In 1957 a sympathetic and informed Irish-American scholar, John V. Kelleher, who had long interested himself in Irish literary, cultural and political affairs, published a bleakly pessimistic assessment of Ireland’s contemporary standing in Foreign Affairs (the American journal of international relations). There he pondered the possibility that the Irish nation, beset by manifold problems and lacking regenerative energy, might vanish from history through “an implosion upon a central vacuity.”1 The fact that this unhappy, if original, fate was avoided is usually credited by historians, and by those who participated in the economic revival of the early 1960s, to the adventurous policies suggested by T. K. Whitaker, ably and energetically prosecuted by the Fianna Fáil Taoiseach Seán Lemass, who succeeded de Valera in 1959. Indeed the period from 1958, when the government White Paper Economic Development appeared, for which Whitaker was responsible, to 1963, when the First Programme for Economic Expansion was succeeded by the Second, soon became almost legendary years in Irish self-understanding. Irish men and women believe now, as they believed then, that those five years represented a major turning-point in Irish fortunes. In the collective memory, 1958–63 is seen as the period when a new Ireland began to come to life. The Irish associate the successes of those years with a renewed national self-confidence that helped the country to survive future vicissitudes.
Whitaker’s recipe for economic revival was, as Oliver MacDonagh succinctly designated it, “latter-day orthodoxy, a body of Keynesian solutions.”2 These included a much greater involvement by the state in investment in productive industry than had been thought wise in more prudent years, the employment of increased Central Bank power to direct investment by the commercial banks, and encouragement of foreign investment by packages of attractive incentives.
The First Programme envisaged a growth rate for Ireland of 2 percent per annum. Between 1959 and 1963 the annual growth rate achieved was in fact a very encouraging 4 percent. In 1962 therefore a commentator could report that between 1958 and 1961 the GNP had increased by 15.5 percent, volume of production by 28.5 percent, total imports by 30.25 percent, car registrations by 29.5 percent, and the volume of personal expenditure by 11.5 percent.3 Between 1957 and 1962, another commentator noted in 1965, the number of people “engaged in the production of transportable goods alone, rose from just under 150,000 to just over 170,000, an increase of 13 percent.”4 The fact that analysts began so soon to remark on the economic changes that were occurring (and those are only two examples of many assessments that appeared as the 1960s progressed) suggests how deeply a sense of a new age had entered the Irish collective mind. The state policy, which in the 1960s was to attract over 350 new foreign-owned companies to Ireland and to allow an economic growth “faster and more sustained than in any previous period in Irish history”,5 was recognized as a policy which would in a short space of time change the face of the country itself. Seán Lemass wrote in 1962 in the Spectator of the new Ireland which under his direction was preparing to play a part in “a unified Europe;” this, he hoped, would resolve the local issue of partition in a wider, continental harmony. Others agreed with him. Denis Meehan, professor of ancient classics at Maynooth, in 1960 had already sensed the new era as it dawned:
In purely physical terms the population cannot dwindle any further; the bottom of the curve must come somewhere; there is literally nowhere to fall from. On the contrary some sort of minor boom may ensue in the economic field: American and West German industrialists will be attracted in by the cheapness and geographical convenience of Ireland as a distribution centre; such young people as are in the country will find pretty gainful employment by staying at home.6
And by 1965 a young historian, David Thornley, could risk publishing his pamphlet “Ireland: The End of an Era?” where he suggested:
We are for the first time at the threshold of a delayed peaceful social revolution. It would be foolhardy to go on to predict its course. Its seems certain that our island will become affected increasingly by the spread of European social and philosophical ideas, strongly tinged with Catholicism. It is reasonably certain that many of the issues of education and social welfare will slowly be transplanted from the field of emotional controversy to that of economic efficiency, and that a great deal more money will be spent on both. It does seem certain that the depopulation of the countryside will continue and perhaps accelerate, and that our social habits and our politics will take on a flavour that is ever more urban, and, as a consequence, ever more cosmopolitan. And this in turn will sound the death knell of the attempt to preserve any kind of indigenous Gaelic folk culture in these islands.7
Thornley, as this quotation demonstrates, clearly recognized that the ideological change of direction initiated by the economic decisions of the late 1950s would have profound effects on Irish social and cultural life. The fact was that “the economic nationalism of Sinn Féin” was “dead as the policy of the state.”8 This would alter the face and mind of the nation since it sounded a death knell for a traditional Ireland, already dying on its feet. What surprised Thornley was how easily the transition from one ideological ideal to another had been managed. “What is remarkable,” he wrote, “almost to the point of incredibility is the passiveness with which this change has been accepted inside a single generation.”9 In fact enthusiastic approval of the new order of things might more accurately have described the public response to the economic revival. Donald S. Corkery, an American journalist who published an account of the new Ireland in 1968, wrote in that volume of the manifest psychological changes he had recently noticed in a country that in the past had been characterized by a deep-seated inferiority complex. The new policies had acted, he sensed, as a “powerful tonic, almost a magic elixir:”
Returning to Ireland in early 1963 it was impossible not to feel the atmosphere change or notice the many signs of modernization. There was an unaccustomed briskness about the way Dubliners moved and a freshness of complexion which I had not seen before. Even the grumbles were indicative. There were too many Germans and other foreigners moving into the country to suit some people; there were complaints about all the money being spent on jet airliners and luxury hotels; and it was annoying that the upsurge in car ownership meant that the Irish would now have to take examinations for driving licenses.10
