The Celtic Tiger’s Equine Imaginary

Abstract

Yet from the temporal vantage point of the twenty-first century, it would be easy to dismiss the Irish horse as nothing more than an ensign of a romantic Celtic past, through the figure of the kelpie, the Irish water horse, and Epona, the horse goddess, or an emblem of the country’s colonial heritage, through the Anglo-Irish tradition of landed gentry. Although the horse secured a position as an Irish national symbol in 1928, when a committee chaired by W. B. Yeats selected the Hunter to appear on the half crown coin of the new nation, nearly a century later, and particularly in light of the modernization undertaken during the Celtic Tiger period (1994–2008), the Irish horse might seem quaint and obsolete: a vestigial trace of agrarianism and cultural nationalism, a ghostly revenant haunting Yeats’s poetry and the paintings of his brother Jack.