The run of ourselves: Shame, guilt and confession in post-Celtic Tiger Irish media

Abstract

This article examines the emergence of the themes of shame and guilt in Irish print and broadcast media in the wake of Ireland’s 2008 economic collapse. It considers how the potential search for explanation of the crisis as a manifestation of unregulated banking and development sectors was displaced onto a confessional discursive pattern in which emphasis was placed on rampant borrowing and consumption as reflective of collective narcissism and acquisitive greed. Hence the logic that ‘hubris’ led inevitably to a national fall from grace and the corresponding resurgence of postcolonial shame; and the interplay between cultural nationalist and neoliberal discourses of redemption through confession of guilt and disciplinary self-regulation as the purging of excess.

Home Truths: Property TV, Financialization, and the Housing Crisis in Contemporary Ireland

“…While the examples of property television examined were broadly compliant with the ideological assumptions associated with home ownership societies, cracks in this ideological façade were nonetheless consistently evident throughout. This article contributes to a recent trend in scholarship that interrogates such ambivalence in Irish lifestyle and reality programming (Free and Scully 2018; Kiersey 2014; Negra et al 2018).…”

‘In the end you adapt to anything’: Responses to narratives of resilience and entrepreneurship in post-recession Spain

“…Appeals to austerity have also been used to define the crisis as the consequence of years of irresponsibility and excess spending (both public and private). This idea is encapsulated in the discourse of ‘living beyond one’s means’ (Oliva and Pérez-Latorre, 2020; Free and Scully, 2018), which has been wielded to blame citizens for the crisis (especially in southern European countries), suggesting a moral interpretation of it (as a chance to change former habits and values).…”

Social Solidarity and Generational Exchange in Post-Celtic Tiger Reality Television

“…Resigned pragmatism was the primary national response in the early years of the crash as the Irish public watched political leaders from home and Europe engage in what Nicholas Keirsey (2014, 360–1) has described as “one of the most spectacularly unjust, and undemocratically decided, transfers of wealth from the taxpayers of an advanced Western nation to foreign bondholders.” Lauren Berlant lists pragmatism (together with depression, disassociation, cynicism, optimism, and activism) as a way societies respond to the growing instability of “conventional good-life fantasies” (Berlant 2011, 2). At the time, Ireland’s docile response to the crisis was widely commented upon, with some research pointing to a residual sense of Catholic moral reasoning (“reaping what you sow”) as well as a collective memory of suffering and endurance playing a role in the acceptance of this spectacular fall from grace (Free and Scully 2018; Power 2016, 60).…”