In her inaugural address as President of Ireland in 1990, Mary Robinson stated that she saw her election as an opportunity for Irish people worldwide to ‘tell diverse stories […] stories of celebration through the arts and stories of conscience and social justice’. Seven years later Gerry Smyth argued that

Arguably, there had not been a generation of Irish writers so conscious of the contribution they were making to the redefinition of Irish identities since the Literary Revival a century before. Part of this development was the rapidly increasing number of short stories by female Irish writers which began to appear during the 1980s. This was largely the result of the social and cultural changes that had taken place in Ireland over the previous two decades, as the country slowly moved away from the old certainties of Catholicism, nationalism and patriarchy. The changing role of women in Irish society was a pronounced feature of this transformation and the women's movement a key catalyst in the process. In the literary world, this was evidenced by the emergence of small feminist presses such as Attic Press and Arlen House.