We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

by Fintan O'Toole

Three out of five children growing up in Ireland in the 1950s were destined to leave at some point in their lives, mostly for the shelter of the old colonial power, England.

In 1841, the population of what became the twenty-six-county Irish state was 6.5 million. In 1961, it would hit its lowest ever total of 2.8 million. By that year, a scarcely imaginable 45 per cent of all those born in Ireland between 1931 and 1936 and 40 per cent of those born between 1936 and 1941 had left.

In a bitter paradox, Ireland was an agrarian economy that was actually not much good at producing food.

With some of the richest fishing grounds in Europe, Ireland had managed in the previous year to export a grand total of £799,000 worth of fresh fish.61 In spite of having huge numbers of dairy cattle, Ireland could barely make edible cheese. In 1957, Ireland had managed to sell a total of £20,000 worth of cheese abroad – Britain alone imported £25 million worth from round the world that year.

To define the place I was born into might be to think about what subsets of countries it belonged to. One, certainly, was Dillon’s descaminados with Iceland, Greece and Turkey. Another was the tiny group of European countries that experienced a fall in population during the 1950s. It was an exclusive couple: Ireland and East Germany.

These imagined walls were those of protectionism – the moral protectionism of McQuaid’s repression and the economic protectionism of high tariff barriers instituted by the Fianna Fáil government when it came to power in 1932.

Almost as soon as Fianna Fáil took office, it imposed duties of between 15 and 75 per cent on thirty-eight different kinds of imported products. By 1936, more than a thousand categories of goods were subject to tariffs of 50 to 75 per cent.73 The holding of shares and voting rights in Irish companies by foreign nationals was severely restricted.

Ireland was part of a group that also included Burma, Iceland, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait and the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms, and Libya. These were non-British Commonwealth countries that were nonetheless members of the Sterling Area. Their currencies were all pegged to the British pound. In Ireland’s case, the relationship was rigid.

Irish globalization had long been about labour going to where the capital was; now it would be about capital coming to where Irish labour was.

Economics was only about money, after all – what really mattered were the old lodestars of the nationalistic constellation: a United Ireland, the revival of the Irish language and the maintenance of Ireland’s special place in the world as the exemplary Catholic nation.

This was the great gamble of 1958: everything would change economically but everything would stay the same culturally.

The single national channel, Telefís Éireann, had gone on air on New Year’s Eve of 1961. This was very late – Albania got its own television station before Ireland did.

But freshest in their minds was the scandal of Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls. O’Brien’s debut novel, telling the story of two young women through adolescence and teenage years, was banned in Ireland in June 1960, almost immediately upon its publication in London. It was one of thirty-five books banned on the same day by the Censorship of Publications Board, ranging from literary novels by O’Brien, Alberto Moravia, James T. Farrell and Emigdio Alvarez Enriquez to Diana Dors in 3D and French cartoons, from the Home Medical Encyclopaedia to What to Tell Your Children About Sex.11 They were all just filth.

Kennedy created strange hybrid images of the Irish situation that mingled economic jargon and personal grief. He told us that ‘most countries send out oil, iron, steel or gold, some others crops, but Ireland has only one export and that is people’.

When I started school in 1962, the church-dominated school system had left the Irish among the worst-educated people in the western world.

In the mid-1950s, there were 476,000 pupils in the primary education system, but just 83,000 in secondary and vocational schools, suggesting that more than 80 per cent dropped out of formal education at fourteen, the legal school leaving age. The reason was simple: secondary schools, overwhelmingly owned and run by the church, were private institutions and charged fees that most families could not afford.

A Council of Education had been established in 1954 to consider the possible reforms of second-level education, but it sat so long that its members began to die off before it could issue a report.11 When it finally did report in 1960 (the report was not published until 1962), it remarked contentedly of secondary schools that ‘The dominant purpose of their existence is the inculcation of religious ideals and values. This central influence, which gives unity and harmony to all the subjects of the curriculum, is outside the purview of the State…’

The small minority who managed to complete secondary schools were not encouraged to learn contemporary European languages. The main ‘foreign’ languages were Latin and Ancient Greek: 90 per cent of males sitting the Leaving Certificate took the Latin exam; just 9 per cent took French, 2 per cent German, while Spanish and Italian attracted negligible numbers.

When the government did establish a steering committee to produce a landmark report on investment in education, one of its internal debates was about the suggestion that free transport to secondary schools be provided for pupils in rural areas. A member of the committee, Father Jeremiah Newman (later the Catholic bishop of Limerick) ‘objected on the basis that the Catholic Church would never agree to teenage boys and girls travelling together on school buses’.

This was the church’s great achievement in Ireland. It had so successfully disabled a society’s capacity to think for itself about right and wrong that it was the parents of an abused child, not the bishop who enabled that abuse, who were ‘quite apologetic’.

