Yeats, who declared “romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,” would have been bemused. His country’s astonishing economic success during the past decade, built on the IT boom and huge tax breaks for foreign companies, jacked up the GDP by 11.5 percent in real terms last year. It’s filled the country with Mercedeses, shopping malls and multinationals. It’s built new bookstores, museums, art galleries and theaters–not to mention visitors’ centers.
The newfound wealth has given Ireland the confidence and the distance to confront its old identity as an isolated, impoverished, superstitious nation. But in doing so, the country is faced with an odd new question of character: if the old Ireland of Yeats and J. M. Synge made art of its dark misery, what to make of today’s thriving art industry? Can the sudden novelty of Irish wealth produce great art? The quick answer is that a surge of young, world-wise Irish artists are on the rise, equipped with a national palette that is more diverse than ever. “In the old days, much of Irish writing was about absence–the absence of people, the absence of money, the absence of cultural influences,” says Gerry Hynes, the first woman director to win a Tony Award (for “Beauty Queen of Leenane” in 1998). “Now that’s changed, and we have real choices.”
Traditionally, Irish literature was rooted in a near-sacred sense of place. James Joyce’s “Ulysses” is an epic mapped out on Dublin streets; Yeats’s and Synge’s works are tied tightly to the Irish landscape. But opening Ireland to foreign capital has meant the slow erosion of place: new construction is changing landscapes; technology and immigrants mean that the Emerald Isle is now wrestling with multiculturalism. In the Temple Bar district–billed as “Dublin’s cultural quarter”–the culture in question is global. Signs for Persian and Italian cuisine compete with those advertising the Auold Dubliner and Gallagher’s traditional Irish restaurant. Nigerians, Russians and Chinese are buying up small Dublin shops. Newly rich urbanites are building seaside bungalows for weekends, and developers are throwing up cheap prefab structures on the outskirts of towns. In “How We Wrecked Rural Ireland,” an article in the current issue of the Irish Planning Institute, the institute’s former president charges that the country is destined to keep building eyesores. “Irish people have no reverence for the past at all, because it was so poor and unhappy,” says Ann Marie Hourihane, a Sunday Tribune journalist whose book of essays, “She Moves Through the Boom,” examines everyday life in the Celtic Tiger. “They can’t get to the future fast enough.”
The world is eagerly awaiting them. Over the past decade, Irish culture has become more popular than ever–especially in the vast American diaspora–and a commodity that Dublin is as eager to promote as its tax breaks or pool of IT talent. “Angela’s Ashes,” by Frank McCourt (who wrote the following essay), has sold an estimated 5 million copies from Kyoto to Bogota. The Corrs, a quartet of comely siblings, have popified Irish music. The Web site for the phenomenally successful Irish dance show “Riverdance” reveals that 12.6 million people have seen it to date. (Ireland’s new self-assurance is evident even in the jokes making the rounds in pubs: “Now that Tony Blair has apologized for the Famine, when will [former Irish president] Mary Robinson apologize for ‘Riverdance’?”) Seamus Heaney, Nobel laureate for poetry in 1995, playwright Martin McDonagh, and novelists Roddy Doyle and Colm Toibin are not just Irish writers but international ones, winning critical plaudits as well as popular audiences around the globe. Indeed, Irish literature has become “almost a natural resource,” writes Joseph O’Connor in “The Secret World of the Irish Male,” a collection of essays on 1990s Ireland. “It is the literary-historical version of offshore gas.”
Money–both private and public–has made a huge difference for Irish artists. Yuppies are snapping up paintings and sculptures, and the Irish Arts Council’s funding has increased by about 50 percent over the past five years. In 1997 it sponsored 28 arts festivals; last year it sponsored nearly twice that many. Thirty new theaters, showcasing everything from classic theater to modern dance, have sprung up over the past three years. The Arts Council, says director Patricia Quinn, has become savvier about helping Irish artists tap into international-touring possibilities and funding sources. “If you look at multinationals’ reports on whether to locate in Ireland, the ‘Quality of Life’ page is all about Irish arts,” she says.
Samuel Beckett once quipped that Irish writers had been “buggered into existence by the English Army and the Roman Church.” But as Ireland looks toward the Continent and the United States instead of its English colonizers, and as Roman Catholicism recedes in a tide of apathy and clergy scandals, where are today’s writers looking for inspiration? So far the answer seems clear: the past. The phenomenal success of “Angela’s Ashes,” McCourt’s account of growing up louse-ridden and emaciated in 1940s Limerick, suggests a wealthy culture’s fascination with the ghastliness of poverty. “A lot of Irish literature has been created from the outside, by American or [British] publishing companies,” notes poet Eavan Boland. “The success of Frank McCourt is about America saying, ‘This is the peasant hell that we escaped from’.”
