Ireland 1990-2011 in the fictional families of Colm Toibin, Anne Enright and Roddy Doyle

322 Pages·2015·1.72 MB·English

Riding the Tiger: Ireland 1990–2011 in the Fictional Families of
Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright and Roddy Doyle

Danielle Margaret O’Leary

20726267

B.A. (Hons), Curtin University, 2009

This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
at the University of Western Australia

School of Humanities
English and Cultural Studies

2015
Dedication and Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge and thank my supervisor, Professor Andrew Lynch. Your
guidance and encouragement have been vital. I will miss our meetings full of your
inspiring intelligence and AFL analysis.
Acknowledgements also to the Graduate Research School Coordinator
Professor Kieran Dolin and all members of the English and Cultural Studies
Department at the University of Western Australia; to the staff at the Reid Library and
the staff at the Graduate Research School at the University of Western Australia.
Furthermore I would like to acknowledge the International Association for the
Study of Irish Literatures; the staff at T.L. Robertson Library at Curtin University; the
staff at the Boole Library at the University College Cork; Russell Library at the
National University of Ireland, Maynooth; and James Hardiman Library at the National
University of Ireland, Galway. I would also like to thank for their inspiring writing and
advice, Margaret McIntyre, Dr. Stefanie Lehner, Dr. J. Edward Mallot and Dr. Cormac
O’Brien.
My love and thanks to Ray Monahan and Michael Campion for helping me to
understand the Irish economy; to Jack O’Connor for loaning me a book that became
vital to my thesis; to all of my Irish families, especially the Monahan and Punch families,
for looking after me during my research trip in 2011; to my friends who have supported
me throughout this process.
To Liz Byrski – thank you for your advice and precious friendship.
To Lynda O’Leary – thank you for your support and love.
To Jonathan Wall – thank you for your love and for making me so happy.

This doctorate is dedicated to my parents, Gerard and Gerardine O’Leary. You are the
most incredible people that I know. Thank you for moving to Australia, giving me two
places that I call home.
Table of Contents

Abstract ………………………………………………. v
Declaration …………………………………………… vi
Introduction …………………………………………... 1
Chapter One …………………………………………... 35
Chapter Two ………………………………………….. 98
Chapter Three ………………………………………… 145
Chapter Four ………………………………………….. 208
Aftermath ……………………………………………... 300
Reference List ………………………………………… 305

iv
Abstract

This thesis examines selected prose fiction of three major writers – Anne Enright,
Roddy Doyle and Colm Tóibín – in relation to societal and economic change in
Ireland in the prelude, duration and aftermath of the boom called the ‘Celtic Tiger’. In
particular, the thesis discusses how their representations of Irish families trace major
shifts in the nation’s life and consciousness over this period, and engage with broader
questions of history, memory and national identity. The theme of the family has a
long tradition in Irish fiction. It offers writers an opportunity for a rapprochement
with the past that registers recent and contemporary developments: dissatisfaction
with traditional nationalism and the rise of historical revisionism; the declining status
and influence of religion, with associated changes in laws and community customs;
sudden economic prosperity and decline, leading both to new levels of consumerism
and to widespread unemployment; and the social challenge of greatly increased
immigration. Other specific issues, such as the clerical sex abuse scandals of recent
years, domestic violence, inter-generational conflict, and non-standard relationships
are also articulated through the medium of their domestic narratives. The thesis
examines a range of novels by Enright, Tóibín and Doyle from the 1990s to 2011, and
also considers the significance of their collective turn to the explorative short story
form as the boom declined. Overall, it concludes that the hectic circumstances of the
Celtic Tiger’s rise and fall drew from these writers a major reassessment of the
formerly accepted co-ordinates and goals of Irish society, saw them assert the
necessity of a break with existing cultural visions, and challenged their imagination to
provide new visions for the future. In their family narratives – often observing new
forms of inter-relation between fathers, mothers and children – these writers have
offered a conspectus of both continuity and change in the wider Irish social context.
v
Declaration

This thesis does not contain work that I have published, nor work under review for
publication.

Student Signature ________________________________
vi
Introduction

Irish people, it may be said, are amongst those who are, at one and the
same time, deeply archaic and immediately contemporary.1
– Robert Welch

