A year after all of the head-shaking and nay-saying assurances that ‘negotiations’ with the IMF and EU were mere ‘fiction’, the sense of betrayal that Irish people experienced about the then Government’s denial that the Irish nation was about to lose its economic sovereignty is still palpable.

The power of neoliberal discourse lies in how it contaminates and thrives on the established language we use to discuss politics and society. In particular, ideas of ‘freedom’ and the ‘individual’ now mainly operate in a shrivelled register of economic instrumentality. Audrey Bryan examines how praise of human resilience has come to mean Croppy lie down.