A county called WAWWA: Brian McCarthy’s ‘Boomtown’

This piece offers a critical reading of Brian McCarthy's collection Boomtown as a form of visual social commentary on post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. Through the technique of magical realism, McCarthy constructs a counterfactual landscape that challenges the self-congratulatory narratives of the boom years, rendering visible the spatial and social wreckage left in their wake. Invoking Debord's critique of spectacle, the analysis argues that McCarthy's imagery disrupts the official iconography of Irish national identity, reframing familiar landscapes through references to Latin American inequality and urban ruin. The collection is read as a geographical and cultural document of a society suspended between rage, disillusionment, and the hollow political mantra of "We Are Where We Are."