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March 1 - April 14, 2023
Behind all the deals and all the music was the real business of the ballroom: the promise of sex.
And therefore the girls tried to keep the image as, “Oh sure I wouldn’t do that at all, Michael. You’re a terrible man.” But it was very pretentious.
The new bungalows were the petrified spirit of Irish country and western. Like the music, the bungalows were democratic − almost anyone can sing country and western; almost anyone could build a bungalow with Bungalow Bliss.
For all that they were unattractive and sometimes absurd, the bungalows were an expression of faith in the future by a generation only a few years away from mass emigration.
The new generation in the countryside would rather own an American homestead in Ireland than pine for an Irish homestead in America.
Fianna Fáil, party of traditional values, fully embraced Bungalow Bliss and country and western culture.
Nobody thought any of this at all strange. Not the procession through the town of a 300-year-old severed head. Not the Knights of Columbanus or the avalanche of white-clad nurses.
Not the participation of a supposedly secular state, through its army, in a religious ritual. And not the feeling this all conveyed that this might be the 1930s, that whatever outward changes had happened since 1958, power still lay where it had before.
The tone almost everywhere – on the streets, in the media – was one of utter reverence. Catholic Ireland seemed invulnerable, impervious to change or challenge. Only in retrospect did I pick out the bass note of foreboding in John Paul’s booming addresses to the faithful.
What he was afraid of was money and modernity. The pope did not say directly that Ireland’s faithfulness was linked to its relative poverty, that the country was much more religious than the rest of western Europe because it was less developed economically.
‘The most sacred principles, which were the sure guides for the behaviour of individuals and society, are being hollowed out by false pretences concerning freedom, the sacredness of life, the indissolubility of marriage, the true sense of human sexuality, the right attitude towards the material goods that progress has to offer. Many people now are tempted to self-indulgence and consumerism…’
Speaking in Galway at a Mass for 250,000 young people the next day, he cautioned that ‘the lure of pleasure, to be had whenever and wherever it can be found, will be strong and it may be presented to you as part of progress towards greater autonomy and freedom from rules’.
‘Satan, the tempter, the adversary of Christ, will use all his might and all his deceptions to win Ireland for the way of the world. What a victory he would gain, what a blow he would inflict on the Body of Christ in the world, if he could seduce Irish men and women away from Christ. Now is the time of testing for Ireland.’
As it happened, I shared John Paul’s apprehension about the future, but for precisely the opposite reason. He worried that Ireland, its most faithful child, might be lost to the church. I feared that it wouldn’t. The church had played its trump card: not just the first ever visit to Ireland by a reigning pope, but the arrival of a pope whose conservatism was almost irresistibly radiant. If John F. Kennedy had arrived sixteen years earlier as a herald of transformation, John Paul came as a harbinger of reaction. His message was plain. Things have gone far enough. One more step on this road of
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The distinction between church and state was abolished: Dublin Airport was closed to all planes except the pope’s. All traffic, including public transport, was banned from the city centre. Seven thousand members of the 10,000-strong police force were deployed on papal duties.
In 1973, the Supreme Court had ruled that the seizure by the customs of spermicidal jelly belonging to Mary McGee, a married mother of four children, had infringed her constitutional right to privacy within her marriage. The blanket ban on the importation of contraceptives could not continue. But to legislate for a general freedom to buy contraceptives would bring down the wrath of the Catholic Church and its lay organizations like the Knights of Columbanus.
married couples could not be prevented from using contraceptives but the rest of us could.
By 1979 there was no evidence that public opinion had become much more liberal.
In discussions with Haughey, the bishops made it clear that they would not go to war provided the legislation expressed support for the ‘natural’ methods of contraception sanctioned by the church, that there be no public family planning service, that intrauterine devices would not be available and that both the advertising of contraceptives and the availability of sterilization would be strictly controlled.
They would be allowed to purchase condoms, but only if a doctor, satisfied as to their bona fides, issued a prescription. Ireland became the first and only country in the world to make a condom a medicine.
This might be seen as a victory, albeit a very small one, for liberalism. It seemed to me to be precisely the opposite. It was a great victory for the status quo, not in spite of its absurdity, but because of it.
Everybody knew that fornication would continue to be recreational as well as procreational. The problem was how to legislate for this activity without being seen to give any form of official recognition to its inevitability.
Nobody else would have doctors writing prescriptions for condoms because it was mad. But this was a good thing. It meant that we were preserving our unique way of life – the way of ambiguity and unknowing, of dodging and weaving around reality.
In its public self, Ireland had available words and an available grammar of law and religious orthodoxy. And underneath them, it had the silences and evasions with which it interpreted between privacies.
It demanded that, on the one side, the system did not really, seriously, believe that it was going to push too far into people’s lives, that, for example, young people would be frisked for condoms at discos and prosecuted if they could not produce a marriage certificate. But it also depended on most people not flaunting their defiance of the law or pushing too hard against the boundaries of what was acceptable.
There had been ups and downs, but broadly, since 1958, the trajectory had been upwards.
