Header image: Triskelion Ireland, with permission, by ChipperDesigns
- Of the 7,000 farmers’ sons who left school every year to take up farming, only 200 received any formal instruction in agriculture. Why? Because, in the 1930s, the Catholic bishops had rejected a proposal to establish 500 agricultural colleges. This was ‘an unnecessary extension of state control into education’.
- There was a kind of unspoken pact: people transformed themselves through emigration so that the state and society could stay the same.
- It is apt that Economic Development was published at almost the same time as the great novel of conservative transformation, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard. Tancredi, the novel’s central character, famously explains to his aristocratic uncle why he is going off to fight with Garibaldi’s rebels: ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’
This was the great gamble of 1958: everything would change economically but everything would stay the same culturally.
- Our characters were formed according to laws as definite as the laws of chemistry. The purpose of the Brothers was to provide a passage from one state to another. Their problem was that they could not imagine anything outside the inherited categories of the unruly bad boys and the angelic good boys.
- Enid Blyton and Billy Bunter books I borrowed from the library. It could not be construed.
- An example of how this might work in daily life was the German manufacturer of mechanical handling equipment Steinbock of Moosburg, that opened a 60,000-square-foot plant in Galway in 1961, employing 240 men. The site had the remains of ‘a regional sanitorium and rolling acres of grass and grey rock walls’. The transformation of a sanitorium into a factory for German-engineered machinery was emblematic of the sudden and radical change ushered in by the revolution of 1958. By way of reassurance, Steinbock’s managing director, Dr Shattenhemel, presented the Bishop of Galway Michael Browne, a domineering ally of John Charles McQuaid known locally as Cross Michael, with a wood carving of the Madonna from Oberammergau and, more importantly, a cheque for the fund to build the gigantic new cathedral he was planning.10 (Browne’s monstrosity would include, when it was finished, an icon of JFK among the other saints and martyrs.)
- This begged the question: what was the Irish problem? It was not sex or pregnancy, which were known to be issues of some relevance to foreigners, too. It was the maintenance of an acceptable gap between what we knew and what we acknowledged. Everybody knew that fornication would continue to be recreational as well as procreational. The problem was how to legislate for this activity without being seen to give any form of official recognition to its inevitability.
1984−1985: Dead Babies and Living Statues The revelations that week were disturbing.
- This could not be sustained – state borrowing went out of control. The response was to try to shrink the state. Expenditure on social housing was cut by half; the number employed in the civil service was cut over the course of the 1980s from 30,800 to 25,000; spending on public hospitals was slashed. The number of registered unemployed rose from 61,000 in 1971 to 230,000 by 1993; the rate of unemployment tripled. But even these figures masked a much larger crisis, because much of the workforce was emigrating. In 1988−9 alone, an astounding 70,600 people left the country – 2 per cent of the entire population. Most of these were young – those aged between fifteen and twenty-four made up 69 per cent of the total.16 The slow demographic recovery that validated the revolution of 1958 was going into reverse. By 1986, there were fewer people in the Republic than there had been in 1981. The birth rate was also dropping very rapidly: from 21.9 per thousand in 1980 to 16.6 per thousand in 1987.17
- ‘The vast majority of Cork emigrants are not climbing social ladders abroad. Indeed many are simply climbing ladders because the construction industry alone accounts for almost 30 per cent of male emigrants from Cork.’
- When I heard the phrase first in the early 1990s, ‘bogus non-resident’ seemed almost excessively apt. It was a sort of dark mirror image of the other fleeting non-person of the 1980s, the ‘undocumented’ Irish migrant in the US, who was, I suppose, a kind of bogus resident. One was here but not here; the other there but not there. These two ghostly figures were, moreover, intimately related. People had to leave Ireland physically because so much of its own bourgeoisie had left it morally.
- In March 1985, Declan Costello, another of the supposed Fine Gael liberals of the 1960s, now turned High Court judge, ruled on Flynn’s claim that her dismissal was unlawful. He found that the nuns were fully ‘entitled to conclude that the appellant’s conduct was capable of damaging their efforts to foster in their pupils norms of behaviour and religious tenets which the school had been established to promote’ and therefore to sack her. What had been implicit was now explicit: teachers, even though they were paid by the state, could be sacked if their ‘lifestyle’ was not in keeping with orthodox Catholic ‘norms of behaviour’. This was not a whim of the nuns – it was now the law of the land.
- Cf. Current Ontario Teacher Act
- This was the great paradox of the long 1980s, which ran, in effect, from 1979 to 1992. Things were falling apart, but they were also holding together.
