Colin Sheridan: Sally Rooney is leading Ireland's cultural renaissance

Back to the spring of 2019.

I was living and working in Beirut, domiciled above a bookshop that led a double life as a bar.

The fact it’s still open amazes me, as I could never work out — given the economic turmoil that had gripped Lebanon — how it paid its staff, never mind turning enough profit to buy new books.

It did both, quite well, owing much, I think, to the altruistic sensibilities of the woman from Co Laois that ran it, who ensured there was at least as much Midleton on display, as there was Kevin Barry on the shop’s bookshelves.

The place was a hub of creative endeavour. If the bar in the old Mayflower hotel in west Beirut was where Fisk and Marie Colvin drank and filed their copy during the 1980s, Aaliya’s in east Beirut became, and remains, a beacon of cultural enlightenment to this day. A hipster hangout and an old-timers refuge. A speakers’ corner, and a secular sanctuary in a city where even chaos can always get much worse.

It is there that I reluctantly experienced the first throes of the burgeoning Irish cultural renaissance — thrust, as it was, upon me by others far more willing to be inspired by the art this country produces, than I initially was.

First came Sally Rooney.

We all know by now that Rooney is well on her way to becoming the next Zadie Smith but, four years ago, notwithstanding the critical success of her first novel, Conversations with Friends, she was still relatively unknown, especially to me in the Middle East.

Her second book, Normal People, changed all that. What started with a trickle of recommendations soon became a tsunami.

“You’ve read Normal People, right?” was an almost daily question to me from friends, none of them Irish, and all of them better-read than I.

South African writers, American academics, Tunisian activists: They’d all taken to Rooney, and the more they spoke about her work, the more adamant I was to avoid it.

Why did I do that to myself?

I was a proud Irish man, raised on the poetry of Kavanagh and Kinsella, the short stories of Bryan McMahon, the music of the Plague Monkeys and Rollerskate Skinny.

If a gang of impressionable internationalists were impressed by some Irish ingénue writing about reading philosophy at Trinity, then, I erroneously believed, it could only mean one thing; contemporary Irish literature was having its Quiet Man moment, and I simply wanted no part of it.

Besides, a simple Google search told me Rooney claimed to be from Mayo.

I was from Mayo!

Why were these people that I liked and respected so taken with a woman from Castlebar? Seven miles from my bloody house? Enda Kenny came from Castlebar. And Padraig Flynn!

We didn’t produce writers, but politicians and heroic Gaelic footballers.

Having a Lebanese NGO worker tell me to read Sally Rooney was an affront to my self-hating Irishness, raised as I was on Behan and boxty.

So I did what I did with sushi, years before, and dismissed Rooney without trying her, claiming I’d never stoop so low as to read her much-too-popular fiction.

Then, I secretly bought a copy of Normal People and devoured it in the bathroom at work.

It was a transformative act to read about an Ireland I was part of, written with such clarity and so devoid of clichéd nostalgia. Emotionally dyslexic young men infatuated by smart, Marx-quoting, ambitious women.

Up to that point, the only self-harm Irish characters visited upon themselves in fiction was perpetuated on a school, with the demon drink the weapon of choice.

Rooney subverted the notion that we were a nation of tortured — predominantly male — souls, perpetually frustrated by a lack of sex and opportunity and, well, sexual opportunity, unable to shake the generational trauma of our colonial past.

The NGO worker was right and I, the man born in the same hospital as Sally Rooney, was very, very wrong.

Having spent the previous year acting as a quasi-cultural attaché, convincing anyone who’d listen that I only read “writer’s writers”, was humbled by a woman from just down the road.

The Rooney Revelation precipitated a chronic case of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon — otherwise known as the frequency illusion or recency bias — in which something you recently learned about suddenly seems to appear everywhere.

Next came the music of The Gloaming, recommended to me by a Syrian colleague who told me he listened to them as he wrote.

Wary of my Rooney reversal, I nodded knowingly, and disingenuously. I’d never heard of them.

A week later, after a dive so deep I ended up ordering a bespoke fiddle online, I texted a friend back in Ireland to ask was he familiar with the five-piece, to which he disgustedly replied — “You’re taking the fucking piss, right? Next you’ll tell me you’ve never heard of Lankum.”

