This chapter provides a crucial historical perspective on the repeated crises of hunger leading up to the Great Irish Famine of the mid-nineteenth century. Margaret Kelleher argues that “Although the Great Irish Famine of 1845–1851 is the best-known occurrence, the experience of large-scale famine in Ireland was of much longer duration.” Ireland of course had experienced a number of famines (smaller in scale) before the devastation of the 1840s. Kelleher points to “periods of great hardship in 1756–57, 1782–84, 1800–1801, 1816–18, 1822, and 1831,” and relies on the environmental history of the eighteenth century for a longue durée historicization of the Great Hunger.

In this chapter Sharae Deckard reminds us that far from being a “green” country, Ireland’s carbon emissions are currently among the highest per capita in the EU and continue to rise, so that the Irish state falls far short of the reductions required by the Paris Agreement.” The chapter traces the history of Ireland’s energy regimes that range from turf, coal, oil, and more recently, renewables. In a comprehensive survey of the energy regimes and their representation in Irish literature Deckard argues that literary and cultural representations play a crucially subversive role in the contemporary neoliberal environment by offering “alternative conceptions of value that repudiate capitalism’s devaluing of human and extra-human life.”

This chapter expands on what we generally conceptualize when we think of Irish narratives’ attention to the natural world. Folklore, Bairbre Ní Fhloinn writes, “speaks with the authority of the group and with the sanction of accumulated tradition”; it has at its disposal “a ready-made vocabulary.” In many ways, folklore suggests a radically different form of epistemological and aesthetic practice when compared to the Gaelic annals. It is worth noting here that indigenous epistemologies and vernaculars are not only important for historical reasons but also, as the field of Traditional Ecological/Environmental Knowledge (TEK) testifies, paramount for contemporary sustainability measures. Ní Fhloinn demonstrates Irish folklore’s place in a global tradition that is inspired by oral narratives and local histories and committed to environmental activism.

This chapter provides us with a rich historical trajectory that begins with the catalogue of trees found in Edmund Spenser’s sixteenth-century epic poem The Faerie Queene, in which Irish forests, following a well-established English rhetorical tradition, are politicized as hiding places for Irish rebels and threaten the sanctity of the English plantation. The chapter is especially interested in analyzing the complex history of Irish deforestation in literature. Anna Pilz notes that “For Spenser and his contemporary planters, the reality of Ireland’s woods presented a threatening wilderness, precluding any form of surveillance, resulting only in chaos and danger.” She then traces later narratives about deforestation through the writings of Lady Morgan, Maria Edgeworth, and Emily Lawless, which strike new avenues for Irish Environmental Humanities scholarship, before culminating in an astute critique of the Irish government’s “Climate Action Plan” published in August 2019, which announced that “it aims to mitigate [aspects of] the climate crisis by planting 22 million trees per annum over the course of the next twenty years.

This chapter “examine[s] the encounter between Irish literature as a ‘terrestrial form of thought,’ and the ocean as a putatively alien environment.” John Brannigan draws on a host of Environmental Humanities scholarship, most specifically from Blue Humanities; his reading treats the oceanic as a critical and material space providing alternative epistemologies to humanity’s dominant land-based knowledge systems. In the “encounter with the maritime” such terrestrial thinking “would find a scene of negation, radical otherness, or utopian or dystopian release.” The chapter begins with an important reminder of “The Real Map of Ireland, a dataset resulting from the Irish National Seabed Survey which mapped the 220 million acres of “land under the sea” over which Ireland is entitled to claim sovereignty and “exclusive economic rights” under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).” This new submarine “territory” that extends to almost a thousand kilometers across the Atlantic Ocean and the Maury Channel, and to the south over three hundred kilometers, Brannigan argues, “marks a submarine treasure map” and is open to capital’s inexhaustible extractive appetite.

