This chapter offers a study of some key developments in Irish realism from the 1980s to the contemporary moment. The Irish novel in a variety of forms, including the bildungsroman, the family novel, the expatriate novel and political fiction, has developed significantly in this period and its highest achievements are distinguished by memorable characterisation, probing social critique, and lyrical writing. Stressing issues of form, style, and affect as well as content, the study examines a selection of Irish fictions, urban and rural, domestic and overseas, northern and southern, and considers their relationship to wider and ongoing changes in Irish society in recent times.

After free secondary-school education became available for all in Ireland, questions as to the outline and content of a literary curriculum at secondary level became relevant to our understanding of how a contemporary generation of Irish writers responded to, and re-engaged with, their own educational background. This chapter initially offers a brief overview of Irish government policy in education before 1940, before discussing the key curricular developments between 1940 and 1980, bringing to light the political and cultural negotiations that determined how English literature was taught in Irish second-level schools. When free second-level education was introduced in Northern Ireland (1947) and in the Republic of Ireland (1967), it amounted to a widening of social access to education that was of huge personal significance to many Irish writers. The second half of this chapter explores the shaping power of the English literature programme for the Irish literary imagination through a study of how a selection of Irish writers who were students of English during these decades depicted their educational formation; this section focusses on writers such as John McGahern, Seamus Deane, and Paula Meehan, amongst others.

This chapter focuses on the early fiction of John McGahern, whose first major novel, The Barracks, was published in 1963, the year of Larkin’s ‘Annus Mirabilis’. Reading from this novel and from The Dark, 1965, with overviews too of The Leavetaking and The Pornographer, written in the 1970s, it analyses the transitional energy of Irish writing against the strictures of church and state and the policing of marital, sexual and personal relationships in Ireland. It reads McGahern’s depictions of sexuality and Irish Catholicism in relation to his Irish, British and European contempararies and antecedents. Drawing upon Dáil debates about the ‘outrage’ of McGahern’s controversial first novel as well as editorial discussions that the author himself had with his publishers Faber and Faber, the chapter offers an insight into his relationship with Catholic Ireland and the vestiges of the Irish state’s culture of censorship in the 1960s. In particular, the chapter focusses on his 1979 novel The Pornographer, McGahern’s ‘most experimental novel’, as partially motivated by the settling of scores from the previous decade, but also his ‘fullest novelistic treatment of the sexual instinct and its impact on man’.

The collapse of the authority, credibility, and influence of the Catholic Church in Ireland, a process that had begun in the 1960s and 1970s and was given added momentum by the revelation of child abuse and institutional scandals in the 1990s, continued unabated in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In tandem, while Ireland remained a country with a high degree of religious practice by international standards, many Irish Catholics decided to become Catholics on their own terms and Irish society became increasingly secularised, as was made clear when Ireland became the first country in the world to approve gay marriage through a referendum vote in 2015, while abortion was legalised following a referendum in 2018. This chapter explores how a range of Irish writers navigated and explored these themes, in poems, novels, and plays and considers the searching questions they asked about the weight of complex history underpinning the changes and their own role in characterising a society whose faith and religiosity were in transition.