Austerity and Irish Women's Writing and Culture, 1980–2020

Deirdre Flynn, Ciara L. Murphy, Deirdre Flynn, Ciara L. Murphy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000588354
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Austerity and Irish Women's Writing and Culture, 1980–2020 focuses on the under-represented relationship between austerity and Irish women's writing across the last four decades. Taking a wide focus across cultural mediums, this collection of essays from leading scholars in Irish studies considers how economic policies impacted on and are represented in Irish women's writing during critical junctures in recent Irish history. Through an investigation of cultural production north and south of the border, this collection analyses women's writing using a multimedium approach through four distinct lenses: austerity, feminism, and conflict; arts and austerity; race and austerity; and spaces of austerity. This collection asks two questions: what sort of cultural output does austerity produce? And if the effects of austerity are gendered, then what are the gender-specific responses to financial insecurity, both national and domestic? By investigating how austerity is treated in women's writing and culture from 1980 to 2020, this collection provides a much-needed analysis of the gendered experience of economic crisis and specifically of Ireland's consistent relationship with cycles of boom and bust. Thirteen chapters, which focus on fiction, drama, poetry, women's life writing, ?and women's cultural contributions, examine these questions. This volume takes the reader on a journey across decades and forms as a means of interrogating the growth of the economic divide between the rich and the poor since the 1980s through the voices of Irish women.

1Irish Women’s Writing and Culture under the Shadow of Austerity

Deirdre Flynn and Ciara L. Murphy

DOI: 10.4324/9781003207474-1

In 2018, Claire Kilroy said there had been a Celtic Tiger of Fiction in the aftermath of the banking collapse. According to The Devil I Know (2012) author, ‘once the boom collapsed, once the economy crashed, then the stories started coming out because now we have a story’ (García). This response to what had happened during the Celtic Tiger and the subsequent collapse has created what she calls a new genre: ‘austerity fiction’. In 2015, the Guardian’s Justine Jordan suggested that there was ‘palpable energy’ in Irish fiction after the Tiger’s demise (‘A New Irish Literary Boom’). The same year, Patrick Lonergan writing in the Irish Times suggested that the economic collapse was the saviour of Irish theatre: ‘Since the end of the Celtic Tiger period, we have seen the emergence of exciting new forms of theatre-making, and a resurgence in Irish playwriting and design’ (Lonergan). There is no doubt that in the aftermath of the 2008 collapse, Irish writing and performance flourished, and in particular women’s voices and stories came to the fore. Writers like Claire Kilroy, Melatu Uche Okorie, Sally Rooney, Louise O’Neill, Lisa McInerney, Eimear McBride, Sara Baume, Ailbhe Darcy, Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi, Rosaleen McDonagh, Louise Lowe, Ursula Rani Sarma, and Stacey Gregg became established within the Irish literary and cultural scene.

When the then Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan bailed out the banks in 2008, and the Troika arrived in Ireland, the result was a government policy of austerity that continued for many years. As one of the first countries in Europe to declare ourselves in recession, Ireland had ‘a structural adjustment programme imposed by the IMF/ECB/EU known as the troika’ (Barry). The ‘social consequences’ of the crisis were what Cullen and Murphy call ‘severe’ with ‘a 7 per cent or €30.1 billion reduction in public expenditure over six years, the impact of which has exacerbated existing gendered inequalities and intensified the neoliberal Irish model’ (Cullen and Murphy). Unemployment levels grew sharply, and any progress that had been made in gender equality employment policies were paused when ‘policies shifted’ as Ursula Barry explains: ‘Gender equality was marginalized and treated effectively as a luxury that, due to crisis, was rendered unattainable’ (Barry). Combined with cuts to social welfare supports, the impact on women was significant. According to Barry and Conroy, there have been ‘negative consequences – some severe – from a gender, equality, and social inclusion perspective to many of these policies’ (Barry and Conroy). Despite, what Debbie Ging calls, the ‘mancession’ rhetoric, many women were hardest hit by the 2008 recession (209). Similarly, in the south, the recession of the 1980s coincided with a significant conservative push back on women’s rights (hard fought for and won in the 1970s) and which resulted in the introduction of the 8th amendment of the Irish Constitution as well as large-scale scandals exemplified by the Kerry Babies and the Ann Lovett controversies. In the north of Ireland, the 1980s was a period of social, economic, and political upheaval. Sectarian violence was at its peak in the 1980s, with a range of paramilitary groups on all sides of the divide. The human cost was huge, and after decades of unrest, modern politics and grassroots activism saw people move towards a more moderate politics, leading to a ceasefire in 1994.

