The emblem of modern Ireland? Not fiddles and Guinness but a soulless shopping plaza | Emer McHugh

The singer CMAT dances around a retail centre in a video for her new album. It is the elegy those of us who grew up in the post-Celtic tiger recession have been cravingYou wouldn’t know it to look at the tourist board ads, but the emblem of modern Ireland is probably a shopping centre. And now that emblem has found its bard, in the form of Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, the Irish pop star and songwriter better known as CMAT. She is a woman wielding a creative energy that is completely her own, but which is also profoundly shaped by her experiences coming of age in a post-Celtic tiger, recession-era Ireland. This has never been clearer than on her new single, Euro-Country, from the forthcoming album of the same name – a project that reminds us that pop culture has the power to illuminate political and social realities that are otherwise being ignored. It is the elegy that we, Ireland’s post-recession generation, needed – and it references at least two shopping centres.The Euro-Country album artwork is a send-up of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s painting Truth Coming Out of Her Well, with CMAT emerging from the fountain in Blanchardstown shopping centre, beside a giant euro coin. In an interview with the Guardian before her spectacular Glastonbury performance in June, Thompson observed that while Ireland is “a little more fetishised and trendy than it’s ever been”, it’s also “a really hard place to live, a really hard place to grow up, unless you have money, which we didn’t. So yeah, magical, beautiful, mystical Ireland: it’s a shopping centre – that’s what I grew up with.” Continue reading...

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