In 1977 Fianna Fáil came to power when the electorate dismissed a coalition government that had in the last stages of its administration become increasingly unpopular. Jack Lynch, the leader of the party, formed his government with a majority that exceeded any he might have expected. Lynch’s electoral success was undoubtedly in part caused by the widespread dislike several of Liam Cosgrave’s ministers (Cosgrave, as we saw, was Taoiseach in the Fine Gael/Labour coalition government) had managed to draw upon themselves during his government’s term of office. It was also a vote of public approval for the highly ambitious economic programme that Fianna Fáil had proposed for the nation at the hustings. Such immediate matters as the removal of rates on domestic dwellings and the abolition of road tax for private cars were the irresistible leader items of an economic package that would, it was hoped, through creating demand by tax cuts and investing foreign borrowings in profitable enterprises, lead to full employment and economic boom. A key and, as it turned out, crippling element in the plan that was detailed in the government’s White Paper of 1977, National Development, 1977–1980, was heavy dependence on foreign borrowing. An Irish economist reflected in 1984 on this huge governmental wager with the economic well-being of the country at stake:
It was a brave strategy but a risky one. It gambled on continued growth in the rest of the world; and it gambled on Irish workers being willing to accept lower wage increases than our competitor countries, so that we could increase our share of growing world trade. Regrettably, both bets lost. In particular, the second oil crisis of 1979 plunged the Western World into the worst recession since before the Second World War. Our exports faltered but imports, fuelled by foreign borrowing, continued to grow.1
By 1980 the effects of this lost economic wager were beginning to make themselves felt. As the decade proceeded, the economic recession grew into a full-blown crisis.
Indicators of how this economic crisis gathered and deepened in the early 1980s were readily available and made grim reading as they reflected even grimmer realities. Between 1979 and 1982 unemployment rose by 77 percent and, at 160,000 people in the latter year, seemed already dangerously high.2 By December 1984, however, it would reach 208,000 which represented 16.4 percent of the workforce (well ahead of the overall EEC figure of 10.3 percent).3 What was almost as disturbing was that roughly one-quarter of those in employment were public servants and therefore not directly involved in the creation of wealth (public service employment rose by 13 percent between 1977 and 1981). And almost a third of the unemployed were under twenty-five years of age.
These figures would have been alarming enough, given the youthful nature of Ireland’s demographic profile. But when set beside the galloping increases that had occurred since 1979 in the Republic’s foreign indebtedness, a sense of the perilous economic position in which the state found itself was overwhelming.
As recently as 1974, Ireland had been a creditor nation. In 1977 net foreign debt (when external reserves had been deducted) stood at only £78 million. In 1978 that figure rose to £297 million, and in 1979 it exceeded £1,000 million. At the end of 1983 it had reached the frightening figure of £6,703 million. In fact, the state’s foreign debts doubled between 1980 and 1981 and doubled once more between 1981 and 1983, and much of the money made available by this borrowing went to fund current spending, little finding its way into profitable and employment-generating enterprises. Furthermore, since 1979 – when the Republic of Ireland chose to enter the European monetary system, despite Britain’s refusal to do so, thereby breaking the historic link with sterling – the Irish punt had declined against sterling and, more strikingly, against the dollar, keeping import costs high.
The social results of this depressing economic picture were not far to seek. An EEC report revealed that in the Ireland of 1983 one million people were dependent to some extent on social welfare payments, and for 700,000 people they represented the main source of income. With emigration to the UK – the traditional “safety valve” for Ireland in the twentieth century – undesirable because of the severely depressed British economy, and unemployment and the social deprivation these social welfare statistics highlighted so prevalent, it is not surprising that the Republic suffered a disturbing rise in criminality. Dublin in particular in the early 1980s experienced an epidemic of petty larceny, housebreaking and street “muggings” which persuaded many citizens to remain in the suburbs in the evenings for fear of walking the city-centre thoroughfares. And parts of the city of Limerick, which suffered much following the closure of the Ferenka mechanical engineering plant in 1977, at times resembled the “no go” areas of the troubled ghettos of Northern Ireland. The startling statistic that in some Dublin suburbs the crime rate had been rising by more than 50 percent a year4 was symptomatic of the systemic malaise that afflicted Irish society in the 1980s. So too was the steady increase in drug abuse among the young, the extent of which is revealed in the following grim statistics. In Dublin the main drug advisory centre was at the Jervis Street Hospital. In 1979 the number of patients attending this centre was 415. By 1982 the figure had risen to 1,307, of whom 850 were new patients; in 1983 it reached 1,515 of whom 841 were new patients. Such figures of course related only to those seeking treatment and at one particular hospital. Crime statistics again fill out the picture. In 1965 only two people were charged in the state with drug offences. In 1970, seventy-one people were charged. In 1983 this figure had reached 1,822.5
Through the 1970s, although in an increasing population the marriage rate declined somewhat, the numbers of young women embarking upon matrimony rose. After 1980 a decline was noted in the proportion of women aged between twenty and twenty-four years who were married. And the number of births, which had been climbing steadily in the previous decade, fell from 74,388 in 1980 to 66,802 in 1983. Demographers suggested that it would not be rash to attribute these fluctuations to the direct effects of the recession. In the prevailing economic climate it seemed that marriages were being postponed and families restricted.6
If the recession touched people’s lives in this most personal way it also affected general public perceptions of the condition of the country. In the early 1980s a sense developed among social commentators and analysts that the end of the 1970s was the end of an era in Ireland, and this view may have reflected an emerging public consensus. It was felt that the period inaugurated by Seán Lemass in the late 1950s had somehow drawn to a close, the energies released then, finally exhausted, the modes of action stimulated by these no longer effective. Desmond Fennell’s The State of the Nation: Ireland Since the Sixties, published in 1983, caught, in its depressed insistence on the need for national reassessment of the previous two decades, something of this new mood. Fennell characterized the state of the national psyche as a punch-drunk confusion:
As we passed through the recessions of the ’70s and early ’80s, with the government borrowing wildly to keep the party going somehow, while unemployment grew weekly and the North rumbled on, people seemed dazed, like sleep-walkers, and were afraid to think. Chatter about unemployment, wages and prices, the bankruptcy of the public finances, political scandals, divorce and abortion, and Northern violence filled the air.7
For Fennell the underlying Irish problem was the lack of a satisfactory, workable self-image after the economic and social change of the 1960s and ’70s had destroyed the once serviceable version of the national identity of Ireland as Gaelic, Catholic, and republican.
In 1982 the Institute of Public Administration devoted an issue of its quarterly periodical Administration to a collection of articles considering the Irish experience of government since 1957. This work was subsequently reissued in volume form under the title Unequal Achievement: The Irish Experience, 1957–82. The editor in his preface precisely expressed the sense of an era concluded and of a new, more difficult period waiting in the wings:
The Irish economy is in recession. Unemployment is rising and the social problems which follow from economic stagnation are growing. Despondency seems to be on the increase, as though the intractability of our problems had at last sapped our will to solve them. It is difficult to avoid recalling the grim fifties, the last severe economic depression.8
Other contributors shared their editor’s impression that a failure of nerve and will was putting the country at risk. The historian Joseph Lee noted that “the ship of state seems to have begun to drift increasingly out of control, in rather rudderless fashion in recent years,”9 while two sociologists, David B. Rottman and Philip J. O’Connell, observed:
It is striking that today, in contrast to the late 1950s, there is no confidence in Ireland’s ability to control its future. No new organisations are being proposed to assist in the task of national development and the experts can only warn of the limits to what state policy can achieve.10
Another contributor, Thomas J. Barrington, saw national shipwreck ahead: “We have chosen to drift steadily towards disaster,”11 while Tom Garvin reflected on an “exhaustion of political ideas.”12
Contributory to, and perhaps in part expressive of, the despondency of this volume was its analytic awareness of the ways in which the social progress Ireland had enjoyed in the previous two decades had created new problems without always solving the old ones. Swift changes in the class composition of the Irish workforce, identified by Rottman and O’Connell, had, since they were incomplete, left behind a residue of marginal people stranded in the course of industrial development. Such people, small farmers and unskilled labourers, comprised a social group for whom the “only European parallels…[were] in Greece, Portugal and Spain.”13 Furthermore, the educational revolution of the late 1960s and ’70s had in fact produced a remarkably well-qualified population of young people. Between 1964 and 1979 there had been a two-thirds increase in participation rates in tertiary-level education.14 But research made clear that it had been the upper middle and middle class who had chiefly benefited from the vastly increased public expenditure on secondary- and tertiary-level education (between 1970 and 1979 expenditure on education as a whole increased by 100 percent in real terms).15 As Rottman and O’Connell reported, “middle-class dominance is strongly evident at the Leaving Certificate standard and in the late 1970s nearly three-quarters of children of members of the major professions entered a third-level institution, in contrast to less than 4 per cent of the children of unskilled workers.”16 And in 1984 an Economic and Social Research Institute study showed that, in Dublin, movement from the working class to the professional class was twice as less likely than in England and Wales.17 Its findings tended to confirm Rottman’s and O’Connell’s observation that “the educational system today is a barrier to social mobility.”18
From 1979 to the mid-1980s persistent political instability meant that various administrations found it remarkably difficult to respond appropriately to the rapidly worsening economic and social problems of the country. In 1979 Charles Haughey, who had spent almost a decade in the political wilderness after his acquittal in the Arms Trial, made a successful bid for the leadership of Fianna Fáil. In the period since his electoral triumph of 1977 Jack Lynch had found his majority something of a handicap for it apparently allowed his party the opportunity to change the leadership without unduly damaging political consequences. In fact the acrimony which Haughey’s 1979 victory set loose meant that the party would not thereafter achieve an overall majority in a general election, and that disappointed and dissident elements would break away to form a new party, the Progressive Democrats (founded in November 1985).
