Identity predicaments and the music metaphor in contemporary Irish fiction

Abstract

Ever since Jimmy Rabbitte proffered his oft-quoted “niggers of Europe” line in Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments (1987), contemporary Irish culture, especially during the boom years, was characterised by an insistent revisiting of popular music as a metaphor for interracial and/or intercultural connection or understanding. Cross-cultural identification through music may be seen, in Werner Sollors’s memorable terms, as an eschewing of “descent” relations in favour of “consensual” relations. This essay revisits the music metaphor as it has manifested itself in Irish fiction since it was announced officially that Ireland had entered recession in 2008. Specifically, it explores Kevin Curran’s Beatsploitation (2012) and Joseph O’Connor’s The Thrill of It All (2014) arguing that, through their deployment of the music metaphor, the novels stage the murky politics of contemporary Irish iterations of consent and descent. By exposing the extent to which the rhetoric of Irish economic recovery is yoked to paradoxical invocations of volitional and ancestral Irishness, the novels urge their readers to consider the ways in which discourses of economic recovery work to reinforce and perpetuate patterns of exclusion and marginalisation established during the Celtic Tiger years.

Keywords:

• Joseph O’Connor
• Kevin Curran
• David McWilliams
• popular music
• economic recovery
• migrants

Notes

1. McWilliams, Generation Game, 60.

2. O’Connor, Thrill of It All, 111.

3. For a discussion of the invocation of Phil Lynott as “the incarnation of multiple hybridities” in Celtic Tiger Ireland, see my “Other People’s Diasporas,” 35, 176–9.

4. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 6.

5. Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads, 56.

6. Ibid.

7. Onkey, Blackness and Transatlantic Irish Identity, 171.

8. Ibid., 138.

9. Ibid., 137.

10. Gray, “Irish State Diaspora Engagement,” 263.

11. Fanning, New Guests of the Irish Nation, 163–4.

12. McWilliams, Generation Game, 255.

13. Ibid., 243.

14. Ibid., 255.

15. Ibid., 243.

16. Ibid., 233.

17. Ibid., 236.

18. Ibid., 233.

19. Ibid., 231.

20. McWilliams, “Rooney,” 14. See also McWilliams, “Other Irish,” 4–5.

21. McWilliams, Generation Game, 256.

22. Brennan and Walshe, “Economist Rallies Diaspora,” 11. Among the attendees were Alan Joyce, chief executive of Qantas; Kip Condron, president and chief executive of AXA Financial; Brendan McDonagh, chief executive HSBC North America; Dennis Swanson, president, Fox Television Stations; Craig Barrett, retired chief executive and chairman of Intel; and Moya Doherty, director of Tyrone Productions. See also Sheahan, “Top Ex-pat Business Chiefs,” 9.

23. See the website of the Certificate of Irish Heritage: https://www.heritagecertificate.com. In August 2015, as this article was going to press, it was reported by Ciara Kenny that the scheme had been abandoned due to a low uptake. Only 2925 certificates were purchased since the scheme began in September 2011.

24. Gray, “Irish State Diaspora Engagement,” 266.

25. Cited in ibid.

26. Ibid., 268.

27. Ibid., 269–70.

28. Curran, Beatsploitation, 11, 33.

29. Donnelly, “Catholic-first School Policy,” 3. Balbriggan is home to an Educate Together primary school, which opened in 2007 (a secondary school will open in 2016). In September of that year, the school became the focus of media attention when it was alleged that the establishment of Educate Together schools in areas with relatively high numbers of migrant settlers was leading to de facto segregation in Irish primary schools. The Irish Independent reported that the Equality Authority warned Catholic schools that their “Catholic-first school enrolment policy could be in breach of Irish and EU anti-discrimination laws”. The Authority was “reacting to the controversy over all-black enrolment in a new school in Balbriggan, Co Dublin catering for about 50 pupils for whom no place was available in other schools in the area”.

30. Curran, Beatsploitation, 288.

31. Courtney, “From Gleeks to Wikileaks,” 13.

32. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 280.

