On 24 April 1990 the Abbey Theatre in Dublin premièred a new play by Brian Friel. Just as Translations in 1980 had caught a public mood in its vision of a culture negotiating transition made explicit in the linguistic shift from Irish to English, Dancing at Lughnasa seemed a work of special contemporary relevance. Set in 1936 in rural Donegal at harvest time, it dramatized in warmly celebratory terms the lives of five sisters, living together in the family home along with the youngest sister’s seven-year-old child and their brother, Father Jack, recently returned from an African mission. Their world is on the cusp of change as the rural economy is threatened by modernization. Older forms of cultural expression are being replaced by the jazz tunes a new-fangled wireless spills into a cottage set, so often in Irish twentieth-century drama the site of an imagined pastoral. But this is no idyll for at the play’s end we learn that this is the last year in which their courage and familial solidarity will keep them together.
In Act One, in a wonderful coup de théâtre, the five sisters are stirred into a wildly pagan dance by an Irish tune on the wireless. For a moment it is as if we are witness to the ecstasy that their narrow lives as single women (the child in the play has been born out of wedlock) in straitened circumstances has denied them. At once a carnivalesque celebration of their womanly exuberance it is also a premonitory exhibition of thwarted energies being released in a symbolic ritual. Of its effect on the eldest sister, the piously strait-laced schoolteacher and principal household support, the playwright insists she should be in the dance “almost unrecognizable” and “grotesque,” as she expresses “a pattern of action which is out of character and at the same time ominous of some deep and true emotion.”1
Friel’s play, which became an instant classic of Irish theatre, seemed to serve notice that in Ireland’s post-colonial experience (analogies are drawn with Father Jack’s Ugandan sojourn) the energies of women could not easily be contained in conventional, patriarchal versions of the social order and that Irish society would ignore such a force at its peril. In the same year it was joined by a remarkable and equally successful work by John McGahern, a novel tellingly entitled Amongst Women. A mesmerizing evocation of the life of small-farm Ireland in the post-independence period, its main character is an ex-IRA activist who cannot adjust to the civilian life of the Free State and the Republic. He rules his family in the self-declared republic of the family farm as an iron-willed patriarch, driving his sons from him and deforming his daughters’ lives. A widower, he has married again; with compassion and lucid accuracy the novel recounts how the balance of power in the family tilts across the fulcrum of gender as the years run on. A powerful study of the pain of love in a flawed familial world, the novel quickly took on the significance of parable and prophecy in a decade when politics and social and cultural life would be marked by major changes in Irish power relations in which gender and sexuality would play a crucial role.
In the early summer of 1989 the Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, had called a snap election on what appeared to be insufficient grounds to the electorate (an electorate, it must be noted, already infected by cynicism since Haughey had returned to power in 1987 helped by a pre-election advertising campaign which appeared to rule out the kind of health service cuts which his government almost immediately introduced). He failed again to reach an overall majority and could hold on to power only by entering a formal coalition with the Progressive Democrats (the PDs), who numbered among them those who had broken with Fianna Fáil because of Haughey’s central role in the party. In so doing Haughey took a great political risk, not only because he was making himself dependent on erstwhile colleagues who had become opponents, but because a determination not to enter formal coalitions with other parties had always been a core value of his own. That he countenanced such an arrangement at all was probably a measure of his own addiction to power and that he effected it, a testimony to his political skills and capacity to quell, if only temporarily, dissent in the ranks. He had, however, in a move that reflected changed social realities, broken another mould in Irish politics in appointing a woman, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, to his cabinet in 1979, the first woman to serve in such a role since 1922.
Haughey as politician was profoundly aware of the significance of image and symbol in politics. He probably relished the fact that no politician since de Valera had attracted so much adulation and execration. The adulation was based on a reputation for hyper-competence earned in a period as Minister for Finance in the 1960s, on the whiff of danger that surrounded him since his acquittal at the Arms Trial in 1970 on a charge of conspiring illegally to import arms, and on the sumptuousness of his lifestyle (which included a neo-classical mansion, a private island, fine horses, an art collection). An aura of invincibility, of devastating charm deployed and withheld at the whim of an enigmatic but commanding personality gave him the air of one not lightly to be crossed on any matter. Familial and personal claims on various parts of the country (he was simultaneously Mayo-man and true-bred northside Dubliner), together with his reputation for staunch anti-British republicanism, added mythic stature. His machismo was a given, charisma undoubted. By contrast, his enemies feared a famed temper and suspected dictatorial tendencies. Some reckoned that he was mired in financial corruption (the source of his ostentatious wealth was unknown).
Haughey’s sense of style as a political weapon had made him artistic patron as well as ward boss who could intimidate with a glance. His almost seigneurial vision of his chieftainly powers (he clearly took the title Taoiseach very seriously in respect of his own person) had found expression in 1985 in the RTE/Channel Four film, subsequently released as a video cassette, Charles Haughey’s Ireland. This included scenes in which Haughey sat at table in his island fastness off the coast of Kerry like a vacationing high king. And in 1990, when in the first half of the year Ireland held the presidency of the European Union, as German reunification was planned after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Haughey exploited his international prominence to the full. Few could have imagined then that by the end of the year a new Ireland would be inaugurated – Mary Robinson’s Ireland.
Mary Robinson (née Bourke), like Haughey, was Mayo-born. There the resemblance ended. The Bourke family had a history of British colonial service and Protestant and Catholic ancestry (she herself married a Protestant whom she had met as an undergraduate in Dublin). She graduated from Trinity College, Dublin in 1967 (at a time when many Catholics still observed an episcopal ban on attendance at such a “Protestant” institution) and embarked on a career in the law which was marked by brilliant advocacy on behalf of litigants seeking redress in contentious areas of social legislation. Elected to the Seanad (Senate) by the graduates of her alma mater, she was to the fore in pressing for change in the law forbidding artificial contraception. She appeared for the plaintiff in the Mary McGee case in 1972 and for Josie Airey, who in 1978 won her case before the European Court of Human Rights, which required the Irish state to give free legal aid to citizens, including those seeking a legal separation who could not otherwise have afforded the cost of legal representation. It was she who argued the Norris case before the Irish Supreme Court and subsequently won the day for gay rights before the same Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. She had consistently championed women’s rights while setting her feminist concern with the oppression of women in a broad context of ethical and political awareness. She had joined the Labour Party in the hope of election to the Dáil (electoral success in that arena defeated her) but in 1985 she had resigned from the party in protest at the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Where Haughey had denounced it as a vitiation of the republican demand for a unitary Irish state, free of any British interference, Robinson thought it “fatally flawed” in as much as Unionists had been kept in substantial ignorance as it was being negotiated.
The presidency of Ireland, established by the 1937 Constitution, while holding certain crucial constitutional powers in the matter of dissolving parliament and examining legislation, had long seemed largely a ceremonial office. Its symbolic significance was sufficient, however, for Fianna Fáil to consider it a position in its gift as the party which thought of itself as a national movement. When the leader of the Labour Party, Dick Spring, invited Mary Robinson to run with his party’s support for the presidency, which would fall vacant upon the retirement of Patrick Hillery at the end of 1990, few gave her any chance. It was assumed that a Fianna Fáil candidate, or one approved by that party, would be found either to stand for election or to take office as an agreed figurehead, as they had done since 1938 when Douglas Hyde first ascended to the presidency.
In the event Mary Robinson found herself matched against an extremely popular Fianna Fáil minister, Brian Lenihan, and a Fine Gael candidate, Austin Currie, who, uniquely, had served in ministerial office North and South of the border. Robinson ran a vigorous campaign as an independent, with the support of both the Labour Party and the smaller Workers’ Party. Travelling extensively, she discovered a new constituency. It comprised those who outside the main political parties constituted energies and forces in civil society – women’s groups, environmentalists, community groups, social activists of one kind or another – who in the past had usually felt excluded from the political process. By the autumn of 1990 what had seemed a quixotic crusade took on an impetus of its own and it was clear that Robinson would give Lenihan a real fight. Gaffes by Lenihan himself and an attempted smear of Robinson by a Fianna Fáil colleague, who questioned her commitment to family values, were crucial in carrying the long shot of the early spring past the post at the second count in November (Lenihan topped the poll at the first count, but with insufficient votes to elect him).
