Observing literary responses to the post-Celtic Tiger economic crisis around 2014, Lucy Collins noted that poetry “due to its economies of scale and flexible publishing modes […] offers a particularly effective means to engage with contemporary issues” (2017: 164). The market-driven practice of releasing poetry collections in modest print runs, and the medium’s seemingly free-of-charge online presence (for nothing is really free in the age of datafication) substantiate the critic’s assessment. Poetry’s aptitude for confronting the crisis extends also beyond economic and technical circumstance. The environmental predicament, in Ireland exacerbated by the disastrous aftermath of the Celtic Tiger construction boom, has also been effectively addressed by poetry, whose instantaneous philosophical insight, metalinguistic superstructures, as well as “unique formal qualities” are responsible for its “open-ended, multiple and even contradictory levels of meaning”, which “challenge established patterns of […] thought and address complex, labyrinthine twenty-first century human-environment relations” (Garrard and Lindström 2014: 37).[1] Urban encroachment in the years of Ireland’s prosperity dramatically transformed one’s immediate environment, triggering shifts in identity and history perception. The process, in turn, elicited decided reactions from Irish poets, generating such literary landmarks as Paula Meehan’s “Death of a Field” (Painting Rain 2009) analysed by numerous scholars.[2] This article will look closer at two kindred responses, by Eavan Boland and Alice Lyons.

Obviously, it is not only women poets who ponder environmental issues related to the Celtic Tiger and its demise. Derek Mahon, for instance, partly integrates these themes into the all-embracing “garbage theory”[3] manifest in his oeuvre since the 1970s; Paul Durcan in The Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have My Being (2012) offers an ironic positioning of the “New Ireland” in the Irish West; while Thomas McCarthy’s Pandemonium of 2016 (quoted below) juxtaposes the image of disturbed nature – however broadly defined by the poet in real life[4] – with his critique of austerity measures under foreign influence. Having drafted much of the volume in 2008,[5] McCarthy in “The Land Is Not Settled” delves into the historical, social and political implications of the recession. A similar practice can be observed in Boland’s poem “In Our Own Country” and, to an extent, Lyons’s “river Shannon sequence” with its intersection of economic and environmental concerns.

Finally, Billy Ramsell’s cycle from The Architect’s Dream of Winter (2013), centred on technology amid economic adversity, presents a case apart, if not a contrast to the other three poets’ approach to the crisis, and thus completes our comparative framework also in theoretical terms.

Austerity, Control and Surveillance

As Christopher Breu contends, the “rhetoric of austerity” intertwines with “the violence of financialization” and its effect “on the sphere of labor” (2014: 24). While in the Irish context this financial violence references the mechanisms of insolvency (the banking sector and corruption), more broadly it implicates tools under full state or corporate control, and under illusory control – or even beyond the grasp – of the individual: virtual financing, debt, “plastic money”, etc. These tools are integral to the expanding financial markets “pioneered within what became known as the ‘shadow banking’ system, permitting investment in credit swamps, currency derivatives, and the like” (Harvey 2010: 21). The rise of invisible banking created a paradox during Irish prosperity, defined by the material culture, consumerism and “fetishization of home ownership”, which Eóin Flannery deemed “the highest in Europe” (2014: 212). In Breu’s understanding, however, austerity and financialisation are perfectly matched by “a similar logic of the fetishization of the immaterial and degradation of the material” (2014: 26). Ireland’s population, first in thrall of the excessive consumerist culture and then hostage to austerity measures, remained in both phases subject to the Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). The surveillance theorist David Lyon characterised such systems as “not centralized […] on the contrary, […] diffuse, shifting, ebbing and flowing – and yet […] not without discernible patterns of their own” (2010: 113): a description that precisely anticipates the model employed by Billy Ramsell in his “Distant Fears” documenting the crisis years.

Breu’s “rhetoric of austerity” (24) highlights a linguistic process, and as such interlocks in our context also with the economic newspeak of the preceding Celtic Tiger years. Both discourses utilised mass media to exert control over the public mind. Poets, with their heightened sensitivity to the integrity of language, acted as cultural radars: some stripping bare the appearances, others subversively engaging with the jargon. Their engagement mirrors the ambiguity surrounding the Celtic Tiger itself: economy of huge potential, relying on the sector of technology, promoting urban, and not natural or rural environments. We will trace the ambiguous rhetoric of boom and bust (including its acoustic layers and poetic appropriation) in the subsequent analyses.

