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March 1 - April 14, 2023
It was a great achievement of Irish diplomacy, in these strange circumstances, to present the country as normal enough to be let in.
What remained, though, was to convince the Irish electorate in the referendum that was held on 10 May 1972. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael strongly urged approval. The Labour Party and both wings of Sinn Féin were against.
Left wing opposes - nafta parallels
The Common Market Defence Campaign, formed to campaign for a No vote, had an impressive line-up of artists and intellectuals among its patrons: the great essayist Hubert Butler, the poet Austin Clarke, the 1916 Rising veteran and activist Máire Comerford, the playwright John B. Keane, the novelist Monk Gibbon, the actor Siobhán McKenna, the lawyer and anti-apartheid campaigner Kadar Asmal, the novelist and editor Peadar O’Donnell, my favourite singer Luke Kelly of The Dubliners and the academic sociologist and future president Michael D. Higgins.
Its declaration was a return to the apocalyptic pessimism of the mid-1950s: EEC membership would result in ‘the depopulation of Ireland, the decline of our industry, the decimation of our farming population’ and ‘the eventual destruction of the Irish people as a viable distinct national community’.
The gloom was rooted in a paradoxical lack of confidence in the existential condition of Ireland. Even after a decade of growth, it expressed a belief that everything – even the population – was still so fragile that it could be swept away at any moment.
Now, it expressed a fear of too much change, a sense that, in a world where Muhammad Ali and Charles de Gaulle were Irish, the term had no secure meaning.
Of the three applicant countries that held referendums (Britain did not do so until 1975), the Irish were by far the most fervently in favour of joining the EEC.
It was not very surprising that urban Ireland voted for entry.
Despite Labor/Sinn Fein?
The divide over Europe could be presented to farmers as a split between their honest, hard-working selves and pinkish, effete city types.
The simple answer is the primacy of economic discourse. For socialists and Republicans and artists and intellectuals, the Irish people were supposed to have their minds on higher things – the national struggle against the Brits, the threat to Ireland’s cultural distinctiveness, the need to remain outside of the bourgeois world of businessmen and their narrow values. But the overwhelming interest of the public was in the economics of membership.
If you worked in clothing or textile-based industries, as a lot of people in Crumlin did, the years after Ireland joined the EEC were bad – most of these small factories closed.
It lured the core of conservative Ireland into a radically modernizing project under the guise of a great scheme to increase farm incomes. Consequently, the Catholic Church was also convinced that EEC membership would stabilize rather than undermine rural Ireland.
Irish farmers wanted to be exactly the same as French farmers, not because they shared a faith or a destiny, but because the French got much better prices for their sheep and cattle. The Irish were fed up with being poor and colourful and different. European normality looked pretty good.
By the time of his death he was, according to Father Joe Dunn, ‘powerless, unemployed and semi-ostracised’.31 Yet, in death, he was still a prince.
He defended this inflexibility as a consequence of McQuaid’s saintly devotion to ‘absolutes’. Watching a very feeble, blind Eamon de Valera, still president, arrive at the cathedral for the Mass, I realized that the era of absolutes was fading.
Since he was also from Ballina, the IRA planned to bury him in the Republican plot beside Gaughan. The Irish government determined that it would not allow this to happen. Stagg’s shrunken body became a battlefield.
The Irish government discovered that the British authorities had refused to give her police protection because they saw Stagg’s body as a useful bargaining chip with the IRA: they would hand his body over to the IRA if it would agree to confine any public demonstrations of mourning to the island of Ireland.
This was, in essence, the great tension in Irish Catholic identity: on the one side, the mythic imperative of heroic death; on the other – we have to live here, here being the ambiguous space of real lives lived between competing contexts.
More credibly, Stagg’s brother Emmet claimed that he had agreed, as a compromise, that the body could be buried in the plot with IRA honours, but that the IRA, deprived of its planned cross-country parade of the corpse, had refused to accept this.9
Stagg’s other brother Joe told the crowd that ‘People are saying of my mother that there is no sorrow equal to her sorrow. But I say there is no pride equal to her pride.’ This was a conscious echo of the language used by Patrick Pearse about his own mother shortly before his execution in 1916.
In November 1977, ten members of the IRA, in the middle of (of course) a dark, wet and squally night, dug up Stagg’s body. They removed it by digging a tunnel from a nearby grave and burrowing their way under the concrete shield. They carried it to the Republican plot and, with the help of a Catholic priest, reburied it beside Gaughan’s grave. It was like a daring prison break, except for a corpse.
We had a way of doing these things, which was to keep the world in which we really lived separate from the world of martyrdom and blood sacrifice. It had functioned well enough ever since I was born – honour the martyrs but do not follow them. Pray for them and sing about them but close your ears to their siren call. Bury them with honour but bury them deep. Leave them to their underground afterlife. But this wasn’t working anymore. The dead did not want to be prayed for or sung about. They wanted to be avenged, and everyone knew what that meant. It meant doing what the IRA had done after
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This was a country in the middle of a social revolution, a time when fluidity should be the norm. I was myself a prime example of it. Hardly anyone in my extended family had ever gone beyond a primary education. Almost everyone, as a result, worked in manual or low-skilled jobs or as homemakers. By far the best form of social mobility was emigration – if you went to England, your kids would get a secondary education and could reasonably aspire to go further. Yet I got to secondary school and was accepted without question at UCD because I got enough points in the state exams.
