Celtic Tiger Period Research Articles

The narrative mechanics of transmission in Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart (2012): hostile environments vs. readerly reflexes

In Donal Ryan’s 2012 novel The Spinning Heart, a great amount of contextual, diegetic and stylistic elements points to an utter failure of communication and, above all, of transmission. The story unfolds in an Ireland that bears the very recent economic scars of the end of the Celtic Tiger period, and whose citizens appear disconnected from their culture, dreams and fellow Irishmen and women. For the characters, this leaves a void that is gradually filled by tensions, secrets and hostility. For the reader confronted with such a text, developing sympathy for these characters quickly emerges as a challenge, all the more so as this short 155-page novel is divided into twenty chapters, each corresponding to a different narrator telling their story in the first person, making it difficult for the reader to get in-depth knowledge of any of them. Understanding the text is made all the more complicated by the frequent – and often contradictory – echoes between the twenty chapters, forcing the reader to constantly make inferences and to make their way through this novel on their own since no uniting, all-encompassing narrative voice emerges to guide them in their perception of the story.This paper analyses how, in The Spinning Heart, the stylistic choices draw on readers’ reflexes to co-construct the narrative, while studying the effects this has on the interpretation of the novel, the diegesis of which features transmission as a key theme.It first focuses on the many ways in which transmission is done wrong and has gone wrong plot-wise, before analysing the narrative choices which complicate the transmission of information and feeling to the reader; at last, it challenges the idea that transmission is completely absent from the novel, by focusing on the micro-scale of the characters’ singular voices and by paying close attention to the role of the reader.

Marina Carr'ın Kediler Bataklığı'nda ve Kanlı Düğün Adlı Oyunlarda Küyerelleşme ve Uyarlama

Embarking on her career by imitating the Beckettian style at the end of the 1980s, Marina Carr (1964- ), a contemporary Irish female playwright, later moves to a phase in which she rewrites ancient myths, Greek tragedies and some other classical works, including those of William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf. While Carr brings the female voice and agency into sharper focus in her adaptations, her revisions integrate the global myth or story with local Irish elements. What emerges here is that Carr puts the global in conversation with the local considering that her source text stands for the universal, and her elaboration on Irish culture and troubles resonates with the particular. It is noted that, following the Celtic Tiger period in Ireland, the time Carr initiates her dramatic career, Irish drama has undergone a radical change with globalisation. However, it is the particular argument of this paper that Marina Carr’s way of rewriting corresponds with glocalisation, a term which suggests the incorporation of the local into the global. From the early stage of her writing to her recent works, Carr’s use of glocalisation in her adaptations can be pinpointed. This article explores the elements of glocalisation in Carr’s adaptation of Euripides’s Medea in By the Bog of Cats… (1998) and Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding in Blood Wedding (2019) as examples from two different periods of her oeuvre. Hence, this paper considers the Irish playwright’s method of adaptation in terms of glocalisation.

Conflicts and Crises, Dialogues and (Dis-)Connections: Renegotiations of Identities through Irish Narratives of Community

In the first two decades of the 21st century, the condition of glocality was rendered highly visible by the 2008 world financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic in Ireland, as elsewhere. Moreover, glocality can impact on such forms of identity as that of nationality, either with an exclusionary impetus or effecting the recognition of shared experiences. This article examines how the community, as a spatiotemporal concept, serves as a means of exploring renegotiations of identity and modes of interdependence in a glocal world. Discussing short fiction by Roddy Doyle and Emma Donoghue, published against the background of changing cultural narratives of Irishness during the Celtic Tiger period, I argue that short story cycles function as multi-layered reflections and interventions that place Irish identities in dialogue with other affiliations, but also with Irish history. Such a critical discussion renders visible the potential in literary fiction for coming to terms with conflicts that are rooted in essentialist understandings of identity and for opening up possibilities for renegotiations in light of local and global interrelations. When Doyle’s and Donoghue’s stories reflect upon and criticise exclusionary tendencies, they further the recognition of shared experiences despite cultural difference within a glocal world. Thereby, they interrupt the perpetuation of simplifying identity discourses based on notions of alterity and exceptionalism, contribute to identity renegotiation, and invite the possibility for building communities during times of continuous crisis.

Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction: Ireland in Crisis by Eóin Flannery

Reviewed by: Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction: Ireland in Crisis by Eóin Flannery Kevin Hargaden (bio) Eóin Flannery, Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction: Ireland in Crisis (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), ix + 239 pages Ireland almost went bankrupt in 2008. The aftermath was marked by devastating unemployment, a return to mass emigration, and the establishment of policy commitments directly responsible for the present housing crisis, along with innumerable cuts in funding and limitations on social initiatives as part of the crushing austerity regime. It is surprising how quickly the death of the Celtic Tiger has been assumed into Irish discourse as an event we all acknowledge but do not particularly need to reference. The economists who boosted the bubble are back on our screens and in our broadsheets as commentators. The ten-year anniversary passed without much more than a few newspaper features1 and we have slipped happily back into economic buoyancy, marked by inflated property prices and semi-regular chastisements about the importance of keeping wages low to maintain the market’s confidence in our productivity. It is hard not to think that this period in our recent history warrants more attention. And in Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction, Eóin Flannery, from Mary Immaculate College in Limerick, offers a crucial intervention. It might seem that an assessment of this period from an English literature department would be marginal. Surely it is the economists and sociologists who must take the lead on understanding the significance of these events? But Irish novelists were examining the economic and social changes wrought by the Celtic Tiger through the boom days and into the period of barren bust. Flannery considers Chris Binchy’s Open-Handed (2008), Peter Cunningham’s Capital Sins (2010), Dermot Bolger’s Tanglewood (2015), Donal Ryan’s The Thing About December (2015) and The Spinning Heart (2012), his debut novel that preceded The Thing About December in terms of publication but exists in a subsequent text within the novels’ narrative chronology. He also considers Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know (2012), Justin Quinn’s Mount Merrion (2013), Deirdre Madden’s Time Present and Time Past (2013), and Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void (2015), as well as discussing the poem The Celtic Tiger (1999) by the late Denis O’Driscoll. Throughout these discussions, Flannery is concerned with ‘how authors of Irish literary fiction grapple with the registration of debt and indebtedness in the Celtic Tiger period and its aftermath’ (p. 9). This is a fascinating way into [End Page 127] an essential conversation – the abstract concepts of neoliberal capitalism can be illuminated in a fresh light when set inside the plot of a novel. There is a logical progression through the different books discussed. We start with Binchy and Cunningham’s novels which present ‘not a clinical analysis of a crudely divisive economic system but a second-hand description of well-known commoditized types’ (p. 38, emphasis original). These may be entertaining novels, but they are structured so as to engage with the Celtic Tiger in a way that re-inscribes the consensus narratives which are grouped under the ‘we all partied’ and ‘a few bad apples’ clichés. We end with The Mark and the Void, a complex novel which confronts the reader directly with what we think a novel is and what it can do. The relationship established between the main characters – a novelist named Paul suffering writer’s block and a depressed financier named Claude – allows Murray to draw attention ‘to the fictive nature of the macrostructure of high finance’ (p. 181). This is a work of literary criticism before it is a work of social analysis and Flannery’s insights offer readers a renewed appreciation of the works under discussion. Dermot Bolger’s Tanglewood is the focus for the second chapter and Flannery unveils the role shame plays in the narrative, proposing that while not perfect, the novel offers ‘a prompt with which to commence renewed discussions regarding the possibilities of shame in the Irish context’ (p. 73). Flannery shows us how Donal Ryan’s novels formally...

IRELAND/IRISHNESS IN TRANSITION: CONOR MCPHERSON'S “THE WEIR”

As a contemporary Irish playwright who is well-known for his monologue plays, Conor McPherson (1971- ) illustrates the changing process of Irishness within the scope of clashing traditional and modern values in The Weir. In the early twentieth century as a result of the nationalist and isolationist policy, Irish identity was constructed as rural, agricultural, and Catholic, but it began to change with the impact of the Celtic Tiger referring to an economic boom starting in the mid-1990s. In this article, The Weir is analysed as a transition play representing the 1990s in terms of the collision of the old and the new Irishness with regard to social, sexual, and religious values. This paper aims to examine and discuss Ireland and Irishness in transition within the context of rural-urban, traditional-modern, local-global dichotomies escalating by the impact of the Celtic Tiger period.

