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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“One of the fears that Garret FitzGerald [Minister for Foreign Affairs, 1973-1977] would have had was there were suggestions at one stage in the middle of the decade that Britain might withdraw and, of course, that created panic,” says Ferriter. “What happens then?

“What are the consequences of that – a potential apocalypse, which is one of the reasons [the Irish government] championed the cause of the SDLP. As far as they were concerned: if it was left to extremists on both sides, the result would have been civil war, and they had to be very mindful of what they called ‘the Doomsday scenario’, which was withdrawal without any plan.

“The other side of that was how much would a united Ireland cost? There is a line in the book, quoting Declan Kiberd, ‘Make us pure, Lord, but not yet,’ and not if it involves financial sacrifice on our part.”

The chief driver for Ireland’s entry into the EEC in January 1973 was money rather than any ideological yearning to get closer to continental Europe. Income per head in the Republic was two-thirds of the UK level that year. Conservative estimates suggested that a quarter of Ireland’s population lived in poverty at the time. For example, 71% of the people surveyed by a group called People before Profit in Dublin’s Pearse Street neighbourhood were without hot water in 1971. But how poor were people relative to Irish people today?

“This is all about expectations and what people are used to and what they expected,” says Ferriter. “There are periods in the 1970s where there’s a lot of money around even at government level. The Labour Party ministers were trying to increase welfare payments and welfare entitlements. They’d some success in that regard.

“One of the great myths was that the Irish people weren’t as materialistic as people elsewhere but when they got access to money, people were taking foreign holidays for the first time, and they wanted the nice houses and the trappings of a consumer lifestyle; then when things go bad they complained viciously about taxes. Look at the big PAYE marches in the ’70s and farmers didn’t want to have to pay tax and were slowly dragged into the tax net.

“But I would think poverty was very different to what you have now in that we’re coming from a much higher base. Even a country that is now officially bankrupt and in bailout territory, there is still a lot of money around in terms of people’s salaries and their material possessions.”

Ferriter is particularly strong in teasing out social change, and its ramifications. He applauds the advances made by the women’s liberation movement, citing the young legal advocate Mary Robinson as one of the most impressive people from his study of the period. Remarkably, though, marital rape wasn’t criminalised until 1990.

Pope John Paul II made his landmark visit to Ireland as the decade drew to a close. Church-going, in a country that was 94% Catholic, remained popular, although it seems it may have been as much to do with custom as conviction.

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