It’s 100 years on from the Easter Rising, but in the wake of economic crisis and deep uncertainty, Ireland faces huge challenges once more. Here, five young Irish novelists offer a personal view of their homeland today

Kevin Curran’s first novel, Beatsploitation, tackled the subject of racism in Ireland. His follow-up, Citizens, takes the events of 1916 as its starting point. He works as a teacher and lives in Skerries, County Dublin

In the winter of 2014 I attended my first anti-water charges protest. But the march had already started – its smooth flow of bodies drifting cheerfully down O’Connell Street in Dublin – by the time I joined it. My train had been delayed. Such was the feeling of distrust with the government, whispers from passengers with their “No way, we won’t pay” placards had spread giddy rumours through the carriage that it was a state-directed conspiracy to stop us getting there.

I met my friend Phil near Cathal Brugha Street – only yards from where my great-grandfather had charged an enemy barricade (having taken to the streets in a much more violent show of ideological protest) in 1916. He’d been bayoneted in the leg as he dived at the soldier and when pulled over the barricade – incapacitated with the wound – suffered a collapsed lung and succumbed to unconsciousness, only waking for a moment to find he had been placed on top of the barricade. His enemy victor – thinking my great-grandfather dead – had used him as you might a sandbag by resting his rifle across his midriff and shooting at other rebels making their confused retreat from the all-engulfing flames terrorising O’Connell Street.

Since we had brought no apparatus for protest – only ourselves – Phil and I simply shook hands and, seeing a gap in the steady stream of placards (and clear of any militant banners), prepared to enter the briskly moving queue of mannerly revolt.

I had only really taken part in one political demonstration previously, and that was to protest against the unfair deportation of a young African student in my home town. That protest, although ultimately futile, was a worthy cause. I knew the student, knew what he could offer the country. There was a responsibility to try to highlight his plight in a system that wouldn’t listen. Someone had to speak for him when he couldn’t speak for himself – especially when other immigrants, afraid of raising their heads above the parapet, dared not speak up either. But this march, passing close to where my great-grandfather had his violent protest cut short, I attended peacefully out of responsibility to the future; as a citizen becoming increasingly disillusioned with his state.

Don DeLillo wrote in the New Yorker in 1997 about a stinging review of his novel Libra, in which he was labelled a “bad citizen” for writing such a book. DeLillo scoffed at the charge – as any writer worth his salt would – and instead countered: “Being called a bad citizen is a compliment to a novelist.” He went on, “we ought to [write] against what power represents, and often what government represents, and what the corporation dictates and what consumer consciousness has come to mean. In that sense, if we’re bad citizens, we’re doing our job.”

And so, laying down my pen, I took being a bad citizen a literal step further and moved off the path in O’Connell Street and went against the strong current of government compliance.

Yes, the shadow of neoliberal corporate opportunism is lurking – with a glad eye fixed suggestively on our national assets, in this case our water, but this wasn’t really what brought me to the demonstration. It was only one of a number of reasons people joined the march. It went much wider than that. Those in power were ignoring the growing inequality in our society and devastating effects of austerity, and ignoring, too, the mobilisation of a huge swath of the population against such austerity measures – most gallingly, for me, my whole generation’s exodus. The march was a chance to add my weight to a movement for change. A social movement. A mass movement. Because the only other mass movement I’d witnessed previous to this in Ireland was the emigration of the young.

Ireland today has 27% fewer twentysomethings living here than six years ago. That’s 205,000 people. I marched to add my protest about that. Friends in Australia, Canada and England had had to leave to find jobs, yet they, too, despaired at the inequality and repercussions of austerity cuts happening in their absence. I marched in protest for them. But I also marched in solidarity with the activists who were trying to find a voice for the voiceless, who were creating an alternative social vision for the country.

The contention that unemployment has forced so many of my generation to emigrate no longer holds any weight. In 2014, only one in five who left were unemployed. In 2015, only one in seven. This speaks of a much more depressing reality: Ireland is becoming no place for the young.