I hadn’t.

Suddenly, every trip to Aaliya’s was tagged by a new discovery.

Interspersed amongst copies of The Prophet and Said’s Orientalism, were editions of The Stinging Fly and Winter Papers, Irish literary magazines the envy of the writing and reading world.

A secondhand copy of Colin Barrett’s short story collection, Young Skins, sat puppy-eyed, begging to be read. Lankum’s sweet music oozed from the speakers.

I half expected Lisa O’Neill to come through the door and softly sing 'England Has My Man'.

I wondered then, had I been living at home, would this cultural renaissance have hit me the same way? I couldn’t answer, and anyway it didn’t matter. Being Irish was cool again, just not in a way it had before.

There have been some very high-profile setbacks too or, to put it in a kinder way — reversions to type.

Martin McDonagh’s multi-Oscar nominated allegory to something or other,  The Banshees of Inisherin, played up to many of the stereotypical tropes that keep many doors ajar for us in America, especially, but stymie the progression of our unapologetic artistic resurgence.

Young, inarticulate men, cursed by the drink and repressed by Church/tradition/family. The cinematography in McDonagh’s film was undeniably spectacular. but the metaphor was clunky and quite outdated.

Hollywood loved it but, even then, one has to wonder: Did stars Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, and Kerry Condon not wince a little at the “yera musha” of it all?

See too the Jon Hamm epic Wild Mountain Thyme, in which we all wore shawls, threw fists, drank porter, and sang songs. All set a few miles from where Rooney imagined Normal People.

If we were ever in any doubt what the majority of our American friends do actually think of us, we were reminded by a couple of 'Saturday Night Live' sketches, that would have been offensive were they not so pathetically lazy, and just plain bad.

To a sad few, Irish people will forever be a nation of spud-crunching, freckly gombeens, teeth rotten from cabbage and stale stout, prone to spontaneous song and casual acts of terrorism.

Actress Ruth Negga would have you think otherwise. So too, Sinéad Burke, advocate for disability and design, and front-row regular at every fashion week you’ve ever heard of. Claire Kilroy with Soldier Sailor, and Alice Kinsella with Milk, have helped define the mothering memoir, a genre once thought impossible, with their brilliant work.

Claire Keegan is internationally regarded as master of the short story. Sally Hayden, the crusading journalist responsible for the harrowing My Fourth Time We Drowned, is routinely regarded as the leading human rights journalist working today.

The men are at it, too.

Check out Lankum’s video for 'Go Dig My Grave', and see vocalist Radie Peat rock a sweater designed by Galway man Colin Burke, hand-knitted with a great degree of care, and yours for a cool $1,500 (€1,420).

Writers Paul Murray and Paul Lynch have been shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize.

Manchán Magan is a writer and documentary-maker who has breathed new life into the Irish language.

Expect some Oscar buzz too for a mediocre musician/DJ from Cork by the name of Cillian Murphy who, to his credit, has somehow remained cool before, during, and long after this mini-revolution, in no small part due to Peaky Blinders.

Every cultural renaissance needs a burgeoning subculture to keep it honest and, in the guise of hip-hop trio Kneecap, graffiti artists Wee Nuls, muralist Spicebag, and rappers like Kojaque, the notion of Ireland’s international artistic influence being confined to the written word is already outdated.

Irish society becoming decidedly more multicultural has undoubtedly helped, diminishing, as it has, our inherited desire to be loved and told how mighty we are.

It’s all a long way from the Wolfe Tones and rowdy renditions of 'Celtic Symphony'.

And though, on recent evidence, they still very clearly have their place in the cultural lexicon of the country, such nostalgic lapses are increasingly the exception, not the norm.

The popularity of The Mary Wallopers, a band who give old Irish ballads a contemporary twist, are perhaps a compromise candidate for this period of transition.

It’s been a wild ride, but a century after gaining our independence as a nation, we may finally be emerging from our artistic adolescence, and emerging into adulthood a much less insecure version of our infant selves.

To credit Sally Rooney with this renaissance ignores the work of the many who came before her, but every rebellion needs an icon.

Who better to lead it than a reclusive feminist, someone willing to eschew the stigma of stereotype, and make art that apologises to no one? 

Viva la revolución!