‘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.

‘Irish Working-Class Novels after 1950’ begins by drawing a distinction between British working-class fiction of the 1950s and 1960s, and its Irish counterpart, which remained preoccupied with poverty. Starting with novels such as Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy (1958), the work of Paul Smith, Lee Dunne’s Goodbye to the Hill (1965), and Maurice Leitch’s The Liberty Lad (1965), it is argued that finding forms of freedom – including sexual freedom – in the context of class-based poverty becomes a central concern of Irish working-class fiction in this period, in the process opening out new possibilities in Irish fiction per se. This is particularly true of Joseph Plunkett’s Strumpet City (1969), a historical novel dealing with the 1913 Lockout, and Frances Molloy’s Troubles novel, No Mate for the Magpie (1985). Finally, in the work of Dermot Bolger and Roddy Doyle, writing about working-class life pushed at the limits of literary and cultural norms.

‘A Splintered Past: History in the Irish Novel since 1990’ considers the ways in which contemporary Irish novelists have represented three phases of modern Irish history: the Famine; the revolutionary period; social liberalisation since the 1960s. Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea (2002), in its relative optimism about the contribution of the catastrophe to national self-consciousness, is contrasted with Paul Lynch’s Grace (2017) and Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder (2016). Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry (1999) provides a child’s-eye view of the Easter Rising, while Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way (2005) witnesses the Rising from the perspective of a soldier returned from the Second World War, and Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (1996) filters partition through childhood memories. As we reach Colm Tóibín’s Nora Webster (2014) or Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (2021), historical traumas become comprehensible only in personal terms, and the capacity for collective narrativisation is less prevalent or accessible.

Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan note the perception that “recent transformations in Ireland have resulted in an explosion of new forms and ways of being ‘Irish,’” producing “a more liberal, cosmopolitan and diverse society [… that is] a far cry from [… the country’s] Catholic and rural past.” In this changed society, however, historical forms of racism and classism persist. This chapter prioritizes the intersectionality of class and ethnicity/race in highlighting some instances of how these matters have been dealt with in recent Irish drama since the 1990s. Its reading of plays by Donal O’Kelly, Roddy Doyle, Brian Campbell, Ursula Rani Sarma, Ken Harmon, Dermot Bolger, Vincent Higgins, Jim O’Hanlon, Martin Lynch, Bisi Adigun, Charlie O’Neill, Mirjana Rendulic, and Rosaleen McDonagh suggests how those who write from the subject positions of marginalized minorities have challenged too commonly simplistic, melodramatic, or assimilationist treatments of those communities.

This chapter examines one of Ireland’s longest-lasting sources of engagement with the global South, namely the set of ethical dispositions and embedded practices that we traditionally call “humanitarian aid.” For much of the twentieth century, Ireland’s sense of itself as both a postcolonial nation and an advanced Western democracy found expression in an intense preoccupation with humanitarian aid for newly independent African countries. Over the last two decades, this history of humanitarian action has become a prominent motif in Irish fiction, featuring centrally in fiction by Anne Enright, Sebastian Barry, Roddy Doyle, and J. M. O’Neill. In the hands of these authors, humanitarianism has emerged as a vehicle for reflecting on Ireland’s place in the world – from the ethical attunement to suffering bodies that has dominated Irish representations of the global South to the political stakes involved in refracting such sentimentalized images through the language of anticolonial nationalism.

This chapter offers a study of some key developments in Irish realism from the 1980s to the contemporary moment. The Irish novel in a variety of forms, including the bildungsroman, the family novel, the expatriate novel and political fiction, has developed significantly in this period and its highest achievements are distinguished by memorable characterisation, probing social critique, and lyrical writing. Stressing issues of form, style, and affect as well as content, the study examines a selection of Irish fictions, urban and rural, domestic and overseas, northern and southern, and considers their relationship to wider and ongoing changes in Irish society in recent times.

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.