In his first period in power, Haughey, who brought with him a reputation for decisive political action, seemed strangely immobilized by the tensions within the party. In June 1981, following a general election, he surrendered power to a coalition of Fine Gael and Labour (which depended on the support of a number of independents) led by Garret FitzGerald. FitzGerald’s tenure of office was short. Exuding fiscal rectitude, he determined to rescue the public finances but was unable to retain the parliamentary support of crucial independents. His government’s budget of early 1982, with its wide-ranging assault upon the national debt, included putting VAT on clothing and footwear. This was to apply even to children’s shoes, on the almost Swiftian and certainly very unpopular grounds that since women with small feet could buy children’s shoes and so avoid tax, children’s shoes must in equity be taxed.
The election of February 1982 produced no majority, though Haughey managed to assemble sufficient parliamentary votes, including that of a crucial independent, to form a government. It was a less than secure arrangement which lasted only to the end of a year in which Haughey’s administration was bedevilled by a series of accidents and scandals. These did much damage to the reputation Haughey had retained throughout the 1970s for adroit and commanding leadership. Following a further general election, Fine Gael and Labour entered upon a new coalition in December 1982 which again brought FitzGerald to power. Although this government managed to hold office until January 1987, its freedom of action in tackling the economic crisis was hampered by divisions between its Fine Gael and Labour members, and its stability, too, frequently appeared in doubt.
Indeed, the problem of how effectively to redress the country’s economic difficulties in a context of electoral uncertainty dogged all the governments that had exercised power since 1979. The need to maintain public popularity in a period of political instability scarcely allowed for the application of painful remedies. FitzGerald’s government’s budget in early 1982 was one such effort to restore the public finances to some order, but it foundered on the rock of political misjudgment. During Haughey’s administrations, policy followed an erratic course based, as it seemed to be, on an optimistic faith in an inevitable economic resurgence, punctured by bouts of fiscal realism. Towards the end of his second term of office, Haughey, through his government’s economic policy document The Way Forward, seemed at last to have seriously reckoned with the inevitability of a protracted period of austerity. That plan, however, was shelved on FitzGerald’s return to power, though the strict budgets which followed did not contradict its basic conclusions, and in a national plan of 1984 the coalition government outlined a strategy for an economic recovery based on the assumption that public spending could not be sustained at then current levels.
In a society in which so large a proportion of the population was young and in which that population was increasing (one study suggested that between 1979 and 1989 the population of the Republic might increase by half a million)19, the stresses on the educational system were severe. Both Fianna Fáil and the coalition, in its second term of office, sought to confront the challenge of educational needs and priorities. In December 1980 Fianna Fáil issued a White Paper on educational development. Such a document had long been awaited; in the end it seemed an inadequately considered one, swiftly produced to redeem an electoral pledge. The Minister for Education’s foreword, in the guise of open-mindedness, appeared apologetically aware that in many areas the White Paper could not form the basis of administrative action; he insisted that “it is nowise intended that the proposals of this White Paper be regarded as rigid or inflexible.”20 On key issues – the difficulties encountered by pupils transferring from child-centred primary schools to subject-orientated secondary schools, the necessity for curricular expansion in the secondary schools, and the need for reorganization of the universities – the White Paper only could refer to the work of existing committees (which would report in due time), propose new committees, or await new legislation (in fact it took until the late 1990s for a new Universities Act to give independent university status to the constituent colleges of the National University of Ireland at Dublin, Cork, Galway and Maynooth, and a broad revision of the secondary curriculum and examination system remains to be effected). Inasmuch as it expressed any real educational philosophy, it was one in which technology was regarded as a social panacea without which an economy cannot thrive (and it was technology rather than scientific research and development that was emphasized). The context of education was conceived of primarily as the economy, the arts being associated with leisure. There was no apparent awareness that technological innovation can depend on the creative energy of society in general and on a culture in which respect for the achievements of science as an intellectual avocation is encouraged.
The coalition’s response to the educational demands of the 1980s, documented in the Minister for Education’s Programme for Action in Education 1984–87, was similarly lacking in philosophic resource. Indeed, it was expressly stated therein that it would be inappropriate to formulate any philosophy of education in the context of the programme. The pragmatic, cost-accounting approach to educational needs was matched in this document by the same simplistic view of the relationship between technology and the economy that had characterized Fianna Fáil’s 1980 White Paper. If in the 1960s the Investment in Education report was representative of an era in which the immensity of the tasks at hand had provoked enthusiastic optimism, in the 1980s the Programme for Education may well have represented in its depressingly cost-conscious way an era of retrenchment and reduced vision. Yet the need to tackle educational deficiencies was acknowledged, as was the awareness that the future would depend more on technological skills in a young workforce than on the traditional sector of agriculture and related activities.
While the various governments that held power until 1987 seemed almost mesmerized into legislative inactivity by the magnitude of the social and economic challenges they faced, one problem, that of Northern Ireland, forced itself upon their attention in irresistible ways. Inactivity was not an option. A problem that throughout the 1970s seemed as if it could be contained and perhaps resolved, largely within the framework of the six counties of Northern Ireland, no longer appeared so. For the electoral successes of Sinn Féin (the party which provided direct political support for the Provisional IRA guerrilla campaign against the British administration of Northern Ireland) in Northern Ireland itself gave sharp notice that the Northern Catholic nationalist minority there was in a deeply alienated mood, disinclined after a decade of political disillusionment to give permanent, unquestioned support to moderate constitutional politicians whose moderation had won few tangible concessions and had brought no obvious benefits to their constituents.
It was not only changes in the political climate in the North which stimulated a quickening involvement in the problem in the Republic. The accession to the office of Taoiseach of Charles Haughey was sufficient for that. Throughout the 1970s Fianna Fáil under Jack Lynch had maintained a bipartisan approach with the opposition and the coalition government. This had broadly sought to encourage a power-sharing devolved administration in Northern Ireland, with some links of association with the Irish parliament, and had resolutely attempted to avoid embroiling the Southern state in anything which might import violence to its territory. Haughey partly came to power in Fianna Fáil because an influential section of the party believed that a stronger, more full-blooded expression of the traditional republican nationalist stance on partition was essential. Enough others in the party were sufficiently unhappy with Ireland’s economic performance after Lynch returned to power in 1977 to allow Haughey his chance in office, remembering his successful period as Minister for Finance in the 1960s.