Thornley’s near incredulity at Ireland’s rapid transition from a society ostensibly dedicated to economic nationalism and its social and cultural concomitants, to a society prepared to abandon much of its past in the interests of swift growth in the context of the modern British and Western European economies has been shared by other historians and commentators. Some of them have sought the explanation in a conjunction of factors: the introduction of television to the state in 1962 (although British television had been received on the east coast of Ireland for some years prior to this date); the modernizing impulses in Catholicism abroad which followed in the wake of the Second Vatican Council and the effects of these in Ireland; the fact that the late 1950s saw the emergence into positions of power and influence of men who had been born since independence; and the quickening pace of interest in social and cultural developments in the outside world of the kind that we have noted were evident even in the 1940s and ‘50s. Others, while ready to accept that each of these factors may have had a part to play, nevertheless felt that something more profound was at work. Some, most notably the historians Oliver MacDonagh and John Whyte, had recourse to a general theory of Irish historiography which proposed that Ireland since the Famine had been marked by a “series of sudden transformations at intervals of roughly a generation.”11
David Thornley, in his pamphlet of 1965, struck by the changes he saw in process about him, hinted at an even more ambitious explanatory thesis. The new era of economic vitality was quite simply the inauguration of “delayed peaceful social revolution.” This consummation devoutly to be wished had been, Thornley suggested, “held back by the civil war, Sinn Féin, and by the unsophistication of our social philosophy.”12 Such a view therefore denied to the first decades of independence the historical significance that many had given them (Thornley asserted that “the pace of changes between 1922 and 1945 had been positively and negatively exaggerated in romantic history”.13) It dismissed, with an iconoclasm entirely characteristic of the 1960s, the period since independence as simply years of misguided postponement of the necessary Irish social revolution that had been in the making before the Civil War and the establishment of the Free State. For decades, that revolution had been thwarted as a conservative social order had been buttressed by essentialist ideology.
In an earlier chapter I outlined the features of Irish social life and intellectual and cultural development which I believe allowed the ideological and material changes of the late 1950s and early 1960s to proceed without undue conflict. Nothing I said there accounted, however, for the remarkable enthusiasm with which the new tasks were embarked upon. Thornley suggests that this enthusiasm was the product of an authentically Irish Catholic nationalist aspiration to social and economic improvement and modernization, at last allowed free, almost explosive, expression in the 1960s as “traditional” Ireland and its constraining ideologies swiftly became defunct.
There were those who, realizing that the collapse of traditional Ireland and its “corresponding ideologies of illusion”14 might not have been followed by a ready and bold adoption of new aspirations, sought an explanation for the remarkable transition in the early 1960s in terms of the individual genius and vision of Seán Lemass. The Irish journalist and commentator John Healy, for example, in his columns in the Irish Times (“Backbencher” and its successor “Sounding Off”) contributed much to the growth of a Lemass legend which proposed Lemass as almost sole architect of the new Ireland. The historian Joseph Lee in a Thomas Davis lecture on RTE radio put an academic imprimatur on such a view when he introduced a series of broadcast lectures on change in modern Irish society with a near-hagiographic celebration of Lemass’s contribution to the modernization of the state. Lee highlighted Lemass’s dedication to efficiency, his desire to remould the Irish Republic into a streamlined, functional, corporate state which would allow decisions to be taken with a managerial dispatch. Lee celebrated Lemass’ antagonism to mediocrity in the public and private domain that sheltered behind notions of hierarchical tradition, his passionately pragmatic belief that in “a small society with no inherent momentum of its own and with a heritage of stagnation, it was men that mattered. The initiative, or lack of it, of a handful of individuals could make or mar important institutions for a generation.”15 And in Lemass, Lee believed, Ireland had had an individual of quite remarkable vision at the helm; for “only a conquistador of the spirit”16 could have hoped in the stagnant conditions of mid-century Ireland to make clear the way for the modern Irish version of the merchant adventurer.
Perhaps Lemass’s most vital contribution to economic revival and the psychological breakthrough of the early 1960s was his capacity to distinguish modernization from anglicization. As Lee astutely noted, when Lemass disclosed that “the historical task of this generation is to secure the economic foundation of independence,”17 he was arousing his people to a new mission which he believed could do more to achieve the country’s most profound aspirations – genuine political independence and unity between North and South – than the previous decades of economic isolation and cultural self-regard. Lemass succeeded therefore in linking an achievable economic resurgence within the economic orbit of the United Kingdom, and eventually within Europe, to Irish patriotic instincts and hopes (it was to release less noble instincts too, as we shall see in Chapter twelve). It was indeed a bold stroke of a kind which must go a fair distance toward justifying Lee’s concluding assessment: “It was to be the historical achievement of Seán Lemass to lay the foundation of a new Ireland perhaps destined to endure as long as its immediate predecessor.”18
So in Lemass the age had its man who called a new breed of Irish entrepreneur and manager into the centre of the Irish stage – those new rich Irishmen who, in the playwright Hugh Leonard’s witty phrase, upon finding that “they could not now get through the eye of a needle began to manufacture bigger needles with wider eyes.”19 What Professor David C. McClelland termed the almost inexplicable “mental virus”20 which seems necessary if a society is to modernize, was certainly abroad in the social atmosphere of the 1960s in Ireland, infecting individuals in many different spheres.
