Presented by MoLI in partnership with the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Join Professor Barry McCrea with musician Ian Lynch of Lankum in this edition of Ireland's Generation X?, a series of conversations about Ireland's in-between generation.

“Generation X” describes the group of people born between 1965 and 1985, a generation caught between Baby Boomers and Millennials characterised by anti-establishment slacker culture, cynicism, irony, and— after the global economic crash — negative equity. An American term describing American lives, the moniker perhaps fails to accurately represent the experience of those who came of age during the 1980s and 1990s in Ireland. This series invites artists and writers who grew up in an Ireland shaped by the Troubles, social justice movements, EU membership, the Peace Process, and the Celtic Tiger, to share their work and reflect on the social and cultural influences at home and abroad.

Ian Lynch is a musician, singer, songwriter and founding member of the band Lankum, with whom he has spent the last 18 years touring and recording with. He started the podcast Fire Draw Near a year ago and he has spent lockdown researching and making episodes for that, as well as a 3-part documentary on the history of the song The Wild Rover. He has an MLitt in Irish Folklore and has lectured on traditional music and song in UCD. He swims in the sea whenever he can and plays a lot of Dungeons and Dragons.

Barry McCrea is a novelist and a scholar of comparative literature. His novel, The First Verse, won a number of awards, including the Ferro-Grumley Prize for fiction. His most recent academic book, Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe, was awarded the René Wellek prize for the best book of 2016 by the American Comparative Literature Association. He holds the Keough Family Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where he splits his teaching between its campuses in the US and Europe. He is finishing a new novel which follows the life of a Dublin suburban cul-de-sac from 1982 to the present.