Haughey lost little time in making clear that the days of comfortable bipartisanship were over. In February 1980, at his first party conference as leader, he put it on record that in his view Northern Ireland had failed as a political entity. He declared it as his policy that he would seek to resolve the problem in direct talks with the British government. The issue would be shifted from the Northern-Irish context to a British-Irish one. Accordingly, Haughey met the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, in London in May 1980 and at Dublin Castle on 8 December of the same year. This second meeting, which the British Foreign Secretary, the Chancellor, and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland also attended, was interpreted by Haughey immediately afterward as having historic significance. In press conferences he gave the impression that British and Irish relations had been placed on a new footing in which the future of Northern Ireland would be resolved between himself and Mrs. Thatcher. Much was made of a phrase in the official communiqué “the totality of relationships within these islands” and of the agreement that joint studies would be commissioned “covering a range of issues including possible new institutional structures, citizenship rights, security matters, economic cooperation and measures to encourage mutual understanding.” Haughey encouraged a sense that the end of partition was in sight. That this would be a distant prospect became clear when the joint studies were published. But this was scarcely the point. Haughey, by apparently making progress on the issue of partition, made it imperative that a successor should be seen to act with similar conviction and historic authority. In a matter so fraught with dangers and pitfalls this was the thorny legacy which Garret FitzGerald inherited on coming to power in 1981.
Furthermore, when FitzGerald took office in June 1981 events in the North had taken a threatening turn. A hunger strike to achieve political status for republican prisoners in the H-block cells at Long Kesh (the Maze Prison) was taking place when Haughey met the British Prime Minister in Dublin. By the time FitzGerald became Taoiseach, a second hunger strike had been undertaken which would sacrifice ten martyrs before it was called off, giving to the Provisional IRA both in the North and the South a moral legitimacy in many people’s minds it had never hitherto enjoyed. That Mrs. Thatcher failed to perceive this outcome, in obdurate resistance to the strikers’ demand for political status in prison, or in perceiving it did not give it sufficient weight, was a significant misjudgment on her part. For her intractable stand against the hunger strikers’ demands was precisely the stuff of which Irish martyrs are bred, linking Bobby Sands (the first to die) and his nine companions to Pearse, Emmet, and Tone. Their sacrifice gave the “armed struggle” a dignity and a purchase on Irish feeling which meant that Sinn Féin as the mouthpiece for the IRA would have to be accommodated in any future settlement, an outcome just as likely to unsettle governments in the Republic as in Britain.
During the months of the second hunger strike, in the midst of which FitzGerald came to power, more popular demonstrations of support for the republican cause were mounted in the Republic than at any time since the aftermath of “Bloody Sunday” in 1972. Black flags were displayed in most towns and villages, marches and protest meetings held. These expressions of solidarity with the republican hunger strikers culminated in a mass demonstration to the British embassy in Dublin on 18 July at which serious rioting took place. FitzGerald could have scarcely experienced less auspicious circumstances in which to grapple with the Northern Irish question. His nationalist credentials implicitly and explicitly cast in doubt by his Fianna Fáil adversary, with Northern violence threatening to spill over onto the capital’s streets, and Provisional Sinn Féin apparently ready to seek electoral support in the Dáil, it was obviously necessary to take action. Its mode was altogether less obvious.
FitzGerald’s response was to propose a referendum to change the 1937 Constitution so as to make it more acceptable to Northern Protestants, thereby removing the basis of unionist argument that the Republic was a sectarian, irredentist state. Articles 2 and 3, which laid claim to the whole island of Ireland as the national territory and asserted the de jure right of the twenty-six-county state’s government to rule the six counties of Northern Ireland, would be deleted if the referendum were carried. FitzGerald indicated his intention to mount a “constitutional crusade” to influence Irish public opinion to this end. His approach to the Northern question therefore was radically different from that of Haughey, for it clearly placed much greater importance on the susceptibilities and political significance of the unionist population of Northern Ireland. This became even clearer after a meeting with Mrs. Thatcher in November 1981, when FitzGerald agreed in a joint communiqué that “any change in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland would require the consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland.” Predictably, Haughey was contemptuous of FitzGerald’s mooted crusade and indignant that FitzGerald had interrupted the process he claimed to have inaugurated himself with his meeting with the British Prime Minister in London almost a year earlier. Electoral exigencies did not allow FitzGerald much time to prosecute his crusade with any vigour, for in the new year Haughey had returned as Taoiseach.
And it was to be a period of icy British-Irish relations. Haughey denounced the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland’s attempts to create a legislative assembly with devolved powers in the province before he had embarked upon the task. He did not too strenuously dissent from his Minister for Defence’s claim, after the sinking of an Argentinian battle-cruiser by British forces in the South Atlantic Falklands/Malvinas war, that Britain had become the aggressor, ordering Ireland’s derogation from EEC sanctions against Argentina’s breach of international law. These acts served notice that the “special relationship” Haughey had made much of in his first term of office was definitively at an end. Ireland had a profound quarrel with Britain – partition – and until Britain moved to end that injustice, relations between the two sovereign governments would constantly be soured.
Events north of the border in the first half of the 1980s threatened to transform the Northern problem into an all-Ireland one, making it more a source of Irish instability than a cause of a British-Irish disagreement, as Haughey saw it. The effect on Northern nationalist opinion of the hunger strikes made it possible for the Provisional IRA and Sinn Féin to embark on a radical new direction. Traditional Sinn Féin policy had been almost always to hold itself apart from the electoral process in the North and South. During the hunger strikes Bobby Sands had stood for election to the Westminster parliament in a by-election and was successful. Two H-block prisoners were elected to the Dáil in the general election of that summer (one of them, Kieran Doherty, dying, as a result of his hunger strike, shortly thereafter). Initially, Sinn Féin justified this departure from a traditional policy in terms of the extraordinary circumstances in which it found itself. But involvement in H-block committees (groups which espoused the prisoners’ cause) introduced its leaders to the possibility of really popular political activism, and a more general electoral support. Consequently, at a meeting in Dublin in October 1981, the traditional policy was abandoned for a pragmatic, flexible exploitation of the democratic system. Local elections would be contested in the North and the seats, if won, occupied. Seats in the Dáil, Westminster and Stormont would be contested but not occupied. In a chillingly memorable sentence, Danny Morrison, national publicity director for Sinn Féin, gave succinct expression to the new policy: “Will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in this hand and an Armalite in this hand, we take power in Ireland?”
The political party likely to be most immediately affected by this strategic shift was the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), which represented the non-violent constitutional nationalist position in Northern Ireland. That party had throughout the 1970s enjoyed the support of the Southern political establishment, and it was assumed that it would play a crucial role in any resolution of the Northern Irish problem. Were it to be replaced, or seriously undermined by Sinn Féin’s elected representatives, any Dublin government would find its negotiating position vis-à-vis the British government rendered very uncertain. For what case could it put as a democratic government, a partner of Britain in the EEC, while an armed struggle continued with the electoral support of a substantial section of the nationalist population in the North against the British governance of Northern Ireland? Furthermore, such a state of affairs, in which an Irish government might find itself unable to act with real authority, could allow undemocratic forces in the South to claim that they were acting where the government would not. And electoral success for Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland might encourage that party to activism among the socially alienated, young unemployed in the Republic itself, thereby threatening political stability there. In the British general election of June 1983 Sinn Féin proved that such fears were not groundless as their candidates took 13.4 percent of the vote to the SDLP’s 17.9 percent, with Gerry Adams the high-profile victor in West Belfast.
Earlier in the year, in anticipation of such an electoral threat, the leader of the SDLP and the leaders of three of the Republic’s political parties (Fine Gael, Labour and Fianna Fáil) reached an agreement on a proposal largely emanating from John Hume of the SDLP that an all-Irish forum be established. This body would, after extensive consultation, set out the basis of the constitutionalist position on the problem of Northern Ireland, recommending ways in which the conflict might be peacefully resolved in some new Irish political order. The intention was to impress upon the British government the dangers of an inaction which would leave the political arena open for a nascent, politically active Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland and to outline various parameters within which joint Irish and British ameliorative action might be taken.
The performance of Sinn Féin in elections to a new and short-lived Northern Ireland Assembly in October 1982, when the party had won five seats in the bitter aftermath of the hunger strikes of the year before, had been the danger signal, alerting politicians throughout nationalist Ireland. And they responded with considerable seriousness of purpose and sustained intellectual determination. Initially, doubt had existed whether Fianna Fáil under Haughey would agree to participate in an all-Irish forum, since it was not clear that Hume and the other party leaders unambiguously held that a unitary Irish state and the ending of partition were immediate desiderata; but Fianna Fáil decided to involve itself in the proceedings, perhaps fearing its position might go by default. In the event that was scarcely the problem.
