The Transformation of Ireland 1900 - 2000 by Diarmaid Ferriter

This is one of the most important books to be published this year. It is a comprehensive history, in one volume, of 20th-century Ireland. It is a history of what people felt, as well as of what happened to them. It draws together narrative political history alongside economics, women’s studies, culture and the arts.

It avoids becoming boringly analytic and does not spend too long on any topic.

It assesses different characters and movements in Irish history fairly. Diarmaid Ferriter does not fall into the fashionable trap of blaming everything on the Catholic Church, but rather accompanies his just criticisms with credit for the enormous work that the Church did in highlighting social problems, combating alcoholism, and providing care for the excluded.

In dealing with the War of Independence, Ferriter draws on official interviews with participants which had been withheld from public view until 2003 because they might have proved too controversial.

The death rate in Cork from political violence in the 1917-1923 period was one per 530 people, which exceeded the one per 1,200 death rate in Northern Ireland during the worst of the Troubles. Most of those killed by the IRA in Cork did “not die in armed combat but as a result of shootings of unarmed people”. The Kilmichael ambush involved the “deliberate killing of already surrendered soldiers”. In May 1922 “10 Protestants were shot dead in Cork in a single night”. These issues were “glossed over in the bluster of post-revolution memoirs”, he says.

Just as in 1995, it was Lloyd George’s decision to drop a precondition of arms being surrendered prior to the start of negotiation that led to the Truce and the end of the war.

One of the advantages of the 1921 Treaty, over what had already been won in Home Rule, was that the new State had the right to impose tariffs. But when these tariffs came to be imposed along the newly created border, they actually deepened partition. There was an unresolved tension between the objectives of unity and of separation from Britain.

One of the enduring themes of Irish 20th-century history was emigration. The £13m of emigrants’ remittances in 1961 almost equalled the amount the State paid in that year for primary and secondary education!

Paddy Lynch, an adviser to the first inter-party government, said that “emigration allowed those at home to maintain their standard of living”. This, of course, had been true in the 19th century too. Despite wholesale emigration, Irish incomes rose from 40% of the British level in 1840 to 60% by 1913, passing out countries like Finland, Italy and Portugal.

Apart from emigration, another strategy for dealing with surplus population seems to have been institutionalisation. The number of children committed to industrial schools in Ireland far exceeded the British level, and seven out of every 1,000 Irish people were in mental hospitals in 1963.

The Ireland of 1900 was a very different place from that of 2000. In 1900 there were only 322 people in prison, but there were 27,000 soldiers stationed here. In contrast, in 2000, there were almost 3,000 in prison in the Republic but only 9,747 soldiers.

Ireland did not grow economically during the first 50 years of independence because economic development was not really a priority. The priorities were to “revive the speaking of Irish, revive traditional music, and keep people on the farms”. Canon Hayes said that “rural Ireland is real Ireland, and rural Ireland is true to Christ”. De Valera went along with this anti-materialist reaction against the making of money, something he identified with an alien British and urban culture. There was a zero sum and static approach to economics, as shown in efforts to ration work by barring married women from government jobs and by rationing land by sub-dividing farms.

All changed during the 1970-2000 period. Material progress became the predominant value. There was a six-fold increase in higher education. Whereas only 2% of school-leavers went on to third level in 1950, almost 50% do today.

But there has been a price – a 41% increase in alcohol consumption in the last 10 years and a cultural superficiality evidenced by the increased media emphasis on lifestyle, celebrity and the journalist as a personality. Talk about celebrities has replaced gossip at the village pump!

Some issues remain too hot to handle. Back in 1968, the FitzGerald report recommended a rationalisation of our hospital services to provide top-class facilities. Almost 40 years later, the Government has yet to act on the more modest Hanley proposals. Localism still rules.

Certain professions that held a dominant position in the 1950s still hold it today. The late Senator Micheál Hayes said, of the Mother and Child controversy of the 1950s, that the Catholic bishops were really pulled along by the doctors who opposed Noel Browne’s proposals because they did not want “officials near their tax returns”!