A Female Fate in “Quare Name For A Boy”, by Claire Keegan

Questions regarding the female gender – especially those that entail women’s role in society – are better understood once analyzed within a historical background. In the Irish patriarchal perspective, women were idealized as wife and mothers; motherhood was imposed as a social norm, and the domestic realm was sanctified as the basis of the family unit. This institutionalized version of womanhood, questioned initially by the 1970s feminist movements, is confronted by the transformations of Ireland after the Celtic Tiger Period, when the work environment was redesigned with the inclusion women as workforce. From the 1980s onward, Irish women demanded the revision of issues such as marriage, motherhood, abortion, sexual freedom and equal pay. In “Quare Name for a Boy”, published in Antarctica (1999), Claire Keegan presents the predicament of a woman who gets pregnant after a casual fling, returning home to reassess her place and fate, in comparison to those of her female relatives. This reading of Keegan’s story, in the light of studies by Pauline Jackson, Jacqueline Rose, and Pilar Argaiz on the social and cultural transformations that Ireland has undergone, intends to demonstrate how women are breaking the mold regarding female fate by opting for a more independent role in society.

Transnational mobility desires and discourses: Young people from return‐migrant families negotiate intergenerationality, mobility capital, and place embeddedness

AbstractA longitudinal and intergenerational perspective opens up possibilities of novel insights into the socio‐spatial practices and relations that constitute, and generate, transnational youth im/mobilities. This paper draws on research conducted over 10 years with young adults who had migrated to Ireland as children with their return‐migrant parents during the Celtic Tiger period. It explores how, as young adults, they envisage and navigate their unfolding im/mobility pathways. In a context where transnational mobility experience is highly valued and celebrated, they draw on their mobility capital as former migrants to self‐position as knowledgeable mobile subjects. However, precisely because of their personal and family mobility resources, their engagements with discourses of hypermobility are selective—simultaneously claiming the cultural capital of transnational mobility and de‐fetishising it by producing grounded interpretations that value place embeddedness. The paper sheds light on some of the tensions of contemporary youth mobilities in contexts of globalisation, uncertainty, and migration.

Ireland Inc.: The corporatization of affective life in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland

Employing a framework of commercial nationalism, this article analyses how a post-Celtic Tiger Irish government aligned with elite interests has doubled down on its commitment to corporate citizenship. Despite the depredations of this era being directly attributable to the irrational exuberance of the Celtic Tiger period and lapses in financial regulation, Ireland post-2008 is marked by a radical forgetfulness and defined by ‘Shock Doctrine’ regulatory policies that have installed corporatism at the heart of everyday life. Key features of this landscape include ongoing governmental facilitation of tax avoidance by multinational corporations, the hollowing out of public services, the normalization of under-employment and a burgeoning housing crisis. We show here how the popular images and narratives of the period index a shift toward corporate impregnability and a public culture in which individuals absorb greater risk and take up positions of heightened precarity.

The Possibilities of Shame in Dermot Bolger's Tanglewood

Dermot Bolger’s 2015 novel Tanglewood is one of a raft of literary responses to the demise of Ireland’s recent economic ‘miracle’, the so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’. Bolger’s narrative is deeply critical of the corrupted morality that characterised facets of the property ‘boom’, a corner of the Irish economy that underlay such a significant part of the economic buoyancy of the country. Consequently, Bolger mobilises shame as one part of his critical armoury, and in so doing he resurrects a familiar affect in the Irish context. However, Bolger’s use of shame, and his suggestion that those who benefited most lavishly during Ireland’s Celtic Tiger period should be shamed, and feel ashamed, are deeply conservative and self-defeating ways of confronting the aftermath of the economic recession in Ireland. As we note, Bolger’s version of shame causes little more than personal isolation and familial fracture, and lacks any potential to partake of what we shall term ‘a revolutionary politics of shame’.

Racism and Xenophobia: The Crisis of Black Asylum Seekers in Donald O’Kelly’s Asylum ! Asylum !

