Editorial / Autumn 2006

The speed of change in Ireland is so great that nobody seems to have time to be lazy.  “Stressed” would be a more accurate term for us.  Our experience of being bucolic has changed.  Rural Ireland is no longer the national template.  Many younger people, however, see far too much of the countryside during long commutes to cities and larger towns; many town dwellers have a second home in the countryside; an ever-increasing percentage of us have overseas property, made accessible by budget airlines.  This gives us an unprecedented mobility. 

Stress and mobility have changed Irish self-awareness and, therefore, our sense of identity.  We will no longer be patronized as charming, but feckless and slightly out-of-date.  We know all about the problems of modern living.  It is very unlikely that, in the future, anthropologists will live amongst us to write books our quaintness, something which happened regularly until the 1990s.

As we become more like anywhere else, we may need some form of neo-nationalism.  The enthusiastic commemoration of the anniversary of the 1916 Rising proves that nationalism is respectable once again, but it is a different kind of nationalism.  The hierarchical part of the Catholic Church has lost most of its political and social influence, whilst the laity (never encouraged to speak out) has not found its voice.  The link between religion and populism has gone.  The image of Ireland as an oasis of virtue, which was the basis of censorship, has vanished.  We can eat exotic foods, drink too much, buy illegal drugs and have messy personal lives, just like any other nation.  This requires a different kind of nationalism, which must develop in an atmosphere where any curtailment of freedom of expression is now incomprehensible.

All this change has left us facing some paradoxes.  There is much less cynicism about our national past in this post-revisionist age.  It is our present which is bewildering, because the social markers and shared values, which used to be very clear, have disappeared.  Some, perhaps many of us, are more than a little lost and lonely in a more impersonal country, where immigration is changing the human landscape very rapidly, but where the emphasis on personal fulfillment has caused considerable isolation.  Very urbanised, we are unsure about the values required for successful urban living and are creating a society where money has the loudest voice.

Every survey of Irish literature is dominated by the study of writers who chose exile.  The gifted Irish author who lives elsewhere is almost a cliché.  Many had to exile themselves for financial as well as artistic reasons.  Those who now write from abroad are out of touch and portray a country that no longer exists.

Some of our best playwrights seem to be coping with the decline of inspiration by translating or adapting the work of renowned foreign dramatists.  The results may be impressive, but are hardly original and say nothing to the Ireland of charter flights, second homes and binge drinking.  The decline in the power of institutional Catholicism and the death of many politicians of the old school has removed sources of inspiration and motives for attack, hence the exaggerated lamentation and media overkill which followed the death of Charles Haughey.

Cecelia Ahern is in the vanguard of those who write immensely popular novels and whose sales alone are a reflection of our times.  The troubled areas of the inner city are, however, missing from modern Irish literature.  Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown trilogy, which is set in a blue collar suburb, has a touch of the period piece, because none of his characters use drugs.  The inner city lacks a convincing contemporary literary portrayal, but so does modern Irish society as a whole.

Irish society is experiencing unprecedented wealth and is so distracted by itself that it overlooks those left behind in the rush to prosperity.  A portrayal of our small, but complex country is not to be found in the pages of John Banville’s remarkably dull novel The Sea (which describes unbelievable people in an unbelievable situation), nor, despite the beautiful writing, in Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way (which is yet another look at our past).  The only novelist who has, to date, successfully described one very important element in modern Irish life is Stephen Price, who gives an all too credible account of our media in his Monkey Man.