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Unfortunately, one villager, Lizzy Quinn, refuses to play the game, not because it is false, but because she wants a larger cut of the winnings. To force her to join in, according to Lyotard, would be an act of "terror." True to its postmodern spirit, then, Waking Ned Devine is careful to show that no pressure other than gentle persuasion is placed upon Lizzy; the villagers acknowledge that they may have to give up on their game if she refuses to play, and they even accede to her demands for a larger percentage of the take. Lizzy, however, knowing she can make even more money by turning her back on the community, heads for the phone booth outside town to expose the "game" to the Lottery Officials, who give a substantial monetary reward to anyone who exposes fraud.
Lizzy has shown herself to be parsimonious throughout the film, nastily refusing to pay her debts to others in the village. Any compassion she might generate by being confined to a motorized chair is quickly overturned when the chair runs out of energy on her way to expose the village's scheme: she hurriedly walks the rest of the way to the phone booth. Thus, even her "disability" is merely a manifestation of her narcissistic self-interest. Called a "witch" by Jackie O'Shea, Lizzy's demise creates a fairy-tale element within the film; she is killed by accident while she's in the midst of sinning against the community—in such an outrageous fashion that the screen all but sings, "Ding, dong, the witch is dead; the wicked witch, the witch is dead!"
In radical contrast, the film closes with the noble act of Maggie, a young single mother, who surreptitiously sacrifices her son's legitimate claim to the lottery winnings so that the money can be shared by all.
Community solidarity becomes the highest good, fancifully illustrating the postmodern ethic suggested by Richard Rorty's famous Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. The "true" for Rorty does not correspond to universal moral principles but is contingent on the coherence of a community's vocabulary.
Rorty's neopragmatic ethic is grounded in "we-intentions": immorality is "the sort of thing we don't do"2—like defy the "intentions" of an entire village to share a dead man's lottery winnings. Of course, these weren't always the "we-intentions" of the community in Waking Ned Devine; the new solidarity of Tullymore is shaped by the two protagonists who see potential for positive change. Jackie and Michael thus illustrate Rorty's concept of irony: a force that brings into view the contingency of a community's vocabulary. Ironists prevent a community from stagnating or becoming legalistic, providing "new metaphors" for new contexts. A metaphor, of course, is when one object represents another: "My love is a red, red rose." In Waking Ned Devine, one person represents another: Michael O'Sullivan is Ned Devine, an incarnated metaphor that benefits the entire village.
Here the pun on the film's title be comes relevant: Michael is "waking" up the dead Ned by acting his part so that everyone can rejoice at his "wake"—the traditional Irish party celebrating someone's life after he has passed away. The villagers in their "waking" of Ned Devine celebrate how happy his lottery winnings have made them: a joy he would have welcomed, for he is repeatedly described as a "good man."
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