“Ill Fares the Land”

Locating the fields of postcolonial criticism and ecocriticism as adjacent in their respective materialist critiques of global capitalism and neo-imperialism, Graham Huggan suggests the following:

Both are invested, for example, in the situated critique of current globalizing practices that use capitalist ideologies of development to justify corporate expansionism and technological managerialism; and both are equally concerned with critically analysing the representational mechanisms that lend legitimacy to these practices, demonstrating the power of culture to (re)shape the word and, through it, the world. ²

Huggan’s comments are “global” in themselves, but they are no less useful for that; his convention of postcolonial and ecocritical methodologies, at a general, abstract level, can be productively applied to specific local instances of global capitalist incursion. In this case we will attend to the situation and experience of Ireland, a country with a protracted colonial heritage and a postcolonial history that belatedly became deeply entwined with the machinations, and ecological costs, of modernization and global capital. A combined postcolonial and ecocritical prism is a profitable way in which to read the Irish context. As Joe Cleary argues, while Ireland is geographically European, historically speaking, it has always been out of sync with the cycles of industrial modernization and capitalist expansion characteristic of many other European nations. For Cleary, “although Ireland belonged to the same geo-cultural locale, the same orbit of capital, as the major European imperial powers, it was integrated into that orbit of capital in a very different way to its main European neighbours.” ³ In other words, despite its proximity to the central ruling geographies of global imperialism, Ireland was viewed and governed as a colony. Again in the current context, we need to think about how such a historical pedigree has informed social, economic, environmental, and cultural developments during, to use David Lloyd’s term, Ireland’s postcolonial “moment,” ⁴ and, more precisely, during the period of economic and financial buoyancy: the “Celtic Tiger.”