This collection asks two questions: what sort of literature and theatre does austerity produce? And if the effects of austerity are gendered, then what are the gender-specific responses to austerity? According to Mary Murphy, ‘gender has not been a variable in most studies of the Irish banking and economic crisis’, and this collection redresses the balance (220). We ask how do writers and artists across the island of Ireland respond to austerity? We investigate how austerity manifests itself in women’s writing and culture from 1980 to 2020 providing much-needed analysis of the gendered experience of economic crisis. Across this volume’s multi-disciplinary approach, these 13 chapters will examine the nature of austerity and how the violence of austerity is represented in Irish women’s writing. This volume takes the reader on a journey across decades and forms as a means of interrogating the growth of the economic divide between rich and poor since the 1980s and its impact on Irish women.

This book will expand on the excellent work of Claire Bracken and Tara Harney-Mahajan, who edited special issues of Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory in 2017 that focused on Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland Contemporary Women’s Writing. This important intervention detailed how ‘women’s literary voices thus play a significant role in the questioning and interrogation of the neoliberal value systems that continue to structure, post-boom, the austerity and recovery policies of the period’ (1). Similarly, we will engage with the vital scholarship of Melissa Sihra and Cathy Leeney, whose scholarship on women’s theatre and drama paved the way for numerous fruitful investigations of Irish women’s dramatic writing. Sihra’s Women in Irish Drama (2007) brings together key scholars in the field to negotiate a century of women’s authorship and representation in Irish drama. Leeney’s Irish Women Playwrights, 1900–1939 (2010) demonstrates how women’s dramatic writing was a fruitful element of modern Irish drama and a foundational influence for contemporary Irish women writers. Several other researchers have made important critical contributions to Irish women’s writing across mediums in this time period, including David Clare, Fiona McDonagh, and Justine Nakase,¹ Fiona Coleman Coffey,² Miriam Haughton and Maria Kurdi,³ Heather Ingman (Ingman),⁴ Cliona O Gallchoir (Ingman and O Gallchoir),⁵ and Michael Pierce.⁶

Cycles of Boom and Bust: Austerity as Violence

Ireland, like other late-capitalist nations, is no stranger to the damaging and chaotic cycles of economic boom and bust. In the last fifty years alone, Ireland has seen the detrimental impact of economic recessions in the 1980s and the mid-2000s to 2010s. This has resulted in large-scale emigration, the decimation of public services, and a widening of the margins of Irish society through systematic and government-led austerity. Ian GR Shaw describes austerity capitalism as violence that has a severe negative impact on our societies. These policies create divisions, and repercussions of austerity can be observed ‘in bodies, buildings, minds, ecologies, streets – slashing the potential of worlds to provide a dignified life’ (972).

The economic depression of the 1980s followed the boom of the 1960s and 1970s when Ireland’s entry to the EEC in 1972 created significant growth and modernisation. However, the 1980s brought a global downturn, and the initial level of European and international investment could not be maintained. As Drudy and Collins explain:

[T]he 1980s proved to be a period of difficulty. Ireland, heavily dependent on external growth, was hit by a severe world recession. Significant government expenditure and heavy reliance on borrowed funds from the late 1970s proved unsustainable and the national debt rose significantly (340).

In response to this fiscal crisis, a range of austerity measures were put into place in order to reduce the national debt and steady the ship. Kinsella explains that this policy of austerity was seen as successful, as overall debt levels were reduced from ‘a peak of 112% in 1986 to 25% by 2007’ (233). With the return of the economic downturn in the 2000s these measures were used as a ‘blueprint’ to respond to the crisis (Kinsella 233). However, while Kinsella points out, these were very different times and the fiscal parallels are limited, austerity policies were once again instigated by the then government in 2008. Neo-liberal austerity policies have the biggest impact on the most vulnerable in our society and have disproportionately harmed women and their position in society. As Spillane explains, this fiscal approach is ‘a systematic dismantling and restructuring of equality infrastructure’ (159):

The withdrawal or slashing of funding to state-supported equality, poverty and women’s organisations has not only undermined but attempted to reverse some of the progress made in recent decades and illustrates the extent of structural violence against women in Ireland (159).

