Celtic Tiger

The abundance of contemporary Irish fiction dealing with crime seems hard to refute. While most works have been produced in the literary field, cinema has also explored Ireland’s contemporary situation through the lens of crime fiction. The aim of this article is to analyse the relationship between crime, crisis, and capital in a contemporary Irish thriller: Peter Murphy and Rachael Moriarty’s Traders (2015). The film creates a bleak and acidic depiction of Ireland’s financial world and how in times of crisis, crime and capital are negotiated and articulated. A brief introduction of what the Celtic Tiger era and its subsequent crisis meant for Ireland will be followed by an exploration of its relation to the crime thriller. By studying crime and its intersections with class structures, economic conditions, and the shaping of its space in the film, I will attempt to undertake an economic and aesthetic reading. Moreover, I will consider how the film delineates a portrait of Ireland’s ...

There is an absence of literature that places social work practice in Ireland within a global context. This circumstance is obstructive to students and practitioners of social work in Ireland, who must increasingly demonstrate understanding of social work as an international endeavour. Ireland is also steadily more globalised and multi-cultural. In social work, related changes underway include increased transience of persons across national lines, and complex transnational social problems. In this context, social workers may broaden their understanding of Irish practice through drawing upon learning from elsewhere. To facilitate this, a theoretically informed critical commentary on the literature is presented in this article. The specific focus is on globalisation in the Republic of Ireland. The core argument of the paper is that variance in international socioeconomic wellbeing must be better understood by social work students and practitioners in Ireland, as a response to intensif...

Italiano) Nel presente articolo, analizzerò come l'invisibilizzazione del lavoro riproduttivo durante la Tigre Celtica in Irlanda venga narrativizzato attraverso l'uso di elementi gotici e perturbanti all'interno del romanzo Nothing on Earth (2016) di Conor O'Callaghan. Dopo aver dato alcune coordinate teoriche sul concetto di lavoro riproduttivo all'interno dell'ecologia-mondo capitalista e averle poi situate nel contesto irlandese, passerò all'analisi del testo. La mia argomentazione si baserà sul lavoro di teoriche come Maria Mies,

This book seeks a fundamental shift in spatial systems of experience and understanding that govern basic assumptions of Western modernist traditions reliant on empty space and diametric spatial oppositions. A shift towards concentric relational spaces of assumed connection and relative openness for experience and thought is proposed for psychology, as well as social and emotional education. To do so requires interrogation of concepts usually peripheral to psychology, such as othering, the iron cage, fear of freedom. as well as integration of depth psychology with social and emotional education in cross-cultural, spatial terms. Space is being treated as both a domain of analysis and a method of interpretation, as part of this proposed interdisciplinary paradigm shift for psychology, education, and the humanities and social sciences more widely.

During the 1990s the Celtic Tiger era began in the Republic of Ireland. This article tracks the response of the Irish Urban System to that remarkable period of growth ended abruptly with the Global Economic Crisis of 2008. Using Small Area Population Statistics from Ireland’s Central Statistics Office for the years 1996, 2002, 2006 and 2011 it was possible to record growth across the towns and cities of Ireland that constituted the Irish Urban System. The location, size, type and rates of change were recorded and mapped with a view towards discovering the extent to which the urban hierarchy and the spatial distribution was being altered, and by what geographical processes. Over 15 years the national population grew by 26% with most of that growth taking place in urban centres. A clear diffusion outwards from the Dublin region is noticeable and the capital’s role in systemic change is explored alongside other factors. The article highlights the changing nature of growth over time and...

This article explores the representation of family and individuals in Anne Enright's novel The Green Road (2015) by engaging with Zygmunt Bauman's sociological category of “liquid modernity” (2000). In The Green Road, Enright uses a recurrent topic, a family gathering, to observe the multiple forms in which particular experiences seem to have suffered a process of fragmentation during the Celtic Tiger period. A comprehensive analysis of the form and plot of the novel exposes the ideological contradictions inherent in the once hegemonic notion of Irish family and brings attention to the different forms of individual vulnerability for which Celtic Tiger Ireland has no answer.

The Celtic Tiger boom, and now its collapse, has been largely analysed through the lens of neo-classical economics and modernisation theory with much attention being paid to economic issues such as the role of foreign direct investment (FDI) and the need for cost competitiveness, or social issues such as the liberalisation of values and practices, upward social mobility, increased living standards and debates about social polarisation. While these lens offer many valuable and valid insights, they tend to neglect the particular and distinctive structural characteristics of the way the Irish economy and Irish society have developed, and the reasons for these. This paper takes a more structuralist approach, identifying the ‘Irish model’ that emerged during the boom years, a particular form of structured power. The paper places this ‘model’ in the wider context of the emergence of financialisation as a driver of a particular kind of global economy. Focusing attention on the role of the ...

Migrant workers in the construction industry are often taken to be motivated purely by short-term financial gains. The dramatic influx of Polish workers into the Irish building industry during the Celtic Tiger boom thus appears a clear case of economic migration. A qualitative panel study (2008–2013) which interviewed Polish construction workers through the boom and subsequent recession reveals a more complex picture. Migrants’ initial move to Ireland was sometimes motivated partly by non-financial concerns such as the desire for new experiences. When the construction industry crashed, many migrants did leave Ireland, but interviews with them back in Poland showed that family issues such as children’s education had been important. Many migrants remained in Ireland, sometimes facilitated by access to unemployment benefits. The Polish construction workers included some with technical and professional qualifications and these appear more likely to have stayed in Ireland. This decision ...

