| A Short History of Ireland |
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| Pre-History and Mythology |
| Archaeologists tell us that a Celtic people arrived in Ireland during the westward migration of the 5th and 4th centuries BC - contemporary with the rise of the Roman Empire. No evidence has been found for a Celtic “invasion” and it is more likely that the period was marked by a process of trans-European cultural diffusion when those intrepid voyagers sailed to the western-most island in Europe with new technologies and new forms of social organisation and began to transform the physical and social landscape they met with there. What they brought with them was an Iron-Age culture which was already wide-spread in Europe and by means of which they effectively displaced (not replaced) an earlier population of Bronze-Age farmers as the dominant group. That displacement almost certainly involved martial superiority whenever the two came into conflict and hence the warrior-like character of the origin myths which speak of battles in the Lebor na Gabhala (Book of Invasions) - itself an eleventh-century compilation of earlier pseudo-historical manuscripts incorporating hero-tales and love-stories. It would be a mistake, however, to consider the legends it contains as utterly devoid of truth when they speak of a series of armed invaders warring with each other. Someone came, and depredations took place; gods were engendered and revered, and famous warriors played their part. |
| Firbolgs and Tuatha de Danaan, Formorians and Milesians - those mythic peoples may have been counterpart of pre-Celtic peoples or fabrications of poetic imagination. It is likely that, by the time the warrior-god Lugh enters the narrative in Lebor na Gabhala, we are dealing with the common stuff of Celtic mythology which has left its trace elsewhere in Europe whether at Laon, Lyon, Leidon or Lugdunum (viz., London). Who the first Celtic arrivals were and who the succeeding groups is unclear, especially in view of a pattern of repeated arrivals and repulsions with many recycled details in the telling. Those who emerge triumphant are said to be the Milesians who are billed as sons of an Eastern king called Míl thus endowing them with a noble lineage in the best classical tradition. Alternately, Milesians are milites or soldiers in a transposed Roman trope - a thesis I have not heard mentioned. At any rate, those who were deprived of rulership in circa 400 BC were no insignificant people either. It may be that they themselves overcamed the humble Beaker People and Larnians who settled for many hundreds of years on an escarpment overlooking the River Bann where the forest and river meet, but it certainly wasn’t the Gaels who built the megalith tombs of the Boyne Valley (in the east) and Carrowdore, Co. Sligo (in the west) which are among the pre-historical wonders of the country. |
| Megalith Tombs of Ireland |
| These funerary mounds are composed of massive “table-stones” (called dolmens) supported by pillars of the same irregular kind, often arranged to form long passages to the centre of the mausoleum. In addition to their funerary significance they seem to have served as a seasonal compass since the opening sometimes includes a so-called “light-box” which permits the sun to enter at the winter solstice and thus to shine on an altar of kinds at the centre where bone fragments have been found. Whether that design was the architectural embodiment of a belief in re-incarnation or an aide-memoire for the druidic priesthood we simply do not know but those monuments to immense human ingenuity, labour and passion were already ancient when the Celtic people from whom the Irish Gaels claim descent reach the island’ shore. It is indicative of the long life of such ideas that James Joyce reprises them in Finnegans Wake when he writes that “The spearspid of dawnfire totouches ain the tablestoane ath the centre of the great circle of the macroliths” [FW594] - although he actually knew England’s Stonehenge rather better than the edifice at Newgrange, Co. Meath.* |
| What became of the Mesolithic inhabitants of Ireland and their lineage when the sword-wielding Gaels swept ashore? In legendary accounts they retired to the raths and duns which they had build - those funeral mounds we see today - as well as innumberable little tumuli which country people regarded as “fairy mounds”. Thus they became the supernatural beings who long continued to dominate the Irish imagination in the form of sídh (pronounced ‘shee’) or fairies whose power over the living supplies the content of much folktale - not least the tales of iarlaisaí or “changelings” which mesmerised W. B. Yeats and supplied a central element in his folklore collection The Celtic Twilight (1893).* In the mythological cycles of hero-tales and warrior-myths they assume a more divine character, appearing as Midir and Aengus and other gods of the Celtic underworld. Although Christianity and Rationalism both treat the Irish fairies as a superstitious belief they remained very much a part of Irish popular memory in rural Ireland. Indeed it was common until quite recent times to hear country-people say, “I don’t believe in fairies, but they’re there all the same!” |