The New Ireland Forum met for the first time on 30 May 1983. Unionist parties, although invited, refused to attend, though some unionists made individual representations. Sinn Féin was not invited. The Forum reported eleven months later, during which time twenty-eight private sessions and thirteen public sessions were held, at which the various party members heard oral, and studied written submissions (these totalled 348). There were also fifty-six meetings of a steering committee comprising the chairman and the party leaders. The published results of this intense activity were at once challenging, generous in spirit, but practically limited.
The challenge of the Forum Report lay in its unblinking recognition of the desperate, tragic nature of the Northern Irish conflict and of its potential for even more widespread violence. The report listed the statistics of conflict with compassionate urgency. The violent deaths of 2,300 men, women, and children in fifteen years were reflected upon:
These deaths in an area with a population of 11/2 million are equivalent in proportionate terms to the killing of approximately 84,000 in Britain, 83,000 in France or 350,000 in the United States of America. In addition over 24,000 have been injured or maimed. Thousands are suffering from psychological stress because of the fear and tension generated by murder, bombing, intimidation and the impact of security measures. During the past fifteen years, there have been over 43,000 recorded separate incidents of shootings, bombings and arson. In the North the prison population has risen from 686 in 1967 to about 2,500 in 1983 and now represents the highest number of prisoners per head of population in Western Europe. The lives of tens of thousands have been deeply affected. The effect on society has been shattering. There is hardly a family that has not been touched to some degree by death, injury or intimidation.21
After a decade in which the Republic had tended to hope the Northern-Irish problem could be isolated by a mental quarantine, such a passage in an official document represented a courageous recognition of the human dimension of the problem that confronted the Irish government and its people.
The New Ireland Forum Report revealed a generosity of spirit too in its sincere efforts to comprehend the Northern unionist mentalité and acceptance that “nationalists must…acknowledge that unionists, sharing the same island, have the same basic concerns about stability and security as nationalists. The major difference between the two traditions lies in their perceptions of how their interests would be affected by various political arrangements. These perceptions have been largely formed by different historical experiences and communal values.”22 Such a formulation, particularly in that final sentence, for the first time gave official, diplomatic expression to a view of Irish history that diverged from republican nationalist orthodoxy, in which unionist instransigence was always regarded as the misguided result of British manipulation or as a self-interested desire to maintain sectarian ascendancy. The creation of a positive vision of an Ireland in which unionists might feel more at home was identified in the report as a central aim for constitutional nationalists. The statement “Society in Ireland as a whole comprises a wider diversity of cultural and political traditions than exists in the South, and the constitution and laws of a new Ireland must accommodate these social and political realities”23 is one that Æ of the Irish Statesman might have penned.
The Forum Report envisaged three constitutional frameworks within which a settlement might be achieved: a unitary state, a federal constitutional state and a joint authority, without dealing with the fundamental problem: that without unionist consent none of these options could be set in place.
Immediately after the report’s publication, disagreements developed between Haughey and FitzGerald on the status the document afforded to the federal constitutional state and to joint authority. Haughey was insistent that these would not resolve the Northern Ireland conflict and that the report opted only for a unitary state. It was not at all clear in his utterances why a federal state could not be a united state and why such would be a failure in Ireland. What was clear was that the spectacle of Haughey and FitzGerald squabbling in public on the differing interpretations reduced the report’s impact, suggesting that the consensus achieved was largely cosmetic.
These disagreements swiftly seemed to become academic, however, when in November 1984, after a meeting with FitzGerald, Mrs. Thatcher bluntly stated that none of the three options would be acceptable to the British government: they were “Out, out, out,” as she stated at a televised press conference, which was read in Ireland as a studied insult to the Irish Taoiseach. (Her attitudes to Irish perspectives had scarcely been softened by the IRA’s attempt to assassinate her and her cabinet in the Brighton bombing in October.) It was a measure of FitzGerald’s maturity as a statesman at a fraught time that he swallowed his pride at this rebuff and continued the work of persuasion (ably assisted by officials in the Department of Foreign Affairs) that doing nothing would exacerbate the problem of Northern Ireland. The Forum Report had fortunately envisaged British opposition and had stated that the Forum would consider other proposals if those on the table proved unacceptable.
By June 1985, at a meeting in Milan, Mrs. Thatcher accepted that something must be done and an intensive period of negotiation ensued which bore fruit in the Anglo-Irish Agreement, signed at Hillsborough Castle, near Belfast on 15 November 1985. This gave the Irish government a consultative role in various aspects of the governance of Northern Ireland, with an Irish secretariat in Belfast. This concession to Irish interests was balanced by a clear statement, accepted by both the Irish and British governments, that no change in the status of Northern Ireland could take place without the consent of a majority of the population there and that at present no such majority existed. Crucially for the Irish government, Britain declared that it would not stand in the way of a United Ireland if in the future a majority in the North desired such an outcome. Britain thereby signalled publicly for the first time that it was essentially neutral in the Irish quarrel, a change in policy which could be built on over time.
The Anglo-Irish Agreement was only a shadow of joint authority as envisaged in the Forum Report. It was reckoned something altogether too substantial by unionist opinion in the North. The Unionists felt betrayed by Mrs. Thatcher who, they claimed with good reason, had not kept them abreast of where the negotiations were leading. And whatever the constitutional assurances the Agreement contained, a Southern Irish secretariat in Belfast looked like the thin end of a very green wedge which would prise the North apart from the United Kingdom. Protest was unanimous, bringing all sectors of the unionist community together in a mass demonstration at Belfast’s City Hall. Loyalist violence now had a sharp ideological edge in the context of such perceived betrayal. It was not clear that the RUC and British Army could maintain order, especially as IRA violence continued unabated, culminating in the horror of the Remembrance Day massacre in Enniskillen in November 1987, when a memorial service at the Cenotaph there was bombed. An agreement which had been designed to bring about peace and stability and to strengthen the centre ground in Northern Ireland (the SDLP benefited electorally from it) looked as if it had also deepened antagonisms. For to almost all unionists it was anathema. Haughey had rejected it immediately on behalf of Fianna Fáil, and Sinn Féin was adamantly opposed, in public, to the Agreement’s position on consent. Yet Sinn Féin was, under the direction of its president, Gerry Adams, in the process of altering its strategy. In November 1986 the party agreed (with a rump departing in protest) that henceforth it would take any seats it won in elections to the Dáil.
In this challenging context, John Hume, the leader of the SDLP, in 1988 began secret talks with Mr. Gerry Adams, the President of Sinn Féin, to see whether the new British position, implicit in its acceptance of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, could wean the Provisional IRA away from the path of violence it had travelled so far along since the early 1970s (the discovery in late 1987 that the IRA was importing substantial armaments from Libya made clear the level of military threat the movement posed).24 Contacts between the parties were intensified and became public, to the great consternation of unionists, who felt increasingly isolated. However, the fact that Sinn Féin was willing to engage in such dialogue perhaps indicated that its commitment to a long war was weakening and that it knew it could not overtake the SDLP electorally while supporting the IRA’s armed campaign. Sinn Féin had endured much opprobrium after the Enniskillen massacre in 1987. The military future, furthermore, seemed to involve a bloody stalemate. So although nothing came of these talks in the 1980s, they helped to prepare the way for the radical departures of the 1990s.
The New Ireland Forum Report had acknowledged in a rather half-hearted way the settled Northern Protestant perception that law in the Republic of Ireland was unduly affected by Roman Catholic social policy. It accepted without analysis unionist fears that “their civil and religious liberties…would not survive in a United Ireland in which Roman Catholicism would be the religion of the majority of the population.”25 Developments in church-state relations in the Republic in the 1980s could not have been adduced to put their minds at rest.