Finally, this article argues that in confronting the post-2008 economic collapse and its harbingers, Irish poets have created a body of work that exposes the mechanisms of surveillance and control inherent in the new financial and technological landscape of austerity. The choice of the poems had thus been dictated by the related imagery; consequently, the analysed texts were situated in the framework of surveillance studies. Though not devoid of controversies over the very term “surveillance” (originally applied to punitive schemes and now covering numerous types of monitoring activities, including entertainment) and over the existence of the discipline as such,[6] the research area has been expanding since the 1970s to be eventually dominated by two major currents: panoptic/post-panoptic on the one hand, and non-panoptic on the other. The first model relies on Jeremy Bentham’s foundational 18^th-century theory of the Panopticon (2010), later elaborated by Michel Foucault with his diagnosis of “disciplinary society” (1975/1992), and by Gilles Deleuze, who replaced it with “society of control” (1992). The wealth of sub-theories and modifications of panopticism that followed have sought to address the challenges posed by rapid technological expansion, modern capitalist economy and post-9/11 security demands.[7]

Essentially, the panoptic theories apply a negative notion of surveillance “connected to coercion, repression, discipline, power, and domination”, where power is centralised and society controlled (Allmer 2011: 578). This article primarily draws on the Bentham/Foucault panoptic model, with some elements of the subsequent theories. Bentham, in one of his Panopticon versions, namely, the “prison-Panopticon”,[8] envisages a penitentiary institution with a central tower and a surrounding circular building with cells, where surveillance relies on visibility: a system of windows, venetian blinds and doorless passages permits the controlling agent in the tower to inspect the inmates while remaining invisible. This arrangement creates the psychological effect of ubiquitous oversight, compelling the supervised toward self-surveillance and thus “assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault 1992: 201).[9] As Foucault remarks, “the Panopticon must not be understood as a [utopian] building; it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form”, “the disciplinary mechanism […] democratically controlled” by everyone willing to inspect it (1992: 205, 207). While in Foucault’s version the power is administered by disciplinary institutions (military, school, hospital, factory), in Deleuze’s it is taken over by corporations focused on short-term results, where surveillance, much more abstract, is “achieved via continuous monitoring and assessment of markets, workforces, strategies” (Galič, Timand and Koops 2016: 19). This centralised disciplinary and self-disciplinary context of panopticism will be applied to the analyses of Boland’s and McCarthy’s poems.

Non-panoptic theories, by contrast, adopt a broader, neutral and more technical concept of surveillance (Allmer 2011: 578), centred on data collection, storage and processing, i.e. the cluster of activities which have generated terms such as datafication, dataveillance (Clarke 1988), data-self (Elmer 2003: 233) and data-double (Haggerty and Ericson 2000: 611, 613-14; Hier 2002: 402). Deleuze anticipated this shift in surveillance theories by conceiving of the supervised as numeric “dividuals” in databanks (1992: 5). Although some non-panoptic models still address power inequities, this power is decentralised, while society may be unwitting, consenting, even amused, and, less frequently, resistant. Some of the theories consider double-edged surveillance, with the supervised just as active (though not as powerful) as the supervising mechanisms or institutions.[10]

Out of the non-panoptic surveillance theories, almost all can be compared to a network expressive of decentralised power, as opposed to the panoptic tower. One of the most useful models, that of “rhizomatic surveillance” or “surveillant assemblage”, has been proposed by Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson (2000), who founded it on Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concepts of the rhizome and assemblage. The French philosophers conceived of assemblage as multiplicity of matters formed by “lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flights, movements, deterritorialization and destratification”, allowing for slow, accelerated or ruptured flow along the lines. The rhizome, in turn, acted according to the principles of heterogenic interconnection and self-reproduction (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 3-4; 7; 9). The technological advancement of the 20^th century led Haggerty and Ericson simultaneously to condense and expand this theory into the “surveillant assemblage” which “operates by abstracting human bodies from their territorial settings and separating them into a series of discrete flows. These flows are then reassembled into distinct ‘data doubles’ which can be scrutinized and targeted for intervention. In the process, we are witnessing a rhizomatic leveling of the hierarchy of surveillance” (Haggerty and Ericson 2000: 606). These principles will be primarily applied to the analysis of Billy Ramsell’s cycle.

Alice Lyons’s sequence levels the regard (understood as a combination of attention, respect, concern, care and gaze) and communicates a non-hierarchical vantage point; yet, by the sheer presence of that vantage point and a few other significant features, it situates itself at the borderland between the panoptic and non-panoptic.