One of the most crucial of those was the educational. Indeed the fact that as economic improvement became evident, and as Ireland set its sights on membership of the European Economic Community, a concurrent sense developed that educational reforms were long overdue was a sign that the new impulse at work in Irish society was a desire for genuine social modernization. For a conviction grew that only by giving educational opportunities to the mass of Ireland’s young could the economic potential of the state be realized. It became a matter for serious concern that without major reforms Ireland would be left hopelessly behind as the pace of economic and educational change quickened in the United Kingdom and in continental Europe, following the policy decisions there of the immediate postwar period.
Since independence the Irish educational system had changed but little if one excepts the major effort to gaelicize schools in hopes of linguistic revival. The general profile of the educational system bequeathed by the departing colonial power remained, even as late as the early 1960s, essentially unchanged. A system of church-controlled, state-supported National Schools offered basic education to the mass of the population (the School Attendance Act of 1926 made school attendance obligatory between the ages of six and fourteen). Secondary schools, also largely in the control of the various churches, often managed and staffed by religious, offered further education to fee-paying pupils, while a small state-supported vocational sector provided technical education for pupils who, for one reason or another, sought further training but could not gain or did not seek entry to the more academically oriented, more expensive, secondary schools.
If in the first forty years of independence, however, little in the nature of educational restructuring had been attempted, the state, through the Department of Education, had made strenuous efforts to ensure that uniformity of curricula and standards was achieved and maintained. This rigour was most profoundly expressed in the control of the National Schools. As a result, the educational system, where it was encountered by almost the whole of the population, was notable for its austere authoritarianism, the pupils held to a sharply defined curriculum leading to a primary certificate, the teachers themselves held vice-like within the control of the department by a salary rating system (abandoned in 1959) based on the findings of an inspectorate which in the circumstances was invariably viewed by the teachers as the enemy’s chief representative. At the heart of the system was the National School teacher; for many pupils he or she was the only teacher they ever encountered. Rigidly controlled by the Department of Education, these teachers were often themselves, by reason of background and social experience, the stern agents of authoritarian social, cultural, and religious control. As Charles McCarthy outlined it, a source of that ubiquitous Irish authoritarianism which marked Irish life in many of its aspects in the modern period was to be found in the carefully regulated relationship between church, state, and National Teacher:
These young men and women were drawn from the most academically able in the country, but, certainly in the case of the men, from a remarkably limited social group. It appears to me that they came primarily from small farmers and small shopkeepers in the south and west, and in many cases had themselves left home as early as thirteen or fourteen years of age, attending first the preparatory colleges (which now fortunately have been disestablished) and also the diocesan colleges, all residential in character. From there they went to a residential training college which was conducted on remarkably authoritarian lines.21
For forty years therefore the National School seemed a representative Irish institution in the new state, a peculiarly resonant symbol of a society where authoritarian control enforced ideals of nationalism, religion, and language. In literature and in reminiscence, such schools figured largely as centres of austerity and rigour, marking for life generations of Irishmen and women. What they did not do was create genuine equality of opportunity, a fact which became clear in the 1960s.
In 1962 the government appointed a commission to investigate the conditions of Irish education. The commission’s report was published in 1966 under the title Investment in Education. In preparing this report, a small group of statisticians and economists, with the help of an inspector of secondary schools, made the first full-scale, scientific investigation of the Irish educational system. Their work was supported by the Department of Education and by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The historian F. S. L. Lyons remarked upon the “peculiarly apt symbolism” in the fact that the report was in part financed by the OECD, since he saw the report as an expression of the changing ideological and psychological climate of the 1960s, when Irishmen with increasing frequency tended “to measure their achievements by the standards of western Europe.”22
The tone, concerns, and recommendations of Investment in Education certainly reflected a radical ideological departure in Irish educational thinking.23 From the introduction onwards, a novelty of approach was apparent as the commission recorded how throughout its work its members had tried “to keep before our minds at all times the character and purpose of education and that the term ‘educational system’ has little meaning if it is considered apart from the human needs which it is there to serve.” The key words here were “human needs,” and the report, declaring itself “essentially fact-finding and analytic in character,”24 showed by cool, systematic, scientific investigation that the Irish school system could by no means be said to serve human needs as it ought. So instead of an Irish educational document reflecting on national identity, on the revival of Irish, and on cultural imperatives of one kind or another, Investment in Education dissected the social facts of Irish education, to reveal the class and geographical components of the system, setting out its human deficiencies for all to see.
