Drawing together the strands of music, sport, and popular culture under the umbrella of 'Ordinary Life, ' this engaging new book takes the reader on an entertaining journey through modern Ireland, celebrating the many unique expressions of 'Irishness.' From the folk roots of popular culture in the song The Night Larry Was Stretched, to the showbands and community building among U2 fans; from the Riddle of Ravenhill and the 1954 Irish Rugby International, to The Lion of Lahinch - an IRA man's appearance at the Walker Cup. Everyday life is explored in Corner Boys in Small Town Ireland, while a historical dimension follows the Irish railroad workers to Cuba in 1835. Bringing it back to the present is a chapter on the fascination with talk radio and its development in Ireland, and the general recycling of Irish popular culture. This lively collection contributes to the study of Irish Cultural Studies, and meets the growing interest in Irish music and sports studies in an entertaining and cutting-edge fashion. Accessible for a wide audience, the book captures the spirit of Irish life with examples of events and emotions shared by everyone

"So that's our setting. Sixty-nine houses, four corners of Georgian Dublin but just one address. Scope enough for some remarkable tales and extraordinary lives. Homes that ... provide a backdrop for drawing room intrigue, revelry and temperance, devilry and romance; the abandon of artistic expression and the restraint of social convention.... So follow me, dear reader, into Fitzwilliam Square." Fitzwilliam Square on the south side of Dublin provides the setting and a true-life cast of characters for Lives Less Ordinary, which examines how the people of this Georgian square impacted on the history of Dublin and the wider world. These disparate denizens from a small residential enclave permeated every walk of Irish life - political, legal and cultural - in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this updated edition, we follow the inhabitants of Fitzwilliam Square into nineteenth century courtrooms; we witness their soldier sons on a succession of battlefields through personal reminiscences; we examine their remarkable artistic and literary output; we hear amusing anecdotes about the politicians, doctors and academics who lived there, including tales about duels, ghosts and political and personal scandals. On their own, the sketches offer an intriguing portrait of individual lives, but woven together they provide a fascinating overview of Irish life at a particular place and time. The stories are varied and wide-ranging, but they are anchored by the fact that they only involve those inhabitants of the sixty-nine houses of Dublin's Fitzwilliam Square.

This book examines how Irishness as national narrative is consistently understood ‘from a distance’. Irish Presidents, critics, and media initiatives focus on how Irishness is a global resource chiefly informed by the experiences of an Irish diaspora predominantly working in English, while also reminding Irish people ‘at home’ that Irish is the 'national tongue'. In returning to some of Ireland’s major expat writers and international diplomats, this book examines the economic reasons for their migration, the opportunities they gained by working abroad (sometimes for the British Empire), and their experiences of writing and governing in non-native English speaking communities such as China and Hong Kong. It argues that their concerns about belonging, loneliness, the desire to buy a place ‘back home’, and losing a language are shared by today’s generation of social network expatriates.

This book examines a number of different interpretations and explanations in the context of historical change, as the Irish grappled with the questions of political independence, economic autonomy, the decline of provincialism, the rise of pluralism, and the unsolved conundrum of Irish nationhood.

Bringing together the diverse and marvelously articulate voices of women of Irish and Irish-American descent, editors Caitriona Moloney and Helen Thompson examine the complicated maps of experience that the women's public, private, and literary lives represent—particularly as they engage in both feminism and postcolonialism. Acknowledging Mary Robinson's revised view of Irish identity—now global rather than local—this work recognizes the importance of identity as a site of mobility. The pieces reveal how complex the terms "feminism" and "postcolonialism" are; they examine how the individual writers see their identities constructed and/or mediated by sexuality. In addition, the book traces common themes of female agency, violence, generational conflicts, migration, emigration, religion, and politics to name a few. As it represents the next wave of Irish women writers, this book offers fresh insight into the work of emerging and established authors and will appeal to a new generation of readers.