In the past year, listeners around the world were captivated by "Ireland's Generation X?," a series of conversations about Ireland's in-between generation led by Faculty Fellow Barry McCrea, Keough Family Chair of Irish Studies, the University of Notre Dame.
Presented by the Musuem of Literature Ireland (MoLI) in partnership with the Keough-Naughton Institute, “Generation X” describes the group of people born between 1965 and 1985, a generation caught between Baby Boomers and Millennials characterized by anti-establishment slacker culture, cynicism, irony, and—after the global economic crash—negative equity. An American term describing American lives, the moniker perhaps fails to accurately represent the experience of those who came of age during the 1980s and 1990s in Ireland. This series invited artists and writers who grew up in an Ireland shaped by the Troubles, social justice movements, EU membership, the Peace Process, and the Celtic Tiger, to share their work and reflect on the social and cultural influences at home and abroad.
"Ireland's Generation X?" is now available on YouTube and also in podcast form across most major podcast platforms. For many, highlights of the series are Nick Laird's first reading of his poem "Up Late" and Caitriona Lally reading an excerpt from her upcoming novel.