Introduction

“The Blessed Virgin and Cathleen Ní Houlihan were probably the two most dominant female icons in my thinking – the one being religious and the other poetic and romantic”, Edna O’Brien “a new languageis a kind of scar and heals after a while into a passable imitation of what went before”, Eavan Boland The decline of second-wave feminism in Western societies, the legacy of neo-liberal capitalism in general and of the Celtic Tiger in particular, and the emergence of a more liberal Irish society ...