Introduction

This past year has seen the publication of several texts which, at their heart, consider the complex entanglements of Irish identity and performativity. Reviewed in this section is a selection of works which variously critique popular or received perceptions of Irish identity; interrogate what that identity means in personal, societal, and cultural contexts; examine the ways in which that identity is performed; and consider the people behind these images, from cultural producers to those overshadowed by narratives foisted upon them.

In her review of The Green Space: The Transformation of the Irish Image by Marion R. Casey, Ciara Moloney praises the book for offering a novel analysis through its examination of Irish and Irish American identity via the framework of image-making. Casey frames Irishness as transatlantic and mutually constructed, rather than as a binary between Irish and Irish American identity. Moloney is less convinced, however, by Casey’s sustained focus on Irish American diasporic communities (to the exclusion of others), and by the limited consideration afforded to the broader power and influence of America in the post-Second World War period.

Joe Huber reviews the special issue of Sport and Society, “Sport, the Media and Ireland: Intersections of Gender, Class and Geography”. Huber draws attention to the issue’s focus on gender, particularly the challenges faced by female athletes and sports journalists in relation to visibility, emotional labour, and a lack of institutional support. While noting that some articles occasionally stray from the stated themes of gender, class, and geography, Huber argues that the special issue is timely and offers a valuable and much-needed insight into the social and cultural importance of sports media in Ireland – more pertinently, into the representational approaches employed by sports media producers and the ideas this media communicates.

Elsewhere in this section, Kane Geary O’Keeffe praises Irish Digital Cultures: Identity, Contexts, Space as an accessible and largely comprehensive examination of Ireland’s contemporary digital landscape. Geary O’Keeffe identifies a pattern in the book’s second section whereby digital practices adopted during moments of crisis (notably the COVID-19 pandemic) are frequently abandoned in favour of a return to “real” physical spaces, suggesting limits to the long-term reconfiguration of cultural production. They also note the ways in which marginalised Irish identities appear in and move through online spaces. Geary O’Keeffe praises Sandrine Uwase Ndahiro and Eric Ehigie’s use of interviews in “Negotiating Black and Irish Identity in the Digital Space” as “a refreshing and insightful change of pace in an academic collection”.

In a year in which questions of national identity and its performance have been so productively foregrounded by researchers in Irish media studies, it is particularly timely that this period should also see the publication of selected writings by one of Ireland’s most significant filmmakers – an artist who has consistently subverted received notions of Irishness. Ellen Scally contributes the final review in this section, examining Count Me Out: Selected Writings of Filmmaker Bob Quinn, edited by Toner Quinn. Scally argues that reviewers have thus far overlooked the political content of Quinn’s book, in favour of its entertainment value and though she notes that the structure of the book and the arrangement of Quinn’s writing threatens at times to undermine the seriousness of its import, she highlights the forward thinking, progressive quality which has always been present in his work. Scally highlights in particular Quinn’s concerns about the anaesthetising quality of passive media consumption, which she notes remains “pertinent as we navigate the newer and more complex territory of internet and AI regulation and policy”.

Alongside the publication of these texts, 2025 also saw sustained scholarly engagement with questions of Irish identity, representation, and cultural production through a number of academic gatherings that helped to articulate the current shape of Irish film and media studies. In May, the Irish Screen Studies Seminar at University College Cork brought together researchers working across film, television, digital media, and cultural theory to reflect on the theme of loneliness and how this is mediated, performed, and experienced under contemporary conditions. A further valuable dimension of the Irish Screen Studies Seminar was the Round Table: Professional Horizons, which proved particularly generative for PhD candidates and early-career researchers. The discussion foregrounded questions of precarity within Irish media studies, addressing the realities of short-term contracts, uneven institutional support, and shifting expectations around academic labour. Crucially, the session also invited reflection on the evolving role and identity of media studies scholars and how academic practice might respond to changing cultural, industrial, and pedagogical conditions. Presentations frequently returned to tensions between the individual and their environment and asked questions about the nature of selfhood, performance and identity.

These questions were further developed later in the year at a symposium on Irish Film Studies held at Trinity College Dublin in December, convened in honour of the retirement of Professor Ruth Barton. Recognised as one of the most influential scholars of Irish cinema, Barton’s has consistently approached Irish identity as a cultural formation that must be interrogated rather than assumed. Her work is attentive to history, diaspora, gender, industry, power and place. Her scholarship has played a crucial role in establishing Irish film studies as a critical field that resists narrow national narratives, instead emphasising exchange and the politics of representation. The symposium addressed a wide range of topics among which figured the history of Irish and Northern Irish cinema, contemporary media production, distribution, and exhibition practices and policies, women and the Irish film industry, and questions of national, cultural, and social representation. Barton’s keynote address was an insightful consideration of Irish media studies, past present and future.

Both the Irish Screen Studies Seminar and the Irish Film Studies Symposium underscored the vitality of current scholarship in Irish media and film studies and its sustained engagement with identity as something which is constructed, contested, and performed. They provide an important backdrop for the works reviewed in this section. Taken together, these discourses reflect a field deeply attentive to the ways in which Irish identity is articulated and performed through media, labour, technology, and spectatorship. The works reviewed here respond to notions of identity and the performance with novelty and elasticity. Collectively, they expand the scope of the discourse and encourage us to ask new questions about what it means to be, to perform, and to watch Irishness in 2025. This critical orientation, evident throughout the academic year and in the publications under review here, signals a continued commitment within Irish media studies to questioning how identities are produced, circulated, and received. Reminding us to ask what stories we tell, as well as why, and how we tell them.