9, 2020). 458

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Farrell, Yvonne and Shelley McNamara. “Manifesto by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara: FREESPACE.” www.labiennale.org/en/architecture/2018/introduction-yvonne-farrell-and-shelley-mcnamara (Accessed June 9, 2020). Fisher, Thomas. “Labor and Talent in Architecture.” Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design. Edited by Peggy Deamer. Bloomsbury, 2015, pp. 219–227. Fitzgerald, Helena. “Caring for Place, Constructing Common Worlds.” Building Material, Vol. 22, 2019, pp. 137–162. Frampton, Kenneth. “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance.” The Anti Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Edited by Hal Foster. Bay Press, 1983, pp. 16–30. Goldhagen, Sarah Williams. “Coda: Reconceptualising the Modern.” Anxious Modernisms. Edited by Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Rejean Legault. The MIT Press, 2000, pp. 301–324. Hanly, Orna. Practising Professionalism in Architecture: The Identification, Analysis and Implementation of Appropriate Models of Practice in a Changing Professional Context. Masters Dissertation, University College Dublin, 2011. Hill, Dan. Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary. Strelka Press, 2012. “Johnny Savage: Fallout.” Domus, September 23, 2014. www.domusweb.it/en/photo-essays/2014/09/23/ johnny_savage_fallout.html (Accessed June 9, 2020). Killip, Sophie. “Tom dePaor Reveals His Concrete Arthouse Cinema.” Design Curial, August 2, 2018. www.designcurial.com/news/tom-depaor-arthouse-cinema-galway-ireland-6285613. Accessed June 9, 2020. Kitchin, Rob. “The Future of Rural Towns in Ireland.” Free Market News, 26 May–25 November, 2018, p. 17. Lappin, Sarah A. Full Irish: New Architecture in Ireland. Princeton Architectural Press, 2009. Lawton, Philip. “Rethinking the Liveable City in a Post Boom-Time Ireland.” Spacing Ireland: Place, Society and Culture in a Post-Boom Era. Edited by Caroline Crowley and Denis Linehan. Manchester University Press, 2013, pp. 102–105. Leatherbarrow, David. “Landings and Crossings: The Lewis Glucksman Gallery.” O’Donnell + Tuomey Selected Works. Edited by Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey. Princeton Architectural Press, 2007. Linehan, Denis. “Reading the Irish Motorway: Landscape, Mobility and Politics after the Crash.” Spacing Ireland: Place, Society and Culture in a Post-Boom Era. Edited by Caroline Crowley and Denis Linehan. Manchester University Press, 2013, pp. 75–88. Linehan, Denis and Caroline Crowley. “Introduction: Geographies of the Post-Boom Era.” Spacing Ireland: Place, Society and Culture in a Post-Boom Era. Edited by Caroline Crowley and Denis Linehan. Manchester University Press, 2013, pp. 1–14. Lootsma, Bart. Super Dutch: New Architecture in the Netherlands. Princeton Architectural Press, 2000. Maher, Eamon and Eugene O’Brien. “Introduction.” From Prosperity to Austerity: A Socio-Cultural Critique of the Celtic Tiger and Its Aftermath. Edited by Eamon Maher and Eugene O’Brien. Manchester University Press, 2014, pp. 1–18. McCarter, Robert. Grafton Architects. Phaidon, 2018. McDonald, Frank and James Nix. Chaos at the Crossroads. Gandon Editions, 2005. McGrath, Brendan. Landscape and Society in Contemporary Ireland. Cork University Press, 2013. McLaughlin, John. “Data: Clouds and Precipitation.” Infra Éireann: Infrastructure and the Architectures of Modernity in Ireland 1916–2016. Ashgate, 2015, pp. 185–199. Mee, Alan. “Spatial Chaos; Addressing Spatial Production in Dublin, Ireland.” The New Urban Question— Urbanism beyond Neo-Liberalism Conference, Amsterdam/Delft, 2009. Conference Paper. Moore, Niamh. Dublin Docklands Reinvented: The Post-Industrial Regeneration of a European City Quarter. Four Courts Press, 2008. Murphy, Derville. “Commonage: Culturstruction, Rosie Lynch and Hollie Kearns.” Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks. Edited by Fintan O’Toole. Royal Irish Academy, 2016, pp. 289–291. Murphy, Derville. Practising Art/Architecture: Observations on Praxis within the Overlapping Field. PhD Dissertation, University College Dublin, 2015. Ó Broin, Eoin. Home: Why Public Housing is the Answer. Irish Academic Press, 2019. O’Callaghan, Cian. “Ghost Estates: Spaces and Spectres of Ireland after NAMA.” Spacing Ireland: Place, Society and Culture in a Post-Boom Era. Edited by Caroline Crowley and Denis Linehan. Manchester University Press, 2013, pp. 17–31. O’Callaghan, Cian, Mark Boyle, and Rob Kitchin. “Post-Politics, Crisis, and Ireland’s ‘Ghost Estates’.” Political Geography, Vol. 42, 2014, pp. 121–133. O’Donnell, Sheila and John Tuomey. Space for Architecture: The Work of O’Donnell + Tuomey. Artifice Books, 2014. 459

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O’Toole, Shane. “Their Hearts’ Desire.” Des/IRE Designing Houses for Contemporary Ireland. Edited by Gemma Tipton. Gandon Editions, 2008, pp. 76–81. Peillon, Michel. “The Making of the Dublin Conurbation.” Place and Non-Place: The Reconfiguration of Ireland. Irish Sociological Chronicles (4). Edited by Michel Peillon and Mary P. Corcoran. Institute of Public Administration, 2004, pp. 167–178. Pike, Michael, Emmett Scanlon, Hugh Campbell, Peter Cody, Will Dimond, Marcus Donaghy, Tiago Faria, Miriam Fitzpatrick, Mary Laheen, Orla Murphy, and Peter Tansey. “Habitus: A Social Anthropology of the Contemporary Dublin House Extension.” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archaeology, Culture, History, Vol. 111C. Special Issue: Domestic Life in Ireland, 2011, pp. 311–336. Rabeneck, Andrew. “The Place of Architecture in the New Economy.” Industries of Architecture. Edited by Katie Lloyd Thomas, Tilo Amhoff, and Nick Beech. Routledge, 2016. “RMIT University Research Repository.” https://researchbank.rmit.edu.au/adv_search.php (Accessed June 9, 2020). Rowley, Ellen. “Crisis Culture and Memory Making across Two Generations of Dublin Architecture.” i.e. Patterns of Thought. Edited by Ellen Rowley with Maxim Laroussi. Architecture Republic, 2012. The School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, University College Dublin. Research Scoping Study in Architecture: To fulfil Action 1 (ii) of Government Policy on Architecture 2009–15. Unpublished Report, 2017. Spier, Steven and Martin Tschanz. Swiss Made: New Architecture from Switzerland. Princeton Architectural Press, 2003. Sterrett, Ken, Mark Hackett, and Declan Hill. “Agitating for a Design and Regeneration Agenda in a Post-Conflict City: The Case of Belfast.” The Journal of Architecture, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2011, pp. 99–119. Stevens, Dominic. “irishvernacular.com.” www.irishvernacular.com/ (Accessed June 9, 2020). Tuomey, John. Architecture, Craft and Culture: Reflections on the Work of O’Donnell + Tuomey. Gandon Editions, 2004. Webb, Rosie. “Back to the Future for Town Squares.” Free Market News, 26 May—25 November, 2018, p. 18. “We Can Build Better Public Procurement.” www.wecanbuildbetter.org/ (Accessed June 9, 2020). Wilkinson, Tom. “A Nebulous Concept: The Incoherence of ‘Freespace’ at the Venice Architecture Biennale Proves That Brilliant Architects Do Not Necessarily Make Good Curators.” Architectural Review, July/August 2018, pp. 144–6146.

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36 Repackaging history and mobilizing Easter 1916 Commemorations in a time of downturn and austerity Mike Cronin

All acts of commemoration or remembrance are political and are constantly shaped and reshaped by the passage of time. Even acts of commemoration which appear to be firmly historical can have a contemporary resonance (Horne and Madigan). In 2020, the global protests after the killing of George Floyd in the United States and support for the Black Lives Matter movement led to a criticism of public statues of slave traders, anti-abolitionists and colonial oppressors. In the United Kingdom, this led to the toppling of a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol and the removal of a similar statue of Robert Milligan in the London Docklands. In the United States, Richmond, Virginia, declared it would remove the city’s statue of the confederate General Robert E. Lee. These statues, and many others that were criticized and defaced during the protests, were all over a century old. In addressing and challenging contemporary political issues and injustices, the public statues and commemoration of figures that represented and symbolized historic beliefs were critiqued, attacked, and removed (Burch-Brown). The historical symbolism of acts of commemoration can be hugely powerful. An act of commemoration, whenever conceived, is shaped by contemporary concerns. This is particularly true in relation to the Irish state’s Decade of Commemorations, 2013 to 2023, and most centrally in its curation and presentation of the events of Easter week 1916 (Grayson and McGarry). The Decade of Commemorations, while producing a wealth of new scholarly research into and reassessments of the events of a century ago, was not about promoting complex scholarship. Commemorations are, as Dominic Bryan has argued, “about the present and the future” (Bryan 24). No agency organizing a commemorative event wants to get their facts wrong, but they also don’t want nuance, sophistication, and complexity (Heartfield and Rooney). Commemorative planners and organizers are concerned with dates: in this case, a series of centenaries and a straightforward narrative of events, people, and places. It was enough for the general public to know that the course of Irish history was transformed between the Home Rule crisis of 1913 and the ending of the Civil War in 1923. The end product of that period was the creation of a partitioned island which included the independent 26 counties of the Irish Free State, later the Irish Republic (Bryan, Cronin, O’Toole and Pennell). The story of commemoration was therefore focused on the creation of the modern Irish State and produced a teleological narrative that 461

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could lead only to this endpoint. From the state’s point of view, the decade of commemoration should be almost exclusively focused on celebrating, commemorating, and remembering the events of 1916 as the pivotal moment in Irish history (White and Marnane). This resurgent focus on the outsized heroism and formative political impact of the 1916 Rising had far more to do with the fragile economic and political landscape of twenty-first-century Ireland than it did with the State’s desire to isolate one particular moment in Irish history. The celebration and commemoration of 1916 was entirely linked to the Irish Republic having regained economic sovereignty from the Troika in 2014, and its desire, in 2016, to position the nation and its people, that had endured years of austerity and suffering, as compatible with, and as valiant as, the struggles of the men and women of 1916. The contemporary Irish population was positioned as having endured hardship and, in celebrating 1916 and the spirit of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, the state sought to reroot itself in the founding principles and aspirations of the Irish nation. Commemorating and celebrating national history are in no way specific to the Irish experience (Mycock). What has made the Irish experience of commemoration unusual is that the mobilization of the memories and narratives of historical figures are packed with contested identities and narratives. On an island that is divided between two states and two ethno-religious identities, that have a history of sectarian conflict, commemoration of either identity’s history has always been divisive. Put simply, commemoration on the island of Ireland has been perceived by one or the other of the communities as being triumphalist, oppositional, and narrating only one side of history (Walker). Commemoration in Ireland is nothing new. The Decade of Centenaries, while far bigger than anything conceived before, was one in a long line of remembrances and celebrations of dates and events from history. For example, the Easter Rising was celebrated by the state annually from the 1920s (and in grand style in 1966), events such as the centenary of Catholic Emancipation in 1929 were commemorated in the Republic, and in the North, annual commemorations of both the Battle of the Somme and Battle of the Boyne celebrate the historical roots of the unionist and Protestant tradition (Evershed; Higgins). As these separate celebrations suggest, there is little or no space for shared remembering in Ireland’s commemorative sphere. Events interpreted as triumphs to the nationalist population of the island are seen as defeats by the unionist population, and vice versa. Each population has a calendar of noteworthy events to commemorate, and these calendars are wholly separate. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, notable commemorations of historic events set in place many of the themes and responses that were evident in the Decade of Centenaries. In the mid-1990s, and particularly in 1995, the Irish State and its diaspora commemorated the 150th anniversary of the Irish famine (Mark-Fitzgerald). In 1998, the bicentenary of the 1798 rebellion was the focus of commemoration (Beiner). Both commemorations mixed scholarly interpretation, a recounting of the “facts,” and the opening and unveiling of museums, interpretive centers, and statues. It is obvious that the commemoration of neither of these events had any appeal to the unionist population. The famine spoke to a catastrophic failure of both British policy in Ireland and also the enforced globalization, through emigration, of an Irish Catholic and nationalist agenda. The latter, for all of Wolfe Tone’s appeals to cross-community support for the ideal of Republic, still represented an attempt to create an Irish nation unhooked from the British State. The complexities evident in these two major commemorations and also the tentative and very low-key approach that the state took to the 75th anniversary of the Easter Rising in 1991, demonstrated that contemporary political concerns, particularly the politics of the North, shaped commemoration. The issue central to debates around these commemorations, and into the Decade of Centenaries, was who “owned” the events that were being remembered, and who could make most political capital from them. By the 1990s, Northern Ireland was 462

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beginning to work through the political choreography necessary to produce a peace deal that would end the Troubles. The need to end the conflict was not simply about bringing peace to the North, but also, from the perspective of the British and Irish governments, as well as for unionism, an attempt to halt the rise of Sinn Féin at the ballot box. The 75th anniversary of the Easter Rising, in 1991, was a small event, centered on the reading of the Proclamation outside the GPO on O’Connell Street, with President Mary Robinson in attendance. It seemed as if the state did not have the confidence to publicly “own” the 1916 commemoration and associated message in 1991. Instead, it appeared that the State wanted a commemoration that minimized the physical-force ideology of Patrick Pearse and the signatories of the Proclamation in order to similarly minimize what seemed to be the ideology’s menacing legacy: a rising republican mood, personified by Sinn Féin and the ongoing conflict in the North. After the relatively successful commemorations of the famine and of 1798 (although they were not without criticism and rancor in some quarters, especially notable in the war of words between Kevin Whelan and Tom Dunne), all attention focused on the complex web of centenaries that would celebrate the period of the passage of the Home Rule bill in 1912 to the ending of the civil war in 1923 (Dunne). There were obvious questions and concerns about what these commemorations would look like, what would be commemorated, and who would have, or at least profess to have, ownership of the ideological messages connected with the myriad of personalities, events, and political narratives of this decade. Within the grand narratives of Irish history there were a number of competing strands and traditions that were part of this period. How, if at all, could commemoration include the vastly different and conflicting ideas of the Home Rule principles of John Redmond, the socialism of the trade union movement during the lockout period, the decision of both Catholics and Protestants to fight in the imperial war of 1914 to 1918, the advanced nationalism of the Easter Rising, the creation of the unionist state of Northern Ireland, the participation of both Irish and British forces in the War of Independence, and the divisiveness of the Civil War that followed? The Decade of Centenaries potentially offered the opportunity to celebrate and commemorate almost every strand of political thought, ideological standpoint, and diverse experience of warfare that the island has witnessed in the modern period. But who, if anyone, would want to commemorate the Irish Catholic dead of battles fought in Gallipoli or on the Somme? Would anyone want to embrace commemoration when it spoke to the bitterness, divisiveness, and bloodletting of a Civil War? How would the communities of Northern Ireland embrace or reject a series of commemorations effectively centered on a narrative that created a separate state, when, from 2018 on, they would also have a series of 50th anniversaries to mark the early years of the Troubles, a more immediate and relevant period of recent history to consider? (Ferguson and Halliday). At the start of the twenty-first century the Irish Republic was in the middle of an economic boom and the peace process in Northern Ireland, despite some issues surrounding power sharing and decommissioning, appeared to be holding. It was clear that Fianna Fáil, then in government, were alert to the political possibilities of the centenaries that were at hand. In 2001, the government of Bertie Ahern organized for the reburial of the so-called “forgotten ten,” the men who had been executed by British forces during the War of Independence and buried at Mountjoy Jail. In front of members of the government, the nation’s President, and thousands of people lining the streets, the forgotten ten were transferred from Mountjoy Jail and given state funerals at Glasnevin Cemetery (Carey). It was a clear attempt by Bertie Ahern to take control of the commemorative agenda, and to remove it from the hands of Sinn Féin before they could link historic republicanism with their contemporary agenda. Through the act of state-sanctioned reburial, Ahern attempted to demonstrate that those men and women who had died in the cause of creating an independent state belonged to the Irish nation and not to a republican party born out of 463

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the conflict in the North. Ahern further capitalized on the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising in 2006, his welcoming of Paisley and McGuinness to the Battle of the Boyne site in 2007, and his 2007 address to the British parliament to position his party as the creators of an economically successful Irish Republic, the guarantors of the peace process in Northern Ireland, promotors of positive Anglo-Irish relations, and the proprietors of the forthcoming commemorative period. In this he was marking his party, Fianna Fáil, as both the inheritors and the custodians of the Irish Republican tradition. In 2007, in an attempt to further gain control of the commemorative agenda, Ahern promised funding in the millions for a major program of events to honor the men and women of 1916, a dedicated museum in the GPO, and the formation of a cross-party committee to plan the program. As Diarmaid Ferriter noted, the commemoration of 1916 was not going to be about what happened and why, but how a selective use of the events of 1916 could be employed by those wishing to wrap the green flag around themselves in order to ‘out-republicanise’ their opponents. (Ferriter 2007, n.p.) Ahern was trying to take ownership of the commemorative agenda and frame the centenary as a state event celebrating the ways the Rising laid the foundations for independent Ireland. In doing so, he was also trying to halt the dissemination of a Sinn Féin lineage which drew a genealogical line from the spirit of Patrick Pearse to Gerry Adams and the contemporary party. Ahern’s attempt to gain control of the commemorative agenda demonstrated what a contemporary political football the centenary period would be. Events overtook Ahern, and he lost his position as Taoiseach in 2008 as the global financial crisis took hold. The period from 2008 to 2010 saw the Irish Republic fall from the dizzy heights of the Celtic Tiger into indebtedness and bankruptcy. Between the bank guarantee scheme and the arrival of the Troika to take control of the nation’s finances in 2010, any talk of the forthcoming centenaries, and their potential political value, disappeared into the background (Hourigan). What was instead apparent was how the loss of economic sovereignty under the Troika was contrasted in public discourse against the events of 1916. On November 18, 2010, Michael Noonan stated in the Dáil that Ireland had lost the economic sovereignty, or freedom, that had been won by the patriot dead in 1916 (McCarthy). In a similar vein, the next day, the Irish Examiner front page carried the headline “the proclamation of dependence” (O’Brien and Cahill n.p.). In 2011 a Fine Gael led government was elected, and the party pursued a policy of deep austerity that led to a deepening economic recession, emigration, high levels of unemployment, and rancorous debates about how the indebtedness of the boom period should be paid off. Amidst all of these complex responses to the economic collapse, however, the new government had no choice but to start thinking about the impending centenary period. They began slightly later than would have been ideal, as the natural starting point for this period would have been 2012, in order to acknowledge that the complex historical landscape of this period began its most significant changes with the 1912 passage of the Home Rule bill. However, it was clear that contemporary economic and political issues were dominating the new government’s agenda, and the centenary of 1912 passed without any start of a formal, government-led commemoration program (if anything, it was the centenary loss of the Titanic that dominated the commemorative agenda) (Neville; Neil, Murray and Grist). Finally, in 2013 the Irish government announced that the events which led to the creation of an independent Ireland would be marked under the organizing framework of the Decade of Centenaries. Despite the years of austerity (economic sovereignty would not be regained until 2014), the government made it clear that adequate funding would be made available for the program of events. It was also 464

