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National Identities
and Imperfections
in Contemporary
Irish Literature
Unbecoming Irishness

Edited by LUZ MAR GONZÁLEZ-ARIAS

National Identities and Imperfections
in Contemporary Irish Literature
 Luz Mar González-Arias
Editor

National Identities
and Imperfections in
Contemporary Irish
Literature
Unbecoming Irishness
Editor
Luz Mar González-Arias
University of Oviedo
Oviedo, Spain

ISBN 978-1-137-47629-6    ISBN 978-1-137-47630-2 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-47630-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016961364

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Cover image ‘Days Beside Water’ (detail) © Bridget Flannery

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London,
N1 9XW, United Kingdom
 In Memoriam

Eithne McGuinness (1961–2009)

actor, playwright, friend

Amparo Pedregal Rodríguez (1960–2015)

historian, feminist, friend
 Contents

1 The Imperfect as a Site of Contestation

in Contemporary Ireland1
Luz Mar González-Arias
Works Cited16

Part I The Tiger and Beyond: Political, Social

and Literary Fissures19

2 What Plenty Laid Bare! Ireland’s Harsh Confrontation

with Itself: 1999–201421
Ciarán Benson
Works Cited35

3 Satiric Insights into Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland:

The Case of Peter Cunningham’s Capital Sins37
Juan F. Elices
Works Cited49

4 Understanding the Imperfect in John McGahern’s

First and Last Novels51
Anita Morgan
Works Cited63

vii
viii Contents

Part II Disruptions of Religion, Family and Marriage65

5 Hard Times and Sibling Songs: Sibling Relations

in Contemporary Irish Literature67
Patricia Coughlan
Works Cited81

6 Psychological Resilience in Emma Donoghue’s Room83

Marisol Morales Ladrón
Works Cited97

7 The Fallen Sex Revisited: Imperfect Celibacy

in Mary Rose Callaghan’s A Bit of a Scandal99
Auxiliadora Pérez-Vides
Works Cited111

Part III Ex-Centric Bodies and Disquieting Spaces113

8 Form, Deformity: On Pathology and Poetics

in Paul Muldoon 115
Rui Carvalho Homem
Works Cited128

9 Imperfection as a Chance: Matrixial Borderspaces

in Anne Enright131
Hedwig Schwall
Works Cited144

10 Monstrous Mothers and Mutant Others:

Bodies out of Place in Emer Martin’s Baby Zero147
Aida Rosende Pérez
Works Cited161
 Contents  ix

11 Changing Places: The Imperfect City

in Contemporary Irish Poetry163
Lucy Collins
Works Cited179

Part IV Stereotypes and the Distortion of Irishness 181

12 Irish Drinking Culture on the Screen183

Rosa González-Casademont
Works Cited 196

13 Treading the Boards? Be Sure to Put on the Right

Brogues! The Actor’s Search for the Perfect
Irish Accent 201
Shane Walshe
Works Cited215

Part V Unbecoming Irish Literature: The Inside Gaze219

14 ‘Absolutely Imperfect’: In Conversation with Lia Mills221

Luz Mar González-Arias
Works Cited238

Index239
 Foreword

On Irregularities
Bridget Flannery

Irregularities help us see more clearly. The smooth, the even are beauti-
ful, calming to the eye and the spirit, but the contrary, the odd and the
irregular irritate, agitate and delight my eye. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ line
from ‘Pied Beauty’—‘All things counter, original, spare, strange’ (30)—has
been written on every studio wall I’ve worked in. The words remind me of
what it is I seek when painting, what I yearn for and ferret out in the world
around me. The blue-green field of rye grass is glorious in its fertility, in
its breadth of shape and colour but my eye is always drawn to the field’s
ragged edge where wild growth is tangled, overgrown and unkempt. This
space offers a different abundance, that of the hidden and overlooked.
I grew up between two places: Cork city and the seaside village of
Ardmore, Co. Waterford. The former offered high hills and narrow streets,
the sinuous river and many bridges, watery light and high, ever changing
horizons. While Cork is all about shallow spaces, rich with textures of
whitened limestone and red sandstone and linear with verticals that go up
and down, Ardmore is about space and wide sweeps of sea and sky. And
colour—blues of all tones, greens, purples, umbers and turquoise. Some
colours come directly from the sky and clouds, some from the golden
greens of the vegetation growing on the cliffs, some from the red-orange
of the seaweed on the red-purple rocks while in between are the colours
on the water, depending on the depth and what is passing overhead. These
two places form the basis of my visual life.
xi
xii Foreword

Looking and looking again are the pleasures of sight. Such intense
looking at textures is always balanced by the glimpse of something odd
that literally catches the eye—the myriad greys of a shingle strand are
revealed in greater beauty by the crumpled, yellow plastic bag, discarded
after a family picnic. For the painter’s eye, this contrast is alluring, some-
thing to be remembered. This glimpse can be the beginning of a long
series of paintings, collages and drawings where the oddness and contrari-
ness of colour and shape can be explored. Or it can be the stored visual
image that is needed to resolve the tricky upper-left hand corner of a
painting that has been worked and reworked over many years. Suddenly,
on seeing that piece of yellow, I know with full certainty what colour, what
tone is needed to balance or unbalance the composition I’ve struggled
with. In the studio, such visual memories enliven the working day.
When I’m painting I want to make visible these moments that take me
by surprise, and when I’m working things happen with colours and tex-
tures that are often surprising. The irregular in what I see is echoed by the
contrariness in what is made. I love these moments; what I call happy acci-
dents. This is the space where my work lies, the space between seeing and
making, where something emerges that is fresh, something that surprises
me but also something that I recognize. Images that I have examined or
glimpsed, sounds that I have listened to or overheard, the balance or the
imbalance between the concrete and the elusive are what interest me and
what I explore through painting.

