“I think we all just got a bit too proud of ourselves too soon”: heteronormativity, whiteness, and Far-Right extremism in Caroline O’Donoghue’s <i>All Our Hidden Gifts</i> trilogy

Caroline O’Donoghue’s All Our Hidden Gifts trilogy, comprising All Our Hidden Gifts (2021), The Gifts That Bind Us (2022), and Every Gift a Curse (2023), engages closely with the zeitgeist: it is markedly informed by the cultural, social, and political climate in Ireland during which it was written and published. The trilogy fictionalises a backlash in response to Ireland’s recent rapid cultural and societal change. It offers its readers the opportunity to consider anxieties that arose in Ireland during this time period and appraise Ireland’s status as a liberal society. In particular, the trilogy engages with concerns to do with Irish identity, heteronormativity, and whiteness, as well as anxieties about the threat that Far-Right extremism might pose to Ireland’s multiculturalism and adolescents. This article examines the trilogy’s intersectional approach to representing expressions of sexuality, gender, religion, race, and ethnicity in expansive ways. It questions whether the trilogy offers a complex investigation of discrimination and racism in Irish society or counterproductively reifies the hierarchical structures it seeks to critique.