The Ex-Isle of Erin: Images of a Global Ireland

by Fintan O'Toole

Book Overview

Drawing on contemporary politics, economics, literature, and history, the author comments on the country's self-image and how that image is changing in response to a world without boundaries. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1874597499
• ISBN13: 9781874597490
• Release Date: December 1997
• Publisher: New Island Books
• Length: 235 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

An Island Unmoored

Fintan O'Toole can find a pulse. He also knows what's hiding in the closet, or under the bed, or up a hole. For sheer diagnostic brilliance, the self-professed "lugubrious and cynical" essayist has no equal in observing Ireland's wild cavorting with the planet. Stock images of the Irish, he contends, have been utterly blown to smithereens as contemporary Ireland has undergone a radical transformation, the result of an economic boom and scandals within the Catholic church which have permanently eroded its grip upon the Irish people. O'Toole suggests that exposure to a wider world has given the once isolated island much needed flavor but has in turn reduced its cultural distinctiveness. The certainties of Eamonn de Valera's rural idyll, the failed attempt to counter an urban, markedly Protestant ethos, have succumbed to a new heterogeneous reality. That in itself is no astounding insight. What's remarkable is O'Toole's deft handling of modern Irish history and his own personal reminiscences to demonstrate this profound change. Every essay in this fine collection ends with a sentence like a pebble sending ripples out throgh the pool of Ireland's past and present.