Similar debates were conducted on educational reform. That "Catholic ethos" which had pervaded schools for two centuries had never been clearly defined, largely because it was assumed to be unproblematic and all-pervasive. What was to take its place was not at all obvious. Traditional constraints of Catholicism had been set aside by the post-1960s generation: by the early 1990s many church congregations in Dublin were dominated by persons over forty years of age, and that in a city with a markedly youthful demography. The old pieties had been absolutist: in the vacuum left after their breakdown, it became obvious that exponents of the "liberal agenda" had no alternative philosophy beyond vague nostra about "growth" and "GNP". Even in the discipline of economics, some intrepid commentators began to ask the politicians whether they were running a country or just an economy. In the philosophical vacuum, it was all too easy for a "cowboy" ethic to flourish, often to the strains of country-and-westem music.12 To some critics it seemed that the Irish, a most sociable and friendly people, still had not managed to create a truly civil society.
Many people – probably a clear majority – were better fed, educated, housed and cared for than ever before: yet by the 1990s three hundred thousand were unemployed and one in every three lived below the official poverty line. For them the loss of the old coherent codes would prove especially traumatic, for they had few material comforts to make the new spiritual emptiness bearable. This, along with the lack of employment opportunities, high taxation and the burgeoning debt crisis, may have prompted many young people to decide that there was no future for them in the country. Emigration, which had halted during a brief period of affluence in the 1970s, began again to assume chronic proportions, with up to 40,000 leaving in some years. Entire villages in the west of Ireland now had few, if any, inhabitants in their twenties and thirties. Instead, in the absence of that middle generation, the very old began to retreat into a world of nostalgic fantasy, while the very young succumbed often to a rather mindless hedonism. Yet, for all that, the conviction remained that it was from the younger generation that answers must finally come. When many of the more recent emigrants began to return in the 1990s from countries where recessions left alternative employment hard to find there was a perverse kind of hope that their experiences and energy might have given this generation the impetus to change life at home for the better.
What made such transformation problematic was the obdurate, unyielding nature of the problem of Northern Ireland a state which seemed unreformable from within or without. To the modernizing élites in the republic, as to public opinion overseas, the opposition of northern unionists to the ecumenical spirit of the 1960s had seemed the worst form of traditionalism. "We are now approaching Aldergrove Airport, Belfast", went a comedians' joke in Dublin: "Please put your watches back three hundred years". Though the immediate portents from the Lemass-O'Neill meetings of 1964 had been good a more ominous response came from the unionist community, one third of whose members pronounced themselves opposed to any renewed contacts with the Dublin government.13 When a younger, more self-confident generation of nationalists initiated the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) in 1967, modelled on Martin Luther King's non-violent movement in the US, the unionist answer was to baton the marchers off the streets. A mildly reformist set of proposals to eliminate discrimination against Catholics in housing, local government and the franchise, led to the toppling of Terence O'Neill from the prime ministry; and by 1969 the British Army had been drafted into Northern Ireland initially to protect Catholic homes from Protestant gangs.
At the time, a wag wrote tauntingly on a Belfast wall: "IRA = Irish Ran Away". By 1971, however, the same IRA was doing a roaring business, training recruits in the wake of internment without trial. In January of the following year, thirteen unarmed civil rights marchers were shot dead by British paratroopers in Derry on "Bloody Sunday"; and later that year, the IRA killed eleven with bombs in public places on "Bloody Friday". The death-toll began to mount fast. Against this lurid backdrop, the accession of the Republic to the European Economic Community or the ending of compulsory Irish in its schools, seemed events from a different order of reality. To some northern nationalists they must have seemed like further confirmation that the south would betray them and the traditional insignia of national sovereignty To many southerners, the north seemed a Neanderthal place, caught in a historical time-warp, inhabited by paranoiacs who couldn't trust one another, much less the outside world. The south liked to think of itself as superior, affluent, urbane and forward-looking; the north, according to such thinking, was trapped in a woeful, repetitive past. Although Taoiseach Jack Lynch in the earliest phase of the "Troubles" moved troops nearer to the border and made rhetorical references to the defence of "our people", the longer-term view was that northern nationalists were not really "our people" at all. In theory, of course, this was because such a phrase in good republican parlance should apply to all in the north, separated unionist brethren as well as nationalists; in practice, it was because many southerners had long despaired of accommodating either northern side and simply called down a plague on both houses.14
The citizens of the republic had been enjoying a rare period of affluence when Northern Ireland erupted into violence: they feared that the spill-over of such disorder into the south could only threaten their new material well-being. That well-being was, by any previous standard, spectacular. In the 1960s alone the standard of living had doubled. Between 1962 and 1982 Irish industrial growth was the fastest in Europe (admittedly, the baseline from which it started was low, but this only added to the sense of momentum gained). So there was no serious solidarity with the Catholics across the border: in the new, emerging Ireland religion was to be a private affair. Hence, when Jack Lynch dismissed two senior government ministers on suspicion of gun-running (at a time when some people felt that northern Catholics needed arms in the face of a loyalist community armed to its teeth), it soon became clear that there was more support for than opposition to the Taoiseach's hands-off policy. The general attitude to the North in the republic was not unlike the approach to the Irish language: make us pure, Lord, but not quite yet (and certainly not if such purity entails financial or intellectual sacrifice).