Abstract The Celtic Tiger Period altered the ethnic landscape of Irish society which suddenly became a destination for immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees. The socioeconomic and political transformations since the mid-1990s have given rise to experiences of racism by new racialised minorities, i.e. immigrant communities and refugees. This research paper highlights the racialisation of the government’s immigration policies, its reasons and consequences through examining Donald O’Kelly’s Asylum! Asylum! (1994). The play deals almost entirely with the painful experience of a desperate Ugandan asylum seeker during the boom. As an early scene in the play depicts, the black asylum seeker Joseph Omara is framed as a victim of societal and State racism. He is subject to unjust discrimination, pain and suffering. Throughout the play, he is incarcerated, humiliated and finally deported to his home country for no other reason except his blackness. العنصرية ورهاب الأجانب : أزمة طالبي اللجوء السياسي السود في مسرحية لجوء سياسي! لجوء سياسي! لدونالد أوکيلي ملخص خلال الفترة الزمنية المعروفة بسنوات النمر الأيرلندي شهدت أيرلندا طفرة في النمو الاقتصادي أدت إلى تدفق أعداد کبيرة من المهاجرين وطالبي اللجوء السياسي. لمواجهة هذه الأعداد المتزايدة من المهاجرين تبنت الحکومة الأيرلندية سياسه عنصريه ممنهجه تجاه الأقليات من المهاجرين وطالبي اللجوء السياسي. يهدف البحث إلى إلقاء الضوء على هذه الممارسات العنصرية الممنهجة ودوافعها وأيضا النتائج المترتبة عليها من خلال دراسة مسرحية لجوء سياسي ! لجوء سياسي ! للکاتب المسرحي دونالد أوکيلي والتي عرضت لأول مرة عام 1994. تتناول المسرحية التجربة المريرة للاجئ سياسي أوغندي في أيرلندا في تلک الفترة حيث تظهر الشخصية المحورية في المسرحية کضحية للممارسات العنصرية للدولة والمجتمع. تکشف أحداث المسرحية عن معاناة هذا اللاجئ حيث يتعرض للحبس والاعتداء والإهانات المتکررة وأخيرا للترحيل في نهاية المسرحية ليس لأي سبب غير کونه أسود.

“I Could Read It Like Leaves”: Communion of Languages in Paula Meehan’s Geomantic

“I Could Read It Like Leaves”: Communion of Languages in Paula Meehan’s Geomantic Wit Pietrzak Throughout her oeuvre, Paula Meehan has paid much attention to the tragic condition of oppressed people, including women and the financially destitute, all of whom are often evoked in conjunction with the precarious situation of the natural environment. In her twentieth-century volumes, the matters of economic deprivation and social injustice, also on the part of the Catholic Church, come to prominence, as in “The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks,” which focuses on the church’s “toxic language of evasion and hypocrisy.”1 In The Man Who Was Marked by Winter (1991), the role of poets across the ages has been that of “representative spokespersons of the oppressed and vulnerable communities,” even if Meehan is hesitant to accept that role, instead frequently “emphasiz[ing] the limitations involved in presenting herself as a spokesperson.”2 While it would be disingenuous to claim that her work has undergone a major change—especially as Meehan has noted, in regard to frequently being dubbed an urban poet, that “[she doesn’t] see the city and the human beings and non-human beings in the city as apart from nature that nature ends where man-made material looms”—it seems there has been what she herself describes as “a gear shift” in her twenty-first-century work, particularly in the last two collections, Painting Rain (2009) and Geomantic (2016).3 In them, the issue of environmental degradation is brought to the fore with an increased urgency. Given the breadth of her preoccupations and the degree to which they intertwine in her poetry as well as in interviews, “addressing her work fully,” as Kathryn Kirkpatrick points out, “requires an expansive ecocritical frame, one that [End Page 62] acknowledges the interconnections between exploitative economic systems, social inequities, and environmental degradation.”4 The “ecocritcal frame” that has so far been applied to reading Meehan’s poems includes the work of cultural theorist Carol Merchant as well as of ecofeminist thinkers like Rosi Braidotti, Val Plumwood, Maria Mies, and Vandana Shiva. The starting point in considering Meehan’s ecologically attuned work is the critique of “the cosmology of a capitalist patriarchal world system which defines freedom as the transcendence of nature, a transcendence available only for a few and at the expanse of the Others.”5 This condition of capitalist exploitation is characteristic for the Ireland of the Celtic Tiger period. Meehan has increasingly noted in interviews that So many of our vulnerable ecosystems were (are still) under threat from mindless turbo development. Late century capitalism run riot. Now that the boom is over and we’ve gone into recession and the government is using taxpayers’ money to bail out the banks, we may have a breathing space to estimate what’s been lost through the unmediated and rampant greed that characterized both planning and building in nineties and noughties Ireland. In there too is the “Sean Bean Bocht,” poor old mother Ireland with her four green fields—“each one is a jewel” as the song tells us, only now she’d more likely sing about her four green sites. House and site for sale was a common advertisement, whereas before you’d have House and garden for sale. In fact you’d be afraid to stand still too long in case someone built an apartment complex on your head.6 This general anxiety over the fate of the environment is given a still sharper expression in the 2009 interview with Jody Allen Randolph, in which Meehan states that “the ravages of turbo development in the last decade have meant enormous loss, erosions of rich biodiverse fields and the communities they sustained,” adding, “I think the big loser [of the Tiger-period boom] has been the environment. There are ecosystems and marginal zones that will never recover.”7 Compared to her earlier interviews, the 2009 conversation with Allen Randolph exudes a sense of grief for the condition of nature. The above remarks about the destruction the Irish environment has suffered are made in reference to her celebrated poem “Death of a Field,” which opens Painting Rain: “The field itself is lost...