Robinson’s election, though it represented a surprising shock to the body politic, in as much as she had seemed successfully to challenge the comfortable order of things, was, it can be argued, a particularly graphic manifestation of a significant process that had been at work in Irish society since the 1980s. Internationally, as Linda Connolly has observed of the women’s movement in general during the period, “established feminist organisations” which “cooperated and formed alliances with each other, depended on the state for resources and developed into professional organisations.”2 In Ireland the movement had travelled the same route. A pressure group that had reintroduced a women’s agenda to Irish politics (before independence, Irish suffragism had been a vigorous movement) by radical action in the 1970s had by the 1990s become, in Connolly’s words, “part of established interest-group politics.”3 The Council for the Status of Women, for example, founded in the fervour of feminist agitation in 1973, had by the 1990s become the highly professional and influential National Women’s Council, a body that politicians opposed at their peril.
On her election Mary Robinson made a point of thanking Mna na Eireann (the Women of Ireland), “who instead of rocking the cradle rocked the system,” but also made clear that she saw herself as a people’s president “because [she] was elected by men and women of all parties and none, by many with great moral courage who stepped out from the faded flags of the Civil War and voted for a new Ireland.”4 The sense that she had been popularly elected gave her great strength during her presidency. She sought to enhance the powers of the office as they had hitherto been understood, by using her role as President to influence public opinion. And as a constitutional lawyer, she was especially equipped to do so.
Yet it was not simply Mary Robinson’s astute legal understanding of the constitutional limits of her position that made the Robinson presidency so effective an instrument for change in Ireland in the 1990s. Her travels throughout the country as she sought election had softened what before had seemed a slightly austere, academically reserved personality. In office she quickly came to symbolize at home and abroad the new kind of Irish woman the women’s movement had helped to create since the 1970s – highly capable in professional life, liberal in social attitudes, politically adroit, even tough, but bringing to public affairs a true appreciation of how the human dimension must always be respected. She also understood how the cultural sphere is the zone in which politics is often conducted in modern and post-modern societies.
At her inauguration, when she declared she would “rely on symbols,” she revealed that her thinking had been influenced by the Crane Bag and Field Day philosophies. She hoped that the presidency could be a symbol of a “Fifth province – a place within each one of us, that place that is open to the other – this reconciling and healing fifth province.”5 It was clear that she wished to embrace the diversity of Ireland’s population, both in the South and in the North, where she continued to keep channels open to the unionist community, whose views she felt had been disregarded in the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985.
Robinson quickly expanded the social activity of the presidency, both in her own official residence in Dublin and in her frequent travels throughout the country and abroad. She invited people from all sorts of backgrounds, representing different cultural traditions and interests, to feel themselves part of her own voyage of discovery about the potential of Irish life. Visits to meet with women’s groups, peace and community activists in Belfast had a special symbolic import (at a second such meeting in June 1993 she shook hands with Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams). Just before, in May 1993, she had taken the unprecedented and bold step of meeting Queen Elizabeth II in London, signalling that a process of normalization of relations between two sovereign states, sharing responsibility for good governance in Northern Ireland, was well advanced. As a biographer remarks: “For an Irish audience, seeing the Irish President in Buckingham Palace was an especially potent symbol. In more ways than one, it broke – as Mary Robinson said later – a psychological barrier.”6 Her sense of the Irish nation was not bounded by the island of Ireland. From the start of her presidency she had kept a lighted candle in a window of her residence in the Phoenix Park in Dublin to remind the country that Ireland had scattered its people to many parts of the world, to constitute what was increasingly termed a “diaspora.” Though some found this gesture almost mawkish, it undoubtedly struck a note in the United States among the American Irish (whose influence on Irish politics would increase throughout the decade) and in a period when issues of memory and commemoration would enter national debate with renewed force, it had emotional salience for many. The economic crisis of the 1980s indeed had stimulated a new wave of emigration, creating a “green card” and “illegal” generation of young, highly educated Irish migrants to the United States who did not view their departure from Ireland in the traditional, definitive terms of exile. In the poet Greg Delanty’s word’s: “many of us learned the trick/of turning ourselves into ourselves/free in the fe fiada [unseen] anonymity/of America.”7 The candle in Aras an Uachtaráin (The President’s House) spoke for them as well as for many more nostalgic exiles of earlier migrations.
The election of Mary Robinson as President probably had two direct political effects. First, it further set in doubt Charles Haughey’s leadership of Fianna Fáil among those members of the party who believed he had betrayed tradition and principle in entering a coalition with the PDs. A group of disaffected and ambitious members of his parliamentary party planned to unseat him. They wanted a leader who could gain an overall majority in a future election. The impetus of change gathered around the figure of Albert Reynolds, who became Taoiseach when Haughey was forced to resign over a wiretapping scandal in February 1992 (the actual incident, in which two journalists had had their phones tapped on the instructions of the then Minister for Justice, Seán Doherty, had taken place almost ten years earlier).8 Secondly, the Robinson triumph significantly boosted the popularity of the Labour Party and its leader Dick Spring. When in November 1992 Reynolds was forced into an election by the withdrawal from coalition of the PDs (whose departure they believed he had deliberately engineered), the success of the Labour Party in Dublin cut into Fianna Fáil’s traditional support in the city. Consequently Reynolds failed to gain the overall majority he had been put in place to deliver and was forced into a further coalition, this time with the resurgent Labour Party itself which had doubled its representation in the Dáil. Dick Spring became Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister) and Minister for Foreign Affairs, leading a party with thirty-three parliamentary seats. Reflecting the new role which women were playing in Irish professional life in the 1990s, twenty women deputies took seats in the new Dáil.
In 2000 the sociologist Michel Peillon, reflecting generally on the Robinson presidency (Robinson left office in 1997, after deciding not to seek a second term), considered that she had achieved almost mythic status in Ireland, in a country that was, as economic well-being increased rapidly in the second half of the decade, learning to celebrate itself:
She came to symbolize an Ireland that was confidently taking its place in the world; one that had achieved recognition. She represented an Ireland from which the gloom was seemingly lifting. And this modern Ireland did not reject the past or exclude tradition: all could celebrate this Ireland. Mary Robinson was the medium of this celebration; or rather, Ireland celebrated itself through its President.9
Peillon associates the Robinson presidency with a spirit which returned to Irish life in the 1990s, which had been almost completely suppressed since the early nineteenth century. It is through the carnivalesque, he argues (drawing on the work of George Bataille), that societies cope with the perceived “problem of ‘consuming’ a surfeit of resources.”10 By 2000, when he was writing, after five years of explosive economic growth in Ireland, with major public events such as St. Patrick’s Day “turned into ostentatious displays and dissipations of wealth and energy,”11 his thesis seemed persuasive. However Robinson’s celebratory note had first been struck in altogether more exiguous conditions than those of 2000. If in the latter years of her presidency, Robinson was afforded iconic status in an Ireland en fête, the real strength of her contribution to the country may have been that in a difficult time she had discovered and helped people to understand the great social capital invested in Irish civil society. It was well, it can be argued, that she had – for in the 1990s key building blocks of the Irish social order were suddenly to be revealed as fashioned from all-too-human clay. Economic success, as we shall see, undoubtedly helped the country and the body politic to weather these extraordinary revelations about the nature of power, influence and authority in Ireland; but the kind of self-confidence Robinson had engendered enabled many ordinary citizens to feel that their own participation in society was a real resource, in a decade when the foundations of the Irish social structure seemed to fracture.
Most crucially, the Catholic church experienced unimaginable problems in the 1990s and found its authority in Irish life undermined from within and attacked from without. For a series of controversies and major scandals meant that it scarcely ever appeared in anything other than a negative light in the Irish media, which for much of the century had been markedly respectful of ecclesiastical interests.12
To begin with, the issue of abortion emerged again in a way most likely to disturb the church’s equanimity. The 1983 amendment to forbid abortion had seemed definitively to rule out the possibility of legal abortion in Ireland. The impetus for this amendment had come from lay Catholics, but the hierarchy, in making its preference clear on the form of words to be put before the people at the very least had suggested it was happy to have the running made for its views by the lay activists. In consequence they could not escape the irritation, impatience and outright obloquy which was directed towards the amendment’s sponsors, when after nine years its effects were made manifest in relation to one tragic case.