I don’t know, maybe there will be the economic recovery of which we hear so much, but an idealistic recovery, like the one my great-grandfather put his life on the line for, driven by the romanticism and vitality of youth, gets less and less likely the more the young decide, in their own silent protest (regardless of jobs), to live elsewhere.

Power doesn’t have to answer to what it refuses to see or hear. That’s why we need more immigrant voices in our culture, we need more contemporary, visceral stories of emigration so power can’t help but listen. We need rebels like my great-grandfather, who through his actions and words, helped create a new national identity. We need brave people willing to step off the path and be bad citizens, we need people storming our 21st-century barricades and willing to be used as sandbags.

The continued water-charges demonstrations and success of the marriage referendum last year are signs that there are many such rebels still out there. The battle for the repeal of the eighth amendment – the ban on abortion – will need such people, too.

In a republic, the one my great-grandfather charged at the barricade for, all citizens have a duty, and responsibility, to be bad citizens when power doesn’t listen, and step off the path and add nothing but themselves and their idealism to the movement for change.

Sara Baume: ‘I grew up in rural Ireland, but living here as a self‑employed adult is a different condition’

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sara Baume photographed in west Cork. Photograph: Patrick Bolger/The Observer

Sara Baume grew up in rural Cork. She has won prizes for her short stories and her novel Spill Simmer Falter Wither was nominated for the Guardian first book award in 2015

Every morning, almost as soon as I am awake, regardless of weather, of light level, I go outdoors.

Outdoors, on the far side of my mud and gravel driveway, across the facing field, I see cows. They are making their way from pasture to milking parlour, ponderously. Along the shit-splattered, furze-fringed cattle path in a long, wiggly line.

Nowadays, occasionally, an overseas publicist asks me to email them my “bio”. As appears to be the custom, I like to end on a single sentence of personal information. “She lives on the south-west coast of rural Ireland”, I put, or if I feel at liberty to be poetic: “She lives in the countryside, by the sea.” The exact phrasing doesn’t matter all that much; I just don’t want anybody believing I live in New York or London, or even Dublin.

I did live in Dublin. From the age of 19 to 26, during an uncomfortable yet curiously exhilarating phase when I had not yet decided exactly what I wanted, when I was still snatching tasters from the sampling tray of life. For seven years – through the boom and out its nefarious end – I made a home of the capital city, first studying the arts, and then working in them.

Cities, to my mind, are for people who like to do things in close proximity to other people Sara Baum

During the downturn, we heard much about jobs, banks, houses and immigration in the media; significantly less about the cuts in arts funding.

It was early in 2011 that, unable to afford its rising rents and weary of Dublin anyway, I moved with my partner, another artist, to east Cork, where I grew up. We lived for almost five years on the edge of the harbour, and just recently moved to the generally wilder west side of the county. Our closest village, which isn’t actually very close, is called Castletownshend.

I have nothing in particular against Dublin, perhaps because Dublin does not seem to me in any way particular. It’s a city of Starbucks and Topshop and Tesco, the European headquarters of Twitter and Facebook and Google. It’s an anglophone city much like any other, and cities, to my mind, are for people who like to do things in close proximity to other people. Whereas I prefer being at a distance – close to open water and wood and mud instead.

Rural Ireland is the only Ireland where you can’t be anywhere but Ireland. Where a biscuit tin is a perfectly acceptable substitute for a letterbox. Where the bumpy green gives way to a sea interminably twitching with white horses, but the tyrannous cloud never allows the panoramas to be taken for granted. Where the houses are painted lemon and salmon and beige, and the neighbours are pheasants and hares and bachelor farmers. Where every village used to have a shop and a post office and a policeman, but now only has a pub.

Last year, I spent autumn on a residency in Iowa City. Even though I was based in the heart of corn husk country, the midwest US, my daily companions were 33 writers from countries as diverse as Myanmar, Cuba, Togo and Afghanistan. Time and again, conversations with my companions showed me how little I really have to complain about. Of all the published poets, novelists and playwrights on the programme, approximately three of us are able to live and work full-time as writers in our home countries – the Finn, the Austrian, and me. The residency illuminated how fortunate I am to hail from this tiny island on the tip of western Europe, with its temperate climate and first world economy.

