Other People's Diasporas: Negotiating Race in Contemporary Irish and Irish-American Culture

2. “Maybe It Was Riverdance” Roddy Doyle’s Fictions of Multicultural Ireland

67 3 “Maybe It Was Riverdance” Roddy Doyle’s Fictions of Multicultural Ireland “We are the blacks of Europe,” observes a character in Roddy Doyle’s novel The Commitments. But that isn’t really true any more. . . . An Irish passport gives you what people in advertising call a reachier punch, I don’t know why. . . . The whole world longs to be oppressed and post-colonial and tragically hip and petulantly Paddy, and we Irish just want to be anything else. —Joseph O’Connor, introduction to Ireland in Exile (1993) And it’s as bad since the country went sexy . . . Riverdance and that. The same ol’ shite with shorter dresses. Compulsory sexiness . You know, like, we used to be miserable but now we’re fuckin’ great. —Roddy Doyle, “Home to Harlem” (2004), in The Deportees Jn his introduction to Ireland in Exile, Joseph O’Connor looks back to 1987, the year in which Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments was first published, just as he anticipates the views of Doyle’s Declan O’Connor in 2004. As Diane Negra and others contend, the promotion of Irish identity as “oppressed and post-colonial” is precisely what has rendered Irishness “sexy” in the contemporary moment. Asserting a kind of “miserable” Irishness in the past is what enables it to be considered “fuckin’ great” in the present. Although, for O’Connor, Doyle’s “blacks of Europe” analogy is no longer true (and many would argue that Doyle delivered it with tongue firmly in cheek), in fact, black-Irish analogies have helped to bolster Irishness 68 • “Other People’s Diasporas” as a “tragically hip” identity. The persistence of such analogies is confirmed in Declan’s invocation of Riverdance as shorthand for the seductiveness of Irishness in the contemporary moment. This point is significant, on the one hand, because the global success of the Irish-themed dance show became a widely cited analogy for the economic success that accompanied Ireland’s commitment to globalization in the 1990s and, on the other, because the appeal of the show is derived, in part, from its “romanticized narrative of shared [Irish and African American] oppression” (Eagan 2006, 29).1 The inclusion of this narrative in the dance show, according to Natasha Casey, “consoled Irish-American audiences by assuring them of their egalitarian past” (2002, 17). In other words, the marketability of Irishness in the contemporary moment relies on the affirmation of both Irish victimhood and solidarity with other oppressed peoples (notably African Americans) in the past. This chapter examines the work of Roddy Doyle, who, throughout a career bridging the “bad old days” of the 1980s and the Celtic Tiger years, has retained a profound interest in the possibilities and limitations of ethnic analogies and takes on, in a more literal way than O’Connor, the issues of race and immigration in contemporary Ireland. If O’Connor’s major literary endeavors in the Celtic Tiger years were his two historical Irish American novels, this point is not to suggest that he has not published works that are more obviously related to events occurring in contemporary Ireland. In one fascinating venture, O’Connor revisits the signature character of his early work. Irish emigrant to London Eddie Virago is the protagonist of O’Connor’s first published short story, “Last of the Mohicans ” (1989); his first novel, Cowboys and Indians (1991); a further story, “Four Green Fields” (1993); and resurfaces, twelve years on, in “Two Little Clouds” (2005). An homage, of sorts, to James Joyce’s 1. According to Belinda McKeon, “Some believe Whelan himself, with Riverdance in 1994, wrote the official soundtrack [to a particular era in Irish history]: the Celtic Tiger” (2009, 7). “Maybe It Was Riverdance” • 69 “A Little Cloud,” the story appears in New Dubliners, a collection celebrating the centenary of the composition of Joyce’s Dubliners in 1904–5 (eventually published in 1914). In Joyce’s story, Dublin law clerk Little Chandler is reunited with his old friend Ignatius Gallaher , who made good after emigrating to London eight years previously . The encounter provokes Little Chandler to question somewhat regretfully his own decision to stay in Dublin, get married and start a family, and achieve comparatively modest success. In “Two Little Clouds,” the unnamed narrator is a London-based Irishman visiting his hometown of Dublin who bumps into returned emigrant Eddie Virago on Fownes Street “a decade or more” after he last saw him (O’Connor...