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Urban space, luxury retailing and the new irishness
Abstract
Written in 2006, at the end of an era that Fintan O'Toole has aptly characterized as one in which the Irish economy served as ‘the poster child of free-market globalization,’ (O'Toole, F., Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger, London, Faber & Faber, 2009) this essay seeks to elucidate some of the features of what we might now designate late stage Celtic Tigerism. Its central concern is with an exploration of the affective parameters of boom-era Irishness in a period driven by the national priority of being “business-friendly.” Charting a shift in the discursive repertoire of Irishness from warmth to coolness, and considering the emergence of Ireland's position as an exemplary scene of capitalism in the first half of the twenty-first century's first decade, the piece examine a range of suggestive examples including a music video by an Irish pop group, an Irish-themed financial advice book and the rhetoric of promotion that surrounded the opening of Ireland's largest shopping mall in 2005.
... The impetus for the new center emerged out of the Celtic Tiger era of the 1990s and early 2000s that was often celebrated, too soon it now seems, as "an economic miracle." Setting arguments about economic transformation aside, Negra (2010) argues that the Celtic Tiger era also ushered in a new set of cultural and personal values that displaced "sentimentality, pathos, nostalgia, volatility and vitality" (p. 839). ...
The Cliffs of Moher is one of the most popular tourist sites in all of Ireland, and buskers have been playing traditional music there for generations. The site and traditional music have each become powerful metonyms for Irish identity. In this article, I explore the complex and changing relationship between Irish identity, music, and tourism at the cliffs. In particular, I analyze recent conflicts that have erupted between musicians and the local tourism authorities which opened a €32 million award-winning interpretive center there in 2007.
This chapter tracks the changing ways in which space and place have been visualised within Irish film and conceptualised in Irish film writing. It maps the shifting social relations and cultural concerns that are constitutive of an Irish cinematic space. What is interesting in the case of Irish film is how landscape has stood in for such a set of auteurs or aesthetics as the distinguishing characteristic of an Irish national cinema both domestically and abroad. Furthermore, it is questions of landscape and location which have provoked the most furious debates internally around what Irish cinema is and ought to be. Writing in a 2007 collection exploring Irish cinema's intersection with genre, Martin McLoone discusses the physical and imaginative transformation which Dublin experienced from the early 1990s. He coins the term 'hip hedonism' to capture the style and thematic approach of a set of urban films which emerged in Ireland from the late 1990s.
Gaelic games have repeatedly provided a resonant motif through which (perceived) aspects of Irish identity have been encapsulated and represented in film. This process extends to the contemporary context wherein Ireland has experienced huge changes, economically and socially. While Gaelic games are less a prominent feature of contemporary fiction film (with notable exceptions), the cinematic has now been incorporated and integrated into major sporting occasions themselves, including the Laochra pageant, one of the largest and most viewed commemorative events held in Ireland in 2016. Laochra was organised by the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), and broadcast live by the Irish medium broadcaster TG4 on Sunday April 24th, exactly one hundred years to the day after the first shots were fired in the Easter Rising. The GAA was a key force in defining Irish identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and it was one of the most active organisations in 2016 in evoking that period and commemorating events surrounding the Rising. I have included a question mark, however, in the title of this paper – taken from the title of the penultimate scene in the Laochra pageant – as I want to raise questions in this article as to the new Ireland that was configured in Laochra, both in terms of how ‘new’ this configuration actually was (given its indebtedness to older Irish iconography) and the problematic manner in which Irishness was depicted, particularly in terms of gender and militarism.
This article contributes to the discussion on Irish identity by considering a set of empirical data from ethnographic research carried out in Pakistani communities in Dublin. The article considers views on 'Irishness' through the lens of young second-generation Pakistani Irish men. The data presented highlight how the Celtic Tiger experience reproduced cultural and ethnic narratives of Irish identity, but simultaneously initiated a new, more civic-oriented view of 'Irishness'. Of particular concern in the minds of young Pakistani men include the secularisation of Irish society and the role that 'whiteness' plays in processes of 'othering' in Ireland. The article reveals that the current period of Irish history provides an opportunity for the Pakistani Irish to challenge some of the assumptions currently associated with Irish identity. Ultimately, the article calls for a broader understanding of Irish identity through the lens of civic national principles, which can better serve Ireland's increasingly diverse population.
The aim of this paper is to contribute to the discussion surrounding national identity by considering a particular set of empirical data on perceptions of ‘Irishness’. Based on ethnographic research carried out in Pakistani communities in Dublin, this paper considers various interpretations of Irish identity through the lens of young second-generation Pakistani Irish men. The data presented highlight that for these young men, ‘Irishness’ has multiple meanings. The views of the participants raise several types of Irish identity and how these types manifest themselves in the everyday lives of Pakistanis. To frame the discussion, the paper examines three terms: cultural nation, civic nation, and ethnic nation. According to the cultural nation, ‘Irishness’ is a matter of lifestyle to which one adheres; the civic nation defines Irish identity on citizenship; and the ethnic nation defines as ‘Irish’ those individuals believed to have Irish ancestry or blood. A key finding is that respondents are perceived by people of Irish ancestry as threatening to mainstream views of ‘Irishness’. As such, young second-generation Pakistani Irish men are less likely to be viewed as members of a common, shared national community in Ireland.