| *Wikipedia has an excellent article on the ‘History of Ireland’ and the Encyc. Brit. online is particularly good on WBY"s Celtic Twilight |
| Arrival of the Gaels (c.400 BC) |
| Meeting the pre-Gaelic people of Ireland, the newcomers probably assimilated a good deal of their culture which then mixed with their own. It appears, for instance, that the republican tendency to elect leaders shared by most European Celtic tribes gave way to the institution of Kingship which seems to have long existed in Ireland from long before. (It provides a better, if not indeed a necessary, explanation of the megalithic tombs.) On the basis of that institution the Gaelic leadership established kingdoms of their own in the South, East, West and North of the country - each designated as a province. This is ancient political division of Ireland is to some extent determined by its geography which involves arable regions arranged around a bowl-like depression mostly occupied by bog. (We speak of these are the remains of primeval forests but they probably ante-date any inhabitants of Ireland.) Strangely, the word for “provinces” was cuigí, which literally means “fifths” - and so it is inferred that there were actually five of them as distinct from the modern count of four. By way of explanation it has been suggested that the fifth was actually a “central” province in which the ritual order of Gaelic Ireland was magically united - less a real province than an imaginary or even a spiritual one. |
| Some recent thinkers and writers have made rather more of this than the facts strictly allow, yet traditionally the the Hill of Uisneach more-or-less at the centre of the island at the Hill of Uisneach in modern Co. Westmeath was the seat of a druidic religion, just as the fortress-system of raised banks and ditches in Co. Meath to the East traditionally served as the seat of the High King (ard-rí) of Ireland. Many suggest, however, that the title was purely ceremonial and that it changed hands among whichever provincial kingships were uppermost at any time. Certainly it enjoyed a recognised prestige and the literature shows that the High King was also the host of annual gatherings known as aonach (from aon, “one”) which in themselves express the cultural and political unity of Ireland in spite of wide differences in dialect and custom. A rival etymology gives the origin of the word as den-ach, meaning “great assembly” - but the outcome is the same. According to the ecclesiastical record - or, more precisely, the hagiographical literature - it was thus to Tara that St Patrick made his way in 432 AD when he sought to convert the Irish to Christianity on the simple premise that, if he could convert the High King then her could convert the whole nation at a single stroke. |
| Celtic Christianity & Viking Ireland |
| The arrival of St. Patrick inaugurated the age of Celtic Christianity during which the monastic culture he established in consort with the nobility of a tribal social system produced the artistic flourishing that gave us some of the finest illuminated books in Europe. It was an era when the both nearby Britain and the European continent were immersed in various degrees of civic and cultural disorder - though the “darkness” of the Dark Ages is often questioned today. St. Patrick first arrived in Ireland as a slave captured by a raiding-party on the British coast. Long after escaping by ship he dreamt that he received letters carried by angels in which the Irish people seemed to say, “Come walk with us again in Ireland.” By now his childhood Christianity - his father was a deacon - had re-established itself in his mind and he returned to Ireland as a missionary for the faith of his Roman forebears. It is likely from his own account that his awareness of a sinful youth seemed to lie behind his missionary zeal and it counted for much that he knew the Irish language so he was not arriving as a stranger or a conqueror so much as a neighbour and a friend. |
| No martyrs died in the conversion of Ireland and St. Patrick succeeded in marrying Celtic and Roman culture in a close bond. Druidic temples were gone but priests and nobles shared authority and power in the remote western island. By 800 AD, however, the Scandanavian peoples known to history as Vikings had begun their maritime raids and much treasure was destroyed - chiefly around the monasteries and their churches where articles of ecclesiastical reverence made of precious metals, and decorated with still more precious stones, had accrued over centuries. Only a few of these fortuitously survive such as the Armagh Chalice along some notable broaches and torques which collectively show the workmanship of the Irish artisans of the period. Like Britain, the Irish found themselves sharing territory and power with the Vikings - or, rather, paying danegild to them. Indeed, the Vikings founded most of the Irish cities whether Dublin or Waterford or any other port with river-access and an estuary suitable for the long-ships in which they navigated the North Atlantic on the continental shelf. |
