From Sally Rooney’s bestsellers to actor Paul Mescal, Ireland, which holds a general election this week, has been enjoying a cultural and creative renaissance in recent years.
In the past few weeks it’s been hard to miss Rooney’s fourth novel “Intermezzo”, the Grammy nomination of rockers Fontaines DC or Mescal’s muscles on posters and trailers for “Gladiator II”.
“We’re having a cultural moment and there’s a lot of energy around Irishness at the moment,” said Ruth Barton, professor of film studies at Trinity College Dublin.
The phenomenal global success of the television adaptation of Rooney’s “Normal People”, which introduced Mescal to the world, has played a key role.
“I definitely think there’s a new wave of Irish writers, novelists — particularly women — who came up with books on experiences that were not articulated before,” said Christopher Morash, the Seamus Heaney professor of Irish writing at Trinity.
Irish writers, musicians and filmmakers have all been praised for their humour and being down-to-earth.
“The profile, internationally in particular, of Irish artists across all arts forms has actually never been higher,” said Maureen Kennelly, director of the Arts Council of Ireland.
That has led to cross-cultural cooperation, for example, with Oscar-winning actor Cillian Murphy starring in the adaptation of Irish author Claire Keegan’s bestseller “Small Things Like These” and Fontaines DC providing the soundtrack to Andrea Arnold’s film “Bird”.
It also starred Dubliner and Oscar nominee Barry Keoghan (“The Banshees of Inisherin”).
Barton said the presence of multinational tech giants such as Meta and Apple in Ireland due to low corporate taxes has helped.
“The country has more money than it used to have… we’re fundamentally a rich country and we have spent a lot of money on culture,” she added.
The Arts Council budget has jumped since 2019, Trinity’s drama academy, The Lir, has become a hotbed of new talent, while the country has even launched a trial minimum income for artists, which the main political parties have promised to continue.
– Pride and plaudits –
“I think the country has always defined itself through its culture and particularly its writers and poets,” said Barton, pointing to the likes of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, who earned world renown.
For Kennelly, periods of cultural booms have coincided with “seismic shifts” in society, the last being the final years of the three decades of sectarian violence over British rule in Northern Ireland.
That brought the likes of U2 and The Cranberries to the global stage.
More recently, the approval of same-sex marriage in 2015 then legalisation of abortion in 2018 have also transformed Ireland’s image from conservative to progressive.
“There’s no doubt that there’s a sense of Irish society increasingly freeing itself from the affects of the (Roman Catholic) Church,” said Kennelly.
Morash likened Ireland’s outsized cultural influence to that of South Korea, where K-Pop has become its biggest global export.
“You had a country that was an agricultural one that turned into a pop culture hub,” he added.
Now Ireland is “cool” overseas because of a new generation of actors: Mescal and Murphy are household names alongside the likes of Saoirse Ronan (“Blitz”, “Lady Bird”, “Brooklyn”), Andrew Scott (“Fleabag”, “Sherlock Holmes”, “Ripley”) and Nicola Coughlan (“Bridgerton”, “Derry Girls”).
Murphy, who hails from Cork in Ireland’s deep south, this year spoke of his pride in his country in his best actor Oscar acceptance speech for “Oppenheimer”, ending with a heartfelt thank you — in the Irish language.
The unexpected success of “Kneecap”, a docu-fiction about three Belfast upstarts who rap in the ancient langauge, marks the beginning of a new turn towards the Irish language “as a kind of medium of cultural expression”, said Barton.
The film has been named in 14 categories in the British Independent Film Awards in December and selected to represent Ireland in the foreign language category at next year’s Oscars.