In the case of the 2008 economic crash, post-Celtic Tiger, the approach promoted by the Troika and the Irish government in response had a profound impact on Irish society, and the implications of those decisions are still being felt today. Policies of austerity have been shown to negatively affect the most vulnerable in society as Cooper and Whyte point out: ‘people most affected by austerity cuts are not only struggling under the financial strain but are becoming ill, physically and emotionally, and many are dying’ (2). Specifically, in Ireland, social welfare supports were eroded with sweeping cuts to everything from child benefit to pensions and single-parent allowances:

the era of austerity has seen some €28 billion removed from the Irish economy in the guise of tax increases and reductions in state services. This represents around one-fifth of the country’s GDP, meaning that the austerity measures introduced in Ireland have effected [sic] the greatest economic adjustment ever experienced in a developed country outside of wartime.

(Coulter and Nagle 5)

In the arts sector, austerity measures have ensured a largely heterogeneous and freelance workforce, and the implications of this employment instability are of widespread harm among artists and arts workers, as recent report into harmful behaviour in Ireland’s arts sector demonstrates. The Speak Up: A Call for Change report found a tangible link between freelance employment and the likelihood that the respondent would experience harmful behaviour in the workplace. The report, which was published in October 2021 and sought to examine dignity in the workplace issues across Ireland’s arts sector, stated that ‘63% of the respondents to their survey indicated that they worked in a freelance capacity’.⁷ The report goes on to find that ‘Freelancers were much more likely to experience sexual harassment (24% of respondents) than non-freelance respondents (14%), and more likely to experience humiliation (46%) compared to the general respondent cohort (38%)’ and that ‘freelance workers are more vulnerable to instances of harmful behaviours in work within the arts sector. This may relate to the increased precarity and lack of job security freelance workers face’ (Murphy et al). These economic policies have had a wider impact, especially when combined with the incredible social changes in the last 40 years, altering the fabric of life across the nation. Although the term ‘austerity’ has only become popularised in recent decades, the so-called austerity politics of the post-Celtic Tiger era provide a lens through which to view previous periods of economic recession on the island of Ireland.

Social Change

Irish society has also been called on more regularly in recent decades to vote on substantial changes to the Irish Constitution/Bunreacht na hÉireann through referendums. Since the 1980s, the Irish electorate has voted in 29 referendums. Fifteen of these referendums have been on social issues such as regulations on: reproductive rights (1983, 1992, 2002, and 2018), divorce (1986, 1995, and 2019), marriage equality (2015), children’s rights (2012), and citizenship rights (2004) among others. This period of 40 years has been one of great social and economic upheaval and change. The Irish public was called on numerous times to vote on what the constitution should contain. From the citizenship referendum to the referendums on abortion and more recently the eighth amendment, many of these focused on women’s bodies. These referendums asked what kind of place we want Ireland to be, and how this should be reflected in our constitution. From the referendum on the Good Friday Agreement (1998) to the Divorce referendum (1996) and to the repeated European Treaty referendums (1987, 1992, 1998, 2001, 2002, 2008, and 2009) essential questions were asked on traditional markers of Irish identity such as Catholicism and sovereignty. The timing of the referendums is also interesting. As we move towards prosperity, referendums on the liberalisation of our constitution are held – Divorce (1996), Equal Marriage (2015), and Abortion (2018). In times of fiscal crisis, referendums on curtailing rights were held, such as the insertion of the Eighth amendment (1983).

The citizenship referendum was held in 2004, just as the Celtic Tiger was on pause. This referendum which asked voters to remove the automatic right to citizenship of Ireland at birth passed by 79.1%. Set against the backdrop of massive inward migration at the turn of the millennium, the referendum focused on the pregnant bodies of migrants, rather than the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that caused the anomaly. As Vincent Browne said in 2007, it was ‘a despicable stunt designed for political advantage and devoid of any rational justification of any sort’ (Browne). Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Irish Women’s Writing and Culture under the Shadow of Austerity
• Section 1 Austerity, Feminism, and Conflict
• Section 2 Arts and Austerity
• Section 3 Race and Austerity
• Section 4 Spaces of Austerity
• Index