Works Cited
Manley Hopkins, Gerard. Poems and Prose. Ed. W. H. Gardner. London: Penguin
Classics, 1985. Print.
 Acknowledgements

An edited collection of essays is always the result of numerous energies.

While the editor gives coherence to the overall picture, each author con-
tributes with his/her distinct style and particular way of reading a poem,
a novel or a work of art. My first recognition is to all the contributors
who have made collaborative and individual efforts to make of this book a
strong piece of scholarship in the field of Irish Studies.
I feel particularly indebted to performance artist Amanda Coogan for
granting me permission to use a still from her live performance Bubble up
in Blue (2012), taken by Paddy Cahill, and to visual artist Carmel Benson
for permission to use her painting I Confess (2014), both pieces are repro-
duced in the introductory essay to this volume. I owe a debt of gratitude
to Bridget Flannery for the cover image—a detail from her inspiring Days
Beside Water (2010), which has made this book a beautiful object to look
at and touch and feel—and to novelist Lia Mills for her generous answers
to my questions every time I knocked—literally as well as virtually—on her
door, even at the busy times that preceded and followed the publication of
her latest novel Fallen (2014).
This book has benefitted from the financial support provided by
the R&D project FFI2011-13883-E, funded by the Spanish National
Research Programme, whose contribution is gratefully acknowledged.
On the institutional front, I am also grateful to the Spanish Association
for Irish Studies for trusting me with the organization of the Conference
to celebrate their Tenth Anniversary (in May 2011), where some of the
ideas contained in this book began to take shape. My colleague Marta
­Ramón-­García was instrumental in the organization of that conference
and her help, then as well as now, is much appreciated.

xiii
xiv Acknowledgements

Finally, I want to express my gratitude to Ronnie Lendrum for her

expertise at proof reading and her good humour, and to Tomas René at
Palgrave, for his professional assistance and his perfect support in times of
imperfections.
 Notes on Contributors

Ciarán Benson is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at University College

Dublin, where he held the Chair of Psychology between 1992 and 2009.
He also held the Royden Davis Chair in Interdisciplinary Studies at
Georgetown University in 2007. He was the first Chairman of the Irish
Film Institute, and Chairman of An Chomhairle Ealaíon/The Arts Council
of Ireland (1993–1998). He has been director of The Gate Theatre, The
Wexford Festival Opera and The Irish Museums Trust, among other insti-
tutions. He curated the In the Time of Shaking exhibition in support of
Amnesty International in the Irish Museum of Modern Art (May 2004),
and edited the accompanying book In the Time of Shaking: Irish Artists for
Amnesty International (2004). He has twice served as a judge for the
Architectural Association of Ireland annual awards, and has served on many
other academic and cultural panels. Amongst his publications are The Place
of the Arts in Irish Education (1979), The Absorbed Self: Pragmatism,
Psychology and Aesthetic Experience (1993) and The Cultural Psychology of
Self: Place, Morality and Art in Human Worlds (2001).
Lucy Collins is Lecturer in English Literature at University College Dublin.
Educated at Trinity College Dublin and at Harvard University, where she
spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar, she teaches and researches in the area of
modern poetry and poetics. She has published widely on modern and con-
temporary Irish and British poetry. Recent publications include Poetry by
Women in Ireland: A Critical Anthology 1870–1970 (2012) and an edition of
the poems of Sheila Wingfield (2013). The Irish Poet and the Natural World:
An Anthology of Verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics, co-edited
with Andrew Carpenter, appeared in 2014. Contemporary Irish Women Poets:
Memory and Estrangement (2015) is her most recent book.
xv
xvi Notes on Contributors

