Diaspora and representation: Martin McDonagh, Oasis, and Ireland

By Entertainment Editor Tess O’Regan

Ireland loves a diaspora success story. If there’s a rising star who has any connection, no matter how tenuous, to this island, they are sure to be claimed. “They’re Irish, you know,” a chorus of journalists, radio hosts and mothers will proclaim, pointing to an Irish parent, grandparent, surname, or distant aunt who lived here once for a summer. These “gatekeepers” of Irishness stand with the door ajar, doling out the céad míle fáiltes to anyone who’ll look twice at us. A familial connection isn’t even a necessity for these passports. In 2020, Matt Damon went for a swim in Dalkey carrying a SuperValu bag, and endeared himself to the entire island. Earlier this year, Ayo Edebiri became an honorary citizen when what began as a joke on Letterboxd ended with her thanking Ireland in her Emmy acceptance speech. This habit of adoption is by far one of the more wholesome aspects of Irish culture. In a time where xenophobic attitudes have gained unfathomable traction, it’s heartening to see such a liberal application of the word “Irish”, where  anyone who wants to be Irish can be just that.

That’s not to say, of course, that the relationship between famous members of the diaspora and Ireland is alway straightforward. In 2022, Ireland was quick to celebrate the success of The Banshees of Inisherin. Written and directed by Martin McDonagh, the film garnered numerous Oscar nominations, and was a hit not just here but in America too. In fact, it was Banshees that kickstarted Ireland’s love affair with Edebiri, after she “confessed” to playing the role of Jenny the Donkey in her Letterboxd review of the film. But despite its commercial success, Banshees was received with trepidation from many critics.

McDonagh’s parents hail from Sligo and Galway, and he describes himself as London-Irish. Born in England in 1970, and emerging as a playwright in the late 1990s, with titles such as The Cripple of Inishmaan (1996), McDonagh’s early work often revolves around the west of Ireland. As Patrick Lonergan notes in his book on McDonagh, it is the west ‘in particular [that] has been romanticised in art and literature and tied to notions of Irish identity.’ Banshees, originally written as a play during this early point of McDonagh’s career before being adapted for the screen, is a monster of such romanticisation.

A clumsy metaphor for the Irish Civil War, the film traces the deterioration of a friendship on the Aran Islands, as battles rage on the mainland. Lonergan notes elsewhere in his book that the ‘fighting, drunken, religiously superstitious, slovenly, feckless but pleasantly humoured and good-natured Irish [is] a stereotype…propagated across different forms of popular culture.’ The characters of Banshees stagger around the island, more often than not finding themselves in the local pub, where they drink or talk or fight. They are flat caricatures, devoid of much interiority and all originality. McDonagh leans fully into the stereotypes, painting Ireland with the same colours its biographers always choose: alcoholic and melodramatic.

Yet there is a tension between irony and sincerity in McDonagh’s writing. His medium of choice is, afterall, comedy—a genre infamous for subversion. Could it be that, by employing them to such a heightened degree, McDonagh is poking fun at Irish stereotypes? Possibly. But an author’s intent is only the set up to a joke. It must stick the landing as well.

Banshees was not a small production, made with an Irish audience in mind, where we could laugh at the people who laugh at us. It was screened globally, and that global audience was ultimately entertained at the west of Ireland’s expense. It’s a shame, especially considering other McDonagh films that succeed in lightly mocking both Ireland and its portrayal in international (read: USAmerican and British) media. Yet, despite the likes of In Bruges, it’s hard not to feel as if McDonagh has turned his Irishness into something to be exploited for inspiration. 

McDonagh is far from the only famous member of the Irish diaspora that has a complicated relationship with Ireland. Like McDonagh, Liam and Noel Gallagher of Oasis were born to Irish parents. Growing up, they spent their summers in Mayo, with their mother’s family. Paolo Hewitt’s book Getting High: The Adventures of Oasis, which follows the band during their 1996 tour, over-romanticises the band’s Irish Catholic roots to no end, but it does offer a detailed analysis of the brother’s connection to their heritage and its influence on their music. 

Depending on who you ask over here though, the Gallaghers are either completely one-hundred-percent our own, or Britpop messers that we want nothing to do with. This divisive reaction is characteristic of public reaction to Oasis, who came out of Manchester in the mid-nineties with uncompromising lad-ish behaviour that either endeared or outraged audiences. 

News coverage of their reunion in late August is a great example of this. On the one hand, you had fans rejoicing in the fact that Cain and Abel finally decided to forgive and forget, after their turbulent split in 2009. Meanwhile, critics saw the reunion as nothing more than a cash-grab, scandalised as the brothers pulled a Taylor Swift on it, employing dynamic pricing for their 2025 tour on Ticketmaster. What was once a working class band, which you could see for the price of a pint, was now charging a month’s rent for a show. Audiences felt betrayed. Irish journalists, especially, seemed eager to distance themselves from early reactions to the reunion, when they had interviewed old GAA coaches and extended Irish family members indiscriminately. No longer was the line: “Remember the ’95 gig at Slane? Or ’96 at the Point Theatre?” Instead, the main question in the Irish media became: “Do we really want to be associated with these hooligans?”

McDonagh might represent Irish stereotypes on the page, but, to the press, the Gallaghers are those stereotypes made flesh. After their shock rise to fame in 1994 and 1995, with back to back platinum selling albums Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, the brothers were torn to shreds by the tabloids. From leaked stories to completely fabricated fictions, the pair were painted as drunken, brawling idiots, with a bit of “champagne” sprinkled on top, to keep things current. To be sure, Oasis were no angels. But you have to wonder, would the band’s publicity have been as negative if they weren’t working class and Mancunian-Irish? Their contemporaries and rivals, Blur, were seen as cheeky but clever; ironic upstarts, but not riotous. No one subtitled Damon Albarn’s accent on television.

As with everything in Britain, the reaction to Oasis boils down to classism, with a bit of anti-Irish sentiment thrown in for flavour. Nobody wants their culture to be represented at its worst—reduced to stereotypes for the purpose of eliciting laughs or selling more magazines. But that’s the thing: the negative images of Irishness the Gallaghers seem to put forward were shaped by press and audiences more than their behaviour alone. McDonagh, as a writer, holds the pen, and has more power over his reception. But his ink is blotted by Hollywood and drained of its irony. Neither the Gallagher brothers, nor McDonagh’s character, are what you would call “role models for good behaviour.” But should they be? Oasis were (are!) a rock band. They are musicians, not diplomats. The same applies to McDonagh. For all three of them, good representation is not the order of the day, art is. 

Heritage is a complex, malleable thing, but maybe that’s the beauty of it; in the uncertain spaces between ironic and sincere, Irish and not, the boundaries of national identity can be broken down, re-negotiated and interpreted. And through these deconstructed boundaries a living, breathing, ever-changing and open culture emerges.