In the Labyrinth of Forgetfulness: Charley Grainger’s Joycean Journey in Christine Dwyer Hickey’s Cold Eye of Heaven

Cold Eye of Heaven (2011) shows pre-Brexit Dublin steeped in the post-Celtic Tiger anxieties. The novel narrates the life of a contemporary Everyman, Charley Grainger, known as Farley, from his final moments back to his childhood. Thus, Farley’s journey envisages both a Joycean interior monologue depicting his old-age bafflement in the meanders of memory and a realistic description of the character’s bewilderment at the changes in the cityscapes of the Dublin of 2010. The present paper is a comparative study of the first two chapters of the novel in reference to the history of the city present in the entire text, through the use of the tropes of the mental and urbane labyrinths. Imbued with the allusions to current reality, i.e., the presence of immigrants, Hickey’s observations are in line with Joycean anti-nationalism, as the story offers a nostalgia-stricken picture of the inevitable economic transformation of the metropolis.

Spectral Streams of Post-Consciousness in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones (2016)

This article analyses Mike McCormack’s novel Solar Bones (2016) which narrates in a run-on sentence Marcus Conway’s everyday life within the rural context of a 2008 Celtic Tiger Ireland about to collapse. Drawing upon the narratological precepts of experimental writing, especially the use of streams of consciousness, and Derrida’s hauntology, this article argues that McCormack’s novel charts tensions of coherence and collapse in post-Celtic Tiger fiction. The narration takes place within a post- perspective as Marcus’s ghost brings it into existence. The experimentation with streams of post-consciousness and spectrality provides McCormack with valid aesthetic mechanisms to respond in fiction to Celtic Tiger concerns.

Investing in Fictions: Faith, Abstraction and Materiality in Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void

One of the central contentions of this essay is that Paul Murray's novel, The Mark and the Void, addresses questions of faith, fictionality, literary form and the relationship between abstract finance and material sociality. The novel engages with and exposes the arcane vernaculars of finance capitalism, while at the same time registering the inalienable materiality of their effects in terms of impoverishment, displacement and terminal indebtedness. As we shall detail, for Murray, the purpose of ‘finance fiction’ is neither to confirm nor further mythologize the transcendental fictionality of high finance. In crafting such a literary critique of Celtic Tiger Ireland, Murray invokes an increasingly common trope – the zombie. In doing so, The Mark and The Void partakes of a figuration that acknowledges ‘the deadliness of financialized debt and credit crisis’. In a sense, enlisting the metonymic figure of the zombie speaks to the undead nature of indebtedness, and it is an apt figuration of the past that continues to haunt in the present and into the future. As the narrative suggests, debt is the financial burden that refuses to die, and the literary zombie represents communities of Celtic Tiger debtors metonymically.

Muslim Integration and the Hijabi Monologues Ireland

In 2012 and 2013, two productions of the Hijabi Monologues, an American theatre project featuring the stories of Muslim women, were staged in Ireland. This essay considers their relationship to state-sponsored and community-led interculturalism during the Celtic Tiger and post-Tiger years. Both productions centred on the act of storytelling and tended to downplay xenophobia, instead enacting the type of feel-good intercultural exchange that has dominated Irish and European integration efforts since the late 1990s. At the same time, the 2013 production, on which the essay focuses, employed coalition-building strategies borrowed from the field of migrant activism, thereby ensuring Muslim involvement throughout the production process. The Hijabi Monologues Ireland furnishes a snapshot of a transitional moment in Irish intercultural programming when the state-funded projects of the Celtic Tiger era were giving way to migrant-led initiatives. By examining the production's artistic process, community participation, and funding streams, the essay assesses its successes and shortcomings in addressing the complex challenges of Muslim integration.

Overcoming the consequences of financial crisis on the example of Island and Ireland

Will Ireland share the fate of Iceland? Is this open, small economy with a debt-to-GDP ratio of above 130% on the verge of bankruptcy? Economists argue that if public debt is greater than national income, then smaller economies, heavily involved in the international division of labor are at risk of becoming insolvent. The bankruptcy of Ireland, whose prosperity is based on its reputation for being a good place to do business, could be a catastrophy. Contrary to the countries of southern Europe, the economy of the Green Island has never had problems with paying its liabilities and with solvency. While Greece has gone bankrupt five times since gaining independence in 1826 and Spain as many as thirteen in the past two centuries, Ireland's history in this area is impeccable (Reinhard, Rogoff, 2009, p. 3-6). Since the beginning of the 21st century Ireland's economic development has been based mainly on construction industry and not exports, as it used to be in the 1990s when the country was nicknamed the Celtic Tiger. The boom resulted in a budget surplus and a positive balance in current settlements. But it also resulted in higher prices - the Irish no longer had to accept slow wage growth to stay internationally competitive - which, combined with the low nominal interest rate of the European Central Bank, provided fertile ground for the build-up of the real estate bubble. The aim of the article is to identify the factors that led Ireland to the brink of bankruptcy and to try to answer the question whether the action of recapitalization of failing banks by the government and international financial institutions will bring the expected results in the form of healing the financial system and returning Green Island to the path of economic growth.