| In 1014 the O’Neill King Brian Boru - heir to a dynasty originally from Ulster but born in the midlands at Killaloe and High King of Ireland at the time - succeeded in beating the Vikings in a battle at Clontarf on the east coast very near Dublin - a city which they had occupied for some two hundred years. (Remains of their urban lives have been excavated in recent times.) In the sequel to that battle he was apparently slain by a fleeing Viking yet he is credited with re-establishing the nation-wide power of the Gaels. Gaelic power thus resumed its sway while Gaelic culture enjoyed a revival both on the secular and the ecclesiastical side. This was short-lived, however, since in 1172, the Normans - who had seized the English throne a hundred years earlier in 1066 - invaded Ireland in force on the invitation of Dermot MacMurrough (Gl. Diarmait Mac Murchada) the ruling king of the eastern province Leinster, who was then involved in a struggle with the the O’Rourke of Breffne in the West concerning the affections of a lady called Dervorgilla (Dermot’s wife, in fact). |
The Norman invader, known as Strongbow (Richard de Clare), then married Dermot"s daughter Aoife by pre-arranged agreement and the long unravelling of Gaelic culture had begun. Henry II soon arrived in Ireland to claim his new dominion and receive the fealty of the Norman knights - in case they thought of establishing a rival kingdom. Henry, is was claimed, had permission from the Pope for the invasion of Ireland which he granted Strongbow the privilege of conducting for him. (The existence of the Bull Laudabiliter has, however, been bitterly contested and, besides, the Pope was for once an Englishman.) |
| Ireland under English Rule |
| Medieval English kings after Henry II rules ruled Ireland as “Lords of Ireland”, but after the English Reformation in 1536, the Tudor dynast Henry VIII change the script and declared himself the King of Ireland and sought to impose the new faith on the country with small success. it soon became apparent that conversion or replacement were the options facing the Irish aristocracy when Anglicanism became the Established Church on both islands. The Irish leaders - including the Norman noble families which had, proverbially, become “more Irish than the Irish themselves” (Hiberniores quam hiberniis) - did not accept the Reformation and the separation from the Roman Catholic religion that it involved. Hence there were to spend the next few centuries in a state of religious war with the English - a conflict which heated up and cooled down at different points but increasingly involved a greater and greater degree of control on the part of the heavily armed English government in Ireland. |
| In 1641 a Rebellion of Catholics began in Ulster with a massacre of numerous Protestant settlers - sent by James I, the success of Elizabeth who had spent many years fighting the Hugh O’Donnell, the Earl of Tyrone - who went into open rebellion when the Spanish (also Catholics) threatened to invade English. James hoped to terminate the problem by replacing the population and those he sent to settle there during the Ulster Plantation were to become the ancestors of the present Protestant population of Northern Ireland. The 1641 Rebellion led to a brutal retaliation by Oliver Cromwell and his Parliamentary army which effectively turned Ireland into the scene of a massive land-grab on the part of English soldiers, each getting their share of arable land in place of cash-payment for their services. |
| When Charles II returned to the throne from France in 1660 - his father having died on the scaffold in 1647 - he did not reverse the Cromwellian Settlement and the Cromwellian arrivals thus remained in possession of the country, flourishing there as the new “gentry” in their well-built Palladian houses. In 1690 the forces of the Protestant King William III who drove the Catholic King James II out of English won a crushing victory on Irish soil and at the Battle of the Boyne. That catastrophe, which saw the destruction of the Jacobite (Stuart) Army and the decimation of the Irish Catholic nobility, was followed by the Seige and Treaty of Limerick in October 1691, when the Irish leaders agreed to leave the country by ship for France and Spain on condition that they could take their families with them. |
This was, indeed, a repeat of the Flight of the Earls in 1603 when the beaten Earl of Tyrone left the country by ship, to settle and die in Rome. Those who left in 1691 came to be known as The Wild Geese. Patrick Sarsfield, the best known Irish warrior of the period, died on a battlefield in Belgium, pronouncing with his dying words, “Would that this were for Ireland!” Many of them took service in continental armies and fought for France and Spain in foreign fields - one even attaining fame in Chile in the person of the Admiral Bernardo O’Higgins who defeated the Spanish at sea in defence of his adopted country (“Live for honour or die for glory! He who is brave, follow me!”). |
| The Penal Laws and the Famine |
