In the early 2000s the economic boom, more commonly known as the Celtic Tiger, unleashed such euphoria and optimism that the depression of the previous decade, which had led political commentators to consider the Republic a "third world country" (Caherty), seemed now a matter of the past. Moreover, those very same political commentators were now eager to declare the "end of Irish history"-a history understood as one of penury and destitution, of not being sophisticated and "modern" enough, in other words, of not being European enough.
Whereas phenomena like the Celtic Tiger and recently Brexit have helped Ireland's aspirations to emerge from the shadow of England and become a European nation in effect, the promises made in the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic (Irish: Forógra na Poblachta) to the Irish by the Irish remain to a large degree unfulfilled. As I demonstrate, Jamie O'Neill's At Swim Two Boys (2001) contests the latter by looking at the complex and complicated colonial and imperial context from which the independence movement emerged, recuperating in the process the voice of those gay men who, although active participants in the rebellion, were left out of the national narrative.
Set in 1915 and 1916, At Swim Two Boys chronicles the coming-of-age love story of two 16-year-old Catholic boys from different socioeconomic backgrounds amidst the turbulent times before and after the Easter Rising. The latter is not a background, nor a mere setting, but a medium through which the characters find meaning and purpose to their relationship and into which they project their desire for a non-heteronormative affiliative and affective free country. To achieve this "nation of the heart," where kinship will be established through the shared love for one another regardless of sexual orientation and for the Irish nation, Jim and Doyler will count on the guidance of Anthony MacMurrough, a Catholic aristocrat who spent two years in an English prison for sodomy charges. MacMurrough's contribution to their objective involves creating a counter-history that will instigate a sense of belonging in the teenagers. This counter-history involves an alternative and more inclusionary visions of the past.
