Social Change and the Transformation of National Identity

Abstract

Just under a quarter century after the foundation of the state, at the end of the Second World War, the transformation of the identity project of Irish nationalism into an institutional project for the reconstruction of society had reached its zenith. Society had been reconstructed according to the model of a Catholic and radical nationalist imaginary, an imaginary that had been decisively forged before independence and subsequently institutionalised. The transformation of the identity project of nationalism into an institutional project was not the product of absolute consensus. Profound differences had arisen between the constitutional and radical wings of the movement on political issues though there were no irreconcilable differences between them on social issues. Political differences and the requirement for a theory of the social propelled a conservative Catholicism into a powerful position of compromise. Where both constitutional and radical nationalism was geared to power over the state, Catholicism was geared to power over the extensive non-state institutional order.¹ Catholicism and the evolution of the institutional order in the Free State period brought about substantial consensus which enabled a radical hypothesis to be tested: that the Irish nation was self-contained and scarcely needed the wider world.²