This chapter takes as its vantage points two crucial markers of contemporary Ireland – the Good Friday Agreement and the Celtic Tiger. The chapter focuses on the topic of development and environmental violence as they emerge in Northern Ireland after the peace agreement, and in the Republic during the Celtic Tiger years. While Belfast in the post-Peace Agreement era enticed tourists by reinventing the city as a global “anycity,” “Dublin, along with other southern cities, has been indelibly marked by economic boom and bust: So-called “ghost estates” now dot the country’s landscape, and rapid urban gentrification has exacerbated its homelessness crisis.” In a series of evocative readings of individual poems, Julia Obert and Nolan Goetzinger pay attention to the shifting definitions of violence in the Irish context – from the acutely visible and spectacular tragedies of the Troubles to the invisible or drawn-out calamities in the wake of the Celtic Tiger – and demonstrate an energetic critique of late-capitalist and neoliberal definitions of progress and the good life.

A complex, triangular relationship existed between Ireland, Britain and France that structured eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debates over the vicissitudes of empire in Ireland. The significance of this relationship, I have suggested, was not reducible to the military threat France occasionally posed to British rule. It lay instead in the influence of Franco-British rivalry and emulation exerted over the political economy of empire, and in the manner this was interpreted by contemporaries in Ireland, Britain and Europe. The threat, and the example, of France inspired British and Irish efforts to reform and consolidate empire, alongside Irish attempts to escape from it. In Ireland, political thinkers across Europe saw not just a land of religious dissension and emergent ‘nationality’, but a vital case study in the workings of mercantile power politics, and in the consequences of the persistence of aristocratic inequality in an era of commercial growth and agrarian transformation. The government of Ireland was not, therefore, a narrowly Irish problem. It lay at a vital intersection between contemporary understandings of commerce, empire and international order.

This chapter examines four novels published since the Irish economic crash and set in Dublin during the late boom and early bust years. Kevin Power’s Bad Day in Blackrock (2008), Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz (2011), Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know (2012), and Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void (2015). Each of these novels details the effects of economic developments on the live, finances, and psyches of Irish citizens, while also exploring how a culture of accumulating indebtedness has altered the nature of contemporary Irish reality and the real ties that band society together. Reading these novels in the context of a recent turn in Irish Studies away from cultural concerns and toward a focus on Ireland’s “real economy,” I show how these novelists pay attention to the economy while not being afraid to explore world views, ideologies, desires, and feelings that serve to make it real.

Discussions about the state of Irish fiction during and after the Celtic Tiger often centred on the issue of cliché, as detractors criticised writers for rehearsing timeworn tropes instead of addressing the vertiginous upheavals of the boom and bust. This chapter considers the gendered and generic underpinnings of that claim. More than an aesthetic pitfall, cliché serves as a constitutive feature of post-Celtic Tiger women’s fiction. In Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz (2011) and Tana French’s Broken Harbor (2012), narrators draw upon conventions derived from post-war genre fiction in order to reinforce fraying narratives of bourgeois happiness and success. While cliché provides temporary narrative and affective ballast amid recession, it also enmeshes women novelists within ongoing debates about the value of genre in an evolving literary marketplace.