Polyphony, Provincialism, Nostalgia and Involution in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland: Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart (2012)

ABSTRACTThis paper analyses the narrative and thematic structure of Donal Ryan’s debut novel, The Spinning Heart (2012), which offers a snapshot of rural Ireland after the Celtic Tiger period and questions its benefits, the modernisation of Ireland and the response of Irish people faced with critical times. It draws on three theoretical frameworks for the analysis of Ryan’s narrative structure, thematic content and style: first, a variation of Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia at social and stylistic levels; second, the conceptions of the parochial and the provincial in post-Celtic Tiger rural Ireland; third, the concept of nostalgia. The analysis concludes that the proliferation of voices and the use of monologues show Ryan’s need to portray disaffection and regret when a silent dialogising discourse reigns. Ryan’s novel denounces the loss of collectivity in rural communities to a more individualistic society. It proposes a parochialism that is universal albeit rooted in the local.

The end of the Celtic Tiger: an Irish case study on the failure of corporate governance and company law

This article considers the effect, if any, that company law and corporate governance law had on the phenomenon of excessive lending and borrowing that occurred in the Irish economy towards the end of the Celtic Tiger era (1990–2008). The final years of the Celtic Tiger period saw the growth and collapse of the Irish property bubble, fuelled by lending of ‘cheap’ money by Irish banks and borrowing by indigenous Irish property development companies. This chain of events culminated in a state guarantee and bailout of the Irish banking sector which has led to ongoing significant damage to Ireland and its economy, the full consequences of which are continuing to be manifest. What is clear is that excessive risktaking by banks, as lenders, and property development companies, as borrowers, led to the collapse of both sectors. The Irish property bubble, and this pattern of behaviour that caused it, is used here as a case study to raise questions as to why corporate governance law and company law seem to have failed to curtail such risktaking during this period. In describing these events from a legal perspective, the paper hypothesises that the failure of law can be explained by considering the inter-relationship between law and non-legal norms, the latter seeming to be more powerful and to have the ability to trump the rule of law in certain circumstances and contexts. This analysis of the role of non-legal norms is not intended to suggest that legal frameworks do not matter, but more to illustrate that, where they have failed to deliver stated goals, other factors must be understood so that the law can address the causes and drivers of this failure.

Fragmentation and vulnerability in Anne Enright's <i>The green road</i> (2015): Collateral casualties of the Celtic Tiger in Ireland

This article explores the representation of family and individuals in Anne Enright's novel The Green Road (2015) by engaging with Zygmunt Bauman's sociological category of “liquid modernity” (2000). In The Green Road, Enright uses a recurrent topic, a family gathering, to observe the multiple forms in which particular experiences seem to have suffered a process of fragmentation during the Celtic Tiger period. A comprehensive analysis of the form and plot of the novel exposes the ideological contradictions inherent in the once hegemonic notion of Irish family and brings attention to the different forms of individual vulnerability for which Celtic Tiger Ireland has no answer.

The Embodied Subjectivity of a Half-Formed Narrator: Sexual Abuse, Language (Un)formation and Melancholic Girlhood in Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

Set in Ireland, in some undetermined time and place, Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2014) is a story about the crisis of identity of a nameless girl who has been sexually abused by her uncle in her teens. The aberrant sexualisation resulting from rape and the socially pre-established discourses of girlhood and womanhood provoke the fragmentation of the protagonist’s identity as a female subject and her transformation into a “half-formed thing”. McBride tries to capture this process of half-formation by means of language and other experimental narrative strategies, which are a clear legacy of modernism and the works by female writers from the Celtic Tiger period. The violent world, in which the main character is under the rule of her authoritative mother and predatory uncle, contrasts with the loving relationship with her terminally ill brother. The melancholic experiences of shame and guilt invade the Girl’s sense of embodied identity and interfere with the process of becoming an individual. The death of her brother is the ultimate trigger for the half-formed girl to disengage permanently from her “sinful” body, opening the possibility of an alternative mode of being in the world. The analysis of this novel-long stream-of-consciousness focuses on the narration of the conflicts with corporeality, abnormal sexualisation, the dissolution of subjectivity and failure to regain agency over a powerless body.

Is there a ‘revolving door’ to the private sector in Irish politics?

