Abstract
Our Day Will Come is a novel that centers around two stories set one hundred years apart in Dublin, Ireland. Kath McDermott is a budding paper conservator tasked with restoring the journal of a relatively unknown IRA rebel and Squad member, Darcy McNamara, who vanishes after his final mission on Bloody Sunday, 1920. Kath engages Teagan, a self-exiled Traveller, to help translate Darcy’s journal from Irish and the Cant into English. When Kath is nearly killed in a pre-mediated car bombing perpetrated by the political extremist group, Saoradh, it becomes clear that discovering Darcy’s full history has more implications for her own life than she could have ever imagined. While drawing connections between the IRA and Saoradh, Kath, in recovering the transformation of Darcy’s sexuality, also comes to recognize and accept her own queer identity. Our Day Will Come is a contemplation on the dualities of past and present that aims to complicate black-and-white perceptions of war, morality, faith, and heteronormativity. As an Irish-American woman of queer-identification, my passion runs deep for portraying the nuance of Irish history and developing conversations about the erasure of non-normative sexualities from stories of the past. The thesis comprises of the first seven chapters of Our Day Will Come.