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announced that an expert advisory committee of historians would assist the government in assessing the nature of commemoration and ensuring that recent scholarship and the wealth of archival material relating to the period was brought to the widest audience.1 The Decade of Centenaries aimed to offer a broad canvas on which the various strands of history and tradition within the island, and beyond, could be remembered. This would include Home Rule, trade union activism during the period of the lockout, Ireland’s involvement in World War One, the Easter Rising, the War of Independence, the foundation of the state, and the Civil War (Cronin). The reality of planning a decade of commemorative events, beginning in 2013, was that the same political party would not necessarily have the government reins for the whole of the commemoration period. Fine Gael had taken office in 2011, and an election would have to be held by 2016. The ideological coloring of the Decade of Commemoration was therefore not fixed in stone: it would begin with the political ethos of Fine Gael, who were comfortable in highlighting the Home Rule movement and Irish participation in World War One, and yet it could end potentially with Sinn Féin in government, who would commemorate the politics of the War of Independence and the Civil War with an entirely different political reading. Commemoration is never politically neutral, and a decade is a long time in modern politics. The program of which centenary events would be marked may have been commonly agreed, but how they were commemorated, and through what political narratives, would be subject to the changing winds of twenty-first-century political life. The first three years of the Decade of Centenaries did much to highlight the complex legacy of Irish involvement in World War One and created a heightened understanding of the sheer numbers of Irish men, from both communities, who went off to fight (Pennell). Likewise, the work of the labor movement in commemorating the events of the 1913 lockout, and the associated problems of poverty in Ireland at the time, were especially powerful in the ways they spoke to the contemporary experience of austerity (McNamara and Yeates). What became evident in 2015, however, was that the high point of the whole Decade of Centenaries and the state sponsored commemorative events, as well as the bulk of state expenditure, would be focused on a celebration of the events of Easter week, 1916. The centenaries of the War of Independence and the Civil War lay beyond the timeframe of the government that had been formed in 2011. Also, those wars, and their memory, were highly complex, divisive, and destructive. It was clear that there was no stomach at governmental level for planning, in the long term, to commemorate a war between 1922 and 1923 in which Irish people had killed each other and the nation divided along political lines. It was far easier to commit resources in the short term to commemorating an historical event around which there was a broad consensus. The Easter Rising may have been a military failure, but it was a short-lived event, and a relatively low-intensity struggle that did not lead to wholesale atrocities. Events were focused around a single week in a fixed location, the cast of characters was relatively small, and the leaders and those that were executed offered a manageable number of figures that were readily familiar. In the planning and performance of the Easter Rising, as well as the voicing of an ideal through the Proclamation, history had gifted contemporary politicians a moment when the articulation of what Ireland might be, of an Ireland that had triumphed over adversity, could be replayed against the backdrop of the emergence from austerity. In the same way that the men and women of 1916 had heroically battled for their freedom, the commemorations in 2016 played on the idea that contemporary Irish men and women had also collectively sacrificed to deliver themselves from the scourge of downturn and austerity. The people in 2016 could congratulate themselves for their achievements in the wake of economic collapse and compare themselves heroically to those who had marched out towards potential death on Easter Monday 1916. The Proclamation of the Irish Republic opened with a call to “Irish men and Irish women in the 465

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name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood.” The men and women of 1916 were, by 2016, part of the dead generations, and it was now for the men and women of the contemporary era to be rallied to the ideal of nationhood, and to reassess, in the context of the twenty-first century, the dreams of the Proclamation. It was a brilliant political manipulation of commemoration. After years of damaging austerity, for which families across Ireland had paid a high price, the state mobilized a simple narrative of sacrifice in the name of nationhood. Through television and programs, museum and gallery exhibitions, events and specifically designed lessons within schools, online and across a plethora of public events culminating with a state parade on Easter Sunday 2016, the story of 1916 was told, retold, and celebrated. The commemorations of 2016 came shortly after an inconclusive general election. Government formation would take weeks, and the centenary of Easter 1916 happened as those talks were ongoing. Before the unsettled election, however, the thengovernment had created a delivery body for the commemoration, simply called Ireland 2016, to ensure both the continuity of events through and subsequent to the election, and the state’s official endorsement of the vast majority of these events, no matter what the new government looked like. There was an exhibition at the Ambassador on O’Connell Street which had been organized by Sinn Féin, but by and large any events that were suggested, and which did not have the Ireland 2016 imprint, failed to get the necessary planning permission or permits and failed to materialize. What was presented to the public in 2016 was an entirely familiar story. While there were important correctives, such as the acknowledgements of the centrally important role of women during the rising and the high number of civilian deaths, especially children, during the fighting, the narrative was straightforward (Duffy; McAuliffe). The men and women of 1916, with little chance of success against the might of the British empire, heroically fought for a week against the odds, before the inevitable imprisonment and executions. The beauty of 1916 was its heroism, its simple binary of good and bad combatants, its articulation through the Proclamation of an idealized nation, and the fact that it was a failure. The Easter Rising of 1916 ushered in, alongside a weight of other events, a period of change that would transform the Irish political landscape, most clearly signified by the dramatic shift in public opinion at the 1918 election. The modern Irish State that came into being after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the conclusion of the Civil War was not the state as envisaged by the signatories of the Proclamation. This failure of the rebels of 1916 to achieve their goals during Easter week, and of their fellow travelers after 1918 to deliver on the Proclamation, meant that the Rising was left open-ended. No political party could claim, with complete clarity, that there was a lineage that ran from the signatories of 1916 directly to the leadership of Enda Kenny, Michael Martin, or Gerry Adams. But the state could, on behalf of the people and through the act of commemoration, claim the open ending of 1916 as a shared national rallying point for 2016. Adherence to a national ideal, to stories and acts of bravery and a Proclamation that promised much, was a powerful tool in 2016: through a widespread national engagement with the commemoration, the government could divert attention away from the catastrophic and damaging mismanagement of the Irish State, by its two major parties, through the Celtic Tiger boom, economic collapse, and austerity. However, creative challenges to the state-led narrative surrounding commemorative events— which, as Ciara Murphy noted, were dominated by a “narrative of heroic nationalism and national myth making” (Murphy 146)—emerged in cultural, digital and archival spaces. Criticism of the government focus and presentation began in November 2014 when the initial promotional film for the 2016 program was criticized for including images of rugby player Brian O’Driscoll, but none of Patrick Pearse. And broader discussion of the inclusiveness of events of 2016 were heightened when the Abbey Theatre launched its program, “Waking the Nation,” for 466

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the commemorative year. The program completely overlooked the work of Irish women and led to the rise of #wakingthefeminists on social media and the ensuing report on women in Irish theater, Gender Counts. Such critiques of the shape of the commemorative program demonstrated that there was a desire for an inclusive direction in planning that acknowledged the diversity of contemporary Ireland, and which did not simply impose a masculinized and ahistorical version of the past onto the present. Positively, the works of site-specific theater by Anú Productions such as Living the Lockout: Dublin Tenement Experience (2013), Pals: The Irish at Gallipoli (2015), Glorious Madness (2015) and Reflecting the Rising (2016), as well as a host of other performances by a variety of companies, were critical in rethinking the lived experiences of the revolutionary period. These performances often drew public criticism when they stepped away from a strictly historical gaze in order to offer alternative stories, as happened with Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones’s In the Shadow of the State, which explored how the Irish state had historically negatively controlled and damaged women’s bodies and life experiences (Kinsella). Commemorative events that stuck to the well-rehearsed historical script of the Easter Rising’s national value were easily digested and happily accepted, but cultural performances, if they interrogated history, were often criticized and misunderstood. This is why the commemoration process—the official one at least—was so grounded in known history. It was uncontroversial, a balm for the Irish people in a world of austerity. If the wider failings of the state were questioned, as it was in the work of Browne and Jones, for example, it produced an uncomfortable disruption in the national narrative. This is perhaps why David Rooney’s portraits of 40 leading Rising figures for the Royal Irish Academy (also used on buses and as building wrap-arounds) were much applauded, as they stuck to the accepted script (White and Quinn), whereas Rita Duffy’s Souvenir Shop—where the artist transformed “the everyday into the magical [and] fundamentally question[ed] public attitudes towards violence, commemoration and national identity”—produced far more ambivalent reactions. Duffy’s work played with the possibilities of multiple layers of history, delivering competing and inconsistent narratives through disruptive artifacts of the past that she reproduced in the form of commercial products. In the words of Irish Times, “Souvenir will be an antidote to taking the centenary too seriously. Prepare to be amused, stimulated, perhaps irritated, but above all intrigued” (Cosstick n.p.). Much of the scholarship that emerged in the broad field of Irish Studies in the years leading to 2016 was an attempt to suggest meaningful avenues for new research and to argue for the place of research within the commemorative space. The failure of the government to appreciate the value of scholarship was especially pressing in view of the 2016 decision (later abandoned policy) to remove history from the list of compulsory subjects from the Junior Cycle curriculum. The role of national cultural institutions and universities in promoting an informed engagement with the centenary history was especially important. Exhibitions such as the National Library of Ireland’s World War Ireland or the National Museum’s Proclaiming a Republic were hugely popular but also told wide-ranging, complex, and detailed stories about the past. In a similar vein in the digital arena, Boston College’s Century Ireland (www.rte.ie/centuryireland), University College Dublin’s Decade of Centenaries (http://centenaries.ucd.ie/) and University College Cork’s The Irish Revolution (https://theirishrevolution.ie/) made available, to a global digital audience, a wide range of archival material and imagery as well as distilled versions of major scholarly outputs (Crowley et al.). Interest in the history of the centenary period also led to a number of landmark television documentaries including RTÉ’s 1916 (2016), The Irish Revolution (2019), Life Before the Rising (2016) and Children of the Revolution (2016). Many of these outputs were designed with large audiences in mind that would stretch beyond the island, and a key role of the network of Irish Embassies and Consulates across the globe was promoting the various websites, films, and exhibitions associated with the Decade of Centenaries 467

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to a wider audience overseas. The largest projects to emerge from the centenary years have been those driven by the various archives in Ireland. The process of digitizing previously inaccessible files and placing them online has been very successful and has also produced the major scholarly additions to the collective understanding of the 1912–23 period. Key amongst these projects has been the work of the Military Archives and the National Archives in making available the records of the Bureau of Military History and the Military Service Pension Collection (www. militaryarchives.ie/en/home/). These thousands of pages of documentation are the largest collections of effective eyewitness accounts of what happened, and what roles individuals played during the revolutionary years, and are already producing dividends across the field of Irish Studies (Coleman; Ferriter; Stover). While the Decade of Centenaries has been a major undertaking by the Irish State, particularly in its approach to the commemoration of the events of 1916, the memory of such state and public embrace of the past will rapidly recede. In the 15 years that have traversed Celtic Tiger, downturn and austerity, Brexit, and the COVID-19 crisis, the commemorations of 1916 especially will be little more than a fleeting moment in a time of profound transition. As Ireland moved from austerity and collapse to rebuilding and a renewed boom, the contemporary restabilization of an entire society could be easily celebrated through the heroic narrative of 1916. But what did the commemorations truly tell us about the contemporary state of Ireland, in all of its precariousness and complexity? In essence, the performativity of the state, through the work of Ireland 2016, repurposed a familiar narrative for contemporary consumption without attempting either to reevaluate the histories being commemorated or to think creatively and critically about how these histories could shine new light on contemporary Ireland. Irish battles of the past were retrofitted to offer succor to an Irish population struggling with austerity, unemployment, mortgage arrears, homelessness, addiction, and domestic violence. The commemorations were not about truly understanding Irish history and culture, or about exploring and explaining why and how the twentieth-century version of an independent Ireland came into being (and failed as a modern state), but were instead about a nation being encouraged to applaud itself without interrogating the material conditions under which they were living. The fundamental and most valuable legacy of the Decade of Commemorations won’t be this easy national applause, but will rather lie in the creative and scholarly work the broad field of Irish Studies furnished in relation to these centenary celebrations. In part, this is the result of the vast amount of new archival material that was made available for the first time during this period, but even more important was the field’s assessment and publicization of the non-political narratives of the period of revolution. For instance, this work produced better understandings of early twentieth-century social and cultural life and more fully confronted the use of a sexual violence as a political weapon during this period. Cultural and artistic reimaginings of the revolutionary period have illuminated the multiplicity of perspectives from which it can be narrated, and the history of the whole period has been diversified to ensure that women are no longer written out of its story. The centenary provided artists and scholars with the opportunity to fundamentally challenge and reframe the patriarchal domination of Irish history, in the revolutionary period and beyond. But acts of commemoration are an evanescence. In a dizzying news agenda of economic collapse, austerity, Brexit, and COVID-19, the Decade of Centenaries will be historically marginalized. It was certainly important that the state, and the wider scholarly and cultural community, engaged with this profoundly important decade in Irish history. One wonders, however, what commemorations in the 2060s will look like: will the state simply rehash the heroic national stories that they trotted out for the centenaries? Will it be the centenary commemorations themselves that take center stage, as scholars 50 years in the future reassess and interrogate the ways the 468

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state framed the stories it told the nation? Or will the centenaries, and the history they celebrate, seem inconsequential as Ireland grapples with a half-century of repercussions from the Irish economic collapse into generational indebtedness? Perhaps by the 2060s the crash and all that followed will seem a far more significant and important set of events to understand and analyze.

Note 1 Details of the Committee and the overview of the Decade of Centenaries can be found at www.decadeofcentenaries.com/.

Works cited Beiner, G. Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster. Oxford University Press, 2018. Beiner, G. “Negotiations of Memory: Rethinking 1798 Commemoration.” The Irish Review, Vol., 26, 2000, pp. 60–70. Bryan, D. “Ritual, Identity and Nation: When the Historian Becomes the High Priest of Commemoration.” The Easter Rising, The Somme and the Politics of Commemoration in Ireland. Edited by R. S. Grayson and F. McGarry. Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 24–42. Bryan, D., M. Cronin, T. O’Toole, and C. Pennell. “Ireland’s Decade of Commemorations: A Roundtable.” New Hibernia Review, Vol. 17, No. 3, 2013, pp. 63–86. Burch-Brown, J. “Is It Wrong to Topple Statues and Rename Schools?” Journal of Political Theory and Philosophy, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2017, pp. 59–88. Carey, T. Hanged for Ireland: The Forgotten Ten, Executed 1920–21. Blackwater, 2001. Coleman, M. “Military Service Pensions and the Recognition and Reintegration of Guerrilla Fighters after the Irish Revolution.” Historical Research, Vol. 91, No. 253, 2018, pp. 554–572. Cosstick, V. “Laundered Diesel and Black and Tan Boot Polish: The Rising Gets an Artful Injection of Mischief.” Irish Times, April 5, 2016. Cronin, M. “Irish History Online and in Real Time: Century Ireland and the Decade of Centenaries.” EIRE-Ireland, Vol. 52, No. 1–2, 2017, pp. 269–284. Crowley, J., D. Ó Drisceoil, M. Murphy, and J. Borgonovo, Eds. Atlas of the Irish Revolution. Cork University Press, 2017. Duffy, J. Children of the Rising: Untold Stories of the Young Lives Lost during Easter 1916. Hachette, 1916. Dunne, T. Rebellions: Memoir, Memory and 1798. Lilliput, 2004. Evershed, J. Ghosts of the Somme: Commemoration and Culture War in Northern Ireland. University of Notre Dame Press, 2016. Ferguson, N. and D. Halliday. “Collective Memory and the Legacy of the Troubles.” Psychology of Collective Victimhood. Edited by J. R. Vollhardt. Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 56–74. Ferriter, D. A Nation Not a Rabble: The Irish Revolution, 1913–23. Profile, 2015. Ferriter, D. “Rising to the Challenge.” Irish Times, April 21, 2007. Grayson, R. S. and F. McGarry, Eds. The Easter Rising, The Somme and the Politics of Commemoration in Ireland. Cambridge University Press, 2016. Heratfield, J. and K. Rooney. Who’s Afraid of the Easter Rising? Zero Books, 2015. Higgins, R. Transforming 1916: Meaning, Memory and the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Easter Rising. Cork University Press, 2012. Horne, J. and E. Madigan, Eds. Towards Commemoration: Ireland in War and Revolution, 1912–23. Royal Irish Academy, 2013. Hourigan, N. “Delayed Protest Responses to Austerity and Post-Colonial Memory: Trauma, Collective Action and the Irish Economic Crisis, 2010–12.” Memory and Recovery in Time of Crisis. Edited by F. Larkan and F. Murphy. Routledge, 2018, pp. 183–199. Kinsella, T. “Reconsidering 1916: Embodiment, Memory and Relational Affect in Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones’ In the Shadow of the State.” https://tinakinsella.wordpress.com/conference-paperreconsidering-1916-embodiment-memory-and-relational-affect-in-sarah-browne-and-jesse-jones-inthe-shadow-of-the-state/. Mark-Fitzgerald, E. Commemorating the Irish Famine: Memory and the Monument. Liverpool University Press, 2013. 469

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McAuliffe, M. Margaret Skinnider. UCD Press, 2020. McCarthy, M. Ireland’s 1916 Rising: Explorations of History-Making, Commemoration and Heritage in Modern Times. Routledge, 2016. McNamara, C. and P. Yeates, Eds. The Dublin Lockout: New Perspectives on Class War and Its Legacy. Irish Academic Press, 2017. Murphy, C. “The State of Us: Challenging State Led Narratives through Performance During Ireland’s Decade of Centenaries.” Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2018, pp. 146–159. Mycock, A. “The First World War Centenary in the UK: A Truly National Commemoration?” The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 103, No. 2, 2014, pp. 153–163. Neill, W., M. Murray, and B. Grist, Eds. Relaunching the Titanic: Memory and Marketing in the New Belfast. Routledge, 2014. Neville, P. “Nostalgia and Titanic Commemorations in Cobh, Ireland.” Irish Studies Review, Vol. 23, No. 3, 2015, pp. 292–309. Pennell, C. “A Truly Shared Commemoration? Britain, Ireland and the Centenary of the First World War.” The RUSI Journal, Vol. 159, No. 4, 2014, pp. 92–100. O’Brien, P. and A. Cahill “Proclamation of Dependence.” Irish Examiner, November 19, 2010. Stover, J. D. Enduring Ruin: Environmental Destruction and the Irish Revolution, forthcoming. Waking the Feminists. Gender Counts: An Analysis of Gender in Irish Theatre, 2006–15.#Wakingthefeminists, 2017. Walker, B. Irish History Matters: Politics, Identities and Commemoration. The History Press, 2019. White, L. W. and J. Quinn, Eds. 1916: Portraits and Lives. Royal Irish Academy, 2016. White, T. J. and D. Marnane. “The Politics of Remembrance: Commemorating 1916.” Irish Political Studies, Vol. 31, No. 1, 2016, pp. 29–43.