Many of these were devastatingly depressing. Despite the investment in school building that had taken place in the postwar period, much of the educational plant was in dire condition. Less than half of all schools had piped drinking water and modern sanitation. And for all the traditional rigour of the National Schools, many pupils were leaving them without the basic qualification of a primary certificate. In the year 1962–63 it was found that an estimated 17,500 completed full-time education when they left the National Schools (in 1961–62 the report reckoned about 54,500 in all left National Schools, some for further education; the figures for 1962–63 would have been close to this). Of these, 26 percent of boys had a primary certificate, 7 percent of boys had failed the relevant tests, 10 percent of boys had been absent, and for 57 percent of boys there was no trace or record of them having completed school through taking the examination. In the case of girls leaving school, 30 percent passed the certificate tests, 10 percent failed, 11 percent were absent, and of 49 percent there was no trace or record. In all 11,000 of those leaving National School in the academic year 1962–63 left without a certificate either because they had failed the test or because they had left before reaching or completing the sixth standard, when all pupils were required to be entered on the examination lists. “The annual emergence,” commented the report with a reserve that suggests irony, “of a large number of young people who apparently have not reached what is commonly considered a minimum level of education, can hardly be viewed with equanimity.”25
Almost as damning were the report’s findings with regard to entry to secondary school and university, which showed that participation in post-primary education was marked by striking differences between counties and a clear association between class and educational advancement which became “the more marked the higher the age group and the higher the level.”26 It seemed clear from the report that despite its vigorous instinct for centralization and control, the Department of Education was presiding over a school system shaped by forces other than educational. The availability of secondary schooling, for example, was sometimes as much a matter of local religious history as it was of central educational planning. Investment in Education therefore revealed two areas where major changes were required: primary education, where so many were failing to receive even a required minimum of education, and secondary education, which was inaccessible to far too many and availed of by far too few.
Partly in the cool revelatory light of the Investment in Education report (the report was published when pressures for change had already begun to mount), the impulse to reform the Irish educational system took hold in the 1960s, and led to rapid changes. The opening of secondary education to the majority of young people following decisions taken by the government in 1966 was perhaps the most dramatic of these. The Second Programme for Economic Expansion had proposed that the minimum school-leaving age should be raised from fourteen to fifteen by 1970. Consequent upon such a decision was a reordering of the relationship between the National Schools and the secondary schools. Since it would have been unreasonable simply to protract attendance at National Schools, the proposal implied that all pupils should have some experience of secondary education. Accordingly, in 1967 Donough O’Malley, the Minister for Education, announced a new dispensation in Irish education which would abolish fees in the vocational sector and provide supplementary grants to such secondary schools as chose to waive their charges to pupils. The plan also provided for free transport to and from school for pupils who lived more than three miles from the nearest secondary school. The effects of these arrangements were swiftly evident. In 1967–68, 118,807 pupils were enrolled in 595 schools. In 1968–69 this figure had risen to 133,591 in 598 schools. By 1973–74, when a rising population of school-going children was putting pressure on a secondary school system that had been opened to the majority, 554 secondary schools enrolled 167,309 pupils. The figures in relation to the school bus service show that good use was being made of this simple but socially innovatory service. In 1968, 31,350 pupils availed themselves of the service. By 1973 this figure had risen to 61,533.27
There were other innovations at the secondary level. State-supported comprehensive schools were instituted in 1963. By 1974–75 there were thirty of these, in areas where privately owned secondary facilities were inadequate. Secondary schooling in Ireland had traditionally been segregated by gender. The opposite was true of the new comprehensive schools: of the thirty schools of this kind built by 1976, twenty-six were for boys and girls, three for boys alone, and one for girls alone. In that year there were 13,162 pupils attending comprehensive schools. The vocational sector also felt the reforming and innovatory pressures of the period. Schemes were devised that would allow cooperation between vocational schools and secondary schools; the Intermediate Certificate examination introduced in 1963, which was common to secondary and vocational schools, brought the vocational sector into a closer relationship with the rest of the educational system. After 1975 no new comprehensive schools were established but the introduction of the concept of the community school (the first opened in 1972) was an equally innovatory replacement. These schools involved vocational educational committees working in cooperation with religious orders or diocesan authorities and the Department of Education in the provision of a broad range of secondary educational opportunities, often in areas where new city housing schemes catered for a burgeoning population.
From the early 1960s, therefore, Irish secondary education became an integral part of a system of mass education. A writer in 1970, reflecting on Ireland’s position in a world educational crisis, remarked, “Education is the most rapidly and inexorably expanding business in the country.”28 That expansion did not take place without considerable debate and conflict. An increased state role in the funding of secondary education necessarily involved much discussion about management and control. Perhaps indeed so much time and energy were expended on issues of this kind that strictly educational matters were somewhat neglected. It is notable, therefore, that in the twenty years in which the social revolution of the largely free availability of secondary education took place did not see any radical appraisals or reorderings of the academic content of secondary education. Individual subject curricula were reformed and reorganized, but overall, secondary education remained geared towards the attainment of a Leaving Certificate largely based on strictly academic assumptions, with vocational subjects enjoying less social esteem than traditional arts and sciences.
