The Influence of Ireland on Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Irish Writing

by Carla Jenkins

Presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Philosophy in Irish Writing, School of English, Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin August 2018.

Declaration

I declare that this thesis has not been submitted as an exercise for a degree at this or any other university and that it is entirely my own work. I agree that the Trinity College Library may lend or copy this thesis upon request.

Signed......

August 2018

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my Maw and Paw, Val and Robert. For all the words I have written in this thesis, I will never have the words to express how much you both mean to me and how thankful I am for everything you have done for me, this year and all the years previous. This, in the end, is for you.

Thank you to Dr. Amy Prendergast, for her immense patience (even when I told her I hated the whole Long Eighteenth Century, and that I wanted to write my thesis on Scotland), her incredible direction, and her wonderful supervision. Thank you to Professor Eve Patten for her grace, and to Dr. Julie Bates, for being a friend.

Thank you to Emmet Kirwan and John Boyne for being as great in person as they are on paper.

Special thank you to Morag, for the whole year. I could never buy enough Irn Bru to show how lucky and grateful I am to have found the deep friendship I have with you. Your assistance on this magnum opus will stay with me indefinitely.

Katherine Hodgson, if the past influences our futures as I argue here, we are in for a golden life. Thank you for all your help.

Thank you to the special friends I have found in Frank and Anne, Jean and Colum, Carol and Phil, Brian Doherty (where it all began), Pierre, Katharine, Sammy, Molly, Dara, Jessie, Lottie, Toby, Arnie and Hugo and of course, my grandparents Isabel and Graham. How lucky I am to have pockets of home everywhere I go!

A final thank you to Dublin: although schooled, I was not born here, and you will not have me dead or alive. Yet, you have never ceased to hold my mind.

This is for Paul Curran and Scott Hutchison, whose hands I will never forget.

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Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter One 10 The Influence of Ireland on Expressions of (Failed) Masculinity in Emmet Kirwan’s Dublin Oldschool and Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends

Chapter Two 22 The Influence of Ireland on Expressions of Femininity in Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing and Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends

Chapter Three 36 The Influence of Twentieth Century Ireland on Sexual Identity and Expression in John Boyne's The Heart’s Invisible Furies and Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half- Formed Thing

Conclusion 50

Bibliography 57

Appendix Contents 68

Notes on Appendix 69

Appendix 70

Abstract

This thesis critically examines the influence of Ireland on gender and sexual identity in contemporary Irish writing. Chapter one explores Irish masculinity; chapter two expressions of feminine experience and chapter three the influence of Ireland upon sexual identity and expression. The thesis analyses the role of the Catholic church and the use of Dublin as an urban city in contemporary Irish writing, as well as themes of emotional inarticulacy and sexual repression, and issues such as drug abuse, self-harm, mental instability and institutional abuse to define the extent of the influence of Ireland’s changing socio-political and artistic landscape on contemporary Irish writing. It concludes by exploring the multi-faceted compound of contemporary Irish writing with visual art, music and film which, in turn, serves to have a mutually influential relationship with Ireland’s socio-political landscape.

Introduction

Once upon a time, more than a million Irish pilgrims descended on the Phoenix Park to serenade their pope. “He’s got the whole world, in his hands”, they sang. He doesn’t now. Different times. Different pontiff (Lord, 2018, online).

In the same year as the referendum result which legalised abortion and provided access to full reproductive healthcare in Ireland, (O’Carroll & Fitzgerald, 2018, online), Pope Francis visited Ireland for the World Meeting of Families. The closing mass, which anticipated crowds of 500,000 people, gathered only around 130,000 attendees (Moore, 2018, online). The arrival of Pope Francis inevitably echoes the

1979 visit of Pope John Paul II to Ireland, which amassed a far larger number of attendees. Many have argued that in contrast to the 1979 visit - which was viewed as an emblem of triumphant Catholicism - Pope Francis’ arrival in Ireland was the “final hope” of a “last-ditch stand against an inorexable secularist tide” (Hederman, 2017, online). Despite attempts in the 1979 visit to lynch-pin Irish Catholicism in the face of increasing modernity, in that year contraception for married couples was also legalised, marking the beginning of a movement towards sexual freedom and secular liberalism that has culminated in this year’s public vote to legalise abortion.

Since the turn of the millennium, the socio-political, cultural and economic landscapes of Ireland1 have been completely redrawn to represent the neoliberal, educated and wealthy European country that it has become. However, this movement towards liberal secularity has not been without difficulty. In light of the current climate, many viewed the arrival of Pope Francis to Dublin as an attempt to reclaim a previously-held social order. Former president Mary McAleese has described the World Meeting of Families as a “right-wing rally within the church’s

1 The “Ireland” of this thesis refers to the Republic of Ireland only.

teaching…designed… to get [people] motivated to fight against the tide of same- sex marriage, rights for gays, abortion rights, contraceptive rights” (Gleeson, 2018).

The influence of Ireland’s church and state on expressions of gender and sexual identities is ubiquitous and insidious. Contemporary Irish writing is engaging and exploring this influence now more than ever before: in Dublin Oldschool, Emmet

Kirwan rewrites Pope John Paul II’s “young people of Ireland, I love you” to “young people of Ireland. Wreck the fucking gaff!” (58).

Just as the integral structures of Irish society are changing, so too are structures of thought and attitude around gender and sexuality. This thesis will critically examine the links between society, gender and sexuality - and the expression of both - using works such as Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed

Thing (2013) (A Girl), Emmet Kirwan’s Dublin Oldschool (2016) (Oldschool), Sally

Rooney’s Conversations with Friends (2017) (Conversations) and John Boyne’s The

Heart’s Invisible Furies (2017) (The Heart’s).

As Judith Butler wrote, the prospect of ‘gender’ – rather than being interpreted as a monolithic entity inherited from birth – is now regarded as an identity marker which is diverse, hybrid, consistently being mutated by its environment and, fundamentally, consistently performed. Such a performance requires men and women to have a mutually influential relationship as both are informed by and constantly informing their spatial and social environments. Butler writes:

Gender ought not be constructed as a stable identity or locus of agency which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts (1995, 60).

Despite these relatively modern findings, much of Ireland’s integral socio-political, economic and cultural structures were constructed on the twentieth-centuries model of hegemonic masculine privilege. R.W. Connell defines hegemonic masculinity as

the configuration of gender practice which “embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women” (2005,

77), and argues that state organizational practices as structured in relation to the

‘reproductive arena’ whose gender configurations favour masculinity. Whilst it is not unique that the Irish state is essentially masculinist, the strength of the patriarchal authority of the Irish state was enabled by its relationship with the Catholic Church, another overwhelmingly masculinist institution. Arguably, for the large majority of the twentieth century, Ireland was an oppressive patriarchy which prioritised heteronormative models of gender, based on traditional religious stereotypes and familial based relationships.

Hegemony (like gender) is not fixed; rather, it is based in power which shifts when dynamics change: “hegemony is likely to be established only if there is some correspondence between cultural ideal and institutional power, collective if not individual” (77). Hegemony is a ‘historically mobile relation’ where “new groups may challenge old solutions and construct a new hegemony”. Shifts in gender equality and representation and sexual emancipation in twenty-first century Ireland have challenged the previously assured patriarchal hegemonic structures of Ireland, and arguably will usher in a more progressive future. Tom Inglis argues that “a catholic culture of self-abnegation in which sexual pleasure and desire were repressed”, is now replaced by a “culture of consumption and self-indulgence in which the fulfilment of pleasures and desires is emphasized” (2005, 11). This is partly influenced by the universal changes in gender theory and sexual identity/expression, but also in a more local context as the integral structures of Ireland have been rapidly changing since the late twentieth century. Conn Holohan and Tony Tracy write,

Between 1990 and 2011… Ireland had gone through a period of dramatic social change that included a near-collapse in the moral authority of the Catholic church (resulting from a succession of paedophile priest scandals

and the uncovering of a history of abuse in institutions run by Catholic orders), a substantial increase in immigrants settling in Ireland… and an exceptional economic and, later, property boom with a concomitant rise in a culture of consumerism in a rapidly secularized Irish society (2).

Whilst this is true, with these dates including the boom and bust of the Celtic Tiger and the presidential tenure of Mary Robinson from 1990 until 1997 and Mary

McAleese from 1997 until 2011, it can be argued that these structural shifts began much before 1990. The 1970s and 1980s presented a challenge to the post- independence championing of the heteronormative Irish Catholic family, complete with strict parental roles of mother as home-maker and father as bread-winner, as fights for female emancipation and LGBTQ+ rights, access to reproductive healthcare, and access to sexual education became increasingly visible and publicised. As Clare Bracken argues, “in the 1980s this entrenched construction was destabilised, with the feminist, gay and lesbian movements actively working to challenge the conservative orthodoxies of the Irish imaginary” (2015, 19). In 1979, contraception was legalised for married couples (only later made fully accessible in

1990); homosexuality and sexual acts between men were legalised in 1993; in 1996 the referendum to remove the constitutional ban on divorce passed, albeit with a narrow margin; in 1998 the government introduced equality legislation to prevent discrimination on grounds of gender or sexual orientation, the Employment Equality

Act, and established the Equality Authority to ensure this policy was implemented.

Changes continued after the turn of the century: Ireland was the first country to legalise equality in Marriage for all couples by referendum vote in 2015, also passing the Gender Recognition Act that allows legal gender changes without the requirement of medical intervention or assessment by the state that year. Most recently, and previously mentioned, in May 2018 Ireland voted by referendum to repeal the eighth amendment of the constitution and allow abortion in Ireland

(Cronin, 2018, 242-248).

As expected, such changes are reflected throughout Irish writing and publishing. It is hard to believe that drug use or homosexuality are as openly written about as they were censored in twentieth-century Ireland. Similarly, Irish female writers are now more influential than ever, and many are using this influence to rectify the previous marginalisation of women writers in the Irish canon. Anne Enright is the current and inaugural fiction laureate and Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin is the current

Chair of Irish Poetry, with Paula Meehan finishing her tenure in 2016. Movements such as the Waking the Feminist movement and “Fired! Irish Women Poets and the

Canon!” pledge (2017) are fighting for equal representation of male and female writers, and anthologies such as Sinéad Gleeson’s The Long Gaze Back: An

Anthology of Women Writers, published to readdress the unequal representation of female writers as seen in the publication of The Field Day Anthology, have won the

Best Irish Published Book at the Irish Book Awards in 2015 and 2016. Furthermore, the authors of the chosen texts in this thesis are contributing to the movement towards equal representation and respecting of female trauma: Kirwan’s spoken word piece on the eighth amendment, “Heartbreak”, was published in Una Mullaly’s

Repeal the Eighth Anthology (2017).

This thesis seeks to engage with how these changes in the Irish socio-cultural, political and economic landscape influence contemporary writing, and how in turn, contemporary writing influences the changing landscape of Ireland. Each chapter will examine a different area of change - masculinity, femininity and sexuality - before applying theory to a critical analysis of the chosen texts to decipher the ways in which Ireland influences gender and sexuality in contemporary writing.

Chapter one will outline the context of masculinity in light of the changing nature of gender studies as well as within Irish culture, and then explore such changes in contemporary writing through a critical analysis of characters from

Oldschool and Conversations. It will discuss the use of the urban space of Dublin as

a means of enabling explorations of subversive masculinity and representations of social marginality through substance abuse, unstable mental health and themes of emotional repression, linguistic inexpression and masculine guilt and anxiety.

Chapter two seeks to illustrate the influence of Dublin and, to a greater extent, the socio-political landscape of Ireland on twenty-first century expressions of femininity in A Girl and Conversations. By examining the traditional gender roles of women in the twentieth-century Irish socio-political and cultural landscapes, the chapter will decipher firstly how these earlier gender roles have impacted upon contemporary expressions of femininity. In applying such differences to a critical reading of the texts, it will illuminate how changes in the gendered and socio- political landscape of post-recession Ireland have influenced the way in which women writers are expressing their experiences of being female in twenty-first century Ireland.

Chapter three will illustrate the influence of Ireland upon the sexual identity and expression in the Girl from A Girl and Cyril Avery from The Heart’s, to explore and compare urban and rural progressions in Ireland. The chapter will examine closely the expressions of sexual identity and how that identity manifests and expresses itself through sexual repression and expression; sexual roles and stereotypes demanded by the church and the effects of ‘subverting' these stereotypes; the influence of sexual liberation on the expression of sexuality in Irish writing; the roles of naming and labelling sexual identities and the particular nuances and experiences that form the fabric of Irish sexuality, including rape, incest, and sexual abuse.

The reason for choosing these texts is multi-faceted. Each engage with gender and sexuality, illustrating their prominence as thematic subjects in Irish contemporary writing. The texts ensure that the thesis is gender balanced, and, perhaps ambitiously, attempts to comment on multiple forms of genre and artistic platforms in Irish writing. Fundamentally, these texts are integral to the fabric of both

contemporary writing and the contemporary Irish experience, highlighted through the success of each text in the mainstream culture. Whilst the contemporary nature of the some of the texts has raised some difficulties in sourcing secondary and academic writing, their popularity ensures that this will not be addressed and rectified in the near future: the main difficulty, as with all contemporary writing, is that the social and cultural landscapes which the texts are embedded in and representative of change so rapidly. The objective, therefore, is to explore the influence that the writing has over the speed and magnitude of these changes.

The first text this thesis will address is Conversations, Rooney’s debut novel.

Conversations explores the relationships between 21-year-old protagonist Frances and her ex-girlfriend-come-best-friend Bobbi, both students at Trinity College

Dublin, with married thirty-something couple Nick and Melissa, an actor and writer respectively. Conversations presents self-repressing characters in contemporary

Dublin navigating post-boom artistic life. Narrated entirely in mostly paraphrased conversations, as well as excerpts from texts, emails and Facebook messages, it explores themes of emotional inarticulacy, self-harm and Conversations constructed as “performance art” (Kilroy, 2017). Rooney has been dubbed the “Salinger of the

Snapchat generation” (Pymm, 2018, online), and in 2018, became editor of The

Stinging Fly, one of Ireland’s most popular creative writing platforms.

A Girl, also McBride’s debut novel is a stream-of-consciousness, experimental and fragmented narrative that explores an unnamed Irish girl’s relationship with her neglecting, hyper-religious mother; sexually abusive and predatory uncle; and sick brother who suffers a brain tumour from birth that results in his death at 21. The book had four launches, won the Goldsmiths Prize and Geoffrey Faber Memorial

Prize in 2013, and in 2014 won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction; the Kerry Group

Irish Fiction Award; and the Desmond Elliott Prize, as well as being adapted for the stage by Annie Ryan before touring to sold out shows in Dublin, Edinburgh, London

and New York and having its publication rights sold to Faber & Faber (Collard, 2016,

148-161).

This thesis will also be exploring the theatre script of Oldschool, by Emmet

Kirwan. Developed during Tiger Dublin Fringe as part of the ‘Show in a Bag’ programme. The play deals with themes of emotional inarticulacy, masculine anxiety, and drug abuse in urban Dublin. Its formation as a spoken-word performance piece both engages with new performance trends and a performative way of writing and speaking about gender and the Irish experience. Premiered at the Dublin Fringe

Festival in 2013, Oldschool was remounted by Project Arts Centre for a sell-out run in

December 2014, Where Kirwan and Ian Lloyd Anderson won Best Performers Award at Tiger Dublin Fringe 2014. The play has since been made into a screenplay and had its cinematic premier, directed by Dave Tynan, in July 2018. It will return to

Project Arts Centre for another run in December 2018.

The final text this thesis will critically engage with is John Boyne’s The Heart’s.

A historical novel, The Heart’s allows for a reflective expression of Cyril Avery's life as an Irish homosexual man, spanning from 1945 to 2015. In writing Cyril's life throughout the whole century to end in 2015, shortly after the Equal Rights Marriage

Referendum vote that legalised same-sex marriage, Boyne captures the rapidity of modernisation in Ireland through the achievement of female and LGBTQ+ rights. In

2017 it selected as one of the New York Times Readers’ Favourite Books and is

Boyne’s most transcendent and autobiographical novel to date. Boyne writes: "Cyril spends the formative part of his life as anxious about his sexuality as I was, and many of his experiences, I'm embarrassed to admit, echo my own during my youth” (2017,

627).

These changes in the gender and sexual landscapes of Ireland have been met with a body of work in Irish scholarship that explore the influence of Ireland on gender and sexual identity and their representations. This study is greatly indebted to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) and R. W. Connell’s Masculinities (1995), but

also to works which focus on gender in the Irish context. In terms of Irish masculinity,

Caroline Magennis and Raymond Mullen’s Irish Masculinities: Reflections on

Literature and Culture (2011), Debbie Ging’s Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema

(2012), Conn Holohan & Tony Tracy’s Masculinity and Irish Popular Culture: Tiger’s

Tales (2014), Fintan Walsh’s Male Trouble: Masculinity and the Performance of Crisis

(2010), Anthony Clare’s On Men: Masculinity in Crisis (2000), and Brian Singleton’s

Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre (2015 ed) were vital to this thesis.

Irish female writing, both academic and creative, has been crucial to feminist studies in the twenty first century. Bracken’s Irish Feminist Futures (2015), Gerardine

Meaney’s Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change (2010), Angela McRobbie’s The

Aftermath of Feminism (2008) and Ivana Bacik’s Kicking and Screaming: Dragging

Ireland into the Twenty-first Century (2004) were incredibly influential on the formation of this thesis. Finally, Susan Cahill and David Collard’s writing on A Girl is imperative to any critical study on the text, and the studies into Irish sexuality in general are informed by Michael Cronin, Diarmaid Ferriter and Jeannine Woods.

Declan Kiberd writes:

A real patriotism would base itself not on the broken bones and accumulated grudges of the national past, but on an utterly open future […] In a land where the word ‘past’ is interchangeable with the word ‘guilt’, the idea of an uncertain future has a liberating force, as much because it is uncertain as because it is the future (2005, 161).

This thesis will explore the influence of Ireland on the genders and sexualities of its inhabitants, as represented in Contemporary Irish writing. It will illustrate that a successful future for Ireland lies, as Kiberd suggests, in accepting and exploring the influence of the past whilst working towards and embracing the unknown potential of a New Ireland.

Chapter One: The Influence of Ireland on Expressions of (Failed) Masculinity in

Emmet Kirwan’s Dublin Oldschool and Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends

In his essay, “Gently. Not Gay: Proximity, Sexuality and Irish Masculinity at the End of the Twentieth Century”, Edward Madden describes the Irish social culture of masculinity as “gently bruised”. Grounded as it is in “violence and aggression”,

Madden argues that Irish manhood nonetheless still seeks “through the homosocial affiliations of friendship forms of community that belie economic oppression, and forms of expression foreclosed by traditional masculinities” (2010, 83). The idea of masculinity being “gently bruised” encapsulates perfectly the essence of issues surrounding masculinity in the social and political landscape of the twenty-first century Ireland.