In February 1992 the news broke that the Attorney General, Harry Whelehan, had sought and been granted an interim injunction, citing the 1983 amendment, to restrain a fourteen-year-old pregnant victim of rape from travelling to the UK for an abortion. The girl and her family had already made the journey to England when the judgment was handed down. The country was appalled by this horrific turn of events. Emily O’Reilly comments in her book on the tactics of those who had masterminded the 1983 amendment that the public should not have been as surprised as it was. Cases taken since 1983 had shown that the courts were obliged to interpret the amendment in a severe way (forbidding abortion information, for example).13 But few had imagined such an acute dilemma. It got much worse. The girl (who, evidence suggested, had threatened suicide) and her parents returned from England and awaited the further judgment of the High Court, which confirmed the injunction in terms that effectively made Miss X (as she was known to protect her identity) a prisoner of the state. It appeared that the irresolvable conundrum at the heart of Article 40.3.3 of the Constitution – “with due regard to the equal right to life of mother and child” – would be “solved” by always giving the child’s right to life precedence. The High Court’s judgment was appealed to the Supreme Court and to general astonishment that court, by a majority of four-to-one, concluded that a threat to the life of an expectant mother (including the possibility that she might commit suicide) was grounds for an abortion and that such persons could travel abroad for the termination. However only those whose lives were at risk could be permitted to travel for that purpose. (For Miss X and her family their terrible ordeal had something of a conclusion when, reportedly, she had a miscarriage.)
Accordingly, three challenging prospects opened up for the Irish state and its people. Abortions when a mother’s life was at risk might legally be performed by Irish doctors, though it was unlikely many would choose to do so; conversely many of the 5,000 and more women who travelled to England each year for abortions might find themselves restrained by court orders; and the government might have to produce a new amendment to deal with this confusing situation.
All this was bad enough, but when it became known that a vote in favour of the 1991 Maastricht Treaty (the blueprint for European economic and monetary union), which was to be put before the electorate in a referendum later in 1992, was in jeopardy because of a protocol the pro-Life movement had insisted be placed in the Treaty in support of what was now shown to be a dangerously ambiguous article in the Constitution, then patience wore very thin. Voices which in the past could not have been raised in support of abortion in even the most limited of circumstances, now made themselves heard. The behaviour of the hierarchy, and of what were perceived as the machinations of its lay shock troops, could now be openly criticized. In the event the referendum on Maastricht was passed by a considerable majority, with another referendum promised to protect Irish women’s right to travel and to acquire information on abortion. That referendum took place in November of the same year (concurrently with the general election). Although two significant rights had been affirmed, it left what was called the “substantive issue” of abortion still defined by the Supreme Court judgment. Prochoice and anti-abortion groups had both, for radically different reasons, opposed the proposal to deal with this issue, which would have allowed an abortion when the mother’s life was threatened, but would have ruled out the possibility of, or determination to, commit suicide as constituting such a threat.14 Tellingly, in the summer of 1992, a bill making its way through the Dáil to liberalize the contraceptive laws, in response to the AIDS crisis, was passed without much contention.
There is no doubt that the Catholic church’s position as moral arbiter in Irish society was weakened by this crisis. Consequently it began to seem possible that moral life could be governed by principles other than those of a church which claimed sole right properly to inform the consciences of its members. An individualistic morality, which took cognizance of specific circumstances, began to replace obedience to authority and its absolutes even among devout believers (in the matter of contraception it was obvious that many of the faithful had for years simply disregarded church teaching in that area of their lives), especially as revelations began to emerge that distinguished churchmen scarcely practised what they preached.
This was brought home with stunning force in May 1992 when the popular and high-profile Bishop of Galway, Eamonn Casey, suddenly resigned and left the country. It had come out that he had had an affair in the early 1970s with an American woman, Annie Murphy, who had borne his child. A picture emerged of a man who had apparently spurned both his former lover and son and had enjoyed the fruits of his episcopal office without much attention to his obligations as a father. The sense of betrayal among many devout Catholics was palpable, as was, by contrast, a relish for the scandalous, especially among those who had borne in the past the brunt of church disapproval for their less than perfect marital circumstances. The sight of Annie Murphy being interviewed on prime-time national television was a watershed in Ireland. In retrospect, in the light of subsequent, quite terrible revelations concerning churchmen and women, Casey’s behaviour seems possibly less egregious than it did at the time. But in 1992 it certainly undermined ecclesiastical credibility.
That credibility was profoundly challenged as the decade wore on: a spate of clerical child abuse and other sexual scandals set the church in the dock of public opinion in a way that would have been unimaginable in the recent past. One of the most disturbing and momentous of these scandals involved a member of the Norbertine Order, a Father Brendan Smyth.15 In March 1991 he was interviewed by the police in Belfast and charged with the sexual abuse of minors. Released on bail, he fled to his home abbey, in County Cavan, across the Irish border, where for almost three years he had avoided the efforts of the Northern Ireland authorities to have him extradited to appear before their courts. In January 1994 he finally surrendered himself to Northern justice and in June of the same year he pleaded guilty to seventeen charges, dating back to the 1960s. He was gaoled in Northern Ireland and on his release stood trial in Dublin. He died following a heart attack a month into his second gaol term, in 1997. An Ulster Television documentary broadcast in October 1994 by the Counterpoint programme brought deeply troubling aspects of the affair to wide public attention (UTV is readily available in much of the Republic). It was argued that not only had Catholic church authorities long known about their paedophile priest, but that they had sought to deal with the problem he presented by moving him from post to post in the hope that he might desist from his activities. The possibility that he might have been turned over to the civil authorities had not, it seemed, entered into their calculations, which appeared to be related more to guarding the Church’s good name than to protecting children.
The Counterpoint programme and the subsequent book by its researcher, Chris Moore, certainly damaged the reputation of the Catholic church in Ireland. Moore’s judgment in his book that “to the bitter end, all those in authority in the Catholic church whom I approached singularly refused to be held accountable for Fr Smyth”16 was especially damning. Ironically it was the civil authority in the Republic that first felt the heavy aftershock of this seismic event in Irish ecclesiastical history.
The Counterpoint programme claimed that “extradition warrants issued by the RUC in the last week of April 1993 had been sent to the Republic but never acted upon.”17 This meant that seven months had passed between the date on which these were sent and the date on which Smyth voluntarily left the Irish jurisdiction. It would eventually become known that this circumstance had arisen simply because of decisions taken within the busy office of the Attorney General in Dublin in respect of the prioritization of work to be done there. In the autumn of 1994, however, it created the context in which a considerable political crisis unfolded.
The Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, wanted to appoint the Attorney General, Harry Whelehan, to the presidency of the High Court. His coalition partners in the Labour Party were not enthusiastic about this. Dick Spring and his Labour ministerial colleagues were intent that the Attorney General should explain to the cabinet in person and to their full satisfaction how the Smyth matter had been handled in his office and how what had come to seem like an undue delay in executing the extradition warrants, had occurred. When Whelehan was nonetheless appointed president of the High Court without the agreement of Spring and his Labour ministerial colleagues (they had left the cabinet meeting in protest at Reynolds’ intention to proceed with that appointment), then the stability of the coalition government was in obvious jeopardy. By mid-November, after much high drama in the Dáil generated both by the Smyth affair and Whelehan’s appointment, Spring and the other Labour ministers resigned from government. Since he could no longer depend on a parliamentary majority to sustain him in office, Reynolds, with a good grace, bowed to the inevitable. He resigned as Taoiseach and as leader of Fianna Fáil. Subsequently Labour entered a new coalition with Fine Gael and Democratic Left (a recently-formed party). This coalition (dubbed “The Rainbow coalition”) summoned enough votes in the Dáil to elect John Bruton, leader of Fine Gael, as Taoiseach; the Rainbow coalition would hold power until the summer of 1997. That the charging of a single member of the regular clergy in Belfast in 1991 should have set off a chain of events which brought down an Irish government in 1994 was the stuff of awful fantasy made real. In the aftermath of the crisis Albert Reynolds had the look of a man struck by lightning, unsure if he had lived to tell the tale or not. The effects of all of this on Harry Whelehan, who resigned after only six days in office, could only be imagined.