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37 An ordinary crisis SARS-CoV-2 and Irish Studies Malcolm Sen

I: Viruses, ventilators, vaccines A pathogenic agent, a biological entity, a submicroscopic monster, a virus intercepts the linear progression of time. Viruses are historical revenants, presently animated, but already haunt the future. They call into question the ideological fabric of linearity through which is threaded the dogma of progress. Viruses also agitate neat spatial demarcations. They proclaim the threads of connectivity between geographically distant locations through routes of transmission: a global circuit of inhalations and exhalations, sipping and spitting, injecting and excreting. In their pandemic form viruses behave as paradigms, bifurcating both space and time—life before outbreak and the one after—so that their origins become significant, resonant with symbolic value. On December 31, 2019, China reported an outbreak of pneumonia in the city of Wuhan to the World Health Organization (WHO). Twenty-four hours later the WHO formed its Incident Management Support Team to respond to the potential of an epidemic. By March 11, 2020, the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and its multi-symptomatic disease (COVID-19) would result in a pandemic of truly global proportions.1 Despite the brief hindsight afforded in June 2020, when this chapter was being drafted, it does not seem far-fetched to suggest that the ominous timeframe of COVID-19’s arrival casts a viral halo over the entire third decade of the twentyfirst century; perhaps even beyond it. How might literary and cultural study respond to what appears to be a historical transition of magnanimous proportions? Will the world not be the same if and when this is over, as Sinéad Gleeson prophesizes? What is the new beginning that comes after the end, as Ling Ma suggests? Literature has a vicious ability to turn illness into metaphor, as Susan Sontag warned us in her excellent study of 1978.2 Francesco Pacifico, ruminating on the coronavirus in Italy, also noted the paucity of metaphors: Listen to me. The problem is your imagination. Stop using dystopia as your compass. Stop using metaphors. You have to live through this. . . . This is a proper quarantine, a real one, not just a brief dimming of everyday life. (Pacifico 103)

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It is true, COVID-19’s sociocultural and biopolitical ramifications provoke much more than representational anxieties. It might call into question the focus of entire fields of scholarship: we might wonder whether studying literature and culture sufer from a relevancy deficit at a time of a global health crisis. Is Irish Studies, already blamed for its putative insularity and self-promoting exceptionalism, especially threatened by the global scope of pandemics? After all, as the novelist Caoilinn Hughes notes, “The biggest issue we face as a species is not a national issue; it’s global. The climate crisis is a pandemic far greater than COVID-19”3 But species is a broad term that identifies genetic markers; is does not invoke the cultural practices and the political policies that dehumanize certain humans. In what follows I reason that the biological nature of the coronavirus’s threat, its pathogenic inscrutability, and its attendant alphanumeric nomenclature, makes critical humanistic engagement with COVID-19 crucial. Furthermore, even though the proportions of a pandemic are often global, as in the case of this coronavirus outbreak, medical and cultural analyses, mitigation and critical eforts, are squarely dependent on political infrastructures in their national and global incarnations. Additionally, pandemics have a bearing on epistemological biases. Literary and cultural studies need to confront the sociocultural and biopolitical fallout of COVID-19 especially because the public rhetoric surrounding this particular crisis popularizes scientific terminology and empirical methodologies, as if the only viable tools of analysis and understanding lie within the sciences. But, diagnosing cytokine storms in a single patient’s pulmonary system cannot ofer a full prognosis of the systemic susceptibility of particular bodies already marked for death, well before succumbing to a viral threat; addressing the urgency of ventilators and vaccines does not necessarily entail critical care to resuscitate ecologies already deemed disposable.4 Human health is intricately braided to environmental factors of which the ecological equilibrium of species habitats is crucial. It is equally dependent on intersectional concerns of race, class, and gender, which often transcribe themselves as comorbidities, determining a patient’s ability to access healthcare when needed and their precautionary abilities to address vulnerabilities before they manifest as symptoms. Therefore pandemics, like famines, are not simply biological crises with pharmaceutical or economic solutions.5 Medical care during contagious diseases and pandemics attend to individual bodies as sites of immediate crises but equally pathologize societies as populations and promote coercive forms of governmentality, the cornerstone of biopolitics.6 No matter the sound medical rationale—which makes us hope that people in our villages, towns, and cities maintain physical distancing measures during a pandemic—the heightened powers of governance propagated in a state of emergency need to be acknowledged and then quickly followed by increased vigilance of political power. Pandemics also bring into focus a nexus of political concerns that circulates around the figure of the human, and they highlight the mesh of concerns within which the human is implicated. Neel Ahuja has noted that such acknowledgement leads us to conceive of the political as an “interspecies zone” (pg/kindle loc?). On the one hand, literary and cultural study are especially well-placed to comment on the long-term risks associated with states of exception that are vigorously advocated during crises. On the other, they promote alternative sites of origin for viral outbreaks, which trace enduring historical patterns and make visible the interconnected dynamics between capital, culture, and ecology, vibrantly challenging the misinformative potential of circulating pandemic rhetoric. What is a pandemic if not an exacerbation of susceptibilities already promoted in the past? What is a disease outbreak if not an extreme mutation of what Mike Davis has described as “the virulence of poverty” (26).

II: Pandemic punditry Pandemics properly understood make the historical vibrant and the present predictable even though the popular rhetoric during such times (as it always has been) is of crisis and 472

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unpredictability. But while the biological mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2 has so far been unpredictable, social and individual responses to such pandemics are not as volatile. The primary lesson of plague literature, from Thucydides onwards, is how predictably humans respond to such crises. Over millennia, there has been a consistent pattern to behavior during epidemics: the hoarding, the panicking, the fear, the blaming, the superstition, the selfishness, the surprising heroism, the fixation with the numbers of the reported dead, the boredom during quarantine. (Theroux n.p.) COVID-19 gives rise to concerns that fall more traditionally within the ambit of Irish Studies (such as cultural memory, historical discourses of disease, their correlation to contemporary issues such as financialized medical care, and others). But the pandemic also has the potential of greatly expanding the future scope of this discipline. Here’s the rub: pandemics generate punditry and also defiant skepticism of polymathic commentaries in equal measure. Thus, many hurried analyses of COVID-19’s efects on our biosocial, political, and cultural realities appear threatened by short critical shelf-lives. However, there has at the same time also been a welcome eforescence of critical interventions on the comforts and cautions that can be garnered from cultural narratives, canonic novels, science, and climate fiction. The defiance of poetry, confronting the odds posed by social crises, has once again been recognized. It makes sense to include Irish literature and Irish cultural narratives within this general schema, of course. But this chapter is not necessarily about the relevancy, to ofer as an example, of W.B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” a poem written during the flu pandemic of 1918 and on which much thoughtful critical deliberation has occurred in recent weeks.7 Those avenues seem too neat and tidy to address the complexities that the third decade of twenty-first century unfolds. No, the more alluring questions, it seems to me, entail asking whether COVID-19 is that paradigm that will shape Irish Studies of the twenty-first century; if so, then what might such a field look like? Is Irish literature already engaged in unpacking viral rhetoric and in pointing us towards what a post-COVID world might usher? Much predictive scholarship often encodes its own epitaph. But predictions and projections are also the stuf of urgent scholarship in the sciences (including disease outbreaks and climate change modeling). Humanists should be wary of of-loading such predictive capacities to the sciences alone. Is it too early to predict the capacity of COVID-19 to transform business-as-usual neoliberal lives of contemporary times? Is it too early to comment on the viral signature of this pathogen and its violent worldly efects as somehow in conversation with the Ireland of the past and the one of the future? If pandemics of the past have taught us anything it is this: our interventions, much like the invocation of life-saving lockdown measures during this current crisis, always arrive belatedly so that often all that literature can ofer is a posthumous “merciless inventory,” as Eavan Boland notes in “Quarantine” (n.p.). Viruses lead highly numeric lives in medical grammar; the numbers spill into public discourse. Rates and methods of transmission, reproductive factors, and other enumerable data provide prophetic gateways for epidemiologists who predict the depth of infection spread, build models of worst-case scenarios, and calculate herd immunity patterns, if and when vaccines become accessible to all. But the pandemic ill and the pandemic dead do not provide any easy calculus. Rates of transmission cannot map the terror of the recently infected, disease vectors and death rates belittle communal tragedies and gloss over personal grief. Illness and death are lonely preoccupations in the best of times, they are extremely so during viral outbreaks. These observations resonate with Albert Camus’ words: “a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination” (38). Reflecting on the recent 473

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resurgence of Camus’ The Plague, Jacqueline Rose clarifies the author’s logic: “refusing to submit to indiscriminate numerical calculations also represents a form of creativity, a decision to imagine the world beyond the agonies of the hour. Doing otherwise risks replicating the merciless logic of the plague itself ” (n.p.). Thus we turn to literature as comfort and guide, especially ones that were written during similarly frightening times, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, which subverts the mercilessness of numbers in a multitude of ways. In that book, Leopold Bloom disrupts the tabulation of death by commoditizing it in an ironic fashion: “Scarlatina, influenza epidemics. Canvassing for death. Don’t miss this chance” (Joyce 1922, 87).8 However, not an insignificant part of critical readings of such texts rest upon unpacking the dominant narrative structure of pandemics themselves. After all, “An outbreak, like a story, should have a coherent plot,” but for the most part such plots, seeded on political pulpits, fertilized through whodunit journalism, and now turned viral on social media, obfuscate the true origins and causes of pandemics (cited Davis 56). No single wet market in the world can be singularly held accountable as the ground zero of a modern pandemic if we were to invoke the longer narrative of increasing epidemics at this contemporary time. Thus, despite the hazards of attempting urgent responses, especially ones that wish to retell the outbreak story, literary and cultural scholars may be emboldened to comment on the latest coronavirus pandemic. Boland urges us towards such urgent responses and in fact warns us against complacency in her oft-quoted poem “Outside History”: “And we are too late./We are always too late” (Boland 1995, 160). Contemporary literary engagements amplify Leopold Bloom’s irony and exhibit his diagnostic tendencies to see beyond the cataloging of crises. And in their evocations of the ontopolitical, metaphysical quality of viruses, they aim to both witness past events and prophesize future ones. The issues I raise earlier find multiple evocations in Irish literature, and often in the most unlikely of spaces. Viruses have been on the minds of contemporary Irish writers and for good reason. There was already an endemic viral crisis in Ireland with intermittent periods of respite before the arrival of SARS-CoV-2. In 2005, there were two outbreaks of cryptosporidium in Ireland. Between March and May, 30 cases of cryptosporidiosis were confirmed in Carlow and residents were advised to consume only boiled or bottled water for a period of six weeks. In June, a cluster of cases was reported in Ennis, County Clare.9 Following that, in 2007, the cryptosporidium outbreak in Galway and Clare is especially noteworthy. Although in no way comparable to the pandemic reaches of SARS-CoV-2, cryptosporidiosis was nonetheless more lethal than the widely disseminated boil water notices might have superficially suggested. Arriving at a time of Celtic Tiger plenty, the diarrheal disease hearkened back to the atavistic realms of the so-called developing world. In Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones, the outbreak is a common denominator that links Ireland to the global South in a common bond of biological frailty. Furthermore, in its webwork of ecological connections, Solar Bones does not hesitate to extend the reaches of empathetic fellowship to the more-than-human entities that surface in the novel. all news feels foreign today—telling me that an outbreak of cholera in West Africa has endangered thousands of lives and threatens to cover a large section of the western part of the sub-Saharan continent, reaching into Chad and Cameroon, while somewhere in South Korea an outbreak of avian flu has crossed the species barrier, diagnosed in a twenty-twoyear-old medical student who is currently in quarantine, God’s creatures bound together in a common suffering, our aches and pains one and the same as those of the duck and the turkey and the chicken and . . . (McCormack 174–5) 474

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McCormack’s overt references to the rising threat of viral illnesses in the twenty-first century highlights the simultaneity of diferent outbreaks in the twentieth century, provoking us to identify connective threads between geographically distant epidemics. In addition, biological vocabulary—“crossed the species barrier”—also underlines a rupture in the thin film that allows coexistence between human and more-than-human entities. Aestheticized commentaries on the webwork of ecology attains the proportions of critical discourse in this novel; it is as if the true ramifications of the cryptosporidium outbreak can only be fathomed when seen in relation to the cholera and avian flu epidemics. Here, the aviary may be one mode of identifying viral origins but it does not deter from the multispecies network within which the human is evoked: “our aches and pains” are “the same as those of the duck and the turkey and the chicken.” Thus, the cryptosporidium outbreak points to “a contamination of the very stuf of life itself ” (McCormack 146). A virus’s ability to skew time and space, society and politics, makes McCormack qualify his naming of the virus as such. At one point he describes the pathogen as “some ontopolitical virus,” at another as a “metaphysical virus” (McCormack 147).

III: Decolonial immunizations We can recognize today that the coronavirus pandemic not only infects human bodies but people’s cultural and psychological lives as well. Solar Bones anticipates such obsessive reflexes of life under quarantine: I kept abreast of the virus story as it began to make headlines across all the national news outlets, gradually surfacing through newsprint and broadcast articles . . . I watched or listened to throughout the day, eyes and ears peeled for the slightest development in the story. (McCormack 136) Incidentally, the cryptosporidium outbreak that Marcus obsesses about was not identified as a life-threatening protozoal disease (especially for immunocompromised individuals) until the emergence of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in the 1980s.10 That latter epidemic is the most chronicled of all infectious diseases because it could not be contained, because it carried with it great social stigma, because it was related to wider injustices surrounding LGBTQ rights, and had a bearing on the place of Africa in an evolving late-capitalist era. HIV and AIDS also turned our attention to the clarion call of the twenty-first century’s emerging epidemics for the first time. The decades-long “outbreak narrative,” to use Priscilla Wald’s phrase surrounding HIV, and the numerous national and international failures of governance in relation to responses to the epidemic, has taught us that racialized and gender-oppressive regimes greatly amplify such crises (passim). There is much scholarship in this area, notably Neel Ahuja’s work that I have mentioned earlier. In the Irish context, the ramifications of the disease are well articulated in Cormac O’Brien’s scholarship. I invoke these continuing conversations in light of McCormack’s viral previous references principally because despite the empathetic gesture of interspecies and intercultural bonding, Solar Bones and many other contemporary Irish texts fail to acknowledge the intersectional concerns that were made visible during the HIV epidemic. Intersectionality demands an acknowledgement of diference rather than analogical similarities. Falling prey to an epidemic, receiving medical attention, and eventually surviving a deadly disease depend on a host of factors of which race, gender, class, and location are, unfortunately, obvious ones. In fact, unproblematically correlating a white person sufering from crypto in Ireland with a cholera patient in Chad requires a form of naïveté that is open to being weaponized to service the infrastructure of racism. 475

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McCormack’s sound assessment of the global rise in viral diseases thus invites us to extrapolate the ramifications of cultural analogy and speciest discourses. COVID-19 shadows our present and heralds a future marked by an even more virulent, civilization-altering pandemic epidemiologists have been warning us of for some time (COVID19 is widely understood by epidemiologists as a harbinger of such a future outbreak). To address such a fragile future, it is paramount that we begin by acknowledging the ecologies of disease outbreaks in their intersectional complexity, and provide a sociocultural underpinning to biomedical urgencies. I have written elsewhere on how contemporary Irish literature attempts to reproduce the ecological matrix, but there I had not substantially elaborated on ecology’s racial ramifications except to say that Sara Baume’s A Line Made By Walking prominently attempts to raise the specter of racial difference in the context of health.11 A part of the hesitation in engaging race in that instance was my own long-standing identification in Irish Studies as a scholar of color who had migrated to Ireland to carry out graduate study—an identification that creates a double bind for scholarship on race by people whose existence is already thoroughly racialized. Anne Mulhall has eloquently written of such dilemmas: ‘The political’ is perhaps difficult to escape if your existence is itself politicized. There is an expectation that the . . . writer of migrant background will or should write on particular themes and experiences, or that the writer is happy to be categorised as a representative of a particular community. (97) When it comes to pandemics, questions of race are thrown into especially sharp focus, which is one of the reasons why the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, sparked by the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police ofcer, is now strengthened and reaching closer to its proper geopolitical proportion. A climate of disease allows us to identify symptoms of underlying ones such systemic racism that virally replicates itself across the global spectrum. Here the Irish example becomes noteworthy. While its responses to COVID-19 demonstrated quick and decisive measures that have seemingly paved the way for a successful suppression of community spread, the Irish government simultaneously displayed the public dangers of a state of exception in which certain bodies, mostly black, have all been marked for pestilence and death. The Direct Provision system that “houses” asylum seekers and refugees in unhygienically close proximity is the underbelly of a state which has otherwise prided itself on “cocooning” its mostly white vulnerable populations.12 To be considered vulnerable in COVID times thus becomes a luxurious rung beyond reach for the immigrant; vulnerability, oddly, becomes a sign of social and political mobility. The Irish chapter of the United Nations Refugee Agency notes Asylum-seekers and refugees are included within the national measures to stop the spread of this pandemic. In line with the National Action Plan in response to COVID-19, the government is putting in place specific measures to protect vulnerable groups, including those in direct provision. And yet, those measures were either too late or often exacerbated the rate of infections, as the resettlement of refugees in Skelling Star Accommodation Center demonstrates.13 Asylum seekers and refugees were only superficially designated as “vulnerable groups” during the coronavirus pandemic. As a recent Irish Times article elaborated, when the few asylum seekers who were allowed to work lost their jobs due to the pandemic, they were also stopped from receiving the 476

