HISTORY: Down, Down Deeper Down: Ireland in the 70s & 80sBy Eamonn Sweeney Gill & Macmillan, 442pp. €16.99
A SUBLIMINAL question mark hovers around each chapter of Eamonn Sweeney’s account of Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s. Did the course of events through those troubled, confrontational years contribute to the making of the catastrophe that has overtaken us in the first decade of the 21st century?
Even from the doom-laden perspective of 2010 this is an unhappy narrative. We revisit a country beset by murder, bombings, strikes, social confrontation, sectarianism, sexual abuse, political opportunism, superstition, interference in the police and the courts, clerical corruption, emigration, discrimination and inequality.
Sweeney's narrative technique is to draw on the news columns of The Irish Timesand Magillmagazine while cross-referring to contemporary offerings by writers from Roy Foster to Tim Pat Coogan, from Conor Cruise O'Brien to Nell McCafferty. Thus what we have is a chronology, an almanac, rather than original research.
Fair enough. But this approach has limitations. Events are recorded. But trends and tendencies, the evolution of ideas, the striving to new values, are not tracked or highlighted. The profound changes that followed from European membership, or from the liberalising influences of the media, to take but two examples, are not set out. They have to be winkled out, like clues, from the chronology.
Shocking things happened on this island in these years: the terrible violence of the North and its overspill into the Republic; the triumph of political venality, embodied in the rise of Charles Haughey; the devastation of communities by heroin; the holocaust at the Stardust; the lonely, obscene deaths of Ann Lovett and her child; the Catholic Church’s campaigns (supported by some politicians) to determine social policy and to continue the repression of individual freedoms; the violence of the “Heavy Gang”; the sorrowful travesty of the Kerry Babies case.
Today’s generations of twenty- and thirtysomething Irish are insulated from that Ireland by the benign, soft-edged 1990s, by the sense of economic well-being enjoyed throughout the first half of the current decade. They find it impossible to relate to a society where individualism and sexuality were so vigorously repressed, where sectarian murder was commonplace, where advanced educational opportunity was still the preserve of the fortunate few, where money was scarce and where emigration touched almost every family.
BUT, WOVEN THROUGHthe chronology of corruption and crisis, the reader will recognise the titanic struggles taking place between those pressing for change and those seeking to maintain the status quo. Courageous, challenging individuals appear on the landscape; John Hume, Josie Airey, FX Martin, Mary Robinson, Willie Bermingham, Sergeant Tom Tully, Des O'Malley, Catherine McGuinness, Dr Paddy Leahy and many others.
Then there are the writers, the journalists and the artists: Nuala Fennell, McCafferty, June Levine, Gay Byrne, Seamus Heaney, Frank McGuinness, U2, Bob Geldof, Gene Kerrigan and Christy Moore, to name a few.
And there were heroes of many varieties: Tiede Herrema, Joanne Hayes, Garda Dick Fallon, Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh, Msgr James Horan, Fr Denis Faul and so on.
The chronology traces the successive rising and falling of the economy; the tailing-off of the Lemass boom in the early 1970s; the mass bribery of a gullible electorate that brought Fianna Fáil back to power in 1977; the bleak, hopeless midyears of the 1980s, with their unemployment, emigration and massive State indebtedness.
Yet it has to be remembered that somehow, out of all this, Ireland did actually become a better place, more mature, more tolerant and more forgiving. It also managed to attain a significant measure of sustainable economic advancement. The sustained economic growth that endured from perhaps 1992 to about 2002 was built on foundations that were laid in the latter part of the 1980s.
But although the book’s title implies a survey of the two decades, it effectively stops in 1985. So there is little narrative of the positive processes that gave us the good years; the great investment in education, training and research; the advent of the new universities; the funding supports from Europe; the modernising of agriculture and the food industry; the liberalisation of laws affecting personal morality; the successful inward-investment policy; the work of the IDA that brought the giants of information technology to Ireland, in turn paving the way for the return of tens of thousands of young educated people who had left in the 1980s.
Are any of the root causes of our current distress capable of being identified in this narrative? Some undoubtedly are. One can recognise the same aversion to accountability in politics and in public institutions; the rise of the stroke in public life; the assumption by many politicians that state institutions are in their ownership and are there to be exploited to their own ends.
These are the values that gave us the infamous Galway Tent, a pork-barrel regime on certain state boards, the abuse of expenses and state resources, a system of regulation that was little more than cronyism, a banking regime and a development industry that were allowed to act as if there were no rules.
At the end the reader is left in the mid-1980s, wondering how the story went from that bleak point to boom and from boom to bust again. The narrative will apparently resume in a follow-up volume.
Conor Brady was editor of The Irish Timesfrom 1986 to 2002