In 1980 and 1981 a number of Catholic pressure groups – some new, others semi-secret societies with histories of private influence on Irish public affairs – gave support to a campaign that sought an amendment to the Irish Constitution that would make it impossible for an Irish legislature governing under that Constitution ever to pass laws permitting abortion in any circumstances. Unquestionably, many of the people who involved themselves in some of these organizations, the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC) and the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign (PLAC) for example, were moved by a genuine abhorrence for the way in which abortion had become, as they saw it, all too readily available in other jurisdictions and were concerned that Ireland as a Christian nation should bear witness to its respect for the sanctity of human life. The fact, however, that it was wholly improbable in the foreseeable future that any political party would attempt to make abortion legal in Ireland gave many Irish people reason to suspect the good faith of at least some of the campaigners.
In the aftermath of the papal visit of 1979, when the Irish people had been challenged by supreme authority to uphold traditional values, conservative-minded individuals had decided that it was an opportune moment to check the erosion of such values (which in their view had been enforced by legislative change in the 1970s) by a show of carefully marshalled popular force. However the plan went badly wrong. For instead of a moral majority calmly affirming its respect for life to the discomfiture of a small group of shallow progressives, the amendment campaign, although ultimately successful in constitutional terms (by a two-to-one majority in a referendum in which only 50 percent of the electorate chose to vote), stimulated an intense, very bitterly conducted debate (some reckoned a kind of moral “civil war”). In this debate it was revealed that a significant proportion of the Irish population was not prepared to support the sort of moral absolutism that the amendment proposed.
The divisions unleashed by the amendment campaign intensified until a direct church-state conflict arose. It was Haughey who, two days before his second administration fell, introduced the wording for the amendment: “The state acknowledges the right of the unborn, and with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and as far as practicable, by its laws to protect and vindicate that right.” On his accession to office, FitzGerald, informed by his Attorney General that this wording was dangerously deficient and might paradoxically expedite the introduction of legislation permitting abortion, presented his own government’s version: “that nothing in [the] Constitution shall be invoked to invalidate any provision of a law on the grounds that it prohibits abortion.” The major Irish Protestant churches, which had all registered their disapproval of the decision to amend the Constitution and of the Fianna Fáil wording, made clear that they found the new wording less objectionable. The Catholic hierarchy, however, gave formal support to the Fianna Fáil formulation, while recognizing that the faithful had the right to exercise their informed consciences on the matter. The nation was therefore afforded the unedifying opportunity to observe Fianna Fáil, with the support of the Catholic bishops, arrayed on the issue against a coalition government that had made belated and ineffective attempts to take account both of its own doubts and of the vigorously expressed views of the Protestant churches. Tragically, what had too readily, even opportunistically, been seized upon by the leaders of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael as a political asset in an electorally unstable context (for what party could allow another to go to the polls clad in the armour of moral righteousness while remaining defenceless itself?) had opened a wound in the Irish body politic which had in recent times seemed entirely healed. That the Church of Ireland primate, Dr. John Armstrong, felt called to protest “This is the Mother and Child Act all over”26 suggests how painfully deep such wounds cut, indicating the inter-confessional tensions the debate provoked. And the manner in which the Catholic church’s teaching on a moral and social issue received majority constitutional support even when Protestants protested vigorously, seemed once again to prove to Northern Protestants that a political accommodation with their neighbours in the twenty-six-county state would be risky. The amendment was carried by 66.9 percent to 33.1 percent, on 7 September 1983, with consequences few then really foresaw.
On 9 February 1984 a group of Catholic bishops appeared in a public session at the New Ireland Forum to receive questions and present the hierarchy’s views on various matters. On this occasion the bishops, through the eloquent, evidently sincere person of Bishop Cahal Daly, wished it to be made clear that “we have not sought and we do not seek a Catholic State for a Catholic people.”27 It was also stated that in any new Irish political arrangements which might encompass the whole island:
What we do here and now declare, and declare with emphasis, is that we would raise our voices to resist any constitutional proposals which might infringe or might imperil the civil and religious rights and liberties cherished by Northern Protestants.28
Even with the clamour of the amendment debate still ringing in many people’s ears, to have said that these words struck a hollow note would have been unfair to the future Cardinal, who delivered them with evident conviction. But other less eirenic episcopal utterances which followed tended to vitiate the significance of the bishop’s words. Questioned specifically on the issue of divorce – constitutionally forbidden in the Republic and a civil right if not exactly cherished by Northern Protestants one they individually and through their representative church bodies recognized as a necessary legal remedy for flawed social realities – the bishops at the Forum took refuge in unhelpful generalities. Nor indeed could they respond in any convincing way to the question as to why Protestants and other non-Catholics should not be afforded in the existing Republic the same civil rights the bishops would be earnest to protect were Northern Protestants to join in the future with their neighbours in forming a new Irish state.
The actual position of the Catholic hierarchy on this question became clearer. They would not grant that divorce was a civil right. However in view of a rising rate of marriage breakdowns (about 70,000 persons in the state were enduring such breakdowns without recourse to divorce legislation) the church increasingly granted marriage annulments. In 1985 Garret FitzGerald declared himself in favour of removing the constitutional ban on divorce. In the knowledge that the Catholic church could not approve such a change, he outlined in April 1986 what divorce, Irish-style, would involve (a decree granted after five years’ separation, with provision for dependent spouses and children) and pressed ahead with a referendum in June, buoyed up by opinion poll evidence that he could carry the day. It was a bold, not to say foolhardy, step, given that significant figures in his own party were dead set against divorce in Ireland and that the Fianna Fáil opposition would do nothing officially to help and would privately work to frustrate FitzGerald at any price, thereby keeping the conservative sections of the electorate happy. In such circumstances the Catholic hierarchy did not have to oppose FitzGerald too vigorously in public but could depend on lay ginger groups (Opus Dei, the Knights of Columbanus, Family Solidarity) and local parish communication to carry the message that Ireland should reject the proposed constitutional amendment. When anti-divorce groups managed to associate divorce with loss of property rights, especially for married women on farms, in rural Ireland, FitzGerald’s proposal was fatally torpedoed. The referendum was defeated in June by a majority of almost two-to-one. The Protestant Bishop of Cork drew a salutary lesson, commenting in July 1986: “The glorious vision of the New Ireland Forum has been set aside…” Bishop Samuel Poyntz asserted: “Many will interpret the 1986 referendum result as sending out a signal that we are not prepared to accept as of now the price of unity by consent.”29 He did however prophesy, accurately as it turned out, that within ten years Ireland would have accepted divorce.