It may be that the most profound and direct effect of the educational decisions of the 1960s with regard to secondary schooling (I shall be suggesting some less direct cultural effects in later chapters) was the manner in which it enforced a major reorganization of primary education in the National Schools. Since most pupils might be expected to leave National School for a secondary school, it was clear that pupils would choose to transfer at an earlier age than fourteen, when in the past the Primary Certificate was taken. In 1967 this examination was abolished. Such a drastic redirection of the traditional aims of the National School must undoubtedly have stimulated the reappraisals that resulted in the radical new Primary School Curriculum of 1971. That the kinds of contentious issue that occupied all those involved with secondary education in the period were somewhat less pressing during the 1960s in the primary sector, where matters such as control and state and church responsibility had been defined and understood for many years, perhaps meant that the educational content of the curriculum could receive attention. Reorganization of the management of the National Schools, giving representation on new boards of management to parents as well as to bishops’ appointees and to the principal teacher, took place in 1975, after the introduction of an altogether innovatory curriculum earlier in the decade. This new curriculum had represented an infusion of novel thinking into the cultural life of the country.
The signals that changes were afoot had been evident since the early 1960s. In 1963 a school library scheme had been initiated in the National Schools and the amalgamation of schools where numbers were small had meant that funds could be made available for the provision of such things as visual aids to brighten up what until then had most usually been dismal schoolrooms indeed. In 1968 an assistant secretary in the Department of Education published an article in Studies29 which revealed that he, a very crucially placed individual, was in favour of as major educational reforms in the National Schools as had occurred in the secondary sector. The article displayed a commitment to the concept of child-centred education which had taken root in the UK and in the United States.
The new Primary School Curriculum of 1971 admitted in its introduction a dependence on educational thinking abroad. The Plowden Report, published in the United Kingdom in 1967, was an obvious source for a passage such as the following:
Recent research, conducted in many countries into the learning processes and development of children has shown…that knowledge acquired through the child’s personal experience and discovery is likely to be more meaningful and purposeful to him than information acquired at second-hand.30
So the ideological thrust of the introduction to the curriculum was unequivocally in the direction of child-centred education. Invoking the fact of divine creation, it was affirmed that each person “is entitled to an equal chance of obtaining optimum personal fulfilment.” The aims of primary education were defined as follows:
Part of that equipment, the introduction assumed, would be an understanding of Ireland’s “ancient spiritual and cultural tradition”, together with an appreciation of modern Ireland’s “democratic institutions.” But the introduction also recognized that education must be more than merely a handing on of tradition. It must prepare children to live as adults in a changing world.
The curriculum introduction had an unexceptionable Irish authority to cite in support of these new departures in the National Schools – none other than Patrick Pearse.
What the teacher should bring to Irish pupils is not a set of readymade opinions, or a stock of cut-and-dry information but an inspiration and an example; and his main qualification should be, not such an overmastering will as shall impose itself at all hazards upon all weaker wills that come under its influence, but rather so infectious an enthusiasm as shall kindle new enthusiasm.32
An INTO survey of 1976 demonstrated that the new curriculum had indeed generated some of that enthusiasm. Some 64.4 percent of teachers approached replied to a questionnaire that the new curriculum had “affected favourably” their job satisfaction.33 Critics, however, pointed to lowering standards in the knowledge of the Irish language among pupils. Impressionistic evidence suggested, however, that a quite new atmosphere permeated the primary schools where the new curriculum had been imaginatively presented.34
At the other end of the educational scale the period brought crucial changes. Tertiary-level opportunities were created not only by an expansion of student numbers at the universities, but by the swift creation in the 1970s of nine regional technical colleges. These colleges brought to Irish tertiary-level education an increased awareness of the technological demands of a modern society and marked the beginning of a much greater emphasis in Ireland on technical education than had existed hitherto. The establishment of the National Institute of Higher Education in Limerick in the 1970s was also a sign of the state’s new commitment to the creation of a technically skilled population, ready to play its part in a new industrial society, for that institute was also geared to technological education. In 1979 plans for a further National Institute of Higher Education, combining existing colleges in Dublin with new facilities, were drawn up. These institutions were subsequently granted full, independent university status as the University of Limerick and Dublin City University.
In a modernizing society, education reforms and innovations have a close companion in expanding information services. Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s was no exception. The Economic and Social Research Institute was founded in 1960 and since then has provided a steady stream of sociological and economic information to enable planning to proceed on rational lines. The Central Statistics Office has also supplied much data against which statements about the Irish economy and society could be tested. In 1968 the Economic and Social Review started publication, giving the opportunity for the first generation of Irish sociologists to publish scientific analyses of Irish society. The Catholic periodicals Christus Rex, the Furrow, and Doctrine and Life began to publish articles that attempted social investigation. Indeed in 1962, the last-named periodical published one of the first studies of the relationship of the mass media and society to appear in Ireland. From the 1960s, too, Irish investigative journalism became established in the daily newspapers. Before that date only the periodical the Bell had sought to bring Ireland, warts and all, to the attention of an educated, concerned readership. Since the 1960s the daily newspapers have provided a steady flow of documentary reportage that has increased the store of information in a society starved in the past of serious self-examination.
