Cool Hibernia: ‘New Men’, Metrosexuals, Celtic Soul and Queer Fellas

Abstract

During the Celtic Tiger period,¹ Irish cinema changed significantly, both as an industry and as an art form. Ireland’s relatively rapid transformation from an agrarian, postcolonial nation to a (post)modern, first-world state gave rise to a cinematic output that was significantly more diverse, generically, thematically and stylistically. This was bolstered in no small part by the formation of the second Film Board in 1993, the same year in which homosexuality was decriminalised in Ireland.² In the relatively brief period of prosperity that followed, cinema was characterised by more upbeat, celebratory images of Irish life, underpinned to a large degree by a shift from the traditional to the modern and from the rural to the urban. As we have seen in Chapter Eight, much of the male imagery that evolved during these years was ostensibly preoccupied with the darker underbelly of Irish prosperity, although, as I have argued, this imagery plugged into a much broader, highly commodified aesthetic of ‘underclass chic’ in Anglophone cinema. At around the same time, however, there was also an embracing of cosmopolitanism, resulting in more ‘positive’, optimistic and non-heteronormative images of masculinity, and marking a clear break with what had become a rather stock repertoire of priests, autocratic fathers, depressed and isolated ‘loners’, small-time gangsters and charming sociopaths.