{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.027857829010566763, 'fraction_numerical': 0.008965738072366315, 'mean_word_length': 5.210735586481113, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
‘To Me, Here Is More Like There’

A distinguishing feature of recent studies of the Republic of Ireland is the assertion of a tectonic shift in the economic and cultural plates on which the state had been constructed since its early twentieth-century inception. Titles such as Collision Culture: Transformations in Everyday Life in Ireland (2004), The End of Irish History? Critical Reflections on the Celtic Tiger (2003) and David McWilliams’s The Pope’s Children: Ireland’s New Elite (2006) crowd the shelves of Irish bookshops where a title such as Chasing Progress in the Irish Republic (1994) stands as an historical curiosity. The very idea of an Ireland lagging in the rear of progress is a comic anachronism in the contemporary state where ‘social structures and institutions, culture and identity, are being transformed by processes of reflexive—or accelerated— modernisation and globalisation’. However, the consensus in contemporary studies is that while the Irish state ‘registered levels of economic growth that soon became the envy of every other western state’, it also became ‘the home not only of a people who have changed but also of a changed people’; some essential characteristic or quality had been lost or erased. As captured in Anne Marie Hourihane’s She Moves through the Boom (2001), the world of, particularly, urban Ireland now registers a cacophony of cultural influences as simulacra of ‘authentic Ireland’ crash against the tackier manifestations of CocaColonisation. In such a transformed and transforming ‘collision culture’ which is experiencing ‘collisions between old and new, global and local’ Martin Esslin’s assertion that ‘The theatre is the place where a nation thinks in public in front of itself’ takes on a particular force. In a global culture, spaces for the consideration of national concerns are jostled to the margins by the market dominance of communications and entertainment media whose interests (and ownership) are frequently external to the nation-state itself. In such a context, theatre provides a location where national desires can be expressed and debated by local voices, a point underlined by the origins of modern Irish theatre itself. The Abbey, Ireland’s effective national theatre from 1904, was founded to establish what Loren Kruger termed ‘theatrical nationhood’ in which the theatre simultaneously staged and created the nation. And what is striking is the extent to which theatre, more than any other genre in Ireland, has been advanced over the decades as the central cultural seismograph, alert to shock-waves radiating from the impact of profound changes in the economic and social systems of the nation. Curtis Canfield’s, Plays of Changing Ireland (1936) was informed by the desire to reflect ‘the extent to which each [play] was an expression of new forces and conditions in the modern State’. The changes that Canfield identifies are all elements of industrial modernity bringing about a situation in which ‘radios and moving pictures [are] helping to smooth away those salient features which once made Dublin different from London or New York’.