In the economic and political circumstances of 1980s’ Ireland, emigration presented an attractive option – and in some cases the only option – for young people north and south of the border. The two key protagonists of the works I examine in this chapter, the first from Dublin and the second from Belfast, are representative of these changes. Their authors, Joseph O'Connor and Robert McLiam Wilson respectively, were typical of a new generation of Irish authors at the time who brought a renewed youthful iconoclasm to the pages of Irish fiction. Here, familiar locations of Irish London (the building site; Euston station; the local Irish pub) metamorphose from iconic to ironic sites. Rather than being merely parodied (as was the case in the texts I explored in Chapter 5), in these texts the experience of the Irish migrant in London is subjected to a degree of postmodern pastiche not seen before. However, while London's streets provide (sometimes literally) an arena for the expression of a more individualized, if solipsistic, sense of self beyond questions of national allegiance, personal identity ultimately proves to be something over which O'Connor's and Wilson's protagonists have less control than they might think. Eddie Virago, a key figure in O'Connor's early fiction, and the eponymous protagonist of Wilson's novel Ripley Bogle (1989), leave Ireland because they feel constrained by traditional notions of Irishness and an attendant nationalist/republican rhetoric to which they feel no sense of allegiance. But after being in London for some time, their sense of exile becomes evident, albeit experienced in radically different ways. Rather than issues of ethnicity, they discover (sometimes through altered states of consciousness) that their identities are ultimately subject to more fundamental questions about fact and fiction, sanity and madness, and life and death.

Cowboys and Indians (1991) and related short stories by Joseph O'Connor

The character of Eddie Virago, who first appeared in Joseph O'Connor's debut novel and later in a number of his subsequent short stories, is one of the most memorable fictional portrayals of the Ryanair generation. London offers the former English literature student a convenient way of escaping the recession-ridden country of his birth and, as ‘the fetid birthplace of punk’, promises this would-be rock-star a career and lifestyle still only dreamed of back home.