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COVID-19 unemployment payment. The supplanting of one form of precarity with another, one form of vulnerability with another, makes prominent the deadliness of sovereign enactments of emergency powers. This is the reason why a politically abstract construct such as sovereignty should be increasingly scrutinized during crises. Given that Giorgio Agamben has been the most vociferous critical voice on the nature of contemporary sovereignty practices, it was not surprising when he entered the fray of pandemic proclamations earlier this year. And yet, he was incorrect in his assertion that the measures adopted by the Italian government to combat the coronavirus was “frenetic, irrational and completely unfounded”; a charge that was instantly and duly challenged (quoted D’Eramo 23). However, it is equally true that “By the end of this crisis . . . the surveillance powers of governments will have increased tenfold” (D’Eramo 25). Marco D’Eramo notes that under these emergency powers, “Rulers are also taking advantage of the pandemic to push through policies that would cause outrage in normal times” (27). Residents in Direct Provision centers occupy an awkward position in such enactments of sovereignty: already under an increased surveillance regime of the state, immigrants at the same time are overlooked, out-of-sight creatures during the coronavirus pandemic. Proximity to each other and enforced distancing from the state’s care reveal that during a pandemic an immigrant’s disposability increases ten-fold. The cocoon of state protection does not filter the menacing microbe when it comes to immigrant bodies; in fact, refugees in Ireland should be seen as having been given an order to “shelter in place” instead. That latter phrase is generally used in the United States in the context of “active shooters” in the vicinity. It was also utilized in the context of the pandemic and it is no wonder that under the auspices of a Trump administration the national response to viral outbreak was thoroughly militarized. These examples will hopefully initiate a longer conversation about how the nexus of surveillance, invisibility, and precaritybartering affects racialized and marginalized communities (such as Travelers) in Ireland and how crises bring such matters to the fore. These examples are not one-off instances; the institutionalized nature of racism in Ireland, which goes hand-in-hand with cynical acknowledgements of vulnerability, or alleged hospitality, such as in The Department of Justice’s rhetoric of “visitors,” becomes especially clear when we identify networks of governance and sovereign control that grant the state the power over life and death of non-white and marginalized bodies even under “normal” conditions: [The] Department of Justice, which presides over an increasingly punitive migration and asylum regime in Ireland, and that keeps people segregated in the apartheid ghettoes of Direct Provision, is the same government department that controls the EU-funded Communities Integration Fund. (Mulhall 101) The Irish story of race relations, cultural adoptions of whiteness etc., does not begin with the arrival of immigrants during the Celtic Tiger era as we all know. But, as Julie McCormack Weng and I deliberate in our forthcoming book, the neoliberal Irish economy produces unique forms of institutionalized racism that manifest themselves on a spectrum that spans microaggressions and violent physical harm. Ebun Joseph notes eloquently that “Right here in Ireland, we feel people’s knees on our neck,” drawing a parallel between the sufocation of George Floyd in the United States and the asphyxiating threat of COVID-19 that residents of Direct Provision facilities are subjected to in Ireland (quoted Freyne n.p.). But these are also two different kinds of violence: in the case of George Floyd it was recorded and virally transmitted across the world; in the case of refugees and asylum seekers in Ireland the violence is largely unrecorded and unseen.14 477

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What is clear from such observations is that COVID-19 cracks open the neoliberal safehouse of business-as-usual politics if we pay attention to the forms of sovereign power being enacted at a time of emergency. The moment provides an opportunity for humanist scholarship (and activism) to respond to COVID-19’s intersectional effects by not treating it as a critical flashpoint but as an echo-chamber of previous violence and a precursor of future injustices. The latter is certainly going to be more heightened as environments are further distressed. Since COVID-19 is an allegorical nugget of the behemoth of climate change, we might also note that the cooptation of climate change by STEM fields has meant that critical humanistic engagement with the greatest planetary threat has often been subdued. COVID-19, alternatively, is a crisis that readjusts the sociopolitical dynamics within the frame of ecology into sharper visibility. This is therefore a crisis that especially needs retelling from the platforms of cultural, literary, and historical scholarship. An avenue that will be boldly pursued in Irish Studies in the coming years, hopefully by both race-educated white scholars as much as by scholars of color, will be the intersectional nexus of race, ecology, and politics. The area has the potential to engage with the ecocritical work in Irish Studies already being carried out, as evidenced by Maureen O’Connor’s and Nessa Cronin’s chapters, and Sarah L. Townsend’s chapter on race in this volume.15 Decolonizing the hotly pursued identity politics of postcolonial studies in Ireland—guided as they were by the urgencies of the Troubles and Ireland’s membership in the European Union, and influenced by the dominant trends being pursued by an emergent postcolonial studies globally—need recalibration in the light of contemporary environmental crises and the geopolitical futures of the state, the citizen, the migrant, and the refugee. Ecology’s multiscalar, intersectional mesh also paves the way to align the unique achievements of feminist and queer studies frameworks in Ireland, which often have had to pit themselves against the restrictive, masculinist frames of Irish nationhood. But isolating postcolonial studies from critical assessments of gender formations in Ireland does more disservice to the critical enterprise than not. Quarantining during the coronavirus pandemic has proved deadly for many women worldwide who have been doubly forced to live in abusive relationships. One of the fallouts of the pandemic in Ireland has been the resurgence of evidence of domestic violence in the country.16 It is noteworthy that domestic abuse was also listed as an area requiring urgent attention in the Program for Government published in June 2020. For the first time, it seems that there is a national-level recognition of what the Program described as an “epidemic of domestic, sexual and gender-based violence” in Ireland (Kelly et. al., n.p.). COVID-19’s racial, gender, and class characteristics certainly share correspondences. Keeping these trajectories in conversation with each other is not meant to homogenize critical exercise but address the complexities already embedded in everyday life, complexities that are heightened under crisis conditions.

IV: Anthropocene and its many apocalypses COVID-19 cannot be cured by reading a poem by Vona Groarke or a novel by William Wall. However, the quack remedies abounding in our pandemic universe makes reading literature at this time a less deadly form of self-medication. Paying attention to the dynamic commentary of species extinctions in the short stories of Danielle McLaughlin, for example, may not inoculate us from injecting or ingesting sodium hypochlorite but they do help us understand the apocalyptic tenor of the Anthropocene. In McLaughlin’s short story “In the Act of Falling,” a young boy is distracted by recurrent thoughts of the apocalypse. McLaughlin’s aviary, like Mike McCormack’s noted earlier, also resonates with motifs of environmental collapse. The young

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protagonist in the short story has imagined birds, especially those that drop dead mid-flight and fall to the ground, to be a harbinger of the end times. Birds, it seemed, were the next great heralds of the apocalypse, and Finn had decided it was important to catch them in the act of falling. Before the birds, there had been two long weeks of insects: a meticulous recording of spiders, flies, and beetles, tallies of the dead entered each night in a blue-lined copybook. (McLaughlin 186) Here, McLaughlin’s protagonist narrativizes the Anthropocene as a period of mass extinctions through an entomological and arachnidan catalogue of death. Species extinctions, especially those of the insect world, are noteworthy in this regard in both scientific and environmental humanities scholarship. These extinctions, associated with prolonged habitat loss and industrial agriculture’s chemical warfare against local and planetary ecologies among others forms of environmental degradation, have a direct bearing on the rise of zoonotic viruses in the twenty-first century. McLaughlin’s focus on such matters may not be overt, but the potency of the rhetoric is not diminished as a result. The imagery of individual insect deaths as an allegorical symbol of a larger and more entrenched crisis of the Sixth Extinction resembles the technique also employed by Baume in A Line Made By Walking as well. What is noteworthy in such descriptions is that the concept of the apocalypse is correctly shorn of its temporal glamor: the apocalypse is not an abrupt intrusion of a massive event that breaks upon the surface of banal normality. Apocalypse here is instead rendered as a long-term, slow-evolving multiplication of risk and precarity. McLaughlin deliberately constructs such a temporal stretching later in the story. Soon the evocation of childhood visions of an unfolding apocalypse is braided to the violence of plantation economies of the past and the production of addictive cash crops in modern times. The simultaneity evokes long-term health risks of consumers in a capitalist system. Thinking about the apocalypse the precocious protagonist notes in passing that “The first peanuts ever grown in America were grown in Virginia, but now the people of Virginia mostly grow tobacco, which is immoral and also causes plagues” (McLaughlin 191). This is a significant aside. Here the language of apocalypse, economy, and plague (the epidemics surrounding lung and other diseases arising from tobacco use) create a set of intersecting concerns. Peanuts, first brought to the United States from the African continent by enslaved people, seem to have a tangible link between past histories of capital and late capitalism’s fostering of death and disease. While cigarette smokers are certainly chained to an addictive habit they are not enslaved by them—there is no analogy here. What holds the contrapuntal evocation of violence and addiction is the logic of capital, and neoliberalism’s death-drive. This last is alluded to in the short story’s prominently post-Celtic Tiger landscape. Michel Foucault argued for a new history that would chart “the evolution of relations between humanity, the bacillary or viral field, and the interventions of hygiene, medicine, and the different therapeutic techniques” (Quoted Ahuja Loc. 5). Proximate relations between ecology and medicine are evoked in Kevin Barry’s work. For example, note the words below from “Doctor Sot,” where the short story’s physician protagonist is an alcoholic and travels to the supermarket to replenish his supply: The Tesco at eleven this weekday morning was quiet and the quietness for Doctor Sot had an eerie quality. As he walked the deserted aisles, wincing against the bright colours of the products, he felt like the lone survivor in the wake of an apocalypse. What would you do

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with yourself? All the fig rolls on earth wouldn’t be a consolation. So taken was he with this grim notion he walked into a display of teabags and sent the boxes flying. (Barry 114) The braiding of addiction to medical expertise may be seen as an example of Barry’s quintessential ironic couplings. But ironies are the cornerstone of political satire and “Doctor Sot,” when read in this light, provides a prognosis of the twenty-first century as one of addiction, an epidemic of consumption. Here, the location is of interest in the context of “the lone survivor in the wake of an apocalypse.” Empty supermarket shelves are a dominant motif of the postapocalyptic visual imaginary. Narrative representations have returned time and again to the petro-normative, hyper-consumptive worldview as normality by recruiting the iconography of empty supermarket shelves and roads deserted of cars as an abnormal condition. But, the Greek word apokalypsis does not simply mean a catastrophe but an event that reveals as much as it disrupts. Apocalypses reveal “the true nature of what has been brought to an end” (Berger 5). During the early months of the pandemic, when the first world responded to a slowing supply chain in supermarkets by hoarding everything from cans of tuna to rolls of toilet tissue, it did so out of a fear that the model of limitless consumption and excretion had suddenly reached an apocalyptic end. The coronavirus was the avatar of the zombie apocalypse, an imaginary that has been circulating since the nuclearization of the planet but especially since the Cold War era. An opinion piece in The New Yorker grimly noted the irony in equating the virus with the apocalypse: “Is a virus not a kind of zombie, a quasi-life-form moving in and out of inertness? It is zombie time: the virus can’t be transmitted when all of its hosts have died” (Moore n.p.). Of course, it is mindless consumption that hastens species extinctions, making the metaphor seem like a short-hand reference to capitalism’s cannibalistic momentum. It should be clear by now why, in most Hollywood films, zombies embody cannibalistic practices. I wish to conclude this chapter by noting that future-oriented dystopias in Irish fiction are also an imaginary privilege that the global South and many people of color in the global North do not have access to. For many, the apocalypse is the history within which they have been born. Kathryn Yusoff clarifies such a conceptualization well: If the Anthropocene proclaims a sudden concern with the exposures of environmental harm to white liberal communities, it does so in the wake of histories in which these harms have been knowingly exported to black and brown communities under the rubric of civilization, progress, modernization, and capitalism. The Anthropocene might seem to offer a dystopic future that laments the end of the world, but imperialism and ongoing (settler) colonialisms have been ending worlds for as long as they have been in existence. The Anthropocene as a politically infused geology and scientific/popular discourse is just now noticing the extinction it has chosen to continually overlook in the making of its modernity and freedom. (Yusoff Loc. 1) What appeared to be an evolving situation in January and February 2020 in Europe and America had been rehearsed numerous times in diminutive, bite-sized, allegorical, and even forgettable forms in the not-so-distant past but nonetheless distanced, and invisibilized, continents of Africa and Asia. The zoonotic epidemics of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century— Ebola appeared in 1994, avian influenza in 1997, SARS in 2002—had played out in the public imaginary of the global North as a third world problem. This forgetting is a major reason for the bewilderment and dejection, disbelief and hopelessness, which have all been defining 480

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characteristics of public discourse in recent weeks in Ireland. The sense of apocalyptic doom on Facebook and Twitter feeds belies SARS-CoV-2’s impact on the global North’s self-conception as the future of the South. However, as many environmental scholars have noted, it is more likely the other way around. To address the current pandemic holistically thus requires addressing the deadly forms of capitalism in the neoliberal era. Reflecting on the avian flu, “a mutant influenza of nightmarish virulence,” Mike Davis identified its origins in “global agro-capitalism” that allows the conditions for a virus to search “for the new gene or two that will enable it to travel at pandemic velocity through a densely urbanized and mostly poor humanity” (14). Similarly, there is certainly some perversion of logic at work when we claim that SARS-CoV-2 originated in China, or in a single wet market, or was caused by a single bat, or a single pangolin. The idea behind Patient Zero or a stable originary moment of an epidemiological crisis are rhetorical products; they may be acutely important for medical purposes but can prove quite deadly in cultural and political terms. In fact, the rhetoric of solutions, which is correctly the discursive currency at a time of pandemic, is also a common denominator of climate change discourse. This language of solutions determines our theorizations of political possibilities, but may misdirect more than it intends to when we are in the midst of long-term precarity. How to inoculate ourselves from this discourse of solutions while at the same time acknowledging the validity of much scientific discourse in its hegemonic and indigenous forms? In fact, most of us understand exactly what needs to be done when it comes to climate change: extractive industries have to be shuttered, consumption patterns have to be radically altered, equity has to inform every policy decision at every level, and violence, in its racialized, gendered, and environmental forms, have to be eradicated. Dimitri Ivanovsky’s description of a non-bacterial pathogen infecting tobacco plants appeared in an article in 1892 which ultimately led to the discovery of the mosaic virus in 1898.17 More than six thousand virus species have since been researched in depth and millions of types of viruses exist in every ecological system on this planet. They are probably the most populous life form on the planet. This particular strain of coronavirus, like the approximately six others known to infect humans thus far, has been around for many years. It has been around for so long that scientists cannot reasonably form an estimation. The word “novel” acknowledges its recent zoonotic transmission into human bodies but sarcastically feeds our fetish with newness. However, even the newness of SARS-CoV-2 is debatable in the sense that we have already witnessed the first novel coronavirus of the twenty-first century in 2003: in March of that year WHO issued a global alert about an “unexplained atypical pneumonia,” that would soon be called SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), a virus that crossed over 12 national boundaries. Social epidemiologists described it as the “first novel infectious disease epidemic of the twentyfirst century” (quoted Wald Loc. 87). So, although technically new, there’s more than just a passing resemblance between the current coronavirus and viral outbreaks of the past. Acutely, the penumbra of rhetoric which surrounds the virus in the public sphere is evidence of what James Joyce might have described as the same story told anew: “There extand by now one thousand and one stories, all told, of the same” (Joyce 1939, 5, lines 28–9). SARS-CoV-2 alarmingly replicates discourses of bodily infections, of villains and victims, of racial resiliency and white supremacy, of the weaponization of pandemic, and the invisibilization of “surplus populations” that infect global history already. This replication yet again proves that the biopolitics of the past does not inoculate the neoliberal present but amplifies the resurgence of violence. A closer scrutiny of the contemporary moment thus reveals the viral replication of “outbreak narratives” of the past (Wald 2). Priscilla Wald in her study on such a subject identifies “the repetition of particular phrases, images, and story lines,” which “produced a formula that was amplified by the extended treatment of these themes in the popular novels and films 481

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that proliferated in the mid-1990s” (2). To understand the rhetorical similarity between past infections and the coronavirus of today, including competing storylines about sites of origin, the identification of routes of transmission, and super-spreaders etc., we might turn to the formulaic plot that narratives of viruses utilize. The similarities between the visual economy of the Spanish Flu of 1918 and COVID-19, for example, is striking: circulating images of makeshift, hastilybuilt hospitals offer images of social control and resiliency in both cases, the enormity of the scale of such crises is represented through the sanitized and militarized removal of dead bodies, and haunting images of mass graves in Brazil and in the USA in recent weeks also mirror in the historical archive. Even the newfound fascination with masks and tailoring instructions on how to make them, which are currently circulating in Twitterverse, can be pre-dated to instructional posters on mask-making after the pandemic of 1918. The reason why such parallels are striking today is because much of the historical memory surrounding the flu of 1918 has been, perhaps deliberately, forgotten. In her study on the effects of the pandemic of 1918 in Ireland, Ida Milne notes that: “The archival material available on the Spanish Flu has only recently garnered interest among historians” (Milne Loc. 5). Historians of Ireland have generally favored the cholera epidemics and the Great Irish Famine as sites of critical enquiry; however, although the “the numbers of [Spanish flu] dead are on a scale comparable to the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century,” scholarly debate in Irish Studies on this time period has been diverted to commentaries and analyses of the 1916 Easter Rebellion, the First World War, and the Anglo-Irish War (Milne Loc. 5). Milne notes that the “pandemic represents a curious lacuna in Irish history, for it was omitted from the historiography until the last decade despite contemporary newspapers documenting its arrival and passage” (Loc. 5). The newness and the unpredictability are rhetorical layers that envelop SARS-CoV-2 just as potently as the protein membrane in which it is housed. The story of Sars-Cov2 is, for sure, banal in the sense that there is little that is new about the unfolding tragedy of global proportions. Like the Black Death, like the pandemic of 1918, the political responses and discursive patterns embroidering this outbreak rehearses older narratives from the middle ages. The stakes, however, are certainly higher now than they were before. As I conclude this brief chapter, the temperature of the Arctic has reached an all-time high, 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit, which is more than 30 degrees above the normal high temperature. This is momentous. COVID-19 does not initiate any healing of the planet’s ecology, as has been naively claimed. All it does is what an apocalypse should do: illustrate the nature of endings and illuminate the causes of extinctions.

