‘Irish Fiction and Migration in the Long Twenty-First Century’ observes that while migration has been a topic prominent in Irish fiction since at least the middle of the nineteenth century, more recent novels have considered the Irish subject overseas as a product of what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘liquid modernity’, migrants in a world characterised by neoliberalism and globalisation. The chapter considers works of outward migration in the long twenty-first century, beginning with William Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey (1994) and extending to later works, such as Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009) and E. M. Reapy’s Red Dirt (2016), as well as historical fiction including Roddy Doyle’s Oh, Play That Thing (2004). The flows of migration into Ireland are also considered, in relation to Anne Enright’s The Green Road (2015), Oona Frawley’s Flight (2014), and Donal Ryan’s Strange Flowers (2020), concluding that recent Irish diasporic fiction is characterised by multiple displacements.

The collapse of the authority, credibility, and influence of the Catholic Church in Ireland, a process that had begun in the 1960s and 1970s and was given added momentum by the revelation of child abuse and institutional scandals in the 1990s, continued unabated in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In tandem, while Ireland remained a country with a high degree of religious practice by international standards, many Irish Catholics decided to become Catholics on their own terms and Irish society became increasingly secularised, as was made clear when Ireland became the first country in the world to approve gay marriage through a referendum vote in 2015, while abortion was legalised following a referendum in 2018. This chapter explores how a range of Irish writers navigated and explored these themes, in poems, novels, and plays and considers the searching questions they asked about the weight of complex history underpinning the changes and their own role in characterising a society whose faith and religiosity were in transition.