Rosaleen McDonagh and the fractured heart

In the penultimate paragraph of the introduction to her essay collection, Unsettled (2021), Rosaleen McDonagh writes about how composing the collection allowed her to take ownership of a ‘fractured heart’. Her deployment of the metaphor of a fractured heart here is indicative of the emotionally rich and gently arresting nature of the testimony that follows across the sixteen chapters of varying length that comprise the book. This is an essay-collection-cum-memoir that should serve to make us, as readers, wholly unsettled. For McDonagh’s claiming of her fractured heart involves the telling of stark and uncomfortable truths about the treatment of those with disabilities and impairments in the Irish Republic. It involves, too, the careful centring of Traveller ethnicity, and of cis femininity, as intersectional nodes of personhood that for McDonagh are always mutually informing. The fractures that emerge speak to intersections between and across identities, which overlap in McDonagh’s narration of her own life experience as a Traveller, a woman, and as a disabled person who uses a wheelchair and an adapted car for her mobility.