For many in holy orders the fact that the Catholic church in Ireland had become the focus for child abuse scandals was a terrible ordeal. In 1995, in the Catholic periodical the Furrow, which in the 1990s addressed the subject in a number of anguished articles, Father Enda McDonagh, professor of moral theology at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, acknowledged that “the pain lines of the Brendan Smyth affair run their savage way throughout the island of Ireland”18 and reflected that “a sense of darkness, of winter darkness, of the darkness of death has surrounded recent revelations.”19 He bravely recalled Christians’ complicity with the Jewish Holocaust of the 1940s in a way that allowed profoundly troubling analogies to seem possible. In the light of subsequent revelations on the national television station, RTE, in a three-part documentary entitled States of Fear (transmitted in April and May 1999), about the conditions that had prevailed until quite recent years in Irish industrial schools and reformatories run by religious orders, this did not seem to be an over-reaction. For these institutions, to which orphaned and unwanted children were dispatched and many young people were incarcerated for crimes and misdemeanours, were revealed in some instances to have been places of virtual slavery, of vicious cruelty and sexual depredation. And it was clear that the state had not taken its supervisory responsibilities seriously. In May 1999, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern responded to public outrage over the revelations by issuing a formal government apology on behalf of the state and its citizens to the victims of this system and a commission was established to investigate the matter (which has not yet finally reported). Writing of the appalled reaction of the Irish public to these exposures of a dark stain on the nation’s twentieth-century life, the journalist and social commentator Mary Kenny observed:
The scale of the cruelty seemed so systematic that it was as though it was inherent in our history: not only were the religious who ran these institutions accused before the bar of history, so was the Irish state, which utterly failed to take responsibility for those in its care. So, indeed, were the complacent middle classes, who used these reformatories as a source for servants, and so was the media, which remained indifferent to the punitive regimes around them.20
So devastating were the traumata undergone by the church in the 1990s, as “a veritable avalanche of clerical scandals” poured “into the Irish public arena,” that Kenny could conclude in 2000: “the very concept of ‘Catholic Ireland’ was by the end of the century, gone.”21 In this she was echoing what some members of the clergy were admitting in private. In a public letter to the papal nuncio, published in 1995 in the Furrow, the correspondent reported how “three times in past months different priest friends have said to me that they now see their function as making sure that the Irish Catholic church gets a decent burial.”22 Tom Inglis, in his book Moral Monopoly: The Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church in Modern Ireland, assessed the position of the church in more measured terms: “Suddenly, the Church has lost its sacredness and has become another interest group in civil society which is open to the same inspection as any other.”23
What Mary Kenny’s dramatic death notice reflected was not that Ireland had ceased to be a religious country (the fact, for example, that about a million people turned out to pay their respects to the relics of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, when they were toured through the country in the summer of 2001 bespeaks vibrant popular piety), but that the conservative social construction of people, nation and state was no longer as securely in place as it had been for much of the century (Inglis offers an extended analysis in these terms).24 Individual Catholics were disregarding aspects of church teaching they found onerous or disagreeable, while a process of secularization was making life outside the social direction of the church available to many. In 1996 one analyst observed that “the fact that women are becoming more and more alienated from Catholic teaching on the family and on sexuality is bound to have huge consequences for the whole fabric of Irish society.”25 She also noted that the figures for those who claim they never attend religious services “is getting closer to the European average and would seem to indicate that Irish people’s religious practice is converging towards that of other European countries.”26 In 2001 another analyst found it striking that “Irish weekly church-attending under twenty-five-year-olds are now a minority of their age group.”27 A national survey in 1998 had found weekly attendance at mass stood at 48 percent of Catholics in urban areas, though 77 percent of Catholics in rural areas maintained the practice of weekly mass-going. The overall figure of 60 percent represented a steep decline from the 91 percent of Catholics as weekly mass-goers in 1973.28
Perhaps even more seriously for the future of the church, vocations to the religious life fell away drastically. As recorded by Inglis, between 1966 and 1995 “the number of priests, nuns and brothers decreased by over one-third (35 percent) and in the same period “the number of vocations dropped from 1,409 in a year to 111, a decrease of 92 percent.”29 Although the decline among the secular clergy was much less marked than the among the regular, a crisis in religious life that had been in the making since the 1960s now seemed irreversible. Inglis paints a picture of a geriatric institution sapped of new blood.
At the political level this climate was reflected in legal changes. In 1993 the Fianna Fáil Minister for Justice was able to put a bill through the houses of the Oireachtas to decriminalize homosexual relations between consenting adults (the state in fact was required to do this on foot of the victory David Norris had won before the European Court of Human Rights). It met with surprisingly little dissent, despite the fact that the age of consent was set at seventeen. In 1995 a referendum to change the Constitution to allow divorce under fairly strict conditions was narrowly carried (50.3 percent in favour, 49.7 percent against), despite the fact that the same groups who had fought against change in 1986 had returned to the fray.
The social climate of 1990s’ Ireland suggested, moreover, that the moral policing in sexual matters the church had enforced in the early decades of independence had almost completely broken down. In 1997 Garret FitzGerald challenged the nation by claiming that recent statistics showed that “for many people the institution of marriage has simply lost much of its significance…[there is] a widespread dissociation of marriage and childbirth.”30 Michael O’Connell, analyzing the matter further, acknowledged the salience of FitzGerald’s conclusion, observing that “the trend towards the unlocking of parenthood and marital status was a broad European one. However, in Ireland the change was taking place far more quickly than elsewhere – at an electrifying pace sociologically speaking.”31 O’Connell concludes:
The trend overall in Ireland is one where people feel less obliged to get married, are marrying later, no longer rigorously associated marriage and parenthood, or for that matter see marriage as a strict condition for having a sex life. And they are less willing simply to endure a married relationship that no longer meets their experience.32
The fact was that many young women in the 1990s thought that a career was at least as important as marriage. The nuclear family as a social norm, established, as we saw in the postwar period, was losing its attraction, especially for young women. The statistics reflected a changed workforce. In 1976 there were 212,000 women in that workforce. By 1996 the figure stood at 488,000,33 though much of the work undertaken by women was part-time. The suburban Irish family with the mother and children at home and the father at work was increasingly a thing of the past. High house prices and other costs often made it necessary for both partners to work outside the home – especially in the cities. And society became more tolerant of the arrangements people made to cope with marital breakdown. This was highlighted by the fact that Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, who had assumed the leadership of Fianna Fáil when Albert Reynolds resigned in 1994, and had taken power in 1997 in coalition with the PDs, was in a second relationship, although he had not divorced his wife. His partner Celia Larkin accompanied him at state and civic occasions, to little adverse comment.
If the church was assailed by manifold problems and shamed by a flood of discreditable revelations in the 1990s, the state and the Irish political class were far from immune from the unmasking mood that gripped the media and public alike in an extraordinary decade.
In May 1991 a British television station broadcast a documentary on suspected corruption in the Irish beef trade. The allegations of irregularities in a beef empire, Goodman International, were so grave and were made so publicly that Haughey’s government, pressed by Desmond O’Malley of the Progressive Democrats, was forced to set up a tribunal of enquiry on the matter headed by the President of the High Court, Mr. Justice Liam Hamilton. No one in 1991 could have foreseen that the 1990s was to be a decade of tribunals, some of which would complete their investigations into various forms of alleged Irish corruption before the decade’s end, others which are still sitting at the time of writing. In the event Mr. Justice Hamilton’s tribunal delivered its report in July 1994, making public once more the scarcely surprising fact: tax evasion and other scams had been operated in the industry. The political ramifications of this matter were considerable. In 1992 the Taoiseach Albert Reynolds had employed the privilege of the tribunal to challenge Desmond O’Malley’s evidence to it. Shortly thereafter, his government, as we saw, fell, when O’Malley withdrew the PDs from the governing coalition (though Reynolds was probably happy enough to see the end of what he had hoped would be the “temporary little arrangement” of the coalition with the PDs that Haughey had bequeathed to him). When the enquiry’s report appeared in the summer of 1994, the distrust of Reynolds’ new coalition partners in the Labour Party was aroused since they believed he precipitately announced that he had been vindicated by the tribunal, before they had had a chance to consider the implications of what Mr. Justice Hamilton had found. In the autumn the distrust occasioned among his coalition partners by this incident was intensified by the Whelehan affair which broke the Labour/Fianna Fáil coalition, brought down Reynolds’s government, effectively ending his political career.
For all its dramatic political consequences, the legal cases it generated and its considerable constitutional implications,34 the beef tribunal and subsequent report did not catch the public imagination or generate righteous indignation in the way later enquiries did. Of these the McCracken Tribunal and the interlinked Moriarty Tribunal were epic, even tragic public dramas, substantially damaging as they did the reputation of Charles J. Haughey.
Like the Father Smyth affair, this controversy began with a police matter. In February 1992 Ben Dunne of the Dunnes Stores chain was charged in Florida (after a night of wild partying), with the possession of an illegal drug (he was fined and required to attend a London clinic to help him with his drug problem). So affronted was his sister Margaret Heffernan, at the image of the family firm being besmirched that legal conflict erupted in the family. She commissioned a study of Dunne’s conduct of its financial affairs. Documents existed dealing with large unexplained payments to politicians. The details leaked out. In 1997 the Taoiseach John Bruton established the McCracken Tribunal to examine these payments. It reported in seven months. Among its principal findings were that Ben Dunne had paid substantial sums to Charles Haughey. It was also revealed that Haughey seemed perfectly at ease with having a prominent businessman gift him large sums of money (indeed he seemed to believe it was his due). In its investigations, the enquiry had opened a trail which eventually led to the Cayman Islands and the role of a company there, Ansbacher (Cayman) Ltd., which had been providing a safe haven for the offshore funds of a wealthy Irish elite. Haughey’s personal accountant, Desmond Traynor, had, until his death, been the linchpin of an ingenious arrangement that could only credibly have been devised to expedite tax evasion (though not all who availed of its services necessarily evaded tax). This scheme effectively involved a coded “mirror” account operated by Traynor within a Dublin private bank which allowed interest-bearing deposits to be technically “offshore,” but available for clients’ use.
