ABSTRACT
Irish literature is being conspicuously silent about Brexit, despite the clear implications that the exit of Britain from the EU has for Northern Ireland and, by extension, for the Republic of Ireland. The present contribution intends to interpret the Irish silence as well as to deal with one of the most obvious causes of Brexit, the new citizenship policies adopted by the British and Irish authorities, and their treatment of the condition and circumstances of foreigners and migrants both in England and in Ireland.
This chapter proposes a transcultural analysis of Oona Frawley’s novel, Flight, published before Brexit, in 2014, although significantly set at the time of the 2004 Irish Referendum on Citizenship, and of Donal Ryan’s Strange Flowers, published after Brexit (2020). Both novels feature migrants in the Republic of Ireland, both authors have opted for deploying the variety of causes and circumstances that force human beings to emigrate, and, more interestingly, the protagonists in both narratives experience the complexity of the phenomenon of contemporary migrations and transcultural relationships, both on English and on Irish soil.
