The eruption of Northern Ireland was both sudden and slow. On the one hand, very few people expected it. By 1965, when Lemass and Whitaker crossed the Border to meet with Northern Ireland’s prime minister Terence O’Neill, the future seemed to lie in a gradual rapprochement between the two parts of Ireland and moves towards practical co-operation in areas like energy and tourism. This was part of what modernity would mean, the arrival of a new set of values in which old animosities would matter much less than practicality and prosperity.