Patricia Coughlan is Professor Emerita of English at University College

Cork. She has published, lectured and broadcast widely on Irish writing. She
edited Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (1989), and co-
edited Modernism and Ireland: The Poets of the 1930s (1995) and Irish
Literature: Feminist Perspectives (2008). She is the author of numerous arti-
cles on early-modern colonial discourse, Beckett, Bowen, Kate and Edna
O’Brien, Peig Sayers and life-writing, Heaney and Montague, John Banville,
Anne Enright, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, among others. In the 2000s she led
an IRCHSS-funded research project on Women in Irish Society, which pro-
duced the Dictionary of Munster Women Writers 1800–2000 (2005). She
was also appointed as a member of the European Research Index for the
Humanities Committee to classify research journals for ESF, Brussels. Her
principal current project is a monograph on gender, subjectivity and social
change in Irish literature since 1960.
Juan F. Elices is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Director of the
Language Centre at the University of Alcalá. He has published extensively
on contemporary English and Irish Literatures, focusing primarily on
aspects related to satire, dystopia and post-colonial fiction. He is a founding
member of the Spanish Association for Irish Studies (AEDEI) and is the
author of several books, namely El realismo mágico en lengua inglesa
(2001), Historical and Theoretical Approaches to English Satire (2004) and
The Satiric Universe of William Boyd: A Case Study (2006). His research
now centres on post-colonial science fiction and alternate history.
Bridget Flannery is one of Ireland’s leading abstract painters. Educated at
St Angela’s College (Cork) and the Crawford College of Art and Design
(Cork), she has exhibited across Ireland and internationally. Her work can be
found in the Cross Gallery (Dublin), the Pigyard Gallery (Wexford) and the
McBride Art Gallery (Killarney, Co. Kerry), among others. Mark Ewart has
written that ‘[s]he is not a landscape painter in the strictest sense of the
word’, but both he and fellow critic Aidan Dunne contend that her work is
influenced by landscapes and seascapes. Her signature pieces are character-
ized by a change of texture in the surface of the painting that resembles an
imperfection but which is often paramount in the aesthetic experience of art
contemplation and also in the interpretation of meaning.
Luz Mar González-Arias is Senior Lecturer in the English Department,
University of Oviedo. Her research is primarily in the areas of body theory
and Medical Humanities, as applied to the work of contemporary Irish
 Notes on Contributors  xvii

women poets. Embodiment and sexuality feature prominently in her two

published books: Otra Irlanda (2000), and her study of the myth of Adam
and Eve in recent Irish women’s writing, Cuerpo, mito y teoría feminista
(1999), which draws heavily on the theme of anorexia and female identity.
Recent publications include a chapter on Ireland in The Routledge
Companion to Postcolonial Studies, and an essay on the Sheela-na-gigs in the
poetry of Susan Connolly in Opening the Field. She has contributed to the
Special Issue that An Sionnach dedicated to Paula Meehan with an essay on
citified embodiments in Meehan’s urban poetry. She is currently working on
a book-length monograph on Dorothy Molloy and co-editing, with Lucy
Collins, a volume on Celia de Fréine.
Rosa González-Casademont has lectured in Irish literature and cinema at
the University of Barcelona from 1974 until her retirement in 2016. She has
edited the journal of the Spanish Association for Irish Studies Estudios
Irlandeses (2005–2016), the volumes The Representation of Ireland/s. Images
from Outside and from Within (2003) and Hailing Heaney. Lectures for a
Nineties Nobel (1996), and is co-author of Ireland in Writing. Interviews with
Writers and Academics (1998) and Diccionario cultural e histórico de Irlanda
(1996). In 2002 she was awarded an honorary doctorate in literature by the
National University of Ireland (NUI, Galway).
Rui Carvalho Homem is Professor of English at the Department of Anglo-
American Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Porto. His research interests
and publications include Irish Studies, Early Modern English drama, transla-
tion and word-and-image studies. He is also a literary translator and has
published versions of Shakespeare (Antony and Cleopatra and Love’s Labour’s
Lost), Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin. He is the editor of Relational
Designs in Literature and the Arts: Page and Stage, Canvas and Screen (2012)
and the author of Poetry and Translation in Northern Ireland: Dislocations in
Contemporary Writing (2009).
Marisol Morales Ladrón is Senior Lecturer in English and Irish literature
at the University of Alcalá. Her main areas of research are contemporary
Irish literature, gender studies and the inter-relationship between literature
and psychology. She has written several books on comparative literature and
the reception of James Joyce in Spain, edited Postcolonial and Gender
Perspectives in Irish Studies (2007), and co-edited, with Juan F. Elices, Glocal
Ireland: Current Perspectives on Literature and the Visual Arts (2011). She
has published extensively on Irish authors such as Emma Donoghue,
xviii Notes on Contributors

Deirdre Madden, Colm Tóibín, Edna O’Brien, Roddy Doyle and Kate
O’Brien, among others. She was Chair of the Spanish Association for Irish
Studies (AEDEI) between 2007 and 2014.
Anita Morgan is Lecturer in English in the Universidad CEU San Pablo,
Madrid. She has participated in numerous national and international confer-
ences in the areas of literature and the relevance of the arts in divided societ-
ies. She has published on the role of music in conflict transformation in
Ireland and on the works of Seamus Heaney and John McGahern. Among
her interests are the use of drama to improve oral fluency skills and the cre-
ation of materials for Journalism, Media Studies, Advertising and Public
Relations courses. She has completed a research project on Irish Studies in
The Amergin Institute of Irish Studies, University of Coruña, and is cur-
rently completing her doctoral thesis on John McGahern’s fiction.
Auxiliadora Pérez-Vides lectures in English at the University of Huelva,
where she is an active researcher within the Women’s Studies Group. She is
the author of a monograph on family and gender relations in contemporary
Irish fiction (Sólo ellas: familia y feminismo en la novela irlandesa contem-
poránea, 2003). Her principal research interest is the representation of sin-
gle motherhood in Irish narrative, which has formed the basis of many
conference papers, guest lectureships and research visits at foreign institu-
tions and she has had several articles and book chapters published in national
and international fora on this subject.
Aida Rosende Pérez is Lecturer at the University of the Balearic Islands.
She is also an active member of the research group on Gender Studies in
the English Department at the University of Vigo, where she previously
worked as a part-time lecturer. Her research interests include contempo-
rary Irish women’s writing and artistic practices, post-colonial literatures
and criticism, nationalisms and globalization, transnational feminisms, and
theories of the body, among others. She has presented papers at various
national and international conferences and she is the author of numerous
articles on Irish women’s contemporary fiction and visual arts. She is the
author of a doctoral thesis on Emer Martin’s fiction.
Hedwig Schwall researches and teaches twentieth- and twenty-first-­
century Irish Literature, Psychoanalytic Theory, Comparative European
Literature and Art at the KU Leuven and at University College Brussels.
She was Chair of EFACIS from 2009–2013 and since 2010 has been the
Director of the Leuven Centre for Irish Studies (LCIS), an interdisciplinary
 Notes on Contributors  xix

