Ireland Now

Flanagan William

Description

Ireland Now is an accessible guide to understanding how Ireland and the Irish people have changed during the past fifteen years. Largely as a result of the country's rapidly expanding economy, Ireland has been transformed from one of the poorest to one of the richest countries in the European Union. William Flanagan uses personal, first-hand stories from a wide range of Irish citizens, including the elderly, farmers, people in small towns and rural areas, and new immigrants, to illustrate how various segments of the population are coping with a shifting social landscape.

Flanagan skillfully weaves his stories of real people together to reflect themes of promise and loss attached to economic upheaval, the struggle to maintain traditional ways in the face of new social and moral orders, the effort to adapt to a country with an enhanced place in the world economy, and the challenge of remaining at home as the meaning of home becomes forever changed.

Based on years of Flanagan's personal experience and careful research in Ireland, this important book examines the nature of Irish character and the fusion of tradition and change. It will appeal to anyone with an interest in Ireland and Irish identity.

Sujets

• Modern
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Sociology
• Celtic studies
• Modern history
• General officer
• Ireland
• Celtic Tiger
• Stephen Ireland
• General
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 30 août 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268079642
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

William Flanagan
IRELAND NOW
t a l e s o f C h a n g e f r o m t h e g l o b a l I s l a n d
Flanagan_CVRmech.indd 1 7/11/07 10:53:11 AMFlanagan 000.FM 6/5/07 1:36 PM Page i
IRELAND NOWFlanagan 000.FM 6/5/07 1:36 PM Page iiFlanagan 000.FM 6/5/07 1:36 PM Page iii
WILLIAM FLANAGAN
IRELAND NOW
Tales of Change from the Global Island
University of Notre Dame Press • Notre Dame, IndianaFlanagan 000.FM 6/5/07 1:36 PM Page iv
Copyright © 2007 by University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Designed by Wendy McMillen
Set in 11.8/14 Fournier by Four Star Books
Printed on 60# Williamsburg Recycled Paper by Versa Press
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Flanagan, William G.
Ireland now : tales of change from the global island / William Flanagan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-0-268-02886-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-268-02886-9 (per)
1. Ireland—Economic conditions. 2. National characteristics, Irish.
3. Ireland—Social conditions. 4. Ireland—Social life and customs —
20th century. 5. Ireland—Social life and customs —21st century. I. Title.
DA925. F53 2007
941.70824—dc22
2007019491
This book is printed on recycled paper.Flanagan 000.FM 6/5/07 1:36 PM Page v
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 2
CHAPTER 1
There Is No Map of Ireland 16
CHAPTER 2
In the Teeth of the Tiger 36
CHAPTER 3
Strangers at Home 64
CHAPTER 4
No Traditions Without Change: Listeners 82
Make the MusicFlanagan 000.FM 6/5/07 1:36 PM Page vi
CHAPTER 5
Passing on the Farms: From Family to Euro-Business 112
CHAPTER 6
Parish Life: The Job of Keeping the Faith 162
in Changing Times
CHAPTER 7
The New Irish 200
CHAPTER 8
Global Ireland and Places Called Home 242
Bibliography 275
vi ContentsFlanagan 000.FM 6/5/07 1:36 PM Page vii
Acknowledgments
Putting this book together has been a pleasure for me. For others, it
involved a certain amount of effort — making contacts, reading drafts,
opening their lives, and searching their thoughts. Readers will be able
to recognize how indebted I am to many of those who appear on these
pages. Others’ contributions will not be as evident, but I know the value
and will always be grateful for their work in reading, commenting,
encouraging. Thank you, Cauvery Madhavan, Lorna Gleasure, and Khalid
Sallabi, for your help in making contacts, as well as for your own
stories. Thank you, Mary Katherine Freeston and Resmiye Oral, for your
able assistance in research and recording, for putting people at ease in
your presence. Thanks to Al Fisher, Josef Gugler, Robert Marrs, Rick
Hills, Nukhet Yarbrough, Tim Flanagan, and Karen Wachsmuth for
reading and commenting on parts of the draft. Thank you, Connie
Birmingham, for slogging through the whole thing and liking it. Thanks
to Beth Wright of Trio Bookworks for a great job of copyediting. And
my thanks to the people at the University of Notre Dame Press: director
Dr. Barbara J. Hanrahan, managing editor Rebecca R. DeBoer, and
design manager Margaret A. Gloster. And I am especially grateful to all the
people in the book for guiding us through the way a profoundly changed
Ireland has looked and felt in their lives.
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IntroductionFlanagan 00.intro 6/5/07 1:38 PM Page 3
A man in bright green warm-ups made his way slowly along the main street
of a small town in the west of Ireland. He wore a baseball cap with an
Irish saying on the front of it, and he carried a polished blackthorn stick.
He paused, then entered a shop that sold souvenirs and gifts. He poked
around, waiting for the shopkeeper to be done with her few customers.
When the place appeared to be otherwise empty, he approached the
