The domestic, moral and political economies of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland

The use of public houses as a collective representation of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ireland

“…Dufour (2017) has argued that the defining feature of postmodern subjectivity is the loss of the big subject or other, paralleled by the growth of the narcissistic-psychotic subject, dwelling in the context of desymbolisation. This has been persuasively argued to be a process underway in late-modern Irish society (Keohane and Kuhling, 2014). It is a process that can be witnessed in relation to public houses, as the sector has contracted and consumption has shifted to individualised, de-structured and privatised modes of consumption, facilitated by neoliberal alcohol policy (Mercille, 2016).…”

“…The features of late-modern Irish society have been widely diagnosed as the spread of a neoliberal ethic and policy and a profusion of liminality of both the positive and negative variety. As Keohane and Kuhling (2014) put it: ‘[n]eoliberalism's cultural revolution is to disarticulate the symbolic chain, to decompose and dissolve its points de capiton , to undermine and erase the “name(s) of the Father” – the ideals, the authorities, the meaningful and meaning-giving traditions that have formed modern subjects, the “big Other” to which modern subjects have been beholden and through which modern societies have been solidary and integrated’. The pandemic has been replete with big Other's however – the gerontocracy, cultural-nationalist values, immoral enemies within, and polluting enemies without.…”

Zombie banks, zombie politics and the ‘Walking Zombie Movement’: Liminality and the post-crisis Irish imaginary

“…However, the growing resistance to the Water Charge tax reveals a new, more active, more populist, political subjectivity that may have the potential to transcend both the subservient centrism of Irish Labour and the extremism of the ‘hard left’ in Ireland. From this point of view, dressing up as a zombie for these protestors is not simply a metaphor for half-dead, half-alive economic systems, institutions and subjectivities, or simply a symbol of the collective loss of hope in the democratic potential of both national and EU governance (Keohane and Kuhling, 2014). Rather, this can be seen as a desire for a ‘zombie mob’, for new collective solidarities and for a new, more democratic political imaginary that can replace Ireland’s monstrous austerity regime.…”

The New Age Movement in the Post-Celtic Tiger Context: Secularisation, Enchantment and Crisis

“…What is "real" about real estate is that it stands in the place of what Lacan terms the Real: the abyss of nothingness and meaninglessness over which human existence is suspended 31 . The idea of home and belonging resonates with deep seated anthropological needs that are both material and spiritual, and it is at times of material and/or spiritual insecurity that the house assumes an amplified value -hence the saying "as safe as houses 32 ". For Benjamin, the house retains a utopian potentiality, for it is a repository of the memory of a deeper, richer, collective life that transcends the eternal recurrence of the present as monadic individualism, for it retains traces of a childhood memory of a lost ideal that might be recollected 33 .…”