Ultimately, all the texts under consideration shuttle between these theoretical frames to some degree. This overlap stems from their individual characteristics as well as shared historical background, i.e. the elusive operations of Ireland’s prosperity and austerity (real estate bubble, financial operations etc.) on the one hand, and the rapid ubiquity of new technologies on the other. Another intersection occurs in the temporal frame: while McCarthy’s, Lyons’s and Ramsell’s poems were published in the economic trough, Boland’s belongs to the rapid growth phase. The choice is deliberate and lies with Boland’s portents of decline, a diagnosis of the issues later addressed by Lyons and McCarthy, evincing a continuity of processes and ideas that underpins the crisis.[11]

Eavan Boland’s New Ireland

Most of Eavan Boland’s “In Our Own Country” (Domestic Violence, 2007), unfolding a narrative of the Celtic Tiger property boom and highlighting – in the literal sense – the problematic of attention and surveillance, lends itself to the panoptic context. Set in the Dublin suburb of Dundrum – once a village where Boland lived over thirty years – the poem records its ruthless demolition and replacement with a colossal shopping centre (Randolph 2014: 384).[12] The panoptic perspective immediately establishes a stark divide between “us” (the supervised inhabitants) and “them” (wielders of power and control). Initially, “us” refers to local inhabitants versus the developers and builders; however, by the fifth stanza, “us” expands to encompass Ireland, while “them” extends to the European Union (“old Europe”, which has become “a machine from the Netherlands or Belgium” [Boland 2013: 208]). Boland underscores the violence of this transformation through a register of warfare, damage and loss, using verbal forms (aim, tearing away, lost, dragging, tossing, breaking apart, burned, clearing away), adverbs denoting oppression and duress (tightly, predatory, wintry), nouns for vulnerable body parts (neck, throat) and adjectives for weakness (timid), various forms spelling a closing phase (last, end, once), and finally, abstract forms designating the void (never; nothing, nothing, nothing). Such a register clearly positions “them” as aggressors and “us” as victims. This dynamic aligns with Bentham’s prison Panopticon and Foucault’s disciplinary society, detectable in the witnessing function imposed on “us”, underlined by the tone of the poem: notably, when the imperative “We are here to watch” follows the threat of “vistas we will never recognize” (Boland 2013: 207), striking a tragic note for the spectators. The erasure of Irish landscape, history, memory and identity happens “under our very eyes” (207), as if “we” were watching a public execution.[13] Surveillance of “us” and “our” landscape is implemented by giant arc lamps: a disciplinary tool that evokes prison torture (“aiming”) and invasion (“beaming” far into ‘our’ world; 207). The blinding light enforces the panoptic rule of one-sided visibility, and the colossal lamps hover high to create an impression of ceaseless control, in a manner precisely analogous to Bentham’s original design (the tower in the penitentiary panopticon).

The rhetoric of warfare persists in the old Europe’s “wars and treaties” and the builders’ “onslaught of steel”, a collocation where the contextual sense of “fierce attack” supplants the literal meaning of “abundance”. Importantly, the Irish identity as portrayed in the poem once formed an integral part of the European cultural and historical heritage. Now, the new Europe/“new Ireland” (the “stranger”) undermines the values of “old Europe”/old Ireland by replacing them with greed.[14] The fragmentation of primary matter (clay) and the exchange of memory for the void suggest that, ultimately, the new Ireland becomes a form of new colonisation, turning the natives, in an ironic historical reversal, into “exiles in our own country” (208).

In such a reading of Boland’s poem, the new Europe/Ireland functions both as Foucault’s “disciplinary mechanism […] democratically controlled” (the European Union; the Irish government authorising real estate investments) and as a corporation driven by short-term results, reminiscent of Deleuze’s post-panoptic surveillant in the society of control. Perhaps due to its fatidic voice, “In Our Own Country” also possesses a few features of the non-panoptic approach, most importantly by presenting two vantage points. While the distribution of power in the Irish microcosm of Dundrum leaves no doubt, the natives’ capacity to watch the strangers renders the surveillance double-edged. In the poem, the dual surveillance scheme has been punctuated especially by the anaphoric placement of the preposition “under” (“under our very eyes, / under the arc lamps”), levelling the two perspectives. The witnessing function, while imposed, becomes equally significant to the local community, determined to testify to the destruction. This role, a distant echo of the old Irish bardic tradition of “monitoring” social rules, nonetheless stretches into the future (the Dundrum residents seek “new knowledge”; 207), and may act, in the poem, as a space of difficult negotiation bridging the hiatus between the old and the new locality.

Another element of non-panoptic frameworks which can be raised in connection with Boland’s poem is deterritorialisation. While Jody Allen Randolph aligns it with John Tomlinson’s globalisation theory (partly applicable to Boland’s text)[15], deterritorialisation in “In Our Own Country” can be selectively contextualised by Haggarty and Ericson’s surveillant assemblage mechanism aimed to “abstract human bodies from their territorial settings” (part I), then “reassemble” them (II) so that they “can be scrutinized and targeted for intervention” (III) (2000: 606). The villagers in Boland’s poem, deprived of their neighbourhood (I), get out of their houses (II) driven by dismay, only to find themselves exposed to the scrutiny of the builders’ technology (III). While this particular situation is transitional, one can easily imagine its consequences, with the locality targeted to shop in the new mall, or even reassembled in terms of the population with the influx of newcomers (the fate frequently befalling once nondescript and then fashionably “revitalised” suburbs). Though society in Boland’s poem seems far from being digitalised, old Ireland/Europe with its human concerns (“music, wars and treaties”) is already being bulldozed by the dehumanised “machine” of the new regime (208).