When Charles Haughey appeared before Mr. Justice McCracken, he claimed lack of knowledge of his own financial affairs, saying that he had left such matters to Traynor so that he could devote himself to public life without the distraction of money worries. McCracken found many of his claims “unacceptable and untrue.” And: “By allowing himself to be put in a position of dependency, Mr. Charles Haughey failed in his obligations to his constituents and to the citizens of [the] state.…” A recent account of Haughey’s career concludes of the McCracken Tribunal’s findings: “The publication in full of Haughey’s initial [evasive] response to McCracken, coupled with a retraction and a grovelling apology in which he effectively accepted that he had lied, reduced his reputation to tatters.”35
In October 1997 the Moriarty Tribunal was established to investigate matters further (although it was held up by various legal challenges and got down to its real work only on 28 January 1999). For a fascinated public the wait was strikingly worthwhile. At last the mystery of Charles Haughey’s millions began spectacularly to unravel. Instead of the great financial acumen that his supporters attributed to him, Haughey was revealed as a man who had in the 1970s and ’80s lived wildly beyond his means and had become hugely indebted to a strangely supine creditor, the Allied Irish Banks, and subsequently had depended on such businessmen as could be persuaded to bankroll his ostentatiously lavish way of life.
Sadly, for one who had aspired to greatness and an honoured place in Irish history, Haughey’s performance at the Moriarty Tribunal became the stuff of comedy. As the details of his extravagance emerged and the extent of his dependency was etched in the public mind, he began to seem tragic too. In poor health, he seemed like a victim of hubris, instead of the commanding political presence he had been at the height of his powers, as the highly effective Minister for Finance he had been in the 1960s and as the decisive Taoiseach of the late 1980s.
Haughey was not alone in his vicissitudes. Indeed he seems only to have been at the apex of a sector of society that, with a fine abandon, had indulged itself since the economically resurgent 1960s. A Department of Industry and Commerce enquiry into the Ansbacher account, published in July 2002, presented a case that it was a “deliberately complex…sham trust structure” made use of by pillars of the community. It reckoned that there was evidence that it “facilitated widespread tax evasion” (although the Inspectors who carried out the investigations cautioned: “a finding that any particular individual is a client of Ansbacher is not a finding that that person evaded tax”). Furthermore, in October 1997 the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ray Burke, was forced to resign amid rumours about his role in alleged planning scandals in north county Dublin. A tribunal under the chairmanship of Mr. Justice Feargus Flood began its hearings in 1997 to examine the planning history of land there. In 1998 its remit was extended bringing Burke to its attention. At its hearings dramatic allegations and denials emerged about considerable alleged payments by developers to Burke. A key witness at the tribunal, James Gogarty during his evidence also made serious allegations against George Redmond, retired assistant city and county manager in Dublin, who had been involved in planning matters for three decades. When Redmond was arrested at Dublin airport in February 1999, returning from abroad with a substantial sum in his possession, questions about his role in planning increased. Subsequently allegations were reported that he had about twenty accounts under his control. It was also reported that there was “evidence that about a million pounds had passed through those accounts over the previous twenty years.”36
The picture of suspicious payments that the Flood Tribunal helped to create lacked the high drama of Haughey’s downfall. It suggested, however, that a culture of tax evasion had been tolerated among Ireland’s elite for many years, inducing individuals to believe that they were immune to serious penalty. (Though the tribunals gave the Revenue a lot to investigate.) That leniency for tax defaulters could indeed await those prepared to keep their heads down, had in fact been encouraged by action of the state itself. A tax amnesty had been granted in 1988 accompanied by dire warnings of future proceedings against defaulters. In the financially straitened conditions of that year, to wide astonishment, it was revealed that the amnesty had amassed a very welcome £500 million for the state coffers. In 1993 the exercise was repeated with even better terms on offer. The message it inevitably sent to evaders and to compliant taxpayers alike was that cynical pragmatism dictated government policy. Probably, criminally acquired assets were “laundered” on both occasions. The state brought in about £200 million from the second amnesty with over £1.3 billion written off.37
Writing in September 1999, as the decade of tribunals drew to a close, the Irish Times columnist and author Fintan O’Toole gave this stark estimate of a malaise at the apex of Irish society: “We have to adjust our understanding of contemporary Ireland to take account of two startling facts. One is that, at least from the early 1980s onwards, a large swathe of Ireland’s ruling elite silently withdrew its allegiance from the state. The other is that organized crime in Ireland, which we used to imagine as the preserve of shifty working-class men…is also carried out by respectable, beautifully tailored members of the upper-middle class.”38 O’Toole might have noted that some of those in the upper echelons of society who could be judged as having failed in their duties as citizens were often the loudest in their proclaimed nationalism (Haughey, for instance, published his collected speeches as The Spirit of the Nation in 1986). Yet other things in the period suggested that white-collar crime pervaded more widely than among an elite golden circle, or in the upper-middle class. Many ordinary people had lodged money in banks, employing, often on the banks’ advice, bogus foreign addresses to evade tax in a symbolic act of exile from a country whose services they were willing to exploit, but whose state they were determined to cheat. A black economy burgeoned in which almost everyone seemed to be involved in one way or another. Where conscience pricked, the very high levels of personal taxation, especially of PAYE workers, in the 1970s and ’80s, were adduced in exculpation.
Church, people, nation, through much of the twentieth century in Ireland, had shared a consensus on basic aspects of sexual morality, on marriage and on family life and values, which they were happy for the state to uphold by law. For many however – especially since the 1960s when a thwarted, energetic materialism had been released and given respectability as economic nationalism which could result in Irish unity – commercial life was conducted with little or no sense of civic duty and compliance. Tax law in particular was regarded by many as less a matter of ethical responsibility than an evil to be evaded if at all possible. The tribunals of the 1990s merely made manifest flagrant examples where the state was treated as an inconvenience to be circumvented. That the state itself in the period seemed capable of moral uncertainty did not induce much confidence even in those who wished to give Caesar his due.
This disturbing fact was made grimly evident in the revelation in 1994 that the Blood Transfusion Service Board (BTSB) had unknowingly given a contaminated blood product to patients in the late 1970s which meant that at least 55,000 women would require tests to establish whether or not they had been infected with the hepatitis C virus, thereby exposing them to a potentially fatal illness. Quite soon over 1,000 women were found to have been affected by the virus. A tribunal of enquiry, which reported in March 1997, confirmed what had been slowly forced into the public domain since 1994: that in a state institution professional error had meant that women treated for rhesus negative blood had been infected with a dangerous disease.
Shocking as that was, the state’s self-protective attitude as it sought to avoid liability was a signal affront to the public’s sense of how their democratic state should behave. Compensation was offered in terms which would have avoided the acceptance of liability and any further legal action by victims. It was made clear by the state that anyone who took a case to the courts would be met by the state’s obdurate determination to avoid liability. A dying woman, a Mrs. Brigid McCole, bravely persisted in seeking a court judgment in the matter, only to have the state appear to oppose the speedy hearing of her case in what seemed a cruel fashion. At the last moment the BTSB did admit liability and offered compensation, which Mrs. McCole accepted. She died on 2 October 1996, a few days before her case had been scheduled to take place. A separate scandal involving blood products (hepatitis C- and HIV-infected product had unknowingly been given to haemophiliacs in the 1980s) further rocked the public’s confidence in the medical services. In 2002 the Lindsay Tribunal report on the matter criticised the BTSB but did not apportion any individual blame.
