One hundred years on from the Easter Rising, amid economic crisis and deep uncertainty in Ireland, five young novelists offer a personal view of their homeland today
Kevin Currans 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 OConnell 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 wont 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. Hed 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 OConnell 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 wouldnt listen. Someone had to speak for him when he couldnt 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 were bad citizens, were 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 OConnell 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 wasnt 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 generations 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 Id witnessed previous to this in Ireland was the emigration of the young.
Ireland today has 27% fewer twentysomethings living here than six years ago. Thats 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 dont 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 doesnt have to answer to what it refuses to see or hear. Thats why we need more immigrant voices in our culture, we need more contemporary, visceral stories of emigration so power cant 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 doesnt 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 selfemployed adult is a different condition
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