Interfaculty Research Institute at KU Leuven. She is a member of several

research groups, among them Aesthetics and Spirituality, CECILLE (in
Lille III) and the Iconology Research Group at KU Leuven. Two of her
most recent interdisciplinary projects focus on trauma and resilience, and on
the rhetorics of food and drink. She has published several studies on con-
temporary Irish literature, focusing on the work of, among others, Joyce
and Yeats, Deane and Doyle, Banville and Enright, Murphy and Friel.
Shane Walshe is Lecturer at the University of Zurich. He studied English
and German at the National University of Ireland, Galway and was awarded
a PhD in English Linguistics from the University of Bamberg, Germany.
His thesis Irish English as Represented in Film was published in 2009 and
examines the way in which Irish English is portrayed in fifty films set in
Ireland, ranging from John Ford’s The Informer (1935) to Lenny
Abrahamson’s Garage (2007). His research interests are varieties of
English, perceptual dialectology and linguistic stereotyping, with his most
recent studies looking at Irish and Scottish stereotypes in Marvel comics.
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Bubble up in Blue, Amanda Coogan (2012).

Still from live performance 10
Fig. 1.2 I Confess, Carmel Benson (2014). Acrylic on board, 62 × 62cms 12

xxi
 CHAPTER 1

The Imperfect as a Site of Contestation

in Contemporary Ireland

Luz Mar González-Arias

I am the thin fault

that runs through the seam, a wave of quartz
surfing through granite, condemned to masquerade
I am where history breaks and divides
Brittle and weak
Mary O’Malley, ‘Weakness’

‘Madame Memory is a great and subtle dissembler’, says Alexander Cleave,

the protagonist of John Banville’s 2012 novel Ancient Light (3). Although
now in his sixties, Cleave’s memories take him back to his teens when he
had a love affair with Mrs Gray, 20 years his senior and the mother of his
best friend Billy. However, from the outset of his narrative Cleave is aware

Financial support for the research carried out for this essay was provided by the
R&D project ‘Multiplicities’ (FFI2013-45642-R), funded by the Spanish National
Research Programme, and by the Research Group Intersecciones (GrupIn14-068),
funded by the Government of Asturias.

L.M. González-Arias (*)

Dpto. Filología Inglesa, Francesa y Alemana. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras,
University of Oviedo, Asturias, Spain

© The Author(s) 2017 1

L.M. González-Arias (ed.), National Identities and Imperfections
in Contemporary Irish Literature,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-47630-2_1
2 L.M. GONZÁLEZ-ARIAS

of his mind’s limitations to faithfully reproduce what happened in those

early days: ‘Images from the far past crowd in my head and half the time
I cannot tell whether they are memories or inventions. Not that there is
much difference between the two, if indeed there is any difference at all’
(3). These statements complement Banville’s own position with regard
to the possibilities of language to represent what we call ‘reality’. In his
speech on receiving the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature 2014,
the author referred to ‘the sentence’ (literary or otherwise) as the ‘most
momentous invention’ of civilization—‘It is with the sentence that we
declare love, declare war, declare oaths. It is with the sentence that we
declare the self’, he contended. However, for him the beauty of the sen-
tence resides in its lack of precision: ‘every full stop is an admission of
failure’, he confessed, since ‘[r]eality is ultimately beyond us’ (‘Speech’).
Cleave’s belief in memory as being imprecise and his realization that the
line separating invention from reality is quite a blurry one thus echoes
Banville’s view of past and present as edited through language, that is, as
categories of fiction.
The idea that history is located somewhere between fact and imagina-
tion may seem poetic, certainly artistic, and even a suitable trend of post-
modernism—with its preference for imprecision and fluidity—but it has
also long been shared by scientific thought. In his essay ‘Speak, Memory’,
neurologist Oliver Sacks explains that humans ‘are landed with memory
systems that have fallibilities, frailties, and imperfections’. From a neuro-­
scientific perspective we have no direct access to the past, all routes in that
direction being in some way mediated and of a highly subjective nature.
Sacks exemplifies this thesis using his autobiographical writings. He elo-
quently explains that some of the memories he could vividly recollect about
his childhood, and which he wrote about as being based on first-hand
experience, were in fact false memories that his brain had constructed as
the truth, that is, events he had not gone through himself but read about
in letters and then imagined as lived experiences. However, these impres-
sions were, shockingly, as precise as those originating in events he had
actually witnessed and experienced. Thanks to neurological testing we can
be sure, Sacks explains, that once ‘a memory is constructed, accompanied
by vivid sensory imagery and strong emotion, there may be no inner,
psychological way of distinguishing true from false’. He describes how, by
means of functional brain imaging, it can be demonstrated that the pattern
of brain activity generated by images that correspond to such memories—
in the sensory, emotional and executive areas of the brain—is identical
 THE IMPERFECT AS A SITE OF CONTESTATION IN CONTEMPORARY IRELAND 3