This chapter will outline the changing nature of masculinity in gender studies as well as the social, political and cultural landscape of Ireland, and then explore such changes in contemporary Irish writing through a critical analysis of Jason from

Emmet Kirwan’s Dublin Oldschool (Oldschool)2 and Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends (Conversations). Both characters create portraits of Irish men who visibly struggle with their masculinity as illustrated through their engagements with masculine anxiety, guilt, emotional repression and linguistic inexpression, and literary techniques such as the anti-hero trope, the use of fragmented or multiple narratives, and cyclical time. The chapter will explore how through these characters, both texts arguably reject a traditionally hegemonic or patriarchally masculine point of view, instead critiquing patriarchal privilege and the masculine structures of

Ireland’s social, cultural, political and economic landscape. It will discuss the use of

Dublin (as an urban space) to enable masculinities which subvert social norms through mental instability and substance abuse. Through this it will conclude that as the country's capital Dublin works as a microcosm for expressing how masculinity

2 Oldschool critical analysis complemented by interview with Kirwan quoted in Appendix, 1

has changed in Ireland since the twentieth century, and how representations of masculinity in post-2010 contemporary writing are both influential upon and influenced by what it means to be a man in Dublin in 2018.

It is now generally accepted that gender is both socially influenced and performed and that culture, politics and history are not gender neutral. Despite this, there remain certain presumptions about masculinity that create a schism within the changing landscape. Ging writes:

Most societies maintain a vested interest in ascribing fairly limited sets of gender traits to each sex […] when masculine norms are challenged… there is often a very concerted effort both at the cultural and the political level to reaffirm a more traditional or robust concept of manhood (2012, 9).

In essence, although masculine studies have exposed the performativity behind heteronormative masculinity, there remain facets of society that still expect men to adhere to these socially acceptable heteronormative standards: for example, Ging writes that “self-discipline… became a crucial component of the Irish male identity, a value that was actively fostered by the church, the educational system and the Gaelic

Athletic Association” (2013, 26). Ging concludes that these stereotypes of Irish masculinity that have “supported the social dominance of men - stoic, emotionally inexpressive, competitive and oftentimes violent” are “damaging” for men, as well as “woman and children” (2013, 34). The schism created between reality and expectation reveals the existence of emotional repression, an inability to express feelings and emotions, and a remaining sense of familial obligation to both provide and protect, regardless of however “damaging” these demonstrations become.

This is demonstrated in Conversations, where Nick remains married to Melissa despite both their infidelities and her apparent dislike of him – she tells Frances that he’s “completely useless” (106) and in her letter to Frances, assassinates his character, writing that “he has a weak personality & compulsively tells people what

they want to hear” (182). He is observed as being emotionally inexpressive: “it was hard to figure out how Nick really felt” (63). On numerous occasions he openly admits to his struggle to emotionally articulate himself, telling Frances “I’m not very good at these Conversations” (124); he explains his emotional distance from her by describing himself as “just awkward” (110) and near the close of their relationship, admits that “I know sometimes you felt like I wasn’t expressive enough. It was hard for me” (202). Their relationship becomes pockmarked with silence, misunderstandings, and a mutuality of emotional expression. Frances describes his

“manner” as “cool and detached in a way that suggested sexual brutality” (33) and that “his touch made me want to be quiet” (99). This suggests that she begins to adopt his silent, emotionally repressive behaviour, substituting physical for emotional intimacy; an assertion completed when after her diagnosis with endometriosis, Nick asks her what she is upset about and she does not tell him, and instead they have sex:

Can we talk about it? he said. I said there was nothing to talk about, and then we had sex (286).

In Dublin Oldschool, Jason also represses his emotions, demonstrated through his relationship with his ex-girlfriend, Gemma. Seeing her with her new partner he internalises to himself his inability to say what he wishes he could to her, but ultimately, feels that he cannot:

I want to shout out, he’s cheating on you. I want to say, before you go to London can we talk? I feel bad about how we left it and sometimes when I dream, you’re there, but you’re always just out of reach. I bottle it (35).

Jason’s hopes to reunite with Gemma despite their previous “train-wreck relationship” (51) is arguably motivated by the fact that he believes her new partner to be cheating on her, perhaps revealing a sense of masculine obligation to emotionally ‘protect’ her which is thwarted by his incapacity to emotionally articulate. When Gemma initiates conversation, he again attempts to express his

emotions and hopes for their future: the difference between his internal monologues in comparison to his actual dialogue indicates the extent of his emotional inarticulacy.

This is it. Yeah tell her now. How you feel, about her fella, everything. Yeah tell her now. The wheres the what ifs the whose and the how. She asks can we talk? Yes. I follow (42).

Furthermore, Jason demonstrate the same substitution of emotional intimacy for physical intimacy as Nick and Frances. Gemma longs for Jason’s body: “I miss the touch and smell and weight of your chest on my breast and the sweat of your soul on your brow” (65), but Jason’s desire for a more meaningful connection is conveyed in his response as he physically yields to her and they have sex:

My brow’s pressed on her breast and the rest of my soul and control Of the whole Of my heard. It says, yes... (44)

Despite seeing “a thousand timelines possibilities hit my face”, Jason never ‘tells’

Gemma anything, only asks “so what do we do now?” and Gemma replies “you think this changes anything, I’m going to London” (44). Finally, in an attempt to admit his love for her which he “never said” during the course of their relationship, he avoids taking full responsibility of the declaration by blaming it partly on the drugs: “it may be the Blue Ghost’s talking” before Gemma interrupts him: “you never loved me”. When he asks her “so what was this about?” she replies “nothing”

(44). In both Nick and Jason’s case, they fill their own inability to express their feelings with actions that they hope indicate them instead – i.e. by having sex with their partners – and are inevitably met with misunderstanding or mirrored silences and repressions.

In expressing an awareness of masculine performativity, Nick and Jason also demonstrate awareness of the privileges of the dominant heteronormative

masculinity they assimilate, and the position this gives them in Ireland’s hegemonic landscape. Heteronormative masculinity, defined by Lauren Berlant & Michael

Warner as the “institutions, structures of understanding and practical orientations that make heterosexuality not coherent – that is, organised as a sexuality – but also privileged” (1998, 548), manifests its privilege in the social positions of white, heterosexual, middle-to-upper-class men, such as Nick and Jason. This is also gestured to by the geography of the narratives: most of Nick and Frances’s relationship occurs in Nick’s marital home in the rich suburb of South County Dublin, immediately identifiably as wealthy locations to an Irish audience, such as Frances’s mother: “it’s far from nice houses in Monkstown you were reared” (41). Similarly, the action of Oldschool takes place in South Dublin the city centre or on the quays;

Jason attends a “designated session gaff” on South Circular Road which although

“you wouldn’t want to live in it”, was once a grand “Victorian” (16), and they rent an apartment for a “session” in the Italian Quarter that he says “looks...plush” (42).

Nick is extremely conscious of both the privilege of his social position as an

“oppressive white male” (90), and that in his artistic lifestyle he voluntarily subverts the traditional hegemonic standards of masculinity. He jokes with Frances that his conservative father, a “real wealth creator”, struggles to love his “camp actor son”.

Frances reassures him that in keeping her as his “twenty-one-year-old mistress” he is in fact “aggressively heterosexual”, behaviour which his father would “approve of”

(149). Although he appears to disprove of his father’s morals, he accepts his money; suggested when he apologises for “assuming everyone’s parents can pay for stuff”

(193). In order to be financially stable, Nick accepts rather than challenges father’s traditional hegemonically masculine values, thereby enabling the endurance of

Ireland’s hegemonic order and the dominance of his social position. This results in an illustration of masculine guilt, which manifests itself into what Melissa describes as

Nick’s “pathological submission” (90). He is self-deprecating, telling Frances that he is “extremely aware” of being a “total embarrassment” (90); he feels urged to

“thank” Frances for having sex with him (92), and buys her gifts and food, eventually resulting in a one-sided financial transaction: “I can give you money… you can pay me back if you want, we can call it a loan” (193). Jason is arguably less concerned about the privilege his social position grants. Like Nick, he lives an artistic lifestyle, attempting to DJ in clubs and parties in areas around South Dublin like Churchtown,

The Black Pits in the Liberties and Pygmalion on South William Street. The affluence of these places stands in stark comparison to the lanes and the spots on the North

Lotts and Liffey Boardwalk that Daniel occupies, described by Jason as “a forgotten city-centre cobbled street of smack heads bang in the middle of Dublin” (29).

Despite this, Jason borrows Daniel’s “sock full of change” to spend on drugs, yet, like Nick, suffers from a “knot of guilt” (33). Daniel’s position as a homeless addict also subverts traditional representations of the Irish male, as his addiction has him reject his education and “safe and loving home” (61). Whilst his position in the socio- economic landscape does not grant him the same masculine privilege as Jason - highlighting the contradictory, hierarchical nature of Irish masculinity - it too suggests the influence of the Irish landscape on his gender. He blames his addiction on a “shocking indictment of … society” (61), and the failure to provide support for

Daniel has resulted in homelessness. Despite being unable to contribute economically to Irish society, he still demonstrates traits of hegemonic masculinity: he feels obligated to protect his brother - “I’m worried about you” and return to his mother “we could go to me ma together” (61). Whilst Daniel’s situation chimes with

Ivana Bacik’s assertion that Irish society is “deeply polarized” (243), yet, seems more honest and arguably, at peace with his addiction - and gender - than Jason.

Both situations demonstrate that while the changing understanding of heteronormative masculinity challenges the masculine privilege received through the hegemonic order of Ireland, social expectations are becoming increasingly

harder to maintain in the changing social landscape. Such awareness results in a sense of guilt and anxiety, demonstrated by Nick and Jason.

The twenty-first century context of liberal sexuality and powerful femininity has allowed many critics to argue that masculinity is in crisis. Clare argues that “in this feminist revolution, male power is being overthrown”, and continues to wonder whether “phallic man, authoritative, dominant, assertive – man not merely in control of himself but of women – is starting to die, and now the question is whether a new man will emerge phoenix like in his place or whether man himself will become largely redundant” (2010, 9). Notably, the prospect of masculinity being in crisis is not singular to twenty-first century masculinity. Magennis and Mullen argue that masculinity is always in a state of flux (2011,4), and Abigail Solomon-Godeau states that it is in these moments of shift that masculinity must “restructure, refurbish and resurrect themselves for the next historical turn” (1995, 70). Despite this, masculinity in an Irish context is bleak. Revelations of violence, substance abuse and anti-social behaviour are overwhelmingly male, whilst male suicide is being rightly termed as an epidemic (Clare, 2011, 3). Clare blames these truisms on the demands of emotional repression by hegemonic masculinity:

These suicide figures are viewed as the tip of an iceberg of male depression…only because men are seen to be either too proud or too emotionally constipated to admit when their feelings are out of control (2011, 3).

Nick and Jason illustrate this fear. Whilst both admit to their struggles with mental health it inevitably influences their sense of guilt, emotional repression and inarticulation that both demonstrate throughout the texts. Nick tells Frances, “…you have to understand… I was used to everyone seeing me as a burden… I still felt like this very worthless, pathetic person...like I was just a waste of everyone’s time” (262).

When Daniel suggests to his brother in Oldschool that he might be depressed, the aggression of Jason’s response suggests it’s obvious:

Daniel: You don’t mind me saying, but you sound kind of… angry. Like you’re depressed. Jason: I fucking am depressed! (52)

Although throughout the play the validity of Jason’s depression is unclear, his behaviour demonstrates the reckless hedonism paired with damageable substance abuse that may well be symptomatic of his mental state as well as a “non-articulated consequence of Ireland’s socio-economic conditions” (Singleton, 2015, 8). Alongside this sense of hedonism there are moments in Jason’s dialogue where he sees his

“twin” – the audience is never sure whether or not this is an apparition or an actual physical being – which may betray an unbalanced frame of mind.

Whilst Nick’s depression is referred to numerous times by different characters throughout Conversations, he only acknowledges it after being urged to do so by

Frances whilst on Dame Street, and, like Jason, it is marked by a sense of being something so inherently it doesn’t demand articulation. When he tells her about his depressive period that culminated in him being eventually institutionalised, he realises only then it was the first time he vocalised his experience:

After a while, he told me that was the first time he had ever told the story of that year and what had happened. He said he had never actually heard the story from his own point of view before…it feels strange, he said, hearing myself talk about it like I was the main character. It almost feels like I’m lying, although I think everything I said was true (262).

Nick’s description of himself as the “main character” is fundamental to his performed masculinity: he doubts his own validity and even in telling his experience of his own mental instability his gesture feels fabricated. His detachment from his own life is arguably both a coping mechanism and symptomatic of his own performed masculinity: notably, Nick is an actor by profession. Fundamentally, these declarations are made whilst the two men are in the heart of the city. The urban space is neutral, allowing them to make such admissions, but it is also emblematic of the environments which have fostered these unhealthy frames of mind for masculine

citizens. In both narratives the geographical locations are stressed and mapped out, just as one can map out the influence of the Dublin landscape on their sense of masculine identity. The majority of the action in Conversations and Oldschool is located within Dublin, whose social, political, cultural and economic landscapes have vastly changed since the millennium, as the expressed in the introduction to the thesis. These changes have ultimately destabilised masculinity and subsequently, the hegemonic ordering of Ireland’s structures.

As the capital, Dublin is arguably at the centre of progressive changes throughout

Ireland where a more thorough exploration of Irish masculinity in the contemporary landscape can be gleaned through its mix of urban anonymity and liberal secularity.

Dublin acts as a site that demonstrates characteristics from all aspects of society, from extreme wealth to homelessness, drug addiction, mental instability and self- harm, all of which are explored in these texts.

In Conversations, Nick’s marriage is perhaps influenced by the twentieth- century hegemonically masculine tropes: Melissa says that he will “never divorce” her (171), but in the anonymity of the city he can conduct his extra-marital affair with

Frances. They meet in her flat in the Liberties or his house in Monkstown, date on

Dame Street, and reunite in St. Stephen’s Green after a phone call whilst Frances is in Hoggis Figgis on Dawson Street. The geography of the city offers a haven where they may manifest their love for one another, whilst the hegemonically masculine structures create friction, symbolised by his marriage with Melissa which (almost as if addicted) depresses him, but which he will not leave. In Oldschool, Jason takes recreational drugs, insisting that he is in control of his addiction, despite being sick numerous times and spending beyond his means: “hand over my brother’s begged fiver in change for a / secondhand pill” (33). Daniel observes, “every time I’ve met you this weekend you’ve been ouvit” (51), and despite Jason’s protestations - “I’m healthy” – Daniel warns: ”it sounds like you’re hitting the session too hard and trust

me when it’s a homeless heroin addict telling ya that” (51). Dublin enables these frequent, seemingly coincidental meetings between Jason and Daniel, and whilst

Daniel sees them as meaningful, Jason tells him it is inevitable because claustrophobically, Dublin is “not a city... it’s a village” (53). These meetings are fundamental to Jason’s understanding of the motivations behind his reckless hedonism:

Jason: … Me head's twisted. I don't feel right. Daniel: In what way? Jason: I don't know, it's just hollow, empty, I'm … thin. Daniel: Physically? Jason: Mentally, both… it’s like everything is collapsing in, with the job, me mate getting nicked, the bird (53).

Rather than addressing his problems, Jason spends the weekend in and around

Dublin in a Ulyssean chemical odyssey on Francis street, Thomas street, Meath

Street, South William Street, The Liberties, Dame street, around the Liffey and the

Italian Quarter and Portobello (among others) taking a variety of substances intended to give him relief, but rather, bringing him face on with them. Singleton writes that Jason comes to emulate the city as well as the drugs:

Jason moves with lightning speed and the verbal dexterity of an urban Dublin street-jive between clubs, raves and house parties, describing and re-enacting the effects of the drug cocktails on his body, describing a times a ‘toxic masculinity’ when his body succumbs…all the while name-checking the streets of Dublin by means of which we can chart the extent of his incredible journey (2015, 7).

The city mirrors his sense of fractured masculine identity. The Old Tailors’ Hall

Walled Garden provides “sanctuary” (14) from the violent affront of “the city” which hits his “face like a hot / gush of piss” (15). The city allows him to examine his relationship with the Irish hegemonic order: seeing a man topless from the heat, he says “there’s never any excuse for a man to take his top off in Dublin” (48). Despite

Daniel’s indifference (“it’s hot”), Jason holds him against the traditional

hegemonically masculine values of suffering in silence in order to protect one’s

‘tough’ masculine façade, protecting the homosocial boundaries between men in

Dublin. Jason and his friends wish to escape the “trudge of the mundane” of their city jobs in “service” by giving their minds a “chemical kicking” (17), but arguably, it is only in the city that they have facilities with which to do so. The city both instils hegemonic ideals which its citizens struggle to maintain, whilst also allowing for a site to enact these struggles. Gemma tells Jason that Dublin keeps them apart: “you hear that small slip of a river. At night the silver sliver of a river on your cheek, cuts / through / the city / and separates me from you” (43), and while Jason ruminates on the idea that the Liffey is what “lifts / my voice and words with it”, seemingly personifying the agency that the city has on his ability to express his emotions, he accepts the idea that he is as much at one with Dublin as the walled garden that is

“inured to the dirt of Dublin 8” (15).

Oldschool and Conversations represent fragile and emasculated masculinities by adopting postmodern techniques of expression. Gender is literally performed; as mentioned, Nick is an actor, and the events of Oldschool are retold on a stage through two actors embodying multiple voices. The narratives, like masculinity, are contradictory and unstable. Conversations has entirely paraphrased Conversations with no quotation marks, intertwining dialogue with both setting and characterisation, making the narrative one continual voice where it can be hard to decipher who is talking. Oldschool relies totally on the two actors’ narrations to embody multiple characters in multiple locations. Both narratives reject the nuclear- family narratives and are foreclosed by absent or failed father figures: Frances’s father neglects to pay her allowance, leaving her penniless, and Daniel’s father enables his heroin addiction; he tells Jason, “he always stuck up for me” (39). Both

Nick and Jason are the typical postmodern anti-heroes, whose

Downfall is no longer innate, inherent and predestined… his flaw is not of his soul, nor an essential force within him…his ruination if caused by

undercurrents of earlier, more youthful interactions, and brought to bear not in death, but in the loss of dignity, self-worth, and – the most important constituents of any masculine identity – agency, autonomy, and free will (Deirdre Duffy, 2011, 168).

Nick and Jason are devoid of their defined places in society, not needed by either their employers or sexual partners; they do not have to fear death, but rather survival. Both men are consistently self-deprecating – Jason describes himself as a

“gargoyle” (42), and Nick as a “bad guy” (148). Finally, both narratives are entirely cyclical – Jason calls it “loop history” (64), whilst the final lines of Conversations with

Friends have Frances telling Nick to “come and get me” (321). As Solomon-Godeau argues, masculinity is also cyclical, “always in crisis… the real question is how both manage to restructure, refurbish and resurrect themselves for the next historical turn” (1995, 70). Jason and Nick, at the end of their narratives, go back to the start – and whether they learn from their previous mistakes, or are condemned to repeating the same mistakes – is left unanswered.