Spill Simmer Falter Wither by Sara Baume review – instils fear and wonder Read more

And yet, possible though it may be to subsist as an artist in Ireland, it is extremely rare. More recently, over coffee in Dublin with my cousin, who is a painter, he told me, pointedly: “You know you’ve won the lottery, don’t you?”

On my way out of Dublin that same evening, traversing Ireland’s busiest interchange, I watched the seemingly endless trail of tail lamps leaking from the city. My bus continued through the midlands and finally terminated in the southernmost city, Cork, where I collected my van and continued my journey. This time, along the potholed and flooded regional roads which lead west, through the unmitigated blackness until, five hours since leaving Dublin behind, I reached the grassy lane down which I live.

I grew up in rural Ireland, but choosing to live here as a self-employed adult is a vastly different condition. I don’t yet know whether I will be able to succeed at this phase of my life, but waking up on the mornings when I don’t have to go anywhere all day long – when there is nothing but the rhythm of weather and natural light, the burning of wood and baking of potatoes and walking of dogs, the cows furrowing their path – I feel extraordinarily lucky to be here, as if my cousin is right, and I have won some strange sort of lottery.

Lisa McInerney: ‘We were drunk on Aldi whiskey and our own epiphanies’

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘We did not vote’: Lisa McInerney. Photograph: Gary Doak/Writer Pictures

Lisa McInerney’s first novel, The Glorious Heresies, gave a voice to Cork’s urban underclass. It has been longlisted for the Baileys women’s prize for fiction



It was 2011 and Ireland was due a general election. The year was tinted with tension, anger, despair – sentiments none too handy for the incumbent Fianna Fáil, which had convinced us all that our gently motoring economy was an 18-wheel juggernaut, and proceeded to drive it off a cliff. Unemployment had risen to 14%; the property bubble was an oily film popped over the country; we were told we owed money all over Europe like some sort of shifty north Atlantic nephew. The barbarians were at the gate, which was lamentable because I was employed as a gatekeeper. I worked as a receptionist for a construction company in Cork city’s hinterland, answering phones, dealing with email inquiries, translating the anguished sighs of the in-house accountant.

Cork suffers more than it needs to for being Ireland’s second city. Under-resourced, but on one of the world’s biggest natural harbours, it’s a place cleaved into north and south by the river Lee, by social class, by political constituency. Cork, known for its food and its jazz, a city that floods mercilessly in winter.

At work, we had gone through three rounds of decimations. Our factory floor, once turbulent with the tug-of-war of Irish and Polish accents, had become cloister quiet. Some of the offices were repurposed as store rooms for old computer monitors and Christmas decorations. Stationery was rationed. Our sales reps were running on marrow. It was grim, and that grimness depleted our appetite for political argument. The country was falling down around our ears, but at work we were concerned only with the tasks right in front of us. Maybe it was that in the construction industry, which relied so heavily on the housing market, dissection of our nation’s woes would have felt too intimate. There was a feeling, too, that passionate social engagement was a bit uncouth, that all the left could offer was half-sighted mutiny. Detachment was the appropriate reaction, with the odd concession made to furious outburst. “Bastards!” the accountant would belch, and we would pat his back.

This was, ostensibly, the coal face, but we seemed resigned, determined to work with whatever new rules Dublin made for us. Ireland would vote in the forthcoming election and Ireland would vote in Fine Gael, even further to the right than Fianna Fáil, a crowd of joyless skinflints who would put us back on the correct fiscal course no matter the social cost.

The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney review – the Sweary Lady is on bellicose form Read more

There was another side to my life in Cork in 2011. At the weekends, I would attend underground dance music gigs. These were run by friends, almost all of them natives. Those who worked were in dead-end jobs like me. Their passion, creativity and intelligence otherwise untapped, they funnelled it into the city’s music scene. They secured venues, promoted and played at gigs without the aid of a booking agent, a publicist or a manager; the scene felt very much like putting on shows in a series of barns.