It is difficult at this date to assess the effects on Irish society of the scandals and revelations involving both church and state in the 1990s. There was undoubtedly some reduction in faith in institutions, an increase in cynicism about public life, and a gathering determination that some of those most grievously involved should be held to account (the tribunals were themselves an indicator that the public at least wanted to know what had been going on). What perhaps can be said, as we suggested above, is that Irish society was able to deal with revelations which might otherwise have caused a major breakdown in national self-belief because of two things. Mary Robinson’s releasing in the early 1990s of the energies of civil society (which her successor Mary McAleese continued to endorse) meant that many people were prepared and enabled to derive a sense of personal and social dignity from a wide variety of their activities in the public sphere, despite the failings of politicians. And good citizenship was uncoupled to a degree from the practice of religion, so a crisis in the church’s moral authority did not mean society lacked moral guidance and a sense of its autonomous worth. Secondly, from the mid 1990s the country enjoyed a remarkable economic boom which enormously increased national self-confidence at a time when revelations of political and economic malfeasance might otherwise have alienated the public from the freedoms of the neo-liberal, and increasingly global, marketplace. In the boom years the alleged misdoings of some of the few who found themselves before the tribunals paled before a success story that drew the attention of the world.
Some simple statistics reveal the scale of this economic explosion. Ireland’s growth rate averaged around 7 percent for the decade and around 9 percent for the second five years of the decade. In 1999 unemployment stood at 2 percent (virtually full employment). Consumption rose remarkably. In 1995 the Irish consumer spent £23 billion on goods and services, in 1999, £34 billion, and in 2000 the figure almost reached an extraordinary £40 billion.39 What a London-based economist in 1994 had dubbed “the Celtic Tiger” was taking to its new-found wealth with enthusiasm. And those who had benefited from the boom could take satisfaction from an OECD report that in 1999 had found “the Irish economy has notched up five straight years of stunning economic performance. No other OECD member country has been able to match its outcomes in a variety of dimensions.”40 In 2000 Raymond MacSharry and Padraic White (both of whom could rightly feel proud of Ireland’s achievement, MacSharry as former Minister for Finance, White as former director of the Industrial Development Authority, responsible for attracting foreign direct investment) concluded of “the most far-reaching transformation of the economy since the foundation of the state”:
…under virtually every indicator, greater economic progress was made since 1987 than in any comparable period over the previous sixty-four years. Rising real incomes have ensured that living standards have converged on the European average, virtual full employment has been reached and the tide of emigration has been reversed. Workers are now returning to take up employment at home, rather than leaving to try and find work abroad.41
Economists and social commentators have adduced a variety of reasons for the Irish economic miracle of the 1990s. A blend of factors, some fortuitous, some planned, is identified in accounts to date.42 Crucial were the protracted boom of the 1990s in the United States and the strategies adopted by the Irish state to make Ireland attractive to foreign direct investment in the era of the knowledge economy. The fiscal rectitude of the Haughey/MacSharry period, together with a sustained neo-liberal commitment to reduce capital and personal taxation (for which the Progressive Democrats and Charlie McCreevy, Fianna Fáil’s Minister for Finance in Bertie Ahern’s government, were the most vigorous advocates) was accompanied throughout the decade by the institution of social partnership with the trade unions, established by Haughey in 1987. These agreements, which effectively brought the unions close to the heart of government, secured industrial peace as Ireland prepared for and adapted to the European Single Market, completed in 1992. International capital was attracted to Ireland, especially in the information technology sector, by a well-educated, English-language-speaking workforce in a country where an infrastructure inferior in European terms was being significantly improved by a major injection of structural funds from the European Union. A low level of corporation tax undercut the competition in the investment stakes (much to the chagrin of Ireland’s European partners).
MacSharry and White were right to set the successes of the 1990s in a historical context. For twice in the twentieth century the economic basis of independence had seemed fundamentally in question – in the late 1950s and in the late 1980s. The scale of Ireland’s success as the century ended can most obviously be measured in demographic terms. When Ireland had seemed to be dying on its economic feet in the 1950s, its population was at its lowest recorded level (the nadir was reached in the 1961 census at 2,818,341). The preliminary report of the 2002 census revealed that the country’s population stood at 3,917,377 and had risen by 8 percent since 1996. With an annual increase of 1.3 percent, Ireland was doing well in European terms. When one considers that in the 1950s a country with a population of under three million was incapable of generating sufficient employment to stem the flood of emigration that had drained Ireland since at least the 1840s, then the achievement of the 1990s comes into striking focus. For by the end of the decade a shortage of labour was what seemed to threaten the opening up of a vista of endless growth. Married women, who had in the past been forced out of the labour market, were encouraged by tax reform to join the workforce.
The statistics of consumption reflected the booming economy of the second five years of the decade, reaching, as we noted, the figure of £40 billion spent on goods and services in 2000. By 1999/2000 urban families spent an average of 612 euro per week, with Dublin families spending an average of 684 euro (the average gross weekly income in Dublin stood at 842 euro). Over 90 percent of households owned a washing machine and almost 90 percent a fixed telephone. In 1987 only 6.3 percent of households had a microwave oven; in 1999/2000 71.5 percent did so. Almost 50 percent of households owned two or more television sets and 85 percent of homes could boast a video player; whilst almost a third of householders possessed a dishwasher.43 Mobile phone use became commonplace, expanding from 25,000 units in 1990 to 1,408,000 in 1999.44 The new car in the driveway became a symbol of suburban affluence (the sale of luxury cars per year almost trebled between 1993 and 1997, and rose from 1,606 in 1987 to 5,789 in 199745).
That Ireland was becoming more and more of a suburban and commuter society (or what Mary Corcoran has dubbed, in a telling term, an “ex-urbanisation” society)46 was made clear in the preliminary report of the 2002 census. The population of Dublin city and Dublin County as a whole grew by 6.1 percent between 1996 and 2002 but the city population increased by only 2.7 percent. It was in the outlying suburbs that major growth took place. The Esker area of the west Dublin suburb of Lucan almost trebled its population between 1996 and 2002. And in the province of Leinster, with Dublin as the lodestar, the population exceeded two million. Accordingly many commuter towns within a range of fifty or so miles of the capital saw large increases in population, when rocketing house prices in Dublin put a home beyond the reach of many first-time buyers (and even of those couples where both were in paid employment) as Dubliners and migrants who sought work in the city bought and rented properties far from their places of employment. Long-settled suburbs of Dublin actually saw their populations fall as offspring spread their wings for the green-field sites, where new housing estates mushroomed. County Meath’s population rose by 22.1 percent, while that of County Kildare rose by 21.5 percent. The town of Ratoath in County Meath increased its population by 82.3 percent in a six-year period. In the west of Ireland Galway city increased its population by 14.9 percent as its suburbs burgeoned. Throughout the countryside bungalow blight intensified.
The majority of this development was a response only to market forces and reflected little spatial planning. Inadequacies in the transport network swiftly became all too obvious, with traffic gridlock in the cities and overcrowding in trains and buses. Mary Corcoran has described the new Dublin of ex-urbanized citizens:
The ex-urbanised city now climbs to the foothills of the Dublin mountains and sweeps down to the seaside towns of north Wicklow, also extending northward and westward beyond the city’s boundaries. On the perimeter of the city, industrial estates, business parks and, most recently, shopping malls have sprung up, all of which are linked through a series of ring roads and motorways.47
Corcoran sees the shopping malls, to which access is almost entirely by car, in this new Irish environment as centrally involved in the construction of novel forms of consciousness – uprooted, and displaced, inhabiting a globalized system of distribution in a globalized economy. In the mall, private space masquerades as public space and makes consumption seem communal as “citizenship is being defined as the capacity to participate in the new means of consumption.”48
Consumption of a specific kind began to pose a real problem in a decade of high disposable incomes. Alcohol abuse became a significant problem of affluence. Between 1989 and 2001 Ireland’s alcohol consumption per capita increased by 40 percent.49 Young people were especially vulnerable to clever advertising campaigns that made drinking a part of youth culture in a way it had not been before. In January 2003 a joint committee of the houses of the Oireachtas heard that the incidence of intoxication among teenagers had increased by 370 percent since 1996.50 Huge theme-bars aimed directly at the youth market opened in the cities, replacing more traditional public houses where a diverse clientele had traditionally mixed. Opening hours were extended in the hope that drunkenness would decrease as drinking became a more relaxed social activity. Instead, public disorder in the early hours of the morning in cities and even in small towns became a serious problem.