The second, even more fearful, form of incarceration was the network of Magdalene asylums where women were held, forced to work without pay in the attached laundries, and often institutionalized for the rest of their lives. The system, which was not particular to Ireland, dated back to the eighteenth century. What is remarkable is that it was not just allowed to continue in Ireland until 1996, but that it was actively renewed in 1960, just as the country was supposedly modernizing.

In the 1970s, country and western had become the staple music of rural Ireland.

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. As the Irish Medical Association dryly noted, ‘the prescription or authorization of condoms is not a medical function’. Nonetheless, the legislation passed in July 1979 and came into effect in November 1980.

Between 1980 and 1987, there was a 27 per cent reduction in employment in indigenous Irish firms. This meant that, by 1985, the level of employment in Irish companies was lower than at any time since the 1940s.

Most of the multinationals imported their components into Ireland and then exported almost all of their profits. About 40 per cent of what they did (paying wages and buying local products or services) was ‘Irish’. The rest was not. And this began to play tricks with the very idea of Irish reality. For most of the 1980s, while the actual Irish economy was in dire straits, Ireland had, officially, the highest rate of growth in industrial output in the developed world.

On the face of it, Ireland in 1981 was still outstandingly religious, in practice as well as in theory. The vast bulk of the population was Catholic and 88 per cent of Catholics went to Mass at least once a week. Nearly a third actually went more than once a week.

The operative law in Ireland was literally Victorian: the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act that made ‘buggery’ punishable by penal servitude for life; and the 1885 act outlawing ‘gross indecency’ under which Oscar Wilde had been imprisoned. These laws, repealed in England and Wales in 1967, would remain in place until 1993.

The bishops had suffered a minor setback when, against their strongly expressed wishes, the laws on contraception were liberalized in 1985 to allow for their sale to anyone over eighteen through pharmacies, family planning clinics and health boards. It would no longer be necessary to get a doctor’s prescription to buy condoms. The pretence that only married couples were allowed to buy them was dropped.

The murder rate in those years in Northern Ireland was 6 per 100,000 people. In Miami, the mean homicide rate between 1985 and 1994 was 34 per 100,000; in New York it was 25; in Chicago 27. In Washington DC, where Bill Clinton lived, it was 60 – ten times a bad as in Northern Ireland.3 A cynic might have wondered why Clinton was pouring his energies into ending the violence in a small, sad corner of Europe, when it was flourishing at much greater heights far closer to home.

In 1994, when Intel launched the Pentium processor that was central to the emergence of the personal computer as an everyday consumer product, more than half of worldwide processor production was based in Leixlip. In one vertiginous leap, Ireland had gone from backwater to leading edge. Over the next decade the Irish plant produced one billion Pentium chips. Intel went on to invest over €6 billion at the site, making it the most technologically advanced industrial location in Europe.

But from the mid-1980s, the Industrial Development Authority developed a more sophisticated strategy of trying, not so much to attract this or that company, as to build clusters of world-leading companies, most of them American, in these three fields: information technology, pharmaceuticals and medical devices.

In the twenty-five years after 1990, US companies would invest roughly $277 billion in Ireland; the comparable figure for Brazil is $92 billion; for Russia $10 billion; for India $32 billion; and for China $51 billion.4 By 2012, Ireland, which was 1 per cent of the EU economy, accounted for 11.5 per cent of sales by US affiliate companies in Europe. By 2017, US direct investment stock in Ireland totalled $457 billion, a greater investment stake than in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Denmark and Sweden combined.

There was nothing quite like this in world history. Some poor countries had experienced very rapid development in the late twentieth century, but they had done so primarily by reordering their own societies and developing indigenous industries that could trade on world markets.

The acceptable solution for both the corporation and the state was that Apple established two Irish incorporated companies of the Apple group, Apple Sales International and Apple Operations Europe. With these entities, there would be no there there. Almost all sales profits recorded by these two companies were internally attributed to a ‘head office’. These ‘head offices’ existed only on paper and could not have generated such profits. They had no premises, no staff, no directors who were not full-time executives of other Apple entities. Thus, the profits allocated to these ‘head offices’ were not subject to tax in any country.

Polish passed out Irish as the second most spoken language in the home in Ireland. In 1981, 93 per cent of the population was Catholic. By 2016, that was down to 78 per cent. The fastest growing faiths were Orthodox Christianity, Pentecostalism, atheism and Islam. In a very short time, Ireland became a multicultural society.

Between 2008 and 2015, Ireland injected €62.8 billion into its banks. Germany, which had a very serious banking problem of its own, put €64.2 billion into its troubled financial institutions. Germany issued €135 billion in guarantees for bank liabilities. Ireland issued €284 billion.10 Proportional to the size of their economies, in other words, the Irish poured more than ten times as much of their money into failing banks than the Germans did. In 2013, it was calculated that Ireland, with less than 1 per cent of the EU population, had paid 42 per cent of the total cost of the European banking crisis.