This wasn’t always a rewarding enterprise. Some nights the venue would be jointed with girls in smudged eyeliner and flat shoes, boys with short sleeves and tribal tattoos. Other times, the smoke and shadows did nothing to disguise the vacant dancefloor.

But there was always an after-party, almost always in a gaff on the Northside hills, during which we would share what booze we had and conduct adulterated discussions. We – young parents, working class, far too broke to emigrate – would sit around shouting at one another about the state of the country, about corruption and class. We were Marxists, we were idealists, we were conspiracy theorists, we were drunk on Aldi whiskey and our own epiphanies. And almost to a person, we did not vote.

In 2011, the lineup was short of options for Marxists or idealists or epiphanists; what leftist candidates there were we didn’t trust to guide us, and the rightwingers were firmly in favour of strengthening an establishment that saw us as barnacles on the hull. We refused to take part in the system that we mistrusted, even though playing the establishment’s game was the only way, outside of bloody revolution, to engage with it. We were conscientious objectors uncounted and unnoticed. We were on the frontlines as the recession loomed, but so wary, so accustomed to our unimportance, that we dropped arms and watched it advance.

We had confidence in our voices only where they could never be heard: in rented sitting rooms in terraces miles from the Lee and the harbour and the city hall. We stayed where we were: in the spaces where our anarchy couldn’t hurt us. The contrariness of it: it was the detached middle-class who took their say in 2011, and they lumped for trickle-down misery. Those of us who looked set to suffer grasped suffering’s inevitability; we held on to our standpoints and coddled our spliffs; we stayed silent.

Five years on and things are different: five years of austerity to quicken voters’ tempers, the vivid memory of the recent marriage equality referendum during which Ireland’s emigrant youth came home to make their mark, Irish water protesters who marched, march and will keep marching. Five years on and things are the same: Ireland is parochial, Ireland is bipartisan, Ireland’s majority will do what it must. Enda Kenny turns the sod on a promised €50m development on the site of Cork’s historic Beamish and Crawford brewery. Hopefully, it will not flood.

Rob Doyle: ‘I was raised to believe abortion is murder. Few issues here arouse stronger emotions’

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rob Doyle: ‘The decision to abort a foetus is a profound one – as serious as death or as life itself.’

Rob Doyle’s acclaimed debut novel, Here Are the Young Men, was published by Bloomsbury in 2014 and his second book, This Is the Ritual, came out in January. He grew up in Dublin and now lives in Wexford

When I was 20, I got my girlfriend pregnant. I was still living at home, in the south Dublin working-class suburb of Crumlin, where I’d grown up. I was a philosophy student, but spent my weekday evenings working at the post office, which also employed both my parents.

I was aghast when my girlfriend told me she was pregnant – and greatly relieved when she immediately explained that she wanted to have an abortion. An acquaintance of hers had gone to England, she said. It wasn’t hard to arrange.

In the weeks that elapsed between the decision and the procedure itself, I told very few people about what we were planning to do: a couple of friends, and the psychoanalyst I was seeing. The latter urged me to discuss the issue with my parents; I did not even consider doing so. My parents are devout Catholics, who were married in Rome and travel to Europe on pilgrimages. Throughout my childhood I went to mass every Sunday and received confession once a month. I was educated at an all-boys Christian Brothers school (and later by Jesuits).

According to the belief system in which I was raised, abortion is murder. Ireland is one of the only European countries in which abortion on request is not legally available; few political issues here arouse stronger emotions. In all likelihood, the first my family will hear of what happened back then is when they read this article.

The abortion would cost around €700. I had to borrow the money from friends. My girlfriend did most of the research and planning. She had been pregnant for about two months when we took the night ferry from Dublin port, across the Irish Sea to Holyhead. An estimated 12 Irish women make that journey each day for the same reason.

This Is the Ritual by Rob Doyle review – sex, drugs and Nietzsche Read more

I don’t remember the journey, only looking out from the rear deck at a cold twilight as the ship set sail. We arrived at Holyhead late at night, and from there we took an overnight coach to London. It was an awful journey. We were shattered, but it was impossible to get comfortable enough to sleep. When we arrived in London, we were in the zombified, dreamlike state that comes from extreme tiredness. I had not been to London since I was a child: the noise and violence of the city appalled me.

