Across the globe radio developed rapidly as a popular and transformative technology in the aftermath of the Great War. In the 1920s it quickly became a means of mass communication reaching millions, enabling listeners access to news, information, and entertainment. In Ireland the advent of ‘wireless’ broadcasting coincided with independence and the partition of the island. Initially, broadcasting in Ireland looked inward as it sought to help define and consolidate the deeply conservative states that emerged from the violence of the Irish Revolution. However, identities throughout the island of Ireland have evolved to challenge the narrow, defensive, insular states that struggled to assert themselves a century ago. This chapter addresses the evolution of broadcasting in Ireland and how Irish writers have successfully used radio and television to find regional, national, and global audiences. Although presented in an Irish context, much of their writing transcends national borders because it explores the human condition in a variety of dramatic and comedic forms.

A cliché of Heaney criticism is that his poetry can be divided into two phases: an earlier one of bog and body, a later one of air and spirit. It is less frequently observed that a third phase emerged in the late Heaney. His poems no longer treat body or spirit as a binary but explore the catalytic relationship between them, and the constant movement, between time and eternity, between the past and the present, between the represented and the representation, between history and memory, between filiation and affliliation. His poetry never erupted into a fulminating rage against the killings of the Troubles as an inevitable consequence of a rancid politics. A therapeutic function is fundamental to Heaney’s poetry. Violence enters his poetry as painful and wounding divisions, to which his poetry is applied as a healing ointment.

This chapter frames Heaney’s long investment in Eastern Europe in the intersecting contexts of the Cold War and the Troubles. From 1970 on, Heaney read, promoted and translated poets from behind the Iron Curtain. The same Anglo-American poetic and academic climate that alerted Heaney to the presence of Eastern European poets also led him to turn to these poets to resolve problems he had with the Anglo-American lyric in the context of Irish history and politics. The chapter pays particular attention to the influences of Osip Mandelstam and Czesław Miłosz on Heaney’s poetry from North to Electric Light, a volume that includes multiple elegies for Eastern European poets and Heaney's only poem set in Eastern Europe, 'The Known World'. Finally, this piece takes stock of the enduring impact of Eastern Europe on Heaney's imagination at the end of his life.

This chapter re-examines the poetry of the early Troubles and addresses the limitations of what was, to a large extent, an atrocity-led literature, drawing on works such as Thomas Kinsella’s ‘Butcher’s Dozen’ and Seamus Deane’s ‘After Derry’ to reassess the role played by writers and critics at this time. Discussing both retrospective and contemporaneous interviews with authors, the chapter also addresses the ways in which writers such as Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Michael Longley responded to the new mandate which poetry had been given after the outbreak of the northern conflict, with the relentless media exposure of the Troubles often, but not always, eliciting evasive responses to the conditions engendered by the violence. Finally, it examines the fresh formal and linguistic strategies adopted by younger poets including Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian. By this time, writing the violence of the Troubles into poetry could make evasion a form of engagement which helped to preserve artistic autonomy.

Mid-century Ireland was a society of surreal contradictions: an island that declared neutrality an emergency, a nation that became a republic by accident. This chapter examines how Irish writers responded to and reimagined the political and ideological contours of both states on the island in the post-war period, and in particular the creation by artists of altered states in which to seek refuge from the foreclosed reality of official Ireland(s). It charts the responses made by a group of writers whose themes ranged from a historical sense of dislocation and the search for a voice and an audience to an openness to vision and a careful attention to the environment. Initially discussing the novels of Elizabeth Bowen, Brian O’Nolan and Edna O’Brien, it outlines how they conceived of their roles within and beyond the nation in this time of change. The chapter then discusses how the outbreak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland provided the backdrop and impulse for new collective aesthetic projects in these later decades, such as the Field Day project and Atlantis magazine, that advanced the use of literature to imagine alternate Irelands beyond the pale of state and nation.