Cultural Perspectives on Globalisation and Ireland

Technological University Dublin ARROW@TU Dublin AFIS (Association of Franco-Irish Studies) Books Publications 2011 Cultural Perspectives on Globalisation and Ireland Eamon Maher Technological University Dublin, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://arrow.tudublin.ie/afisbo Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Maher, Eamon, "Cultural Perspectives on Globalisation and Ireland" (2011). Books. 6. https://arrow.tudublin.ie/afisbo/6 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the AFIS (Association of Franco-Irish Studies) Publications at ARROW@TU Dublin. It has been accepted for inclusion in Books by an authorized administrator of ARROW@TU Dublin. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License Cultural Perspectives on Globalisation and Ireland Reimagining Ireland Volume 5 Edited by Dr Eamon Maher Institute of Technology, Tallaght PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien Eamon Maher (ed.) Cultural Perspectives on Globalisation and Ireland PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National- bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at ‹http://dnb.ddb.de›. A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Maher, Eamon. Cultural perspectives on globalisation and Ireland / Eamon Maher. p. cm. -- (Reimagining Ireland ; 5) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-03911-851-9 (alk. paper) 1. Culture and globalization--Ireland--History--20th century. 2. Globalization--Social aspects--Ireland. 3. Ireland--Civilization--20th century. 4. Globalization in literature. 5. Literature and globalization--Ireland--History--20th century. 6. English literature--Irish authors--History and criticism. 7. English literature--20th century--History and criticism. I. Title. DA959.1.M25 2009 303.48'2417--dc22 2009017889 ISSN 1662-9094 ISBN 978-3-03911-851-9 Cover image: collage created by Paul Butler. © Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2009 Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland [email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. Printed in Germany Contents Foreword vii Fintan O’Toole Introduction 1 Eamon Maher Part I: Globalisation and Irish Society 1. Inside Out: Time and Place in Global Ireland 11 Michael Cronin 2. The Global Irish Spirit 31 Catherine Maignant 3. In at the Death: The French Press and the Celtic Tiger 53 Grace Neville 4. Negotiating the Self: The Spectral Mobile Subject 67 Eugene O’Brien 5. Globalisation, Vulnerability and the Return to Religion: Reflections from the Irish Experience 93 Peadar Kirby 6. The Global is Personal 113 Tom Inglis Part II: Literary Perspectives on Globalisation and Ireland 7. Contemporary Irish Fiction and the Transnational Imaginary 133 Anne Fogarty 8. ‘Root and Routes’: Home and Away in Friel and Heaney 149 Alison O’Malley-Younger and Tom Herron 9. Irish Theatre and Globalisation: A Faustian Pact? 177 Patrick Lonergan 10. ‘Coming of Age’ (and other Fictions of Globalisation) in Three Novels by Seamus Deane, Roddy Doyle and Patrick McCabe 191 Willy Maley 11. ‘The Universal is the Local without Walls’: John McGahern and the Global Project 211 Eamon Maher Notes on Contributors 233 Index 239 Foreword Fintan O’Toole A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, far away, the Communist Party in each part of the Soviet empire was given a ‘brotherly working-class party’ from a benighted capitalist country to look after. The special protégé of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania’s Communist Party was Ireland, so the gen- eral secretary of the Communist Party of Ireland, Michael O’Riordan, was a regular guest at the official seaside town of Palanga. On almost every visit, he gave an interview to the state newspaper. He would stress the similari- ties of Lithuania and Ireland, with their comparable area and population size. But, recalled the Lithuanian writer Simonas Daukantas, his recurring theme was, ‘How much Ireland could learn from Lithuania’s non-capitalist way of development’ and that ‘Lithuania shows what would be Ireland’s achievements if the country went socialist’.1 By 2005, there were 70,000 Lithuanian immigrants working in Ireland. Lithuanian students were being told ‘How much Lithuania could learn from Ireland’s free market way of development’ and that ‘Ireland shows what would be Lithuania’s achievements if the country went capitalist’. The Lithuanians were urged to create a Baltic Tiger in conscious emulation of the Celtic Tiger. And by the end of 2008, the Lithuanian government was running job fairs in Dublin, offering the migrants a way out of the imploded Irish dream.2 1 S. Daukantas, review of Lee Komito, The Information Revolution and Ireland: Prospects and Challenges (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2004). In Information Research, 10 (3), 2005, review no. R171. Available at: http://informationr.net/ir/ reviews/revs171.html. 2 Ronan McGreevy, ‘Lithuanian immigrants urged to come home’, in The Irish Times, 22 November 2008. viii Fintan O’Toole It is tempting – and not entirely wrong – to see this circular journey as a small parable of the dislocations and ironies of Ireland’s experience of postmodern globalisation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Yet, by stressing the newness and strangeness of that experience, we can oversimplify the Irish past. Lithuanian migration into Ireland, for example, did not begin in the late 1990s, when the Celtic Tiger was a magnet and a model. It began in the 1880s, when anti-Jewish pogroms followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Jews from Lithuania, indeed largely from the single shtetl of Akmijan, formed the core of the Jewish communities of Dublin, Cork, Belfast and Limerick. That single community produced such important figures of late twentieth-century Irish culture as the editor and novelist David Marcus, the film maker Louis Marcus, the politician and intellectual Gerald Goldberg and the director and documentary maker Louis Lentin. In the Jewish cemetery that was literally over the wall from where I grew up in Dublin, there were gravestones marked with inscrip- tions like ‘a Good Woman of Akmijan’. Amnesia has overtaken Akmijan: it is now called Akmeme and all trace of its Jewish community has been obliterated, first by the pogroms, then by the Holocaust. Amnesia has also overtaken the Lithuanian Jewish communities of Irish cities, the Little Lithuanias long gone, the memory of their existence rapidly fading.3 We must bear in mind that understanding globalisation in the Irish context is as much a task of remembrance and recovery as it is of encountering the new. The paradox of globalisation is that it is at once a process of cultural homogenisation (the aim, as the Irish capitalist Tony O’Reilly put it, is to make all cultures alike so as to ‘generate the cosmopolitan aspirations best satisfied by global brands’4) and a process that is experienced in ways that highlight the specificity of every culture it touches. In the Irish case, that specificity lies, not in genuine newness, but in a sense of what might be 3 See Dermot Keogh, Jews in Twentieth Century Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998), passim. 4 See Fintan O’Toole, The Ex-Isle of Erin: Images of a Global Ireland (Dublin: New Island Books, 1997), pp. 129–30. Foreword ix called dislocated continuity. What I mean by this is the sensation of experi- encing the same things in a different spatial and temporal context. Within this sensation, there was a constant slippage between apparent opposites – new and old, history and current affairs, home and abroad, familiarity and estrangement. Put simply, between 1990 and 2007, Ireland experienced as newness and postmodernity what Irish people as emigrants had experienced as modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This experience has to be distinguished from the obvious ways in which globalisation itself is not a new experience for Ireland. As far back as the late Iron Age, Irish elites were adopting fashionable European styles (so-called Celtic art) to distinguish themselves from their humbler fellow countrymen and women. Since then, we can distinguish three huge waves of globalising influences. There was Christianity, with its revolutionary privileging of the universal over the local and stunning new communications technology (literacy). There was imperialism, experienced both through the forcible incorporation of Ireland in the burgeoning British Empire and through the deployment of Irish people in the projection of imperial power. (This process was as complex and multi-dimensional as anything experienced in the twenty-first century. As early as the 1750s, for example, we find Irish men killing each other in the forests of the North American frontier, some as ‘French’ soldiers, some as ‘English’ troops and all therefore as suspect and unstable elements in a supposedly clear dichotomy.) And there was consumerism. Global trade may have expanded and contracted in different phases since the eighteenth century, but it affected Irish culture in the most profound ways. Again, as early as 1745, we can find the Irish trader William Johnson selling Chinese vermillion, wrapped in convenient little packages, to Iroquois warriors for use as war-paint – an example of the pure globalised consumerism that we tend to associate only with late modernity.5 At home the nineteeth-century consumer revolution affected Ireland at least as much as any other part of western Europe.

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