Ireland in the 1970s – a powerful new book by historian Diarmuid Ferriter

Women’s lib, Northern Irish troubles exploded, and the country grew up

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British Army confronted by demonstrators on William Street during the Troubles

Photo by Fulvio Grimaldi

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For anyone who came of age in Ireland during the 1970s, festivals loomed large. There were all kinds of great festivals on the calendar.

The Dublin Horse Show in August was in its pomp. The Listowel Writers Week was inaugurated in 1970 and down the road there was the Ballybunion Bachelor Festival, but, as is alluded to in Diarmaid Ferriter’s magisterial study of the decade, “Ambiguous Republic: Ireland in the 1970s,”  fans of music had the best craic of all.

The Sherkin Island Festival in 1978 lasted for seven days and seven nights, and it was only a one-day festival. Planxty played at the Claremorris Ham Festival in 1972, which, according to the band’s lead singer, Christy Moore, consisted of a smoked leg of ham in Andy Creighton’s Lounge window and eight late-night bar extensions.

“Many of these gigs,” he once said Moore, “were followed by fierce sessions that often went on into the next day … one night I was on stage eight hours after dropping half a tab of very pure acid.”

Ferriter, who is professor of modern Irish history at UCD and Ireland’s most prominent broadcaster of history, explores an extraordinary range of topics in his 700-page volume – availing of an avalanche of recently available archival material – from the country’s anti-apartheid movement to zinc deposits in Tara. Although the focus of the book is the 26 counties, he admits that the Troubles in the North, which ignited in 1969, defined the island of Ireland in the 1970s.

By the end of the decade, 1,900 had been killed, the worst year of atrocities coming in 1972, with an average of 30 shootings every day, most horrifically on Bloody Sunday in Derry when 13 people were murdered (and another fatally injured), and Bloody Friday when the IRA exploded 19 bombs over an hour across Belfast city.

There was ambivalence in the Republic of Ireland about the situation north of the border. The general public and politicians in the 26 counties, according to the historians referenced by Ferritter, were preoccupied with their own economy. As the RTÉ presenter and historian Brian Farrell pointed out the issue of the Troubles was more of a British Question than an Irish Question.

When it came down to it, people in the south couldn’t fathom Unionists or the culture of Protestantism; meanwhile Unionists were deeply distrustful of their political counterparts in the Republic.

Unionists, according to Brian Faulkner, who was the last prime minister of Northern Ireland before the abolition of its government in 1972, were wary of the ideas politicians from the South might “plant” in the British mind. Jack Lynch, his opposite number, he disdainfully reckoned to be a “wily Irishman”.

Politicians in the Republic realised too late, however, that if the dream of Irish unity was taken to its logical conclusion, it entailed full-scale civil war.

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