In this chapter Adam Hanna notes that “From the lonely farm-redoubts of John Hewitt, to the flooded demesnes imagined by Seamus Heaney to, more recently, the imperiled familial spaces that appear in the work of Sinéad Morrissey, the homes and other refuges of Northern Irish poetry have often been isolated, watchful, and precarious ones.” Apart from the threat of political violence arising from the Troubles (1968–98) in Northern Ireland, Hanna detects a complex dialogic between domestic spaces (which are immediately beholden to local pressures) and the wider environment (which is endangered by rising seas, violent storms, and overflowing rivers). Hanna deconstructs this interplay between the effects of climate change and the “discourses about both the established order of the province and the subversive energies that might undermine this order” and defines a distinctive “Northern Irish ecological poetics” in which “global anxieties and local pressures entwine.”

This chapter focuses on the literary tradition of shape-shifting human-animal figures in early Irish and modern literature. Inspired by ecofeminist and multispecies scholarship, Kathryn Kirkpatrick argues that “Palpably dynamic, relational, and even dialectical, the shape-shifter dramatically embodies ... a relational epistemology, the self-made and known in relation to others, including animal others.” Indeed, shape-shifting is “a powerful trope in an era when human beings, particularly those of the first world, must transform and adapt quickly to climate crisis.” The essay chastises the severe shortcomings of contemporary politics to address the mass extinction of species and contextualizes the historical literary tradition of shape-shifting from the vantage point of contemporary concerns.

This chapter charts a transhistorical narrative to analyze the evolving permutations encoded within human–animal binarisms. Maureen O’Connor argues that “The native Irish were long believed to have powers of human–animal metamorphosis.” O’Connor states that the Welsh clergyman Giraldus Cambrensis, and later Edmund Spenser in his View of the Present State of Ireland, “claimed that the Irish regularly turned into wolves.” Interestingly, in the late nineteenth century “various threats to the status quo, including feminists and Fenians, were figured as werewolves. Following the Great Hunger and the subsequent rise of Fenianism, which agitated for Irish independence often through acts of violent terror, the image of the threatening Irish animal became ubiquitous in English culture.” O’Connor is especially alert to the gendered dimensions to such discourses, making visible the transformation of the dyadic relationship between animality and femininity that stretches from early Irish writing to colonial and postcolonial deployments.

This chapter provides a much-needed corrective to the territorial and terrestrial logic of Irish literary and nationalist discourses. Mary Burke argues that the preagricultural modes of nomadic living mean that ambulant cultures negotiate landscape in very different ways to the more dominant sedentariness prized in normative discourse of nationalism. In Ireland, Travellers “provided seasonal farm labor, horse trading, entertainment, hawking, and tinsmithing services to both the urban and rural majority. The latter two services, in particular, are central to understanding Traveller impact on the environment, since some of the labor of tinsmithing involved the mending and repurposing of items and equipment used in homes and on farms.” Burke shows us how an interconnected set of developments and policies transformed Travellers from providers of services that emphasized mending, repurpose, and reuse, to a degraded community that could only be ‘fixed’ by coerced assimilation into a progressively consumerist majority culture in which disposability was increasingly prized.”

Acknowledging that Ireland’s monastic tradition nurtured scholars who wrote in Old Irish and in Latin, and who were responsible for a vibrant literary culture that included a number of forms, such as hagiography, poetry, epic, or voyage tales (immrama), this chapter analyzes the Irish annalistic tradition for evidence of climatological data. While almost a millennium passed between a scribal entry on vellum and that entry being written on paper, available for us to examine today, it is understandable that a great deal of skepticism exists around the accuracy of the texts. The analysis relies on comparatively checking the accuracy of such narratives by paying attention to alternative historical sources, calculating dates of past eclipses, referring to ice-core records, and matching them to the dates of these events as given by the early medieval texts.

This chapter attends to issues shaping Ireland’s food sovereignty today by paying attention to the “materialities of food production, its distribution, and changing consumption patterns, which reveal the intersections between the environmental and political in food policy.” Miriam Mara detects these issues as important themes in Irish literature from the 1950s to the present. While there are historical continuities to consider, Mara notes that that “the environmental and political situation around food in Ireland shifts over time – from wartime rationing during and after the Emergency 1939–48 – to the unsteady balance between environmental health and food production under European Union Common Agricultural Policy.”The global agroeconomy, an industrialized monster of late capitalism, is at the forefront of climate-change mitigation discourses. The Irish agricultural sector’s reliance on livestock production has meant that the main source of methane emissions in the country are its cattle and sheep.