to that triggered by memories based on actual experience. Neuroscience

thus provides us with evidence that memory may be as close to ‘reality’ as
it is to the world of the imagination. It also accounts for memory’s con-
nection to the creative activity of story-telling, since our past is necessarily
mediated through language: ‘Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth,
the stories we tell each other, and ourselves—the stories we continually
recategorize and refine’ (Sacks).
The same mechanisms that writer John Banville, his character Alexander
Cleave and neurologist Oliver Sacks describe when talking about personal
reconstructions of the past also apply to collective memories and national
histories, equally imperfect, equally malleable, that is, equally subject to
processes of edition, re/interpretation and even invention. What we refer
to as ‘cultural memory’ may be considered as the external dimension of
our individual human memories but, unlike the latter, ‘the contents of
this memory, the ways in which they are organized, and the length of time
they last are for the most part not a matter of internal storage or control
but of the external conditions imposed by society and cultural contexts’
(Assmann 5). Cultural memory in this way provides the answer to the
issue of what we, as a people, must not forget in order to construct and
maintain our sense of who we are, our sense of belonging. It therefore
becomes relevant to decide what mechanisms are at work in the construc-
tion of our collective pasts, who determines what to remember and how
to remember it.
But then, what actually qualifies as ‘the past’, collective or otherwise?
During his visit to the University of Oviedo, John Banville expanded on
what he described as his ‘fascination’, even his ‘obsession’ with the past,
and wondered at what point what we call the past actually becomes the
past.1 His question implies that the distinction between past and present
is a difficult—if not impossible—one, and echoes Jan Assmann’s conten-
tion that ‘[t]he past is not a natural growth but a cultural creation’ (33).
However, and for the sake of analysis, it can be argued that the past is
produced at ‘[e]very substantial break in continuity or tradition … when-
ever that break is meant to create a new beginning’ (Assmann 18). In the
Irish context, the Celtic Tiger—born in the 1990s—and its fatal decline—
initiated in 2008—has translated into profound transformations in the
economic, cultural and physical landscapes of Ireland to the point of con-
stituting one of those ‘substantial breaks’ as indicated by Assmann. The
unprecedented economic expansion and its associated societal changes,
such as the arrival of migrants to a country traditionally schooled in
4 L.M. GONZÁLEZ-ARIAS

e­ migration, the proliferation of buildings sites, improved communication

systems, consumerism and, added to this, the effects of globalization and
an increasing Europeanization have had a strong impact on previous con-
structions of Irishness. Above all, the boom-and-bust era has, necessarily,
called into question many of the idealizations upon which the identity of
the island had hitherto been based. The sole comprehension of utopian
national mythologies and the facile simplification of Ireland as a new vic-
torious economy have proved unable to tackle such urgent issues as the
degradation of Irish landscapes in the name of ‘progress’, the religious
scandals and the crumbling of previously sacred pillars of Irishness, namely
the family and the idea of nation. Addressing the shadowy side of the
Tiger appears to be particularly relevant in twenty-first-century Ireland,
characterized as it is by a deep sense of instability.
In this context, then, representing the imperfect becomes a strategy of
resistance against the tendency to turn the collective memory of the coun-
try, in itself frail and malleable, as all memory systems are, into a record of
glossy images that could never account for the darkness hidden behind its
shining surface. In his lecture ‘A National Identity in Crisis? Reflections
on Ireland 2000–2011’, Professor Ciarán Benson referred to artists as
the only collective that the Irish population could look to when tackling
the present and the recent past of the island, since the narratives of the
sanctioned bearers of the nation—politicians, bankers, economists—were
proving untrustworthy and corrupted. Although art has always reflected
on the disquieting, the imperfect and the dystopian it can be argued that
since the beginning of the 2000s such issues have acquired more and
more thematic weight in the works of contemporary Irish authors. Their
reluctance to praise the good health of the Irish economy and the ten-
dency to represent instead the hidden story is turning artists and writers,
as Benson contended, into the alternative historians giving body and voice
to what might otherwise be left out of the official versions of contempo-
rary Ireland.
Marina Carr’s Ariel (2002) is one such case of resistance. The play is a
contemporary and Hibernicized retelling of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis.
Agamemnon, leader of the Greek coalition in the Trojan War, is in need
of favourable winds to safely set sail towards Troy. To appease the goddess
Artemis and benefit from these winds, the blood sacrifice of his daughter
Iphigenia is demanded, a difficult request that Agamemnon is nonetheless
ready to perform. Although at the end of the play a messenger announces
to Clytemnestra that the body of her young daughter was switched for
 THE IMPERFECT AS A SITE OF CONTESTATION IN CONTEMPORARY IRELAND 5

that of a deer at the last minute, the tragedy reflects on how the rights of
an individual girl are waived for a supposedly bigger cause: political and
armed conflict. In Marina Carr’s version, Fermoy Fitzgerald—the mod-
ern Agamemnon—is a politician from the Irish Midlands who aspires to
become the next Taoiseach. His religious thinking—a mixture of tradi-
tional portrayals of God, with a strong belief in blood sacrifices and savage
rituals—becomes paramount in the unfolding of the action. Fitzgerald’s
Jesus Christ is one of wrath and revenge, an image divorced from the
iconography of love and fraternity usually associated with the Son of God.
Interviewed on television in his capacity as Minister for Education, this
Irish Agamemnon explains his own interpretation of the divine using
Piero della Francesca’s painting Resurrection:

FERMOY: … A big, cranky, vengeful son a God plants a leg like a tree on
hees new opened tomb. He looks ouh inta the middle distance and hees
eyes say wan thing and wan thing only. Ye’ll pay for this. Ye’ll pay for this.
No forgiveness in them eyes. The opposihe. Rage, and a staggerin sense a
betrayal, as if he’s sayin, I’ve wasted eternihy on ye band a troglodytes thah
calls yeerselves the human race. (44)

From the outset of the play we learn that Fermoy is ready to sacrifice his
daughter Ariel on her sixteenth birthday and give her to God in exchange
for his own political success. Ariel is thus murdered by her own father, her
corpse hidden in the silent depths of Cuura Lake.
Classical myths are constantly revisited in contemporary societies,
Ireland being no exception in this respect. Marianne McDonald has con-
tended that ‘[i]n the twentieth-century, there seem to be more translations
and versions of Greek tragedy that have come from Ireland than from any
other country in the English-speaking world’ (37). Euripides, Sophocles
and Homer are still perceived as privileged sources to be trusted when it
comes to answering important questions about who we are or where we
are going, be it as a people or as individuals. This is partly because the
classics offer plot lines that can be used as visible surfaces upon which to
inscribe political messages not necessarily present in the original myth, and
provide contemporary audiences with a comfortable distance from which
to talk about their own social and political contexts.2
In the midst of the Celtic Tiger phenomenon, Marina Carr’s Ariel
presents us with a world that is in actuality crumbling, and does so
in the National Theatre of Ireland.3 In the words of Fintan O’Toole,
6 L.M. GONZÁLEZ-ARIAS

‘[o]n stage, at the sixteenth birthday party of the eponymous daughter

of a rising Midlands politician, the three pillars of the old Ireland—
Church, State and Family—are in an advanced state of decay’ (89).
Ariel is both a cautionary tale and the harsh realization that the coun-
try’s economic expansion was not necessarily coupled with a parallel
level of social satisfaction. Debates on citizenship, race and ethnicity,
triggered by the arrival of migrant communities to the new Ireland,
were at the time causing a deep crisis in the national sense of identity.
Old definitions of Irishness and the certainties of the past could no
longer account for the new political and social milieu of the island. The
dysfunctional order of the family, the Church and the State in Ariel’s
world became a perfect metaphor not only for the imperfections of the
Republic but also for a rapidly changing Ireland that now had to deal
with ‘unmapped territor[ies]’ (O’Toole 89).
Celia de Fréine’s Blood Debts (2014) is another interesting example
of resistance against cultural amnesia.4 The collection is, as yet, the only
poetic articulation of the Hepatitis C scandal in Ireland. In the last years
of the 1970s about 1600 women were infected with a blood product,
known as the Anti-D agent,5 which came from a batch manufactured
by the Blood Transfusion Service Board (BTSB) from a donor who had
infective hepatitis. The women developed various diseases—ranging from
fatigue and lupus to hepatitis itself—but no connection was established
between the women’s initial diagnoses and the contaminated blood prod-
uct. In 1994 the scandal became public when evidence was provided that
the BTSB had been alerted to the possibility of contamination but had
decided to ignore the alert.
In her introduction to The New Irish Poets—which anthologizes poets
who published their first collection in the 1990s—Selina Guinness sum-
marizes some of the main preoccupations of these new Irish bards. ‘In
the early years of the 21st century’, she explains, ‘the immediate political
terrain in the Republic has shifted from border politics to body politics,
as evidenced in the Laffoy Tribunal into the abuse of children by religious
orders, the Lindsay Tribunal into the use of contaminated blood products
by the Blood Bank, and continuing investigations into medical malprac-
tice, chiefly in the area of gynaecology and obstetrics’ (17). Although the
roots of these scandals date back to pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland, most surfaced
in the public arena in the midst of heated debates on economy, citizenship
and border politics that might have rendered gender issues invisible. De
Fréine’s work resists this tendency by underlining the political ­dimension
 THE IMPERFECT AS A SITE OF CONTESTATION IN CONTEMPORARY IRELAND 7