Last but not least, the poem’s binary attention perspective resonates with Lucy Collins’s conviction that “the most familiar opposition in Boland’s work” is the one “between collective female experience and male power structures” (2017: 174-75). Even the title of Boland’s whole collection, Domestic Violence, can be read as pertaining to the national level: the Celtic Tiger and its fall have been notoriously associated with aggressive male style (of business, governance, lifestyle), a critique famously articulated by Rita Ann Higgins, the emblematic poetess of the crisis years. As Higgins sums it up in Ireland Is Changing Mother (2011), “it was stag nites / it was stag nation / it was stag flation” (21); “your sons are shrinking mother. // Before this mother, / your sons were Gods of that powerful thing” (9); “They were kissing babies / and talking roads, / They knew the bankers / would give them loads” (54).[16] While exceeding the scope and focus of this article, this gendered interpretative premise again positions Boland’s text within the hierarchical – this time, patriarchal – panoptic architecture.

Thomas McCarthy’s Unsettled Land

McCarthy’s image of austerity in “The Land Is Not Settled” (Pandemonium 2016: 12) can to some extent function as a panoptic continuation of Boland’s reflections on “prosperity”. McCarthy’s poem is pervaded by an antagonism between “us” (the Irish locality, at times intertwining with the individual “me”) and “them” (the European Union leadership, especially Angela Merkel metonymically condensed into “Berlin”). The “signals” received from Berlin by the Irish in their “autonomous / Region” evoke the power dynamic of the Troika’s intervention (memoranda) during Ireland’s insolvency. The poem opens with the literal panoptic perspective, namely, the bird’s eye view of the “land”; its status of an “autonomous region” which “is not yet settled”, highlighting dependency and a rigid power distribution, aligns with the theoretical framework of panopticism.

The EU performs consistent surveillance from the distance (“All the signals…”), while the supervised strive at self-discipline, a key component of the Benthamese/Foucaultian disciplinary model. However, in McCarthy’s poem, the model reveals a critical limitation in a knowledge gap: the supervised (“we/I”) cannot fully comprehend the supervisors because “[l]ittle did they know” of the region’s specificities. This ignorance, often a cause of invaders’ failures,[17] recalls the history of conquest and colonisation. The author confirms this association in an interview, noting that the poem’s title quotes a 19^th-century expression used by English commentators in reference to Ireland and its civil (anti-colonial) unrest, demonstrating “a typical kind of a colonial thinking about the subject people that there must be some reason why they are unhappy – whereas they are unhappy because they are […] in a British settlement”. McCarthy expresses ambivalence toward the European Union’s impact on his country: “Europe made us modern”, he claims, but ever since the collapse it has offered “depression, recession and reductive thinking” (2024).

The text thus provides a colonial reading of the Irish crisis, mirroring Boland’s colonial reading of the Irish success – both declaring Europe’s engagement. “In Our Own Country” and “The Land Is Not Settled” invoke spectres of exile and eviction (McCarthy’s poem also summons the spectre of Famine). Both utilise the “us” perspective in the witnessing function (McCarthy’s “I” acts as an emergency chronicler). Yet “The Land Is Not Settled” complicates the victim narrative by pointing to Irish responsibility for the failure of self-management: during the “years of pandemonium” (i.e., the time of prosperity), the supervised were governed by their own “demons”. However indebted to Milton’s Paradise Lost in its rebel ethos (as a colony which strikes back?), the “unsettled land” was possessed by fraud and clientelism which supplanted genuine banking and business dealings (“all the gold was gorse / And all investment was storytelling”), by “fallacy of projects and developments come to naught” (Haworth 2017). After all, Pandemonium, Carol Rumens reminds us, was “built on and out of gold” (2017). As such, it demonstrates kinship with other legendary realms, such as W. B. Yeats’s Byzantium, for instance, whose protagonist faces a bare artifice, i.e. illusion, of an alternative reality he has been seeking. These were the regional specificities which the EU surveillants failed to recognise. Preoccupied with an illusory success in their land of fairies and storytelling, the Irish missed the watchtower’s warning signals. This Panopticon, as with all decent utopias, is a prison and does not sport an exit: the colonial conditioning of the Irish crisis persists through bailouts, making the inhabitants, like Boland’s subjects, “exiles in our own country”.

