Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan note the perception that “recent transformations in Ireland have resulted in an explosion of new forms and ways of being ‘Irish,’” producing “a more liberal, cosmopolitan and diverse society [… that is] a far cry from [… the country’s] Catholic and rural past.” In this changed society, however, historical forms of racism and classism persist. This chapter prioritizes the intersectionality of class and ethnicity/race in highlighting some instances of how these matters have been dealt with in recent Irish drama since the 1990s. Its reading of plays by Donal O’Kelly, Roddy Doyle, Brian Campbell, Ursula Rani Sarma, Ken Harmon, Dermot Bolger, Vincent Higgins, Jim O’Hanlon, Martin Lynch, Bisi Adigun, Charlie O’Neill, Mirjana Rendulic, and Rosaleen McDonagh suggests how those who write from the subject positions of marginalized minorities have challenged too commonly simplistic, melodramatic, or assimilationist treatments of those communities.

This chapter examines one of Ireland’s longest-lasting sources of engagement with the global South, namely the set of ethical dispositions and embedded practices that we traditionally call “humanitarian aid.” For much of the twentieth century, Ireland’s sense of itself as both a postcolonial nation and an advanced Western democracy found expression in an intense preoccupation with humanitarian aid for newly independent African countries. Over the last two decades, this history of humanitarian action has become a prominent motif in Irish fiction, featuring centrally in fiction by Anne Enright, Sebastian Barry, Roddy Doyle, and J. M. O’Neill. In the hands of these authors, humanitarianism has emerged as a vehicle for reflecting on Ireland’s place in the world – from the ethical attunement to suffering bodies that has dominated Irish representations of the global South to the political stakes involved in refracting such sentimentalized images through the language of anticolonial nationalism.

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.

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.