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Notes -
Your excerpt from Lynch's novel is exactly what I imagined 🤦‍♀️ "Ochone, Eileen achusla, but isn't it the hard, dreary life you have and you trying to rear your seventeen ragged-arse children while your drunken husband is never home except to beat you and get you pregnant again in between spending the rent money in the pub, och ochone agus ullagón o!" Such a staple of the Irish novel as to become a parody of itself, and he's still using an updated version of it.
Trade union husband finding out that it's the left-wing element* he's served all his life turning Ireland into the authoritarian police state, but one where anyone can get gay married and sure don't we have abortion now (albeit it's in a limited way) and do you want to bring back the bad old days when the Church was in power, do you, Larry? while his middle class striving to be upper-middle class STEM professional wife working for one of the American pharma multinationals with a base here dreams of making it to the head office in California because that's where the action is, everyone knows that the real career advancement and power lies in America if you can get there and doesn't want to know anything about it, don't rock the boat Larry, we're never going to get a visa if you have a criminal record; everyone is happy with the new prosperous Ireland - if you are in the right place to avail of that prosperity - and of course we need to crack down on the ignorant lower class that is rioting in the streets - now that's a novel that would threaten his career.
But that's not a novel he's ever going to write.
*Or the version of it we have now; the Frank Cluskey type in the Labour Party is long gone and replaced by the champagne socialist element much more comfortable with social progressivism rather than the class struggle, and appealing to win the middle-class vote by promising more social liberal policies while the real working-class element is scooped up by Sinn FĂ©in and the tiny splinter Marxist parties, such as our very own college-graduate Trotskyists.
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