Drug abuse remained to scar inner city communities and to add to the muggings and larcenies that swelled the crime statistics (though following the shooting dead of the crusading crime correspondent Veronica Guerin in 1996, the Criminal Assets Bureau had significant successes in breaking up organized crime). Suicide, particularly among young men, rose alarmingly. The gap between the poorest and richest in society palpably widened, even if the majority had grown richer in the boom.51
As a newly rich nation in the 1990s, Ireland found itself, to its considerable surprise, the object of immigration, a situation for which it had scarcely prepared itself. Ireland for so long had been a country of emigration that immigration had never registered as a potential problem in public debate. In the period 1996 to 2002, 153,067 persons moved to the state, an average of 25,511 annually. The economy by the end of the decade, as we saw, was beginning to be troubled by labour shortages, so many of these new residents quickly found employment. However, the position of those who came to Ireland as refugees, seeking political asylum, was altogether more problematic (from a low figure of thirty-nine persons applying for refugee status in 1992 those seeking such status rose to 7,724 in 1999).52 Forbidden to work, subsisting on small state handouts, often forced to wait years before their cases could be heard, asylum-seekers in the 1990s faced hostility in the popular press as they were branded as “fake” applicants, driven from such places as Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Libya, and Algeria only by economic ambition.
What cannot be gainsaid about the Ireland of the 1990s, however, is that a sense of success, nationally and internationally, gave the country a confidence that its problems could be overcome. An inveterate fatalism about the nation’s role in the world was replaced by a spirit of enterprise and expectation. There was little debate about adopting the euro in 1999 (the actual currency to become legal tender on 1 January 2002) as the appropriate currency for an economy which was a European success story. The achievements of an indigenous IT company like Iona Technologies; the sheer effrontery of Michael O’Leary’s Ryanair in successfully undercutting major airlines; the renovation of Croke Park, in Dublin (the headquarters of the Gaelic Athletic Association) to make it a state-of-the-art stadium; the exploits of the Irish soccer team in the European and World Cups, the Tour de France beginning in Ireland in 1998; the award in 1995 of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Seamus Heaney, all represented ways in which the Irish could feel good about themselves. The country took in its stride the information that Ireland had become the world’s major exporter of computer software and accepted as appropriate recognition of a new status its accession to a seat on the United Nations Security Council in 2000. All this managed to keep the national mood high even in 2001 and 2002 when economic indicators began to signal that the boom was ending.
The enhanced self-confidence of an economically successful state may be judged by future historians as salient among the complex of factors which enabled the Irish government in the 1990s to address the vexed issue of the status of Northern Ireland with creative, energetic flexibility.53 Other elements in the equation that by the spring of 1998 allowed a far-reaching agreement to be reached in Belfast between the British and Irish governments on the future governance of the province, can be adduced. With the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and the ending of the Cold War, the United States had less reason to fear offending its NATO ally, Britain, by involving itself in the Irish imbroglio. It was probably this which allowed a President of the United States, Bill Clinton, who was elected in November 1992, anxious for a foreign policy success, the chance to make resolution of conflict in Northern Ireland a policy aim. For by focusing on Ireland he could satisfy an Irish-American constituency which had long pressed for US action on Northern Ireland. Furthermore, Peter Brooke, the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, had publicly signalled the United Kingdom’s awareness that things were stirring when, in November 1990, he had put on record that Britain had no “selfish strategic or economic interest” in Northern Ireland and would not stand in the way of a united Ireland if it was achieved by consent. Political change now brought new players onto the stage of British-Irish affairs. John Major succeeded Mrs. Thatcher as Prime Minister in November 1990. Albert Reynolds succeeded Charles Haughey as Taoiseach in February 1992, retaining power in coalition with Labour following the general election in late November of that year. Both Major and Reynolds were pragmatists anxious to be rid of the burdens of the past. Furthermore, secret contacts begun in October 1990 between the British government and Sinn Féin (which augmented communications which had been passing between them since at least the mid-1980s), while the IRA was still engaged in bloody armed struggle, seemed to indicate that the republican movement was keen to start negotiations. It seemed also that the armed volunteers and their electorally significant political wing (Sinn Féin took 11.3 percent of the votes in the 1989 local elections in Northern Ireland, but in a context of ongoing violence lost out to the SDLP in the general election of April 1992) were anxious to end in a settlement the military conflict they knew the IRA could not win, even if it could sustain its armed campaign. In the early 1990s the scale of IRA attacks on economic targets in London, the toll of inter-community violence in Northern Ireland (when full-scale ethnic cleansing of a Balkan dimension began to seem a dread possibility, with IRA assaults on the centres of “Protestant” towns and loyalist murder gangs terrorizing Catholic areas of Belfast) and the continued opposition of all strands of Northern unionism to the Anglo-Irish Agreement with its Irish secretariat in Belfast, all meant that the Irish and British governments could not avoid the issue.
At the heart of the matter for the Irish government was how to reconfigure its historic and currently unrealizable claim on the six counties of Northern Ireland. The reunification of the national territory was indeed an imperative enshrined in Articles 2 and 3 of the 1937 Constitution. Since the Anglo-Irish Agreement, that unity, it was formally acknowledged, would require unionist consent. The problem in the 1990s, however, was how to address the issue of British sovereignty over Northern Ireland, which the Irish Constitution only accepted as a de facto matter, and of unionist consent, in terms which might interest the IRA sufficiently to tempt it into calling an extended ceasefire which might in time become permanent. But in tempting the IRA, the Irish government could not put the British in the position of seeming further to abandon an already alienated unionist community. Working with the British, the Irish government had to square this circle, conscious that republican nationalist orthodoxy had since before the foundation of the state viewed unionist withholding of consent to participation in an independent Irish polity as a veto on the democratic development of the country as a whole. According to that orthodoxy, it interfered with the nation’s right to self-determination. This remained as the republican movement’s proclaimed core value, and was not to be easily set aside.
How self-determination might be exercised in the actual conditions of the 1990s, when unionist determination to resist incorporation in an all-Ireland polity had been demonstrated in the face of twenty-five years of violence intended to expedite that incorporation, became the crux of the matter. It was central to the new discussions between John Hume and Gerry Adams which became public in April 1993, “with the expressed aim of finding a means of ending violence.”54 Hume teased out with Adams what consent might mean in a country divided about the exercise of self-determination, though Hume’s attempt to nuance the key issue that they had already explored in the 1980s did not seem to produce a solution (though evidence has been adduced that Adams of Sinn Fein had as early as the mid-1980s accepted the need for a form of unionist consent, whatever was the view of the IRA then). However the Joint Declaration issued by Reynolds and Major on 15 December 1993 revealed the possibility of a way forward. The Prime Minister stated on behalf of the British government what Peter Brooke had earlier averred – “that they [had] no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland” – and declared “that it is for the people of the island of Ireland alone, by agreement between the two parts respectively, to exercise their right of self-determination on the basis of consent, freely and concurrently given, North and South, to bring about a United Ireland, if that is their wish.” The Taoiseach for his part stated that “it would be wrong to attempt to impose a united Ireland, in the absence of the freely given consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland”, accepting that “the democratic right of self-determination by the people of Ireland as a whole must be achieved and exercised with and subject to the agreement of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland.”
Arguably, all this could have been read as a sophisticated gloss on hard political realities, but it seems to have offered the republican movement sufficient grounds for believing that in negotiations fundamental change, or the creation of the conditions for change, were possible, while leaving them in a difficult position if they rejected it. The formulations of the Joint Declaration did not of course remove what they had traditionally thought of as the unionist veto to a democratic settlement of the national question, but in August 1994 the IRA called a “complete cessation” of its military campaign. And the long process of preparing for talks began with President Clinton playing a key role at crucial moments. Much suspicion was engendered among unionists and others by the words “complete cessation.” They feared the IRA’s decision was merely tactical and did not represent a permanent rejection of violence as a political instrument. Their suspicions, which have not been fully assuaged to this day, were given grim credibility in February 1996 when the IRA resumed its military activities with a powerful car bomb at Canary Wharf in London. A new ceasefire was announced in July 1997, shortly after Tony Blair’s landslide victory for Labour in the general election of May of that year in the United Kingdom. Sinn Féin had not expected in August 1994, when the IRA called its first ceasefire, that the Irish government would have John Bruton of Fine Gael at its head as they moved towards negotiations (they suspected him of pro-unionist sympathies). The Whelehan affair had put paid to the premiership of Reynolds, with whom they had felt more secure. Blair offered a new opportunity, as did Bertie Ahern, Reynolds’s successor as leader of Fianna Fáil, elected Taoiseach at the head of a new coalition with the PDs in June 1997.