This chapter has attempted to define the changing context of masculinity in terms of both gender studies as well as the socio-political landscape of Ireland, using Nick and Jason’s experiences of Dublin as examples. By establishing the hybridity of masculinity against the hegemonic structures and stereotypes of Irish masculinity, as well as their explorations in contemporary writing, this chapter has argued that Nick and Jason both have a fragile sense of masculinity which is influenced by the Irish socio-political landscape and explored through using Dublin as a site to both enact and challenge gender performativity. By borrowing postmodern tropes such as fragmenting, multiple narratives and cyclical time, both

Kirwan and Rooney emulate the status of contemporary Irish masculinity as it changes, is simultaneously maintained and, of course, guaranteed to infinitely continue.

Chapter Two: The Influence of Ireland on Expressions of Femininity in Eimear

McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing and Sally Rooney’s Conversations with

Friends

This chapter seeks to illustrate the influence Ireland has on twenty-first-century expressions of femininity in Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (A Girl) and Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends (Conversations).

By examining the traditional gender roles of women in twentieth-century

Ireland, through Ailbhe Smyth’s ‘The Floozie in the Jacuzzi’ (1989) (‘The Floozie’), this chapter will decipher how these earlier gender roles have impacted upon contemporary expressions of femininity. In applying these findings to a critical reading of A Girl and Conversations, it will illuminate how changes in the gendered and socio-political landscape of Ireland have influenced the way in which women writers express their experiences of being female in twenty-first century Ireland. This chapter will discuss the use of symbolism, a fragmented narrative structure and, as in chapter one, the role of the city in expressions and explorations of gendered identity. The chapter will ultimately conclude that, through their different narrative styles, the texts construct different experiences of Irish femininity that have an overwhelming number of similarities, suggesting the universality of female experience in Ireland.

A better understanding of contemporary Irish women’s writing is gained by foregrounding analysis of the pre-contemporary landscape of writing from the 1980s; the decade in which, as previously argued, the shifting of Ireland’s gendered landscapes through both the sexual revolution and feminism began in earnest.

In the twentieth century, women were largely silenced, marginalised and subordinated by the socio-political, cultural and economic spheres of Ireland. In ‘The

Floozie’, written in 1989 by Ailbhe Smyth, she encapsulates her experience of linguistic inability, in attempting to speak of her experience as an Irish woman: “In

the end, I couldn’t speak for Irish women. Can barely speak of myself. Can barely speak” (1989, 12). Smyth’s ‘The Floozie’ demonstrates the twentieth century female experience that continues to influence contemporary Irish writing now. The essay comments on the art that decorates Dublin’s city landscape, “The Floozie”, which was commissioned, designed and erected by an all-male cohort3 as the female personification of the River Liffey. Smyth argues that the sculpture is a visceral representation of female subjugation past and present in the Irish cultural landscape and erected in Dublin, the capital. To Smyth, the ‘Floozie’ visibly justifies female subordination for artistic purposes, a comment on the Irish literary canon as well as the laws of Church and State: “woman is an empty signifier or to put it another way, can be constructed to mean whatever ‘we’ want it to mean...always seen, never seer”

(9).

The ‘Floozie’ is a bronze reclining nude female figure displaying an “impossible body, sign of the impossibility of Woman” (8). Smyth, like McBride, employs a

Joycean prose style fused with poetic fragments from herself and other female writers such as Julia O’Faolain, Eavan Boland and Julia Kristeva, provides a narrative of relentless descriptive possibilities of the bronze figure as symbolising the marginalisation of women by the hegemonic patriarchal structure of Ireland. The bronze figure, “relentlessly lapped and licked, caressed and purified by the unceasing flow of clearly polluted city water” (8), is made vulnerable, exploited and damaged by the city water. In the dense referential parenthesis of “(Leda, lada, aflutter afraida, so does your girdle grow)” (8), Smyth fuses the sculpture with the rape victim Leda from Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” (1923) with Molly Malone, suggested in the nursery rhyme format of “Mary, Mary quite contrary”4. Whilst her

3 The sculpture is inspired by Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle from Finnegan’s Wake (1939), designed by Éammon O’Doherty and erected in 1987 by Michael Smurfit of the Smurfit Corporation, together with the Dublin City Council Corporation. 4 The nursery rhyme “Mary, Mary, quite contrary” reads: “Mary, Mary, quite contrary / How does your garden grow? / With silver bells and cockle shells / And pretty maids all in a row”. This echoes the popular song “Molly

bronzed body is the “projection of the male fantasy and desire” (8), the statue is symbolic of the marginalisation and subjugation of Irish women in the twentieth century, signifying:

[The] monumental assertion of the power of the patriarchy; massive appropriation of Woman, sign and symbol; pompous denial of women’s right to self-definition; emphatic affirmation of the negation of women excluded from the generation of meaning (8).

Smyth connects the water-borne statue with images of drowning as sacrifice and the

“Mother Ireland” motif which, by describing as “m/other” (19) both others and diminishes women to maternal vessels. Throughout Irish writing and the nationalist discourse, women’s bodies have been appropriated into the figure of the mother to symbolise of the nation: modelled on the Virgin Mary, who Bracken describes as a

“desexualised, passive mother” who is “always object, never subject” – echoing

Smyth’s line which describes woman as “always seen, never seer” – and whose

“symbolic rendering... as an icon of worship functions to strip women of their actuality… their ‘realness’” (2016, 7).

In Conversations and A Girl, McBride and Rooney explore this motif, arguably resulting in its subversion and a reclamation of the female figure. In A Girl, the protagonist smashes her mother’s plaster figurine of the Virgin Mary in response to her mother chiding her brother about his ‘stupidity’:

I belt young Virgin Mary on the dashboard. Take it. Take that…I don’t want to. Hear. I don’t want. It in my life… Fuck that virgin onto the tarmac. Take her head does she like it? what’s the. Don’t tell me (41).

Arguably, this symbolic act is two-fold: in breaking the statue the Girl renounces both the oppressive Catholicism of her mother from her future, whilst also

Malone”, where Malone, a fishmonger (and, it has been suggested, sex worker) cries: “Cockles and Mussels / Alive, Alive Oh!”. The statue of Malone immortalises her wheeling muscles and cockles through the city, yet another sculpture of a woman made ‘vulnerable’ to the public who are encouraged to touch her breasts for ‘good luck’ (O’Connor, 2015, online)

foregrounding her rejection of the expected familial role of ‘Irish Mammy’. Collard describes it as “an explicit act of iconoclasm, equivalent to Stephen Daedalus and his cocksure non serviam, but also anticipates a later car scene between the Girl and her uncle” (2016, 45).

When not rejected, motherhood is portrayed negatively; her grandmother was

“fucked into the ground… poor Carole Lombard” (12). The Girl’s mother was born into an oppressive patriarchal household, where sexuality was policed, religion was stifling and moral hypocrisy was rife: a theocracy with her Father as God, who spends

Saturdays “praying with his wife – when none of the little could enter without a big knock. Such worshipping worshipping behind the bedroom door” (12). In a literal example of the damaging ‘Mother Ireland’ motif, the Girl’s grandmother dies from bearing children in the name of God (and, presumably, the Constitution): “Mother of perpetual suffering prolapsed to hysterectomied … a life spent pushing insides out for it displeased Jesus to give that up” (12). There is no love, only transactional violence: sons are “for breaking chairs on the backs of”, and daughters are to find

“rich-ish husbands or they got a crack in the jaw. Chaste-ish wives or the boys got more” (12). Throughout the text, fatherhood is either absent - “Our empty spaces where fathers should be” (5) – or predatory, as when her Uncle tells her “think of me in a father way” (52).

Such a damaging upbringing results in the Girl’s mother becoming an authoritative religious presence, abusing her children verbally and physically. Her

Mother suppresses her sexualisation by religion from a young age: “Do. Not.

Wiggle. Your. Bottom. Like. That. It. Is. A. Sin” (21). A harrowing example is when she beats the children after their grandfather’s visit, possibly a result of childhood trauma: “Mammy my my don’t Mammy hit me anymore on my head… the shock like sacrilege” (18). Anne Enright has said the ‘reader can hear, and almost feel, the blows that rain down on the children’ (from Collard, 2016, 45) The children make a reparative dinner of soup and bread -” tomato soup we made” - establishing the

colours red and white that symbolise through the text the Girl's oscillation between pain and purity: we are told that she is left “pure white” (59) after her Uncle rapes her. In her suicide at the texts close, The Girl commits to her ‘iconoclasm’ to the traditional Irish role of mother expected by Church and State in her decision to end her life rather than to procreate.

In Conversations, there is a similar rejection and subversion of the ‘Mother

Ireland’ trope and virginal female stereotype. Firstly, Bobbi is gay and Frances is bisexual, so there is already a rejection of the ‘nuclear’ family and the heteronormative placement of women within the Constitution. Frances’s father is equally absent, an alcoholic and a source of pain and disappointment to her, as when he neglects to pay her allowance. Only when she becomes financially independent is she able to learn to ‘love’ her father, because he ‘cannot hurt her anymore’. Frances’s and Nick’s relationship also rejects the traditional heteronormative familial values favoured by the Constitution: as Melissa ensures her,

“he’s not going to divorce me and if he did he would never marry you” (182).

Furthermore, Frances’s diagnosis of endometriosis leaves her potentially infertile, a possibility never confirmed to herself or the reader:

The secondary problem he said was ‘the issue of fertility’. I recall these words very clearly. I said, oh, really? Unfortunately, he said, the condition does leave many women infertile, that’s one of our biggest concerns. But then he talked about IVF treatments and how rapidly they were advancing (270).

Despite her indifference, it could be argued that Frances becomes traumatised by the prospect of her infertility. She neglects to tell anyone – not even her own mother

– and when she has sex with Nick she cries “pretty badly” but is “confused” as to why (220), signalling her coping mechanisms of emotional repression. She feels disconnected from her body which “felt completely disposable” and acts destructively. She prematurely ends her relationship with Nick and self-harms:

After he left the apartment I took a small snail scissor and cut a hold on the inside of my left thigh. I felt that I had to do something dramatic to stop thinking about how bad I felt, but the cut didn’t make me feel any better (221).

This echoes the Girl's masochistic submission as she asks men to hurt her until she is

“outside pain” (148). This relationship between sex and pain in A Girl will be explored further in chapter three, however it is important to address the correlation between the Girl and Frances in their employment of self-harm and physical pain as both submission, and substitution and/or relief from emotional pain: as Kilroy argues, “these women have repressed themselves: they are too guarded to articulate their vulnerabilities… the self-harm she perpetrates on her thin young body reveals otherwise” (2017, online). Frances harms herself throughout

Conversations, physically, as expressed, internally, by repressing her emotions: Nick tells her “it’s not a sign of weakness to have feelings”, and she tells Bobbi “I’m just not very emotional” (193), and by inviting physical violence; she asks Nick to hit her.

When he refuses and asks, “do you think I want to hurt you?” she replies, “I’m just telling you that you can… you can do whatever you want with me” (215).

Interestingly, she experiences the same disembodiment as the Girl consistently does, describing her tears as “not hot like real tears” but “cool like little streams from a lake” (216). When her self-harming fails to bring her relief, she stops. Likewise, the Girl self-harms through encouraging and submitting herself to sexual violence with men, to a much greater extent. She invites and receives pain as temporary relief from her inner emotional turmoil, which intensifies after her Uncle first rapes her, and when her brother gets re-diagnosed. In one sexual encounter with her Uncle, he

“pull[s]| her “by the hair” and asks, “does that hurt?” She encourages him to “make me know what you mean… when you miss me”. He then “goes somewhere else inside me”, potentially penetrating her anally, and when he asks again “does that hurt?” she says “Yes. A lot. A lot and relieves me for a while” (137). When self- harming fails to provide her relief, it also becomes out of her control; as when she is

frequently raped by her Uncle and the unknown man by the lake. The Girl’s reclamation of her own body and its agency results in her suicide, as she commits the worst act of violence upon herself so as not to be hurt by anyone else. Where

Frances may stop self-harming (and Nick may refuse her requests to hurt her), the

Girl is subject to external and uncontrollable male violence. This is arguably a suggestion of the shifting balance of Ireland’s hegemonic order, and the progression of feminism in Ireland.

However, although Frances stops physically harming herself, she feels no self- worth when faced with her potential inability to procreate: “I now had to look at what had spilled out of me: all my delusional beliefs about my own value and my pretensions to being a kind of person I wasn’t” (220), concluding “I was sick and probably interfile anyway, and… I could give Nick nothing that would mean anything to him” (222). Perhaps influenced by the female position in the Irish Constitution, she values herself in terms of her ability to provide children for Nick, as Melissa does not want or intend to have children. Her anxiety and, arguably, sense of guilt and loss could also be a result of the confrontation of her inability to fulfil the traditional gender roles of Irish society; a conclusion which resonates with the masculine reactions of Nick and Jason explored in chapter one.

Crucially, the possibility of IVF provides hope, and ultimately overrides her sense of inadequacy. So too does the novel’s close, when Nick tells her “it’s not stupid to be upset” about her diagnosis. (243). Unlike the end of A Girl, the potentialities of modernisation provide hope at the end of Conversations, making explicit that in the changing Irish landscape there is space for women like Frances,

Bobbi and Melissa. As Cahill argues, writing the experience of young women as in A

Girl and Conversations is vital to Ireland’s increasing modernisation; it is … “the success of novels that… force us to confront misogynies – especially those levelled against young women” that will lead women to revolutionary futures and ultimately, change (2017, 168).

In ‘The Floozie’, Smyth quotes Ramnoux’s “The Finn Cycle: The Symbols of a

Celtic Legend”, where a woman drowns looking into a forbidden well and death is offered up as a sacrifice that “gives birth” to “a stream” that “fructifies” the country

(15). This theme of symbolic sacrifice is repeated:

Consider again the ethic and rhetoric of sacrifice and martyrdom...For Irish women, sacrifice signifies nothing. Annihilation. To die. Intransitive…symbol. Icon. Even still (18).

Water, drowning and sacrifice are motifs central to A Girl and Conversations, marking the universality of female experience in Ireland over the last three decades.

The fragmented narrative of A Girl demonstrates the struggle to articulate the

Irish women’s experience by emulating gasping for air whilst being submerged in water, reaching a climax when the Girl drowns herself. In doing so, the Girl erases her name which was given to her by her brother as a reward for living, making her life a sacrificial prize: “my name is. Water. All alone. My name… what’s left behind?

What’s it? it is. My name for me. My I…My name is gone” (203). The fact that she was unnamed throughout the narrative suggests her symbolic marginalisation by the landscape to an assigned gender role: by drowning, she takes agency over her forced silence by choosing to silence herself. Finally, as the title suggests, she dies a

“half-formed thing”: just like the ‘Floozie’, she is an object eroded by the landscape she is embedded in.

Whilst there is no suggestion of drowning in Conversations, the use of water as a motif subtly manifests itself by signifying moments of reformation and purification.

It rains prior to every significant moment: some examples are when the girls first meet Melissa (1), before Frances meets Nick for the first time (14), and before every one of Frances’s periods, which are physically painful episodes for her (176). After

Frances faints in a church on Thomas Street, a moment which she calls her ‘spiritual awakening’ (226), she contacts Melissa and Bobbi seeking forgiveness. That evening

Bobbi returns with “streams of water… trickling down her sleeves” (300). Recovering

from illness, Nick baths her, emulating a baptism as he wraps her in white towel: “I tried to imagine how I must have looked: dripping wet, flushed with steam heat, my hair leaking rivulets of water down my shoulders” (231). Meanwhile Nick stands

“calm and fathomless like an ocean”. If Irish women are associated with water (or, more specifically, the river Liffey) like Joyce’s Anna Livia, then Nick being compared to the ocean signifies a homecoming: this is replicated in the text, with Frances writing that in this moment they “didn’t have to speak”, as in that moment Nick and

Bobbi are her “family now” (231). Arguably, the permanence of rain and water resembles the change from hopelessness to hope in Irish female narratives; water is ubiquitous, prominent, and at times comforting, and whilst the characters are always close to being subsumed by the influential nature of Dublin’s gendered landscape, they still maintain their agency over it. The prospect of total immersion is never far away, but unlike in A Girl, the characters are more equipped with tools to navigate the landscape. At the end, Bobbi and Frances symbolically walk in the Phoenix Park

“under an umbrella” through this metaphor of female submersion by the Irish landscape, defiant and visible in their homosexuality and feminine complicity by

“linking arms” (319).

Both texts explore an inability to emotionally articulate oneself through differing literary techniques. In a text literally named after communication, Frances struggles to communicate. She consistently analyses and plans every conversation she has, be it in person or online. She expresses a desire to become cryptic or misunderstood, writing “I'm going to become so smart that no one will understand me” (124). The use of emails, messages and text Conversations also signals the influential nature of twenty-first century technology on the progressing Irish landscape, whilst also acting as a means of placing emotional distance between herself and others: in one instance Frances looks online for ‘evidence’ of her and Nick’s affair, as if she does not trust her own memory (124). Frances often delays her response to others; for

example, she makes herself “take an hour before responding” (51) to Nick’s email apologising for putting her in a “situation” after he kisses her, and she replies with one line to Melissa’s magnum opus of an email “after an hour” (239). Whilst the fragmented lines of A Girl replicates consciousness before it is made into coherent thought, Conversations is the opposite, depicting actions of a protagonist who calculates every communication that she has – possibly even with the reader also. In the same way that Frances withholds information from those around her, she very well may do the same to the reader. Kilroy argues, “conversation in the world of the novel is… a performance art” (2017, online).

Furthermore, the narrative does not employ quotation marks: it is entirely comprised of paraphrased Conversations, save two comments: when Frances calls

Nick a ‘total embarrassment’ and he replies saying that he is ‘extremely aware’ (150), and when Melissa states that she found religious occasions ‘comforting in a sedative kind of way’ (11). These moments are notable: Nick’s response makes him, complicit in his emasculation as he rejects the gendered role of the “strong male”, and

Melissa does the opposite. By allowing herself to become ‘sedated’ by the church, she is complicit in sustaining its prominence in the gender and sexual landscapes of

Ireland. Despite the non-traditional nature of their relationship, Melissa does not divorce Nick, but respects the institution of their marriage which legally does not fully respect her, as she is not a mother.