But in 1979 the boom evaporated. The global oil crisis triggered by the Iranian revolution hit car-dependent Ireland very hard, driving up inflation. Workers responded with wage demands and strikes.
It suddenly felt that Ireland’s progress was being thrown into reverse. There was also a sense of despair about the Troubles. There was no change and no hope. The conflict had settled down into a pattern of intimate obscenity. Any movement forward quickly dissolved into the familiar horrors.
In his homily the next day, John Paul made a dramatic intervention in the Troubles, effectively using all of his authority and charisma to try to get the IRA to stop its campaign of violence. He denounced its efforts to ‘push the young generations into the pit of fratricide’ and ‘the absurdity of war as a means to resolve differences’.
Violence is a lie, for it goes against the truth of our faith, the truth of our humanity. Violence destroys what it claims to defend: the dignity, the life, the freedom of human beings. Violence is a crime against humanity, for it destroys the very fabric of society.’
On my knees I beg you to turn away from the paths of violence and to return to the ways of peace… Further violence in Ireland will only drag down to ruin the land you claim to love and the values you claim to cherish. In the name of God I beg you: return to Christ, who died so that men might live in forgiveness and peace.’12
The following day, the IRA issued a statement: ‘In all conscience we believe that force is by far the only [sic] means of removing the evil of the British presence in Ireland.’
The IRA ‘had the ability to disrupt almost any political settlement designed to address the Northern Ireland Troubles’ but remained ‘unable to impose their own will on the area’. A key reason for this inbuilt strategic failure was, as McKearney realized, that ‘the IRA was finding it more difficult to win supporters in the Republic of Ireland… Southern Ireland wanted the IRA war to end rather than the IRA to win’.
It surely offered a way of saving face: we have not been defeated, but we are responding to a passionate entreaty from the spiritual leader of the community we claim to represent.
The IRA was incapable of responding to John Paul II, paradoxically, because of its strategic weakness. It lacked a large political base on the island as a whole. It had no realistic or realizable political objectives, just the fantasy of a British capitulation. Its only power, as McKearney acknowledged, was negative: it could prevent anyone else from reaching a solution.
At the time, it seemed to me that this adulation was definitive. These young people were, give or take a few years, all my age. They had all grown up after television and the arrival of sex, after industrialization and Gay Byrne. Yet here they were entirely in thrall to a conservative vision of who they were and how they should live their lives. It was only looking again at the film of those fourteen minutes that I grasped what was going on. That unstoppable noise, that torrent of sound, was entirely of their own devising. The pope was helpless, powerless. He had lost control.
In fact, it was outrageously irreverent. This crowd was not revelling in piety. It was revelling in itself, in its own youth and energy and unbounded vigour. It was taking over, inserting itself into the event, insisting on its own anarchic presence.
There were eleven Dunne boys (and they had five sisters) – eight of them were incarcerated as children in the industrial school system. The eldest, Christy junior, had been sent to Carriglea in Dún Laoghaire when he was eleven. He recalled that it was ‘a brutal place’: ‘I actually seen children eating their own woollen socks, it was so bad.’
In 1990, Henry recalled his time in the industrial school system: ‘They beat and abused us so much, they made animals of us. When we came out of there all we wanted to do was hit back at society.
The thing about the Dunnes when I was growing up in Crumlin was that everybody knew they were a criminal family but nobody was really afraid of them.
Larry in particular had realized that, because the drug was addictive, it generated its own demand. It was much easier than robbing banks and the returns were fabulous. He and his brothers became the first heroin dealers in Ireland.
this. It was assumed that ‘hard drugs’, like every other form of moral threat, were associated with foreigners.
Another case was that of an American girl who was just here for a short time. In the few cases we have had where hard drugs were involved our evidence was that the people involved were from the other side.’
In 1985, the then Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald would admit that ‘As a result of complacency and the misplaced belief that we were somehow sheltered from the world outside, the drugs problem had got out of control to a degree that was shattering and horrifying.’10 This was a telling admission. FitzGerald was a cosmopolitan.
This absent-mindedness was more than a personal quirk. It was embedded within government. The official mind went entirely absent from what was happening in working-class communities.
For many of those kids, this is what globalization looked like. The heroin that ended up in their veins had flooded into western Europe through networks established after the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. World events crystallized themselves into a white powder burning on a spoon. Here was proof that Ireland was now truly connected, fully integrated into global trading networks.
In the period between 1960 and the first oil crisis of 1973, real GDP grew by 4 per cent a year. This was lower than in other relatively poor western European countries like Portugal, Spain and Greece, which grew by 7 per cent a year.
But the growth started to slow down – and then it went into reverse.
The growth of new jobs could not keep pace with the loss of traditional employment in, for example, docking or clothing factories. In fact, modernization did not create more factory jobs for ordinary workers in Dublin at all – manufacturing employment in the city actually fell by 10 per cent between 1961 and 1981.12
The jobs that were supposed to have been there for them were not merely not being created. They were disappearing.
