Living at the End of the Irish Century: Globalization and Identity in Declan Hughes’s Shiver

The Celtic Tiger – Ireland’s economic boom of the 1990s – has often been read as either exemplifying or demonizing the economic and cultural effects of globalization. This essay uses an interdisciplinary approach to analyse the history of the Celtic Tiger and to show how Declan Hughes’s play Shiver was one of the first post-Tiger Irish works to assess critically the effects of globalization on Irish culture. Hughes’s drama stages Ireland’s reaction to the Celtic Tiger as one of paralysis, a harsh critique that destabilizes narratives of newness – with their promises of being transformed into something different – by showing how fulfilment is perpetually deferred in the logic of global capitalism. Trying to authenticate the “new” Ireland is a double bind that dislocates both history and the present. Hughes’s play helps to triangulate what globalization can tell us about contemporary Ireland and what Ireland can tell us about contemporary globalization.