In Bobbi and Frances’s actual Conversations, however, we witness the opposite of

Melissa’s ‘sedation’ through their active participation in commenting on the sexual and gendered landscapes of Ireland. Bobbi quotes Woolf when denying a sense of nationalism or obligation to Ireland, refusing to be symbolised or for her gender to be nationalised quoting, “as a woman I have no country” (76); she was suspended at school for writing “fuck the patriarchy” on a wall “beside a plaster cast of the crucifixion” (13), and reminds Frances that she has to “do more than say you’re anti

things” (234). At the start of the text they are defined by labels; Bobbi is “gay” and

Frances is a “communist” (12), which immediately subvert the hegemonic patriarchal economic structures of Ireland. Frances struggles with her label, despite wanting to

“destroy capitalism” and finding “masculinity personally oppressive”; Nick observes that she fetishizes “commodities” (298). She constantly fantasises about Nick and

Melissa’s house in the wealthy South Dublin suburb being her own (14); she admires

Nicks clothes and possessions, such as his “beautiful coat” (263) and admits to

Melissa “I wanted your whole life” (240). Kilroy argues,

Their desire for labels, seeking always to box off the great flux of human experience… is shown to be a reductive force. The body, however, is the wild card. It will not be suppressed, and instead flares up in outbreaks of desire and acts of self-harm (2017, online).

Arguably, like gender, identity is performed: it is in actions that one truly defines oneself, and it is only in Frances’s actions that she fully realises her own wishes and desires. In an extremely progressive move, Frances and Bobbi eventually refuse to label their relationship, a decision perhaps influenced by their experience with Nick and Melissa’s hegemonically labelled marriage:

Who even gets married? said Bobbi. It’s sinister. Who wants State apparatuses sustaining their relationship? I don’t know. What is ours sustained by? That’s it! That’s exactly what I mean. Nothing. Do I call myself your girlfriend? No. Calling myself your girlfriend would be imposing some prefabricated cultural dynamic on us that’s outside our control. You know? I thought about this…then I said: wait, so does that mean you’re not my girlfriend? She laughed. Are you serious? she said. No. I’m not your girlfriend (305)

The contemporary twenty-first century landscape allows more room for movement and exploration than the stiflingly oppressive landscape of A Girl, which Collard argue is set at some point in the 1980s (2016, 111). Indeed, lines such as “all your

Walkmans fizz in tune” (35) also suggest this. Frances comes to accept that she (and

Nick) can love multiple people simultaneously without having to submit these

relationships to the heteronormative standards of the socio-political Irish landscape by labelling them.

As explored in chapter one, Dublin5 is a neutral space that allows for a more modern, liberal approach to gender identity, yet is emblematic of the larger environment that has fostered such a damaging attitude towards women and their place in society. Frances and the Girl are able to fully realise their identities when they move from the rural to the urban environment, under the anonymity and marginally more liberal sexual attitudes of Dublin.

In the city, the Girl is able to inhabit and seek the experiences that she was previously punished for, whilst remaining safe in her anonymity and indifference. She also finds abjection in her surroundings, matching the abjection she feels about her own body:

Crumbs on the carpets and insects bite my back I don’t care for. Nicer is not what I am after. Fuck me softly fuck me quick is all the same once done to me. And washing in their rusted baths and flushing brown with limescale loos amid the digs of four a.m. before I put my knickers on. Say stay the night but I am gone. Down back stairs fag glued lip sore on and wait for, get the night bus home (89).

Similarly, Nick and Frances’s relationship manifests itself either city centre or in the affluent South Dublin suburbs: they date on Dame Street; Nick’s house is in

Monkstown; they spend time in Blackrock and they restart their love in a trajectory that goes from Hoggis Figgis on Dawson Street to St. Stephen’s Green. When

5 The setting of A Girl is not explicit; however this thesis will argue the text suggests that the girl attends College in Dublin. Collard writes, “McBride once said in an interview the ‘book is set in Mayo’ (2016, 43). The landscape is definitively Irish; the Girl’s brother reads The Irish Times and watches RTE. Dialect too suggests Irish countryside: “Mammy” (1) and “Girleen” are regional Irish-English words. Nonetheless, the Girl frequently gets trains to and from College and home after her brother is re-diagnosed – “rolling over the country” signals her college is in Ireland. In the pub in the city they sing “toora loora lay”, an Irish lullaby and drink Guinness. The urban anonymity and liberality of the city that is imperative, highlighting the difference between the country and the universality of experience to women all over Ireland: McBride writes, “a kind of universalism…was certainly my aim. If I'd known how to place the story outside of time and space I would have” (from Collard, 2016, 134).

Frances returns home to Ballina in County Mayo, her mother disapproves of their relationship– “I have to say, it all sounds very odd to me” (48) - and she is confronted with her father’s absence. This may influence her relationship with Nick, who fills the

“empty space” left by her father. This is at least true in financial terms, as he provides her money when her Father does not. Frances’s life in Dublin both as a writer and a student permits her to inhabit these literary circles and fully embrace her relationship with Nick, whereas her home life reminds her of the lack of longevity in their relationship perhaps more generally with the state of hegemonic marriages in

Ireland. When her mother meets Nick on the Quays, she compares her mother’s

“Bally black winter coat” to Nick’s “beautiful grey overcoat” (263). Their complete difference symbolises the difference between the urban and the rural, as well as their generational differences: “he and my mother looked like characters from different films, made by totally different directors” (263). This meeting is symbolic of Ireland’s progression in terms of female sexual agency. Nick says, “that was nice… no pointed remarks about me being married” to which Frances replies, “she’s a cool lady” (264).

Arguably, Frances’s mother is aware that their relationship is sexual, and yet – unlike the Girl’s mother, who tells her that her sexuality makes her “sick in the head” (146) -

Frances’s mother reserves her judgement, urging her to learn from her own experiences by telling her (without hostility) “you’ll have to figure things out all on your own” (267).

As argued in chapter one, these examples demonstrate that the city both instils the hegemonic ideals which its citizens struggle to maintain, whilst also doubling as a city with the universal qualities of anonymity, indifference and vastness that allow it to become a site where citizens demonstrate this sense of fractured identity. In A Girl, the cities fractured identity is echoed in the fragmented narrative style, as the city enables the destruction of the Girl. In Conversations, Frances navigates through the city landscape, figuring out her identity through the shifting

hegemonic structures of Ireland. Therefore, the city comes to influence the narratives as the narratives influence the city they inhabit.

This chapter has foregrounded the decades of female oppression and subjugation which A Girl and Conversations have found themselves projected upon, and illustrated the progression occurring in the ‘genderscape’ which has deeply influenced the events and reception of these two novels. Whilst A Girl is a massively tragic story of a woman destroyed by the Ireland that she finds herself rejected from,

Conversations acts as a beacon of hope for the future of women in Ireland. There still remains worrying similarities, including absent fathers, female self-destruction and identification with masochistic tendencies. However, the reception of both novels to such critical acclaim, and the future of Frances, who begins, at the novel's close, to earn ‘good money’ for her writing suggests that as we figure out how to navigate through the ever-changing contemporary landscape, guides for the future of Irish feminism and female liberation perhaps lie in Irish writing that demonstrates the influential nature of Ireland upon gendered identities and sexual experience.

Chapter Three: The Influence of Twentieth Century Ireland on Sexual Identity and

Expression in John Boyne's The Heart’s Invisible Furies and Eimear McBride's A Girl

is a Half-Formed Thing

This chapter will illustrate the influence of Ireland upon the sexual identity and expression of characters such as the Girl from A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (A Girl) and Cyril Avery from The Heart’s Invisible Furies (The Heart’s)6, paying close attention to the relationship between the country and the city, to argue that the city stands as a site of modernity and progression which chafes against the larger structures of Ireland. The dichotomy between the increasing liberalisation of present

Ireland and the religious conservatism of its history creates a dichotomy detrimental to those caught within the schism, particularly during the turn of the twentieth century into the twenty-first. In Contemporary Irish writing such as The Heart’s and A

Girl, authors are now better able to fully explore the effect that such religious conservatism has had on Irish citizens, particularly in terms of sexuality and the potential challenges that have occurred in the progression to liberal secularity and freedom of sexual expression in Ireland.

By examining the context of Irish sexuality against the changing socio-political landscapes of past and present Ireland, this chapter will explore the influence of

Ireland on sexual identity and expression. Just as the two previous chapters have illustrated the massive shifts in the gendered landscapes of Ireland, there have been similar changes in the Irish sexual landscape, which still continues in its revisions and progressions. The chapter will critically examine the expressions of sexual identity in the characters of Cyril and the Girl to argue that being embedded in such a vastly oppressive landscape as that of the twentieth-century Ireland is inevitably detrimental to one's sense of sexual identity, and how that identity manifests and expresses itself. Furthermore, the chapter will argue that both characters are sexually

6 Critical analysis complemented by interview with Boyne, quoted in Appendix, 2

oppressed by the religious and political contexts of Ireland but do find space to express their sexual identities in the city. From this, we can argue that whilst rural

Ireland was slower to progress, therefore becoming symbolic of a repressively theocratic Ireland, the city can offer secularity and progression, thus representative of the Ireland’s more secular, liberal future. The chapter will study moments of sexual repression and expression; sexual roles and stereotypes demanded by the church and the effects of ‘subverting' these stereotypes; the influence of sexual liberation on the expression of sexuality in Irish writing; the roles of naming and labelling sexual identities and the particular nuances and experiences that form the fabric of

Irish sexuality, including rape, incest, and sexual abuse.

Both The Heart’s and A Girl, although written in 2017 and 2013 respectively, are largely set in twentieth-century Ireland. As argued in chapter two, one can assume that the Girl is born in the 1980s, which is suggested although not explicitly referenced by the narrative: Collard writes, "It's Ireland in the 1980s… McBride once said in an interview that the book is ‘set in Mayo'…" (2016, 43), and Adam Mars-

Jones observes "the Encyclopaedia Britannica the narrator consults even has an entry on Sexism" (2013, 111) suggesting the changing socio-political landscape where feminism and sexual liberation was becoming more prominent. Indeed, Walsh argues that Ireland in the 1980s was a decade characterised by “the growth of the gay and lesbian movement, dominated by concerns for equal rights and responses to AIDS; ongoing feminist debate, including the sittings of Third Wave Feminism; and masculinist backlash” (2010, 2)

As previously argued, much of Ireland's post-independence socio-political landscape was based on a Catholic, patriarchal integral structure which throughout the twentieth century endured a process of modernisation that is still occurring at the time of writing this thesis. The sexual landscape of Ireland, whereby Irish people

identify and express their own sexualities – be they queer, heterosexual, homosexual, binary or non-binary – was too influenced by the patriarchal Irish society that was so bound up with the Catholic church. As Woods writes,

Patriarchal, heteronormative structurings of Irish identity were bolstered and complicated by the central role of the Catholic Church in national discourse and in post-independence Irish political and cultural life… sexualities, genders and identities not conforming to such heteronormative models are marginalized and excluded from the canon of national belonging (2014, 29).

The Heart’s and A Girl represent expressions of such sexualities that reject the heteronormative models subscribed by Church and State: Cyril is homosexual, and the Girl resists the marginalisation of Irish women by engaging in frequent acts of premarital sex.

As Ireland's major cities moved towards an operating economy of capitalism and consumerism, attitudes towards sexuality were also shifting away from previous narratives of repression and austerity. Cronin argues that as "Ireland passes from a religious order to a consumerist one…sexual regimes are conceived in ways that might seem uncannily similar to economic cycles of austerity and affluence" (2018,

237). Arguably, modernisation took longer to reach places located in the periphery, resulting in what Cronin describes as a ‘rupture’ in the social fabric of Ireland (238).

Indeed, Anne Swidler described mid-80s Ireland as an "unsettled culture" (1986,

273).

The legalisation of contraception in 1979 underlines this social friction. Only available to married couples until 1990, the legalisation demonstrates the prolonged grip of Catholicism still on Irish familial and sexual values, despite modernisation.

Throughout all her sexual activity the Girl doesn't use contraception, illustrating the unavailability of contraception to single women engaging in premarital sex and, further, the demonization of the sexually liberated female. At the one point where she does come into contact with condoms she does not use them – "I met a man with condoms in his pockets. Don't use them. He loves children in his heart" (97).

Possibly, her neglect stems from hedonism; a lack of regard for fertility (the Girl forever remains a ‘girl', rather than a ‘woman'), or a residual sense of Catholic guilt: using a condom suggests a ‘hatred' of children. Similarly, The Heart’s is peppered with accidental births throughout: Cyril's, Cyril's child Liam, and even minor characters, such as Mrs. Hennessey's daughter. The one mention of ‘condoms' is

Cyril's anecdote about going through customs and seeing a woman dressed as a

"Legion of Mary" having condoms "confiscated" (292). In comparison to Frances of

Conversations, who rarely has sex with Nick without a condom (and the one occasion she does is enough for Bobbi to comment "I can't believe Nick would try to get away with not using a condom… that's fucked up" (140)), the difference in the sexual landscape of the texts becomes apparent.

Just as argued in chapters previous, the novel fits into those Cyril and the Girl attempt to submit to the heteronormative sexualities accepted by Ireland, only to fail in their repressions. Subsequently, they become marred by self-loathing, guilt and resentment, and demonstrate the influence of Ireland’s ruptured sexual landscape.

Boyne illustrates the influence of modernisation in Ireland on sexuality in The

Heart’s by first demonstrating Cyril’s sexual repression and its subsequent consequences. As mentioned in the introduction, Cyril's life spans the twentieth century, ending shortly after the 2015 Equal Rights Marriage Referendum vote that legalised same-sex marriage thereby capturing the rapidity of Irish sexual modernisation. The first half of the novel demonstrates Cyril’s attempts to live in acceptance with his illegal homosexuality in Ireland as he oscillates between repression and submission to sexual desire. This culminates in his voluntary exile to

Amsterdam after his biggest act of conformity, marrying Alice, his best friends’ sister in 1973. Eventually returning to Ireland after the murder of his lover to meet his son in 1994 (at which point, homosexuality is legalised), the remainder of the narrative depicts his attempts to rectify, justify or accept the consequence of those

repressions. Cyril’s growth is evident in the narrative’s trajectory; in "Yes or No" we see him on Twitter debating with no voters in the 2015 referendum, whereas in

"Shame" he almost commits suicide after his wedding, having previously promising to “be normal if it killed me” (288). Boyne has written that Cyril's personal journey mirrors that of Ireland's journey towards sexual liberation:

I wanted Cyril to represent Ireland itself. In the first half of the book, between 1945 and 1973, Cyril is frightened of his sexuality, of sex itself, of any form of intimacy… In the second half, between 1980 and 2015, he is proud of who he is and no longer afraid (from Wright, 2017).

The accelerated rate of modernity is made apparent as the novel references the lifting of the marriage bar (1972) and the legality of contraception, homosexuality, divorce and same-sex marriage. Despite this, the novel does not hide from the tragic experiences endemic to the sexual landscape of Ireland in its illustrations of discrimination, homophobia – to such an extent resulting in murder - rape, incest and the HIV/AIDS crisis, which causes the death of Cyril’s best friend and first love,

Julian.

Cyril oscillates between repression and submission to his sexual desires. He prays to be ‘cured' from his homosexuality, which is closely bound up with his love for Julian:

"please don't let Julian die, I asked God. And please stop me from being a homosexual" (203). Cyril deceives everyone around him of his homosexuality, to the extent that he embarks on heterosexual relationships, like that with Mary-Margaret

Muffet: "I don't like my girlfriend… she's judgemental and critical of everything and everyone…” (254). Cyril’s repressions are so intense that he submits himself to corrective therapy and holy confession allowing the reader to witness the lack of tolerance that characterised the church and state in Ireland, and Ireland’s failure to support Cyril as well as its rejection: the priest dies of a heart attack once Cyril confesses (206), and the GP tells him, "there are no homosexuals in Ireland. You might have got it into your head that you are one but you're just wrong" (254).

The anonymity of Dublin's inner city provides Cyril with ample opportunity to satisfy his desires but does not protect him from inner turmoil instilled by the larger sexual landscape of Ireland. Subversion leads to guilt which leads to repression, and the pattern is perpetuated:

In the city centre, it wasn't difficult to find a young man with similar predilections…a simple exchange of looks could create an instant contract as we made our way wordlessly to a hiding place with little chance of discovery… A quick thank you would be followed by our turning in opposite directions and walking away, making for home with a silent prayer that the Gardaí were not following us…we swore that this was the last time, that we would never do such a thing again, that we were done with it forever, but then the hours would pass, the urges would return… (244).

This is a fundamental illustration of the influence of Ireland on Cyril's sexuality. Inner- city Dublin provides anonymity, cover and multiplicity in the satiation of his sexual desire in the face of their illegality, just as it provides for Nick and France in their affair: Cyril has “night time excursions” to the Grand Canal, Baggot street and the

Phoenix Park (243). The closely-tied relationship between church and state is made evident, as Cyril says a "silent prayer" that he will not be caught by the Gardaí, praying to the institution that rejects his sexuality. The city gives a moment's relief to the repressions that the larger structuring of Ireland demands, resulting in a sexual anxiety that damages mental health. The strain of repression is so vast that he attempts suicide, commenting on the contradiction between city and country:

This was Dublin, the nation's capital. The place of my birth and a city I loved at the heart of a country I loathed… I wished that I could simply spread my arms and take flight… happy to… disintegrate into nothingness (368).

Before his exile, Cyril is defined by repressing his homosexuality. His decision to "be normal if it killed me" (288) resulted in abandoning his wife and child – perpetuating the existence of Ireland’s empty spaces where fathers should be until his return.

Arguably, had he not left, Cyril’s life would have ended in suicide like McBride's Girl.

Like Cyril, McBride’s Girl follows similar patterns of repression and transgression. By engaging in premarital sex, she rejects both the heteronormative model of Irish female sexuality and the stereotype of the traditional Irish woman, described by Luke Gibbons as "a silent emulation of Mary, the virgin mother" (1996,

108), who "had the virtues of loyalty and forbearance and an unlimited capacity to endure suffering" (1996, 116) and who was represented as "mutually supportive, silent, resigned and passive". Inglis adds, "women were seen as the weaker sex and not proactive in seeking sexual pleasure… passive, submissive receivers of powerful male sexual urges" (2005, 25). Furthermore, Gerardine Meany argues this has rendered women "unable to accept themselves and thinking, choosing, sexual, intellectual and complex ordinary individuals", and that the stereotype has women clinging to a "fantasy of women as simple handmaidens of the Lord" (1991, 5). This reductive view of women is so prominent throughout the narrative, where the Girl, at twenty, remains "girleen" (192) to her abuser.

As argued in chapter two, the Girl's rejections of this traditional stereotype climaxes in her suicide, the ultimate rejection of her existence in and by Ireland. As a child she symbolically smashes a plaster figurine of the Virgin Mary: "I belt young

Virgin Mary… fuck that virgin" (37). After her rape at thirteen, she attempts to metaphorically continue to smash up the stereotype, rejecting God and attempting to regain agency of her body through her sexuality. Yet, Ireland’s stunted sexual liberation does not redeem her, but rather condemns her: as McBride states,

Her sexual behaviour is not that of someone at peace with their sexuality… she is not someone enjoying the hard-won fruits of sexual liberation, she is… the product of a system that could offer nothing to women but sexual shame, ignorance and servitude (from Collard, 2016, 139).