We rode a tube train out to a quiet, leafy suburb: I didn’t really know then where we were, and I have no idea now. As we were walking towards the address, a group of people approached us, beckoning. Confused, I smiled and made to see what they wanted; my girlfriend warned me not to stop, just keep walking. I quickly realised why: they were trying to press leaflets into our hands, showing us images of aborted foetuses, telling us it wasn’t too late to turn back. We weaved through the protesters and stepped into the abortion clinic. The doctor explained that I was not allowed to stay on the premises while the abortion was taking place. I said goodbye to my girlfriend. Then I wandered off and found a small park by a quiet road. Exhausted, I lay down under a tree by a pond and slept. I awoke refreshed, cleansed of the agitations of the journey. I brushed myself off and walked back to the clinic. The doctor told me that my girlfriend was still asleep from the anaesthetic but would wake up soon. He clicked and typed on a computer. Suddenly, I was seeing on his monitor the ultrasound image of the foetus inside my girlfriend’s womb prior to the operation. It looked like a baby. I could make out the limbs, the head, the tiny hands. We gazed at it for a few seconds. Then the doctor apologised. “You weren’t supposed to see that,” he said.

If, as many Irish people believe, it is wrong to abort pregnancies, it seems to me that it would have been a graver wrong to bring a child into the world in such unhappy circumstances. All of this took place not long into what was for me a three-year mental breakdown – a hell of severe depression, panic attacks and psychic torment that, in a sense, I spent the rest of my 20s recovering from. The idea of assuming responsibility for bringing another life into the world was unthinkable: I couldn’t have given a child anything other than misery. Not that such moral reasoning guided my part in the decision (in so far as it was my choice at all): my prime motive was a ruthless selfishness. To have fathered a child then would have foreclosed the only viable future life I could see for myself: one that somehow involved art, escape and a rejection of the social modes that I felt were inseparable from the distress I was in.

I don’t regret what we did (I doubt my ex-girlfriend does either). Still, it irritates me when people say, to soften the impact of choosing abortion: “It’s just a bunch of cells.” That seems to me no less violent than the act itself, the words expressing a brutal, unconscious attack on the reality of what the procedure involves. There is a movement currently urging for a referendum on abortion rights in Ireland, under the banner of “repeal the eighth amendment”. If it came to that, I would vote in favour of legalising abortion for a number of reasons. I don’t see any contradiction between that and calling an abortion what it is: the killing of an unborn human life form. While the issue of abortion is more urgent for women than it is for men, the ultrasound image I wasn’t meant to see came as a haunting personal message: it said simply that the decision to abort a foetus is a profound one – as serious as death, or as life itself.

All of which suggests, perhaps, that Irish Catholicism runs deeper than I might once have imagined. Vestiges of its moral valuations can survive the most ardent readings of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, the fiercest scorn for the authority of a near-eastern creed imported millennia ago. A century on from the insurrection of 1916, an Ireland laid fully bare to globalised influence is undergoing strange, unprecedented and rapid mutations. No one can really say what kind of society will emerge from all the change; the mood is intense and uncertain. There are crises, ruptures, growing pains; there is hope and ugliness. I used to fancy that I was somehow outside of all that; now I know it is inside of me.

Caitriona Lally: ‘The Celtic Tiger changed the quality of rubbish’

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Novelist Caitriona Lally on Dublin’s Samuel Beckett bridge. Photograph: Patrick Bolger/The Observer

First-time author Caitriona Lally was inspired to write her novel, Eggshells, while job-hunting during Ireland’s economic crisis. She lives in Dublin.