So the 1980s saw an amendment to the Republic’s Constitution that could be interpreted as augmenting its confessional aspects and the defeat of a referendum which would have reduced them. One further event can be adduced to show how the 1937 Constitution, while reflecting liberal democratic ideals in many of its articles, also obliged citizens to live in a state marked by religious confessionalism. In rejecting an appeal from the High Court by a plaintiff (Mr., later Senator, David Norris) seeking a declaration that two acts inherited by Ireland from the period of British rule which made homosexual acts and conduct illegal were unconstitutional, a Supreme Court judge made specific reference to the confessional preamble of the Constitution itself. In his judgment, delivered on 22 April 1983, Supreme Court Justice T. F. O’Higgins made quite clear that the preamble in which, as he stated, the Constitution “proudly asserts the existence of God in the most Holy Trinity and recites the People of Ireland as humbly acknowledging their obligation to ‘Our Divine Lord Jesus Christ’” formed a key element in his deliberations that led to his rejection, together with two of his fellow judges, of the plaintiff’s case. His argument was that a constitution framed in the spirit of the preamble could not conceivably render inoperative laws “which had existed for hundreds of years prohibiting unnatural sexual conduct which Christian teaching holds to be gravely sinful.”30
The successful campaign to amend the Irish Constitution to prevent any possibility that abortion would be legalized in Ireland, the dismissal of the Norris case and the defeat of the divorce referendum certainly gave comfort to conservative-minded people who regarded such things as welcome blows on behalf of traditional religious values in an ongoing battle against liberalizing and secularizing tendencies. Some Catholic commentators were not so sure. They inclined to look at more general trends of the 1980s. What they found was that, despite these compelling indications of the social influence of a conservative Catholicism still vigorously at work in the country, the process of secularization, observed in the 1960s and ’70s, was continuing into the 1980s. Considering all the surveys to hand of religious attitudes and beliefs in Ireland, the sociologist Liam Ryan concluded in 1983: “A picture emerges of a people largely believing in God and in the Church, but in possession of a belief which has little impact, not just on the wider world of business and politics, but also in many areas of private morality.”31 Encouraged by the fact that the decline in religious belief and practice had been “minimal, compared to Europe as a whole,” the author of this report was nevertheless disturbed to note that “those who are less active religiously, whether in belief or in practice, come predominantly from three groups: the young, the urban, and skilled or semiskilled workers.”32 It was such evidences of religious decline that allowed a journalist (Peadar Kirby) in 1984 to publish a book entitled Is Irish Catholicism Dying? without appearing wholly alarmist.33
It must be said, however, that the influence of Catholic Ireland was not directed solely on behalf of conservative forces in the late 1980s. For in that decade there was a discernible if not especially dramatic shift to the political left both at the hierarchical and parish levels. The bishops’ pastoral letter of 1977, The Work of Justice, while scarcely a radical document, did raise the issue of Irish poverty in a compassionate way. And in 1983 the National Conference of Priests of Ireland chose unemployment as the theme of its annual meeting, concluding, as Peadar Kirby has remarked, with what amounts to “a new breakthrough for a document coming from Church leaders in that it sought to identify with the unemployed whom it called ‘the new oppressed’ rather than just offering to help them.”34
A specific catalyst to this new social awareness in Irish Catholicism was the public visibility, particularly after United States policy brought the region onto the world stage, of the work of Irish missionary priests, brothers and nuns in Latin America. Since the foundation of the bishops’ Lenten appeal on behalf of the developing world in 1973, through their agency Trócaire, public perception had been gradually educated to an awareness that missionary outreach involved the encouragement of social improvement as much if not more than direct evangelism. A sense of Catholicism as a socially directed, even radical, force developed. Accordingly, during President Ronald Reagan’s visit to Ireland in June 1984, the considerable opposition to his South and Central American policy expressed then did not lack its share of clerical and religious voices. The Most Reverend Eamonn Casey, Bishop of Galway, the member of the hierarchy most readily associated at that time in the public mind with development issues, was noticeable by his absence when the US President received the freedom of Galway city. In the summer of 1985 Bob Geldof’s marshalling of the international popular music business to present the Live Aid concert in London, on behalf of the world’s hungry, was a similar phenomenon, for it seemed right that a citizen of a country that had once been a land of the hungry and dispossessed should play a key role in responding to current famine.
For language revivalists the 1980s enforced a realistic, chastened sense of actualities and possibilities. A key document reflecting this mood was The Action Plan for Irish, 1983–1986, issued in 1983 by the state’s principal body responsible for language matters, Bord na Gaeilge. This document drew attention to the stark facts of language decline (“Today, some sixty years after the foundation of the State, only 1 percent of our population can be said to be native speakers using Irish as their normal day-to-day language in Gaeltacht areas”),35 and recognized, with a frankness not customary in such contexts, that in order to achieve the aim of a bilingual society, “it will be important to fully acknowledge that English has for long been an authentic community language in Ireland.”36 Bord na Gaeilge reckoned that its bilingual aim for society would be “nearer attainment if, by the end of the century, a situation had been reached in which one third of the people had a reasonable speaking knowledge of Irish, another third had a basic ability in the spoken language, and the remainder some basic understanding.”37 It proposed a series of short-term sensible steps that might be taken in pursuit of this scarcely immodest aspiration, while challenging the government on the seriousness of its concern for the perilous position of the language. That in the period immediately following the document’s publication there was little general sense of urgency on the need to act on the board’s advice cannot but have increased the pessimism which, as well as realism, characterized the mood of many committed to the wellbeing of Ireland’s historic language in the 1980s. A constituent of that pessimism was a fear that late twentieth-century Ireland might witness the death of Irish, its terminal condition allowing a final brief remission in which Irish-language verse briefly flourished. Such was the view of one Irish-language poet, Máire Mhac an tSaoi:
Irish – that is Gaelic verse is so intensively conservative that at all times it has taken a major cataclysm to cause it to change. The coming of Christianity is such a jolt…To-day it is possible that yet another crisis, this time the death throes of a language, is producing another last flowering.38
The Indian summer of Irish verse-making was in fact a moment of profuse creativity in the history of modern Gaelic poetry in the country. Since the launching of a poetry broadsheet (Innti, edited by Michael Davitt) in 1970 by a group of University College, Cork undergraduate poets, Munster and its Irish-speaking areas had been the epicentre of a remarkable upsurge in the public performance and publication of Irish language verse (a publishing house, Coiscéim, gave this wave of younger poets the chance of volume publication). Recalling in 1996 this upsurge of poetry in Irish, the critic Alan Titley remembered that in 1984/5 “twenty-five different volumes of poetry in Irish were published”,39 and noted an anthology which “contained nearly four hundred poems from ninety-four collections by fifty-nine poets” drawn from work of a mere ten years.40 In this “poetic plenitude and anarchy,”41 Titley observed a fertile Irish/English bilingualism, as the younger poets in Irish simply ignored the cordon sanitaire between the languages some earlier revivalists had futilely sought to establish. While, in poet and critic Theo Dorgan’s phrase, this “moment of reclamation” was making Irish-language poetry reasonably popular among some of the young, Irish itself however was entering “yet another spiral in its long decline.”42
As if to acknowledge this sad fact, two works, a play produced for the first time in 1980 (Translations by Brian Friel, which premièred in Derry) and a volume of translations of poems in Irish from the period 1600–1900 (An Dunaire, Poems of the Dispossessed by Thomas Kinsella and Seán Ó Tuama) published in 1981, both made a notable impact in Ireland. The first of these, set at a moment in the nineteenth century identified by Friel as the point in the nation’s history when the process of language shift was irretrievably set in motion, may indeed have touched a chord of national self-doubt and guilt. An Dunaire was an act of powerful repossession of something about to be lost, comparable to Daniel Corkery’s rediscovery of eighteenth-century Gaelic Ireland in the 1920s in The Hidden Ireland.
In 1986 Bord na Gaeilge issued a further, very thoughtful, document: The Irish Language in a Changing Society: Shaping the Future, which sought to challenge what it saw as a laissez-faire attitude by the government to the language issue. The report accepted that the old ideological imperatives about language revival no longer had any real impact in modern Ireland and may indeed have been counter-productive anyway. It recognized that the state had moved from attempting language revival/restoration to the encouragement of bilingualism. The effort to foster bilingualism was unfocused, perhaps necessarily so since it was dependent on individual choices, ignoring the influence of social groups. It observed that new elites had developed in the country with “a strong tendency to exclude ‘things Irish’, or markers of a specifically Irish identity, from a place of honour.”43 Concurrently, the report argued, Irish society in general was suffering from a vitiating identity crisis, so that
…while some debate has been initiated, there is not yet emerging a definite philosophy about what being Irish means in the contemporary world. On the contrary there are cross-currents, ambiguities, ambivalences and disconfirming experiences…This inchoate relationship to our Irishness weakens the capacity of a comparatively small society to take collective action on its problems. Instead, a fractious and individualised society, riven by inter-group conflicts and with few mobilising values for collective endeavour, exhibits a depleted potential for self-management while drifting increasingly towards a provincialised cultural dependence and assimilation.44
There was, accordingly, “a certain emptiness in the way Irish people now assert a sense of separate peoplehood, and a lack of consensus whether this is something worth asserting at all.”45 The Irish Language in a Changing Society offered a realistic vision of how Irish could play a part in developing a positive sense of national identity. It recognized, however, that its vision was to some degree “subversive” in nature, since it challenged increasingly powerful interests at a time when there was “no widely shared ideological rationale for the establishment of a bilingual society.” What Bord na Gaeilge proposed was radically in contrast with the ideology of earlier efforts made by apologists of the language, but like them these depended on a change of consciousness by a significant proportion of Irish people:
In calling for a refurbishment of Irish identity we suggest that the Irish language has an integrating and stimulating role to play. This is by no means a plea for a return to the outlook of the narrow nativistic ideology of the revivalists, current in the early 20th century. Neither is it to favour Irish as opposed to English; in fact we are fortunate in having one of the major languages in the world. Rather it seeks for a sense of confidence in our uniqueness within a polyethnic Europe. A process of revitalising Irish identity could perhaps espouse a new and serious political neutrality, reflect a sophisticated distrust of modern hidden imperialisms, show solidarity with the Third World, show a strong tendency towards humanism and egalitarianism, and in re-examining Irish history, transcend any myopic preoccupation with the grievances of the past.46
The first fruits of this thinking were observable in a widespread Bord na Gaeilge advertising campaign which sought to remind the populace that Irish was “part of what we are.” Its exact impact cannot be judged, but it reflected the broadly humanistic outlook of those in the Republic in the 1980s and ’90s who valued the language as an element in modern Irish identity. This compared strikingly with Northern Ireland where language in the same period (Irish and Ulster/Scots) became markers of competing putative ethnicities. However the ideological alignment of Irish with Third-World anti-imperialism risked making Irish seem marginal, especially in the 1990s when the country would experience an economic resurgence that would make it one of the richest countries in Europe.