In 1972 the political scientist Richard Rose pronounced the Northern Ireland problem intractable: it was one of the few trouble-spots on earth, he said for which there was no imaginable solution.15 What followed bore that assessment out: at some point or another almost every remedy has been tried – every one, that is, except a British withdrawal. 1972 was also the year which saw the old regime at Stormont prorogued in favour of direct rule from London: in the following year a power-sharing executive, involving both unionist politicians and the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) was set up to fill a political vacuum which had been exploited by terrorists of all sides. It was brought down, however, in 1974 by a loyalist workers' strike, which the British Labour government failed to confront. That same year, over thirty people were killed in the republic by UVF bombs planted, in Dublin and Monaghan, with the alleged collusion of British operatives. If the objective was to panic the coalition government into ever more draconian legislation, it succeeded: at one point in the mid-1970s the government had rebel songs banned from Irish national airwaves; and it opened a file on the editor of The Irish Press (who had been incautious enough to publish letters from republicans critical of the new censorship).
Through the 1970s a balance of terror seemed to be all that either side achieved: the IRA bombed British cities in scenes of horrific carnage, while the security forces perfected techniques of surveillance, espionage and "grassing" (the work of paid informers who provided courts with uncorroborated evidence concocted by the police). In 1981 ten IRA men starved themselves to death in a desperate attempt to gain political status within the prison system: the emotions unleashed by this even in Northern Ireland brought hundreds of recruits flowing into the Provisional Sinn Féin/IRA movement. Only a tiny minority could
be trained for military activities: the remainder were drawn into the political process, heralding the rise of the modern Sinn Féin as a political party, second only to the SDLP within the northern minority and the largest single party on Belfast City Council. Thereafter, the IRA/Sinn Féin went forward on a two-track policy "with an armalite in one hand and a ballot-box in the other", one result of which was the election of Gerry Adams as MP for West Belfast. In the south, however, news of the hunger strikes was downplayed by the national broadcasting station, probably unnecessarily, for the popular reaction was one of bafflement.
After the hunger strikes Sinn Féin won almost 42 per cent of the nationalist vote in Northern Ireland, and relations between Taoiseach Charles Haughey and the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher soured. In an attempt to reopen debate about the future, the next Taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald, launched a New Ireland Forum in May 1983, at which the Republic's parties, the SDLP and some of the unionists gave evidence. It also heard submissions from a range of politicians, ecclesiastics, academics, writers and so on. Its report went far – some said too far – in acknowledging the integrity of the unionist tradition, about which it had more to say than, for example, about the rights of Irish speakers. It listed three possible options, (i) a united Ireland, which would necessitate a replacement for the 1937 constitution, (ii) federation of the two parts of Ireland, (iii) a system of joint authority with Dublin and London together responsible for the north. As the Irish had radically revised and reduced the aspirations of Irish nationalism, it was assumed that the British would revise their nostra too and attempt to bring the unionists onside. In the event Mrs. Thatcher said "out, out, out" to all three proposals, much to the chagrin of the republic and of international commentators. Indeed, so damaged was she by the ensuing adverse publicity that her advisers urged her to adopt a more conciliatory line.
Accordingly, when the leader of a Fine Gael/Labour coalition, Garret FitzGerald, signed an Anglo-Irish Agreement with Mrs. Thatcher at Hillsborough in 1985, there was an audible sigh of relief. The right thing had been done by the SDLP and northern nationalism: henceforth the Dublin government would have a recognized consultative voice (though not a decision-making one) in the conduct of northern policy, and violations of the civil rights of the minority could be closely monitored Unionist opinion was outraged by this unprecedented recognition of a legitimate southern interest. Many nationalists on the ground complained that the agreement made little difference to their actual living conditions, but that in the process Dublin had conferred legitimacy on the British interest in Northern Ireland.16
In the years that fallowed and particularly during the Sinn Féin/SDLP peace initiative of 1993-4, the British government repeatedly stressed that it had no long term strategic or selfish interest in staying in Ireland and would do so only as long as a majority in Northern Ireland wanted it that way. At the same time, war-weary nationalists began to admit that something less than a united Ireland would satisfy them now. They had never expected much from the republic, a place which had often seemed as hostile as London to their aspirations. At the start of the recent phase of "Troubles" in 1968, only 40% of them had supported a united Ireland (though less than 20% were satisfied with the existing constitutional position: which begged a question – what did they want?). By 1993 a large number still pronounced themselves indifferent to final unity with Dublin, but even more disenchanted than ever with the northern state, whose troubles had cost more than 3000 lives in the interim. Though some demographers estimated that Catholic nationalists might outbreed the Protestant unionists by the year 2040, this was sheer fantasy: the contraceptive pill was doing far more to curtail the number of Catholics than the loyalist death-squads. As Northern Catholics grew ever more confident and sophisticated it seemed unlikely that this group would ever evolve a homogeneous politics or cultural philosophy: they were, in the words of one commentator, "in search of a state".17 Moreover, it was very possible that by 2040 the religious and cultural pieties of both sides would have been so diluted by international consumerism as to render any model which sought to reconcile them useless and redundant.