Throughout the novel, the Girl seeks and is sought for emotionless sexual encounters and is harshly judged by those around her for it. Subjected to a constant push and pull narrative, she navigates herself in a country where it is "good to be seen" (69), but where the male gaze endangers her: "I see you… I can't help

wondering if you see me? You see, I think you do", says her Uncle, before he kisses her for the first time (53). Like Cyril, the Girl's sexuality comes to define her: at school, girls call her "dirty hoor" (72) and boys make crude remarks on the bus, "I'd do her raw and red" (58). Her brother beats her when he finds out she does "dirty things", shouting "everyone's embarrassed…everyone thinks you're disgusting like a maggoty pervy type" (73). Her mother condemns her for her sexuality too: "you may look down your nose at my beliefs and friends but I wasn't out throwing myself on every man passing while my brother was dying. You are disgusting. Sick in the head…This filth you've made of yourself… (199). While her brother sees her sexuality as something unclean and repugnant, her mother suggests it makes her mentally unstable – "sick in the head". Presumably, if the Girl was to confide in her mother about the sexual abuse she had endured, her mother would find her to be complicit

(as, disturbingly, some critics of A Girl have done)7.

At no point are any comments, judgements or retributions made towards the Girl’s abusers, exposing the sexual hypocrisy and sexual hypocrisy in patriarchal Ireland. As

Maura Richards wrote, “Irishmen all want sex before marriage, but they want to marry virgins” (1981, 87). The visibility of the Girl’s sexuality endangers rather than liberates her, seen literally when her Uncle watches her having sex with a man at the lake, then beats him and drags her home. It is ambiguous whether she consents to intercourse: "just shut up and pull your knickers down" (169), and her Uncle watches the encounter before approaching: "what you doing? To that girl?" (169). Rather than interrupting with intent to protect the Girl, her Uncle approaches out of jealousy: he tells the man, "she's my" (169). His silence over ‘what’ she is to him speaks volumes: it could be niece, victim, or object Notably, the objectification of

7 McBride: "I am slightly surprised that no one's raised any flags about this aspect of the book so far – apart from one online reviewer who seemed to think that there was some ambiguity about whether a grown man having sex with a 13-year-old constitutes rape or seduction… a 13-year-old having a crush on a 41-year-old and therefore allowing him to do what he wants to her will probably feel complicit in that act, but is not and cannot be, and those unfounded feelings of complicity may ultimately prove as destructive as the initial violation" (from Collard, 2016, 138).

women being men’s property was echoed in the Constitution, which only criminalised rape within marriage in the Criminal Law (Rape) Amendment Act of

1990. Prior to this it read, “the husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given herself in this kind unto her husband which she cannot retract (from

Hederman, 1980, 58). Although the Girl was never married, the view of women as property arguably influenced the way they were perceived by men.

The Girl’s body is a site of constant battle between herself, external male forces and the patriarchal structures of Ireland. After ‘rescuing’ her, her Uncle "bites" her breast, marking her and reinforcing the recurrent colours of red and white, illustrated in chapter two: " the stupid white my bothered skin. See blood come.

Rings I think of teeth flower" (170). Her Uncle tells her, "my lovely girl my love my…I'll always have you in the end." (170), and his beating of the man serves as his motive for later raping of the Girl: "thanks to your uncle for that… the best fuck I ever had" (194). The Girl's family see her Uncle as a hero when he retrieves her from the lake: "and they clapped they loved they worshipped him" (171). The repetition of

‘and they' in this passage builds a narrative intensity, climaxing in her family's

‘worship', making explicit the injustice of the situation.

The Girl is a product of a society that forbids female sexuality whilst simultaneously enabling male sexual transgressions: as Shadia Abdel-Rahman Téllez writes, the Girl "does not see her Uncle as a sexual aggressor – neither does her

Uncle think he is a rapist" (2018, 7). She asks, "do you feel guilty?" and he replies,

"about what?". The conversation, tragically, ends in her telling him "you haven't damaged me, if that's what you think" (107). The Girl allows her Uncle to persuade her that at thirteen she enticed him and that she consented, thereby making her complicit in her rape (“went about me tooth and claw that I wanted” (58); the lack of sexual education fused with the prioritisation of male desire in a patriarchal landscape that shames female sexuality arguably results in a sub-culture of sexual

hypocrisy. In twentieth-century Ireland, ‘transgressive’ sexuality was blamed on women. As Woods asserts, any subversion of the hegemonic model of sexuality in

Ireland resulted in punishment: Magdalen Laundries and Mother and Baby homes were a visceral product of this hypocrisy, as was sexual abuse. As the first lines of The

Heart’s illustrates, the patriarchal structure of Ireland was rife with sexual hypocrisy:

"long before we discovered that he had fathered two children by two different women… Father James Munroe stood on the altar… and denounced my mother as a whore" (5).

Like Cyril, the Girl frequently attempts to repress her sexuality, usually in relation to her Brother’s health. After he beats her she "packed in and up that life between my thighs" (74), and again after the relapse of his brain tumour: "that's the end of the end of that... Fucking. No more... My family. Need me. Shut your legs. I won't anymore" (149). Before she seduces a man on the train home as she returns for good to care for her brother, the reader witnesses her internal battle with her sexual desire and her attempts to repress that desire, resulting in inner turmoil:

Oh no not that. It is. And I know when those lights go turn on. You. Try to think of you… given fucking up for Lent. But I've done enough to know that…Itch will come. I can't… I know not what I do… No good…It. Comes for me (149).

The language of sexual expression throughout the narrative is fused with religious language expressed in an Irish dialect, emulating the conflation of sexuality and religion throughout Ireland. Passages of Catholic liturgy, hymns, Bible snippets and the figure of the Virgin Mary intermittently surface throughout as a consistent reminder of the church and its abuse of women: the topography of Dublin the Girl studies in was marked with a mix of churches and Magdalen Laundries. The Girl's relationship to the church is like that with her Uncle, first bringing comfort, then damnation. As McBride writes, "the Girl is comforted by the ritual and hope of the magical solutions offered by religion while her personal experience of it is mostly oppressive and destructive" (from Collard, 2016, 136).

Inglis argues that sex in Ireland was built around the “practises of chastity, humility, piety and self-denial’ (2008, 2). Indeed, the Girl’s only sexual education after looking up “sex” in the Encyclopaedia, was being raped by her Uncle. The encounter is deeply painful: "it hurts me take it out… dance with the pain of it" (57),

"I cannot take this. Pain" (58). She is shocked by the violence, "think will it always hurt?... when things are fit that tight how can there not be bruises?" (61), but then comes to later encourage it: "I let him throw me round the bed… choked my neck until I said I was dead… cracked my arm…and slapped and cried and wined and dined" (97). Building on the arguments of chapter two, the Girl’s association with purity and pain could be an attempt to regain the childhood innocence lost when she was raped, which was the moment she “left” her brother “behind”, “just looking on” (61). Ultimately, the Girl’s sexuality becomes entirely influenced and almost subsumed by the patriarchal, religiously-stifling structure of the sexual landscape of twentieth-century Ireland which allows for family members to rape children in one moment and be applauded as heroes in the next.

The condemnation of the Girl’s ‘dirty' sexuality results in a compulsive need for purity, which she tries to achieve through washing and self-baptism. In the city, she washes in the "rusted baths and flushing brown with limescale looks amid the digs of four AM", foreshadowing the "brown water turning to light" of the lake that she drowns in (89). In the same way that water and self-harm are prominent throughout

Conversations, water and pain in A Girl persistently loom in the spectre of the lake and the violence that surrounds it.

The Girl attempts to re-baptise herself in the lake before her first sexual encounter, feeling guilty for her attraction to her Uncle: "I will gush myself out between my legs. Whoever let the poison in… I'll put my head in for discreet baptize" (55). This foreshadows her drowning herself in the lake, also bringing attention to her frequent uses of water to clean, purify and purge herself of her

sexual desire throughout the narrative, which she calls “poison”. In the final section of the novel, "The Stolen Child" (the Yeatsian reference encapsulating her total loss of innocence), even her attempts to purify herself become hijacked by her Uncle as he rapes her in the bathroom ("he lock the bathroom door" (197)), as she tries to clean the "fuck punge of my face" from the man who raped and beat her just before, also at the lake. The fragmented language reaches a climax, interrupting not only syntax but letter capitalisation as details of the sexual violence against her become fused with images of water, emptying its potential to cleanse her or bring her any comfort: "wwherehtewaterisswimming … ithink i smell of woodwherethe river hits the lakebrownwashfoamy up the bank side Isee allcreaturesthere ... spring water going throughmyveins sinktheocean seeoutfar my salt my. Sea firsttime" (197).

The fragmented narrative emulates the girl's truncated expression of self, as she builds a life around sexual and structural abuse: when her last facet of love, her brother, is removed, so too does the Girl’s ability to articulate her experience. As

Cahill concurs, "the novel reveals the ways in which patriarchal religious Ireland refuses the girls expression, so much so that the only revenge is a destruction of language and self" (2017, 159).

Like Cyril, the Girl finds temporary relief in the anonymity and increasing secularisation of the city. In a Joycean epiphany she realises the liberation the city provides:

I could make. A whole other world a whole other civilisation in this this city that is not home? The heresy of it…I can choose this… Laugh at it because the world goes on, and no one cares. And no one's falling into hell. I can do this if I like and if I want and no one's telling tales at home (90).

Arguably, the Girl's happiest time is studying in the city, where she is sexually uninhibited. She "hunts" for men with her best friend in bars and pubs: "City. She and I. Going mad. Back to the books the fucks I forget we are going round and round again" (118). In the city she is in control: she denies her emotional self and

uses men for sex: "nicer is not what I am after. Fuck me softly fuck me quick is all the same once done to me… say stay the night but I am gone" (89). Whilst the urban anonymity and liberal, secular morality does provide a temporary salvation from the oppressive outer structures of Ireland for the Girl, the return of her brother's illness demands her return to the Irish countryside and it's religiously-stifling attitudes subsume her until she (literally) drowns. Even in returning on the train she begins to feel enclosed: "Hem me. Pin me. Nail me in" and, in a heartbreaking echo of her uncle ‘seeing' her, she takes what she knows to be her last look at the city and simultaneously acknowledges its ‘making' of her, the sexual sinner: "see you City. I see you. My land love. City going…. That's the one I made. I went in. It was me my home” (149)

The appalling abuse suffered by the Girl throughout the narrative is enabled by and a product of the Irish landscape that she finds herself embedded within. When researching for her book on the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, Without Fear (2005),

Susan McKay found that "there is nowhere in Ireland… free of rape…. every imaginable cruelty has been inflicted" (2007, 93). Indeed, Magill magazine announced in 1986 that “one in four Irish girls may be sexually abused before the age of 18” (from Ferriter 2009, 451). In The Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland

Report by the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (2002), it was found that one in twenty women reported being raped in childhood, whilst 30.4% of women reported some form of sexual abuse in childhood (Ferriter, 2009, 459). Had the Girl lived, she would have been counted within that number. In twentieth century Ireland, shame and silence were common amongst women, as "rape was shrouded in myths which were still being perpetuated" (94). The narrative’s linguistic truncation narrative mirrors the dialogue around rape in Ireland, where an actual legal definition of consent was only added in 2017, with the amendment of the Sexual Offences Act, despite its prominence in Ireland. McKay concluded, "there are rapists operating with impunity

all over Ireland. How dare they say they didn't know it was happening" (2007, 99).

However, in contemporary writing such as McBride’s and Boyne’s, paired with the increasing anger and calls for complete separation of church and state8, it would seem that the day of reckoning for those who denied or covered up such sexual crimes has come.

This chapter has examined the context of Irish sexuality against the changing socio- political landscapes between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and illustrated how the influence of Ireland on sexual identity and expression in the twentieth century is manifested into sexual repression. This in turn results in linguistic decay and mental instability. Whilst the city stands as a site of modernity by providing moments of respite its anonymity and liberal secularity, ultimately, the dichotomy between the increasing liberalisation of the city and the religious conservatism of the country in the twentieth-century had a detrimental effect on those caught within the ruptures created.

Just as the previous two chapters have illustrated the shifts in the gendered landscapes of Ireland, this chapter has demonstrated that there are similar shifts in the Irish sexual landscape. Influenced by the increasing visibility of LGBTQ+ identities, as well as feminism and sexual liberation, contemporary Irish writing is now able to explore the detrimental influence that the religious and patriarchal Irish landscape of the twentieth century has had on Irish citizens without fear of censor or consequence: upon the release of A Girl, McBride was celebrated, compared to when O’Brien published The Country Girls in 1960 and her books were publicly burnt

(from Collard, 2016, 69), the speed of progression in Ireland is staggering.

8 See Appendix, 14

Conclusion

Contemporary Irish writing is undoubtedly influenced by both the changing understandings of masculinity, femininity and sexuality and the shift in Ireland from a conservative, almost-theocratic patriarchy into a liberal, secular country. As such, contemporary Irish writing looks at Irish gender and sexuality in two ways: illustrating how the past reflects upon the present and how, with these reflections, it can navigate its role in Ireland’s future.

A Girl and The Heart’s illustrate the consequences of heteronormative, religious sexual stereotypes which largely characterised twentieth-century Ireland.

Cyril and the Girl endure sexual repression which develops into linguistic decay and mental instability. Notably, however, both texts demonstrate how such heteronormative sexual stereotypes were slowly undermined by increasing visibility of LGBTQ+ identities, female rights and a steady movement towards secularity. This resulted in greater sexual freedom for men and women alike, demonstrated by Nick and Frances in Conversations and Jason and Gemma in Oldschool, all which take place in present day Ireland.

Twentieth-century Irish conceptions of femininity idealised women as chaste, virginal homemakers: the “m/other” that Smyth describes in ‘The Floozie’ (1989, 19).

Again, this marginalisation resulted in repression and/or rejection of the traditional female stereotype, as demonstrated by the Girl from A Girl. Whilst the Girl’s rejection of this stereotype resulted in her suicide, campaigns for women’s rights in the twenty-first century have encouraged more writers to create characters who subvert and reject traditional and limiting conceptions of femininity. This is best demonstrated by Frances, Melissa and Bobbi in Conversations, and Catherine

Goggin and Alice Woodbead-Avery in The Heart’s. Catherine and Alice both find happiness in this century, despite being previously marginalised.

Masculine identity in Ireland today is still influenced by traditional gender stereotypes from the twentieth-century, as men hold themselves to these unnatural standards and then inevitably suffer the consequences of their inability to do so. Just as Nick, Jason and Cyril hurt those around them with their emotional repression, so too do they suffer from masculine anxiety, guilt and mental instability. Contemporary

Irish writing is engaging with the prospect of fragile masculinity now more than ever; paired with increasing revelations of gender performativity and the removal of stigma around discussions of emotional and mental health, explorations of masculine experience such as Nick’s and Jason’s is at its most progressive, opening up a necessary dialogue to ensure healthier futures for men in Ireland.

The importance of Dublin as a multi-faceted urban area in the formation and expression of gender and sexual identities is a recurring characteristic of contemporary Irish writing. In each text, the city plays a fundamental role. It provides urban anonymity for a couple to conduct extra-marital relationships free from judgement, such as Nick and Frances’s relationship, force estranged brothers to confront their failed relationship and its repercussions on their sense of masculinity, like Jason and Daniel and its greater rate of progression allows for greater sexual exploration like that of the Girl, or Cyril in the second half of The Heart’s. In each case, the lack of judgement around these explorations is necessary for Irish citizens to truly explore and understand their gender and sexual identities, so that they may fully realise what they want from their lives.

As the capital, Dublin is a site of larger social issues affecting Ireland, such as drug abuse, the hypocrisy in dialogues about drug use, homelessness, mental instability and institutional abuses. Yet, Dublin is also is the centre of liberal

progression and secularism - a site where legislation is changed and where people can challenge the status quo.

In each text, the use of topographical, geographical and spatial Irish landscapes necessitates reflection from each character, as they evaluate their role in society. This is further explored in the varying use of dialect, the engagement with political and artistic arenas such as the Dáil and Dublin’s nightlife, and the varying levels of explicit engagement with Irish feminism, masculinity and sexuality. The result that is achieved is a redefinition of post-colonial Irish character; influenced by Ireland’s past repressions and abuses the nation is now forward-facing, inquisitive and inclusive, and wholly represented by a body of writing that does not shy from presenting the nuances and dynamics of Irish experience.

There are various arguments for the influence of Ireland on gender and sexuality. If one accepts that the socio-political landscape of Ireland has changed from twentieth-century religious conservatism, to twenty-first century liberal secularism, then one must question the extent of that secularity: is it a superficial level of secularity, underpinned by traditionally religious and right-wing ideologies?

Contemporary Irish neoliberalism is viewed by some as “deeply destructive to most women”, exacerbating “the intersecting divides of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality and class” (Brah, Szemen & Gedalof, 2015, 7). In many areas in Ireland, gender equality is still to be achieved. The European Commission for Irish Women

2016-2019 highlighted that “challenges remain in fields such as violence against women, reconciling work and family life and gender balance in decision making and positions of power” (2018, online). Furthermore, the extent Ireland’s influence on sexuality is still being fully deciphered; the Commission to Inquire into Child abuse established on 23rd May 2000 to investigate all forms of child abuse in Irish

institutions details “horrific and inexcusable neglect”, with nearly 90% of witnesses to the commission reporting being physically abused (O’Gorman, 2018, online). This report, arguably, is one of the driving forces behind the decay of Catholicism in

Ireland. Similarly questionable is the prevailing existence of social issues; The Irish

Times reported that in 2017, “a dramatic increase in the number of young mothers dying by suicide in deprived parts of Dublin South Central amounts to a condemnation of social policies”, citing “poverty, depression, social exclusion, isolation or alcohol or drug abuse” as being among the reasons behind the rising suicide numbers (O’Neill, 2018, online). Indeed, as the interview with Kirwan highlights9, the housing crisis in Dublin is yet another challenge to the fostering of communities and gender identities in liberal Ireland.

A particular characteristic of Ireland’s socio-political and cultural contemporary landscape is the public engagement with the government, much of which is also demonstrated through contemporary Irish writing used in public campaigning. The death of Anne Lovett and her child in 1986 and Savita

Halappanavar in 2013 are only two out of numerous tragedies turned “national scandals”, which many argue as being used as “rallying points” to intensity political battle (Cronin, 2018, 239). However, the crystallisation of these experiences in contemporary Irish writing employed by campaigns such as that to Repeal the

Eighth arguably add humanity to the personal tragedy inflicted by impersonal legislation, provoking visceral reaction and immortalising the marginalised voices that suffered by the eighth amendment, as seen in the films “Heartbreak”10 and “We

Face This Land” 11, accompanied by Kirwan and Griffin’s spoken word poems.