What the new sociological studies of Irish society revealed in the 1960s and ‘70s was that Ireland was undergoing rapid transformation. The modernizing virus was producing all kinds of symptoms which warranted close observation. The demographers could explore the changing patterns of population and fertility and the rapid urbanization of Irish society. As we saw earlier, in 1956 the population had stood at 2,898,264, but by 1961 it had fallen to 2,818,341. In 1966 the loss had almost been made good, and in 1971 the population had risen to 2,978,248 – the highest (a crucial psychological turning point) to that date in the history of the state, showing an intercensal rise of 3.27 percent. By 1979 the population had increased by a further 386,633 (though it has been suggested that the 1971 figure was an underestimation). It was noted, too, how Ireland was changing from a primarily rural, agricultural society to an industrial, urban society. In 1926 only 32.27 percent of the population had lived in towns of over 1,500 persons. By 1951 that figure had risen to 41.44 percent, by 1966 it was 49.20 percent, and in 1971 it topped the halfway mark at 52.25 percent. The growth of Dublin was most marked. By 1979 over a third of the population in the state resided in the greater Dublin area. In the intercensal period, 1971–79, the counties of Kildare, Meath, and Wicklow, where new dormitory suburbs had been built to serve the city, recorded population increases of 34.9 percent, 26.6 percent, and 26.4 percent respectively. But it was not only Dublin and its environs that increased its population in the period. Other urban centres experienced notable increases in population. For example, Galway’s population rose from 27,726 in 1971 to 36,824 in 1979, a phenomenal growth of 32.8 percent in eight years. Overall the population rise recorded in the 1979 census was 13 percent, drawing from the authors of the Preliminary Report the coolly satisfied comment that “the accelerating rise in population in recent years restored the total state figure to about the average level which pertained during the 1891–1901 intercensal period.”35 Other early responses to the Preliminary Report of the 1979 census were less measured, as the figures revealed in irrefutable terms the new Ireland many had sensed developing about them. “Another Irish myth has been debunked,” remarked an Irish Times report, in terms that were echoed frequently in public and private discussion, “for the Ireland of the 1970s contrasts sharply with the internationally popular image of a sleepy backwater on the fringe of Europe. No longer is this the rural island of the emigrants, but a fast-growing industrializing frontier on the edge of industrial Europe.”36
The evidence for this Irish transformation had of course been available earlier, in the analyses of the structure of the workforce in the 1971 census and in the various statistics published yearly in the Statistical Abstract of Ireland. The 1971 census had revealed that, since the 1966 census, the number of persons at work in agriculture, forestry, or fishing had declined by 58,500 (or 7.8 percent) in the total of all other groups. The largest increases in absolute terms were in electrical and electronics workers (with 5,800), engineering and related trade workers (with 9,000), professional and technical workers (with 15,000), clerical workers (with 11,700). It is notable that the numbers of women clerical workers had risen by 18.3 percent. For women, domestic service was no longer a principal source of employment as it had been in the 1920s and ’30s. And the fact of Irish urbanization indeed had been implicit in the census record of 1971, showing that the east of the country (with 409,900 gainfully employed persons) contained more than a third of those at work in the state and that just over a quarter of the recorded employed persons in the state were engaged in agricultural occupations.
Marriage and fertility patterns were also changing markedly in the period and were the object of analytic inquiry. The demographer Brendan Walsh showed in a series of papers and essays how Irish family life was altering, presumably under the impact of industrialization and urbanization. The nuclear family that Humphreys had recognized in Dublin in the 1940s was becoming a national norm. In a paper published in 1972 Walsh noted that the marriage rates had been showing an upward trend since 1951, with a dramatic acceleration since 1966.37 His figures were startling. The marriage rate (per 1,000 unmarried adults) rose by at least 20 percent between 1966 and 1970 and by over 40 percent between 1958 and 1970. What was surprising in the Irish context, where contraception by artificial means was legally made difficult and was forbidden by the church, was that this rise in the marriage rate was attended by changes in fertility patterns. The number of first and second births to couples grew rapidly in the 1960s, “more or less in pace with the growth in the married population” but by 1970 the births of fourth or subsequent children had fallen by 20 percent from the peak such births had reached in the early 1960s. As Walsh noted, the papal encyclical of 1968, Humanae Vitae (which forbade artificial contraception for the Catholic faithful), did not materially affect the decline in the numbers of couples prepared to give birth to large families. In a further essay published in the Irish Times in 1979, Walsh concluded that “the evidence down to 1977 shows that never before in modern history has as high a proportion of our population been married, especially at the relatively young age of 20–24.”38 The conjunction of higher marriage rates with lower fertility rates still held at the end of the 1970s. Indeed, Walsh computes, on the basis of the fertility levels of 1961, that a fall in fertility of about one-third had occurred by 1977.