In the midst of the severe economic drift and the crises of the 1980s it would have been a lot to expect any government to give language preservation, or indeed any matter of cultural or artistic significance, high priority. The newly appointed Arts Council (the eighth such) in 1984 in fact found it necessary to issue a statement drawing attention to the insufficiency of funds for the huge increase over the preceding decade in the community’s artistic activities (arts organizations in the country had accumulated debts of £1.5 million setting many of them at risk) and to launch a vigorous public campaign to put pressure on the government that included after 1982 a minister of state for arts and culture.
This campaign, although stimulating short-term ministerial ire did, within three years, result in the government issuing the White Paper Access and Opportunity, which set a target of “doubling (in real terms)”47 provision for the arts, drawing down funds from the recently formed national lottery. When Charles Haughey returned as Taoiseach in a minority government in March 1987 he soon moved to go some way to adopting its key proposals. In November he announced that £8 million would be made available from lottery funds and in a statement of 1988 he “signalled that the arts were an integral part of future government policy.”48 A report commissioned by the Arts Council, The Performing Arts and the Public Purse: An Economic Analysis, authored by John O’Hagen and Christopher Duffy in 1987, had highlighted how great a proportion of its grant went to the National Theatre Company (the Abbey Theatre). This was a nettle that was not grasped as the claims of regional and community arts were increasingly pressed under these new circumstances.
It had in fact been Haughey, in the second of his 1980s administrations, who had established a body whose purpose was to honour and support the achievement of creative individuals. On the recommendation of the then director of the Arts Council, Colm O’Briain and of the Taoiseach’s cultural adviser, the poet and author Anthony Cronin, Aosdána was inaugurated in 1982. This honorific body provided for a membership not exceeding 150 persons, of artists – including novelists, poets, dramatists, painters, sculptors, musicians etc. – born in Ireland or resident there for five years (the rules now allow for 200 members). The scheme also allowed for five-year annuities for artists resident in Ireland who depended solely on their creative work.
Other developments, even in the depressed conditions of the 1980s, improved the lot of creative people in Ireland and added to the country’s cultural capital. In 1981 an Irish Film Board was established to seek to encourage the native Irish film industry, in its attempt to represent the Irish experience and thus escape the constraints of international stereotyping imposed by Hollywood. For a time in the 1980s it seemed just possible that a distinctive Irish film movement might emerge, since the board was able to offer development funds to film-makers (often in joint ventures with British television companies) to break new thematic ground. The critical and popular success of such films as Angel (1982), Ann Devlin (1984) and Eat the Peach (1986), all of which had board support, showed what might have been achieved.49 But the abolition of the board by Charles Haughey, when he returned to power in the straitened economic circumstances of 1987, once again made film-making in Ireland predominantly dependent on international backers with their eye on the North American market. Happily, other institutional additions to cultural life were longer lasting. In 1982 a County Monaghan house that man-of-the-theatre Sir Tyrone Guthrie had left to the nation as a retreat for writers and artists, welcomed its first guests, under the joint auspices of the Irish and Northern Irish Arts Councils (with the help of the European Regional Fund). In 1983 the coalition government set a zero-rate tax on books, giving a much needed boost to Irish booksellers (who had been suffering in the recession and from the effects of a disadvantageous exchange rate of the Irish punt with sterling and the dollar) and giving impetus to an expanding Irish publishing industry. The National College of Art and Design’s move to newly converted premises in Dublin also brought a sense of optimism and new life to an area of Irish higher education long associated with conflict and frustration. In 1984, Section 32 of the Finance Act allowed corporations and individuals to set sponsorship of the arts against tax. In 1984 VAT was removed from tickets for theatre and live performances and in 1985 was reduced on cinema tickets.
Artistic activity was increasing in the Irish regions (epitomized by the successes of the Druid Theatre in Galway). The Arts Council moved to encourage this development by supporting the establishment of arts centres in various parts of the country, and arts officers were appointed at regional and county level by local authorities. At a national level, in 1989 the government decided to establish an Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.
Cultural production in the 1980s gave much evidence that the country was in a mood of reassessment and self-analysis. A growing consciousness that the problem of Northern Ireland would have to become a central preoccupation of the political class in Ireland, in a way it had not quite been even in the 1970s, was reflected in a number of developments in the cultural sphere. The journal the Crane Bag (which had been founded in 1977 by a University College, Dublin philosopher, Richard Kearney, and a Benedictine priest, Mark Patrick Hederman) in the early 1980s explored the possibility of pluralist politics in a new way. It sought to move beyond the predictable categories of national debate, sponsoring the notion of a mythical fifth province as a kind of free space in which new accommodations of the old quarrels could be imagined. Writers, artists, academics, intellectuals from the North and South, and from opposed political perspectives, twice a year were given the opportunity to consider, in themed issues, the questions the editors had posed in the journal’s second issue in 1978: “Is there an alternative way in which Irish people can develop a sense of identity? Can we go beyond the idioms of religious sectarianism, nationalist self-righteousness and bourgeois preoccupation with the ‘greasy till’?”50
Overall the journal, it must be said, risked a certain air of abstraction, but it represented a serious commitment by public intellectuals to engage with Ireland as a whole without falling into familiar polemics. Compared with the debates of the 1960s and ’70s analyzed above, which were in essence ideological, individual articles in the Crane Bag and their cumulative impact both suggested that the Irish imbroglio could not be resolved in terms of traditional ideologies. Creative new thinking, in which ambiguity, fluidity and even the muddle of compromise, would have to replace the conflict of irreconcilable opposites. The words of a character in Brian Friel’s play Translations (quoted indeed by one of the editors in his article “Between Conflict and Consensus” in 1985) might be said to represent the Crane Bag’s philosophy: “We like to think we endure around truths immemorially posited…[but] it can happen…that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of…fact;” the same character also observes “confusion is not an ignoble condition.” Richard Kearney insisted of the journal he and Hederman edited that it had “sought to occupy a critical position between conflict and consensus, between the clashing demands of politics and art.” As such, it was not “a programme of propaganda” but at its best “a promissory note.”51
From 1986 onwards The Irish Review to an extent filled the gap left by the Crane Bag, which ceased publication in 1985. It lacked the imaginative brio of the earlier journal, however, being largely academic in tone and content. It nevertheless sought to take the measure of contemporary Ireland, North and South. Edited from Cork, Dublin and Belfast, it included Richard Kearney in its founding editorial team. And it did, in its interdisciplinary focus, contribute to the burgeoning academic field of Irish Studies in Ireland and abroad.
The opening night of Brian Friel’s Translations in Derry in September 1980 was not only a notable event in theatrical history but it inaugurated the work of a new cultural ginger group that was to make a considerable mark in the 1980s and ’90s. The Field Day Theatre Company was the brainchild of Friel himself and the actor Stephen Rea. Their intention was to establish a Derry-based company which would present first-rate drama “in a distinctively Irish voice that would be heard throughout the country.”52 Such plays would be premièred in Derry and would then tour. They hoped that this work, emanating from a city that had suffered so grievously in “the Troubles,” would make a distinct, if indirect, contribution to the rethinking that was required in the political sphere. Friel spoke in 1982 of their hopes, while ruefully acknowledging how such ambitions must appear grandiose. He hoped their activities “should lead to a cultural state, not a political state, a possibilty of a political state follows.”53 Friel admitted in an Irish Times interview that Field Day had appropriated the Crane Bag’s concept of a fifth province “as a province of mind through which we hope to devise another way of looking at Ireland, or another possible Ireland…one that must be articulated, spoken, written, painted, sung.”54 By 1984 Field Day had expanded its membership (its directors were Friel and Rea, Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, David Hammond and Seamus Deane, all Northeners; they would be joined by the County Kilkenny-born dramatist Thomas Kilroy in 1986) and its activities included issuing pamphlets on matters as diverse as Hiberno-English and emergency legislation, which aroused considerable controversy. Further links with the Crane Bag were also evident, since Richard Kearney contributed to the second trio of pamphlets, and Seamus Deane, who had written for the Crane Bag, was both a director and a pamphleteer.