33. Curran, Beatsploitation, 79.

34. Ibid., 148.

35. Ibid., 40.

36. Ibid., 41.

37. Ibid., 74.

38. Ibid., 39.

39. Cowen, “Speech by Taoiseach.”

40. Daire O’Brien, “Old Values,” 14.

41. Declan O’Brien, “€5bn Export Surge,” 1.

42. Coleman, “Brand Ireland,” 27.

43. Goldberg, Threat of Race, 338.

44. Curran, Beatsploitation, 7.

45. Ibid., 29.

46. Ibid., 113.

47. Ibid., 200.

48. Goldberg, 338.

49. Ibid., 331.

50. Curran, Beatsploitation, 17–18.

51. Ibid., 231.

52. Ibid., 125, 53.

53. Ibid., 127–9.

54. Ibid., 162.

55. Ibid., 17.

56. Ibid., 263.

57. Moynihan, “Other People’s Diasporas,” 33.

58. The reference to Theatre L (23) recalls Eddie Virago’s mention of the same space, in relation to UCD, in his 1991 novel Cowboys and Indians (13). Stanton Poly boasts an Arts Block (16) and Agricultural Science students who, inexplicably, all come from the West of Ireland (58). The novelist Seamus Price (Deane?) is Professor of English (39) and there is “a kindly tutor” named Declan Kiely (Kiberd?) (51), all of which detail is consistent with O’Connor’s time at UCD in the early 1980s.

59. Clegg, “Open, Confident Society.” As (then) Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg observed in a speech delivered in Luton in March 2011, the city has recently had “to endure being associated in the national consciousness with some very grim imagery indeed”. Citing the “ugly public posturing of Al Muhajiroun and the English Defence League”, and the fact that Luton was “the train station where the 7/7 bombers boarded a train for London, before detonating horror in our capital”, Clegg’s speech aimed instead to draw attention to “a different Luton”, a city home to “the most vibrant campaigns against racism, extremism and Islamophobia”. In January 2013, it was widely reported that Luton was one of three white-minority cities – other than London – in Britain. In Luton, according to the Daily Telegraph, “white Britons comprise 45% of the population, Pakistanis make up 14% and Bangladeshis 7%”. See Philipson, “White Britons a Minority.”

60. O’Connor, Irish Male, 344. From 2008 until 2012, O’Connor had a weekly slot on Drivetime, a news and current affairs programme that airs on RTÉ Radio One between 4.30 and 7 pm on weekdays. Selected recordings of O’Connor’s Drivetime musings, many of which were engaged with recessionary Ireland, were released on CD in 2010 as The Drivetime Diaries.

61. O’Connor, Thrill of It All, 43.

62. Ibid., 111.

63. Ibid., 37.

64. Ibid., 201.

65. Ibid., 109.

66. Ibid., 159.

67. Ibid., 160.

68. Ibid., 214–15.

69. Ibid., 226.

70. Ibid., 215.

71. McWilliams, Generation Game, 233.

72. O’Connor, Thrill of It All, 112.

73. Ibid., 20–1.

74. Ibid., 39.

75. Campbell, “Irish Blood, English Heart,” 104.

76. Ibid., 82, 143.

77. O’Connor, Irish Blood English Hearts.

78. Campbell, “Irish Blood, English Heart,” 43.

79. Ibid., 49.

80. Ibid., 54.

81. O’Connor, Thrill of It All, 170.

82. Ibid., 133.

83. Ibid., 169. Fran’s status as a kind of endlessly self-reinventing subject recalls his namesake, the enigmatic balladeer Pius Mulvey in Star of the Sea. For Pius, as for Fran, song-writing is simultaneously earnest and self-serving. Ballads are “a secret language: a means of saying things that could otherwise not be said in a frightened and occupied country”. By the same token, the main thing in balladry “was to make a singable song. The facts did not matter: that was the secret.” See O’Connor, Star of the Sea, 94, 102.

84. O’Connor, Thrill of It All, 170.

85. Ibid., 183–4.

86. Negra, “Irish in Us,” 2, 3.

87. O’Connor, Thrill of It All, 318–20.

88. Curran, Beatsploitation, 274.

89. O’Connor, Thrill of It All, 198–9.