9 See Appendix, 1 10 See Appendix, 2,11 11 ibid., 9, 10

Finally, groups such as the Iona Institute founded in 2007 are indicative of remaining conservative and religious thought in Ireland: the ethos of the Institute is to promote the place of marriage and religion in society and champion the right to life. Despite this, the recent referendum results in 2015 and 2018, paired with the over-estimation of crowds for the World Meeting of Families in August 2018 and calls for the complete separation of church and state, as suggested in the handout from the Stand For Truth demonstration12 does indeed suggest that Colm

O’Gorman is correct to address the crowds at the Stand For Truth demonstration as being part of a “new Ireland” (Ryan, 2018, online); a sentiment echoed by Cyril Avery in The Heart’s when he states after the Equal Marriage referendum in 2015,

“everyone can get married now. It’s the New Ireland, haven’t you heard?” (522).

The future of contemporary Irish writing must also be considered in the face of such changes. As this thesis has demonstrated, explorations of Ireland’s influence on gender and sexuality are unavoidable in narratives on the contemporary Irish experience, as they are integral to the dialogues of past and present. The texts in this thesis also suggest that contemporary Irish writing is becoming intertwined with other multimedia and artistic platforms, demonstrating the influence that writing and art is having on Ireland in their own right. As the introduction expressed, there is a mutual relationship between writing, performance and visual art that is being carved out by Irish artists; A Girl was adapted for theatre in 2014 and Oldschool had its cinematic premier in 2018 whilst Sally Rooney’s second novel, Normal People, is to be adapted for a BBC Three show by Lenny Abrahamson and Element Pictures after its Publication in September 2018 (Kelly, 2018, online). This relationship between film and writing is also explored in Dave Tynan’s short film adaptations of “We Face This

12 See Appendix.,13, 14

Land”13 by Sarah Maria Griffin and “Heartbreak”14 by Emmet Kirwan in 2016; the utilisation of these videos in the campaigns to Repeal the Eighth Amendment also highlight the politicisation of writing and visual art in forming political dialogues in

Ireland surrounding the policing of gender and sexuality. This, too, is suggested on a more grassroots level in Dublin by artists such as Kevin Smith of Dublin-based Soft

Boy Records, whose short film Love in Technicolour15 employs visuals and spoken word to explore performed masculinity in Ireland. Love in Technicolour won the RHA

Graduate Studio Award in 2017 and was selected to show at the RDS Visual Arts award show, allowing Smith to extend explorations of masculinity in his alias’

Kojaque concept album, Deli Daydreams16 in 2018, where tracks such as “White

Noise”, “Politicksis”, “Bubby’s Cream” and “Love & Braggadoccio” present the influence of Ireland’s politics, drink and drug culture upon fragile masculinity through rap and film (O’Day, 2017, online). Furthermore, “White Noise” is dedicated to Paul Curran, a Dublin spoken word artist who died in 2016 and whose work spoke of Irish masculinity, sexuality and experiences specific to Dublin youth17; not only does this encompass the themes explored in all texts of this thesis, but is indicative of the marrying between Irish writing, music and life. All these creations lead overwhelmingly to the conclusion that contemporary Irish writing is growing towards a multifaceted artistic engagement in the socio-political landscape of Ireland, and that these approaches are inevitably bound up in the expression of gender and sexual identities in Ireland.

13 See Appendix., 9, 10 14 ibid., 2, 11 15 ibid., 7, 12 16 ibid., 4, 5, 6 17 ibid., 8

Just as in twentieth-century Ireland the landscape influenced gender, sexuality and its representations in literature, contemporary Irish writing is influencing the landscape on which it is embedded into as it moves towards gender emancipation, sexual liberation and a progressive, inclusive future: truly, a new

Ireland.

Words: 18,434

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Walsh, F., Male Trouble: Masculinity and the Performance of Crisis (Palgrave MacMillan, London: 2010)

Woods, J., “Trans-formations of Gendered Identities in Ireland” in Holohan, C. & Tracy, T., Masculinity and Irish Popular Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire: 2014)

Wright, A., “An Interview with John Boyne” in Read It Forward (3rd September 2017). Accessed online: https://www.readitforward.com/author-interview/john-boyne/ 5/08/2018

Yeats, W. B., “The Stolen Child” in The Major Works ed. Larrissy, E., (Oxford University Press, Oxford: 2008)

Appendix Contents

Figure 1: Excerpts from an interview with Emmet Kirwan for Carla Jenkins about the Influence of Dublin and Ireland on Gender and Sexuality in Dublin Oldschool, in his work and in Ireland generally (18th June 2018)

Figure 2: “Heartbreak” by Emmet Kirwan

Figure 3: An Interview with John Boyne for Carla Jenkins, 16th August 2018

Figure 4: “Kojaque is the Dublin soft boy rapping about shitty jobs and Irish life” Kevin Smith to Georgie Wright, for I-D Magazine (10th July 2018)

Figure 5: Kojaque Lyrics from Deli Daydreams

Figure 6: Excerpts from Una Mullaly’s, “Kojaque: Dublin hip hop from the belly of the deli” for The Irish Times (13th March 2018)

Figure 7: Extract from James Merrigan Review of Love in Technicolour by Kevin Smith, Dublin Institute Technology for Soul Beating (12th June 2017)

Figure 8: Excerpts from “‘A Moment of Art’: Even After his Death, Paul Curran’s Poetry Contains All of Life” by Sophie Meehan for Poetry Ireland (2017)

Figure 9: “We Face This Land” Sarah Maria Griffin Published in The Irish Times (21st September 2016)

Figure 10: Stills from “We Face This Land” directed by Dave Tynan (2016)

Figure 11: Stills from “Heartbreak” by Emmet Kirwan, Directed by Dave Tynan (2016)

Figure 12: Love in Technicolour by Kevin Smith (2017)

Figure 13: Pictures from Stand For Truth Rally & Silent March to Last Magdalen Laundry to close in Dublin, Sean McDermott Street, 25th & 26th August 2018

Figure 14: Scan, Socialist Party Handout from Stand For Truth Rally, 26th August (2018)

Notes on Appendix

Unless otherwise stated as interviews by Carla Jenkins, all references for these appendices can be found in the bibliography for this thesis.

With regards to the film stills, it should be noted the recurring use of actors which suggest the inclusive nature of Irish artistic spheres: the actress in the second picture on the left-hand column of figure 10 played ‘Gemma’ in David Tynan’s adaptation of Kirwan’s Dublin Oldschool, and the actress playing the mother in Kirwan’s “Heartbreak” stands in the Repeal video, alongside other Irish female authors, critics, writers, musicians and artists (and Griffin herself).

These stills have been included as evidence of the politicisation of contemporary Irish writing and film.

Appendix Figure 1: Excerpts from an interview with Emmet Kirwan for Carla Jenkins about the Influence of Dublin and Ireland on Gender and Sexuality in Dublin Oldschool, in his work and in Ireland generally, 18th June 2018

CJ: I’m hoping to argue that in these texts that aren’t necessarily solely focused on sexuality or solely on gender, just as a whole, in Irish Contemporary writing there is a breakdown of these stereotypical established characters – you know, the ‘hard man’ who doesn’t talk about his feelings – and there is this paired with language being a barrier to self-expression.

I think that this is more fully realised in contemporary literature, and with that comes an embrace of national identity, and talking in dialect and being like “this is how I speak and this is where I’m from”. What do you think?

EK: I think that Ireland and Scotland as well: they were almost for years and generations seen as homogenous and white. So that differentiation between the classes was achieved through accents and sound. There’s a real push towards, what people say, ‘speak [ing]correctly’. I realised this firstly in acting, that people say ‘speak correctly’. And that’s a nonsense, no one speaks Irish correctly, or rather, no one speaks English in Irish correctly. In South County Dublin they speak incorrect as well. “Matter”, is said with a soft Irish ‘t’, but the thing is that nobody speaks phonetically correctly in Ireland either.

The kind of idea that there was a standard Irish accent of…propriety, is that the word? To speak Irish correctly? A proper Irish accent was a nonsense.

Children from a young age were being told by teachers in school that how you sound and what you sound like isn’t valid, and you need to make it valid by changing the way you speak so as to not represent from where you’re from. But actually as I get older - it takes a long time and a lot of maturity to accept this - as an adult I think, ‘You know what? Fuck that, embrace this. Embrace where I’m from’. What happens then is a much more freeing thing. Especially in writing, it opens up other avenues for you, it’s freer… in the scene where Jason jumps over a wall, he rhymes inured’ and ‘dirt’. These aren’t meant to rhyme but in the Dublin dialect ‘dirt’ becomes ‘durt’ and so they do. You’re using your accent, your phonetics and sounds and phenoms in a way to mould essentially what you’re saying to fit whatever reality you want to fit.

There are so many different accents. There’s a Tallaght accent which is more nasal and becomes changed as the people move out. They move out to Crumlin then Rathfarnam then Tallaght, and beyond. Then, the inner-city accent is evolving from

what it was. So you can basically get characters from different parts of the city and use them.

Accent is a signifier of community, a signifier of where you’re from, you’re culture your class and it should be used and embraced and not suppressed. I try to write some stuff phonetically, the way that Irvine Welsh writes and sometimes it depends because if I was doing it for the texts then when I’m just speaking it then it’s different. I wrote a radio play for BBC, it’s called Wild West for RADIO 4, and I did write some of that phonetically for the actor. Certain parts are read in the same way – the word ‘kilt’ for ‘killed’. I do tell the actors or readers or writers to embrace it because if its character based, its usually indicative of where they’re from and the collective experiences they have.

A vocal teacher said to me that in Shakespeare’s time was speaking with a Cornwall or a Belfast accent. I don’t know how true that is but these things all are affectations, they’re all social constructs where people have chosen to speak in these accents. Another thing that happens is the upper-class choose to speak in one way, and then the working class start to emulate that accent. When the upper-class find that they change how they speak and it goes in a cycle. I think now that in the 21st century its broken down.

It’s happening in Ireland with the BBC. When they started all of the announcers had to sound like the home counties, public school boys. In Ireland it was an edict that went around that the majority of people on TV all spoke like people from South County Dublin. There is a thing that wealth and accent should dictate how people think they want to speak but in actuality it’s all really a nonsense.

CJ: I think that masculine anxiety is manifested in an inability to say what you feel and how you feel it. So there are some examples from the play - Jason says “I bottle it” – is there a link between native language and authentic self-expression? And then again when he says, “tell her now”, and describes the two of them as her being a “statue of an angel” and him a “panting gargoyle”. Could you talk a bit about this kind of way of saying ‘I don’t know what to say how I’m saying’, the sense of anxiety in men and especially in the present day?

EK: In the play it’s weird. Jason is an untrustworthy narrator of his own story and his own existence, when he talks the play and the world of Dublin into existence he does it in this spoken word internal monologue. He’s incredibly articulate and athletic and verbose and garrulous and putting out all these words, he uses all these “she’s a statue of an angel and I’m a panting gargoyle” but then when it comes to the actual regular speech he’s incapable then of putting that to her.

So the whole thing is predicated on the idea that obviously when people are taking drugs together they’re just going out and partying, but when they want to investigate deeper and she’s saying, ‘well you know what do you feel?’ he would go *make gasping noise* and would be incapable of articulating anything to her. This is one of the things for Irish men what they’ve found that, and it’s probably to do with American television and something like that, but that talking about feelings is something that just didn’t happen. Their fathers didn’t give them the necessary tools to communicate, so they were never given the proper vocabulary to express or articulate how they feel. And actually, even in general people aren’t given a vocabulary to articulate how they feel. Feelings are hard to express; you know, contextualise and intellectualise, I suppose. The idea then that people are emotionally frozen…I know that other people have talked about this, because of the amount of men committing suicide. They used to go to the priest and offload, but now they don’t go to the priests and they can’t go to the council because they can’t afford to.

They currency of communication between them and their friends is predicated on an idea of slagging. And joking. You know that kind of way. And I only find then that they become cogent enough because when they’re in that toxic state, they were high. That’s what Brian Singleton was writing in Dublin Oldschool18. The amount of chemicals in their systems had them high, and when men were on drugs or alcohol, all of a sudden then they become emotive.

Especially in the play, they all take ecstasy. It’s a pathogen. All of a sudden, they found that some of them found themselves opening up in other ways and then they would do something different and it would stop. In my poem ‘I Love You, Woman’, there’s a line in that he says, ‘I’m sorry for writing this down instead of saying it to you’. It’s an idea. The director of the piece was a feminist and an intellectual, and she gave me Bell Hooks, who is a feminist theorist. Bell Hooks said, ‘feminism for everyone’ and that there was another feminism to help men. It’s not that men are broken, that’s not what I’m saying, it’s that some men feel they become broken by the failure of relationships. Bell hooks said that, not me. I thought that was really interesting though.

Instead of learning from the failure of relationships (whether that’s familial or romantic), men become more withdrawn and feel more of a sense of failure. Like, “oh that fucked up again”. You know, when boys go out with girls and when it doesn’t go right. “Oh, there we go again, it just didn’t work”. I was thinking in

18 Dublin Oldschool is referred to in the 2015 new preface to Singleton, B., Masculinities and The Contemporary Irish Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2015) and is quoted in chapter one of this thesis. Kirwan personally thanked Singleton for the first academic writing on his script.

general terms that would go a long way – Hooks was talking about her father who would struggle to communicate his love to her; he would become short and aloof. I thought is that what happens with a lot of Irish men? That’s where ‘I Love You, Woman’ came from. I thought, “I’m going to talk about all these things and actually say them to you”. It was a love letter to my girlfriend, my now fiancé, and it was about saying those things that you feel are hard. When people say, ‘oh say something nice’ and you’re stuck on the spot, I just wanted to say something nice. So that was me actually trying to do that, take the time to put it all down.

Masculinity is changing. A lot of the time it defined by industry. The loss of industry and manufacturing jobs and the sense of self has basically transmuted into things like gyms and tan and looking after yourself in a different way. I’m 38, I missed all that Geordie Shore generation, my masculinity was identified by how much you could drink and how much craic you could have and how funny you could be. And then I was even younger, it was dictated by violence and who could be the best fighter. Which I always repelled from, I was always like fuck off!! I’m soft and doughy!!

That kind of masculinity always kind of fucking terrified me. I really didn’t like it, I could see people…

CJ: Its’ toxic masculinity isn’t it?

EK: It is, yeah! It’s the dominant personality, And you could see people – in terms of drug abuse especially – be like “how could this person become a heroin addict?” and it’s like well look if you have a dominant personality in a social group is surrounded by people who don’t have a solid role model they listen to this guy and they inevitably look up to this guy, if this guy says something they accept it as truth.

It’s about the pernicious aspect, the insidiousness of an untruth, a lie that’s propagated as a truth, a hard fact, they look to these individuals and they find them fucking up because they say that guy seemed pretty solid but the reason that he was a solid is because he was the biggest and the strongest, not necessarily the most socially aware one, but he was the one they looked up to and possibly protected them from others so they’re going to look up to him.

I don’t actually really understand it… I’m no expert on masculinity. I was doing a festival where there was a conversation about masculinity and a woman stood up and said “he (meaning me) didn’t talk about it enough”. I said, “It’s not that I didn’t talk about it enough, it’s that I don’t honestly have the answers for you.” I don’t know. That’s what the writing is about, you try to investigate that in the writing. I don’t know if that’s any use to you.

CJ: No, it is! It’s the writing and the figuring it out what you want to say and how you want to say it. I don’t want to say that the writing is a form of therapy but it’s not untrue.

EK: Oldschool isn’t autobiographical. I did want it to be about two young men and what was it about them and why would they do so many drugs and not do a thing. I wanted to find out why men were doing so many drugs and why they couldn’t talk. In the scenes with the two brothers I wanted to find out why they couldn’t talk and why they couldn’t communicate with each other and how that started to tear them apart. The lack of expression or not knowing how to do it and how it then did it for the whole lot. Then I needed a female character in it so that his brother could say “well that’s fucked up” and he could talk to him about morality and take the moral high- ground.

That’s where the play started, that was the first scene I wrote. I wrote back from that. I had to give him something to give out about. That scene, the rooftop scene, the poem came first and I had to go back and write what it was about.

CJ: I’m writing about the role of Dublin as a city, I’m saying that there are things you get away with the receiving of these gender stereotypes that they have to give out. And I’m arguing how they city gives anonymity. The line “safe away from the city and the session”, there’s a withdrawal from that dangerous sense of the session or the city. What do you think Dublin as a place, growing up in it, has to do with that inarticulacy?

EK: I don’t know. I genuinely don’t know.

CJ: Does the city have a role to play?

EK: I think it’s actually wider, I think it’s a sort of wider issue about Ireland. I don’t know... how to express it. I think it’s more of an Irish thing, across all the socio- economic levels, I think it’s an inability of men worldwide to just be articulate. Where I was from, being articulate wasn’t a golden ticket to success. It was more a thing that got you battered. So If you increased your vocabulary as a young person and you used a word people hadn’t heard before, people would say to you “what the fuck are you doing?” It’s because of that, that machismo … the same in the rugby playing schools they’d say “check out your man reading”. It’s a worldwide thing that intellectualism is something to be repelled and is associated with weakness. If you increased your vocabulary then you were bookish, you were Othered, people would call you “weirdo”.

There’s a masculinity attached to sports and sports playing, if you’re articulate about that and you give an analysis of a football match, that’s applauded. If I was to give an analysis of something else people say, “shut the fuck up”.

The currency of communication between young men exists on a communication of jibes, movies, music, other people. When they all hang out with each other, people want to forget about their own lives. They don’t want to talk it through. It’s that Lisa Simpson thing, she writes “The smarter you get the unhappier you get”. There’s that thing that the more you think about something the more it sends you mad.

I think there is an anxiety creeping in to young men now that absolutely has to do with the internet, and connectivity and phones and things. Our brains are a cup filling up with more information than we’ve ever had before. You walk about in a park, you look about, you take in all this information, you go to sleep, your brain quantifies it, you wake up the next day and your brain is reset and ready to take on another day of information. There’s an increase in anxiety of socio-economic anxiety, ‘will I ever own a house?’ We are the first generation who will earn less and who will have less than our parents did. That’s a total reversal of the last 200 years and the achievements of the industrial revolution. That has a definite influence and an anxiety so that coupled with the inability to talk, being on your phone, taking on this information: it does send people a bit batty, it leads them unfortunately… Suicide is caused by depression but there are so many other causes as well, so many other factors.

CJ: (Talks about Frightened Rabbit19 and the visibility of mental health issues and epidemics of suicide seen this May in Scotland with the death of Scott Hutchison). I don’t think it’s not not talking about mental health, it’s about taking the awareness for granted.

