From prosperity to austerity
From prosperity to austerity
A socio-cultural critique of the Celtic Tiger and its aftermath
Edited by Eamon Maher and Eugene OBrien
Manchester University Press
Manchester and New York
distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright Manchester University Press 2014
While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for
ISBN 978 07190 9167 4
First published 2014
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Typeset in Sabon and Gill Sans by
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To our wives and families:
Liz, Liam, Marcella and Kevin;
ine, Eoin, Dara and Sinad
For their unstinting support and for putting up with us
Contents
Introduction
Eamon Maher and Eugene OBrien
1 Crisis, what crisis? The Catholic Church during the Celtic Tiger Years
Eamon Maher
2 The Celtic Tiger and the new Irish religious market
Catherine Maignant
3 Shattered assumptions: a tale of two traumas
Brendan Geary
4 Tendency-wit: the cultural unconscious of the Celtic Tiger in the writings of Paul Howard
Eugene OBrien
5 Popular music and the Celtic Tiger
Gerry Smyth
6 What does a woman want?: Irish contemporary womens fiction and the expression of desire in an era of plenty
Sylvie Mikowski
7 Topographies of terror: photography and the post-Celtic Tiger landscape
Justin Carville
8 Immigration and the Celtic Tiger
Bryan Fanning
9 What rough beast? Monsters of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland
Kieran Keohane and Carmen Kuhling
10 Women, fictional messages and a crucial decade
Mary Pierse
11 A hundred thousand welcomes: food and wine as cultural signifiers
Brian Murphy
12 Contemporary Irish fiction and the indirect gaze
Neil Murphy
13 Holes in the ground: theatre as critic and conscience of Celtic Tiger Ireland
Vic Merriman
14 Ship of fools: the Celtic Tiger and poetry as social critique
Ein Flannery
15 Between modernity and marginality: Celtic Tiger cinema
Ruth Barton
Conclusion
Eamon Maher and Eugene OBrien
List of figures
Notes on contributors
Ruth Barton is Head of the Department of Film Studies at Trinity College Dublin. Her publications include: Jim Sheridan, Framing the Nation (2002), Irish National Cinema (2004), Acting Irish in Hollywood (2006), Screening Irish-America (editor, 2009) and Hedy Lamarr, The Most Beautiful Woman in Film (2011). She has written numerous articles on Irish film and is involved in a number of research projects on Irish cinema and on womens film history. Her current research is on the Irish migr director Rex Ingram.
Justin Carville is Lecturer in Historical and Theoretical Studies in Photography and Visual Culture Studies in the School of Creative Arts at the Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Dun Laoghaire. A former Government of Ireland Senior Research Scholar in the Humanities and Social Sciences (20032004), he has guest-edited a special Irelandthemed issue of The Journal of Popular Visual Culture and an issue of Photographies on the photographic image and globalization. His first book, Photography and Ireland, was published in 2011. He is currently researching the connections between photography, ethnography and the visualization of Irish identity, for which he was awarded an IRCHSS Research Fellowship.
Bryan Fanning is a professor in the School of Applied Social Studies at University College Dublin and is a leading expert on immigration and its impact on Irish society. His books include New Guests of the Irish Nation (2009), Immigration and Social Cohesion in the Republic of Ireland (2011) and Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland (1st edition 2002, 2nd edition 2012).
Ein Flannery is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature in the Department of English and Modern Languages at Oxford Brookes University, UK. He is the author of three books: Colum McCann andthe Aesthetics of Redemption (2011), Ireland and Postcolonial Studies: Theory, Discourse, Utopia (2009) and Versions of Ireland: Empire, Modernity and Resistance in Irish Culture (2006). He is also the editor of three volumes: This Side of Brightness: Essays on the Fiction of Colum McCann (2012), Ireland in Focus: Film, Photography and Popular Culture (2009) and Enemies of Empire: New Perspectives on Imperialism, Literature and Historiography (2007). He is currently writing a book entitled: Listening Deeply: Ecology, Postcolonialism and Social Justice in Irish Cultural History, completing a study of the work of the novelist, dramatist and short story writer, Eugene McCabe and editing a special number of The Journal of Ecocriticism on Ireland and Ecocriticism.
Brendan Geary FMS, PhD, is a Marist Brother and counselling psychologist. He is currently the Provincial of the Marist Province of Europe Centre-West, which includes Ireland. While studying and working in the United States, he specialized in work with victims and perpetrators of sexual abuse. He has published papers on sex offenders, counselling and spirituality. He co-edited The Christian Handbook of Abuse, Addiction and Difficult Behaviour (2008). He has also co-edited the following two books with Joanne Marie Greer: Sexual issues: Understanding and Advising in a Christian Context (2010) and The Dark Night of the Catholic Church: Examining the Child Sexual Abuse Scandal (2011). He was invited to work as a facilitator and presenter at the Symposium on child sexual abuse held at the Gregorian University in February 2012 entitled Towards healing and renewal.
Kieran Keohane is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, at the School of Sociology and Philosophy, University College Cork, and Carmen Kuhling is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Womens Studies at the University of Limerick. Both hold PhDs from York (Canada). They are cultural analysts working in the interpretative tradition, informed by social theory, Continental philosophy, political anthropology and psychoanalysis. They are co-authors of