Focusing upon scapegoating in post-crash Ireland, this article considers a pervasive political process that is protective of powerful interests and the status quo following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Drawing from group conflict theory and framing analysis as part of a broader critical realist take on society, we consider how blame has been placed on myriad targets, ranging from a collective ‘we who went a bit mad with borrowing’ to more specific groups such as public sector workers, the unemployed, single mothers and immigrants. In conclusion, we underscore the need for sociology to assert its relevance by challenging such processes and defend civil society in a capitalist world-system that is in structural crisis.

It is not just publicly funded universities that are facing a cold and hard future in the aftershock of the 2008 global banking crisis. Nations, such as Ireland, are similarly affected as states seek to appease ‘the markets’ and cover private banks' losses at the public's expense. As this wave of neoliberalisation, or market fundamentalism, proceeds we may ask: what is the role of sociology? Drawing from an exploratory study of financial activism, notably silver vigilantism and the Crash JP Morgan Campaign, this paper endorses global public sociology among threatened publics. As per Michael Burawoy's calls for public sociology, this entails promoting reflexive knowledge and democratic dialogue in the defence of civil society. After outlining the core tenets, strengths and weaknesses of silver vigilantism, the role of public sociology and the need for further research are underscored as the economic crisis continues in post ‘Celtic Tiger' Ireland and beyond.

This paper engages with and expands on a number of themes examined in Tom Garvin’s Preventing the Future. It asks if it is accurate to describe independent Ireland as poor before 1950, arguing that Ireland became poor in comparative terms only during the 1950s. While agreeing with the view that Ireland changed during the 1960s, the main contention of this article is that modernisation was severely constrained between 1959 and 1989 by the continuing dominance of traditional interests and attitudes. It also argues that Ireland’s poor economic performance was a consequence of this continuity as successive governments, privileged property owners and rural interests dominated other sectors of society. It suggests that the importance of culture and continuity in the process of change has often been underestimated and this requires closer attention if specific outcomes are to be explained in a satisfactory fashion.

Focusing upon scapegoating in post-crash Ireland, this article considers a pervasive political process that is protective of powerful interests and the status quo following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Drawing from group conflict theory and framing analysis as part of a broader critical realist take on society, we consider how blame has been placed on myriad targets, ranging from a collective ‘we who went a bit mad with borrowing’ to more specific groups such as public sector workers, the unemployed, single mothers and immigrants. In conclusion, we underscore the need for sociology to assert its relevance by challenging such processes and defend civil society in a capitalist world-system that is in structural crisis.

The 1990s have been of utmost importance for Ireland and the Irish as this decade is characterised by a great diversity of problems: economic problems, unemployment and  migration which came as a result of these problems, racial harassment experienced  abroad, psychological problems, the Troubles  whose serious impact was felt not only in  Northern Ireland but also in the Republic of Ireland, which emerged as a consequence of the conflict between the Catholics and the Protestants because of the political status  of Northern Ireland and which began at the end of the 1960s and ended in 1998 with Belfast Agreement; self-centeredness emerging as a repercussion of the Celtic Tiger period which was witnessed between 1995 and 2000 and which means economic development in Ireland, and, lastly, the problem of violence. Martin McDonagh, an Anglo-Irish playwright represents these problems emphasising the problem of violence encountered in this decade in a satirical but grotesque way particularl...

After the financial collapse of 2008, Ireland imposed a program of fiscal consolidation that was designed to address the debt concerns of the nation. The implementation of austerity measures became the inverse to the high-flying years of the Celtic Tiger. Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones and Mary Morrissy’s Prosperity Drive represent examples of post-austerity literature in how they engage with ideas of austerity as an inverted capitalist narrative of success. Their books examine a post-austerity Ireland where the influence of global capitalism has resulted in a disruption of local communities. Both McCormack and Morrissy critique post-austerity Ireland to show the psychological, emotional, and human cost of the nation’s transformation into a post-austerity country.

This article explores the phenomenon of Irish “Celtic Tiger” boom-era “Ghost Estates”: housing developments left in ruin by the burst of the Irish housing bubble in the late 2000s. Ghost Estate imagery is perhaps the most evocative of those associated with the Celtic Tiger. This has led such ruins and their images to become symbolic not only of the Irish boom-era and its crash, but of neoliberalism more broadly. This ideological valency held by Celtic Tiger Ghost Estates makes them an important point of interrogation in the question of how architecture and architectural aesthetics have processed the period, and how they’ve affected subsequent ideological attitudes towards Ireland’s enduring housing crisis. The phenomenon also raises deeper questions regarding ruins in relation to architecture, aesthetics, history, and concepts of time. The estates will be analysed for their dual expression of the ephemeral and the permanent: the ephemeral through their failure as a project of architectural design, town planning, housing economics, and politics – the permanent through their movement from real estate to ghost estate; their transformation from housing to ruin. Architectural ruins will also be shown to transmit multiple conceptions of time; in some ways as burdened by the future as they are by the past. By interrogating this recent history of Ghost Estates in light of the deeper cultural history of the architectural ruin, the article examines how this contemporary phenomenon reveals or disrupts the narrative structure of neoliberal progress, and how architecture contributes to aesthetic conceptions and images of time.