Notes 1 In a media briefing on March 11, 2020, the Director General of WHO noted that “WHO has been assessing this outbreak around the clock and we are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction. We have therefore made the assessment that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic.” See www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/ who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19–11-march-2020 2 See Susan Sontag. This is a combined edition of two landmark studies by Sontag. 3 Caoilinn Hughes, “This will train us to work together,” in “Irish writers on COVID-19.” 4 Cytokine storms are considered to be a complication of respiratory diseases, such as SARS and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) but can also occur with other illnesses. Cytokines are proteins that are triggered as a part of the human immune responses to infection and lead to inflammation. The “storms” refer to a condition in which such responses are dangerously heightened. The phenomenon became widely known after the “bird flu” or H5N1 epidemic of 2005. For more information see www. newscientist.com/term/cytokine-storm/ 5 For an analysis of how the ecology of famines may be addressed through an understanding of the economy of famines see Amartya Sen. Sen’s critique has been greatly expanded in recent decades in the

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6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17

light of neoliberal practices of empire. For a comparative reading of the Bengal and Irish Famines see Margaret Kelleher. See Michel Foucault’s numerous interventions on the subject from the 1960s onwards. The idea of governmentality and sovereignty are clearly articulated in his published lectures. See, for instance, Dorian Lynsky. See John McCourt for his reflections on Ulysses during the COVID-19 lockdown in Italy. See Zintl, et al. 445. See Zintl, et al. 442. See Sen (2019). Leo Varadkar in a highly anticipated and eloquently delivered speech called for such a measure on March 27, 2020. See: www.gov.ie/en/speech/f27026-speech-of-an-taoiseach-leo-varadkar-td-government-buildings-27-march/ See www.cnn.com/2020/06/16/europe/ireland-asylum-direct-provision-coronavirus-intl/index.html I am influenced here by Rob Nixon’s striking formulation of invisible, out-of-sight, long-term environmental violence. Further studies are also forthcoming in these areas. See in particular Malcolm Sen, Ed., The Cambridge History of Irish Literature and the Environment. In June 2020, the organization Women’s Aid Ireland introduced the hashtag “#IBelieveHer on Twitter which further revealed the endemic nature of such violence. See Antoine Danchin.

Works cited Ahuja, Neel. Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of the Species. Duke University Press, 2016. Barry, Kevin. Dark Lies the Island. Graywolf Press, 2015. Berger, James. After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Boland, Eavan. “Outside History.” Collected Poems. Carcanet Press, 1995. Boland, Eavan. “Quarantine.” https://poets.org/poem/quarantine. Camus, Albert. The Plague. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. A. A. Knopf, 1948. Danchin, Antoine. The Delphic Boat: What Genomes Tell Us. Translated by Alison Quayle. Harvard University Press, 2002. Davis, Mike. The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu. The New Press, 2005. D’Eramo, Marco. “A Philosopher’s Pandemic.” New Left Review, Vol. 122, March–April 2020, pp. 23–28. Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. Picador, 2009. Freyne, Patrick. “People of Colour in Ireland Need Allies ‘Not Bystanders’.” Irish Times, June 18, 2020. “Irish Writers on COVID-19: ‘We’re all Having a Shockin’ Dose of the Wombles’.” Irish Times, March 28, 2020. www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/irish-writers-on-covid-19-we-re-all-having-ashockin-dose-of-the-wombles-1.4212107. Joyce, James. Ulysses. The Egoist Press, 1922. Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. Viking Press, 1939. Kelleher, Margaret. The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible? Duke University Press, 1997. Kelly, Fiach, Pat Leahy, Jennifer Bray, Harry McGee, and Marie O’Halloran. “Programme for Government: What Are the Main Points in the Five-Year Plan?” Irish Times, June 14, 2020. www.irishtimes. com/news/ireland/irish-news/programme-for-government-what-are-the-main-points-in-the-fiveyear-plan-1.4279046?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes. com%2Fnews%2Fireland%2Firish-news%2Fprogramme-for-government-what-are-the-main-pointsin-the-five-year-plan-1.4279046. Lynsky, Dorian. “‘Things Fall Apart’: The Apocalyptic Appeal of WB Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’.” Irish Times, May 30, 2020. www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/30/things-fall-apart-the-apocalypticappeal-of-wb-yeats-the-second-coming. Ma, Ling. Severance. Picador, 2018. McCormack, Mike. Solar Bones. Soho Press, 2017. McCourt, John. “Leopold Locked Down.” Dublin Review of Books, No. 123, June 2020. www.drb.ie/blog/ writers-and-artists/2020/06/16/leopold-locked-down. McLaughlin, Danielle. “In the Act of Falling.” Dinosaurs on Other Planets. Random House, 2016.

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Milne, Ida. Stacking the Coffins: Influenza, War and Revolution in Ireland, 1918–1919. Manchester University Press, 2018, Kindle Edition. Moore, Lorrie. “Experiencing the Coronavirus Pandemic as a Kind of Zombie Apocalypse.” The New Yorker, April 6, 2020. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/the-nurses-office. Mulhall, Anne. “The Ends of Irish Studies? On Whiteness, Academia, and Activism.” Irish University Review, Vol. 50, No. 1, 2020, pp. 94–111. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence: The Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011. O’Brien, Cormac. “Ireland in the Age of AIDS.” Irish Review, Vol. 53, pp. 45–59. Pacifico, Francesco. “Stop Making Points: Rome Coronavirus Dispatch.” There Is No Outside: COVID-19 Dispatches. Edited by Jessie Kindig, Mark Krotov, and Marco Roth. Verso, 2020, pp. 103–116. Rose, Jacqueline. “Pointing the Finger.” London Review of Books, Vol. 42, No. 9, May 7, 2020. www.lrb. co.uk/the-paper/v42/n09/jacqueline-rose/pointing-the-finger. Sen, Amartya. Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Oxford University Press, 1983. Sen, Malcolm, Ed. The Cambridge History of Irish Literature and the Environment. Cambridge University Press, 2021. Sen, Malcolm. “Risk and Refuge: Contemplating Precarity in Contemporary Irish Literature.” Irish University Review, Vol. 49, No. 1, 2019, pp. 13–31. Sen, Malcolm and Julie McCormack Weng. Race in Irish Literature and Culture. Cambridge University Press, 2021. Sontag, Susan. Illness and Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Picador, and Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1978, 1988. Theroux, Marcel. “The End of Coronavirus: What Plague Literature Tells Us about Our Future.” The Guardian, May 4, 2020. www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/01/the-end-of-coronavirus-whatplague-literature-tells-us-about-our-future. Wald, Priscilla. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Duke University Press, 2008. Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota Press, 2018, Kindle edition. Zintl, Annetta, Grace Mulcahy, Theo de Waal, Valerie de Waele, Catherine Byrne, Marguerite Clyne, Nicholas Holden, and Seamus Fanning. “An Irish Perspective on Cryptosporidium. Part 1.” Irish Veterinary Journal, Vol. 59, No. 8, 2006, pp. 442–447.

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Index

Note: Italicized page numbers indicate a figure on the corresponding page. Page numbers in bold indicate a table on the corresponding page. Abbey Theatre 305 abortion rights 5, 61, 104, 104, 260 Abrahamson, Lenny 386 abuse: of animals 362; by Catholic Church 6, 65; child abuse 265–266, 404, 408, 420; domestic abuse 4, 11n3, 220, 478; introduction to 420–423; Irish State and 423; narrative in fiction 420–432; sexual abuse 11n3, 408–409, 420; of women 11n3 ACCBank 160 Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) 266, 302, 475 activism: environmental activism 352; feminist activism 232–233; literary activism 240n3; media activism 388–389; new media and 388–389; political activism 238, 240n3, 272, 409; queer activism 232–233, 249, 251 Act of Union (1801) 150–151 Act to Prevent the Cruel and Improper Treatment of Cattle (1822) 363 Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (Quayson) 7, 371 affective/cultural recalibrations 158–160 affect theory 159–160 Africa/Africans 203–212, 474–475, 479–481 African Americans 28, 140, 142 African-Caribbean 155–156 African Irish 28, 210 After Ireland: Writing the Nation from Beckett to the Present (Kiberd) 292 After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (BrittonPurdy) 353

Agamben, Giorgio 476 aging body in Irish writing: dementia narratives 444–445; introduction to 435–436; reclaiming middle age 436–441; reimagining old age 441–444 Agrawal, Arun 352 Agri-business 210 Ahern, Bertie 100 Ahmed, Sara 254 Ahuja, Neel 472, 475 AIB 161, 162, 169n5, 232 AkiDwa 212 Alliance Party 112, 118 Allister Jim 86 All the Year Round 282 Alternative Miss Ireland contest 245 Alzheimer’s disease 444 American Chamber of Commerce 132 American Community Survey (ACS) 139–140 American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS) 7, 21–22, 23 American Journal of Philology 16 Amhrán na bhFiann (National Anthem) 337 Ancient Order of Hibernians 16, 140 Andrejevic, Mark 39, 159 Anglocentric provincialism 33 Anglo-Irish Agreement 117, 466 Anglo-Irish Bank 101, 160, 303 Anglo-Irish War 482 Anglo-Norman 37, 199 Anglo Republic: Inside the Bank that Broke Ireland (Carswell) 304

485

Index

animal studies 362–368, 368n1 Annála Ríoghachta Éireann (“Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland”) (Ó Cléirigh) 51 Anomalous States: Irish Writing in the Post-Colonial Moment (Lloyd) 25–26 Anthropocene 353–357, 478–482 anti-colonial revolution 19 anti-feminist unconscious 25 antiquarian genealogy of interdisciplinary scholarship 47–55 Antiquary, The (Scott) 50 Antiquities of Ireland (Ledwich) 50 anti-sex, anti-body extremism 423–425 ANU Productions 301–302, 467 Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Curtis) 363–364 apokalypsis, defined 480 Apple 101–102, 194 Aquinas, Thomas 262 Architectural Association of Ireland’s (AAI) 455 architectural studies: ghost estates 452–454; introduction to 405, 448; market forces 454–457, 455; overview of 449–452, 451 archives/archival research 55, 248, 468 art exhibitions in post-Celtic Tiger period 314–316 “arthouse sensibility” ethos 388 artistic self-identity 301 Art of Life, The (Durcan) 440 Arts and Crafts Movement 319–320 Arts Council’s Playwright’s Commission Scheme (1999) 302 Asava, Zélie 387 Asian 153–155, 190, 200, 207, 221 Asquith, H.H. 59 Associaçao Brasileira de Estudos Irlandeses 40 Astonished Birds Cara, Jane, Bob, and James (Walsh) 298 Asylum Archive 316–317 asylum seekers 11, 203–214, 220, 236, 250, 316–318, 476–477 atheist 199 At Home in the Revolution: What Women Said and Did in 1916 (McDiarmid) 238 Atlas of the Irish Revolution 62 Audiovisual Action Plan (2017) 191–192 austerity: commemoration/remembrance acts 461–469; effects of 4–6, 128, 206; gender inequalities 231–233; introduction to 3–5; postCeltic Tiger period 302–304; post-crash norms 160–164, 162; of post-recession public culture 158–159; recession and 197, 232, 304, 390, 464; see also crash; recession Babine, Karen 367 Backus, Margot Gayle 248 Bailed Out! (Murphy) 303 bailouts 4–5, 62, 101, 196, 231–232, 303, 336, 393 486

Balbriggan (Co. Dublin) 214–215 Baltic States 210 Bank of Ireland 100, 160–161, 169n3, 232 Bank of Scotland 160 Barnard, Toby 313–314 Barrett, Gerard 383–384, 386 Barry, Aideen 312–313, 314, 316 Barry, Kevin 479–480 Barry, Sebastian 220–221, 421–432, 443 Baume, Sara 476 Bayliss, Darren 193 Beckett, Samuel 7, 371 “becoming animal” theory 366–367 Beiner, Guy 69 Belfast Agreement see Good Friday Agreement Belfast City Council 113, 116–117 Belfast Dockers Strike 117 Belfast Mobility Project 117 Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society 52 Belfort, Jordan 167 Belgium 40, 176, 182 Bell, Lian 304–305 Beloved Stranger (Boylan) 444 Benedict XVI, Pope 266 Benjamin, Walter 358 Bersani, Leo 254 Beside the Fire: A Collection of Irish Gaelic Folk Stories (Hyde) 54 Bhabha, Homi 381 Bhattacharyya, Gargi 231–232 Bigger, Francis Joseph 54 bilingualism 78 biographical reading 284–286 biomorality 159 biopolitics 199, 200, 205, 236–237, 347, 472, 481 bird flu (H5N1) 482n4 birth control legalization 306 birthright citizenship 207 Black Africans 209 Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-currents of the African and Irish Diasporas, The (Lloyd, O’Neill) 28 Black British 154 Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and MixedRace Identities on Irish Film and Television, The (Asava) 387 Black Lives Matter movement 461, 476 Black Pride Ireland 251 Blessing, Charles A. 227 Blindboy Boatclub podcasts 167 Bliss, Panti 234, 248, 306–307 Bloodroot (Ní Churreáin) 251–252 Bloom, Peter 167 Blyth, Mark 158–159 Boland, Eavan 275–276, 293, 437 border 47, 91, 172, 179, 181–186 Borkowski, Tomasz 37–38

Index

Boston 19, 124, 127, 138, 320, 340 Boston Globe 39 Boulding, Kenneth 358 Bowen, Elizabeth 7 Bowyer, Susanna 249 Boylan, Clare 444 Bradley, Finbarr 84 Bradshaw, Brendan 48, 261 Braon Aníos, An (Ó Scolaí) 84 Brazil 9, 36, 40, 203, 214, 339, 482 Brazys, Samuel 163 Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies 248 Breezy Point/Rockaway Point in Queens 140 Brexit: deportation after 207; estimating economic impact of 181–184, 182, 183; introduction to 5, 6, 9, 172; Ireland’s economic relationships and 172–185, 173–174, 175–176, 177, 178–179, 182, 183; Irish border and 179–181; Northern Ireland and 106, 110–111; summary of 185–186, 186 Brim, Matt 252–253 Briody, Mícheál 69 British literary studies 277 Britton-Purdy, Jed 353 Broken Harp: Identity and Language in Modern Ireland, The (Mac Síomóin) 84 Brontë, Charlotte 282–283 Brown, ACL 16 Brown, Bill 312 Brown, Christy 373–374 Brown, Noël 260 Bruton, John 64 Bureau of Military History 468 Burke, Edmund 49 Burke, Tom 261 Burned (McBride) 113 Burns, Anna 416 Burton, Frank 114 Cabinet of Irish Literature, The (Tynan) 282–283 Cahill, Susan 234, 409 Callistus I, Pope 262 Cambrensis, Geraldus 362 Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets (Dawe) 239, 291 Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800–2000 (Quinn) 292 Campbell, Joseph 17 Canada/Canadian 7, 32, 128, 181 Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 248, 312 Cannon, Feidlim 301 canon: autobiographical canon 436; British novels 272; Catholic Church and 424; civil law vs. 264; of drama 300; English literary achievement 19; gay literary canon 248; gendered economies of 237; Irish modernists 27; Irish studies 201; Irish writers and 367, 382, 407, 416;

phallogocentrism of 238–239; of poetry 291–292; rethinking of 275–282, 473; US Irish Studies programs 7; world literature 35 capitalism: culture of 234, 394, 480; neoliberal capitalist culture 8, 11, 272, 313, 345–347, 401, 406, 453 Carson, Ciaran 298 Carswell, Simon 304 Casey, Eamonn 61 Catholic Church (Catholicism): anti-sex, antibody extremism 423–425; ethno-religious divisions 152–153; in fiction 282; during Great Normalization period 104; introduction to 5–6; Irish identities and 142, 201, 261; in Irish Studies 5–6, 260–268; normalization of Ireland and 96; progressive identity vs. 142; repression of sexuality by 404; sectarianism and 111–114, 119; separatism and 61–62; sexual abuse crisis 6, 65, 408–409, 420; social liberalization agenda against 134; Troubles, the 111, 118, 266–267; working-class immigrants 151 Catholic Emancipation (1929) 363, 462 Cawley, Anthony 191 Cearta Sibhialta na Gaeltachta 85 Cedarstrom, Carl 159 Celt/Celticism 16, 51 Celtic Phoenix 81, 97 Celtic Studies boom 15–18 Celtic Tiger period: architectural development during 405; austerity of 4; consumer labor after 160; cryptosporidiosis disease 474; digital content and social media during 190; economists’ explanations for 98; emigration and 127–128; end of 97, 100, 407, 464; expansion of 7–8; foreign direct investment and 62; gay Irish man symbology and 249; immigrant jobs under 209; impact of digital Ireland 194–195; interrelated power interests and 65; languagerelated developments 78; multiculturalism/ multiracialism influence 28; prosperity of 3, 466; redistribution of economic activity 454; sports and 336; transformation of Dublin during 220–221; see also post-Celtic Tiger period Census 2016 Summary Report 36 Centenaries see Decade of Centenaries Centenary production 326–327 Central Remedial Clinic 374 Chaos at the Crossroads (McDonald, Nix) 450 Chicago 20–21, 140–143, 146n2, 146n6 Chicago Daily Tribune 223 child abuse 265–266, 404, 408, 420 childhood 75, 141–145, 280, 341, 376, 387, 404–411, 433n11, 479 Chile 124 China 9, 40, 91, 203, 221, 226, 281, 471, 481 Chinese 34, 40, 154, 222, 225 487

