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 different 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 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 sovereignty to the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the Interna tional 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). 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 so-called 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.
