But if you were shallow and insecure enough to measure your worth by the enormity of your expenditure and the conspicuousness of your consumption, you had a real problem. You had to go higher. And the only real notion of what an upper class might look like was the memory of the very class that de Valera and Lemass and all the other revolutionaries had destroyed, the old Protestant landowning Ascendancy. It is a great historical joke that just as Catholic nationalist Ireland is coming into its own, it is haunted by Haughey’s attempts to become an Ascendancy squire.
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