EK: Yeah. I think you’re right. Illness is met first with compassion, then it’s met with impatience. That’s a societal inability to deal with it, that’s a huge thing we have to deal with.

CJ: And being in a city as well, talking from personal experience of men who don’t talk about their feelings and who take drugs… in these cities people are getting swallowed up by an awareness of the issues and then taking them for granted. It’s easy to ignore posters being plastered all over a wall when they’re already there and

19 A popular Scottish indie-rock band, whose frontman Scott Hutchison committed suicide in May 2018, whose death and whose works informed much of the impetus behind this thesis. See: Hogan, M., “Why Losing Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison Hurt So Much” from Pitchfork (14th May 2018) https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/why-losing-frightened-rabbits-scott-hutchison-hurts-so-much/

you get used to looking at them. Don’t you think the city is connected, in a way, to these inherited characteristics that we feel we have to embody?

EK: I don’t know, yes but I suppose it’s one of those things I can’t articulate myself but which it comes through the writing… I think you’re probably right that where you’re from almost gives you a person who you are supposed to become. I grew up in Tallaght, and then I came and lived in town for the last 10 years and there probably is…there’s that currency of communication again. Look at addicts, they all speak in a certain way: there’s nothing in the taking of heroin that makes you speak like that, but in order to be part of the gang you adopt the sound. Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Mick Jagger; they were on heroin and they didn’t speak like the way men speak to each other on Talbot street. So there’s a currency of communication where you have the communication or you don’t, and then you can’t pay to play with each other.

Individuality and difference… it’s not that it’s beaten out of you, but it’s slapped down. So survival in an area or place is usually quite a lot of kind of young men if they’re in a small town and they feel different, they will leave or they will mould themselves to fit in.

Donal Ryan wrote a book called The Spinning Heart and each chapter is set in an outer town, and is a different man saying an internal monologue of how they feel. There is one guy who is really articulate and well-read and he says his teacher wants him to write and he says, “fucking hell I sound like a real wanker now” and stops himself. Even in his own internal monologue he limits his own creativity, his own articulation. Difference is slapped down. People see the world through the prisms in which they grew up in. It’s kind of rare that people step outside that. You know what I mean? And they look out that from the outside. Most writers are trying to do that.

I don’t know the answer to your question about the city but I do think that individuality, a sort of transgressive behaviour against the norm… they are being slapped out of you.

CJ: When you say, “in school you’re told don’t talk in your accent”. In “Heartbreak”, it’s about a girl and then that same girl as a woman. You don’t put yourself in her mind, but I guess that in writing you’re getting through…?

EK: How I wrote that is that I positioned myself as the boy, writing from that perspective as if he had the knowledge of what his mother went through from the time he was born. It was based on the attitudes of politicians two years ago talking to the same woman on The Late Late Show, and the vitriol that these politicians were facing that woman with. A professor said to her, “you shouldn’t have had the baby”,

a Trinity professor, who was part of a think tank saying, “why should I have to pay for her mistakes?” So unfeeling, so uncompassionate. In 2016 it was like there was a celebratory sort of job done, I wanted to say, no. Job not done. Cherishing all the children equally is a nonsense, it’s cherish the right children so that we sound how we want to sound. That was that ... there is an aspect of trying to get into that mindset, but I didn’t want to say that I did know what it was like because I don’t, I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman. So I wrote it from her son’s perspective, from the perspective of a man of his time. Critique something for what it is, not for what it’s not.

CJ: Oldschool is a text about taking drugs. That’s accessed mostly in the city… it’s also a text that tells a heavy story through a light-hearted manner, it has funny bits in it.

EK: Yeah, that’s definitely an Irish thing: pierce the moment with a joke or a gag, make it slapstick, don’t make it too heavy.

CJ: The movie has been marketed as “the love child of Adam and Paul and Trainspotting”20. Do you think that Ireland needs an Irish Trainspotting?

EK: I don’t think so. It didn’t start like that, and that’s an easy comparison to make: because it’s about drugs in a city then it must be like Trainspotting, taking drugs in a city. Oldschool is about chronicling sub-culture, finding a community of people who find happiness that they didn’t find with their families and so they find that with each other, and then replacing your family, where there is an absence in the first place. And then it’s about what happens when a family member comes back, after being extricated because of drug addictions, a life-altering drug addiction and the hypocrisy about that. It started about a story like Dazed and Confused and American Graffiti – a story where people were going out and taking drugs and then talking loosely and freely with each other when they usually weren’t able to.

I wanted to write a working-class drama about family and Dublin was just the backdrop of it, and drugs just happened to be in it. A working-class drama of two men who got to the stage where they couldn’t talk and then what happened after that, where they went from that.

It was influenced by these thoughtful kitchen sink dramas where there is always a strong matriarchal figure who puts manners on feckless males: I wanted to look at when you remove that matriarchal figure, and you have two men who are fully set

20 Reference to Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, which is similarly referenced by Kevin Smith in the lyrics to “Last Pint” by Kojaque (see figure 4, 5 and 6) (Welsh, I., Trainspotting (Secker & Warburg, London :1993))

their masculinity, it’s been given by their mother who raised them and taught them how to ‘be men’, and now they’re adrift. They find each other in a port to the storm. They’ve flown the nest but the mother is on the periphery, always floating about.

In Oldschool, the mother’s illness compared to the brother’s addiction exposes attitude of giving yourself a sickness, making the sickness. I wanted the rhythms, the current, the correct speech of working-class families written by someone who would know that. The issue is then that all the other women in the story are on the periphery, like the girlfriend…

CJ: It’s not unfounded though, women are always on the periphery of the masculine experience, are they not? If they don’t identify as that?

EK: Exactly. In that session culture it is a mixed bag, but with the consumption of pathogens there is also a sort of removal of that ... sexual urge or ability or even awareness, most of the time… they hang around with each other not trying to score each other because they’re all out of it. in that subculture of house music its very binary with men and women hanging out and all getting on and just being platonically friends, whereas where they came from – the suburban drinking culture, where men stay with men and women stay with women – is so different. In the city, which is inevitable because its where that initial source of modernity comes its where people are taking drugs, it becomes more a culture of expression, taking drugs and then speaking how you feel.

That’s a failed relationship; Jason and his brother, that failed before he left for the city, before he became a DJ and started taking drugs. That happened outside, in the suburbs and in the country where the alcohol culture dominates. Young men, they move into the city centre and the drugs break down those class barriers and you have people from all sorts of walks of life, sexualities and people. That’s where Jason thinks he’s at, then he meets his brother, and he realises that he’s not anywhere at all.

We’ve moved away from religion, the dancefloor is the church, the communion is a pill and your friends are your family. Because of the neoliberal destruction of traditional communities, the bonds that would have been solid have been ripped apart by market forces. This is a massive reason why men kill themselves: that sense of community of belonging no longer exists anywhere because that was there before has been ripped out; we have given ourselves over to neoliberalism so wholly that our sense of where we are from, our country, our environment, it doesn’t exist anymore. We now move from place to place. We hold onto a place as much as we can, then vulture funds and landlords come and take it off us, and we are spread out to the four corners again.

It was about me capturing that period of Dublin youth, I wanted a record of it. I wanted it written down.

Figure 2: “Heartbreak” by Emmet Kirwan

Heartbreak. The ma, fuck does not give. Young one wakes Cos she’s wellouvih to the morning after. The daddy, the picture, well he has Sees grafitti marker been ouhvih Her friend’s names written on the Recently young one has got breasts rafter and attention Of her sister’s bunk, who’s no longer And not just boys, I should mention there. But fully grown men who remark Disappeared. ‘she’s an old 15, but an absolute 10’ A feather blown to the night winds And that was when the boys started where someday young one hopes to yelling, follow. ‘Here, here, here, c’mere, c’mere, Black permanent smell, sweets and c’mere, spells, Let me should sweet obscenities in Christine your ear.’ 1916 Deborah Heartbreak Up The RA Jenny loves Carl She does double take Taylor is a slag And seas Sean I love Sean. She feels she likes this one boy because he didn’t shout Her face is a picture of grace No As she reaches, touches, runs her hand Young one is special, young fella said along the bunk. She always thought her first time Thump thump thump would be in a bed. Now whodathunk Not a wet patch of grass with a dog Her ma made it home. barking at the back end where two She’ll be early morning lucid housing estates meet. When Mam’s hazy And I think when he said it, he meant it She lets young one and friends sit in He truly did. the box room Because he’s not like all the other Listen to tunes boys, but he is still just a boy Smoke squidgy like cave mens who’s pulling out late and now pulling From the BC whens out early. They wrote the happy story of their She sits in a chemist queue lives on the bedroom wall For a patronising talking-to It belies a hurt narrative. ‘Well if I knew it was gonna happen I wouldn’t be here talking to you.’

So she bounces. The owl one’s on the thrill and the Weeks later, stomach follows suit. back ends and the hallways Sister, no longer there for a voice, if Are still full of new they were together they could be ‘C’mere, c’mere’s’ stronger Every weekend And one of her friends simply said, ‘Stinger.’ So she kicks it To a back alley B&B Her ma said, ‘Here, c’mere, c’mere, Asks a grubby blueshirted TD for help c’mere and the problem Look listen, understand there’s no Compounds when he says money for a trip on the ringer, ‘Go back to your mam’s’ That’s only for those that can.’ Sound

Heartbreak Newspaper learns of her predicament Asks for a photography and an But now she’s wide awake interview No longer dropping yokes, but So she rocks this little €15 boohoo dropping little prenatal vit hit Made by her counterpart on the other No longer smoking rollies with a little side of the globe nodge of squidgy She thinks, this little nodge in me that I ‘Look at her, she looks fine to me. see from this strangely My tax euros means she gets rendered orange 3D picture of my everything for free.’ little Squidgy. ‘What about cherishing all of the children equally?’ It doesn’t look or feel real ‘Was a poet’s way of describing And the chemicals that at 12 started Catholics and Protestants living running riot are only harmoniously under one flag Now after settling down Not so my taxes could pay for a house Are whipped up into a frenzy for a working-class slag.’ Sensation of emotion puts her head on a brink and she thinks Heartbreak

Heartbreak But now it’s money she’ll have to make. She had the baby on her own Young one grows and gets a job just But for its sake, she resolves to love to prove them all wrong this thing more than she was She kicks the rhyme in a zero-hour Ever loved herself contract But the gaff is still ill No overtime

How can you work your way out of I am not defined by the fact that I am poverty some man’s daughter, And down, down, down, down, sister, cousin, mother. downtrodden property I am a woman. And I have agency just And keep getting poorer while because I’m breathing air, working she shouts motherfucker Because prices go up and wages go and I’m standing here, motherfucker. down And you, and this State are the ones Now she’ll have to do more who are trying to fuck me.” To change this salacious situation Progression she feels will only come This boy sees this treatment in the through education. street and from the State all his life He decides to regulate. The boy grows tall and strong and But young one now, fully grown, tries school becomes a place for the two to sate this age and build a young Now inspired by her brilliant teacher man, she’s got that yearnin’ for learnin’ This young boy. He will be the best But she’s not learnin’ for earnin’, no elements of femininity wrapped in a she’s just learnin’ for learnin’s sake rebellious feminine but benign So she can articulate masculinity. This incandescent rage between all the The man she always hoped for. young women of Ireland in 2016 He will love you to the end of days She learns things, like constitutional Traverse space and time and do even refusal of bodily autonomy more Thinks this is backwards blasphemy And with her words, her life, a mixture of loving and ethics, You mean, as a woman or plebeian in Food in his belly and all the right this country of opportunity seasoning This ceiling and seas are shamrock- From the instant he achieves cognitive coloured green glass to me reasoning and a maturity You’ll only get the last of me He will be the man to settle up the And still dealing with the ignominy score Of getting followed and hollered at in And say, “Here, ma, you embody all the street in spite of undergraduate that is good and are the one that I am accomplishment fighting for. I’ll never catcall. I’ll treat ‘Relax, darling, take it as a and respect and help create an Ireland compliment.’ that will stand in awe of all mná.” Boys, leave it out, look at her, She’s a mother Heartbreak Heart mend. She says, “Stop! Here! C’mere, c’mere, c’mere

Figure 3: An Interview with John Boyne for Carla Jenkins, 16th August 2018

Twitter: CJ: Hi John. I’m writing on The Heart’s Invisible Furies for my M. Phil thesis and I have a question central to my argument. Is/was Julian Woodbead actually a homosexual with internalised homophobic tendencies, and, if so, would the revelation have mattered?

JB: No. Julian is 100% straight and totally earnest in who he is. He doesn’t care about who does what with who, has no prejudices, but he loves the ladies! Originally, I imagined Julian was going to be a bit of a prick, to be honest, but as I wrote it I thought actually he’s just a guy who knows who he is, loves girls and isn’t shy about it!

CJ: Do you think there is anything in particular about Dublin that influences Cyril’s masculine expressions / identifications, and his particular struggles with identifying with his homosexuality? Or is it more Ireland in general? Dublin is always with him – even when he’s not there.

JB: I don’t think it’s so much Dublin as Ireland. Dublin, after all, would have been easier to be gay in but rural cities would have been harder. With Cyril it’s about getting to a place where he’s basically saying to the world, I don’t care. This is who I am.

CJ: Do you think Cyril’s fate resonates with the fate of characters like the Girl from McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing? It takes a long time for Cyril to ‘Form’, and he hinders himself as well as being hindered by the social landscape. Is sexuality yours, or do you belong to your sexuality?

JB: No. Very different books.

On Email: CJ: Many of Cyril's actions prior to 'Exile' stem from fear of an exposure of his sexuality. Although he comes to be proud of his sexual identity and learns from his mistakes, in the first two sections he at times acts selfishly, and hurts other people around him, and then in turn he suffers more because of his stunted relationships with people (like Alice and Liam - although these are later rectified). Alice and Julian tell him on separate occasions that they wished that he had just been honest about his sexuality and things would have turned out differently, although at the time Cyril doesn't believe them. Similarly, when Cyril meets Alice in 'Peace', one can argue in the conversation they have it seems like Cyril and his actions are defined by his

homosexuality and subsequent repression of it, by himself. At times this can make this hard to sympathise/empathise with Cyril, although at other times, the reader understands why he doesn't tell - illegality and the threat of violence being a few reasons. Would any other character have acted differently? Do you believe he could have told them? Would that have had more life-threatening outcomes, and are we meant to find some of his behaviour frustrating? Importantly - how much of this is comes from Cyril and his nature, or the influence of Ireland and its homophobia upon Cyril? How much agency does he have?

JB: An important thing to remember about Cyril is that he isn’t always a good guy. He does some pretty rotten things from time to time, such as marrying Alice in the first place and then immediately running out on her. In some ways, he’s a victim of his times. It must have been quite frightening to have been gay back then, particularly when it was still illegal, and you certainly couldn’t have relied on friends or family being accepting of it. In fairness to him, when both Julian and Alice say that they wished he’d been honest with them, they’re being slightly disingenuous. They’re saying that from the distance of time, knowing that at that moment they’d be fine with someone saying that they’re gay, but whether they’d have felt that way back when he was young is open to debate. You’re certainly meant to find his character frustrating. In a lot of my books, the central character is very flawed and is capable of as many acts of kindness as he is acts of cruelty.

CJ: Cyril says that he loves Dublin and hates Ireland (How much is Cyril's story demonstrative of that urban vs. rural divide, and what is it that he loves about Dublin in particular?

JB: What he means here is that he loves his home, the specifics of it, as in the streets and people and buildings and shops and everything he knows so well. But he hates the attitudes that exist in Ireland, the small-mindedness, the bigotry, the fake religious fervour. It’s not really an urban v rural divide, as Cyril knows nothing about rural areas anyway. Even though the country drives him crazy a lot of the time, Dublin is still home and it’s still the place that he returns to eventually.

CJ: Jack Smoot says, "Nothing will ever change in that fucking place", and Cyril at times believes and repeats the line, but ultimately, he returns back to Dublin. Would you agree that Cyril almost forgives Ireland? How does this compare to the characters like Jack Smoot, who arguably never forgives Ireland for its transgressions? JB: Cyril does forgive Ireland but Jack is ultimately proved wrong. I was writing the book knowing that I would end at the Equal Rights Marriage Referendum Act, when the country really did change, and I thought it was important to have a character

who thinks that a place will always stay the same when in fact it evolves considerably. Jack can’t forgive Ireland because of what it did to Sean (and how it let his father off after he murdered Sean) but Cyril ultimately grows to accept that a country, like its people, can change and there’s not much to be gained by holding a grudge.

CJ: What was the reasoning and significance behind having so many of the characters working in the Dáil?

JB: Because that’s the centre of Irish political life, where all the laws are made and all the laws are changed. The Dáil also changes over time in its approach to female TDs, for example. I wanted both Catherine and Cyril to work there, but not as politicians, more as people who work behind the scenes and can be observers of life there.

CJ: What was the reasoning behind Cyril meeting his mother on so many separate occasions throughout his life, before he realised that she was his birth mother?

JB: It’s really just a tease for the reader as the reader knows who she is and who he is and sees them miss their chance on so many occasions. As it’s a long novel, I assumed readers would know that eventually they would figure out the identity of the other but the question would be how and when. I hoped that at the moment when he realises – the lines about the Redemptorist nun – there’d be a “FINALLY!!!!!” moment from readers!

CJ: You've said in interviews that you wanted Cyril to be representative of Ireland and how much it has changed. Cyril demonstrates a massive personal growth from start to finish, yet he dies 'alone'. He feels the same as Norris, who didn't jump on the boat. What is the reasoning behind this, and does it have any resonation with the state of Irish sexuality now?

JB: I thought it would be too cliché for him to end up getting married at the end and, even though that chapter teases the reader to think he’s about it, of course it’s Catherine, who’s been told in the opening pages that she’ll never have a wedding day, who’s walking down the aisle. I don’t think Cyril needs to be with someone at the end for his life to have meaning and for him to have understood what it was all about. He’s loved twice and been loved once. He’s not lonely at the end, he has his friends and family, but of course if he was the age of his grandson he’d lead a very different life. And that grandson is embarking on the life that Cyril might have had. But I just didn’t want a ‘and they all lived happily ever after’ moment at the end.

CJ: You have also described this text as as much a feminist text as it is a queer text, and throughout there are many strong female characters who suffer terribly from the

actions of men but remain true and strong to their own sense of femininity and sexuality (it is unforgettable that in the scene in Doyles, Alice is so refreshingly honest about her sexual history, when compared to Cyril). Do you believe that there is a crisis of masculinity that has resulted from the sexual revolution and second wave feminism? What do you believe twenty-first Century masculinity to be, especially when contextualised in the still patriarchal, neoliberal and capitalist structures of Ireland?