| The reduction of the Irish masses to Haitian poverty under the weight of the anti-Catholic Penal Laws which followed the Williamite victory was the chief source of national grievance in the eighteenth-century. In 1798, however, Irishmen of both religions took up arms under the flag of an independence movement inspired by the French Revolution and called the United Irishmen. In the North and South they fought brief but heroic campaigns against English militias which sadly ended in widespread executions during the ruthless repression that followed the defeats at Ballynahinch in the North and Vinegar Hill in the South during that summer. At Vinegar Hill thousands of Irish countrymen armed only with pikes fell before British cannon-fire. Frightened by the Rebellion, the Anglo-Irish promptly quickly agreed to close down the Parliament in Dublin which had been the pride of the Protestant Nation (as it was called) since they won Legislative Independence from the English in 1782 under the leadership of the orator Henry Grattan. (The tradition of parliamentary oratory was continued by Edmund Burke who, living in England, became the nominal founder of what is considered the Conservative Party - though very different from its modern counterpart.) |
| In January 1801 the Act of Union came into force and henceforth Irish Members of Parliament (MPs) would travel to the British Parliament in London. Ireland would be ruled by a Viceroy and his Administration in Dublin and, not surprisingly, many of the Anglo-Irish nobility took themselves to fashionable English resorts rather than linger in a country where they had neither friends nor political power - all though the all-important rent from the “dirty acres” continued to flow into their pockets through their land-agents, the real terror of the common people. In spite of promises associated with the passing of the Union - when the Irish Parliament effectively voted itself into extinction - Irish Catholics continued to be excluded from professions and elections in their own country - granted that only those with property were permitted to vote in any case - until Daniel O’Connell, a lineal Gaelic chief educated in France and qualified at Law who is known in to Irish history as The Liberator, formed a mass-movement which effectively won Catholic Emancipation (This is deemed the first such mass-movement in modern European history.) in 1829 after he got himself elected to a seat in Co. Clare in 1828 against heavy opposition from the Protestant oligarchy. |
| The hopes that the Irish nation - which became increasingly synonymous with the Gaelic and Catholic people of Ireland - would now embark on a course of civil development to compare with England’s wealth and might in the Age of Industry and Empire were tragically dashed when the Irish Famine (called “The Great Hunger”) broke out in the country following the failure of the potato crop on which most of the impoverished population depended for subsistence. That dependence was itself the result of rural overcrowding, rack-renting and sub-division of already-tiny peasant holdings. A third of the population died in the Famine of 1845-49 and another third emigrated to Britain or America, while the population as a whole fell by fifty percent from 8 to 4 million - and it would remain at that figure well into the mid 20th-century. The Famine convinced many - including liberal Protestants - that English Government had failed in Ireland my modern democratic standards and hence a series of small and ineffective “risings” (or rebellions) against English power occurred in the ensuing decades. The Famine also marked the beginning of the plummeting decline of Irish as the vernacular of the country outside metropolitan centres when most of Ireland was predominantly rural. |
First there was the Young Ireland Rising of 1848 which followed the pattern of nationalist movements throughout Europe - especially in Italy and Germany where they changed the political landscape for ever. In ireland the most important issue was always the land and its manner of ccupation - whether ownership or tenancy - and several often violent demands for Land Reform were sounded in this period. Chief among the organised movements in this cause was the Land League which gained the support of the liberal Protestant leader of the Irish Party at Westminster: this was Charles Stewart Parnell. Imprisoned for his supposed connivance in the activities of radical agitators during the Irish Land War, he was politically destroyed in 1890 when a divorce suit was brought against him by a certain Captain O’Shea. Within a year the revered Leader had died of pneumonia while travelling through the country in wintry conditions to gather support. |
| Home Rule and Independence |
| All of this happened at a moment when the Irish Party in Parliament seemed to stand within shooting distance of Repeal of the Union. In this they had the support of the Liberal English Prime Minister William. Gladstone (’The Grand Old Man’) whose party did successfully pass Home Rule in 1914 on the eve of the First World War. At the same time, however, the revolutionary tendency in popular Irish politics was getting stronger. By the 1860s, A group of insurrectionists with strong ties among the huge Irish community in America had formed the Fenian Movement which shocked Britons by embarking on a bombing campaign in that country which ended with the hanging of three Irishmen known as the Manchester Martyrs in 1867. Much of the colouring of that rising and Irish national politics in this period was the idea of a return to the heroic example of the ancient Irish warriors Finn MacCool and Cuchulain. |
