“The Debris of History”. On Waste and the Past in Irish Celtic Tiger Poetry

Abstract

During the Celtic Tiger era of the late-1990s to early-2000s, Irish society radically altered its collective outlook on the national past. More to the point, Ireland transformed from a country ‘obsessed’ with relentlessly negotiating its own history to a country that was ready to disengage from the past altogether. In an affluent and successful Celtic Tiger society, so the dominant conviction of those years went, Ireland’s troubled past was no longer a vital point of reference but became the inferior ‘other’ against which the ‘golden age’ present was contoured. In this context, negatively connoted metaphors, such as history as a haunting ghost or a despotic master, played a pivotal role in contributing to the degradation of Irish history in the public sphere. The following paper analyses one of these metaphors, dominantly featured in Irish poetry of that time: the metaphor of the past as waste. This metaphor is particularly interesting since, by using waste as a concept of comparison, some poets writing during the Celtic Tiger era undermine and counteract the dominant trend of degrading Irish history. Thus, with the help of recent waste studies, the paper attempts to show that in Irish poetry of the time the past, in the form of concrete disposed entities, is not simply abandoned as useless and inferior but, in one way or another, is presented in a liminal position between devaluation and revaluation.