So in a period of major economic change and urbanization a new generation of Irishmen and women adapted to social patterns directly akin to those of populations in other industrialized countries. Early marriages and smaller planned families began to characterize Irish social life, as they did social life in most of the Western world. Ireland had joined the “age of the nuclear family.”
In this context the issue of women’s role in society became, as it had done in the United States in the 1960s, a matter for debate and social action. In 1970 the government established the first Commission for the Status of Women, chaired by Thekla Beere (it reported in 1972). In the same year the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement held its first meeting, marking the beginning of a wave of feminist activism in Ireland that over the following decades would insistently add the concept of gender to the political and cultural life of the country.
In this rapidly urbanizing and industrializing society consumerist values made swift advances. A feature of the nuclear family, as noted by many sociologists, was the manner in which parental authority was lessened. Parents, themselves finding many of their social relations outside the kinship framework in professional, sporting, and cultural organizations, surrendered much of the responsibility for their offspring’s education to the school system. A lengthy schooling protracted youth well into late adolescence, and a new social group was created, composed of young adults who had largely escaped parental direction but had not yet entered the workforce. In Ireland, as elsewhere in the postwar period, this resulted in the development of a constituency of young people in which consumerism was encouraged in magazines, television advertisements, and the faddishness of the popular music industry. By the early 1980s, when over 50 percent of the population was under thirty years of age, this market was significant indeed. The parents of these young people were no less, if perhaps differently, affected by the values of the consumer society in those years. Ostentatious consumption in a society enjoying a rapid rise in its standard of living marked the late 1960s and ’70s in Ireland. Motor-cars, houses, and foreign holidays became major preoccupations if not passions. In 1978, for example, as the Irish Independent reported, half of all new houses in Dublin were detached houses, built for the upper end of the market. Restaurants charging extraordinarily inflated prices sprang up in the countryside as well as in the cities to cater for a new rich clientele and for the expense account executive whose tax liabilities could be self-indulgently eaten away. Supermarkets and the shopping precinct replaced many small shops and the wine bar and the off-licence catered for a middle class whose drinking habits had been influenced by package holidays and images of the good life nightly presented on the national television channels.
Television was without doubt a major instrument in Ireland’s conversion to consumerism. RTE, the national station, was opened in 1962. A survey conducted in 1967 showed that about 80 percent of urban households owned television sets but, as the political scientist Basil Chubb stated, set ownership was “far from evenly spread,”39 and in parts of rural Ireland the percentage fell as low as 25 percent. Since 1967 the number of television sets in rural households rose steadily. By 1980 there were few parts of the country where television was not a part of a majority of the people’s daily lives. In 1978, 83 percent of all homes had a television (92 percent in the Dublin area; 54 percent in Connacht).40 Much of the material broadcast on RTE was of British and American origin. The advertisements were sometimes British-made on behalf of British products, while Irish-made advertisements on behalf of Irish goods and services, where a company could afford it, were created for an audience accustomed to British advertising techniques. One effect therefore of extended viewing of the national television channels (a second channel began broadcasting in 1978) was a sense of Ireland firmly within the British commercial sphere of influence.
The countryside as well as the towns and cities were profoundly altered over the course of twenty years. For those who survived the crisis in rural Ireland which became acute in the immediate postwar period, the 1960s and ‘70s were years of challenge and opportunity. The countryside, like the cities, became considerably modernized. Since Ireland’s entry to the EEC in 1973, parts of the farming community benefited markedly from the Common Agricultural Policy and some of agricultural Ireland knew a prosperity it had not experienced in modern times. For others the challenge of the new era was overwhelming. But for those farmers in possession of viable holdings and already alerted to the possibility of organized efficient farm production through farmers’ organizations such as Macra na Feirme and the powerful lobbying body, the National Farmers’ Association, the 1970s were years of profit and change. Indeed a primary symbol of Ireland in the 1970s might well be the new bungalow (rarely well adapted to its environment) with its central heating and modern furnishings which throughout much of the country replaced the old farmhouse or cottage as farmers reaped the benefit of their new circumstances.
The attitudes and values of urban consumerism and the social forms of the nuclear family penetrated the countryside as prosperity increased and television, the motor-car, and secondary-level schooling altered the patterns of daily life. Such of the customary social relations of the countryside as had survived into recent times almost disappeared, declining under the impact of mechanization.41 Indeed, this latter process had taken a heavy toll even in the previous decade. Between 1951 and 1961, for example, the number of tractors in the country increased by 350 percent while the number of horses declined by 50 percent. Large class differences between farmers who could afford the investment in mechanical equipment and those who could not began to emerge. In the 1970s new industries were located in rural areas, and as poorer farmers forsook the land for the factory floor, a managerial (and often foreign) class became a novel presence, further complicating the social mixture of country districts. Indeed, if the Shannon Electrification Scheme of the 1920s was perhaps the most socially revolutionary venture of an unadventurous decade, the creation of a new town in Shannon, begun in 1958, the first such in the history of the state, was a similar manifestation of faith in Irish social revolution in this period. The town, with its new schools, sports grounds, community halls, swimming pool, shopping centre, clubs and associations, and streets of suburban-style housing depending in part for its existence on the nearby international airport as a tourist stopping point, and on light industries that were attracted to the area from the United States, Canada, and the EEC countries by favourable tax conditions and grants, was another primary symbol of the new Ireland of the 1970s.