Index

citizenship: affective/cultural recalibrations 158–160; birthright citizenship 207; Good Friday Agreement and 204–205; introduction to 158; post-crash norms 160–164, 162; socially progressive neoliberalism 163, 164–166; summary of 166–167 Citizenship Referendum (2004) 6, 199, 306 civic participation of immigrants 211–212 civil rights 207, 306 Civil Rights Movement 138 Civil War 60, 63–64, 461, 466 class-based politics 97 cleanliness narrative in fiction 425–426 Clemenceau, Georges 262 Clifton, Harry 292 climate change 353–358 Clinton, Bill 61, 146n7 Clinton, Hillary 142 Close Encounter: Meetings with Remarkable Buildings exhibition 456–457 Cohen, Jean Louis 455 Cohesion Sharing and Integration legislation 116 Coimisiún na Gaeltachta (Gaeltacht Commission) 78 Coinneáil Orainn (Ó Scolaí) 84 Collins, Lucy 238 Collins, Michael 124 Collins, Stephen 264 Colombia 124 commemoration/remembrance acts 461–469 commercial nationalism 166–167 Commission for Racial Equality 153 Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse 65 Commonage project 453 Common Travel Area (CTA) 150, 151–152, 156 Commonwealth Immigration Act (1962) 153 COMMON? (Woods) 357 communal life history 421 communist 199 Connell, John 363 Conrad, Kathryn 248 Constellations (Gleeson) 444 consumer labor 160 Conway, William 267 Coogan, Tom 376–377, 377n3 Cook, Tim 168 Cooke, Barrie 364 Cooke, John 316, 317, 319 Cooper, Vickie 166 Cork 62, 196, 199, 305, 314, 320 Cork Folklore Project 69 Corktowners 221–225, 222 coronavirus see COVID-19 pandemic corporation tax rates 126 corporatism 125, 158, 164 Cottage Interior, Claddagh, Galway (Topham) 315 Coughlan, Patricia 237 Couser, G. Thomas 375 488

COVID-19 pandemic: ageist assumptions and 445; Anthropocene and 478–482; emigration and 134–135; existential threat of 85; global Ireland and 123–126; immigration and 215; impact of 91, 97, 105, 300, 406, 475–478; introduction to 4–5; overview of 471–472; pandemic predictions 472–475; quarantining during 478; rapid spread of 44; “shelter in place” order 477 Cow Book: A Story of Life on a Family Farm, The (Connell) 363 crash, the (2008): act of reclamation during 330; architectural sensibilities and 405, 452–456; arts after 272; in fiction 347, 393–401; impact of 194–195, 271, 393–396; LGBTQ+ community and 247, 300; political study of 350; post-crash norms 160–164, 162; queer studies after 247–250; Spinning Heart, The (Ryan) 393–401; sports during 334; unfinished business complexes 196; see also austerity Creative Ireland initiative 163 credit crunch 100 Creedon, David 316 cricket 337 Crisis, Austerity and Everyday Life (Bhattacharyya) 231–232 critical race studies/critical race theory 5, 275, 346, 387 Croke, Thomas 335 Cronin, Michael 84, 355 Cronin, Mike 338, 343n14, 343n15 Cross, Dorothy 254 Cross, Tom Peete 16 Crosson, Seán 379 cryptosporidiosis 474 cuckoo funds 161 Culchie 199 Cullinan, Elizabeth 237 Cullingford, Elizabeth 7, 25 cultural binaries 252 cultural development/heritage: folkloristics/ folklore studies 70–73; introduction to 6–7, 271–273; material culture in post-Celtic Tiger period 311–321 cultural identity 118 cultural memory 44, 55, 155, 473 cultural policies 38, 91, 126, 188, 211 culture war 113–114 Curtis, Edmund 40 Curtis, L. Perry 363–364 Dáil Éireann 59 Dam-Burst of Dreams (Nolan) 375 Danske Bank 160 Davies, William 160 Davis, Mike 481 Deaf poetry 373 Deane, Seamus 23, 24, 25, 277, 345

Index

Dearg le Fearg 79, 87 Death of the Irish Language: A Qualified Obituary, The (Hindley) 78 death/regeneration narratives 138 De Búrca, Sinéad 245–246 Decade of Centenaries 319–320, 325–327, 389, 405, 461, 462–465, 468 Deckard, Sharae 356 decolonization 109, 152, 425 Deenihan, Jimmy 133 dementia narratives 444–445 Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) 86–91, 110, 112–113, 180 demography during Great Normalization period 102–103 “de-nationalizing” of Irish cinema 380 De Paor, Louis 330 Department for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs (DCRGA) 81 D’Eramo, Marco 476 Derrida, Jacques 363 Derry City Football Club 336 Derry/Londonderry 116–117 de-skilling concerns 209 detective fiction 3, 277, 280–281 Detroit Free Press 222, 223–228 Detroit News 223–227 Devereux, Sarah 253, 253, 254–255 Devotional Revolution 264 diaspora outside Ireland see emigration; Irish America; Irish diaspora living outside Ireland Dickens, Charles 282, 283 diffusive perspective of Irish culture 33 Digital Hub Development Authority (DHDA) 192–194, 196 digital humanities 239 digital scholarship: agricultural base of 188–190; economic recovery and 196; high technology development zone 192–194; impact on economic crisis 194–195; introduction to 188; records of folkloristics/folklore studies 75–76; report on industry’s potential 190–192 digitization 43–44, 125, 190, 196 Dillon, Myles 20 Direct Provision system 204, 205, 208, 212, 316–317, 320, 476–477 Disability, Representation and the Body in Irish Writing, 1800–1922 (Mossman) 370–371 disability rights movement 370 disability studies: introduction to 370; Nolan, Christopher 372, 373–377; research directions 370–373 discrimination in school admissions 211 disruptive technologies 191 divorce rights 61, 306 Docherty, Thomas 26 domestic abuse 4, 11n3, 220, 478

domestic precarity 3–5 domestic violence in fiction 408 Dominican Tallaght Institute 264 Donegal fiddle style 70 Donoghue, Emma 248, 280, 281–284 Donohoe, Paschal 161 Double Irish 194–195 Down All the Days (Brown) 373 Doyle, Roddy 439–440 Dracula (Stoker) 284–286 Drogheda (Co. Louth) 168, 214–215 Dubai 132 Dublin City Business Association 221 Dublin City University 33, 248 Dublin Civic Trust 221 Dublin Docklands 189, 193 Dublin Docklands Development Agency (DDDA) 193 Dublin Gay Collective 249 Dublin Murder Squad novels 280 Dublin Tenement Museum 73–75 duine beag (“little person”) 245 Dunn, Joseph 16 Dunne, Shaun 301–302 Durcan, Paul 444 Dyas, Grace 301 Easter Rising (1916) 59, 64, 462–463, 465–466 ecocriticism 355, 363, 365, 367, 383–385 Economic and Social Research Institute 159 economic boom 3, 62, 188–189, 303, 409–410, 438, 463 economic crisis 3–5, 194–195, 205; see also austerity; crash; recession economic recovery 11, 124, 127, 132, 196, 448 Economist, The 98 economy/economic performance: bailouts 4–5, 62, 101, 196, 231–232, 303, 336, 393; Brexit and 172–185, 173–174, 175–176, 177, 178–179, 182, 183; business economy and emigration 132–134; collapse of 128; credit crunch 100; Great Normalization years 98–102, 100; impact of digital Ireland 194–195 eco-social art practices 357–358 Edwards, R.W. (“Robin”) Dudley 48–49 EFTA 181 8th Amendment removal 5, 104, 260 Éire-Ireland 22, 24, 312 Eliot, George 282–283 Elizabeth II, Queen 129 Ellmann, Richard 19–20 emigration: business economy and 132–134; concerns over 36, 96; COVID-19 pandemic impact 134–135; diasporic homecomings 129–131; historic patterns 127–129; St. Patrick’s Day brand and 9–10, 131–132; to and from UK 177, 177–178; to US 228n1; see also 489

Index

immigrants/immigration; Irish diaspora living outside Ireland emotional repression in fiction 408 English historiography 48 enigmatic signifier 420–421, 432n6 Ennis, Séamas 72–73 Enright, Anne 408, 410–415, 441–442 environmental activism 352 Environmental Humanities scholarship 364 environmentalism/environmental studies/ environmental theory: challenges to 358; climate change 353–358; defined 350, 352; problem of 349–351; scale jumping 354–355; species thinking 351–354 Enyi-Amadi, Chiamaka 235–236 “Epithalamion” (Hopkins) 252 “Epithalamion” (Liddy) 252 Equal Act (2004) 204 Equality Authority 204 Equality Commission for Northern Ireland 115–116 Equal Status Act (2004) 204 Ervine, Linda 89 Estudios Irlandeses (Flynn, Tracy) 381 Ethnic Options (Waters) 138 ethnic organizations 146n6 ethnic self-consciousness 138 ethno-nationalism 11, 112, 151 ethno-political differences 114 ethno-religious divisions 152–153 Euro-American lexicographers 15 European Central Bank (ECB) 4–5, 101, 161 European Commission 37, 102, 176, 189, 195 European Convention on Human Rights 116 European Council Summit (2019) 180 European Economic Community (EEC) 172 European Federation of Associations and Centers of Irish Studies (EFACIS) 38–40 European Network Against Racism (ENAR) 206 European Union (EU): accession states 203; British relations with 149; economic performance 98, 101; emigration rate in 36; Ireland’s economic relationship with 172–185, 173–174, 175–176, 177, 178–179, 182, 183; Irish nationals within 128; tax processes crackdown 195 evangelical 90, 92n30, 201 exceptionalism 4–5, 8, 382, 424, 472 exports 174–176, 175–176 Extinction Rebellion 349 Facebook 191 Facetime 128 failed multiculturalism 206 Fáilte Ireland 133–134, 341 Far East 128 far-right parties 213–214, 233 490

Fassbender, Michael 149 father narrative in fiction 425–428, 433n9 Featsa 81 Feldman, Allen 26 female subjectivity 418n15 feminism/feminist studies: animal studies and 366–367; Anthropocene debate and 353–354; anti-feminist unconscious 25; art of 253–254; nation, the 304–305; post-Celtic Tiger period 304–305; studies of 15, 265, 292; Waking the Feminists movement 256n18, 304–305; see also women feminist activism 232–233 feminist theory 346, 348n4, 366 Fennell, Cillian 326 Ferriter, Diarmaid 43, 464 fetishization of youth 435 Fianna Fáil 9, 60–64, 97, 101, 102, 105, 168 fiction studies see Irish fiction fiddle style studies 70 Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions (Deane et al) 291 Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Deane et al) 277 film studies 379, 387–388; see also media representations of identity Fine Gael 9, 61–64, 79, 80; coalition attempts 97, 101; election of 464–465; failures of 168; support for 102 Fired! 291–292 Five Irish Women: The Second Republic 1960–2016 (Nolan) 240 flag flying 113 Flanagan, Peter 149 “Florida Wedding” (McCann) 251 Floyd, George 476 Flynn, Roddy 385 Focus Ireland 123 Fogarty, Anne 238, 407, 409 folkloristics/folklore studies 44, 69–76 Following Frida (O’Donnell) 437–438 food resource management 364 For All We Know (Carson) 298 Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (Keating) 51 Foras na Gaeilge 245 forced inclusion policy 152 Ford, Edsel 224 Ford, Henry 224 foreign direct investment (FDI) 101–102, 123, 184, 189–190, 196 Forfás 190 Formation of a Folklorist (Ó Catháin) 69 Formations of Violence: the Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Feldman) 26 Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Levine) 279 Forum Polonia 212

Index

Foster, Arlene 89 Foster, John Wilson 363–364 Foster, Roy 62 Foucault, Michel 352, 479 Four Sides Full (Groarke) 437 fox 365–366 France/French 15–16, 33–39, 48–54, 144, 164, 262–263, 338, 393, 424, 452 Frawley, Oona 403 Freedgood, Elaine 278–279 Freefall (West) 304 Freeman, Elizabeth 254 Free Market News 454–455 FREESPACE exhibitions 448, 456, 457 French, Tana 3, 280–281 Freud, Sigmund 396–398, 420 Fruit of the Loom 189, 190 Fuller, Louise 260 Full Irish: New Architecture in Ireland (Lappin) 449, 457 Gaeilgeoir Deireanach Charna (Ó hEaghra’) 84 Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) 334–337, 340, 455 Gaelic League/Conradh na Gaeilge 17, 85 Gaeltacht, the/Gaeltachtaí areas linguistic struggles 45, 78–91 Gaeltacht Act (2012) 80 Gallagher, Anne 36 Galway. 6, 15, 26, 49, 53, 196, 305 Gans, Herbert 139 Garda Síochána, An 213 Garda Síochána Intercultural Office, An 204 garment manufacturer 189 Gathering, The (Enright) 412, 415 “Gathering, The” project 130–131 Gathering Evidence (Hughes) 298 Gay Community News 248 Gay Health Action 266 Gay Pride 164 Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change (Meaney) 235 gender inequality 212, 305 Gender Recognition Act (2015) 201 gender studies: animal studies and 365; biopolitics 205, 236–237; introduction to 230–231; materialist approaches 233–236; in post-Tiger period 231–233; recovery projects 238–239; summary of 239–240; transnational gender studies paradigm 237–238 gender theory 200–201 generational inequality 161 genre studies 277–280 Georgian 34, 73, 316, 451–452 Ghaeilge agus an Éiceolaíocht, An/Irish and Ecology (Cronin) 84 Ghaeilge san aois nua, An/Irish in the new century (Cronin) 84

Ghaziani, Amin 252–253 ghost estates 96, 316, 448, 452–454 Ghost Light (O’Connor) 441 Ghosts of the Faithful Departed (Creedon) 316 Gibbons, Luke 382–383 Gildersleeve, Basil 16 Gill, Rosalind 159 Gilsenan, Alan 32–33 Ging, Debbie 386 Girl Who Married the Reindeer, The (Ní Chuilleanáin) 295–298 Gladwin, Derek 355–356 Glassie, Henry 26, 311 Glassland (Barrett) 386 Gleeson, Sinéad 277 global agro-capitalism 481 Global Benchmark Complexity Report 132 global capitalism 8, 255 global Dublin 125 global Ireland 123–126 Global Ireland: Ireland’s Global Footprint to 2025 124 Global Irish: Ireland’s Diaspora Policy strategy 133 Global Irish Economic Forum (2009) 130 globalization 8, 103, 114, 124, 410 global neoliberalism 384 Goffman, Erving 374 golf 338 González-Arias, Luz Mar 234 Good Friday Agreement (1998): impact of 86, 96, 106, 110, 115–116; integration and cooperation since 184; Irish Britain after 155; Irish citizenship and 204–205; ratification of 292 Google 191, 193 Gothic 51, 280–281, 316, 372 Government of Ireland Act (1920) 60 Grafton Architects 450–451, 451, 455, 457 Graham, Mark 252 Great Famine 103, 462 Great Hunger (1845-49) 362 Great Normalization period: Brexit and 106; economy/economic performance 98–102, 100; introduction to 96–98; liberalization during 103, 103–105, 104, 105; migration and demography 102–103 Great Recession see recession Greek 15–16, 34, 225, 480 Greeley, Andrew 137, 138 Green, Alice Stopford 53 Greene, David 20 Green Party 9, 99 Green Road, The (Enright) 408, 410–415, 441–442 Gregg, Melissa 159 Gregory, Lady Augusta 7 Gregory XIV, Pope 262 Gregory XVI, Pope 262 Gribben, Trevor 90 Griffin, Anne 441, 442 491

Index

Griffney, Noreen 249 Groarke, Vona 437 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 97, 98, 100, 172–174, 173–174, 196 gross national product (GNP) 194 Grown Ups (Keyes) 438–439 Guaranteed! (Murphy) 303 Guide to Sources for the History of Material Culture in Ireland, 1500–2000, A (Barnard) 314 Guts, The (Doyle) 439–440 Habitual Residence Condition (HRC) 209–210 Halberstam, Judith 245 Halepanavaar, Savita 104 Haliday, Charles 53 Hall, Catherine 152 Hall, Stuart 37, 271 Hamilton, Peter 160 Hanging Gardens, The (McGuinness) 444 Hanging with the Elephant (Harding) 442 Haraway, Donna 353 Hardiman, James 53 Harp, The 40 Harris, Rosemary 111 Harris, Simon 134 Harte, Liam 323 Harvard Mission 18 hate crimes 206, 213 hate speech 213–214 Haughey, Anthony 317–318 Haughey, Charles J. 98 Haverty, Anne 363 Hayes, Richard Francis 54–55 Hayes-McCoy, G.A. 48 Health and Family Planning Act (1992) 266 healthcare 134–135, 168, 190, 203, 212, 472 Heaney, Seamus 7, 23, 27, 114, 290–291 Heisse, Ursula K. 354 Henthorn, James 53 Herr, Cheryl 25 Hickey, Kieran 363 Higgins, Michael D. 330 high technology see tech industry Higson, Andrew 381 Hindley, Reg 78, 84 Hippolytus, Pope 262 Hispanics 140, 143 historicizing Ireland: antiquarian genealogy of interdisciplinary scholarship 47–55; folkloristics/ folklore studies 69–76; introduction to 43–45; Irish-language discourse 77–91; state histories 59–65 historiographical revolution 49 History of Ireland, A (Curtis) 40 History of Ireland in 100 Objects, A (O’Toole) 311 History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (Lecky) 49–50 492

History of Modern Irish Women’s Writing, A (Ó Gallchoir) 238 hockey 337 Holohan, Conn 381 homelessness concerns 102–103, 123 homeownership 228n2 Home Rule principles 463, 464 #HomeToVote 134 homophobia 307 Hong Kong 132 Hop Dance (Richtarick) 371 “Hopeful Monsters” (Joyce) 298 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 252 Horgan, Robert 23 household debt 99 Housing (Gaeltacht) (Amendment) Act (2001) 78 housing issues for immigrants 210–211 How Harry Became a Tree (Bhabha, Higson) 381 How the Irish Became White (Ignatiev) 28 Hughes, Caoilinn 298, 472 Huguenot 199 Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) 475 Human Rights Act (1998) 116 human rights investigations 208 human rights legislation 110 human trafficking 124 hybrid materiality 313 hyperobjects 354 I am a Homebird (It’s Very Hard) production 302 IBM 132 idealized maternity 404 identities see Irish identity Ideology and Innovation: The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 1881–1921: Ideology and Innovation (O’Leary) 28 Ignatiev, Noel 28 Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Heisse) 354 Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary 262 Immigrant Council of Ireland 206 immigrants/immigration: civic and political participation 211–212; Direct Provision system 204, 205, 208, 212; education issues 211; gender inequalities 212; during Great Normalization period 102–103; hate crimes 213; hate speech 213–214; housing issues 210–211; increases in 6, 8, 203; international protection and 208; introduction to 203–204; Irish identities 153–155, 200; migrant belonging 214–215; migrant workers 209–210; migration 102–103, 118; racial diversity of 222; racism and 204–207; state of 208–209; undocumented migrants 143, 204, 215; work rights of 209–210; see also emigration Immigration, Residence and Protection Bill, The (2008) 205

