The last thirty years have undoubtedly been a time of rapid and concentrated transition within Irish society and culture. Every event that occurred over these years in the realm of culture, religion, politics and economics can be read as both a beginning and an end, heralding both the death of an old Ireland and the birth of the new. Certainly the language of progress and modernisation has dominated public discourse as a talisman of desire in the 1980s and the subsequent consensus that something of a break with the past, with tradition, had occurred in the 1990s: that the Irish world was now as it has never before been. Of course, the more mundane truth is that every generation, being so close to events, cannot but view its own time as a moment of profound upheaval, as entirely and painfully new: thus modern Ireland's experience has always being presented as one of transformation and transition. Nonetheless, the rapidity of this change is notable not alone as an Irish but as a global phenomenon. In Ireland, as a consequence, there persists a perverse fascination with excavating the present moment as thoroughly unique in its manifestations of uncharted confusion and trauma. As a result, not since James Joyce articulated the peculiarities of the late nineteenth-century renaissance moment as both the familiar and the foreign has the present seemed so very strange.