This chapter provides a broad survey of the field of Irish literature and the environment, and challenges some of the ways in which the subject has been broached thus far. It argues that the exponential effects of the climate crisis are now being felt across the world in a manner that demands urgent critical intervention and innovation. How is Irish Studies reacting to the momentous ontological and epistemological crises ushered in by the Anthropocene epoch? As the chapters of this survey indicate, scholars working in the field of Irish Studies are increasingly using interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary tools to analyze Irish culture’s relationship to the environment. The chapter goes on to summarize the contents and contexts of the contributions to this volume.

This chapter demonstrates forms of belonging to place in Irish-language poetry and prose.Louis De Paor utilizes Mike Cronin’s term “denizen” to understand alternative forms of belonging in place and notes the military advantages for Irish nationalist fighters traversing the Irish landscape that arose from being able to access local folklore. The essay suggests that “The extent to which intimate knowledge of the local terrain facilitated the kind of guerrilla warfare prosecuted so successfully by Ó hAnnracháin and his comrades (of the Gaelic League) is evident in a significant body of writing in Irish by veterans of the Irish revolution.” This essay spans a wealth of Irish-language writers – from Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Máirtín Ó Direáin (1910–88), to Cathal Ó Searcaigh (1955–), Colm Breathnach (1961–), and many others. De Paor suggests that the aim of reclaiming “a more secure sense of belonging, of being at home in a place where landscape, language, history and community are fully integrated” is the defining characteristic of Irish-language revival.

Christine Cusick argues in this chapter that “an ethics of environmental engagement [often] decenters a sense of nation,” revising our sense of identity honed within discourses of political modernity. She focuses on this crucial aspect of ecological dwelling, countering the rise of nationalist discourses in the twenty-first century. Irish literature, like many other postcolonial literary traditions, is in a bind here: Questions related to borders and border transgressions (central to the discourse of political modernity) need to be rethought in the present. Cusick notes that “Implicit in the question of border mapping is the familiar question about how a critical discourse might approach texts as locally embedded without denigrating global import.” The essay draws on the work of the geographer Nessa Cronin and the polymathic narratives of Tim Robinson but moves beyond them to center contemporary Irish writers.

Irish poetry’s articulation of and emplotment within a spatial matrix is one of its governing rubrics, whether one tracks a literary-historical genealogy from medieval dinnseanchas poetry or contemporary reflexes of that tradition. This essay considers how Irish poets refract genres of English landscape and pastoral poetry and imagines a map of the island of Ireland as a contiguous or palimpsestic series of writerly domains – with Yeats hovering over Sligo, Ní Dhomhnaill over Kerry, Longley over Mayo, Meehan over Dublin, and so on. The chapter examines the poetics of space and place within particular rural, urban, domestic, or public contexts and reads Irish poetry’s emplacement within a regional, national, or colonial frame. Ireland has a long tradition of pastoral, topographical, and nature writings, but Eric Falci asserts that “this isn’t to suggest that all Irish poetry is topographically minded or concerned to locate itself with geographical precision.” Rather it is a call to recognize that “place” “exists both materially and conceptually in a ceaseless dialectical toggle with ‘space.’”

This chapter argues that the agricultural and human disaster of the Great Irish Famine, and its broader cultural interpretation as a preventable tragedy, catalyzed an eco-nationalist consciousness within Irish political and literary circles. Literary landscapes functioned as tools of cultural preservation as well as a means through which a new Ireland might be constructed. Justin Dolan Stover demonstrates how this included political platforms that identified land ownership, agricultural self-sufficiency, and conservation as prerogatives of a politically independent state. The chapter argues that political writing and literary ecology in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland often shared multifaceted concerns within anticolonial discourse.