Even better than the real thing: a conceptual history of the “Celtic Phoenix”

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article chronicles the history of the phrase “Celtic Phoenix.” It began in sincere right-wing Celtic Tiger revivalism, but was popularised instead in a satirical mode, through Paul Howard’s parodic upper-class Dublin persona “Ross O’Carroll-Kelly.” In Howard’s play Breaking Dad (2014), a fascistic character exults that “Oh, the Celtic Tiger was a wonderful thing […] But the Celtic Phoenix – well, it’s going to be even better.” The phrase was quickly rehabilitated into mainstream economic analysis, via The Economist in 2015, and grew widespread in the mid-2010s: a 2018 article even speculated whether the “Phoenix” had already “passed its peak.” Subsequently, a cynical cast returned to the phrase’s currency, with negative connotations of Celtic Tiger shortsightedness observable in its usage in late-2010s and early-2020s journalism and criticism. The shifting usage of this term reflects a country still reckoning with the Celtic Tiger and the 2008–9 financial crash. This is seen in the written literature of “Celtic Phoenix” Ireland, in work by writers including Caoilinn Hughes, Kevin Power and Sally Rooney. To these newer writers, the crash is a previous generation’s disaster: an old but healing wound capable of being explained away as “something to do with capitalism.”