of what might have been dismissed as a personal trauma. In a recent inter-

view the poet referred to Blood Debts as her ‘most political book of poetry’
(McCabe and Crocker Hammer 1048) and recalled the time when jour-
nalists were only interested in who the story was about but not in what it
was about: ‘I felt that the focus should be on what it was about, that is,
a national scandal, and refused to acknowledge that it in fact dealt with
a personal experience’ (1050). In the fifty-seven poems that make up the
book, de Fréine deals with the profound psychological, social, familial and
even sexual consequences of the infection, but she does not disregard the
political and legal systems, which are denounced for their failure to attend
to the women’s illness, which the authorities themselves had contributed
to causing.
In ‘this is my body’ (64–65) the title becomes a refrain that poignantly
appropriates familiar Christian phraseology to inscribe the embodied iden-
tity of the female persona. However, this woman’s body does not inspire
the worship of the community and is instead described as damaged beyond
recovery: ‘This is the wound / that cannot be healed’ (65). Similarly,
‘lover’ (76) makes use of the semantic field of toxicity to establish a par-
allelism between the contaminated waters of a harbour—‘toxins in the
water could damage / the hull of any ship dropping anchor there’—and
the reproductive organs of the protagonist, with whom it is now unsafe to
have intercourse: ‘Lover, keep your distance’. The crossing of boundaries
between a personal disease and a national malady becomes even clearer
in poems like ‘blood sacrifice’ (83) and ‘a price on my head’ (89). In the
former, the Ireland of the Rising is being knocked down in favour of a new
urban geography in accordance with the Tiger. The dilapidation of histori-
cal Dublin is intimately linked here with the mismanagement of women’s
bodies. At the end of the poem, an anonymous woman falls into a pothole
left by a developer. Despite her good intentions, the poetic persona feels
unable to rescue her due to the potential toxicity of her own contaminated
blood. Both figures are thus victimized by the structures of power: ‘I can-
not lend her a helping hand, / all I can do is watch as her blood / flows
into the pool of progress’.
In ‘a price on my head’ (89) the protagonist is at the mercy of the legal
establishment. Her sense of alienation and fear in the space assigned to
her at court—‘a seat I recognise from many a film / one from which I’ve
heard the speech / of many a man sentenced to death’—is all the more
enhanced in the closing lines of the poem, when she feels like a passive
object at the expense of the legal machinery:
8 L.M. GONZÁLEZ-ARIAS

From the dock I concur

with the statements of my team
answer questions posed by the judges

my head tennising between each trio.

All rise as the judges retire
to debate my case
and place a price on my head.

Performance artist Amanda Coogan has similarly contributed to the pres-

ervation of the darkest episodes in the history of the Irish Deaf com-
munity. Born to Deaf parents, the artist considers Irish Sign Language as
her mother tongue and in October 2015 she narrated These Walls Can
Talk, a documentary that RTÉ One devoted to the history of the now
demolished St Joseph’s School for Deaf Children in Dublin. Whereas the
artist’s own father, Larry Coogan, who features in the piece, remembers
his years in the institution as edifying, and the documentary acknowledges
the merits of the school—namely lessening the students’ sense of isola-
tion by teaching them a language and a trade—Amanda Coogan gives
voice to the previously mute-d survivors of abusive behaviour on the part
of the Christian Brothers in charge. An entire chapter of the report of
the Irish Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse,6 known as the Ryan
Report, determined that from the 1950s until the 1990s the school was
in reality a frightening place for many of the boys, an institution where
sexual molestation was tolerated until the necessary intervention of the
Health Board (Ryan). The open engagement of Amanda Coogan with
this shameful episode parallels initiatives taken by other Irish artists in
their attempt to redress the gender asymmetries of Irish history or to take
into the public arena stories of abuse that were conveniently hidden under
the carpet of supposedly more pressing political agendas. A recent exam-
ple of this is the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment
of the Irish Constitution, which was passed in 1983 to protect the right
to life of the unborn. On their website, the artists organizing the cam-
paign7 express their disappointment and frustration at the ‘many shocking
instances of neglect and mismanagement of women’s care as a result of the
Eighth Amendment’. By December 2015, 1762 writers, visual artists—
Coogan among them—musicians and filmmakers had signed the state-
ment (Artists’ Campaign).
 THE IMPERFECT AS A SITE OF CONTESTATION IN CONTEMPORARY IRELAND 9

Coogan’s engagement with the political is also overt in her practice as

a performance artist. In a conversation with John Kelly she describes her
work as ‘unapologetically gendered’. In performance art the body is the
principal medium of communication, and Coogan’s definition of herself
as ‘a female artist making work from a female perspective, from the female
body’ (‘Amanda Coogan’) is an explicit statement about the prominence
that gender issues have in her career. Such is the case of her Madonna Series
(2000–2010)—an assortment of photographs, videos and live perfor-
mances on the theme of the maternal attributes of the Virgin Mary, whose
iconography has been used as a powerful model of femininity in modern
Ireland. Madonna in Blue (2001), one of the most celebrated pieces of the
series, is a postcard-sized photograph reminiscent of the holy pictures that
religious people carry in their purses and wallets. In it Coogan assumes
an angelic pose, looking into the distance, head lowered, submissive. Her
long blonde hair has been carefully tucked behind her ears, tamed, and the
pale blue shirt she is wearing emphasizes the virginal all the more. When
performed, the artist poses without moving for several hours and stands at
a height, resembling statues of the Virgin Mary in churches and grottos all
over the island. However, the parallelism between the sacred icon and the
photograph/performance is problematized through the strong symbol-
ism of the breast: Coogan is holding her naked right breast in her hand
and showing it to the audience. Connotations of maternal nourishment
fuse here with nuances of the reification, sexualization and pornification
of women’s corporealities in popular culture. The blunt blurring of the
boundaries between the sacred and the mundane brings to the fore the
powerless position of women in these two seemingly opposite systems of
representation.
The focus is shifted to the victims of the current economic recession
in Bubble up in Blue (2012), a durational performance in which the art-
ist wears nine winter coats, sewn together in what becomes a heavy bur-
den to carry around, while spilling her own saliva—dyed blue—on the
garments (Fig. 1.1). Coogan walks around the space—be it a gallery, a
museum, a city street—and sometimes lies on the floor, her slow move-
ments often keeping pace with her breathing. Performance art resists a
single interpretation, often the external referent of the piece is unclear,
even ­indiscernible, allowing the viewer to engage in the artist’s journey
with his/her own existential context. However, and in spite of all the lay-
ers of meaning that might emerge from beneath the nine coats of Bubble
up in Blue, the piece necessarily resonates with the stories of eviction,
10 L.M. GONZÁLEZ-ARIAS

