Ireland is suffering from a crisis of authority. Catholic Church scandals, political corruption, and economic collapse have shaken the Irish people’s faith in their institutions and thrown the nation’s struggle for independence into question. While Declan Kiberd explores how political failures and economic globalization have eroded Irish sovereignty, he also sees a way out of this crisis. After Ireland surveys thirty works by modern writers that speak to worrisome trends in Irish life and yet also imagine a renewed, more plural and open nation. After Dublin burned in 1916, Samuel Beckett feared “the birth of a nation might also seal its doom.” In Waiting for Godot and a range of powerful works by other writers, Kiberd traces the development of an early warning system in Irish literature that portended social, cultural, and political decline. Edna O’Brien, Frank O’Connor, Seamus Heaney, and Michael Hartnett lamented the loss of the Irish language, Gaelic tradition, and rural life. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Eavan Boland grappled with institutional corruption and the end of traditional Catholicism. These themes, though bleak, led to audacious experimentation, exemplified in the plays of Brian Friel and Tom Murphy and the novels of John Banville. Their achievements embody the defiance and resourcefulness of Ireland’s founding spirit—and a strange kind of hope. After Ireland places these writers and others at the center of Ireland’s ongoing fight for independence. In their diagnoses of Ireland’s troubles, Irish artists preserve and extend a humane culture, planting the seeds of a sound moral economy.

Handbook of the Irish Revival collects for the first time many of the essays, articles, and letters written during the Revival.

Renaissance Nation is the story of how the Pope's Children rewrote the rules for Ireland.In four decades, bookended by the visits of the pope in September 1979 and August 2018, Ireland has managed to become one of the wealthiest and most progressive nations in the world.Here David McWilliams presents the story of modern Ireland and how, once we threw off the shackles and replaced the torpor of collective dogma with the vibrancy of individual freedom, the economy too started to motor.Meet the everyman revolutionaries who made it all happen, heroes like Sliotar Mom and Flat White Man. Feel the pulse of the Radical Centre and celebrate the optimism of a tolerant, accepting, 'live and let live' nation.In a world where other nations are divided, their economies stalled, lurching to the extremes, convulsed by existential fights pitting one part of the population against the other, Renaissance Nation shows how a well off, relatively chilled Ireland, with a growing economy and surfing a wave of liberal optimism, may not be perfect, but it isn't a bad place to be.A triumph of popular economics and social history, this is the story of how, almost without anyone noticing, an insurgent middle class carried off something extraordinary – a quiet revolution – and with it, reshaped our national destiny.

First published in 1979, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival, through the works of W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, J. M. Synge, and Sean O’Casey, documents the complex spectrum of political, social and other pressures that helped fashion modern Ireland. At least three sets of cultural assumptions coexisted in Ireland during the years between 1890 and 1930, -- English, Irish and Anglo-Irish, each united by a common language but divided by considerable tensions and strain. The question of Irish identity forms the central theme of the study, and illustrates how it was a major, even obsessive concern for these writers. Subsidiary and interwoven themes constantly recur. Themes such as the concepts of the peasant and the hero, political nationalism, the meaning of Ireland’s history and the validity of her cultural traditions. Rather than use the literature concerned as merely endorsing evidence for a sociological or political thesis, this study allows its major themes and issues to emerge and develop from direct and close study of the work of the writers. This book will be of interest to students of literature and history.

Publisher description

Celtic Revival? explores what happens when a society loses its wealth, its faith in government, and its trust in its Church. The glorious rise of the Celtic Tiger in Ireland was thought by many to be a model for future economic growth for countries around the world; its dramatic crash in 2008 resonated equally widely. Yet despite the magnitude of the ongoing collapse, Sean Kay shows that seen in historical perspective, the crisis is part of a much larger pattern of generations of progress and change. Kay draws on a rich blend of research, interviews with a broad spectrum of Irish society, and his own decades of personal experience to tell the story of Ireland today. He guides the reader through the country's major economic challenges, political transformation, social change, the crisis in the Irish Catholic Church, and the rise of gay rights and multiculturalism. He takes us through the streets of Derry and Belfast to understand the Northern Ireland peace process and the daunting task of peace building that has only just begun. Finally, we see how Irish foreign policy has long been a model for balancing competing interests and values. Kay concludes by highlighting Ireland's lessons for the world and mapping a vital path for twenty-first-century challenges and opportunities for the coming generations in Ireland and beyond.