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This essay focuses on Irish writer Kevin Barry's first collection of short stories, There Are Little Kingdoms (2007). The Ireland depicted in this work is the Ireland of the new millennium - a territory facing the transformations of Celtic Tiger prosperity. The analysis of these short stories, which provide several snapshots of contemporary Ireland, will explore how the Republic depicted in Barry's work is a territory in some ways bound to its rural past, often characterised by its short-sightedness despite pretensions of development. Changes are occurring, but at the same time stasis permeates the scenarios of the plots. The irony is salient, considering that the Celtic Tiger era is a time associated with prosperity and joy, yet the lives and stories of the characters of There Are Little Kingdoms (2007), as this essay will reveal, are downbeat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on Claire Keegan's markedly satirical understanding of the inadequacy of quotidian reality in rural Ireland and its tragic effects on people, especially on women, as well as in Keegan's use of the short story genre to concentrate on the quality of seeing rather than on moralizing issues - a technique which has led her way of writing to be considered cold, externalist and non-emotional. To this end, I shall explore which of the rhetorical strategies of the satirical apparatus are present in three stories from her 2007 collection Walk the Blue Fields: "Walk the Blue Fields", "The Forester's Daughter" and "Night of the Quicken Trees". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]