In his essay ‘Story-telling: The Gaelic tradition’ Declan Kiberd states that for “the past eighty years in Ireland, the short story has been the most popular form of all literary forms with readers,” and that it has “been the form most widely exploited by writers”. Kiberd highlights that Patrick Pearse saw with “uncanny accuracy” that the future of Irish literature lay in the short story rather than the folk tale. That essay, which formed part of a collection on the Irish short story, was published in 1979[i]. Over thirty years later the short story form continues to be widely exploited by Irish writers today.
