ABSTRACT
This chapter considers some of the different ways of representing and demonstrating Irishness, and explores how it has been variously performed, achieved and imagined in a range of contexts that have been the subject of ethnographic study. Communal acts of remembering and celebration offer one kind of opportunity for the ‘creation’ and ‘re-creation’ of Ireland and Irishness both at home and abroad, especially in the heritage and tourist industries. In the mid-1990s at the height of the Celtic Tiger boom, the debate about contemporary Irishness and how it should be represented was engendered literally overnight due to a startling and show-stopping performance by a company of Irish ‘traditional’ dancers that was aired on the international stage of Europe-wide television. Standing at the intersection of the local and the global, the present and the past, and of tradition and modernity, it is a powerful illustration of how notions of Irishness are truly at a crossroads.