What was by now dubbed “the peace process” moved on. Talks between representatives of parties that had been elected to a forum in May 1996, and the two governments, had begun in June of that year, under the chairmanship of the US Senator George Mitchell (who as President Clinton’s economic envoy to Northern Ireland had won wide respect). Sinn Féin entered these talks ostensibly “to smash the union”55 in the autumn of 1997 (the Democratic Unionist Party and the recently formed United Kingdom Unionist Party had withdrawn from the talks). The agreement that emerged from agonizingly protracted negotiations on 10 April (Good Friday) 1998 was much less than the end of the Union between Great Britain and Northern Ireland for which Sinn Féin avowedly hoped. Yet it was an agreement capable of being presented by Sinn Féin as a transitional stage in a process which would lead inexorably to that desired end, when national self-determination would be complete. The SDLP could represent it as the expression of its leader John Hume’s vision of an agreed Ireland, endorsed, as it was in May 1998, in referenda North and South of the border, effectively allowing for a self-determination de nos jours, so ending the justification for violence by any group. And the Unionists could feel secure that the union depended not on the British government’s willingness (made dubious for many of them by the way the Anglo-Irish Agreement had been arrived at) to maintain it, but on the settled will of a Northern majority, as they gained a devolved administration (albeit one in which they were obliged to share power with their former opponents and enemies), in a period of more general devolution in the United Kingdom as a whole. The two governments could employ it as the basis of an ongoing normalization of relations between two sovereign powers formerly in territorial dispute.
The broad shape of an agreement had been signalled before the talks in the identification of three strands that reflected a complex of relations which found a violent epicentre in Northern Ireland: relations in Northern Ireland between two communities with conflicting national identities and constitutional hopes; relations between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland; and relations between Britain and the two jurisdictions on the island of Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement put flesh on this skeleton in providing for a 108-member elected Assembly in Belfast, with a First and Deputy First Minister and with safeguards to ensure cross-community support of an executive, in agreeing to establish a North-South ministerial council, which would allow for cooperation in twelve specific areas (from education to inland fisheries) and a British-Irish council to tackle issues of mutual concern. Not dissimilar in overall shape to the ill-fated Sunningdale Agreement of 1973, the Good Friday Agreement had the advantage over that earlier attempt to end direct rule from Westminster, of the participation of Sinn Féin – which could be assumed to speak for the IRA (despite that party’s refusal to accept that that was its role) and that it was endorsed by referenda in both the Northern and Southern jurisdictions. A serious weakness was that a broad swathe of the unionist community represented by Dr. Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party (which had not been party to the Agreement) was adamantly opposed to what it regarded as a sell-out. And even among those unionists in the Unionist Party of Northern Ireland who gave the agreement their support and were prepared to “work the institutions” it made possible, strong suspicions about republican intentions remained. The issue of the decommissioning of what was known to be the IRA’s considerable arsenal – an issue which had dogged the pre-talks process – was not resolved to unionist satisfaction during the negotiations and has remained as a difficult bone of contention in the five years in which the institutions envisaged in the Agreement have failed to become securely established.
The major problem has been diminishing support for the Agreement in the unionist community in face of what is seen as the IRA’s refusal to decommission (to date two symbolic acts of decommissioning have taken place in the presence of the international arms inspectors appointed to oversee this process). Sinn Féin for its part, insisting that it was not in fact the IRA that had signed up to the Agreement and therefore was not bound by its clauses to decommission, suspects that unionist demands for IRA disarmament are a disguised expression of an unwillingness to work the Agreement, with its stringent requirements for equality of status in a transitional North of Ireland polity and root-and-branch police reform.
The Northern Ireland Assembly, which came into existence in July 1998, and the cross-party Executive which it brought into being after much delay in November 1999, were suspended in February 2000 in the face of the First Minister’s threat of resignation on the lack of progress on IRA decommissioning. On foot of an IRA statement that a disarmament process would soon begin, the Unionists agreed to re-enter the Executive in May of that year. In July 2001 the Unionist First Minister, David Trimble, resigned over the IRA’s failure satisfactorily to decommission and agreed to return only in October of that year. In October 2002, under a similar doubt, as once again the Unionists expressed loss of faith in the IRA’s short and long-term intentions, the Assembly and Executive were suspended and Northern Ireland returned once again to direct rule from Westminster.
This punctuated and difficult process has meant that the institutions which would have most directly involved the Republic have not had very much of a chance to prove what they can do in enhancing and developing relations between the North and South of the island and between Britain and Ireland (in periods when the Northern Ireland Assembly is suspended, the strand two and three institutions function, when they do so, without Unionist participation). The existence of the North-South ministerial council and of the British-Irish council is barely noted in the media and does not register in the public mind, so much attention being directed to the stop-start process of politics in Northern Ireland.
The most conspicuous effect of the Good Friday Agreement on the political life of the Republic has in fact been the emergence of Sinn Féin as a serious electoral threat to the traditional parties. The high profile as dedicated peacemaker afforded Gerry Adams by the Irish media (Sinn Féin has been allowed unfettered access to the airwaves since January 1994) and the impressive performance of Martin McGuinness as Minister for Education in the Northern Ireland Executive have given Sinn Féin a cachet, an air of successful novelty, together with a whiff of excitement and danger, in the post-Agreement period which has made traditional politics seem jaded by comparison. Sinn Féin had its first major success when it opposed, with others, the ratification of the Nice Treaty in a referendum, which was defeated by a small majority in a low poll in 2001 (in a re-run in October 2002 the major parties, by vigorous electioneering, saw to it that many of those who had abstained in the first vote came out to vote in favour, which they duly did). In the general election of May 2002 the party took five seats in the Dáil, making it in association with the Greens and Independents a significant parliamentary presence.
The entry of Sinn Féin into democratic politics north and south of the border, which it is hoped will mean the permanent and not merely tactical eschewal of violence by the IRA, has involved pain for many. The release of paramilitary prisoners held for violent crimes in both jurisdictions caused much grief and confusion for those who had lost family and friends at their hands. For the unionist community, the replacement of the Royal Ulster Constabulary by the Police Service of Northern Ireland was felt as a body blow (many reckoned they owed their very survival to what had been a body of men and women unfairly reviled, they felt, in nationalist propaganda). For their part, the republican movement has had to abandon for the time being its core value (that British jurisdiction should end forthwith in Ireland as the Irish right of self-determination is straightforwardly vindicated) and has had to participate in institutions in a Northern Ireland Assembly that throughout the twentieth century they would have damned as illegitimate. It was not for this that their volunteers had given their lives in action or on hunger strike. In the pain, confusion, uncertainty and weary impatience, together with the determined, focused work of many, that has accompanied the Irish peace process after the initial euphoria of Good Friday 1998, it has sometimes been difficult to comprehend how great a change the country as a whole has undergone in the period since the IRA’s first “cessation” in 1994. In an interview which the poet Seamus Heaney gave in 1996, during the months of renewed IRA violence, he spoke of the lightening of the spirit he had experienced in the autumn of 1994 when the IRA declared that first “cessation.” Speaking of a poem he had written of that occasion, he reflected:
I wanted to capture that moment. I had the physical pleasure of that bright Sunday morning after the ceasefire. There was also the political and psychological brightness of that moment. I do believe that, whatever happens, a corner was turned historically in 1994. We’ve passed from the atrocious to the messy, but the messy is a perfectly okay place to live.56
Some events, particularly the horrendous bombing of Omagh on 15 August 1998 by dissident republicans opposed to the Good Friday Agreement, with its cruel loss of life, indicated in the period that the atrocious was never far from the mess conflict resolution can involve. But Heaney’s perception seems sound. The 1994 decision was widely sensed in Ireland to open a field of possibility for the country. Heaney himself had published an article in a Dublin newspaper that bright September Sunday following the ceasefire in 1994, where he had concluded: “the cessation of violence is an opportunity to open a space – and not just in the political arena but in the first level of each person’s consciousness – space where hope can grow.”57
The same sense of liberating possibility, of hope, can be derived from the new articles in the Constitution of Ireland, which were endorsed in the referendum on the Good Friday Agreement and made applicable in December 1999. Their incorporation in the Constitution represents a fundamental shift in Ireland’s legal expression of its territorial claim on the six counties of the North. That act of the people opened up the liberating possibility of a nationalism defined not by implacable territorial imperatives and irredentist demands but by respect for the democratic rights of all. Article 2 reads in its new form:
It is the entitlement and birthright of every person born in the island of Ireland, which includes its islands and seas, to be part of the Irish Nation. That is also the entitlement of all persons otherwise qualified in accordance with law to be citizens of Ireland. Furthermore, the Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage.
It is the firm will of the Irish nation, in harmony and friendship, to unite all the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland, in all the diversity of their identities and traditions, recognising that a united Ireland shall be brought about only by peaceful means with a consent of a majority of the people, democratically expressed, in both jurisdictions in the island.