The egalitarianism of the revolution was always more rhetorical than real, but even so it did not sit well with the buccaneering spirit of the 1960s, in which a select few (like Gallagher and Byrne) could rise up from small farms in the West to become fabulously rich. It was much better to recreate an eighteenth-century hierarchy, except this time with good Catholics in the place of the Protestant Ascendancy.
