I first grasped just how fast Ireland was changing during a visit to Dublin in the 1990s. The city skyline was crowded with cranes. For decades workers had travelled across the Irish Sea to build Britain’s roads and scaffold its cities. Such was the pace of Ireland’s boom, a friend in the capital told me, that history had now reversed itself: construction companies were recruiting English workers.
Confirmation came during a visit to my mother’s home town in the wild (and wonderful) bog lands and mountains of County Mayo. Kiltimagh was just about as deep as you could venture into the isolated rural Ireland imagined by Éamon de Valera, the revolutionary leader who became the nation’s longest-serving taoiseach. There, on Main Street, stood a takeaway Chinese restaurant.
A nation of emigration was becoming one of immigration. For the century and a half since the Great Famine of the 1840s, Ireland had been described by the people who fled it. Independence for the 26 counties of the south in 1922 had not not changed things. The conservative, Catholic republic built by de Valera had shunned the outside world. Unable to find work, its young headed west across the Atlantic and east across the Irish Sea to make their fortunes elsewhere. By the account of historian Diarmaid Ferriter, some 1.6mn of them boarded the ferries for Britain over the course of the 20th century.
A tentative opening to the world beyond had begun during the 1960s under the direction of the far-sighted taoiseach Seán Lemass. His economic reforms provided a platform for the republic’s membership of the EU, which Ireland joined in 1973, and for the subsequent arrival of American technology and pharmaceuticals companies. It was another 20 years before the shift took hold. By the 1990s, Ireland was embracing globalisation with all the zealotry of the religious convert. It was more than a coincidence that at the same time the people were losing faith in a Catholic Church that had steered their lives for generations.
In The Revelation of Ireland, Ferriter, author of several books about modern Ireland, tells the latest chapter in the story with authority and insight, deftly weaving the economic and political upheavals with equally tumultuous societal and cultural shifts. He has an eye for illuminating detail and a healthy habit of looking under stones. The lavish, dubiously financed lifestyle of long-serving taoiseach Charles Haughey was never a secret. Still, it’s startling to read that he spent IR£16,000 to have his shirts sewn by hand in Paris.
Haughey’s political protégé Bertie Ahern is rightly lauded for the political courage and straight dealing he displayed in the negotiations with Tony Blair, UK prime minister, that brought peace to Northern Ireland. Yet an official tribunal investigating Ahern’s financial ties to his party Fianna Fáil’s business backers found that his evidence had been “frankly incredible”.
As Ferriter recalls, a nation in which economic stagnation had been the norm since its break with British colonial rule, saw its gross national product grow by 49 per cent between 1995 and 2000. An unemployment rate that had started the decade at above 15 per cent was down to 4.5 per cent by the end of 1990s. Women, deemed by de Valera’s 1937 constitution as best suited to minding the home, flooded into the workforce. Emigrants began to return home. And even as it tempted British workers to join them, Ireland also opened its doors to workers from across the EU and beyond. Who could have predicted, Ferriter asks, that by 2006 some 36 per cent of the population of Gort in County Galway would be Brazilian?
The picture that emerges is of a nation that changed in almost every dimension in the decades after it earned the Celtic Tiger sobriquet. The march to modernity saw the authority of the once all-powerful Catholic hierarchy eviscerated by the laying bare of the sexual abuse and physical cruelty visited by priests and nuns on children in the Church’s care. Censorious moralism made way for a wave of social liberalism that saw Ireland among the first in Europe to vote for single-sex marriage.
In 2017, voters who had been brought up being instructed that homosexuality was a mortal sin elected Leo Varadkar, a gay man of Indian heritage, as taoiseach. Politics, meanwhile, read the rites over the duopoly of the two parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, that emerged from the civil war after the independence treaty with Britain. Sinn Féin, formerly the political wing of the Provisional IRA, seized the opportunity afforded by the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement to join the political mainstream in the republic.
The Catholic Church was the author of its own destruction. The terrible crimes committed by the clergy against young boys and girls, exposed first in a series of brave television documentaries and then in several official inquiries, might have been cause for a display of the contrition the bishops had long demanded of their flocks. Instead, the Church greeted the revelations with callous diversions and prevarication. Ferriter tells the story of the young woman who told her priest of the childhood abuse she had suffered. The response was that she was “forgiven”.
The economic story, of course, was not one of unalloyed progress. The initial burst of growth was built on solid enough foundations — low corporate taxes to attract foreign investment, access to the EU single market, and a step change in educational standards.
Membership of the euro, marking the final break with economic dependency on Britain, seemed a mark of confidence. By the turn of the millennium, however, familiar ingredients of an unsustainable boom were in place. Deregulated financial markets, uncontrolled credit expansion and runaway property prices might have been treated as an amber light. Instead, politicians, bankers and regulators continued partying.
The bust was as painful as anywhere in Europe, not least because, as Ferriter recounts, by 2010 the European Central Bank was forcing Ireland to load the costs of saving the banks on to taxpayers. The EU has been integral to Ireland’s redefinition of itself as a modern European state. But, Dublin now learnt, there was a price tag. By the same token, though, Ireland showed remarkable sang-froid in the face of enforced austerity. By 2012, America’s Time magazine was trumpeting “the Celtic comeback”.
Ferriter’s account of the tumult of these 25 years is devoid of nostalgia for de Valera’s Ireland. But it is not starry-eyed about what followed. A nation that now provided home to people from 180 countries found that “new opportunities created new divides”. For all its wealth, Ireland still faced chronic housing shortages and a health system that denied modern care to those who could not pay.
As for the eternal goal of unity, the nation that emerged a century after the break with Britain is one that has found a confident identity liberated from its colonial past. That is not to say, though, that the future is settled or that it has shed all the burdens of the past. On the face of it reunification with the north now looks more likely than at any time since partition. The Good Friday Agreement, demography and Britain’s departure from the EU all point in that direction.
And yet, peace in Northern Ireland has not ended the segregation of Catholics and Protestants. In the republic, much as voters profess support for unity, they are reluctant to imagine what the new Ireland would look like. The next chapter may be some time in the writing.
The Revelation of Ireland: 1995-2020 by Diarmaid Ferriter Profile £25, 560 pages
Philip Stephens is an FT contributing editor
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