It can be argued that McCarthy’s text gestures toward the non-panoptic framework through the supervised population’s resistant stance, not only in times of the boom, but also in recession. They abandon attempts at appreciating disciplinary European measures and, by exposing the surveillant’s ignorance (the action evocative of social disobedience such as the Occupy movement), communicate a capacity for counter-surveillance, a more active attitude than the witnessing in Boland’s poem. Furthermore, the spectral attributes of the Celtic Tiger – its virtual financing and demonic leaders – anticipate the features of non-panoptic networks, as opposed to the institutional panoptic control of the recession. This un-reality also connects to Breu’s “logic of the fetishization of the immaterial and degradation of the material” (2014: 26): in McCarthy’s poem, the “demons” of immaterial finance encounter the spirits of the material crisis present and past, particularly in the metaphor “a ghost from the assizes”, which powerfully merges Famine-era landlordism with contemporary haunted ruination.

Alice Lyons’s Soundscape of In-betweenness

Ghost estates, a symbol of the post-Celtic Tiger landscape often represented in visual arts and literature, emerge in many publications preceding Pandemonium, including Alice Lyons’s untitled sequence about the river Shannon (initially published as “The Boom and After the Boom” 2011) and another short cycle titled “Developers” (both included in The Breadbasket of Europe 2016).[18] “Developers” can again be read in conjunction with Boland’s poem, with a crucial alteration of vantage points. The “us” perspective has been appropriated by developers, who dexterously juggle the rhetoric of prosperity and austerity, along with colloquial speech applied to the economic context (“love […] and plenty”, Lyons 2016: 112). The poem exemplifies a reversed Panopticon layout: being a dramatic monologue, it follows the genre’s principles by rendering “you” interlocutors (the “loves”, 112) invisible, while “us the developers” cherish the role of the visible agents of control during and after the boom:

When the last contractions brought us to the brink

of our new predicament, we became developers. (113)

This ambiguity of the situation (including a fiasco forged into an asset in the quote above) is the hallmark of Lyons’s poetry when analysed in the context of surveillance studies, which prompts us to position her writing at the overlap, or even in between, theoretical approaches to surveillance.

In parallel to Boland’s and McCarthy’s poems, and contrary to “Developers”, the Shannon sequence allocates sides more traditionally, by virtue of geography: local inhabitants (“this side” of the river bank) observe a construction site (builders and, by extension, developers) on “that” side (Lyons 2016: 100). The invisible developers wield an apparently panoptic power: they take possession of space through aggressive rhetoric and highly exposed physical presence (“the billboard proclaiming / 42 luxury bungalows only two / remaining”, 101). Yet their failure is swiftly attested to by the material collapse of their symbols (the billboard is “[c]rumpled up” by “winter gales” in part IV, 101).[19] The initial pastoral convention of river descriptions (“The river surface offers / space to the song”, 99, resounding with the Spenserian “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song”, however problematic the pastoral convention in postcolonial Ireland may seem)[20] is violently “translated” into the construction site noise, which becomes a form of aural surveillance, imposing itself panoptically over the neighbourhood. By announcing the arrival of immigrant workers, this “aural invasion”, as we can call the series of plosives in “hammer taps” (99) and “tap-tapping” (100), generates a sense of estrangement “in our own country”, paralleling the spatial shock described in Boland’s poem.

For Lyons, however, sound is not merely an agent of distance between “this side” and “that”; it acts as a bridge, spanning the river and transforming the space into a no man’s land filled with “the song”. Not only does it challenge the perspective of “this side”, but it also negotiates between natives and strangers. In part VII, for instance, the abundance of immigrant languages at the local swimming pool is counterbalanced with the imposing property signature of a local Gaelic resident (103). In part I, the river sound in a cruiser’s wake is likened to the Polish language without negative connotations (98),[21] creating an impression that immigrant labourers stay somehow in tune with the environment. Eventually, sound provides a metaphor for in-betweenness, the “leveling of the hierarchy of surveillance” (Haggerty and Ericson 2000: 606), arousing curiosity, not just animosity, on “this side” of the river. Lyons achieves a triple perspective in her sequence (local residents, developers responsible for the crisis, and immigrant employees whose languages and sounds of labour are omnipresent in the series) that dismantles polarised panopticism, establishing a multi-layered surveillance architecture – one that still remains human and natural enough to keep clear of networked non-panopticism.

