Examines how the Celtic Tiger, an economy that was hailed as one of the most successful in history, fell into a macroeconomic abyss necessitating an unheard of bail-out. A highly-readable account of the unprecedented near collapse of the Irish economy, it covers property market bubbles, regulatory incompetency, and disastrous economic policies.

This collective volume provides the reader with an exploration of various artistic works which grew out of the post Celtic Tiger era in Ireland. The different cultural fields of interest studied in this book include theatre, photography, poetry, painting, and cinema, as well as commemorative spaces. These different cultural voices enable one to explore Ireland, as a country located at a crossroads, in a kind of in-between space, and to wonder about the various political, economic, historical and social forces present in the country. The contributions interrogate Irish society within its present context, which is deeply impregnated by movement and transition but also strongly connected to time, to past and to memory. This collection of essays also presents the way in which these artistic works intertwine with various approaches, artistic, aesthetic, sociologic, cinematographic, historical, and literary, in order to pinpoint the transformations induced by both the Celtic Tiger and its aftermath. The issues of globalisation, identity, place and creativity are all dealt with. In assessing the aftermath of the post Celtic Tiger period, its impact and influences on today’s Irish society, the contributors also allude, incidentally, to its future evolution and trends.

This collection examines the Celtic Tiger, the Irish economic phenomenon and the subsequent financial disaster, from a socio-cultural perspective. Employing a wide range of cultural lenses, the book critiques the cultural, political and aesthetic implications of the progression from prosperity to austerity and the impact this has had on the psyche of Irish culture. An eclectic mix of theoretical approaches enables treatment of religion, literature, popular culture, photography, gastronomy, music, gender, immigration and film, as contributors assess how the Celtic Tiger was represented, or misrepresented, in these particular spheres of experience. This book will be of interest to academics and students who are interested in contemporary Ireland and recent Irish history, as well as to the general reader anxious to understand the effects of this period on the real lives of people as expressed through culture. It features contributions by internationally acknowledged experts in their fields and offers a comprehensive overview of the cultural consequences of the Celtic Tiger and its aftermath.

The death of the Celtic tiger is not an extinction event to trouble naturalists. There was, in fact nothing natural about this tiger, if it ever really existed. The "Irish Economic miracle" was built on good old-fashioned subsidies (from the European Union) and the simple fact that until the 1980s Ireland was by the standards of the developed world so economically backward that the only way was up. And as it began to catch up to European and American averages, the Irish economy could boast some seemingly remarkable statistics. These lured in investors, the Irish deregulated and all but abandoned financial oversight, and a great Irish financial ceilidh began. It would last for a decade. When the global financial crash of 2008 arrived it struck Ireland harder than anywhere - even Iceland looked like a model of rectitude compared to the fiasco that stretched from Cork to Dublin. There was an avalanche of statistics as toxic as the property-based assets that lay beneath many of them And under all this rubble lay the corpse of the Celtic Tiger. How Ireland managed to achieve such a spectacular implosion is a stunning story of corruption, carelessness and venality, told with passion and fury by one of Ireland's most respected journalists and commentators.

This volume discusses place and landscape in Irish fiction since 2008, including work by William Trevor, Dermot Bolger, Anne Enright, Donal Ryan, Claire Kilroy, Kevin Barry, Gerard Donovan, Danielle McLaughlin, Trisha McKinney, Billy O’Callaghan and Colum McCann. In light of writing by geographers, anthropologists and philosophers like Doreen Massey, Tim Ingold, Giorgio Agamben and Jeff Malpas, this book examines metamorphoses of place and landscape in fiction in the aftermath of a crisis with deep economic and cultural consequences. It shows what place and landscape representations reveal of the past and how boundedness, openness and emergence can contribute to designing future landscapes.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Ireland appears to be in the process of a remarkable social change, a process which has dramatically reversed a hitherto seemingly unstoppable economic decline. This exciting new book systematically scrutinises the interpretations and prescriptions that inform the 'Celtic Tiger'. Takes the standpoint that a more critical approach to the course of development being followed by the Republic is urgently required. Sets out to expose the fallacies that drive the fashionable rhetoric of Tigerhood. An esteemed list of contributors deal with issues such as immigration, the role of women, globalisation, and changing economic and social conditions.

In 2008 Ireland experienced one of the most dramatic economic crises of any economy in the world. It remains at the heart of the international crisis, sitting uneasily between the US and European economies. Not long ago, however, Ireland was celebrated as an example of successful market-led globalisation and economic growth. How can we explain the Irish crisis? What does it tell us about the causes of the international crisis? How should we rethink our understanding of contemporary economies and the workings of economic liberalism based on the Irish experience? This book combines economic sociology and comparative political economy to analyse the causes, dynamics and implications of Ireland's economic 'boom to bust'. It examines the interplay between the financial system, European integration and Irish national politics to show how financial speculation overwhelmed the economic and social development of the 1990s 'Celtic Tiger'.