As the Irish LGBTQ+ community has emerged in a period of radical and rapid social change, the figure of the queer is often made to function as a figure for social progress. By focusing on recent queer critical work on time and temporalities, this chapter asks how the queer figure of the contemporary fails to address lingering traumas of social stigma and violence (including the 1982 antigay murder of Declan Flynn) and also fails to fully account for the connection of temporalities to sexual identity and belonging. By examining representations of sexual bodies in and out of sync with normative social and temporal structures – particularly in literature by Irish lesbian writers, such as Emma Donoghue and Mary Dorcey – this chapter foregrounds the ways that temporalities script and structure the sexual and how some forms of queer identity and community may resist or rethink those scripts through alternative registers of time.

Almost stepped on it, on them, bits of digit,

a pinky, knuckle, in the grass and gravel, graveside,

no blood, just dust, grit, some wire in it, in them,

the fingers, bits fallen off, but it's the savior

not a leper, or perhaps St. Pat, some pope—don't know,

just that he's mythic, biblical, robed, and old

as these things go, though these tombs are newer than

the ruins all around—the stone he's propped on

a grave of the lately gone—he's chipped, maybe chapped,

grey saint, white-washed, waving his hand

like that, disfigured benediction for those damn kids

crawling the walls and up inside the old tower,

cider and crisps in the friary, butts, some fumbling

about the motte and bailey just beside, relics

left behind, like these knocked off parts

on the lawn, almost stepped on, those two

bent digits in the litter that say he was divine

and not, flesh like us, to be picked up, pocketed.

A Field of rings glistens in the pawnshop

like cold wickets on grey lawns—

like shackles fragile and under glass, locked

boxes, pincushions of love and loss. Pawned

white gold lifted, found—the old vows

around the ring ground down, the tux and gown

now dust, names polished away. Second hand,

it fits your hand. Ecce homo. He is the man.

CHRISTMAS 1966

The small box is filled with little beasts—

a barn that's a barge, a boat—the ark's

ridged sides like boards, a plastic plank,

a deck that drops in fitted slots, but lifted

reveals that zoo of twos—heaped beasts

to be released beneath a glittering tree,

its dove-clipped limbs. Dad's asleep

in his reclining seat, and crumpled waves

of paper recede as Mom circles the room.

The humming wheel throws light across the walls.

When Grace Quinn, the female protagonist of Keith Ridgway's 1998 novel The Long Falling, flees rural Monaghan for urban Dublin after killing her alcoholic and abusive husband, she intends to make a place for herself there with her son, Martin, a gay man who had fled Monaghan years before. Ridgway's novel affirms the rural/urban divide so often depicted in recent Irish literature, rural Ireland represented as backwards and socially repressive, Dublin a synecdoche for the modernization and the political changes transforming Ireland at the end of the twentieth century. When Martin writes home to his mother from Dublin, in one of the novel's frequent topographical spatializations of time, he figures the cultural difference of the city as both spatial and temporal: “He wrote that it was a different world, a different century” (9). The novel takes place in 1992: there is a new government, a new female president of the nation (Mary Robinson, elected in 1990), and within a year Ireland will abolish laws against homosexuality. The nation is also wracked by the controversy of the X abortion case, in which the Attorney General prevented a suicidal 14-year-old girl from obtaining an abortion in England. The X case provides a constant historical counterpoint to the novel, putting the domestic violence and homosexuality of the Quinn family in the historical context of other movements for sexual and reproductive freedoms, all framed within this urban/ rural divide.

However, if the novel seems a tidy fit in the Irish city/country, future/past binary, additional symbolic spaces complicate that easy urban/rural political-geographical division, especially as places ground both political identity and community formation. Further, although Grace seeks to create “a place of her own” at Martin's side, the novel traces the unraveling of that relationship, a failure not just of the personal alliance but perhaps also of larger political alliances it represents.