- At the end, Byrne said to Murphy that her son Peter would be ‘not be doing too badly’ if he turned out to be half the man his father was. Murphy said, ‘I’m not so bad, Mr Byrne, not so bad myself as you’d like to think’, stood up and walked off the floor. That was it exactly. We were not so bad ourselves and we never would be again. It was an exit line, not just for her, but for the entire era in which Irish people were made to feel that not so bad could never be good enough.
- Ben Dunne]:The two people I don’t like are people who talk about what they are doing and the people who talk about what they’re going to do.’
- He changed the language. A United Ireland became an ‘agreed Ireland’. There was no ‘solution’, just a ‘process’. It was people that must be united, not territory. These were still essentially nationalist ideas but they radically altered the meaning of Irish nationalism, shifting its centre of gravity towards the need to persuade and reconcile with those who did not share its assumptions.
- [Re getting Clinton aboard] The paradox of the peace process was that, in order to de-glamorize violence, it was necessary first to re-glamorize
- the country completed its transformation from basket case to poster child of hyper-globalized modernity
- ‘a social event imprimatured by the Catholic Church where boys and girls met each other under close sacerdotal supervision and practised minimal contact dancing’. In that sense all Irish dancing as we knew it in the cities was
- According to Crehan, there was an intimate connection between the death of dancing and emigration: ‘The country house dance was gone and the countryman didn’t fit in with the jazz and the foxtrot, so it died away. And a world of fellas left for England. They had no social activity at all, nothing here for them and they got fed up so they went off…
- And yet, the phrase ‘child slavery’ was used about the Irish industrial school system as early as 1947, and by probably the most famous of Irish Catholic priests, Monsignor Edward Flanagan, founder of the Boys Town residential care centre in Nebraska. Flanagan
- Grotesquely, the man at the centre of the X case was convicted just before the new abortion referendum, of again kidnapping and sexually assaulting a girl, this time a fifteen-year-old. Ahern was proposing that if that girl, like his previous victim, had become pregnant as a result of the assault, she would be forced to give birth – or quietly flee to England. In 1995, the same man had appealed his sentence of fourteen years in prison for the X case assault. The Court of Criminal Appeal reduced the sentence to four years because, as Mr Justice Hugh O’Flaherty put it, he was a ‘hard-working family man’ who had not committed ‘out and out rape’.
- Perhaps even more importantly, Ahern ensured, also in 2002, that the religious orders who had run the industrial schools would be effectively indemnified from the cost of claims by their victims. He made an agreement with eighteen religious congregations that, in return for some token payments, the state would pay all those costs. By 2015, the state had paid out €1.5 billion to settle claims. The religious orders had stumped up €192 million.9
- The bewildering of our sense of space was matched by a disorientation of time. There was a specifically Irish ‘end of history’. Two of the great continuities of Ireland since the eighteenth century – mass emigration and political violence – seemed, by the late 1990s, to be definitively over. The church, the great guarantor of continuity over the centuries, was coming apart at the seams.
- In essence, the real boom lasted from 1995 until 2001. What made it real were two tangible forces: sharp rises in output per worker (productivity) and in manufacturing exports. Both of these forces began to wind down in the new millennium. Productivity growth between 2000 and 2006 slowed to its lowest level since 1980. It was half what it had been in the classic boom years and actually slipped below the average for the developed (OECD) economies. By 2008, Irish productivity levels were below the OECD average.
- The government decided that it would stay prosperous by going for what the National Competitiveness Council would later summarize as ‘growth derived from asset price inflation, fuelled by a combination of low interest rates, reckless lending and speculation’. Being prosperous would be replaced by feeling rich. Consumption would replace production. Building would replace manufacturing as the engine of growth. The nation was to think of itself as a lottery winner, the blessed recipient of a staggering windfall. It was to spend, spend, spend. Understanding why Ireland had become prosperous and how prosperity could be sustained was much less important than the manic need to keep growing, and spending, at all costs.
- stranded in a future that was, when I served Mass there, unimaginable. It was a factory of faith that had now become part of Ireland’s religious rustbelt, a temple of a lost culture whose meaning was, to those who inhabited its hinterland, increasingly obscure.
- The wages of sin was a kind of political death. In December 2010, Ireland’s existence as a sovereign state was effectively suspended. In return for a €67.5 billion package of loans, a Troika of international institutions – the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission – took over the direction of Irish fiscal and therefore of political and social policy. The local administration operated under strict supervision.
- This is what happened in Ireland in my lifetime. A huge parcel of modernity was delivered. We tried it on, paraded around in it and eventually caught sight of ourselves in the looking glass. We got to work with the scissors and refitted it around ourselves, shaping it to the hand-me-downs of our own collective experiences:
Irish culture was perfectly fine with transformations and translations, with negotiating between contexts.
- Perhaps we are learning to live without being so defined. Over sixty years of change, and through periods of despair, delusion and derangement, we have arrived at what the poet John Keats called negative capability: ‘capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’.