Billy Ramsell’s Financial Lives

Breu’s “logic of the fetishization of the immaterial” (2014: 26) finds its strongest poetic manifestation in Billy Ramsell’s compelling sequence “Distant Fears” from The Architect’s Dream of Winter (2013: 58-60), which may serve here as an almost definitive case study for the non-panoptic rhizomatic surveillance theory. “Distant Fears” probes the financialisation of Irish lives in prosperity and austerity, depicting human existence as utterly monitored and controlled by virtual capital flows. Already the blurb of Ramsell’s first collection, Complicated Pleasures of 2007, states that the poems “attempt to stake out a ‘personal space’ in a violent world of systems, machines and twenty-four hour surveillance where privacy, language and even memory itself are under permanent threat” (2007: back cover). In several poems of his second collection (The Architect’s Dream), the author “foreground[ed] […] the invasive aspect” of technology, where

machines and machine-like entities penetrate our lives […]. In a sense, this vast machine that regulates the world which itself is composed of […] information-gathering and information-transmitting systems, fiber-optic cables, servers, terminals […] penetrate[s] our day-to-day lives, our dreams and indeed our very language (Ramsell 2024).[22]

The poet’s stance vis-à-vis that technology evolved between the first and the second collection. Writing about Complicated Pleasures around 2012, Ben Keatinge situated it against the background of depersonalisation, “postmodern schizophrenia” and Baudrillard’s simulacra, detecting, in the poems, doses of “postmodern paranoia” and images of “an invasive globalized non-reality which induces panic and passivity in equal measure”, reducing the speaker to a “semi-catatonic victim” (2014: 80-81). In The Architect’s Dream, the reader observes a more complex reaction, registering the speaker’s fascination and awe, if not occasional enjoyment, toward omnipresent technologies.

Ramsell’s network of discrete financial flows thoroughly controlling “our lives” reduced to “patterns in [the money’s] stitched design” (60) vividly evoke Haggerty and Ericson’s surveillant assemblage. In “Distant Fears”, the “intangible” money flows between multiple brains-servers “across the time zones” (58), managed by and compared to machines and technologies (electrical impulse, airplane traffic), but also to natural and man-made phenomena redolent of networks-assemblages (the sea, the loom). Analogously to Haggerty and Ericson’s vision of “human bodies [abstracted] from their territorial settings” to form “discrete flows […] reassembled into […] ‘data doubles’ […] scrutinized and targeted for intervention” (2000: 606), Ramsell refers to the numeric language of banking records, of human loan and debt, which “concentrate living in their terse aesthetic” (58), thereby completing the subject’s transformation into a data-double. The structure of “Distant Fears”, including subtitles, documents the history of Ireland’s upswing and collapse, from the perpetual money circulation (part I), through lack of security related to indebtedness (part II), financial market reactions (part III), bankruptcy and bailouts (part IV), citizens’ prayers for money (part V), rescue sought in offshore dealings (part VI) and finally, the climax of the economic impasse (part VII). These phases and their actors (money, data-selves, “he” and “she”) resemble Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage in the multiplicity created by “lines of flights, movements, deterritorialization and destratification”, with slow, accelerated or ruptured flow along the lines (Ramsell’s “pathways the money both is and symbolises”, 58). In both Deleuze and Guattari’s theory and Ramsell’s cycle, the assemblage relies on distance: the poem depicts the Irish psyche controlled by money dependant on remote satellite operations on the one hand, and human speculations (in stock exchange and banking) on the other.

The rhizomatic structure of this financial surveillance (characterised by interconnection and self-reproduction in Deleuze and Guattari, and a levelling of hierarchy in Haggerty and Ericson) is manifest in all of Ramsell’s sequence, and encapsulated with all intensity at the very end of “Distant Fears”:

It’s a machine engendered for its own remaking. Programmed, deft,

it unravels, reweaves itself again. Our lives are patterns in its stitched design. (60)

The “stitched design” of data collection, storage and processing transforms citizens into numeric “dividuals” in databanks (Deleuze). The elusive omnipresent power (of the market, money, banks and its tools such as terminals/POSs, etc.) supervises society that is not only consenting (“parallel lovers”, 58; “Money, be my friend”, 60) but also servile (“Money […] [s]uffer not your servant to suffer your indifference”, 60).

The only moment when power assumes a physical, centralised, institutional presence occurs in part IV (59), where the eponymous “Men in the Grey Suits” arrive in Dublin after Ireland’s bankruptcy becomes a fact. These visits of the Troika briefly thrust us back into the disciplinary Panopticon, similarly to the European presence noted in Boland’s and McCarthy’s poems. In Ramsell’s first collection, the command post of “Brussels”, though belonging to the rhizomatic structure, was perceived as a distant, purely technological backdrop of financial non-reality (“You are being credit-checked / by a mainframe in Brussels”, “Silent Alarm”, 2007: 58). In “Distant Fears”, the sinister, vague nickname “The Men in the Grey Suits” (suggestive of mafia or secret service) signals their role in enforcing accountability for the chaotic status quo (“Nothing is stolen nor yet cancelled out”, “Nothing is built. Nothing is yet cancelled out”, 2013: 60). For the Irish, the phrase “the men in the grey suits” spelled foreign dependence: dating back to Margaret Thatcher’s removal from office, the poet remarks, it re-entered Irish discourse in 2008, when the IMF assumed control. Their presence felt like an “avatar of a greater agency, a greater invisible economic ghost in the machine that had always been running the country really but now was going to run it in a directly fiscal manner” (Ramsell 2024), a physical manifestation that, in the panoptic context, immediately recalls the tower, its invisible surveillant and the impression of constant, centralised control.

