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Irish culture following the 2008 crash can only be understood in light of the two decades of economic boom immediately prior: the Celtic Tiger. The Tiger embodied late capitalism in its fullest peacocking glory with its reliance on unregulated international flows of capital, its structural integration of tax evasion and social inequality, and its deadening insistence that, in Margaret Thatcher's favored phrase, "there is no alternative." As late as 2007-right on the cusp of the plunge-Irish historical materialist critic Joe Cleary warned that
[n]ow, in a post-Cold War climate where it is conventional to assume that the social templates of the future are already given, since all serious alternatives to liberal capitalism have been eliminated from the world stage, that sense of dogmatically stupefied certainty seems to apply more to the artistic and intellectual worlds of affluent Western societies, including Ireland, than to any others. (2, emphasis added)
Just a year later, the very status of Ireland as an "affluent Western society" was in question. As Gerry Smyth noted in 2012, by early 2008 "Ireland's place amongst the global economic elite was [still] guaranteed" (133), but this guarantee then collapsed with astonishing speed. We all know what happened next, as Smyth summarizes:
Credit Crunch leading to Financial Crisis leading to Global Recession . . . . Ireland's great economic miracle was built upon very, very shaky foundations indeed; and once those foundations began to shake, they brought the whole edifice of the Irish economic miracle crashing to the ground in record time.
(133)
The journalist Fintan O'Toole has noted the symbolic importance of Celtic Tiger Ireland to the neoliberal world-system, calling the Irish economy at the height of the boom "the poster child of free-market globalization," "a moral tale with a happy ending for all those who learned its lessons" (10). The revisionist historian R. F. Foster calls O'Toole "[o]ne of the most persuasive of the begrudgers." "Begrudger" here denotes an adversary of the Celtic Tiger's advocates, the "boosters." Foster himself, writing in 2007, prevaricated before siding with the "boosters." With impeccable comic timing he wrote Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 25.2. 2019. Copyright © 2019 by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
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