‘How Will We Kill the Evening?’: ‘Degeneracy’ and ‘Second Generation’ Male Adolescence in Independent Ireland

Abstract

Writing in 1905, the young Cork nationalist Liam de Róiste wondered whether ‘an objective change of affairs, or of general ideas’ had taken place in the Ireland of his teenage years or whether the transition was merely due to ‘the inevitable change from boyhood to youth, from youth to manhood’ in him.1 After his generation’s subsequent achievement of independence, the answer became clearer: it was the former. For de Róiste was a member of the ‘revolutionary generation’ in Ireland, a group of young men and women determined to differentiate themselves from their parents’ world; a collective who would go on to become, to use an appropriately gendered and generational term, the ‘founding fathers’ of the independent Ireland achieved between 1916 and 1922.2