Overwhelming evidence of children’s and young adults’ vulnerability in Irish society at large was produced in Irish journalist Mary Raftery’s TV documentaries States of Fear (1999) and Cardinal Secrets (2002), which revealed the shocking abuse suffered by children in so-called reformatory and industrial schools as well as clerical abuse that had been swept under the carpet for several decades. Significantly, Raftery’s findings led to the setting up of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (in 2000) and the Murphy Commission of Investigation into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin (in 2002).

In the former, commonly known as the Ryan Report, it was concluded that between the 1930s and the 1970s, reformatory and industrial schools, operated by Catholic Church orders and funded and supervised by the Irish Department of Education, were guilty of systematic abuse such as ritual beatings, rape and psychological terror. The reformatory and industrial schools were operating until the 1970s. Arguably, when these schools were closed, one social ill was replaced by another: youth homelessness.

Homelessness, including youth homelessness, has been called ‘perhaps the most extreme form of poverty and social exclusion today, with those residing “out of home” amongst the most vulnerable in society’, and since the 1970s, it has been a growing problem in Ireland. As Michael Punch informs us, ‘[b]etween 1996 and 2002 homelessness in Ireland increased by 123 per cent to 5581 people’.

Siobhán Parkinson’s young adult novel Breaking the Wishbone deals with the uncomfortable issue of youth homelessness in Dublin from the perspectives of young adults. Published in 1999, at the height of the Celtic Tiger and coinciding with the disturbing revelations in documentaries such as Raftery’s States of Fear, Breaking the Wishbone seems both to tap into the climate of questioning the state of affairs in Ireland and to pave the way for, and indeed insist on, social reform in many areas.

In this paper, I will explore the ways in which the novel highlights youth homelessness while at the same time giving young adults a voice in a society that does not seem to care about their well-being.

The economic boom in Ireland, referred to as the Celtic Tiger, resulted in a financial merry-go-round, where there were few restrictions controlling the financial institutions. This in turn created a financial bubble that ultimately burst, resulting in the financial crash in 2008. At both the individual and collective levels, the crash was devastating, causing severe unemployment and economic hardship, even poverty among many segments of the population, re-shaping the landscape of work in Ireland. This chapter explores the pain and vulnerability following the crash as represented in Donal Ryan’s novel The Spinning Heart (2012). The novel offers a hard-hitting critique of irresponsible constructors and employers, a reality ultimately made possible by a corrupt and dysfunctional political culture.

In a globalized world, English Studies is in need of transformation. Serving as an introduction to the anthology, this chapter makes the case for an issue-based approach to English Studies where engagement is sought with fields beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries. From the position that English Studies can be understood as a form of participatory action — where English Studies is brought into the world and the world is brought into English Studies — the chapter examines practices of work in contemporary society, and previews the volume’s contributions.