The ongoing project of Irish sociology

This short article provides an auto-ethnographic perspective on the history of Irish sociology. It is based on the author's experience of Irish sociology, including: experiences as an undergraduate student in the late 1980s and later as a research assistant; a PhD in the US during the 1990s, starting during mass emigration but completed as the ‘Celtic Tiger’ emerged and sociology grew; 5 years in Ireland as a head of department, leading up to the financial crash and the decade between crash and COVID-19. Finally, the article concludes with some general observations about sociology in Ireland today, its promise and the perils that face it.

A Stage for the Outsiders of Neoliberal Capitalism: Dublin’s Gate Theatre, European Austerity and #WakingTheFeminists

This essay analyses Selina Cartmell’s first season as artistic director of Dublin’s Gate theatre, in 2018 in relation to the development of neoliberalism in Ireland and the part played by the European Union in this process. Key social and political contexts are identified in order to frame this analysis, including the concentration of power in the upper-classes distinctive of neoliberalism; the relevance of historical memory in Irish culture; the restructuring of the Irish Arts Council in consequence of post-2008 austerity; and, the influence of #WakingTheFeminists’ protests against the marginalisation of women in the Irish theatre. It is argued that Selina Cartmell successfully fostered the reception of a grassroots movement (#WakingTheFeminists) into a mainstream institution (the Gate, Dublin). However, attention is brought to a pattern of homologation to neoliberal hegemony within such reception, determined by the influences of national (Irish) and supranational (EU) interventions. The article concludes with a reflection on the possibility of counter-performances resistant to neoliberal hegemony within the current Irish and European cultural industry and in the new contexts of the Covid 19 pandemic. Keywords: Gate Theatre Dublin; Irish Theatre; #WakingTheFeminists; European austerity; Celtic Tiger.

Irish Crime Fiction

Irish crime fiction is still an emerging field of study. Much of the scholarship concerns Northern Ireland, though that often pays little attention to popular fiction, as is true of Irish Studies more generally. Among the studies most directly concerned with genre fiction, two further focal points are clear. The first is the work of Tana French, among the most prominent Irish crime writers. The second is more general: crime novels read as reflecting on the Celtic Tiger (Ireland’s economic boom in the late 20th and early 21st centuries), on the crash that ensued, and on the cultural complexes arising from and contributing to that boom. Across these focal points, several thematic patterns are clear but not yet fully addressed by scholars: corruption on all sides of the law; a narrative resistance to closure and resolution; Gothic influences; adaptations of domestic noir; and the systemic abuse of women and children by the church, the state, and institutions like the Magdalen Laundries. Indeed, if one category of crime is a defining marker of Irish crime fiction, it is likely to be corruption in all its forms, literal and figurative alike, from Gothic allegories to ripped-from-the-headlines realist narratives. Little attention, however, has been paid to most crime writers predating this contemporary proliferation: even writers who were just barely ahead of the curve—such as Julie Parsons, Vincent Banville, Eugene McEldowney, and Gemma O’Connor—are not regularly addressed at length in scholarly accounts. While Irish contexts and settings distinguish Irish crime fiction from its international counterparts—including the English, Scottish, and American work to which it is most often compared—its particularity is further signaled by several patterns. One is an insistent avoidance of the closure popularly associated with the genre, as in Alan Glynn’s conspiracy thrillers, where uncertainty is an inescapable baseline. Elsewhere, this avoidance reflects Irish literary inheritances like the supernatural, pronounced in the novels of French and John Connolly, and less overt but still clear across their contemporaries’ writings. A third pattern is discernible in the varied means by which Irish writers have adapted familiar subgenres—the police procedural, the private eye, the serial killer—to Irish contexts, which have proven inhospitable to some of these subgenres, a challenge some writers have addressed by setting their work abroad. A final hallmark of Irish crime fiction is a generic instability, a promiscuous mingling of genre elements, including folklore, the supernatural, and romance.