Over many decades, the poetry of Paula Meehan has given a voice to urban (Dublin) working-class experience, and in doing so, to paraphrase Yeats on Synge, expressed a life that had never before found expression in poetry. This is Meehan’s world, yet her world contains so much more too, in poems that encompass Buddhism, environmental concerns, and the classical world. Class consciousness is an intrinsic aspect of Meehan’s artistic vision, rather than a thematic add-on, and critical engagement with her work requires a decisive reorientation of conventional aesthetic categories. A key piece of revisionism present in the poems is Meehan’s critique of domestic space: as against convention, it is often public spaces that are welcoming, where domestic spaces are fraught with tension and violence. To her critique of domestic spaces and class politics, Meehan has notably added in her recent work a sophisticated strain of ecopoetics, taking us beyond human exceptionalism and into a deeper realm of connection with the natural world.

After free secondary-school education became available for all in Ireland, questions as to the outline and content of a literary curriculum at secondary level became relevant to our understanding of how a contemporary generation of Irish writers responded to, and re-engaged with, their own educational background. This chapter initially offers a brief overview of Irish government policy in education before 1940, before discussing the key curricular developments between 1940 and 1980, bringing to light the political and cultural negotiations that determined how English literature was taught in Irish second-level schools. When free second-level education was introduced in Northern Ireland (1947) and in the Republic of Ireland (1967), it amounted to a widening of social access to education that was of huge personal significance to many Irish writers. The second half of this chapter explores the shaping power of the English literature programme for the Irish literary imagination through a study of how a selection of Irish writers who were students of English during these decades depicted their educational formation; this section focusses on writers such as John McGahern, Seamus Deane, and Paula Meehan, amongst others.

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.