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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.
Tiger and its subsequent demise was a ‘spatial drama’ involving transformation in the material landscape and the imaginative representation of the island. Fuelled by what the progressive Irish think-thank TASC has characterised as the Dublin Consensus – a mix of neoliberal and entrepreneurial discourses that consistently denied growing inequality and social exclusion – the Tiger years were read as the ‘best of times’ (Fahey, Russell and Whelan, 2007; Jacobson, Kirby and Ó Broin, 2006). The Celtic Tiger was very successful at generating a coherent image of Ireland in
of this process as akin to the ‘ jeu de l’oie’ (‘goose game’), an old French board game where one proceeds from outside to inside via concentric circles). Yet another set of more formal tensions is at work in the film that is directly linked to this complex spatial drama and dictates its unfolding. The opening words by Galoup just cited are paradoxically the last words spoken by an earlier manifestation of Bruno Forestier, played by a younger Michel Subor, in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat (1963). Subor stated at the end there: ‘Now all that remained for me to