Index

Incident Management Support Team 471 India 32, 65, 164, 203, 207, 352, 456 Industrial Development Authority (IDA) 189 inflation rates 98 Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) 190 information-intensive companies 189 Ingelbien, Raphaë 278 #InspiringIreland film 133–134 Institute of Historical Research 48 institutionalization narrative in fiction 421–422 integrated education system 112 Intel 189 intellectual property (IP) 188 interdisciplinarity 273 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 349 Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services 349 International Council of Archives 71 International Financial Services Center (IFSC) 123, 163 International Monetary Foundation 350 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 4–5, 101 International Society for Ethnology and Folklore 69 Iovino, Serenalla 368 Ireland: A Smithsonian Natural History (Viney) 364 Ireland House 25, 27, 124, 146n2 Ireland in the European Eye 35 Ireland in the World Project 33 Ireland Literature Exchange 33 “Ireland Reaching Out” project 130–131 “Ireland’s Call” 337 Irish America: as diaspora engagement 146n1; identity formations 146n2; introduction to 137–138; late generation ethnicity 138–141; next generation 143–145, 147n9; politics and 141–143, 146n7; race and succession 220–228, 222, 224; summary of 145–146; US Irish Studies programs 7, 15–29 Irish American Cultural Institute 22 Irish “brand” 125, 129 Irish Britain: Common Travel Area 151–152; education and generic social legislation 150–151; homogenous reconfiguring 152–153; implications for Irish Studies 155–156; introduction to 149–150; Irish identities and 153–155; national formation 150–155 Irish Catholicism 34, 51 Irish Central Statistics Office (CSO) 97 Irish Central survey (2017) 142 Irish chronotype 365 Irish Cinema in the Twenty-First Century (Barton) 385 Irish Constitution (Bunreacht na hÉireann) 409 Irish Corktowners 221–225, 222 Irish Country Furniture, 1700–1950 (Kinmonth) 314

Irish Detroiters 222 Irish diaspora living outside Ireland: diasporic homecomings 129–131; diffusion and translation 32–34; European view of 34–36; importance of 124; introduction to 32; movement to US 7; soft power and 38–41; vernacular cosmopolitanism 36–38; see also emigration Irish Empire, The (TV series) 32–33 Irish exceptionalism see exceptionalism Irish fiction: anti-sex, anti-body extremism 423–425; against biographical reading 284–286; cleanliness narrative in 425–426; the crash in 393–401; father narrative in 425–428, 433n9; folklore 44, 69–76; introduction to 275–277; Irish Victorian novel 278; literary canons 277–280; middle age narratives 438–439; murder narrative in 428–430; music narrative in 427, 433n11; neohistorical novels 280–281; nuclear family narrative 410–415; old age narratives 441–442; realism in 278–279, 281–284; reimagining realism 281–284; short stories 421; trauma and recovery narratives 408–409; see also ageing body in Irish writing Irish Financial Services Centre (IFSC) 189 Irish folklore see folkloristics/folklore studies Irish Folklore Commission 44, 54, 70–71, 72–73 Irish Folklore Commission 1935–1970: History, Ideology, Methodology, The (Briody) 69 Irish Folklore Society 71 Irish Free State 60, 63 Irish Historical Studies 47, 48, 49, 54 Irish identity: Catholic identity 142, 201, 261; immigrants/immigration 153–155, 200; introduction to 199–201; mediated identities 386–388; multiculturalism/multiracialism 28, 200; political identity 113, 117–119; progressive identity 142; race and succession 220–228, 222, 224; social identity 374; sports and 338–340; see also media representations of identity Irish Independent 123 Irish language 45, 77–91 Irish Language Act 86–90, 87, 106 Irish-language dictionary 245 Irish Literature in the Celtic Tiger Years: Gender, Bodies, Memory (Cahill) 234 Irish Media: A Critical History (Flynn, Horgan) 385 Irish Melodies (Moore) 52 Irish Minstrelsy, or, Bardic Remains of Ireland (Hardiman) 53 Irish Monthly 276 Irish music studies: Decade of Centenaries 325–327; introduction to 323; “Mise Éire” production 327, 327–330; notes on 323–325; performance 327–329; referents and pathways 329–330; summary of 330–331 Irish Nationalist Women 1900–1918 (Pašeta) 238 493

Index

Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act (1956) 207 Irish Nationwide Bank 160 Irish neoliberalism see neoliberalism/neoliberal Irishness in North American Women’s Writing: Transatlantic Affinities (McWilliams) 237 Irish Network Against Racism (INAR) 206, 207 Irish poetry 290–298 Irish Queer Archive 248 Irish Queer Cinema (Macleod) 387 Irish Renaissance 19 Irish RM stories 365–366 Irish Rural Interiors exhibition 317 Irish Rural Interiors in Art (Kinmonth) 314, 315 Irish Scene in Somerville and Ross, The (Stevens) 365 Irish State: abuse and 423; Anglo-Irish Treaty 466; architecture and 457; austerity and recession 102; bailout program 336; bankruptcy and 101; capitalism and 167; Catholic Church and 404, 423, 431; cultural capitalism and 263; Decade of Centenaries 319–320, 325–327, 389, 405, 461, 462–465, 468; diaspora and 129, 131, 151; digital technologies 190; economic crisis and 189–195, 347, 380; failed multiculturalism 206; female subjectivity within 417n15; history of 43–44; immigration and 208; independence and 338; material culture 314, 317, 319–320; neoliberalism and 386, 388; origins of 351; as over-centralised 85; power dynamics of 63; private investment 98; racism and 204 Irish storytelling 70 Irish Studies Network 40 Irish Studies programs 7 Irish Studies Review 155 Irish Sweep 65 Irish Sword 48 Irish Texts Society 18 Irish Times 4–5, 40, 237, 247, 304, 364, 467, 476 Irish University Review 233, 235, 248 Irish Victorian novel 278 Irish War of Independence 60 Irlandia Jones poszukiwany (Ireland Jones Wanted) (Borkowski) 37–38 Jackeen 199 James Joyce Quarterly 22, 24 Jewish 28, 199 John Paul II, Pope 264 Johns Hopkins University 16 Johnson, Boris 11, 180 Johnson-Reed Act (1924) 225 Jordan 124, 169 Journal of Irish Studies 40 Joyce, James 7, 262, 276, 279, 371, 408 Joyce, Trevor 298 Karhio, Anne 35 Kavanagh, Noeline 301 KBC 161 494

Keane, Molly (M.J. Farrell) 7 Keating, Geoffrey (Seathrún Céitinn) 51 Keegan, Gary 301 Kelleher, John 19–22 Kennedy, John F. 22, 129, 141 Kennedy, Seán 233 Kenner, Hugh 19, 21 Kenny, Enda 80, 101, 132 Kerr, Aphra 191 Kestor, Grant 358 Keyes, Marian 438–439 Kiberd, Declan 292 Kiev 124 Kilfeather, Siobhán 248 Kinevane, Pat 302 King, Moynan 306 Kinmonth, Claudia 314, 315 Kinsella, Thomas 22 Kirby, Peader 250 kitesurfing 339 Kockel, Ullrich 69 Kolbert, Elizabeth 353 Krajenbrink, Marieke 36 Krugman, Paul 188 Lacon, Jacques 262 Lambert, Craig 160 Languages of Ireland (Ó Cuilleanáin) 37 Lappin, Sarah A. 449, 450 Larcom, Thomas 53 Last Invasion of Ireland: When Connacht Rose, The (Hayes) 54 late generation ethnicity 138–141 Latvia 34, 36, 127, 182 Laughter of Mothers, The (Durcan) 444 Lavin, Mary 7 Lawless, Emily 7 Lecky, W.E.H. 49–50 Ledwich, Edward 50 legacy of the Confederacy 406n2 legacy studies 403–406 legitimation of ethnicity 138 Lehman Brothers 4 Lemass, Seán 60, 124 Lenihan, Brian 80, 166 Lentin, Alana 206–207 Lentin, Louise 204–205, 389 Lesbians Talk Queer Notions (Smyth) 249 Levine, Caroline 279 LGBTQ+ community: growing representation of 272; homophobia 307; migrants 215; on-screen representation 387; poetry of 293; queer performance/theater 300, 305–308; same-sex marriage 5, 21, 61, 246, 306; suppression of 366; see also queer theory liberalization during Great Normalization period 103, 103–105, 104, 105 Liberia 124

Index

Liddy, James 252 Liddy, Susan 388 lifecourse imaginary 442 Likeness, The (French) 3, 280–281 Limerick 196, 264, 364, 453 Line Made By Walking, A (Baume) 476, 479 linguistic hybridity 11 Linguistic Society of America 16 LinkedIn 193 LIP Pamphlets 7 literary activism 240n3 literary history 19, 28, 238, 271–286, 382 literary tradition 29, 37, 293, 417n8 Lithuania 34, 36, 127, 204, 339 Liverpool 127 Lloyd, David 25–26, 28 Locating Irish Folklore: tradition, modernity, identity (Ó Giolláin) 72 London 63, 86, 110, 127, 132, 249, 283–284, 336, 441, 461 Lonely Battle of Thomas Reid, The (2018) 169n4 Long Island 140 Loomis, Roger Sherman 17 Los Angeles 124, 161 Lowe, Louise 301 low-paying jobs 209 Lowry, Alison 318 Luck and the Irish (Foster) 62 Luibhéid, Eithne 251 Macalister, R.A.S. 54 Mac Cormaic, Ruadhán 40 MacDonagh, Oliver 50 Mac Éinrí, Piaras 329–330 Macleod, Alison 387 Mac Risteaird, Seán 84 Macron, Emmanuel 164 Mac Síomóin, Tomás 84 Madden, Richard Robert 53 Magdalene Laundry 200, 390 Magennis, Caroline 234 “Magic in Corktown” (Pooler) 222, 222–226 Majekodunmi, Ola 200 Making the Grand Figure: Lives and Possessions in Ireland, 1641–1770 (Barnard) 313–314 Maleney, Ian 444 Malm, Andreas 353 Maltese/Malta 222–223, 226 marginalization of ageing populations 48 marginalization of women in history 48 Marriage Act (2015) 201 Marriage Act (2020) 201 Marriage Equality Referendum (2015) 5, 164, 351, 387 Martin, James 262 Martin, Micheál 104 Martin, Randy 158 Martin, Richard “Humanity Dick” 363

Martin, Violet 365–366 Martín-Ruiz, Ara 235 masculinity 233, 308, 347, 366, 384–386, 394–398, 439, 442 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 192 materialism/material culture: in fiction 411–415; in post-Celtic Tiger period 311–321; queer theory and 252–255, 253 “matrixial” theory 367 May, Imelda 200 McAleese, Mary 96 McBride, Sam 113 McCaffrey, Lawrence 21 McCann, Colum 7 McCann, Niamh 251–252 McCarthy, Mary 237 McCarthy Report 80–81 McCormack, Mike 474–476 McCurtain, Margaret 43 McDiarmid, Lucy 238 McDonald, Frank 450 McDonald, Mary Lou 168 McGregor, Conor 339–340 McGuinness, Frank 444 McGuinness, Martin 97, 114–115 McHugh, Joe 80 McKenna, Patrick 261 McKevitt, Georgina 304 McKibben, Sarah 233 McKiernan, Eoin 22, 24 McLaughlin, Danielle 478–479 McLeod, Kenneth 358 McLoone, Martin 380–382 McMahon Report (2018) 208 McWilliams, David 130 McWilliams, Ellen 237 Meaney, Gerardine 155, 235, 356 media activism 388–389 Media Labs Europe (MLE) 192–194 media representations of identity: ecocriticism 383–385; industry studies 385–386; introduction to 379–380; mediated identities 386–388; memory studies 389–390; new media and activism 388–389; summary of 390; transnational cinema 380–383 mediated identities 386–388; see also media representations of identity Megaceros Hibernicus (Cooke) 364 Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) 112 memoir 436, 440–441, 442–443 Memory Ireland series (Frawley) 403 memory studies 389–390, 403 Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema (Ging) 386 men’s middle age narratives 439–440 Meon Gaelach, Aigne Nualaíoch (Bradley) 84 Mercier, Vivian 20–21, 23 “Method Matters” (Graham) 252 Mexican 222–226 495

Index

Meyer, Kuno 16 middle age narratives 436–441 middle class 115 Middle East 124, 128 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) 482n4 midlife crisis 440 Migrant Integration Strategy (2007) 205 Migrant Rights Centre Ireland 206 migrant workers 209–210 migration 102–103, 118; see also immigrants/ immigration Migration Nation (2008) 205 Military Archives 468 military history 48, 50, 468 Military Service Pension Collection 468 Milkman (Burns) 416 Miller, Peter N. 50–51 Milne, Ida 482 Minor Monuments (Maleney) 444 Mise an fear ceoil: Séamus Ennis—Dialann Taistil 1942–1946 (Uí Ógáin) 69 “Mise Éire” production 327, 327–330 misogyny 347, 397 Mixed Martial Arts 339–340 Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture (Reynolds) 279 modernity 18–29, 124 Momigliano, Arnaldo 50 Monmouth 140 Moody, T.W. (“Theo”) 48–49 Moore, Jason W. 353, 358 Moore, Thomas 52 Morrissey, Sinéad 298 Mossman, Mark 370–371 mother-child narrative 409, 410–415 Movement of Asylum Seekers of Ireland 208 Moynihan, Daniel 137 Mulhall, Anne 233, 235, 246, 248, 250–251, 409, 476 Mulholland, Rosa 276 Mullally, Una 167 Mullen, Mary 278 Mullen, Patrick 246 multiculturalism/multiracialism 28, 200, 206 multilingualism 37 multinational capital assets 188 multinational corporations (MNCs) 97, 191 multinational domestic polity 150–151 Multi-Party (Good Friday) Agreement see Good Friday Agreement Mumbai 124 murder narrative in fiction 428–430 murder rates 3–5 Murphy, Antoin 232 Murphy, Ciara 466 Murphy, Colin 303 Murphy, Dervla 110 496

Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) 357 music narrative in fiction 427, 433n11 music studies see Irish music studies Muslim communities 203–204 My Left Foot (Brown) 373 Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922 (Valente) 233–234 Nagy, Joseph 18 narrative: abuse in fiction 420–432; of canon 275–282, 473; cleanliness 425–426; death/ regeneration 138; dementia 444–445; father 425–428, 433n9; institutionalization narrative 421–422; men’s middle age 439–440; middle age 436–441; mother-child 409, 410–415; murder 428–430; music 427, 433n11; nuclear family 410–415; occluded narration 294; old age 441–444; see also Irish fiction Nassau County 140 nation, the: abuse and 423, 432, 457; affective exuberance within 164; Catholic Church and 134, 265–266; economy and 4, 8, 193, 196, 306, 462–469; feminism and 304–305; gender studies 230, 240, 247, 251; Global Ireland 125; immigration and 212, 228; Irish Britain and 150–154; Irish literature and 292; languages of 37; legacy and 405, 409; media representations 380–383, 388, 390; music and 330; neoliberal tendencies 167 National Action Plan 476 National Archives 468 National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) 160, 165, 195 National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism (NCCRI) 204 National Intercultural Education Strategy 211 Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Deane) 345 nationalism/national identity 4, 11, 43, 166–167, 255n7 nationalizing strategies 125, 150 National League Party 64 National Library of Ireland 248 National Museum Collins Barracks 318 National Museum of Ireland 307 National University of Ireland Galway 365 National University of Ireland Galway (NUI Galway) 26, 358–359, 365 Naturalization Act (1970) 228n1 Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History (Foster) 363–364 NBC 142 Neocatechumenal Way 264 neohistorical novels 280–281 neoliberal capitalist culture 8, 11, 272, 313, 345–347, 401, 406, 453 neoliberalism/neoliberal 79–86, 124; affective/ cultural recalibrations 158–160; failure of 390; in fiction 400; gender inequalities and 231–233;

Index

global neoliberalism 384; introduction to 3; queer theory and 251; recession and 81, 158, 388; socially progressive neoliberalism 163, 164–166 neurocognitive disabilities 371 neutrality 151 New Critical study of Irish writers 15, 19 New Jersey’s Bergen County 140 New Materialism 313 New York 17, 20, 24, 127, 132, 140–143, 254 New Yorker, The 480 New York Times 281 New Zealand 40, 124, 128, 199, 338 Ngai, Mae 225 Nic Eoin, Máirín 7, 84 Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan 294–298 Ní Churreáin, Annemarie 251–252 Nigeria 207, 212, 287n11, 352 Nix, James 450 Nixon, Rob 352 Noble Call 306–307 Nolan, Christopher 372, 373–377 Nolan, Emer 240 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) 204, 206, 213 Nordic model 212 Normal People (Rooney) 4, 10–11 Northern Ireland: Brexit and 106, 110–111, 179–185; conflict in 27; difference and separation 111–114; diversity, sharing and integration 114–118; fiction studies 234; introduction to 109–111; summary of 118–119 Northern Ireland Act (1998) 115–116 Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission 116 Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) 185 Not to be Known or Named (Barry) 312–313 novel coronavirus see COVID-19 pandemic Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels, and Nineteenth-Century Realism (Mullen) 278 Nuashonrú ar an Staidéar Cuimsitheach Teangeolaíoch ar Úsáid na Gaeilge sa Ghaeltacht: 2006–2011 (Update on Comprehensive Linguistic Study of the Use of Irish in the Gaeltacht: 2006–2011) 83 nuclear family narrative 410–415 Nye, Joseph 38 Oakley, Francis 262 Obama, Barack 28, 129 Object Lessons (Boland) 437 O’Brien, Cormac 234 O’Brien, Edna 7 O’Brien, Eugene 262 O’Brien, Kate 7 Ó Catháin, Séamas 69 occluded narration 294 Ó Ceallaigh, Ben 80

