For the better part of three decades Ireland has run two industries that amount to the same thing. The first is a tax jurisdiction designed to attract American multinationals; the second is a cultural export operation designed to make Americans feel good about Ireland. Both require the same posture of facing outwards, being easily understood, being charming, and not complicating things.
This is because the Celtic Tiger needed foreign direct investment, and foreign direct investment needed a story; that Ireland is friendly, English-speaking, harmless and fun. Come build your European headquarters here, where the craic is mighty and the pints are fresh – just don’t look too hard at the housing.
And it worked, at least on paper. But behind the shop front, the country that this money was supposed to build has not been built. The International Institute for Management Development has found that Ireland’s basic infrastructure now ranks 44th out of 69 countries, down six places in a single year; the Fiscal Advisory Council puts the infrastructure stock at 25 per cent below the average of high-income European peers; and business electricity prices are the highest in the EU. A country that styled itself as the most efficient gateway to Europe cannot reliably power itself, house its workers, or provide them with a functioning public health service.
In the same footsteps, the cultural side of this bargain was no less transactional. The Ireland that counted, and was taken seriously, was always the Ireland that made sense somewhere else. The literary novels that translated for London and the prestige dramas commissioned for American audiences were all beautiful work, but they shared a persistent habit of facing outwards, and of explaining Irishness to people who were not Irish.
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The trad session in the tourist pub and the Booker longlist were doing the same job of packaging a version of the country for external consumption. At some point, without having realised it, we decided that art made by an Irish person, like Irish-booked revenue, only counted when an outsider said it did.
Tax policy and cultural policy operated under the same assumption of orienting everything toward the Americans in the hope that the domestic economy sorts itself out. Of course, it never did. What was left behind was a country that could host Apple’s European headquarters but whose workers cannot afford to shop in one. While the Oscars piled up, we still could not say what we thought about ourselves in a room where no one from Los Angeles was listening.
Something in that arrangement is now breaking down, and the break is coming from a generation of artists who have simply stopped performing for the audience we spent 30 years trying to impress.
The comedian Vittorio Angelone is 29, Italian-Northern Irish, and a classically trained percussionist who gave up the BBC Proms for stand-up. His recent London and Irish shows moved through Ukraine, Gaza, the ethics of making money as an artist while refusing complicity, and the question his generation keeps circling: at what point do the Troubles become just the troubles? Is it still valid to be defined by something that didn’t happen to you?
The answer he provokes is the same one running through all of this – that Northern Ireland no longer needs American politicians to narrate its story any more than its artists need American audiences to validate their work.
Kneecap and Sally Rooney will exchange a smaller audience for the freedom to mean what they say in the place they actually live
What makes Angelone worth watching is not that he clears the bar for serious art, but that he does not care about clearing it. His comedy is unapologetically local, layered with references that do not travel, and with punchlines that reward a very specific post-Belfast Agreement, west Belfast sensibility. If you are not in on it, that is your problem, not his. A British reviewer gave the show two stars, admitted to knowing little about the Troubles, found the material confusing, and signed off by recommending the audience pair it with a Guinness. The work was penalised for being inaccessible, without the reviewer recognising that inaccessibility was the entire point.
He is not alone. Kneecap rap in Irish that they refuse to translate, a choice that by definition excludes the vast majority of a global audience and does not appear to trouble them in the slightest. Sally Rooney has made her position on Gaza a condition of who she will work with, accepting that this may cost her the global market she once dominated; a market that made her, and that she has decided she can live without. None of these are co-ordinated, but they share a generational instinct that the performance of Irishness for outside approval is finished. Their trade-off is explicit, in that they will exchange a smaller audience for the freedom to mean what you say in the place you actually live.
This matters beyond culture because the posture these artists are rejecting is the same posture that has governed Irish economic strategy for a generation. The country that packaged itself as a friendly American outpost in both its art and in its tax code, is now producing a cohort that no longer has any interest in that same package. They are making work that faces inward, that does not need to make sense in New York, and that implicitly asks a question the State has avoided for years: what is all of this for, if not for us?
A country cannot indefinitely sell itself abroad while neglecting what it is at home. The tax receipts will not last forever because windfalls never do. But when they slow, what remains will be whatever was built with them, which at present is very little. Irish artists seem to understand this before the politicians do. They are not waiting for permission to stop auditioning for outside audiences, they have simply stopped.
If that costs Ireland a few stars from a London reviewer and eventually a tech headquarters or two, it may be the cheapest lesson the country ever learns.