The author’s linguistic strategies serve to reclaim much of the “rhetoric of austerity” for poetry. Another formula, “Nothing is stolen nor yet cancelled out” repeated thrice in different variations including Irish Gaelic (59), exposes austerity propaganda by denying responsibility for the crisis. It also triggers reflections on invisible banking, the money miracle and money worship identified in the poem (“making faith of water”, 58; “A Prayer”, 60), aligning with Breu’s “fetishization of the immaterial” (2014: 26). “Distant Fears” transforms dead metaphors revolving around financial flows and tides in market lingo and corporate jargon into the sequence’s structural imagery and rhythms. This compelling reclamation challenges some critical opinions, such as those presented by Debbie Ging, Michael Cronin and Peadar Kirby, that the “phoney discourse of acquisition and plenty” is a transient infestation of language (cited in Flannery 2014: 216-17). Ramsell’s symbolism related to water and flux essentially hints at Ireland’s most famous idea of recent decades, the one of liquidity, a prerequisite of individual and corporate existence. “Offshore” (60), another term of oceanic geography, clearly denotes companies’ fiscal getaway. Yet the literal meaning of this aquatic symbolism is so vitally imbedded in the insular landscape of Ireland and its long history of voyage and exile that “Distant Fears” indeed exemplifies a literary process of taming the crisis through linguistic appropriation and geographical re-anchoring.

Conclusion

The four Irish poets examined in this article probe a range of phenomena linked to the mechanisms of surveillance and control shortly before and during the Celtic Tiger’s dramatic decline. Their literary reactions vary. Although the subtleties of their poems cannot be overlooked, one may venture a classification – inevitably generalising – of these reactions, from disapproval (Boland), through ambivalence (McCarthy), curiosity (Lyons), to cautious fascination (Ramsell) with the “sinister but still friendly” corporate jargon and the numinous aspect of technology (Ramsell 2024). Boland’s and McCarthy’s diagnoses can be primarily situated within the panoptic mode of control (Bentham/Foucault/Deleuze), which exposes centralised power enforced by punitive structures (the developers’ giant arc lamps) and institutional authority (the European Union, the Troika). Their poetic critique often alludes to a new form of colonialism, casting Ireland as a supervised subject compelled toward self-discipline within a fixed, hierarchical field of power. In contrast, Ramsell’s work fully engages in the intricacies of modern technology, thus lending itself to the non-panoptic theoretical framework of surveillant assemblage (Haggerty and Ericson), with decentralised control operated by abstract, mobile constellation of virtual data and finance. Ramsell’s sequence reveals citizens transformed into “data-doubles” caught in the “stitched design” of banking systems and the process of “the fetishization of the immaterial” (Breu 2014: 26). In some of the mentioned poetic renderings of panoptic and non-panoptic models, the supervised venture a passive or active counter-surveillance; Ramsell’s couple even try to “surf” the rhizomatic network (Deleuze and Guattari/Haggerty and Ericson) in which they were caught. Alice Lyons’s sequence occupies a theoretical borderland between these two surveillance modes. By employing a multi-perspective soundscape, her cycle challenges the binary gaze of the Panopticon and achieves a “leveling of the hierarchy of surveillance” (Haggerty and Ericson), promoting ethical attention and human curiosity over condemnation. This range of reactions has been enabled by poetry’s “open-ended, multiple and […] contradictory levels of meaning” (Garrard and Lindström), including intrinsic and contextual elements of that meaning, such as sound qualities, commentaries by title, or fond attention to technological detail. Last but not least, the analysed poems successfully redeem the economic newspeak and the “rhetoric of austerity” (Breu 2014: 24), reclaiming control over the very language of the crisis and transforming it into an insightful poetic idiom. This literary achievement thus promotes understanding of how global systems of control are diagnosed, resisted and symbolically tamed.

Notes

[1] In this sentence, Garrard and Lindström’s ideas start with “unique formal qualities”.

[2] See e.g. Collins (2017: 173-74); Sperry (2015a); Flannery (2016: 66-9); Hanna (2020: 131-32).

[3] See e.g. Haughton (2002).

[4] “For me, nature is just the permanent condition. The permanent condition of the country is its nature. […] Nature to me is what’s beneath everything”, McCarthy says in the interview (2024). Subsequently, in relation to the crisis, he refers to nature in more literal terms: “I never see nature as something that can be permanently ruined […] [but rather] as something that constantly and immediately responds to the crisis. […] coming back to save itself despite the actions of the humankind”. We have to bear in mind the gap of c. 15 years between the interview and the time the collection was written, when the poet’s approach was possibly evolving.

