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Ireland is a turbulent place. This book engages readers with the contours of transformation of Irish society through a series of distinct episodes and sites where change can be confronted. The content of the book intersects with the boom and bust themes to explore the economic and social implications of the recession. The processes are as diverse as cross-border development, farming knowledges, food movements, and the evolution of traditional Irish music. The modernisation of Irish society during the Celtic Tiger and its subsequent demise was a 'spatial drama' involving transformation in the material landscape and the imaginative representation of the island. The first part of the book explores the revolving intersections of identity politics with place. It tracks the discovery of the ghost estate and the ways in which it has been implicated in debates about the Irish economic crash, complicating ideas of home and community. After a discussion on immigration, the book discusses the role of migrants in filling labour and skill shortages. The second part pays attention to questions of mobility and consumption in urban and rural contexts. The new Irish motorway network, free time, leisure and holidaying in the lives of lone parents during the Celtic Tiger, and the role of National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) are discussed. The third part explores diverse cultural practices and some longstanding representations of Ireland. An autobiographical tour of the pub session, National Geographic's representations of Irish landscape and the current Irish imagination are the key concepts of this part.
in modern Ireland are many and complex. Rather than conceiving of the land as simply an economic or a political issue, Ó Tuathaigh reveals its potency in the Irish imagination – past and present – and considers the rich cultural history of the Irish land question. Ó Tuathaigh’s essay lays down a challenge to us and to future students of land questions in modern Ireland to consider the full breadth of issues – political, economic, 01_Fergus_Introduction.indd xv 8/1/2013 9:14:18 PM MUP FINAL PROOF – <STAGE>, 08/01/2013, SPi XVI INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
cultural values at home, will likely facilitate a reprise of NG’s more enduring images of a timeless Ireland in the future. Hubris, Crisis, Regeneration – like characters from some epic poem who roam the land in search of absolution, debates on these grand themes and their daily expression in the twists and turns of their cousin Austerity occupy the current Irish imagination. All have their own geographies mediated by an increasingly turbulent politics and culture that shift across time and space. One day, the EU has our fate in its hands, the next day, the outcome of a
this.”19 But the documentary also gave voice to an undercurrent of anger at the Sisters of Mercy, who ran Goldenbridge and a number of other industrial schools for girls. Buckley made a litany of allegations, ranging from starvation and neglect, to denial of educational opportunities, overwork, and severe physical abuse. In the days and weeks after Dear daughter aired, public outrage was palpable. This outrage was short-lived, however, and it failed to spark the Irish imagination the way subsequent events would. A more sustained public debate arose in April 1999 when
of racism and paternalism, rooted in the collective Irish imagination, which impacts upon black people in Irish society. Racism in Ireland 17 The ‘new racism’ Scientific racisms have become widely discredited, especially in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and have been largely expunged from political discourse in western countries. However the discrediting of racism, so defined, does not mean that racisms have not persisted in western society. The social sciences provided new ‘justifications’ for racist beliefs through assumptions that the cultures and ways of
an impression of nothing, and is rhythmically flat, represents for Moore the antithesis of the Irish imagination and the American spirit. Throughout ‘Sojourn in the Whale’, the colonial occupier enforces an ‘opaqueness’ that requires the Irish to perform apparently impossible feats in order to realise their imaginative potential. In the second stanza, for example, the Irish are ‘compelled’ to perform alchemy in order to survive. They are forced to ‘spin/ gold thread from straw’ (ll. 6–7) because the different kinds of ‘shortage’ they face, as a result of the
to inhabit, move through and be transformed by. This was essential for the vernacular Irish imagination to thrive—perhaps even to merely survive, as mechanisms for Irish literary and cultural production were, with important exceptions, being increasingly eroded, from the twelfth century of the English invasion through to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when the extant manuscripts of the Acallam were made. Remarkably, however, the Acallam ’s respect for and practice of
slaughterhouse of literature’, MLQ: modern language quarterly , 61.1 (2000), 207–27. 9 Watt, Contesting the gothic , p. 1. 10 Jarlath Killeen, ‘Making monsters: creating the Catholic Other in Sir John Temple's mythology of the 1641 rebellion’, Gothic Ireland: horror and the Irish imagination in the long
endorsed this collective mentality: ‘America was the land of, what shall I say, money grew on trees, that was the impression. My aunts would come home and they seemed to be very comfortable and they had nice clothes and they never spoke about any of the problems in the States. It 85 was always very, very rosy.’ Indeed, the clothing adorned by return migrants was a major visible measure of success that lingered in the minds of potential migrants. Clothing, together with manners and money, continued the proliferation of the stere86 otype of the returned Yank in the Irish
provided half of those emigrating at this time with the necessary funds.89 Most who left from Londonderry with 82 NARA, D/S, USD, 4, 4, T199, West to Seward, 12 August 1865. 83 Ibid., 7, 7, T199, West to Seward, 12 February 1869. 84 Dingley, ‘European immigration’, 308–9. 85 See Miller, Emigrants and exiles; Kirby Miller, ‘Paddy’s paradox: emigration to America in Irish imagination and rhetoric’ in Dirk Hoerder, Horst Rössler (eds), Distant magnets: expectations and realities in the immigrant experience, 1840–1930 (New York, 1993), 264–94; Kerby Miller and