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

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.”

KEYWORDS:

• Celtic Phoenix
• Celtic Tiger
• contemporary Irish literature
• literature and capitalism
• modernism
• Ross O’Carroll-Kelly

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In the first of these two parts, some observations and examples are repeated from my short 2021 Alluvium article “From the Ashes: The Celtic Phoenix, Anna Burns’ Milkman and Sally Rooney’s Normal People”, in which I considered Milkman (2018) and Normal People (2018) as alternate models of “Celtic Phoenix literature”. However, the timeline given here has been greatly expanded, revised, and updated from that previous article.

2. Kitchin, O’ Callaghan, Boyle, Gleeson, and Keaveney, “Placing Neoliberalism,” 1302.

3. Burke-Kennedy, “Inventor;” and OED, “Celtic.”

4. Foster, Luck and the Irish, 188.

5. The mis-spelling here of “Fianna Fail,” without the fada in “Fáil,” is retained from the original script.

6. Howard, Breaking Dad, 4. I am grateful to Paul Howard and to Faith O’Grady of the Lisa Richards Agency for providing me with a copy of this script. As the document provided was unpaginated, page numbers refer simply to the pagination of this document as it appears in Microsoft Word.

7. According to John McKeown’s Irish Independent review the setting is 2022, although this is not stated in the script. A “decade and a half” after Ahern’s resignation would place the play’s setting in 2023 — consistent with Ahern’s stated age, as Ahern turned 71 in September 2022.

8. O’Brien, “Tendency-wit,” 72.

9. Egan, “Celtic Phoenix Emerges.”

10. Ibid.

11. Larson and Porpora, “Resistible Rise,” 763.

12. Horn, “Shifting Towards”; “Shift Happens”; and “Pride and Rise.”

13. Kenny, “Speech.”

14. Myers, “Society.”

15. McCourt, “Credibility.”

16. Kelly, “Re-education.”

17. Gough, “State of Irish Literature.”

18. Ibid.

19. Howard, Breaking Dad, 4.

20. Ibid., 5.

21. Ibid., 6.

22. Ibid., 10.

23. Freyne, “The Joke.”

24. Sweeney, “Soapbox.”

25. Ibid.

26. O’Keeffe, “Opinion.”

27. Kummer, “Pro-Business.”

28. Financial Times, “Celtic Phoenix.”

29. Economist, “Celtic Phoenix.”

30. Shmuel, “How Ireland.”

31. Regan and Brazys, “Celtic Phoenix or Leprechaun Economics.” The phrase “leprechaun Economics” itself originated from the Twitter account of American economist Paul Krugman.

32. O’Toole, “Waking the Feminists,” 135; 152.

33. Collinson, “Brexit-Fuelled Boom.”

34. Parsons, “Phoenix … in Flight.”

35. Wilcox, “Ireland – The Celtic Phoenix.”

36. Independent, “Phoenix Passed Its Peak?”

37. Independent, “Phoenix Rising Fast.”

38. Curran, “From Tiger to Phoenix”; and Global Media Post “Ireland Report 2018.”

39. Global Consultancy, “Economy.”

40. Fitzmaurice, “Seven Dublin Artists.”

41. O’Reilly, “Celtic Phoenix.”

42. McCarthy, “Commodity and Trade Structure.”

43. Broe, “‘Taken Down.’”

44. Independent, “Celtic Phoenix Notes.”

45. O’Brien, “Parallel Ireland.”

46. Ibid.

47. Patten, “Contemporary Irish Fiction,” 259.

48. See Gilligan (2018) and Ward Sell (2019), who each offer a literature review of Celtic Tiger realism and an account of McBride’s post-crash modernism, and Flynn (2018), who convincingly links McCormack’s use of stream of consciousness to the post-crash economic climate.

49. McBride, “How I wrote.”

50. One economic analysis, by Valeria Andreoni, uses a yet more condensed scale of: “Tiger” 1998–2007, “Global Financial Crisis” 2008–2011, “Celtic Phoenix” 2012–14 (Andreoni, “From the Celtic Tiger … ,” 8).

51. Couch, “Strange Hotel.”

52. Williams, “Strange Hotel Review.”

53. McKillop, “Review”; and Lasdun, “One Part Gangster.”

54. McCormack’s first novel since Solar Bones, This Plague of Souls, will be published by Tramp Press in October 2023 (Tramp Press, “Plague of Souls”).

55. Hughes, Orchid and the Wasp, 134.

56. Evers, “Earlie King … Review.”

57. Silcox, “A Reordering at Play.”

58. Harrison, “Modernist Legacies.”

59. Charman, “Sally Rooney’s Normal People.”

60. For her reading of Dolan, see Darling, “‘Our Great Generational Decision’”; and Feigel, “Learning to Say No.”

61. Kiberd, “A Cultural History,” 276.

62. McCormack, Solar Bones, 14.

63. Power, White City, 3.

64. Hughes, The Wild Laughter, 66.

65. Rooney, Normal People, 34.

66. O’Callaghan, Nothing on Earth, 102; 185.

67. See note 56 above.

68. See note 57 above.

69. Flynn, “Where are You From.”