Memory is the emotional driver of all O’Donoghue’s work. In this painting he reconnects with childhood holidays in Mayo

For Ireland’s first appearance at the Venice Biennale of Architecture the young designer built a pavilion from 40,000 peat briquettes. It was part stage set, part retreat

The Derry artist’s multiscreen video installation explores the insecurity of emigrant identities and the diaspora’s romanticised views of Ireland

The poet’s ethical concerns are evident throughout this landmark collection

‘Teacup’ displays a short section of the film, ‘Man of Aran’, within the rim of the photographed cup, showing the men in their precarious craft battling the waves

The Co Offaly playwright unleashes the great forces of sex and death, doom and rage – in language whose words ooze into each other until the distinctions between them blur

The artist won the first Glen Dimplex award for making visible the festering wound of the Famine

Roddy Doyle’s novel about a 10-year-old whose parents’ marriage is falling apart reveals the dark secret that the writer had been a literary novelist all along

The former teacher’s dark masterpiece gives a disconcerting but compelling voice to the mistreated children who were Ireland’s darkest secret

The influential Irish postwar multimedia artist played with our sense of time and reality

The Co Armagh-born poet is arguably the first real Irish writer of globalisation

Tony O’Malley embraced his background in the bog, and left behind initial struggles to become an artist of distinction

Commissioned to celebrate Kinsale’s achievements in the Tidy Towns competition, the sculptor’s work of public art immediately attracted controversy

The playwright’s ambition was to create a theatre that was serious in its reflections on Northern Ireland’s political crisis, while being exuberantly theatrical

The Dubliner grew up in the oral tradition of stories and singing – ‘a vivid, interesting and textured world’. However complex her poems may be, they never lose touch with the energy of a shout in the street

Frank McGuinness’s searing drama dared go into the minds of Northern loyalists who have made their own blood sacrifice in the trenches

The artist’s mural celebrating childbirth proved controversial in a country still coming to terms with the death of a teenage girl in Granard and the Kerry babies case

The poet took Irish out of the classroom and into the pubs and clubs of youth culture

In this collection, as in much of the poet’s work, dreams of permanence give way to history’s merciless demand to leave everything behind

Antrim-born Rainey combined the violence of the Troubles with classical tones of Renaissance art – specifically, depictions of the martyrdom of St Sebastian

Poet’s reclaiming of the reality of women’s experience was both important and thrilling

Brian Friel wrote three superb plays in an astonishing two-year burst of activity. ‘Faith Healer’ was the least well received but has become perhaps the most influential

With its pose taken from a famous photograph of the union leader addressing a crowd, the statue on O’Connell Street is one of the most dynamic public works in Dublin

The influential, critically acclaimed artist poses many questions, not least on national identity, history, censorship and the cultural position of painting

Creation of editioned print marked ongoing conflict in North, which Ballagh had reflected in 1972 installation of 13 drawings in blood and chalk, sparked by Bloody Sunday killings

In the poet’s most direct response to the Troubles in his native Northern Ireland, the past is alive with an atavistic violence that thrusts itself into the present day

The Dublin-born writer found fame in New York, but her best stories are set in Ireland

The Dublin playwright, himself an embodiment of upward mobility, brilliantly captured the comedy and melancholy of new money

This journal of ‘art and thought’ provided a ‘rampageous anti-establishment voice’

The poet had to endure the anxieties and resentments of living with tuberculosis. His philosophical third collection expresses the realities of life in all its imperfection

The fall of the British Empire is expressed as dark comedy in this resonant novel

The poet and the artist collaborated to produce a blunt, muscular reimagining of the Ulster legend of the Cooley cattle raid

The screen-print of Che Guevara, based on a photograph by Alberto Korda, became a global symbol of protest

The artist and critic’s staggeringly innovative multimedia ‘magazine’ dared to deconstruct the very concept of conceptual art

The author’s depiction of the leaders of the 1916 Rising is analytic and dispassionate, and it avoids glorification or condemnation

From the get-go, Cork County Hall was designed to reflect the spirit of the age – this was architecture as both an agent and a symbol of civil and political change

The sculptor’s vision of the Irish revolutionary – jokingly dubbed ‘Tonehenge’ – is a fitting tribute to a perplexing figure as well as the perplexing nation for which Delaney made it

Official Ireland approved of McGahern’s mesmerising debut novel, based on his upbringing in a Roscommon Garda barracks. The banning of its follow-up sent him into exile

A sense of alienation pervades the poet’s most important and powerful collection