Through all the "Troubles" Northern Catholics held their heads high: they won a sympathetic hearing in the world, thanks to the astute leadership of John Hume. The IRA, by a combination of ruthlessness and intelligence, remained one of the most feared guerrilla movements in modern history. Though it claimed to be a non-sectarian movement eager to embrace Protestants in the event of a British withdrawal, many of its actions seemed to belie that rhetoric – such as the massacre of eleven Protestants at a service for Remembrance Day in Enniskillen in 1987. For their part, the Sinn Féin/IRA leadership made full political capital out of an alleged "shoot to kill" policy of the British Army in pursuit of unarmed Provisionals: when the British policy officer, John Stalker, probed too closely into this case, he was relieved of his duties. Equally corrupting of due legal process was the widespread use of "supergrasses" from within the nationalist (and, to a lesser extent, unionist) communities: in return for betraying comrades, some rather unsavoury individuals were offered immunity from law and start-up cash for a life elsewhere.
The newly-politicized Sinn Féin/IRA axis exploited such weaknesses to the full before a British audience increasingly ready to believe ill of its police and army. The growing doubts about the safety of convictions for terrorist bombings in the mid-1970s led in time to the release of the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six, after sustained campaigns by their families and friends, much aided by priests, nuns and conscientious members of the British legal profession. For all of their sufferings, nationalists generally conveyed the impression of a group operating to a clear agenda and to some purpose. It was the unionist political leadership which, again and again, gave the sense of an insecure people on the verge of some final betrayal, forever at war with self and circumstance. Unionists excited for more sympathy in the republic (which they nonetheless continued to distrust) than in Britain. This was because the objective interests of the élites in the northern and southern states were now at one.
If southerners liked to think of themselves as happy Europeans who had long outgrown the battles of the past which still engrossed their cousins north of the border, there was much truth in that analysis but also some strain. For they had not so much solved as shelved the problem of creating a liberal nationalism. In their period of national revival, they had identified as essentially Irish precisely those elements of the national heritage which they now seemed most anxious to discard: and through the years of the northern "Troubles", they had allowed a small, tightly-organized cadre of broadcasters to wish all messy, tribal nationalisms away. Coverage of Northern Ireland through most of the 1980s had substituted a wish – that nationalisms would evaporate – for a fulfillment. The collapse of Stalinism in eastern Europe in 1989 left these commentators in shock. The reemergence of nationalism as a force to be reckoned with meant that the question of how to achieve a humane modernization of national traditions (as opposed to their callous liquidation) loomed more pressingly than ever.
Moreover, the debt crisis which sapped enterprise in the south meant that its citizens still owed more per capita than those of Mexico – and the politicians who had squandered the monies loaned by bankers during the spate of elections between 1977 and 1987 had left no major infrastructures with which to service the debts. At one point all the money collected in personal taxation went to service the interest payment component of the debt.18 Given that there had been a doubling of jobs in the public service from 1966 to 1985, it was obvious where much of the borrowed money had gone, but there was often little for these employees to do and poor promotional prospects in a service doomed to cutbacks in future decades. Most young people still faced a future as likely to involve a job in London, Dusseldorf or New York as in Dublin, Galway or Cork. They were better educated than ever and by no means convinced that such a prospect was more unfair than that which many east-coast Americans have of being transplanted to
work in some western state: but, through all the debates, there remained the strong sense that Ireland was a good place, a preferable place, in which to live and raise a family. Nobody could quite say why: encomia on the "quality of life" were often vague. Perhaps what drew people back to Ireland was the conviction that in a Europe filled with countries which have a glorious past, the Irish are among the very few still exercised by the prospect of an interesting future, by a belief that everything in the country might yet be remade.
That belief was shown to have some basis with the election to the presidency in 1990 of Mary Robinson, a civil rights lawyer and feminist, a woman with a record of speaking out on difficult topics such as censorship, sexual freedom and travellers' rights. She expanded the role and symbolic meaning of her largely ceremonial office, in a series of publicized visits to Buckingham Palace (never before graced by an Irish Head of State), West Belfast (a virtual no-go area to most members of the Dublin élite), Inis Meáin (where she started her campaign) and Somalia (where, in a bold linkage to the Great Famine, she told the Somalis that they were the Irish of Africa, before proceeding on to the United Nations to plead for international aid on their behalf). Mrs. Robinson's election had a galvanizing effect upon all political parties, compelling them to put forward more female candidates: of equal importance was her return to traditional ideas of the nation, such as the notion that Irish people include not only the five million on the island but the many millions more overseas, whom she visited regularly and for whom she kept a light burning in the window of her official residence. In her continuing focus on the "Third World" and on Irish anticipations of that experience, she reinvigorated many debates of the revivalist generation.19
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