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7 Pleonexic tyranny in Plato’s Republic and in the Irish republic You eat what you kill ‘You eat what you kill’ is a phrase coined (as it were) in the City, where its usage articulates the principle of remuneration in the financial sector, amongst bankers, fund managers, traders and brokers, whereby individuals who are responsible for particular lines of business within financial organizations personally get the full financial reward accruing to that business. ‘You eat what you kill’, the ethic of the City and of Wall Street, the ethic of the developer and the
This book focuses on the drama and poetry published since 1990. It also reflects upon related forms of creative work in this period, including film and the visual and performing arts. The book discusses some of the most topical issues which have emerged in Irish theatre since 1990. It traces the significance of the home in the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Vona Groarke. The book also focuses on the reconfigurations of identity, and the complex intersections of nationality, gender and race in contemporary Ireland. It shows how Roddy Doyle's return to the repressed gives articulation to those left behind by globalisation. The book then examines the ways in which post-Agreement Northern fiction negotiates its bitter legacies. It also examines how the activity of creating art in a time of violence brings about an anxiety regarding the artist's role, and how it calls into question the ability to re-present atrocity. The book further explores the consideration of politics and ethics in Irish drama since 1990. It talks about the swirling abundance of themes and trends in contemporary Irish fiction and autobiography. The book shows that writing in the Irish Republic and in the North has begun to accommodate an increasing diversity of voices which address themselves not only to issues preoccupying their local audiences, but also to wider geopolitical concerns.
Once held up as a 'poster child' for untrammeled capitalist globalisation, the Irish Republic has more recently come to represent a cautionary tale for those tempted to tread the same neoliberal path. The crash in the world economy had especially grave repercussions for Ireland, and a series of austerity measures has seen the country endure the most substantial 'adjustment' ever experienced in a developed society during peacetime. This book delineates the reactionary course that Ireland has followed since the ignominious demise of the Celtic Tiger. It argues that the forces of neoliberalism have employed the economic crisis they caused to advance policies that are in their own narrow interests, and that the host of regressive measures imposed since the onset of global recession has fundamentally restructured Irish society. The book discusses the mechanisms by which finance in Ireland sustains and reproduces itself, in particular how it was able to protect itself during the 2008 crisis. Property was at the centre of the second phase of the Celtic Tiger boom after US investment in manufacturing began to decline, leading to the Irish economic crash. The years since the onset of the recession in Ireland in 2008 have been characterised not by passivity and quietism but by extreme violence. In December 2009 as part of the first wave of austerity, the Community Development Project was informed that the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs proposed not to continue funding the project beyond the end of 2009.
This book explores the issue of a collective representation of Ireland after the sudden death of the 'Celtic Tiger' and introduces the aesthetic idea that runs throughout. The focus is on the idea articulated by W. B. Yeats in his famous poem 'The Second Coming'. The book also explores the symbolic order and imaginative structure, the meanings and values associated with house and home, the haunted houses of Ireland's 'ghost estates' and the fiscal and moral foundations of the collective household. It examines the sophisticated financial instruments derived from mortgage-backed securities that were a lynchpin of global financialization and the epicentre of the crash, the question of the fiscal and moral foundations of the collective household of Europe. A story about fundamental values and principles of fairness and justice is discussed, in particular, the contemporary conflict that reiterates the ancient Irish mythic story of the Tain. The book suggests correspondences between Plato's Republic and the Irish republic in the deformations and devolution of democracy into tyranny. It traces a red thread from the predicament of the ancient Athenians to contemporary Ireland in terms of the need to govern pleonexia, appetites without limits. The political and economic policies and practices of Irish development, the designation of Ireland's 'tax free zones', are also discussed. Finally, the ideal type of person who has been emerging under the auspices of the neoliberal revolution is imagined.
Irish culture – albeit highly hybridised ones – have the potential to reach a global audience. The burgeoning cultural appeal of the Irish Republic has been underlined further by the changing fortunes of the national capital. If we were to go back fifteen years or so, the reputation that Dublin held among foreigners was essentially that of a fairly drab and unsophisticated place. In the course the 1990s, the image of the city would, however, be transformed almost beyond recognition. Consequently, the view that outsiders have of Dublin today is invariably that of a
. William Shakespeare, The Tempest , 1611 Proto-colonial archaeology of Elizabethan Ireland, particularly in the Irish Republic, has only recently begun, and caution warns against advancing firm conclusions at this stage. Nevertheless, some general observations are justified concerning the twelve-year Elizabethan colonial settlement, or ‘planting’, of Munster, because even limited fieldwork can significantly correct research all too dependent upon insufficient documentation. Elizabethan Ireland was certainly not the ‘brave new world’ that
3 Neither Boston nor Berlin: class polarisation and neo-liberalism in the Irish Republic KIERAN ALLEN The Celtic Tiger is dead. Between 1994 and 2000, real gross domestic product (GDP) in the Republic of Ireland grew at an annual average rate of nine per cent, taking per capita income from sixty-seven to eightysix per cent of the European Union (EU) average by 1999.1 In terms of conventional economics, this would seem to constitute a miracle. Growth rates for most industrial nations were sluggish in the 1990s and even the boom in the United States did not match
there has been a falling level of inward investment since 1995, and multinational corporations continue to be more attracted to the Irish Republic, which has the advantage, among other things, of a low corporation tax of 12.5 per cent as opposed to the 21–28 per cent rate in the United Kingdom. A 2005 study concluded that, adjusted for size, the south attracts twenty times more foreign investment than the north and that the main reason is the lower rate of corporation tax.13 Northern Ireland’s low-wage advantage that helped to attract multinational capital in the 1960
British service ministries agreed that this should in no way affect the position of recruits from the new Irish Republic, who should ‘continue to be treated in exactly the same way as UK citizens’. 28 The Irish Republic remained a significant source of recruits, at least for the Irish infantry regiments. In the late 1950s, for example, one quarter of the officers of the Royal Irish Fusiliers
become alloyed with mysticism, passion and violence, and the vampire slayers would risk becoming monsters themselves. Paddy the vampire slayer The most fateful vampire slayer awakened during this period of cultural renaissance is Patrick Pearse, leader of the 1916 Rising and author of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic; the urbane schoolteacher who, like Mina, a victim of the vampire as well as a vampire slayer, becomes a bloodthirsty monster.6 Pearse knows that to kill the monster he has to enlist the forces of the underworld, he has to raise the dead. In his