| As the turn of the century approached, a movement for cultural and political revival was instigated by an intellectual class compsed partly of Anglo-Irishmen and women like Douglas Hyde, W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, and partly of men and women of Catholic religion involved in the Irish Language Revival movement and the sporting league called the Gaelic Athletic Association which was to become the virtual training-ground for Irish Irish revolutionaries. (Meanwhile, the British Government introduced numerous measures of amelioration - including most significantly, the outright purchase of all landed estates and its sale to the tenant’s on terms of a long loan known. This reform rendered Ireland the only country in Europe without a landlord class. Nevertheless the cultural ferment of Irish nationalist inexorably drove the country towards independance and Britain’s involvement in World War I gave the Irish Republican Brotherhood an opportunity to mount the 1916 Rising from which the successful independnece movement was born - even if (or perhaps because) the Rising itself was a failure. |
| Patrick Pearse and fifteen others who led the Easter Rising during two weeks of May 1916 were executed by court martial and firing squad after their surrender to the British forces. In the view of many, it was the executions rather than the Rising that led to Irish Independence because a flame had been lit of such a kind that that, in the General Election of 1918 at the end of World War I, the Irish voted massively for the Sinn Féin Party which promised to bring the Irish Parliament back to Dublin. Those who did not, of course, were the Unionist and Protestant On 21 January 1919 they did just that and set up a rival government to the British. Independently of the political leaders, a member of the Irish Republican Army called Dan Breen conducted an ambush of a police contingent escorting a load of dynamite for a quarry at Soloheadbeag in Co. Tipperary - and the Anglo-Irish War began. The ensuing struggle, fought by the IRA with guerrilla tactics, was marked by the massive assassination campaign against the Police and Armed forces on one side, with great brutality against the general population on the other. |
Within two years it led to the Treaty of December 1922 when the British agreed to permit the Irish Self-Government subject to the nominal sovereignty of the British King involving an Oath of Allegiance which many Republicans found intolerable and others considered the price of gaining “the freedom to win freedom“. 9 in IRA leader Michael Collins’s famous phrase.) This difference of opinion split the Irish Parliament (Dáil Eireann) and led to Civil War. Meanwhile Ulster became a separate state with its own parliament at Stormont (Belfast) in accordance with British promises. And, though for many generations the Partition of Ireland in this way - one part inside and one part outside the British Union - was regarded by nationalists with abhorrence, it is often spoken of today as the best solution to an intractable difference between the two populations in Ireland. |
| Independence and the European Union |
| Independent Ireland became a rigidly Catholic state, exhibiting an iron loyalty to the Vatican at a time when religion was in retreat everywhere else in Europe. The social and intellectual conservatism of the new leadership - excepting some remarkable citizens and authors - was tragically matched by the failure of the indepedent economy since which had no real market for its chiefly agricultural goods other than Great Britain. Even the currency remained the same although distinctive Irish coins were minted with an array of animals and birds to represent the predominantly rural character of the nation. Sadly, the flow of emigration to Britain in search of work or out of economic desperation increased throughout much of the 20th century. While some progress was made with the infra-structure - notably in the form of Rural Electrification by damming the River Shannon - a huge structure built by the German engineering firm Siemens in 1925 and years following - the official policy of the government was to define Ireland as a agricultural and Catholic rather than industrial and secular. |
| Much of this was motivated by sheer antipathy to Britain and a determination to build a nation that embodied everything that Britain was not and which Ireland could never become, lacking coal and empire. Unfortunately the social price for national revivalism was tremendously high and much of Irish social thinking and public awareness in the 21st century has been concerned with uncovering the degree to which the institutions of State and Church collaborated in the oppression of women and children, in particular, and other underprivileged and marginalised segments of the Irish population as a whole (including of course sexual “deviants”, as they were seen). In reality a petty-bourgeois state had been created in which access of the the best jobs, best housing, and the best education was the preserve of a newly-formed middle-class whose entitlement lay in the role its founding members had played in the War of Independence. Although two main parties existed - Fianna Gael and Fianna Fáil - their policies were largely indistinguishable even if their rhetoric was often different. Basically they reflected the two sides in the Civil War. |