In October 2010, this satirical advertisement was stapled onto a makeshift wall of an
abandoned shop on Shandon Street, Cork City, Ireland:
2
1 R. Welch, Changing States: Transformations in Modern Irish Writing, London,
R o u t l e d g e , 1 9 9 3 , p . x i .
2 Personal Photography, 22 October 2010.
1
Ireland, it seemed, was for sale; the idea of Ireland, anyway. According to the poster,
Ireland was in a state of poverty and despair through the policies of the then Finance
Minister Brian Lenihan and (unnamed) Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. Surrounding the
poster were a large number of photocopied newspaper articles, outlining the state of
the nation. Spray paint and offensive language were not required to mark the wall and
express contempt; the current newspaper articles were deemed insulting enough. The
makeshift wall of information served as a canvas on which the frustration of the
nation was represented.
The years leading up to the creation of this poster, however, were very
different. The ‘Celtic Tiger’ – an appellation created by a London-based economist,
Kevin Gardiner, who used it in a report for his employers, the investment bankers
Morgan Stanley, on 31 August 19943 – was the period of unprecedented economic
growth from 1994 to 2008 in the Republic of Ireland. It took three years for the phrase
‘to take off’4 and it then become synonymous with accelerated change in almost every
aspect of Irish life. Transcending its original economic boundaries, the Celtic Tiger
became the hegemonic signifier for all that changed in the social and cultural world of
the mid–late 1990s in Ireland. During this time, the literary representation of Ireland
was transformed by a flourishing of activity that projected a strong sense of national
consciousness which was, simultaneously, confident and confused.
For all the heady novelty of the Celtic Tiger years, the uncertain national
mood that it represented was in some ways familiar, recalling Daniel Corkery’s
sentiments in 1931: ‘[o]ur national consciousness may be described, in a native
3 L. Harte, Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987–2008, Oxford, John Wiley &
S o n s , 2 0 1 3 , p . 6 .
4 H. Shaw, ‘What is the Celtic Tiger?’, in A. Higgins Wyndham (ed.), Re-Imagining
Ireland, Charlottesville & London, University of Virginia Press, 2006, pp. 16–18,
p.16.
2
phrase, as a quaking sod. It gives no footing.’5 It has been said that the Irish national
consciousness as represented in literature, the characteristic text of the nation, must
always be understood as ‘a process, unfinished, fragmenting’.6 The social and fiscal
transformations experienced in the Celtic Tiger resulted in an extreme contemporary
transitional period: a pseudo-transformational, liminal space that continually offered
the hope for a prosperous future without ever providing a rationale for that hope.
In the words of Liam Harte, the Celtic Tiger was ‘paralleled by an uncommon
flourishing of literary and artistic creativity’.7 This flourishing literature in and around
the Celtic Tiger period is the subject of my inquiry in this thesis. I analyse selected
fiction from 1990 to 2011 by Anne Enright, Roddy Doyle and Colm Tóibín,
examining and evaluating three major literary voices that enhanced, challenged and
redefined Ireland in a series of differing representations that capture this tumultuous
period. Their narratives, while significantly different in content, all implicitly or
explicitly work to reconfigure the relationship between the nation’s past and present
conditions, by ‘renegotiating received meanings of nationality and creating spaces for
a revised rhetoric of Irishness’.8 In this recent and still developing period of rapid
change, the past has proven no longer a powerful guide to understanding of the
present, and the traditional preoccupation with the nation’s history has been re-
evaluated. This articulation of change ‘is an on-going negotiation that seeks to
authorise cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation’.9
The transformation of Ireland has offered writers the chance to re-situate the nation in
5 D. Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature: A Study, Cork, Cork University
P r e s s , 1 9 3 1 , p . 1 4 .
6 D. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of a Modern Nation, London, Vintage,
1995, p. 120.
7 Harte, Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987–2008, p. 1.
8 Ibid., p. 3.
9 H.K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, New York, Routledge Classics, 2010, p. 3.
3
history, or to recast the history of the nation within the contemporary context. In order
to understand the impact of ‘the angular, discontinuous, spliced-together nature of
contemporary Irish reality’,10 the decades that preceded its growth must be examined.

The Robinson Effect
The growth of contemporary Ireland can be traced from the late 1950s where the
country ‘moved from being an essentially rural-based, traditional bound society to
something resembling a modern, urbanised state’.11 The rural, traditional society can
be best understood through Éamon de Valera’s iconic address on Radio Eireann, St
Patrick’s Day, 17 March 1943. In the speech, the then Taoiseach outlines his ideal
Ireland, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the Gaelic League (Conradh na
Gaeilge), a group that actively promoted Irish culture and native language. In his
speech, de Valera presents an isolationist Ireland deeply loyal to the Catholic Church:

That Ireland which we dreamed of would be the home of a people who
valued material wealth only as the basis of right living … and devoted
their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would
be bright with cosy homesteads – whose fields and villages would be
joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children,
the contests of athletic youths and the laughter of comely maidens, whose
firesides would be the forums for the wisdom of serene old age. It would,
10 F. O’Toole, ‘Writing the Boom’, Irish Times, 25 January 2001, p. 12.
1 1 J . K e n n y , ‘ A f t e r t h e N e w s : C ritiquing the Irish Novel since the Sixties’, The Irish
Review, no. 25, Winter/Spring 2000, pp. 62–73, p. 65.
4
in a word, be the home of a people living the life that God desires a man
should live.12

Since de Valera’s imaginings of a rural culture where people live as ‘God desires a
man should live’, Ireland’s social milieu has been complicated by local
socioeconomic and international political developments, resulting in a struggle over
national identity, and a difficult passage to understanding of what it now means to be
Irish. De Valera’s vision of Ireland was as a conservative nation with an emphasis on
self-sufficient agricultural industry, and where the population was encouraged to buy
Irish products as a means to boost the economy and national self-confidence. With
limited national resources, however, de Valera’s protectionist approach was
considered a failure. Under the leadership of Taoiseach Seán Lemass, Ireland’s
economy began to change drastically. As Secretary for the Department of Finance,
T.K. Whitaker wrote a paper, ‘Economic Development’,13 that outlined the future for
the Irish economy, namely foreign investment to stimulate industrialisation. The
paper can be read as a foreshadowing of the Celtic Tiger; Whitaker has been hailed as
the architect of the Celtic Tiger economy.14
Whitaker’s imaginings, however, did not bear fruit until decades later, with
Ireland’s membership of the European Community in 1973 acting as a major catalyst.
This positioned the nation within the European transnational government, leading to a
‘diminishing significance … of national sovereignty’ along with ‘increasing
12 E. de Valera, ‘The Ireland which we dreamed of’, in R. Aldous (ed.), Great Irish
S p e e c h e s , L o n d o n , Q u e r c u s , 2 007, pp. 91–95, p. 93.
13 T.K. Whitaker, Economic Development, Dublin, Department of Finance/Stationery
Office, 1958.
14 See: F. O’Muircheartaigh (ed.), Ireland in the Coming Times: Essays to Celebrate
T. L. Whitaker’s 80 Years, Dublin, Institute of Public Administration, 1997.
5