I began writing my first novel, Eggshells, in a downturn and finished writing it in an upturn. I had been laid off from my job in 2011 and was out of work for a year. Dublin felt dispiriting then, full of companies that wouldn’t hire me. Question marks hung over the buildings that had yet to respond to my job applications; Xs over the ones that gave rejections. I wrote about Vivian, a wandering character who was looking for a portal to another world; I needed to put some magic back into the city. I noticed that many of Dublin’s blue street signs were missing some of their white letters. This was probably due to lack of council funds to repaint the signs, but Vivian imagines a band of Smurfs armed with ladders and blue paint creating new placenames, and she attempts to find meaning in these.

Eggshells by Caitriona Lally review – a daring debut Read more

I walked Dublin’s streets with the character of Vivian in mind. I timed my walks between morning and evening rush hours – working people walked so fast and with such purpose that it highlights your own meandering purposelessness. Even though unemployment had hit 15%, I still felt like an outsider, disconnected from the city. I took my own feelings of not belonging and exaggerated them into this misfit character.

Some years later, I’m back in employment. I walk to work at 5.30am, still managing to avoid rush hour. I leave my house and cross the bridge over the tramline that’s being built. I bought a house during peak house prices in 2007. When the tramline is completed next year, it will raise the house value from serious negative equity to moderate negative equity.

Nearby, I pass one of the houses that James Joyce grew up in. His father once chopped up the banisters for firewood; no matter how bad things got on the dole, I never had to resort to such house-butchery. Joyce’s Leopold Bloom walked many of the same streets that my character walked, but fortunately I hadn’t read Ulysses when I was writing Eggshells, or the task would have seemed too fearsome.

In the north inner city, some of the signage has changed from the grim For Sales and To Lets of the past few years to the more hopeful Sale Agreeds and Solds.

I pass Clerys on O’Connell Street, the 162-year-old department store that closed suddenly last year. More than 450 workers were given 30 minutes to leave while the locks were changed. Just before the company I worked for closed down, my colleagues and I realised something was amiss when the keycodes were changed. Management told us to keep working, that everything was fine, while men in suits measured the desks we were working at. Clerys – which was mentioned in Ulysses and had to be completely rebuilt after the Easter Rising – is still idle, but last Christmas the windows were decorated with the almost laughably hollow words “May Your Days Be Merry and Bright.”

I cross the Liffey. Trucks barrel up and down the quays. The convention centre in the regenerated docklands is lit purple, a cylindrical building that my character, Vivian, calls “that can of beans gone slant”. It was opened in 2010, a project commissioned during a boom and completed during a bust. The Samuel Beckett bridge, a cable-stayed bridge that opened the previous year, sprawls the river near the convention centre like a sunbathing harp.

Coffee used to be a treat to meet a pal for; now it’s a polystyrene necessity to get through the day Caitriona Lally

I pass a Starbucks. Just when you think Dublin has hit coffee-chain saturation, the green and white logo appears over the door of a vacant premises. Thankfully, there are still lots of independent Davids holding their own against this caffeine Goliath.

Men are already at work on the tramline at College Green; the traffic lights are moved and lanes are closed or opened as different sections are worked on. Although it’s commuter chaos, I like witnessing internal surgery being performed on the streets before they are sewn up again. And yet, despite all these developments, I can’t help but see Dublin as a large town with notions of cityhood: we still say we’re going into town rather than the city centre, we still expect to see someone we know there.

I clock into work under the front arch of Trinity College. I cleaned here while I was a student, and I’m back in housekeeping 15 years later. The Celtic Tiger has changed the quality, and quantity, of rubbish. Coffee used to be a treat to meet a pal for; now it’s a polystyrene necessity to get through the day. Bins bulge with coffee cups and water bottles, sushi packaging and burrito wrappers and detritus from snack foods that couldn’t be got in Ireland before the boom.

I have no broad, clean and tidy statements to make about economic life in Dublin today, however: there are students in the university with designer gear and accents a diphthong short of the Queen’s, and students who come in early on commuter buses from outlying towns because Dublin rents are viciously unaffordable. There are students squeezing part-time jobs around college work to afford these rents, and those suffering the kind of financial “dire straits” I overheard one talking about. She explained to a friend that her father had been forced to sell the yacht and some of their apartments. Now those are the kind of dire straits I’d like to be in.