Chapter 6 - Habitations: Space, Place, Real Estate

Summary

This chapter is a survey of representations of place and space in Irish poetry and prose writing from the last decades. It focuses on responses in literature to the building boom that transformed the face of the country over the course of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ years, looking in particular at the work of Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney, Tim Robinson, Paula Meehan, and Michael Longley. It moves on to examine how William Wall, Donal Ryan, and Mike McCormack charted the changed Ireland that followed the 2008 economic crash. Finally, it examines how, in Northern Ireland, writers such as Medbh McGuckian, Leontia Flynn, and Glenn Patterson sought to reconcile old ideas of sectarian territory with a newly dominant understanding of land as an asset. Perhaps ironically, for a time that included such frenetic construction, the chief anxiety that can be heard in Irish literature from these years is for what might be swept away in the name of ‘development’