Friel may have been capable of ironic self-deprecation about the ambition of this shared enterprise, but in fact Field Day, through its theatrical interest in translation and versions, did reflect a general tendency in cultural life in the 1980s.55 For poets and writers in the period, as if sensing that national traditions (at least those available in the Anglicized and Americanized culture of the island and in official nationalist ideologies) had exhausted themselves, or had proved inadequate to the current crises, now sought new modes of vision. In this context, the translation of poetry from the Irish became a quest for alternative perspectives, and the translation of central and eastern European verse and versions of classical drama (the Antigone in particular) became common. Many poets published versions of poems by the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam about whom Seamus Heaney wrote in his collection of essays The Government of the Tongue (1988), which also examined work by Polish and Czech poets and pondered “The Impact of Translation.” In 1987 Paul Durcan published his collection of verse Going Home to Russia, in which the title poem introduced a sequence of verses which made Russia, even under communism, seem preferable to what modern Ireland had become.
It was Seamus Deane who most precisely identified the Field Day project with a national crisis, when in 1985 he wrote of the group’s intention to compile a major anthology of Irish writing of all kinds. He judged: “the central crisis of the island has reached such an advanced stage that it would be irresponsible to avoid the opportunity to provide a sense or vision of the island’s cultural integrity which would operate as a base for an enduring and enriching settlement.”56 Deane was of course referring here to the continuing conflict in the North. It was, I think, a measure of how deeply by the mid-1980s that problem had entered Southern consciousness as a primary concern that Field Day achieved such visibility in the South as well as in the North of the country, and helped to determine the terms of Southern debate. For at no time since independence had a Northern-based movement or ginger group had any real effect on intellectual and cultural life South of the border (if we exclude the historiographical revolution which in the person of Belfast-educated T. W. Moody had its Northern axis; ironically revisionism became, as we shall see, an object of critique in the 1990s). This in the longer term may come to be seen as Field Day’s most remarkable achievement.
Other key literary and dramatic works of the period indicate that crisis was a prevailing Irish condition which had to be confronted. In 1983 the poet Brendan Kennelly published with a small Dublin press his long historical collage-poem Cromwell. It quickly became a national bestseller. An almost unremittingly dark vision of Irish history as a nightmare from which the dreamer longs to awake made it an unlikely contender for such success. Its appalled, compassionate vision of violence at the heart of human affairs nonetheless gave it grim currency in a period when almost every news broadcast from the North carried its cargo of atrocity. Kennelly caught a mood of gathering revulsion from a “war” that had gone on far too long, as he sought to escape “the terrible incestuous angers of Ireland,” fearing a time when “all the living” would become “shaken ghosts/The future a prison crammed/With cowed nobodies and stammering haven’t-beens.”57
In 1984 Frank McGuinness’s play Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme was produced in Dublin by the Abbey Theatre Company. A powerful exploration of the Ulster-Protestant psyche, it dramatized the relationships among a group of Ulstermen as they were caught up in the slaughter of the Great War. A vision was unfolded of historical entrapment, akin to that in Kennelly’s poem. It too was remarkable for its compassion, expressed in pity for the fate of British soldiers in that terrible war and in understanding of the effect memory of sacrifice had on the Protestant unionist mindset. The play’s metaphoric implications were stark for those in the South who had not attempted such acts of empathetic imagining. They could all be prisoners of an unchanging past and future. That the play was presented at the National Theatre and drew sympathetic audiences, again suggests that the South was beginning to face up to the challenges a political settlement of the national question would involve.
Nicholas Grene, in The Politics of Irish Drama, has identified McGuinness’s play as a key entry in a group of 1980s’ dramas which adopted “the same strategy of recreating the past in order to find a means of better understanding the troubled issues of the contemporary period.”58 Another such work was Thomas Murphy’s Bailegangaire, first produced by the Druid Theatre, Galway, in 1985, with Siobhán McKenna in the lead role. Grene rightly points out that most of the “historical” dramas of the period were primarily concerned with a colonial inheritance that had left the Northern Ireland problem to be solved by the present generation. By contrast, Bailegangaire addressed an even more fundamental legacy, that of “poverty and its consequences.”59 A compelling dramatization of how an archaic past impacts inevitably on a dishevelled present struggling to achieve modernity, it highlighted in particular how that patrimony bore most heavily on the country’s women (the fact that McKenna was associated with the major female roles of Irish drama, Pegeen Mike and Juno, to the point where she had almost become the icon of traditional Irish womanhood, reinforced this in the first production). In a decade in which Ireland was asserting its full presence in the modern world in the international success of the Dublin-based rock band U2, with the “Liffey sound” taking over where the “Mersey Beat” had led the way, as Yuppie style defined suburban ambition (the Thatcherite revolution in the UK had its Irish acolytes), Murphy’s play was a stark reminder that the national traumata of the past could not easily be set aside.
The grinding poverty of that past, from which Ireland had apparently escaped in the 1960s and ’70s, was indeed something which might have rapidly returned in the late 1980s. By 1986 the national debt stood at £22 billion, with an annual interest bill of almost £2 billion. The spectre of default and the imminent arrival of the International Monetary Fund loomed large. With 17 percent of the workforce unemployed in 1986 and emigration of the young once again “a massive indictment of economic failure,”60 the national mood flirted with despair. In 1989 the historian Joseph Lee, in a major history of twentieth-century Ireland, was clearly affected by the sombre climate when he judged: “It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Irish economic performance has been the least impressive in modern Europe, perhaps in all Europe, in the twentieth century.”61 He sought the explanation of that dismal state of affairs in the Irish failure since independence to deploy intellectual as well as material resources. Be that as it may, and he makes a case with fine rhetorical brio, material resources, even as he wrote, were in fact being deployed with a disciplined determination that had escaped governments since 1977.
In 1987 Charles Haughey and Fianna Fáil had been returned to power following a general election and in a short time announced a series of cuts in public expenditure that amounted to £485 million. The Minister for Finance, Ray MacSharry, was responsible for these enormous savings which seemed to bear especially hard on the health services. He would scarely have been able to carry through this draconian, but necessary, pruning of expenditure in a government that had come to power by the exercise of the casting vote of the chair in the Dáil, had he not won the support for such action of the leader of the opposition, Alan Dukes. MacSharry has generously admitted that, to some degree, Dukes put the national interest before that of his Fine Gael party in offering such support in a speech made in the western Dublin suburb of Tallaght in September 1987 (which in the same year allowed a Programme of National Recovery agreed, with the employers and trade unions, to inaugurate a period of political stability).62 The fact that this decision became known as the “Tallaght Strategy” was not without appropriateness, for Tallaght was an area that had experienced much social deprivation since it was developed in the 1970s.
The late 1980s in Ireland were marked, therefore, by severe “fiscal rectitude” that closed hospital wards and made 20,000 public servants redundant. In the most impoverished areas of the country’s cities, what began to be perceived as an underclass lived on the edge of destitution as the decade ended. The novelist Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments (1987) made that world visible to literature, and critics began to talk of a new school of Dublin realism in Irish fiction that was taking the measure of contemporary urban alienation. In this body of work, Dermot Bolger’s The Journey Home (1990), with its vision of an Ireland of exploitation, political corruption, drug addiction and abandoned ideals – an anti-pastoral – set a grim seal on a decade in which Ireland had seemed to lose its way. That in the midst of such deprivation Charles Haughey gave his blessing to a scheme which would allow Dublin to become an international financial centre seemed at the time a desperate throw of a gambler’s dice. In April 1989 a major German bank, attracted by the tax breaks Ireland offered, opened for business in the new Irish Financial Services Centre. It was a portent of things to come.