The veteran journalist and author delves behind the myths of change and boom to give a rich, nuanced picture of Irish life as he and others lived it
“For all my life until about 1980,” Fintan O’Toole writes, “I had been told to think of myself as the end of something and the beginning of something else.” While his sweeping, authoritative and profoundly intelligent book sees modern Ireland through the lens of his own life and that of his family, it also offers sharp and brilliant analysis of what form change took when it arrived in Ireland.
Ireland, he writes, “emerged into the world of the postwar boom as a backwater and an irrelevance”. It had a high emigration rate and a shockingly low marriage rate. Between 1949 and 1956 the GDP of the countries of the common market had grown by 42%, Britain by 21%, Ireland by only 8%. The population was at an all-time low of 2.1 million in 1961, by which time Ireland had to decide whether “to open itself to free trade or remain as a protected but even more isolated space”.