This paper argues that the global economic recession provides an instructive point to reconsider recent theorisations of post-politics for two reasons. First, theories of the post-political can help us to understand the current neoliberal impasse, and second, current transformations provide us with an empirical basis to test the limits of these explanatory frameworks. While the resurgence of neoliberal policies, evidenced through the state-sponsored rescue of the financial sector and the introduction of harsh austerity measures in many countries, appear to confirm post-politics, various protest movements have testified to a concurrent re-politicisation of the economy. Furthermore, crises constitute periods of disruption to the discursive and symbolic order, which open a space for hegemonic struggle, however fleeting. We focus our analysis on Ireland's ‘ghost estates’ – residential developments left abandoned or unfinished after the property crash – and their treatment within mainstream print media. We argue that in the context of crash, the ‘ghost estate’ functioned as an ‘empty signifier’ through which hegemonic struggles over how to narrate, and thus re-inscribe, the event of the crisis were staged. We explore the double role played by ‘ghost estates’: firstly, as an opening for politics, and secondly, as a vehicle used to discursively contain the crisis through a neoliberal narrative of ‘excess’. We argue that our analysis offers an instructive example of how post-politicisation occurs as a process that is always contingent, contextual, and partial, and reliant on the cooption and coproduction of existing cultural signifiers with emergent narrations of crisis.
This article proposes to redefine celebrity as a kind of capital, thereby extending Bourdieu’s field theory. This redefinition is necessary, it is argued, because one of the main limitations shared by current definitions of celebrity is their lack of explanatory power of the convertibility of celebrity into other resources, such as economic or political capital. Celebrity capital, or broadly recognizability, is conceptualized as accumulated media visibility that results from recurrent media representations. In that sense, it is a substantial kind of capital and not a subset or special category of social or symbolic capital, the latter being defined as legitimate recognition by other agents in a social field. Rather than adding another definition of celebrity next to many others, the notion of celebrity capital proposed here should be seen as an attempt to integrate the existing approaches of celebrity into a single comprehensive conceptualization that can enable us to grasp this societal and cultural phenomenon better.
In November, 2004, the famed Bewley's Oriental Cafés of Dublin shut their operations on Grafton and Westmoreland Streets. The news generated an intense response in the national media regarding the loss of an icon that defined the city, the loss of a storied place that marked many epochal changes in Dublin and Ireland, and the loss of what, for many Dubliners, was a home away from home. "Dubliners are in shock," reported David McKittrick in The Independent. McKittrick continued,
The demise of the cafés has produced waves of nostalgia for a business which stretches back more than a century, and waves of regret that affluence and economic advance should mean the loss of such venerable institutions. . . . The irony," he goes on to say, "is that the cafés, famous for their tea and coffee, should go under amid an international boom in the demand for coffee.
In the background of all of these perceived losses was a larger concern regarding the dramatic changes Ireland had undergone in recent years. Many newspaper reports, including McKittrick's, began with the tag line, "It's the end of an era."
As an indicator of the hold these cafés had on Dubliners, Dublin city councilor Charlie Ardagh "called on the State to rescue the Bewley cafés as bona fide historical institutions that are 'part of Dublin's soul'." In announcing the decision, even Bewley's owner Patrick Campbell said, "It's like part of Dublin dying." In this, he echoed the description of the coffee shops then found on the web site of the Campbell Bewley Group (the corporation that owned the shops):
The Irish poet Brendan Kennelly once described Bewley's Café in Grafton Street as the 'heart and the hearth of Dublin'. Dublin, he said, would not be Dublin without Bewley's. These sentiments have been echoed by generations of Irish people since Joshua Bewley first introduced tea to the Irish public in 1835. Bewley's is a name synonymous in the history of Dublin and more recently of Ireland as a whole. Bewley's itself has a rich history of growth and survival which has proved it to be one of the last bastions of tradition in a changing Ireland.
In having to close "one of the last bastions of tradition," the Campbell Bewley Group admitted that a changing Ireland actually brought about the demise of this particular bastion; in a sense, the group had to eat its own words. And Dubliners were no longer going to be able to eat any of Bewley's famous cakes or barm bracks.
The Grafton Street premises have since reopened, much to the relief and celebration of many. But a question remains: What does the name Bewley's mean now? And what does it mean to say that it has been "saved"? A letter to the Irish Times offered this stern evaluation:
The idea that Bewley's has been "saved" (Magazine, August 27th) is quite misleading. Jay Bourke and his associates have, thankfully, preserved the internal physical architecture that housed Bewley's Café of Grafton Street. However the large café itself, which was the essence of what Bewley's was about, is completely gone. It has been replaced by two restaurants and a tiny area for coffee-only customers. Bewley's is no more, it has not been "saved."
The concerns expressed over Bewley's closure, and its reopening—concerns that were often framed as an ethical collision over the question of the identity of Dublin, the meaning of the loss of a city icon, and the meaning of the culture of Dublin itself—lend themselves well to the reflexive method of radical interpretive inquiry.
One way to make sense of the closure of Bewley's and of associated changes to Dublin is to draw on the work such globalization theorists as David Harvey, Saskia Sassen, and Manuel Castells regarding the new political economy of the city. For Harvey, the "circulation of capital restlessly and perpetually seeking new ways to garner profits" can explain this development. The Campbell Bewley Group was actually making profits; it was the individual cafés that were losing money. Since 1996, despite an investment...
Symposium on "Law, Morality, and Popular Culture in the Public Sphere" at the Indiana University School of Law-Bloomington, April 6, 2001.
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