Fig. 1.1 Bubble up in

Blue, Amanda Coogan
(2012). Still from live
performance

rough sleeping and homelessness that abound in the post-Celtic Tiger

era. The weight of the nine coats that slows the artist’s movements is
a poignant reminder that not all subjects are equally mobile, or equally
‘nomadic’ if we are to use Rosi Braidotti’s oft quoted terminology, in the
Ireland of the new millennium. The stream of blue bubbles constantly
coming out of the artist’s mouth during this performance breaks down
the traditional borders between inside and outside. Coogan is confronting
her audiences with the cast off, the rejected, the abject—be it corporeal or
social abjection—and disclosing what lies behind the surface. Ultimately,
she is turning the socially invisible into agentive subjects that participate
in the creation of meaning.
Personal and collective memory is also one of the main preoccupations of
visual artist Carmel Benson, as evidenced in ‘How to Be a Child?’, her latest
show, held in 2014. As explained in the exhibition programme, ‘[h]istory has
entered [Benson’s] work through autobiography’, and it is to the perturb-
ing and the imperfect in her childhood that the mature artist returns in her
 THE IMPERFECT AS A SITE OF CONTESTATION IN CONTEMPORARY IRELAND 11

thought-provoking exorcism of the past. The imperfections to which she

refers, while national, are also intimate to the persona behind the representa-
tions. As Lia Mills explains, this work has been a long time in the making, but
the exhibition is acutely ‘timely’ given the ‘recent spate of scandals about the
religious orders and their treatment of women and children’ (‘How to Be a
Child?’). Although the background to the work is the Ireland of the 1950s,
its strong patriarchal structures surface forcefully in the present. The paint-
ings and drawings fuse the textual and the visual to both shock and challenge
the viewer. In Why God Made the World the Catechism is problematized
as a formative text in the lives of Catholic children like Benson’s younger
self. The artist uses its Q&A format in the painting, with the question—
‘WHY DID GOD MAKE THE WORLD?’—and the corresponding ‘right’
answer to such question—‘FOR HIS OWN GLORY & FOR MAN’S USE
& BENEFIT’—occupying all four margins of the composition. The explicit
sexism of the religious lesson is made all the more poignant by the two
human figures placed at the centre of the painting: two little girls, dressed
in white Communion frocks, ready to be disempowered by the oppressive
Catholic phraseology they are made to learn by heart.
Prayers feature prominently in the exhibition, and are placed alongside
images of female physiology. The resulting pieces approach women’s bod-
ies not from a naturalistic perspective but from the strong connotations of
sin and shame that religious thought attributed to them when the artist was
growing up. ‘Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa’ is the background
text for pieces that show vagina iconography. In them, the young child’s
internalized identity as a descendant of Eve is linked with the representa-
tion of menstrual blood and foetuses dropping from triangular red shapes.
Mantra is an impressive piece that shows the innocent dress of a young
girl, stained by the prints of two muddy adult hands, and the words of the
‘Hail Mary’, presumably written by the same girl who owns the dress, cov-
ering the whole surface. The sexual abuse connoted by the muddy hands
that dirty the whiteness of the garment interrogates the religious system
that not only failed to protect the innocent body of the child, but contrib-
uted to the perpetuation of her role as a helpless object in a male sexual
economy. In I Confess (Fig. 1.2) the textual focus lies on the eponymous
prayer, with special emphasis on ‘THROUGH MY FAULT, THROUGH
MY FAULT, THROUGH MY MOST GRIEVOUS FAULT’, which
appears capitalized at the bottom of the piece. The power of prayers partly
resides in the constant repetition of their words by the faithful. This has
a performative effect that naturalizes roles that are in fact constructed.
Another random document with
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 Plate XXXVII.
“Mdlle. Parisot.”
Stipple-Engraving by C. Turner, A.R.A.,
after J. J. Masquerier.
(Published 1799. Size 6⅝″ × 8⅜″.)
From the collection of Mrs. Julia Frankau,
to whom it was presented by the late Sir Henry Irving.
 Plate XXXVIII.
“Maria.”
Stipple-Engraving by P. W. Tomkins, after J. Russell, R.A.
(Published 1791. Size 4¾″ × 6¼″.)
From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq.
 Plate XXXIX.
“Commerce.”
Stipple-Engraving by M. Bovi, after J. B. Cipriani, R.A.
and F. Bartolozzi, R.A.
(Published 1795. Size 18⅜″ × 7⅝″.)
From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq.
 Plate XL.
“The Love-Letter.”
A very rare Stipple-Engraving, probably by Thos. Cheesman.
and F. Bartolozzi, R.A.
(Size 8¾″ × 6¾″.)
From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P.
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