| And so things remained until Ireland joined the European Union - at that time the European Economic Community - alongside Britain in 1972. This was seen as a severance from Britain and a strengthening of ties with continental nations and continental markets. Ireland received enormous investment by means of the EU" Regional Funds and some it was refashioned as a sales platform for major American corporations selling goods into Europe - without paying the tarriffs which would be due if they were not nominally manufactured in Ireland. By the 1990s, however, Ireland had become the “Celtic Tiger” by analogy with Asian countries like Japan after World War II - a war from which the Irish government kept to Neutrality and incidentally antagonised both the British and the Americans, while individual Irish citizens flocked in great numbers to help the war effort against the Nazi Axis (Spain excepted - which remained a Catholic "ally" of the Irish in spite of Franco’s Fascist rule). |
But if Ireland became a suitable base for American investment at the advent of the European Union, this was on account of a policy devised in the 1950s to encourage inward investment on the basis of greatly reduced tax rates, pre-built factory-plant, and a considerable degree of security against industrial action for in-coming industries. That plan was embodied by the Industrial Development Agency (IDA) which was founded in 1949 with the genius of the economist T. K. Whitaker and with the energy of the politician Sean Lemass - the latter a revolutionary who had graduated from guerrilla warfare and came to see the futility of freedom without economic progress. (These two men were the Keynes and Roosevelt of modern Ireland.) The result was not alone to provide massive hike in employment but also to generate much “downstream” industry based in turn on the high education standards of the Irish. |
| The Northern Irish Troubles |
| The 1970s also saw the renewal of the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland where Catholic marched to throw off the stigma of a second-class citizenry caused by their isolation in the predominantly Protestant State created to satisfy the Unionists in 1919 and installed in the north-east of the island in 1922. Much of the pain during the three-decade period of guerrilla warfare which followed the attack on a Civil Rights March at Burntollet in 1967 was produced by the extreme violence of the anti-colonial movement centred on the Provisional IRA who accounted for three thousand out of the four thousand deaths suffered in the period - often killing their own people on suspicion of collaboration. The British responded to Burntollet by quickly abolishing the social and political disadvantages suffered by Catholics but they also sent in the Army, supposedly to protect Catholics against Protestant Loyalist violence but - as matters turned out - to police the IRA who were, by that stage, in a state of armed rebellion. Matters reached their nadir on 19 January 1972 when a battalion of British paratrooper fired on unarmed marchers in Londonderry (commonly called Derry) and killed 13 civilians. Then, at at last, after a series of abortive cease-fires with promises of disarmament interrupted by gun and bomb attacks not only in the little “statelet” but also in the Britain and the Republic, an Agreement was brokered by means of secret talks involving the IRA, the British government, the American President (Bill Clinton) and several European supports. |
| This was called the Peace Process. On Good Friday in 1998 a solution was reached in the form of the Belfast Agreement (otherwise called the GFA) involving power-sharing by rotation of chief executives and amnesties ofr imprisoned terrorists. In spite of quaky moments it has held until this day. Since then, in fact, many of the protagonists have gone into normal politics while others have joined the Republican cause for whom the Troubles are a history lesson rather than a personal memory and the question of a United Ireland is now predicated on the reaction of the Protestant population to Brexit as much as ancestral feelings about Britishness and Irishness which have shaped to landscape down the generations. In another perspective, however, the question of a United Ireland and the survival of the British Union - which is significantly threatened today by the strength Scottish National Party and its independence movement - is less important than the social and cultural changes which have taken place in the Irish Republic in recent decades: changes primarily to do with the impact of Feminism, Gay Liberation, the lesser but important legislation on divorce and contraception and finally Abortion - all of which conservative barriers have been knocked down by younger people since the 1980s. |
