We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

by Fintan O'Toole

Three out of five children growing up in Ireland in the 1950s were destined to leave at some point in their lives, mostly for the shelter of the old colonial power, England. In 1957, the year before I was born, almost 60,000 people emigrated.22 This was the latest episode in a slow, relentless demographic disaster. In 1841, the population of what became the twenty-six-county Irish state was 6.5 million. In 1961, it would hit its lowest ever total of 2.8 million. By that year, a scarcely imaginable 45 per cent of all those born in Ireland between 1931 and 1936 and 40 per cent of those born between 1936 and 1941 had left.23 The idea of disappearance hung over the place.

Militant nationalism needed regular transfusions of young blood to keep it alive, because it led a kind of vampiric half-life, imaginatively and emotionally draining but not visible in any mirror held up to contemporary Irish reality.

In a bitter paradox, Ireland was an agrarian economy that was actually not much good at producing food.

No prospect, no prospect, little prospect – the future was blank and bleak. As the Irish joke had it at the time, the wolf was at the door, howling to get out.

‘The common talk among parents in the towns, as in rural Ireland, is of their children having to emigrate as soon as their education is completed in order to be sure of a reasonable livelihood.’

This was the great gamble of 1958: everything would change economically but everything would stay the same culturally.

Within the space of a single generation – from the 1950s to the 1980s – the patterns of the traditional extended family dissolved and were replaced by the norms of the nuclear unit.’

In spite of these Homeric feats, two out of three homes in Ireland still had no electricity at the end of the Second World War.

A survey by the Irish Countrywomen’s Association discovered that ‘one-third of a woman’s life was spent carrying water to her home’.

With the hand pump I pump for two hours each day”, said a rural consumer when he was purchasing one of our electric power pumps.

The bitterly ironic phrase ‘Love, Honour and Carry Water’, parodying the wedding vows to love, honour and obey, was used as an advertising slogan by a supplier of water pumps in the early 1960s.

In the mid-1950s, there were 476,000 pupils in the primary education system, but just 83,000 in secondary and vocational schools, suggesting that more than 80 per cent dropped out of formal education at fourteen, the legal school leaving age.

The reason was simple: secondary schools, overwhelmingly owned and run by the church, were private institutions and charged fees that most families could not afford. About 5 per cent of secondary students had publicly financed scholarships – a mark of the state’s commitment to educational equality was that the level of the scholarship was set in the 1920s and not increased, so that its real value was eroded by inflation. Even

As late as 1964, a survey of primary schools revealed that 53 per cent had no drinking water in the school or even on the site. Only 48 per cent had either a flush or a chemical toilet. Sixty-three per cent were heated by open fires.

A Council of Education had been established in 1954 to consider the possible reforms of second-level education, but it sat so long that its members began to die off before it could issue a report.11 When it finally did report in 1960 (the report was not published until 1962), it remarked contentedly of secondary schools that ‘The dominant purpose of their existence is the inculcation of religious ideals and values. This central influence, which gives unity and harmony to all the subjects of the curriculum, is outside the purview of the State…’

The teaching of Irish was prioritized at both primary and secondary levels, but the attempts to revive it as the national vernacular had failed so badly that the self-mocking joke was that most Irish people were illiterate in two languages.

There was a serious proposal about how to overcome the problem: ‘the buses would have a door on each side with a vertical partition down the middle of the bus – one side of the bus would be for girls and the other side would be for boys.’21 The partition would be vertical rather than horizontal to avoid comparisons with the race-based system that operated on buses in the American Deep South.

But in September 1966, the most glamourous and charismatic of the new generation of Fianna Fáil politicians, the minister for education Donogh O’Malley, suddenly announced that he was going to introduce free secondary education for all students the following year. He did not consult the minister for finance, Jack Lynch, in advance. More daringly, he did not consult the Catholic bishops. He calculated, rightly, that the measure would be so popular that both the state and the church would have to fall in line with his demarche. (He also told primary school managers to go ahead and arrange for ‘adequate sanitation and heating’ and send the bill to his department.