[5] See Rumens (2017).

[6] One of its main theorists, Christopher Fuchs, in a scholarly comment (2015) referencing 23 of his research contributions, argues against the phenomenon of surveillance studies.

[7] For an overview of surveillance theories, both (post)panoptic and non-panoptic, see Allmer (2011), and Galič, Timand and Koops (2016).

[8] Galič, Timand and Koops point out that Bentham created four panopticons, while Foucault refers only to the best-known “‘prison-Panopticon’(described primarily in Panopticon; or the Inspection-House (1786, 1790-1791)” (2016: 11).

[9] For the description of Bentham’s prison-Panopticon, see Foucault (1992: 200-9).

[10] See Haggerty and Ericson (2000: 617-19); also, the concept of sousveillance by Mann, Nolan and Wellmann (2003: 332-36). A specific case of double-edged surveillance is self-surveillance, or “post-panoptic selfie-surveillance”, mainly in social media (Lyon 2016: 373-74).

[11] Boland’s is not an isolated prophetic voice; most famously, Dennis O’Driscoll’s and Rita Ann Higgins’s poetry of the Celtic Tiger and of the crisis years has been analysed by critics (see e.g. Keatinge [2012: 76-77]; Flannery [2014: 206-11]; Sperry [2015b: 103-28; 133-53]). Out of the four poets discussed in this article, Billy Ramsell’s previous collection Complicated Pleasures (2007) also explores the illusive nature of the Irish success.

[12] The Dundrum Town Centre opened in 2005.

[13] The discussion of the “us” perspective follows below in the non-panoptic framework. However, it can also be situated in this panoptic context: similarly to camp inmates forced to watch public executions, Dundrum residents have to watch the destruction site by force of topography (they cannot escape the view).

[14] Additionally, as Jody Allen Randolph notes, the new shopping centre “has appropriated the name of the town” (2014: 385).

[15] Randolph (2014: 386) refers to Tomlinson (1999: 229-30). Tomlinson regarded deterritorialization as not necessarily negative, but also “exhilarating and potentially empowering” (2012), which is not the case in Boland’s poem.

[16] For the discussion of Rita Ann Higgins’s poetry, see footnote 11; also, O’Toole (2011), Bracken and Mahajan (2017); Workman (2021: 287-88). O’Toole detects, in Higgins’s work, the anger which “rubs shoulders with other deliciously deadly sins, like lust and pride. Sex is important to Higgins’s way of seeing people: it turns them into individuals, gives them some kind of private power” (2011). Bracken and Mahajan, on the other hand, point to the “sexualized language” in Higgins’s poems, the diction meant to “interrogate the phallocentrism and toxic masculinity endemic to the post-boom period”, “a masculinized ‘mess’ [in “The Builder’s Mess”] with descriptions of construction masking striking language about misplaced ejaculations […], cavernous vaginas […], and unreleased sperm”, an “unrelenting dystopic vision of the Irish post-boom landscape in terms of failed sexual conquest” (2017: 100-01). Before Bracken and Mahajan, the gendered discourse of Higgins’s poetry was discussed by Moynagh Sullivan (2013: 173-74; for instance, home as a phallic substitute) and Amanda Sperry (2015b: 113-17), who analyses “traditional markers of Irish masculinity” and its “mythical prototype” Cu Chulainn (117).

[17] Examples include Napoleon and Hitler invading Russia, or Italians invading Greece through Albania during the Second World War. In McCarthy’s poem, it may also be the case of mutual misrecognition despite the attempts on both sides; yet, since self-discipline consumes all of the protagonists’ energy, the reader finds only a brief – and individualised – mention of the Irish striving to meet the European criteria (“Believe me, I tried to understand / All the signals…”).

[18] The poems were discussed by Eóin Flannery (2014: 211-16) and Simon Workman (2021: 288).

[19] The described “riverside property” in its ghost form can be viewed in the video “Developers” which Lyons prepared with the visual artist Orla McHardy (Lyons and McHardy [2011-2014]).

[20] See Frawley 2005. If ever we think of Lyons’s sequence in the colonial context, we should rather apply it to developers conquering space; immigrant labourers performing their work are just hired by those who perform This spatial “conquest”.

[21] Compare Lyons’s and McHardy’s prize-winning video The Polish Language (2009), which attests to the author’s fascination with this language; her poetry also abounds with “literary trips” to Poland.

[22] The publication of The Architect’s Dream coincided with the release of another volume of technological enchantment, Conor O’Callaghan’s The Sun King (2013), representing the Celtic Tiger as a virtual hi-tech or space creature.