Throughout the twentieth century Irish theatre was fully engaged with the pressing questions
of independence - how to achieve it and how the gap between what was desired and what was
settled for might be addressed. In Because We Are Poor Victor Merriman reads Ireland's
postcoloniality as a state of critical desire for a postponed project of decolonization in
Independent Ireland. He develops insights from Awam Amkpa Luke Gibbons Peadar Kirby Joe Lee
David Lloyd and others to argue that Irish theatre is staged in a neo-colonial social order
dominated by economic analyses and public policies designed to secure the position of
indigenous elites usually at the expense of the majority of Irish people. Theatre emerges as a
key site in which the contradictions arising from frustrated but enduring desires are embodied
enacted and enabled. During the 1990s the state's monopoly on public discourse in Independent
Ireland comes under severe pressure with hitherto marginal concerns appropriating public space
and demanding to be heard. Irish theatre responds to the range and diversity of those voices
to the extent that the Review of Theatre in Ireland (1995-1996) envisages a National Theatre in
dialogue with a Theatre of the Nation. The expanded theatrical activity of the 1990s is the
focus of Because We Are Poor and the author's intimate involvement in that moment as scholar
practitioner and policy-maker makes the analysis offered here especially compelling. This book
brings together concerns which the author has worked to articulate in Irish theatre criticism.
It critiques contemporary appropriations of the postcolonial or post-colonial among scholars
of Irish drama and proposes a nuanced postcolonial critical practice challenging critical
vocabularies applied to Irish drama. The book addresses the role crises and potential of Irish
theatre as the cultural and political consequences of globalization manifest themselves.