Ó Cléirigh, Mícheál (Michael O’Clery) 51 Ó Conchubhair, Brian 45 O’Connell, Díog 382–383 O’Connell Street 221, 463, 466 O’Connor, Joseph 280, 284–286, 441 O’Connor, Maureen 234–235, 355–356 O’Conway, Matthias 15 O’Curry, Eugene 53 O’Donnell, Mary 437–438 O’Donovan, John 53 O’Dowd, Mary 43 Ó Duilearga, Séamus (James Hamilton Delargy) 54, 69, 72 OECD countries 103, 195, 303 O’Faolain, Nuala 436 O’Faolain, Sean 54–55 Office for National Statistics (ONS) 153–154 Official Guide (GAA) 335 Official Languages Act (2003) 78 Ó Gallchoir, Clíona 238 Ó Giolláin, Diarmuid 72 Ó Gráda, Cormac 188 O’Grady, James 53–54 O’Halloran, Clare 51 O’Halloran, Mark 308 Ó hEaghra, Breandán 84 Ó hÉallaithe, Donncha 83 O’Kelleher, Andrew 16 Ó Laoire, Lillis 84, 328 old age narratives 441–444 O’Leary, Eleanor 162 O’Leary, Philip 28 Olympic Games 338–339 Olympics 227, 338 O’Mahony, Deirdre 357–358 O’Malley-Younger, Alison 325 Ó Mhársa Go Magla: Straitéis nua don Ghaeilge (Mac Síomóin) 84 Ó Muilleoir, Máirtín 86 Ó Neachtain, Joe Steve 85 One Day as a Tiger (Haverty) 363 O’Neill, Peter D. 28 O’Neill, Terence 60 Operation Transformation (TV show) 166 oral folklore 75–76 oral history 43, 54–55, 70, 73–75 Orgad, Shani 159 Orientalism 51 Ó Searcaigh, Cathal 84 Ó Siadhail, Pádraig 7 Ó Súilleabháin, Seán 71 O’Sullivan, Kate 161, 162 O’Sullivan, Mick 161, 162 O’Toole, Fintan 160, 311, 316 O’Toole, Tina 251 Pacifico, Francesco 471 Paisley, Ian 97 497

Index

Pálás, art-house cinema 448 Palatine 199 Pangur Bán 362 Parallax (Morrissey) 298 Paralympics 341 Parnell Street 200, 220, 221 Parry, John 17 partition 47, 54, 59–63, 74, 151, 230, 335, 337, 461 Pašeta, Senia 238 Passing the Time in Ballymenone: Culture and History of an Ulster Community (Glassie) 26, 311 Patel, Raj 353, 358 patriarchal literary establishment 291 Paye, Michael 356, 364 Peillon, Michel 449 Penney, Emma 235 Pentecostalist 214 Permanent TSB 161 Petrie, George 52, 53 Philbin, William 267 Philippines 203, 207 philological revolution 16 Phoenix Rising (Cooke) 316, 319 PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain) countries 97, 350 Pilgrim Hill (Barrett) 383–384 Pine, Emilie 389 Pius IX, Pope 262 Place and Non-Place: The Reconfiguration of Ireland (Peillon) 449 Planning for Diversity: The National Action Plan Against Racism (2005–2008) 204 platform capitalism 159 playwrights 300–303 Poetry Ireland Review 291 poets/poetry studies: aesthetics of 290–298; of animals 362; Deaf poetry 373; middle age themes 437, 440; queer theory and 251–252; rise of 26–27; women and nature 366 Pokój z widokiem na Dunnes Stores (The Room with a View of Dunnes Stores) (Šlipko) 38 Poland/Poles 36, 103, 127, 209, 212, 336, 339 political activism 238, 240n3, 272, 409 political identity 113, 117–119 political rights 207, 208 politics: Irish-America and 141–143, 146n7; of microspection 384; participation of immigrants 211–212; of shared space 110 Pooler, William 222–226 Poor Law (1834) 152 Possession (Barry) 314, 316 post-Celtic Tiger period: abstract art 316–319; art exhibitions in 314–316; Decade of Centenaries 319–320; feminism and 304–305; financial crisis and 302–304; global cities 452; introduction to 300, 311–312; material culture in 311–321; 498

queer performance/theater 300, 305–308; summary of 308, 320–321; theater-makers 300–302; trauma and recovery in 404, 407–416 postcolonial studies/theory 5–7, 26, 155, 276, 345–346, 348n3, 363, 478 post-crash norms 160–164, 162 Post-Ireland? Essays on Contemporary Irish Poets (Holdridge) 292 postmodern spatialities 385 post-war period 19 pre-Christian figural art 25 Prehistory of the Crisis (I and II), The exhibition 317 Prejudice and Tolerance in Ulster (Harris) 111 Prevention of Terrorism Act (1974) 152 Pride of Parnell Street, The (Barry) 220–221 primal womb 399 Princeton Architectural Press 449 privatization of agricultural cooperatives 99 professionalization of history in Ireland 48 progressive identity vs. Catholic identity 142 Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act (1989) 213 property/property ownership 3–6, 99–102, 160–164, 228n2, 405, 452–453 protectionist 188 Protestant Church (Protestantism) 150–151, 152–153 Providence Journal 18 Prunty, Jacinta 267 psychoanalysis 233, 248, 346–347, 348n3, 423, 432 Puar, Jasbir 250 public housing system 123 Qare Times 249 Quaker 199 Quanta Cura 262 quare/quare theory, defined 249 “Quare Theory” (Griffney) 233, 249 Quayson, Ato 7, 371 queer, defined 246, 247–248, 255n6 queer activism 232–233, 249, 251 Queering Ireland conference 233 Queering the Issue (Kennedy, McKibben, Mulhall, Walshe) 233, 238–239 “Queer in Ireland” (Mulhall) 246, 250–251 Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation (Walsh) 234 queer performance/theater 300, 305–308 Queer Phenomenology 254 queer theory: animal studies and 366–367; cultural symbols 249–251; in fiction 285, 293; gay pride festivities 247–249; introduction to 200–201, 245–247; material things and 252–255, 253; poetry and 251–252 Quinn, D.B. 48 race and succession 220–228, 222, 224, 228n1 racial profiling 207, 213–214

Index

racism 200, 204–207, 214–215; see also critical race studies/critical race theory Randaccio, Monica 371 “Reading the Victorian Novel” (Boland) 275 realism in fiction 278–279, 281–284 recession: ageism in literature 435, 438–440; architecture and 456–457; art and 315; austerity and 197, 232, 304, 390, 464; broadcast environment 162–163; divergent experiences of 386; emigration and 127–134; impact of 62, 97, 100–103, 172, 176; migration and 209; neoliberalism 81, 158, 388; post-crash 4–9, 11; resilience after 163; social change and 345; sports and 340 reclaiming middle age 436–441 recovery: economic recovery 11, 124, 127, 132, 196, 448; gender studies projects 238–239; in post-Celtic Tiger period 404, 407–416; in trauma fiction 420–432, 433n10 Redmond, John 64 Redmond, William Archer 64 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke) 49 refugees 203–213, 357, 476–478 Regan, Aidan 163 Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory (Beiner) 69 resilience 158–159, 161 revisionist history in Ireland 49 Reynolds, Horace Mason 18–19 Reynolds, Paige 238, 252, 279 Rhodes, Carl 167 Richtarik, Marilynn 371 Ricks, Christopher 295 right-wing nationalism 4 Riverdance 10 Roberts, David 32–33 Robinson, Fred 16–18 Robinson, Mary 32, 96, 264, 463 Robinson, Tim 350, 364, 367 Rockland, NY 140 Roma 204, 209, 211–214; see also Travelers Romania 124, 338 Ronan, Saoirse 149 Rooney, Sally 4 Rosie (2018) 169n4 Royal Irish Academy Committee on Language, Literature, Culture and Communication 35, 53 rugby 337–338 rural depopulation 126, 196 Rural Ireland: The Inside Story exhibition 315 Ryan, Donal 393–401, 441 Said, Edward 25 Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland (Scheper-Hughes) 26 same-sex marriage 5, 21, 61, 246, 306 same-sex Marriage Act (2020) 201

Sammells, Neil 155 Saro-Wiwa, Ken 352 SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) virus 481 scale jumping 354–355 scavenger methodology 245 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy 26 Schoepperle, Gertrude 16–17 schools’ admissions 211 Scotland 86, 89, 335, 338 Scott, Sir Walter 50 screen femininities 387–388 Scully, Maurice 154–155, 291 Secret Scripture, The (Barry) 421–432, 443 sectarian/sectarianism/sectarian divides 5, 45, 86, 88, 111–112, 119 Sedis Apostolicae 262 seduction theory 420 segregation in urban areas 106 “Self-Queering Ireland?” (Valente) 246 seminal masculinity 398 Sen, Malcolm 355, 364 sex trafficking 124 sexual abuse 11n3, 408–409, 420 sexualized global culture 435 sex work 212 Shadowplay (O’Connor) 284–286 shadow work 160 Shared Future, A (legislation) 116 Sheerin, Jacinta 304 “shelter in place” order 477 “Shite and Sheep: An Ecocritical Perspective on Two Recent Irish Novels” (Smyth) 363 Shock Doctrine, The (Klein) 80 short stories 421, 478 Siebers, Tobin 372 Silicon Docks 192–196 Singapore 128 Sinn Féin 9, 61, 64, 86–91, 105, 110, 112–113, 115, 168 situated modernists in architecture 450 Skellig Star Accommodation Center 476 Skype 128 Šlipko, Łukasz 38 Slovakia 182 Smith, James 265 Smith, Roland M. 17 Smyth, Ailbhe 261 Smyth, Cherry 249 Smyth, Gary 363 Smyth, Gerry 323–324 soccer 336–337 Social Anthropology study 18 social class 110–111, 114, 163 Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) 110, 112 social housing 102, 126, 161, 194, 211 499

Index

social identity 374 social integration 205 socialist 40, 199 Socialist Workers’ Movement 249 social legislation 150–151 social liberalization 11, 134 socially progressive neoliberalism 163, 164–166 social participation in sport 341 Social Partnership 98, 99 social unity 162 soft power 38–41 Solar Bones (McCormack) 474, 475 Somerville, Edith 365–366 Sontag, Susan 471 Soper, Kate 366 South Africans 204 South Atlantic Quarterly 24 Southern Review 24 Spanish 15, 34, 85, 223, 225, 381, 482 Spanish Flu (1918) 482 spatial drama 456–457 Special Economic Zone 189 species thinking 351–354 spectral feminine 409, 412 Speculative Optimism (O’Mahony) 357 “speechlessness” of Ireland 276 Spicer, Andre 159 Spinning Heart, The (Ryan) 393–401, 441 “Sport for All” policy 341 sports in Ireland: cricket 337; GAA 334–337, 340, 455; golf 338; history and culture 342; hockey 337; introduction to 334–338; Irish identity and 338–340; kitesurfing 339; Mixed Martial Arts 339–340; modern state and 340–342; Olympic Games 338–339; Paralympics 341; rugby 337–338; soccer 336–337 Sports Monitor 340–341 SPUD (O’Mahony) 357 Srnicek, Nick 159 St. Patrick’s Day 9–10, 131–132 Staidéar Cuimsitheach Teangeolaíoch ar Úsáid na Gaeilge sa Ghaeltacht (A Comprehensive Linguistic Study of the Usage of Irish in the Gaeltacht) 78 state histories 59–65 Stevens, Anne 365 “Stillsman” (Joyce) 298 Stoker, Bram 284–286 Stop Violence Against Gays and Women March 249 Straitéis 20 Bliain don Ghaeilge 2010–2030 (20-Year Strategy for the Irish Language 2010–2030) 79, 80 Strange Terrain (Barry) 313 Strategic Development Zone 193 Studies, Joyce 29 Sugrue, Thomas 225 500

Sullivan, Moynagh 230–231, 233, 237, 367, 428 Supreme Court 77, 210, 317 Sydney 127, 131–132 Sydora, Laura 409 Syllabus of Errors 262 symbolic ethnicity 138–139, 144–145 Tale of Two Cities, A (Dickens) 283 Talking Shop Ensemble (TSE) 301–302 Taoiseach, An 9, 11, 60, 64, 80, 102, 131–132, 158, 163–164, 167–168, 200, 247, 260, 306, 464 tax breaks 99 tax havens 102, 195 Taylor, Katie 201 tech industry 6, 99, 133, 188–195, 192–194 Tenement Museum Dublin 73–75 terminality 137, 141 terminological defamiliarization 279 theater-makers in post-Celtic Tiger period 300–302 TheatreofplucK 307 “The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants” (Muldoon) 294 theorizing 345–347 6th Extinction: An Unnatural History, The (Kolbert) 353 Thing Theory 313 “Third Cinema” 382 THISISPOPBABY 307–308 Thomas, June Manning 226 Thurneysen, Rudolf 16 Tiger King (TV show) 4 Time and a Place: Two Centuries of Irish Social Life, A exhibition 315 Titley, Alan 199 Titley, Gavin 204, 205 Together: Building a United Community legislation 116 Tóibín, Colm 248 Tokyo 124 Topham, Francis William 315 Topography of Ireland (Cambrensis) 362 Tormey, Bill 221 Tørsløv, Thomas 195 Totem and Taboo (Freud) 396–397 Tourism Ireland 124, 131, 134 tracker-mortgages 161 Trade (O’Halloran) 308 tradition: folkloristics/folklore studies 44, 69–76; Irish Studies 32–38; literary tradition 29, 37, 293, 417n8; modernity and 18–29, 124; St. Patrick’s Day 9–10, 131–132; see also historicizing Ireland Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) 86–88 translation 32–34 transnational/transnationalism: cinema 380–383; gender studies paradigm 237–238; historicizing Ireland 44; theorizing and 347

Index

TRASNABIO database 34 TRASNA project 33 trauma/trauma studies/trauma theory 346, 380, 404, 406–416, 417n3, 420–432, 433n10 Travelers, Irish 199, 372 Treaty, the 63 Troika Economic Adjustment Programme 102 Troubles, the 111, 118, 266–267, 292 Trudeau, Justin 164 Trump, Donald 195 Tuam 6, 236, 265, 318, 389, 390 Tuatha Dé Danann 199, 350 Turkish 34, 225 Twitter 99, 191, 193, 305, 481–482 Twomey, D. Vincent 262–263 Tynan, Katharine 282–283 Tyndall, John 351 Uber 125, 188 UCD Scholarcast series 364–365 Údarás funding 81, 81, 83 Údarás na Gaeltachta (Ó hAoláin) 80 Uí Ógáin, Ríonach 69 Ulster Bank 161, 232 Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) 59–60, 110, 112–114 Ulster Workers’ Council Strike 117 ULTACH 81 Ulysses (Joyce) 371 underemployment, concerns 209 Under the Eye of the Clock (Nolan) 372, 373–377 undocumented migrants 143, 204, 215 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage 70 unionism 61, 88, 106, 110, 112–114, 463 unions 74, 98, 102, 212, 250, 394 United Irishmen: Their Lives and Times, The (Madden) 53 United Kingdom/Irish relations 172–185, 173–174, 175–176, 177, 178–179, 182, 183 United Nations Refugee Agency 476 University College Cork (UCC) 364, 451, 467 University College Dublin (UCD) 248 UN Security Council 124 urban gangland spaces 385 Urban Memories and Tenement Experiences project 73 urban renewal projects 126, 200, 226–227 US Irish Studies programs 7, 15–29 Valente, Joseph 233–234, 246 Vallancey, Charles 51 Vancouver 124 Varadkar, Leo 9–10, 163, 164–166, 165, 168, 169n5, 247, 306 Vassallo, Rose-Marie 34 vernacular cosmopolitanism 36–38 vernacular traditions see folkloristics/folklore studies

veteran memorial rights 63–64 Victorian realism 277–278, 281–284 Vier, Ludvig 195 Viking 199 Viney, Michael 364 violence: domestic violence in fiction 408; sexual abuse 11n3, 408–409, 420 virtual capital flows 194 virtual social identity 374 visual folklore 75–76 Volcic, Zala 159 Vukašin Nedeljkovic 208, 316–317 vulture funds 160 Waiting for IKEA (Sheerin, McKevitt) 304 Waking the Feminists movement 256n18, 304–305 “Waking the Nation” program 466–467 Wald, Priscilla 481–482 Wales 86–88, 149, 152, 350, 362 Walking Silvermines project 357 Wallace, Mick 77, 165 Walsh, Catherine 298 Walsh, Fintan 234, 245–249 Walshe, Éibhear 233, 248 Wanderings of Oisin, The (Yeats) 294 Wang Zhanpeng 40 Washington Post, The 376 Waters, Mary 138 “Weir View” (Ní Churreáin) 251–252 “Welfare Cheats Cheat Us All” campaign 165, 166 welfare entitlements 231 West, Michael 304 Westchester, New York 140 West Side Industrial Project 226 WeWork brand 163–164, 169n6 What Richard Did (Abrahamson) 386 Whelan, Kevin 48 Whelan, Yvonne 323 When All is Said (Griffin) 441, 442 Whipping the Herring: Survival and Celebration in Nineteenth-Century Irish Art exhibition 314–315 White, Harry 324 Whyte, David 166 Wilde, Oscar 15 wildlife management 364 Williams, T.D. 48 Wilson, Julie 159, 164 Wilson, Kennedy 161 Wolves in Ireland: A Natural and Cultural History (Hickey) 363 Woman in Progress, A (Bliss) 248 women: experiences of midlife 436–439; in Irish society 264–265; poets 291; screen femininities 387–388; writers/writing 277, 348n1; see also feminism/feminist studies Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction (McWilliams) 237 501

Index

Women in Film and Television Ireland (WFT) 388 Women in the Irish Film Industry: Stories and Storytellers (Liddy) 388 Women’s Aid 4, 11n3 Women’s Education, Research and Resource Center (WERRC) 248 Women’s Right to Choose Campaign 249 Women’s Studies Quarterly 252–253 Wonder, The (Donoghue) 281–284 Woodlawn, Bronx 140 Woods, Fiona 356–358 Woods, Jeannine 84 Woodside, Queens 140 Woodward, Kathleen 443–444 Woolf, Virginia 349 Workhouse Visual Communication 167 working-class immigrants 151, 209–210 Workplace Relations Commission 210

502

World Bank 132 World Health Organization (WHO) 471, 481, 482n1 Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel (Freedgood) 278 World Trade Fair 227 World Trade Organization (WTO) 182, 184 xenophobia 6, 199–200, 306, 347 Yeats, W.B. 7, 18, 261, 276, 301, 366, 473 “You Don’t Get To Be Racist And Irish” (May) 200 Young, Ella 17 Young, Liam 366 Youth 2000 264 Žižek, Slavoj 352 Zucman, Gabriel 195