Even younger writers tend to fall back on the past. Martin McDonagh, a 27-year-old playwright born in London to Irish parents, has captivated audiences with his acclaimed Leenane Trilogy, which includes “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” and “The Cripple of Inishmaan.” Set in a rural Ireland, McDonagh’s plays use classic Irish stereotypes like whisky-sodden priests, frisky Catholic-school girls and crippled orphans. But at least he mixes in some more-modern elements: McDonagh’s men and women don’t have blind faith in God or grub for potatoes. They insult the parish priest, watch “Hill Street Blues” and scarf packages of Tayto Crisps.
Still, like many of his fellow writers, McDonagh avoids taking on the pressing social issues of today–like the widening gap between rich and poor. “There are a lot more mobiles and Moet, but there’s still a lot of poverty,” says Geraldine Higgins, who teaches Irish literature at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. But the young generation of artists is not quite ready to tackle that. “At this stage, we’re standing and admiring our own past, and our rise from drink and dementia,” says Brendan Glacken, a satirical columnist for The Irish Times. “We enjoy not just confronting our past, but stumbling around in it.”
That’s something James Joyce would never understand; he wrote that Irish history was a nightmare from which he was trying to escape. But thanks to the boom, Ireland has awoken from its nightmare, and instead of escaping it, the Irish are increasingly willing to explore it. Until the recent prosperity hit, people weren’t interested in hashing over the great potato famine of the 1840s, notes John O’Driscoll, manager of the Famine Museum, which opened in Strokestown, County Roscommon, in the mid-1990s. “It was a black period,” he says. “People didn’t want to talk about it. But maybe because they’re a little more comfortable now, they can take the time to go and look into their own history.”
Indeed, the economic boom has coincided with the acknowledgment of other, more recent “black periods.” Among them: frank discussions of a series of child-abuse scandals that rocked Ireland’s Catholic Church during the 1990s and the recent Moriarty and Flood tribunals hearings, which exposed soap-operatic corruption in Irish government. That even became fodder for a drama: two actors, Joe Taylor and Malcolm Douglas, started enacting the legal transcripts of the tribunal on state radio. The readings became so popular that last summer, they took the show onstage. “Will We Get a Receipt for This??!! Will We F***!!!”–taken directly from the testimony of a building executive giving an alleged bribe to a former minister of the Environment–is rare in that it directly tackles modern Ireland’s social and political upheaval.
The influx of cash for the arts hasn’t been good for everyone. Fringe artists complain that they haven’t seen much of the money. Eamonn Doyle, whose company owns 16 dance-music labels, says his main mission is to find “an inherent Irish techno sound.” But official interest in cutting-edge dance music is nil: “If you go to the Arts Council of Ireland and say you’re a techno producer, they look at you as if you have two heads,” he says. And while the new money has increased patrons and interest, Dublin’s housing crunch has made it hard to find studio space. For the first time ever, Dublin painter Des Kenny, 44, is paying tax on his earnings as an artist. At the same time, the old wool factory housing his studio will soon move to a month-by-month lease. High Dublin rents have pushed many of his fellow artists to the provinces, powering mini-renaissances in smaller cities like Manorhamilton in County Leitrim, Sligo and Galway.
But the Celtic Tiger has brought plenty of potential new subject matter. The number of Dublin homeless doubled between 1996 and 1999; the city now has more people sleeping rough than Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Oxford and Nottingham combined. After Kenny began stepping over huddled figures at his studio’s door, he started painting them. And when he overheard a racist conversation about newly arrived African immigrants at a family christening, he decided to include an interracial couple with a baby in one of his street scenes. “It presented a technical issue for me as a painter,” he says. “I’d never painted black skin before.”
Even so, the great novel of multi-ethnic Ireland has yet to be written. And audiences will have to wait to see an Irish play about the trappings of wealth as opposed to the pressures of poverty. But Irish artists have good reason to stay mired in the past: no one knows how long the boom will go on. Last week, after the U.S. computer company Gateway announced that it was pulling out of Ireland, the Irish Stock Exchange lost nearly 2 billion euro. By using the funds of the present to stay grounded in the past, Ireland’s artists are merely following the golden rule of literature: write what you know. “How we define ourselves as a people can never, ever disown the fact that we were once a dispossessed people,” says poet Boland. Romantic Ireland may be technically dead and gone, but it will always live on in the busloads of people who visit Yeats’s grave and flock to Temple Bar to drink Guinness. After all, the money may come and go, but Yeats’s grave is there to stay.