ABSTRACTThe connections between Irish politicians and the private sector are the subject of constant speculation, particularly in the post Celtic Tiger period. However, there is little systematic evidence whether publicised cases of such ties represent the exception to the rule, or if they are symptomatic of a larger problem. In this paper we focus on one aspect of the public–private nexus and investigate whether a revolving door – the movement of individuals between public and private sectors – exists in Ireland. Using evidence from originally collected data on former TDs from 1989 to 2016, we find that almost one third of ex-politicians are in the private sector; however, many merely return to their previous occupations as solicitors or small business owners. Still, 11 per cent turn to consulting, lobbying or corporate board membership. We find that former cabinet ministers, the representatives of FF, PD and FG parties, as well as TDs who do not run and lose are more likely to join the corporate sector. We additionally compare former TDs with ex-officials in the civil service. Finally, placing Ireland in a comparative context, we find that the extent of the revolving door problem here is lower than in other democracies.

The economic boom, bust and transport inequity in suburban Dublin, Ireland

This paper examines the existence and extent of transport inequity and disadvantage in new suburbs in Dublin, built during the Celtic Tiger period and as experienced during the recession. Findings are presented from a household postal survey from three case study areas built between 2001 and 2008. The case study areas are typical ‘middle class’ suburbs, and were constructed at a time when Ireland was experiencing unprecedented economic growth. The subsequent recession left many of these areas in significant negative equity, and householders with very limited housing mobility. Results from the survey point to considerable problems that are impacting on population groups typically vulnerable to transport disadvantage, such as low income earners and car-less households. The study also highlights the burdens on middle and high income households, and those who are experiencing ‘forced car ownership’. The paper concludes with a commentary on how the findings might be used to inform better transport and planning policy.

The Irish Economic Crisis: The Expiry of a Development Model?

This article studies the impact of the 2008 economic crisis on the Irish development model. The Republic of Ireland has developed its economy thanks to an FDI-led strategy. This strategy was very successful during the Celtic Tiger period in the 1990s and 2000s. Will the crisis put an end to Ireland’s economic development? If Ireland manages to keep a low corporate tax rate, it appears that the country will be able to carry on with its development model. However, Ireland seems to have almost achieved its catching up with the EU core countries and it will be difficult to reach growth rates similar to those of the Celtic Tiger period.

The End of the Celtic Tiger The Property Bubble, Corporate Governance and Failure

This article considers the effect, if any, that company law and corporate governance law had on the phenomenon of excessive lending and borrowing that occurred in the Irish economy towards the end of the Celtic Tiger era (1990–2008). The final years of the Celtic Tiger period saw the growth and collapse of the Irish property bubble, fuelled by lending of ‘cheap’ money by Irish banks and borrowing by indigenous Irish property development companies. This chain of events culminated in a state guarantee and bailout of the Irish banking sector which has led to ongoing significant damage to Ireland and its economy, the full consequences of which are continuing to be manifest. What is clear is that excessive risktaking by banks, as lenders, and property development companies, as borrowers, led to the collapse of both sectors. The Irish property bubble, and this pattern of behaviour that caused it, is used here as a case study to raise questions as to why corporate governance law and company law seem to have failed to curtail such risktaking during this period. In describing these events from a legal perspective, the paper hypothesises that the failure of law can be explained by considering the inter-relationship between law and non-legal norms, the latter seeming to be more powerful and to have the ability to trump the rule of law in certain circumstances and contexts. This analysis of the role of non-legal norms is not intended to suggest that legal frameworks do not matter, but more to illustrate that, where they have failed to deliver stated goals, other factors must be understood so that the law can address the causes and drivers of this failure.

From Celtic Tiger to Crisis: Progress, Problems and Prospects for Social Security in Ireland

AbstractThis article provides an assessment of the impact of changes to social security in Ireland during both the Celtic Tiger and crisis periods, comparing change in social security rates relative to prices and to median equivalized net income. It is argued that, contrary to some commentary, there was progress in terms of social welfare generosity during the Celtic Tiger years, despite Ireland adopting a low‐tax economic model. However, in the latter years of the Celtic Tiger period, this progress was increasingly leveraged against precarious property‐related taxes. Following the collapse of the housing bubble, the bank guarantee and the bailout, there has been substantial retrenchment of social security, both in terms of cuts to some of the primary social welfare payments, tightening of scheme rules as well as more direct cuts to less visible schemes. The article provides an assessment of these changes, ending on a cautionary note in arguing that the prospects for the future do not augur well given Ireland's continued commitment to a low‐tax economic model.