Chapter 17 - Built Environments and Lived Ecologies in Contemporary Irish Poetry, 1998–Present

Summary

This chapter takes as its vantage points two crucial markers of contemporary Ireland – the Good Friday Agreement and the Celtic Tiger. The chapter focuses on the topic of development and environmental violence as they emerge in Northern Ireland after the peace agreement, and in the Republic during the Celtic Tiger years. While Belfast in the post-Peace Agreement era enticed tourists by reinventing the city as a global “anycity,” “Dublin, along with other southern cities, has been indelibly marked by economic boom and bust: So-called “ghost estates” now dot the country’s landscape, and rapid urban gentrification has exacerbated its homelessness crisis.” In a series of evocative readings of individual poems, Julia Obert and Nolan Goetzinger pay attention to the shifting definitions of violence in the Irish context – from the acutely visible and spectacular tragedies of the Troubles to the invisible or drawn-out calamities in the wake of the Celtic Tiger – and demonstrate an energetic critique of late-capitalist and neoliberal definitions of progress and the good life.