Most of his lecturers were also priests, hired for their orthodoxy rather than their brilliance. And this clerical domination extended, not just into logic and ethics as subjects, but into departments like sociology and psychology. The institution was, in theory, secular, but in these respects it was still obviously the successor to the Catholic University of Ireland founded in 1854 by John Henry Newman.
I did not, however, really know how odd this was. I had no idea of what a university was meant to be like. The fact that I was there at all was, for me, an adequately radical idea.
now suppose this was possible because all around me the middle class was expanding rapidly and though I would angrily have denied being part of it, I knew that, having made it to UCD, I would join it in one way or another. Even if I struggled to make a living, that living, however meagre, would come from the manipulation of symbols, not from cleaning offices or keeping order on buses or any of the things my family had done through the ages.
In twenty years, Ireland had gone from being an agrarian economy where cattle was king to one that could be understood as part of the international capitalist industrial order.
Yet this was a remarkably conservative revolution. It was not just that the Catholic Church and Fianna Fáil were still the great bastions of permanent power. It was that the society as a whole was proving to be very adept at navigating the turbulent waters of transformation and yet, in respect of its class system, landing back on very familiar terrain.
The illusion of classlessness was one of the great strengths of the Irish class system. It had specific historic roots. Irish nationalism defined itself in opposition to England, and one of the things it most disliked about England was its class-ridden nature.
The values of old-fashioned civic republicanism made notions of class superiority highly unpopular. Many powerful institutions, from the big political parties, to the Catholic Church, to the GAA, emphasized their classlessness and brought people of all classes physically together.
The revolutionary movement slowly worked its way into the nooks and crannies of embedded advantage, but retained the sense of itself as representative of the victimized and the oppressed and therefore as being itself still excluded by ‘the establishment’. Underneath the carapace of egalitarianism, Irish society was rigorous in its policing of the boundaries between farmers and farm labourers, between ‘gutties’ and ‘good families’.
But there was also a great continuity – in this radical and rapid transformation, the distribution of privilege was not really altered. Old money turned itself into new money; old poverty tended to persist. The cards were being shuffled, but the winners of the game were not all that different. By 1980, Ireland still had a greater degree of income inequality than most western European countries.
If you were not able to get on the escalator of education, you were stuck in an old economy – sewing factories or docking, for example – that was disappearing.
A lot of people like me were acquiring it, people who, twenty years previously, would have had no hope. But the deeper story was the remarkable success of the propertied class in turning itself into the educated class, in parlaying the privilege of the strong farmer in one generation into the privilege of the managerial and professional class in the next.
Those families at the bottom of the old class hierarchy have, if anything, drifted downward into a new underclass dependent on State income maintenance for their livelihood.’4
This is why the economic revolution did not immediately become a revolution in ideology or identity. There was no need for the rapidly emerging new middle class to attack the legitimacy of the old order. Indeed, there was a very good reason for it not to do so – the new middle class was largely made up of the children of that old order.
But Whitaker and Lemass’s ambition to create economic change and opportunity without upending the governing orthodoxies was, it seemed, working out just fine.
The modern Irish country house displayed its assorted ornamentations, gathered from a bewildering variety of sources, as if they were peacock’s feathers. It was not just a place to live − it was a direct expression of the dreams and aspiration of its owners, who were, usually with the help of Fitzsimons’s book, also the designers.
The abandoned cottages that littered the Irish landscape had been the most heart-rending reminder of the pain of mass emigration. I remember, even in the 1970s, occasionally coming across one. You could look through the grimed-up window and see cups and dishes still on the kitchen table, ghostly fragments of vanished lives.
In 1982 and 1983 country bungalows were the biggest category of new housing, surpassing even the sprawling urban estates and accounting for 40 per cent of the houses built in Ireland. Only 11 per cent of the new country houses were designed by an architect.
With a free site from one of their parents and tax-free local labour, they could build a bungalow thousands of pounds cheaper than they could ever buy on the open market. And they were free to take whatever images of success they most desired and use them in their own house.
The belief that our houses in some way reflect our moral worth is a deeply rooted one. In a foreword to Bungalow Bliss, Fitzsimons wrote: ‘I always believed when growing up that people who live in big houses and look out through big windows must have a superior outlook, a desirable dimension to their character, that is denied to those who are brought up in poky rooms with puny windows – that they must have a deeper perception and broader outlook.’
Because they were the products of dreams and aspirations as much as practical realities, the bungalows often stood in stark opposition to their surroundings.
America had been absorbed into the dance halls of Ireland. Merged with the native product, country and western was becoming the staple dance music.
America was always the source of the ballroom sound, copied directly from the movies and the records, with little local variation.
There were immediate echoes of the music in Ireland. Country had its roots in the Irish and Scottish music brought to Appalachia by emigrants.
And the simple stories the country songs told were greatly to the Irish taste.
Until the mid-1960s, the rural punters had accepted mainstream commercial music, the same smooth rhythms that had them swaying in Dublin and London and downtown Boston. It was an American sound. But as the focus of popular music shifted from America to the hard, fast, urban sound of Merseybeat, a slow rebellion began to shape itself; an insurrection against this new commercial mainstream.
Suddenly you noticed that the record sales were very American-biased rather than British.
Suddenly the bands needed protection. ‘Most of the showbands had someone in the band who would do their bookings for them’, says Paddy Cole, ‘but when the boom came the professional managers came into their own.’ Petty corruption was endemic.
