A New Ireland?

Abstract

‘What was it all for? The whole thing was a cod’. Michael Moran — the principal male character of John McGahern’s Amongst Women — found himself questioning the merits of what the independence struggle (1919–1921) had produced: ‘some of our own jonnies in the top jobs instead of a few Englishmen. More than half of my own family work in England’.¹ Government spending had been hampered in the 1920s by the financial burden of reconstruction following the War of Independence and subsequent Civil War; the Great Depression stalked the 1930s, worsened by the Economic War with Britain, while frugality became the theme of the war years in the early 1940s, and rationing and strict controls remained in place after the world’s theatres of war fell silent. The 1950s are often described as Ireland’s ‘lost decade’,² characterised by high levels of emigration, unemployment and general poverty. These social ills were anathema to what the 1916/1919–21 period had seemed to promise and, like McGahern’s Moran, many were left wondering about the value of independence. However, by the late 1950s, an air of confidence, already identifiable among international neighbours who had enjoyed more of the post-war boom, was noticeable as the economy began to show signs of improvement. It seemed that the Irish experience was, perhaps, not that different after all to Eric Hobsbawm’s observation that ‘for 80 per cent of humanity the Middle Ages ended suddenly in the 1950s; or perhaps better still, they were felt to end in the 1960s’³ (italicised in text).