In early 2010, novelist Julian Gough, author of Jude: Level 1 (2007), attacked his fellow Irish writers for their inability or unwillingness to confront the immediate moment of Celtic and post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, making the charge they were content to wallow in the past of a pre-modern Ireland. Of course, his somewhat over-the-top and certainly tongue-in-cheek comments were intended to spur on a response, and a debate duly followed in the pages of the Irish Times newspaper. The merits, or not, of novels that dealt with the past and novels which dealt with the present were bandied back and forth for a number of weeks in articles and letters. The fundamental point missed, or ignored, in the debate was that it is not a novel's immediacy in terms of its content that is important but its relevancy at any given moment to its readership which marks off a novel's success or otherwise. What emerged were depressingly familiar arguments about the novel that were neither new nor fresh, but have dogged the form from its earliest appearance in Ireland. Behind the arguments about the past and the present lurked the suggestion that the form that happily flourishes elsewhere fails to flourish within an Irish context. It would seem that the Irish novel continues to be misunderstood. The discussion possessed no real historical sense of how the novel has developed in Ireland, or indeed elsewhere.