JB: Firstly, yes to the strong women in the novel. Particularly with Catherine, who even from a young age, even when she’s banished from Goleen, refuses to accept that anyone can walk over her and is determined to be her own woman and live her own life. She even stands up to the priest in the Dàil who has ‘lost’ Cyril and Julian when they’re sitting there drinking pints of Guinness. I don’t know about a crisis of masculinity, to be honest; when I look at young people today, people of my nephews’ and nieces’ age, the guys seem completely content to be equals with the girls of their age and there’s no chance they’d ever be let away with anything else. The patriarchal structure still exists, of course, but not as much as it did 100 years ago and it will be swept away completely within the next 50 years I imagine. We’re all just living in our own time and future generations will have their own issues to deal with.

Figure 4: “Kojaque is the Dublin soft boy rapping about shitty jobs and Irish life” Kevin Smith to Georgie Wright, 10th July 2018 for I-D Magazine

The trained visual artist raps in a Dublin accent, deconstructing toxic masculinity with the music he puts out on his own Soft Boy Records. Keeping it local, he wrote an eight-track concept album called Deli Daydreams that follows a week in the life of deli owner. But it’s not because Kojaque has a fixation with beige foodstuffs. He doesn’t even eat at the deli anymore.”

“The job of a deli owner was just a placeholder for any mundane job you have to do to facilitate a living. “It's arbitrary, and that's the point”, Kojaque explains. “When you work in a job you don't like, you don't think about the job. It's the last thing you think about, you think about everything else -- what you don't have, what you could be doing, where you wish you were.” It’s through this lens of an unfulfilling job that Kojaque traces the tribulations of working-class Ireland. Take the opening track, “White Noise”, there’s run-ins with the Irish police (“weekly standoffs in the streets with the Síochána”) and legal battles (“my court proceedings weighing on me”). There’s universal political problems (“fuck the handouts / give tax breaks to smarmy fuckers in the grey suits / leave me starving tryna find a source of income”) and country-specific ones (“sovereign state / they'd rather see my mother bleed out than build a clinic) though thankfully Ireland’s anti-abortion laws are moving towards change.

“I want to get people pissed off,” Kojaque says. “There's agency to anger, there's no agency to apathy.”

“Last Pint” sees him on a night out, doing bumps off the mirror, passing up a pill because he’s seeing “babies on the ceiling” -- a nod to a gruelling scene in Trainspotting where Ewan McGregor’s character is hallucinating from heroin withdrawals.

“Politicksis” is about politics, a word as jumbled as our current state of democratic affairs. This one, too, is about working nine to five, spending wages at the bookies, not having enough money to eat.

Both the track and the album encompass the dichotomy of anger and fragility, bravado and insecurity, of -- as put so well in another track’s title – “Love and Braggadocio”. “I think fragile masculinity is the bedrock of a lot of braggadocio and aggression that you see among men,” he says. “So I try and explore that through characters and in myself.” And with good reason: Ireland, like many other countries, has severe issues with mental health and suicide, especially among men. “If I can

articulate a feeling that someone has but can't express themselves, it can act as a kind of release for them,” he says. “As well as for my own peace of mind.”

Figure 5: Kojaque Lyrics from Deli Daydreams Included with permission from the artist

Love and Braggadocio Last Pint Summer days, some are raised a brash Synthesizer smackin' hard inside the thought, system with your sister To pack away these similes and set a Rackin' lines up with a badge that says light, then blast off, assistant The past taught me one or two points Tryin' crank the volume but I musta hit of interest 'bout myself. conditioning What I like best about myself is I 'Cause I blew half a gram up in the detest my fuckin' self. cockpit like a blizzard Most days I can't find the energy to What's the bets I'll sneak a naggin in dress my fuckin' self. my boxers? Yet some-how in this mess of self- Bribe the bouncer with a bump of indulgent petty hatred, charlie, bound to be obnoxious I can still pick up and mic and rock a I'm the model citizen you want your crowd and make 'em ape-shit; children's feet to follow Still put pen to pad and draw the times 'Til I'm on it, then I split the bag with when we were naked Susan from the office With a crumpled pack of twenty Half baked, half cut, half way to full johnnies emptied by the waste bin. fucked Now you're just a memory I text when I Half day booked a week in advance, so get wasted. good luck Keep your number in my mind but Swiping left 'til I find somebody fixin' man I really should erase it - to fuck I really should erase it. 'Cause I'm about to be evicted need a My trembling fingers trace the outline gaff for my stuff of your body on the bed sheets, Locked out Try to think of how our voices sounded Thought I hid the key beneath the back when we were friendly, mat? Wonder if you still got that freckle on On the phone to my ex yellin' "Text your left cheek… me back!" Nothing like a dry summer for some This taxi-man inside the Lexus takes wet dreams. me there on tick 'Cause I said I'd sort her blow and now we're square on that

Fuck me like you hate me Aw baby that's a hook Love me like you made me As of lately I've been shook… You’ve been saying too much.

Sorry Susan, though the offer is appealing Bubby’s Cream I'mma pass up on a pill, I'm seeing ‘Cus you were in for the penny babies on the ceiling And I was in for the pound I don't wanna talk, or give a fuck about We split a fifth of that henny your children I’m talking sober shit now While your chewing on your jaw and But then this isn’t confession playing Drake and catching feelings Am I acting the child? So where's the jacks, I need to shit or I’m saying prayers and hanging out take a heart attack We haven't talked in a while I'll empty out the sack on top the Well that’s a lie I’ve been talking cistern but your sister interrupts me You just didn’t reply She's about to start some shit she You're just not that into it couldn't finish But that won’t satisfy And I should probably stop it, I've I’ve got to pick apart the 50 different been on it for a minute ways that you hate me The kitchens lookin' grim it's just a All ‘cus I got left on the shelf speaker playin' sad tunes But me and you were never more than Middle age woman, love buzzin' and a daydream… hash fumes Maybe I just hate myself Pizza in the oven, blarin' "Saving All My Love" Nah fuck that - I'm tryin' do bumps off the wall mirror Cus all the signs were present in the bathroom And all the looks checked out And we’d been smitten since seven Foot out the Škoda I had the numbers to dial Shout out to Oprah Even acted the gentlemen Open your noses Kiss goodbye and a smile And everybody gets a piece Told me that you hadn’t been in love Your local hero in a while We're no De Niro So where did I mess up? Just got the yayo Did I come on too strong? Got paid at midnight it's on me Was that an x too many? I'm on your linen Did we make love too long? I'm fuckin' winnin' Did I write your name too many times These walls are spinnin' Throughout these songs? Everybody's face looks fucked I think I'm gurnin' I feel l’m fallin’21 at fault for these My stomach's churnin' failures My nose is burnin' Man, that last pint done fucked me up like… 21 This line, when sang, is made to sound like “Fianna Fail”

I liked it better when we were Politicksis strangers You’re not about to grip the bat until I I think I have to go now make it to majors 'Cause nothing's gunna change right There’s no room at your inn I'm dying in my home town So for now can we fuck in the manger? It's been this way my whole life So for now let’s fuck in the manger I think I have to go now 'Cause nothing's gunna change right I’m less of a wise man I'm dying in my home town More of a prodigal son It's been this way my whole life Follow anything that glitters I came from the land where everything Spent my gold on a gun from the common cold Hold up the Grammys for Straight to cancer can be treated with gramophones a flat 7-Up as the answer Hope mam don't come Wooden spoon clasped in the hands To see her son on the stage of the master I’m laying waste to the funds The mother and the priest not the That’s been invested in me since pastor I smashed the skin of them drums Not that it matters they been all put Or begged for MCPs out the pasture To beat my eardrums numb The good and the bad and the Request those burnt CDs bastards Or cash to skin them blunts Couldn'ta come faster, good riddance And lie like late night walks were used Hope the red man gives you hell. to clear these lungs How'd you out do his bidding's? But God saved his children no kiddin' But if I made it on the tele would we Shout out to the rapists and the rulers work out? and the racists And if I give up the deli and start to You can catch a size eight to the face work out Nine lives, hope your tens curb If I finally start this essay and up the stomped word count Elevens choked throat-deep on a lace Graduate with honours would you still Twelve teeth on my wrist like some think i’m a burn out? new tooth bracelet Misinformation's been rife in my city so Who knows? we erect the murals Let our paint the heart of the grit of your mouth Still scream "Up Da Ra!" when we never set foot out the South But I'd still smack the Queen in the mouth

'Cause I don't know what I want and I'm from the place with the red face I'm willin' to die to get it pigment That's the type of mentality that needs Where the blood bleed green, so the to be vetted bloodstain tinted But the glamour just distracts from the Creepin' in my ripped jeans, the young message paint pictures Your all enjoyin' the picture I'm busy Bitch blushin' in the hoodie 'cause the writin' the credits rain don't give in And the sun set, see us swallow pain 'Cause I work nine-to-five, spend my with the seepin' Guinness wage in the bookies Pray for my sis, keep the faith but I'm 'Cause if I can't afford a home, I'll just watchin' afford to be lucky Fifty Shades when I fidget your bae's And if I can't afford to eat, I'll just digits afford to be hungry Catch another size eight, might do you Most weeks can't afford the cost it is to like J. Simpson (OJ) have money Shout outs to the Dublin huns Sip coddle 'til I'm waddlin' out the Caked up, in the make up with the door at Christmas (baby bumps) Suspicious the cunts keep leadin' to I give a fuck where you came from evictions In the cut with my day’s ones With the same seats sittin' in the Dáil Link up like a daisy chain tryin' fix it Blade one, fade, cup of Jameson That's just Politiksis, let me talk to long Public school pays, two youths, I'll have my name on a hit list nicknamed "Scum" Yeah it's funny how I ended up the Same city, raised different same as 'em Used to run up your estate with the same way of thinkin' Shit changed, with age came wisdom Poppin' champagne out the back lane, drinkin' Hop the last train, tickets, no need to pay Screaming' ACAB when the piggy's chase Drag of a Winston, straight pack, snake up in the grass Made him listen, "Play it safe" is what I used to say The shit that separates us ain't distance,

Figure 6: Excerpts from Una Mullaly’s, “Kojaque: Dublin hip hop from the belly of the deli” for The Irish Times (13th March 2018)

“Kevin (aka Kojaque) has constructed a different sort of hauntology that seems less concerned with history and more with identity. Kojaque’s nostalgia is not for lost futures, but for lost selves.”

“The Dublin MC’s latest project, a concept-album-that’s-not-an-album, is DELI DAYDREAMS and follows a week in the life of a deli worker, delis being something of a great mundane leveller in urban Irish life. Characters and their perspectives populate Kojaque’s work across tracks, music videos and other film projects.”

“Kojaque recently released two music videos as part of DELI DAYDREAMS. One, for Bubby’s Cream, was recorded in a shopping centre carpark in Cabra, during which Kojaque and his film-maker friend defused an attempted mugging. The second, White Noise, is less tune more poem, and is dedicated to Paul Curran, the young spoken word artist who died recently.”

“These tunes are growers, with layers revealing themselves upon repeated listens. The cadences of Bubby’s Cream embed themselves in your brain. White Noise touches on bodily autonomy and slams the coldness with which police and society deal with its young male character.”

““I used it as a crutch to manoeuvre between different issues that are going on in Dublin and Ireland at the moment,” Kojaque says of the week-in-a-life concept. “It’s more political than I’m used to being.””

“White Noise opens with what sounds like the static from a radio and ends with a radio news report and the sound of a car seatbelt alarm. Love and Braggadocio features the crack of a can. There’s an interlude of a supermarket tannoy announcement.”

“As appreciation for Kojaque’s output increases, he wonders whether the growth of hip hop in Ireland has something to do with “how willing people are to put themselves out there in the world”. “There’s always that weird thing that the Irish mentality doesn’t really lend itself to hip-hop in the traditional sense of braggadocio. We’re very self-deprecating people. Stuff like that has changed . . . If I could just do this full-time and not have to worry about money or anything, that would be a goal. I really like the work, and that’s all that really matters.”

Figure 7: Extract from James Merrigan Review of Love in Technicolour by Kevin Smith, Dublin Institute Technology for Soul Beating (12th June 2017)

Immediately we are pulled into the fractured psyche of a young man as he aggressively performs the social rituals that young men often endure. Kevin Smith’s long-haired protagonist in his short film Love in Technicolour is a contemporary ‘Samson’ who looks too pretty and self-possessed to be self-punishing until he shears off his own locks on film. Existing in limbo between hope and hangover, the ever-present props of party hat and lipstick-smeared mirror become insidious reminders throughout the film that the past is a predictor of future behaviour.

Every scene is physical. Every moment is felt. Every cutaway beautifully crafted and psychologically charged. In one unforgettable sequence we follow the young man down a back alley and look on helplessly as he cracks open a six pack and proceeds to inhale one can after another after another to the point of vomiting. But it’s not all angst-ridden behaviour; there’s self-aware humour here too. One morning he wakes up to a makeup transfer of his own face on a pillow. The next morning the visual poetry of cinematic filmmaking is upended when the camera pans across a bedroom to reveal that the dust dancing delicately through a shaft of light is caused by the young man spraying deodorant.

As a visceral and believable exercise in confessional filmmaking, performance and storytelling, Kevin Smith’s Love in Technicolour demonstrates control over the medium, commitment to a poetic register and heart-pumping physicality. Breathtakingly believable.

Figure 8: Excerpts from “‘A Moment of Art’: Even After his Death, Paul Curran’s Poetry Contains All of Life” by Sophie Meehan for Poetry Ireland (2017)

... a moment of art A moment parked in a car that sparks a poem or even just a flow Is worth more than half the world will ever know - Paul Curran, 'Drive'

I wanted to write a piece about my late friend Paul Curran's art. But in doing that, I've had to think about compassion, about the nature of poetry, the realities of working-class life, and about a generation trying to shore ourselves against a constant barrage of shocks. Because Paul's work contains all of these things. Paul Curran, who died this February, was a spoken word artist, an important writer, a talented musician and a wonderful man. If it's true that art is inextricable from the artist, this is especially true in Paul's case. His work is all about his voice, both in the literal timbre of vocals in his spoken word and music, and in the sense of his unique outlook on the world. As a spoken word performer, he never failed to silence a room, and to fill that silence with a unique energy. His poems are full of pride for his area, his family and his friends, but his outlook was universal. Influenced equally by the radical Romantic poets and by the voices of modern hip hop, his work holds an incomparably diverse range of artistic influences on an equal footing. Paul's reading took in everyone from Keats to Mayakovsky, but at its core his art was forged in the oral tradition. When I was trying to crosscheck lines for this piece I contacted a few friends and colleagues, and found that, despite not having written printouts of his poems, they could tell me any line I wanted because they know them all by heart. Even as I write this, there's a dozen remembered lines pushing themselves against the front of my head wanting to get out; "He makes a thousand ten-minute friends a night, under the glow of his taxi light", from ‘Taxi’, a poem that uses something as simple as a taxi trip home to speak about class, compassion and human nature. "Moment maker, record breaker, world's best under 10's set-piece taker", from a sunny childhood recollection of the incomparable highs of a Sunday league. And "I could've been a boxer, but I married your ma instead", from one of Paul's most loved poems, one that became akin his ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’, given the number of times it was requested at spoken word events.

One line in particular has resonated with a lot of people since Paul died, "The art that never gets made". This is from a piece that explores the difficulty of making art, not from a sentimental perspective, not for any lack of "inspiration", but from a practical outlook. There is a material reality of trying to live as an artist that rarely reaches the mainstream narrative. Paul loved Dublin, but it's a hard place to try to make it, to make art, to make ends meet. "You get 50 quid to do a gig/ the 50 quid

goes off a bill/ a bill that never gets paid". And soon, “Your brain turns to mush/ You lost your touch/ you don't do what you love as much/ the art that never gets made."

As well as spoken word, Paul made music and films with his friends in a collective called Burnt Out. Their work seeks to reflect the working-class experience and acknowledge its reality; equal parts searing beauty and deadening brutality. The fields and housing estates of their monochrome videos become the playgrounds and boxing rings where a young man learns how to be. "And the fault felt my own/ In the barren of the back field/ I had watched the cowboys roam", Paul intones in their song, 'Joyrider'. In his lyrics as in his spoken word, Paul imbued every line with multiple meanings. 'Joyrider's’ desperate refrain of "settle down, settle down for me", is both a plea to a desperate young man "in a place where you have to be as stern as any man could be", and a stock phrase a paramedic might use to calm someone who's witnessed the trauma of a joyrider's crash.

But where there is difficulty, there is community. All of Paul's poems harbour joy and hope with an honesty that doesn't deny life's darker side. In 'Drive', Paul crafts something as simple as a drive to Tesco with his friends into a reminder that even the smallest moment can contain all of life. From the first line his voice tumbles out a cacophony of playful rhymes: "As a pile of us pack into the back of Balfey's box of a chat Renault Clio". And in the course of the piece, a car ride with friends becomes a meditation on the life affirming nature of art. For those who loved him, the work Paul left behind is not enough. We miss him. But there's some comfort in knowing that there are still people who haven't heard his voice yet, and that for them his work will make their lives better, in the same way that everyone from Shelley to Skepta did for Paul. In his own words,

From the first time I saw Michael Owen ruining a goalie's clean sheets, Or read When I Have Fears by John Keats Or put Disorder by Joy Division on fifty times on repeat I knew there was a reason, A great upheaval, Redeeming a feeling so primeval to my very being That I burned to do something great.

Figure 9: “We Face This Land” Sarah Maria Griffin Published in The Irish Times (21st September 2016)

Centuries ago, Women accused of witchcraft faced, amongst other ordeals, Trial by water Tied to a chair or run under a boat If she survives the drowning and floats She’s a witch. If she dies, she’s a woman We are not witches but if the church and state insists Then let us be the descendants of all the witches they could not drown This heirloom of trauma, this curse

This agony of water in order to hold agency over our bodies Not all of us have survived, the waves do not part There are no miracles here When the stethoscope is a crucifix on your belly How do you have any choice but the water? And fair medical treatment on another.

A body is a body is a body is a body is a body is a body is a body Not a house. Not a city. Not a vessel, not a country.

The laws of the church have no place on your flesh

A veterinarian will abort a calf if a cow is falling ill. How is it that livestock is worth more to this land than us? Eleven women every day leave Ireland seeking an abortion abroad. We ask for the land over the water. Home over trial. Choice over none. For our foremothers, ourselves, the generations yet to come Witches or women - these are our bodies which shall not be given up

Figure 10: Stills from “We Face This Land” directed by Dave Tynan (2016)

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Figure 11: Stills from “Heartbreak” by Emmet Kirwan, Directed by Dave Tynan (2016)

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Figure 12: Love in Technicolour by Kevin Smith (2017)

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Figure 13: Pictures from Stand For Truth Rally and Demonstration against Pope Francis visit for World Meeting of Families, 25th & 26th August 2018

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Figure 14: Scan, Socialist Party Handout from Stand For Truth Rally, 26th August (2018)

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