That Ireland did not come into being without painful birth pangs. Economists may have taken comfort in the received wisdom that a rising tide raises all boats and may have seen confirmation of this complacent conviction in the fact that visible signs of desperate poverty – barefooted children in the city streets, for example – became much rarer. But the fact that economic waters do not rise with the predictability of the daily coastal tides meant that there were, as well as boom years such as 1977 and 1978, periods of sharp austerity (following the oil crisis of 1974–75 for example) even as the economic conditions of the country improved in general in the 1960s and ’70s. Furthermore, both modernization of the countryside and economic growth in the towns and cities had their victims as well as their beneficiaries. In the countryside small farmers were informed in 1974, in the Farm Modernization Scheme instituted by the Department of Lands, that their farms were “transitional,” in other words, non-commercial in size, and that they should seek early retirement. In many regions where a declining population had already resulted in severe social distress and a lack of confidence in the future, such draconian attempts by a central government agency to reform Irish agriculture to align it with EEC practice sounded like a death knell of a way of life. An anthropologist who was engaged in fieldwork in a parish in Country Kerry when this plan was announced wrote of the devastating effect such policies were having in already depressed areas (Ballybran is a pseudonym):
Throughout the long and discouraging winter, Ballybran farmers gathered in clusters at the pub or each other’s homes to listen to radio or public television reports decry and deride the “backwardness” and “conservatism” of the western coastal farmers, who were characterized as living like parasites off welfare handouts, grants and subsidies, who were opposed to progress, and who hung greedily and tenaciously onto their unproductive and miserable farms. The spectre of forced and early retirement hovered over the nightly pub sessions in Ballybran, and a puritanical gloom settled like a mist into each man’s pint of bitter porter. “Well, lads, ‘tis we’re finished up now for sure” was a commonly heard refrain. The local residents read about their lives and livelihoods discussed in national papers as so much debris and dead weight.42
So a way of life that had once been extolled as the authentic base upon which the nation securely rested was no longer considered viable in Ireland in her new age. It was not, however, that urban life was proving by contrast wholly successful. Undoubtedly in the 1960s and ’70s many experienced living standards higher than any they had known in the past, but poor housing conditions, in bleak, ill-planned areas of the major cities were settings for vandalism, drug abuse, petty crime, and lives of quiet desperation in the way of city life in much of the developed world. Despite the economic improvements of the period, poverty, particularly in the inflation-dogged 1970s, scarred the lives of many Irish men and women in years when social progress, the outcome of increased opportunities in a modernizing society, was assumed to be a primary contemporary fact. There were no full-scale studies of poverty in Ireland at that time, but such analyses as existed suggested that in the 1970s at least a quarter of the population and perhaps nearer a third lived below a “poverty line” estimated on the basis of social security levels of payment.43 In March 1979 a huge protest march in Dublin by PAYE workers, angered by perceived inequities in the tax system, which seemed grossly to benefit farmers and the self-employed, expressed volatile public discontent.
The oddly ambiguous quality of life in the Republic of Ireland at the end of two transitional decades in the country’s twentieth-century history was acutely detected by two journalists who attempted to assess the condition of the nation. James Downey, assistant editor of the Irish Times, in a review of the year in 1978, remarked on the socially disruptive features of Ireland’s new affluence:
The social scientists of the sixties could foresee these things, but they could not foresee that our transition to affluence would be so speedy and disruptive, that a new class system would be developed – and stratified – so soon, that our old easy-going, tolerant, egalitarian ways would be discarded with our poverty, that the “haves” of our society – professional people included – would fight for an even better position by a ruthless use of the methods practised so successfully by the skilled working class, or that the voice of social conscience would be fainter in the seventies.44
But even Downey in this bleak report could not but admit that Irish society in the 1970s was “alive, vivid and thrusting.” For Kevin O’Connor, writing in the early days of 1980, the vibrant energy of that new Irish society, for all its ruthlessness and indifference to much social injustice, was the dominant impression of the times. It was an energy
…fuelled by the folk memory of a race almost extinguished. A hunger for things…the thrust of that age is energetic, affluent, declamatory. The 1980s in Ireland congeal the homogeneity of those who were born poor with those who were not.45
And Dublin for O’Connor, “a capital with its courtiers, multinationals, new-rich boors, careerists,” and enjoying a flowering of the arts, was Elizabethan in atmosphere and expectation, the heart of a nation at the beginning of its life. That ebullient, vigorous, modernizing society in quest of affluence and success, where real opportunities existed for the adventurous and energetic, a society disinclined to view poverty as anything but self-inflicted, brash, ostentatious, and not a little callous, was of course a far cry from the Ireland dreamed of at independence and sought throughout the austere years of Eamon de Valera’s stern premiership. The ideological reverberations of this obvious fact stimulated much of the debate and discussion which marked the intellectual and cultural life of the country in the period, and to this we must now turn.