Accidental Cosmopolitanism: Irish Public Discourse after the Celtic Tiger

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Accidental Cosmopolitanism Irish Public
Discourse after the Celtic Tiger

• St Patricks Day Lecture
• Renvall Institute for Area and Cultural Studies
• 17 March 2006

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I am a child of Pope in the Rip-Off Republic
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The New Irish Dream of the Popes Children

• believes that any Irish person can be or have
  whatever he or she wants. All you have to do is
  believe in yourselfThe Old Irish Dream was of
  Catholicism, nationalism, community, chastity,
  the Brits, the six counties, the Irish language,
  the famine, the underdog, getting a job in the
  bank and the glamour of Grace KellyThe New Irish
  Dream can be best summed up by I wanna trade
  up. I want the biggest fridge, the best holiday,
  the newest car, the loudest sound system, the
  healthiest food, the best yoga posture, the most
  holistic world viewThe Old Irish Dream was about
  us, ours and them. The New Irish Dream is about
  me, mine and yours.
• David McWilliams, The Popes Children Irelands
  New Elite (2005)

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Were heading for binary meltdown

• Old/New
• Tradition/Modernity
• Insularity/Cosmopolitanism
• Neurosis/Confidence
• Unthinking communitarianism/reflexive
  individualism

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Boom town prats?

• Only left-wing pinkos and creeping jesuses
  would criticise the current prosperity

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The economy, cest moi

• Thus the emergence of informational capitalism
  and Irelands semi-peripheral integration into it
  bring to the fore a cultural discourse
  prioritizing individualism, entrepreneurship,
  mobility, flexibility, innovation,
  competitiveness both as personal attributes to be
  cultivated by the individual and as dominant
  social value
• Kirby, Cronin Gibbons (ed.) Reinventing
  Ireland, (200212)

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Imagining the Celtic Tiger
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Entangled modernities

• The local and the global, community and society,
  tradition and modernity, are not forms of life
  that supersede each other in linear historical
  progress, but that exist contemporaneously and
  interpenetrate with one another, collide and
  collude with one another, in the time space of
  contemporary Ireland. Borders and boundaries are
  permeable, andthe experience of living in
  contemporary Ireland is that of living in an
  in-between world, in-between cultures and
  identities, an experience of liminality.
• Kieran Keohane Carmen Kuhling, Collision
  Culture (20046)

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Ive heard that Poles are moving to Ireland
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Dublin, last month