| “The Bishop and the Nightie”: Conflicting Mindsets |
| The history of social liberalisation in modern Ireland virtually begins in 1966 with a television programme called The Late Late Show on which a presenter called Gay (Gabriel) Byrne playfully quizzed a recently married woman about her night-dress on the wedding-night. She didn’t wear one and was prepared to say so. Her answer led to the scandal known as “The Bishop and the Nightie” when it triggered an angry response from an Irish Catholic bishop which, in turn, gave rise to protests against the attempts of the clergy to dictate what people should or shouldn’t do in the privacy of their homes. Beyond that, however, it was the role of women in Irish society which was at issue since, for decades they had been excluded from equal employment and even required to give up Civil Service jobs and even teaching as soon as they got married in order to perform appropriate as wives and mothers of the nation. This conventional idea was on a catastrophic collusion course with the whole tendency of modern culture flowing into Ireland, particularly from a new source: the long reach of American popular entertainment. |
| As the twenty-first century rolled in, a spate of scandals emerged concerning the abuse of women and children by members of the church culminating with the revelation that some 780 babies had been buried without record - many simply thrown in a disused cistern - in a so-called Mother and Child home run by nuns in the West of Ireland. It seemed at that moment that the Irish were capable of doing more harm to their own than the British had ever done - or were capable of doing, given the socialist ethos of the British National Health Service and the more rapid development of feminism in Britain. (Northern Ireland was something of an in-between case in which Protestantism and Catholicism seemed to compete with each other in displays of puritanism.) In intellectual life, the national narrative of oppression and rebellion was significantly eroded by a group of “revisionist” historians who demonstrated that the actual pattern of development in Ireland at any time was much more complex than the simple tale of oppression and exploitation adopted by nationalist patriots. Ultimately, however, it became clear that the logic of post-colonial studies counted for more than either pro-Irish or pro-British thinking and the history of the country is increasingly seen in the context of imperialism and decolonisation. |
| Looking at the Future |
| The overall result of such tectonic shifts in social and historical thinking is that Ireland has emerged in the third decade of the 21st century as one of the most progressive countries in the world in terms of the social and moral reforms engraved in the Statute Books. At the same time it retains a painful legacy of economic inequality with a dismal record for public housing which is threatening the stabliity of the political system today. As the crisis deepens, more and more people are siding with the radical politics of Irish nationalism under the form of the Sinn Féin Party whose history is twinned with that of the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland. Small but noisy groups of right-wing nationalists are also making their presence felt in reaction to liberalism and migration. To a great extent both of these tendencies are driven by economic factors since the euphoria of the Celtic Tiger sadly gave way to a period of depression with the country’s banking system was wrecked by maverick financiers and some misguided politicians. Ireland was then required to dig itself out of a debt-hole imposed by the European Union which stepped in to save the banking system - at a price. In the sequel, public services such as housing, health and education suffered serious set-backs while the debt was being paid off. |
| It is believe today that the worst of the financial crash is now over for the Irish tax-payer and government, admitting that World Recession threatens all countries today, big or small. Looking towards the future one may say that Ireland and its people have weathered the storms of history and emerged as an independent-minded, self-sufficient group who are invested with a deep love and respect for their own heritage and an appetite for a bigger place in the modern world - where, in fact, an Irish name is no discredit to its bearers. Yet increasingly Ireland is a multicultural nation, having absorbed considerable numbers of economic migrants and asylum seekers as well as other Europeans exploiting the freedom of movement which the EU ensures. While much of Irish history has been about national and religious difference, the crude ethnic and cultural distinctions have been largely put aside and neither chronic blame nor self-justification are in vogue among Irish people of today. |
For a more complete account of Irish history, read M. V. Duignan’s Introduction to the Shell Guide - as .pdf [on-screen] or.docx [download].