woman behind the counter as if he were going to ask for directions
somewhere, as if he might be lost. He said in an American accent that he
had spent the past week going up and down the coast, from one town
to the next. Everywhere he stopped Pakistanis or Indians were running
the shops and hotels. There were people with Eastern European accents.
He thumped his stick on the floor and demanded, “What’s become of
Ireland?”
The traveler had come looking for something dear to him that had
never existed in the place where he had come to look for it. The Irish
place he was looking for lived in the once-a-year parade in New York or
Boston (site of the first St. Patrick’s Day celebration in the United States
in 1737) or other American cities. He was appropriately turned out for
such an occasion. The shopkeeper was no help to him. She said quietly
that Ireland had become home to people from all over the world now,
and she thought that they ought to be welcomed as long as they went to
work and behaved themselves and that most of them were very good in
that way. She was done saying her piece on that topic and so busily tidied
3Flanagan 00.intro 6/5/07 1:38 PM Page 4
up the already tidy sales counter, wishing she could please her customer
and knowing that her answer would not. It didn’t. He shook his head, the
bill of his green baseball cap exaggerating the movement, the Irish
saying swinging side to side, negating itself as he left the shop.
Maureen Dezell laments the orchestrated marketing of a particular
version of American Irishness, the St. Patrick’s Day–themed version:
“Descendants of dreamers and tale-tellers in the land of money, myth,
and Disney, the American Irish early on developed a capacity for
romanticizing their heritage and sentimentalizing themselves” (2000, 18).
Ireland in the United States became transformed in popular music and
on the stage into the Emerald Isle, Mother Ireland, a place where in the
twice-removed memory of immigrant descendants the sod had belonged
to those who worked it — not to the landlords. During the Easter Rising
in 1916, while Dublin was devastated and the rebellion’s leaders were
executed, “Americans were whistling and singing the popular ‘Ireland
Must be Heaven for My Mother Came From There’” (23–24). It is not
that the green man was mistaken when he dressed himself that morning
and set out to find his Ireland: that Ireland exists, in himself and millions
of others who share a similar imagery of the homeland. His only mistake
was to look for it in the country his predecessors came from, rather than
looking for it in the country they had come to, where such an image of
Ireland was pieced together and magnified and marketed over the years.
It is understandable that he assumed something like the American
sense of Irish culture might be reflected in the Irish Republic. There are
ten times as many Irish Americans as native island Irish, and the
American cousins come to Ireland in droves, paying good money to get what
they have come for — a lot of money. Nearly a million North Americans
visit Ireland each year, and, according to the Minister for Arts, Sports,
and Tourism, they tend to stay longer and spend more cash compared to
other visitors (Irish Times, August 24, 2006). Understandably, the tourist
board and well-developed tourist industry do try to serve up what they
have come looking for. But it is becoming more and more difficult to
prop up the imagery of the tired old sod: day-to-day Ireland is about
business and economic expansion. It is the poster child of European
Union prosperity. Old Ireland is drifting away, and the international
enterprise zone that the country has become clashes with the bucolic
and easygoing reputation that has characterized the place in the
col4 IRELAND NOWFlanagan 00.intro 6/5/07 1:38 PM Page 5
lective memory of its dispersed sons and daughters. Most of the people
in the land of a thousand welcomes have just so much time for
nostalgia and tourism’s fancies these days, as they get on with trying to get
ahead— or just trying to make ends meet.
The man walking the little town appeared to be in his sixties. He
had spent a life as a proud Irishman in whatever region of the United
States he called home, and he was obviously steeped in the culture he
identified with back there. He was a perfectly authentic Irishman. He
grew up in a place where millions of Irish immigrants over the course of
two centuries have left their mark on town life, where their once-a-year
March celebration of the shiny green legacy is a time when Irish
immigrant descendants take to the streets to show the world that they
remember and are proud of who they are, of their origins. When you come
back to Ireland, of course you want to show that you’re Irish; you put
on the green, and you go to find the place that fits the expectations that
you’ve brought with you. It is the familiar Ireland, your sense of place,
the homeplace. People bring other Irelands, many, many others, not all
in mummer’s parade greens, all equally— none more — authentic.
Authenticity, the dignified truth of who we are at the core of our being, is
not open to question from outsiders. The experience of being Irish is
steeped in centuries of Irish being, of history and culture, wherever it
may have been lived. The green man who wondered what all these