We have passed the halfway point of 2024. You have already ploughed through lists of the year’s best films, best albums and best books “so far”. We now hurtle towards 2025. Quarter-time assessments are less common – even in this era of listomaniacs – but exceptions are surely made for periods of 100 years. Take a deep breath. At the end of the year we will be a quarter of a way through the current century. (No need to trouble the letters page with arch surprise at columnists not understanding when the 21st century began. Let’s just say we’re speaking about the 20-somethings. Okay?)
They had already got through a whack of history in 1924. Eric Hobsbawm, the great Marxist historian, argued the first World War, whose dates also bracketed the Russian revolution, marked the start of a shorter 20th century that ended with the collapse of Soviet bloc in 1991. We can reasonably fence off the 1990s as a neutral buffer zone. A period characterised by centrist complacency in much of Europe and North America. The arrival of Clinton. The rise of Blair. The hilarious argument that we had reached “the end of history”.
The buffer period came to a close with the attacks of September 11th, 2001. A sense of hair-trigger unease has hung around ever since. It is rare that the beginning of the notional century (or decade) matches so closely with the calendar century (or decade). But, in a host of fashions, that was the case with the 20-somethings.
This weekend a fine film titled Housewife of the Year had its premiere at the Galway Film Fleadh. Ciaran Cassidy’s documentary uses the eponymous competition as the foundation for a discussion of a changing Ireland. With beautiful neatness the already anachronistic event came to an end in the fulcrum year of 1995 (succeeded by the well-meaning gender-neutral Centra Homemakers of the Year). I can recall, weeks after returning from a decade in London, watching horrified as the voters came absurdly close to rejecting that autumn’s referendum on the introduction of divorce.
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It would be a lie to suggest that, had the vote gone differently, I was prepared to get on the plane and de-de-emigrate, but, as things worked out, one could convince oneself the nation was on the cusp of dramatic change. It was already all around. Smatterings of wealth. The emergence of new immigrant communities. People like me making the decision I had just made (and not unmade). Meanwhile, the negotiations towards what became the 1998 Belfast Agreement were clanking into motion.
One can dispute where the longer Irish 20-somethings began, but, by the time the fireworks launched, it was clear the nation was hurtling through uncharted territory. Many were the think pieces that argued “Ireland has changed more in the past 10 years than it did in the previous 50″. It wasn’t all baloney.
This is largely a premature column about culture. Space precludes any comprehensive consideration of how convincingly Irish film, television, drama, fiction, music and the rest dealt with the social changes of the first quarter, but there has never before been a period of comparable international visibility. On Tuesday the nation reacted with insouciance to Paul Mescal’s appearance in the first trailer for Ridley Scott’s dizzyingly expensive Gladiator II. How could we not become blasé?
Ruth Negga, Saoirse Ronan, Michael Fassbender, Colin Farrell, Ciarán Hinds, Kenneth Branagh, Brendan Gleeson, Barry Keoghan, Jessie Buckley, Kerry Condon and Mescal himself all received acting Oscar nominations in the current century. Cillian Murphy and Daniel Day-Lewis have won since 2000. It seems a long time ago that the nation came to a halt when Dana won the Eurovision song contest. You can fill in the Booker Prize winners yourself. You can ponder the emergence of new variations on folk and domestic takes on post-punk. It has been a quarter of much figurative trumpet blowing.
Something else came to a head as the new century croaked into vision. Reality media? Well, yes. It is too perfect that the first UK Big Brother launched in 2000. But the cultural conversation over the last 25 years has been inexplicably interwoven with one larger technological innovation. If the second half of the last century was taken up with the consequences of television, the first quarter of the 20-somethings was about our accommodation with the internet. It was there in 2000, but it was still (just about) avoidable. The takeover is now so total it feels gauche to point out its presence. It did not turn out to be the new movies or the new TV. It turned out be the new electricity or the new wheel.
This will not be the century of the internet. We are already at a stage where you may as well celebrate the presence of oxygen.
