Ireland and Ecocriticism: An Introduction

Abstract

Contemporary Irish history, specifically that of the past twenty years, saw the nature of the relationship between people and land alter dramatically and, in large part, detrimentally. So that while ‘land’ and ‘value’ have always been adjacent concepts – the ways in which land came to be valued and hungrily sought after in Irish society reflected a new alignment in the ‘structures of feeling’ that sustained the relations between Irish people and their surrounding environment. Landscape became commercialized at accelerated, and unsustainable, rates as the value-system of significant, and influential, sectors of Irish society changed and only one declension of ‘value’ became dominant: market value. Any ecocritical retrospective of Celtic Tiger Ireland will focus on the idea of values and valuation, but will, naturally, veer away from crass monetaristic valuation towards a reclamation of a sustainable ecological and cultural ethics of landscape valuation.