Dalarna University Centre for Irish Studies

Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change c. 1970-2000 by R.F. FosterReview by: BRYNHILDUR BOYCENordic Irish Studies, Vol. 8 (2009), pp. 151-153Published by: Dalarna University Centre for Irish StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25699530 .

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Book Reviews

R.F. Foster, Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change c. 1970-2000. London: Allen Lane, 2007. 240 pages. ?20. ISBN: 978-0-713-99783-5.

Ireland changed radically during the latter part of the twentieth century, undergoing something of a cultural metamorphosis as, one after another, deep-rooted moral and social codes were surprisingly easily dislodged and

replaced by the new norms of liberal legislation. Crucially, in the 1980s and 1990s, the control exerted by the Catholic Church over the life of the

country melted away: a series of church scandals - concerning the secret

families of bishops and priests as well as the decades of systematically covered-up child abuse - eroded its moral authority, while events such as the women's movement and the campaigns for the legalisation of abortion, contraception and divorce wrought significant attacks upon its influence over social law.

These internal winds of change were matched by external forces of economic expansion, as the country moved in the space of a generation from being Europe's poorest country

- where an archaic way of life kept a third of the population living below the poverty line - to being a globally admired economic miracle. EU membership led to economic growth via the

European Structural Funds and Monetary System; and foreign capital investment, attracted through tax breaks, established the era of the so-called

Celtic Tiger. Having gradually achieved equal footing with other Western

European countries, Ireland had, by the start of the new millennium, overtaken most of them in terms of statistically-measurable 'quality of life' and 'happiness'. The rate of change, in R.F. Foster's words, is most

bewildering - and yet it is possible to track and lucidly explain it, as he

does in his excellent book Luck and the Irish. Foster advances a compelling explanation for the transformation

outlined above. He argues that the country's newfound modernity and

prosperity were made possible by a sudden blurring of traditional binary divisions, and he emphasises in particular the importance of 'How the Catholics Became Protestant', as one chapter-title puts it. According to this thesis, Ireland managed to leapfrog from its status as 'an unchanging country where time stands still' (3) and arrived slap bang in the future, by developing an 'a la carte Catholicism [that] becomes a kind of Protestantism' (57), which may be understood as a kind of secularism led

by what Foster calls 'lower-case /?' protestant attitudes. Alongside this liberal Catholicism, a new Irish Protestantism has appeared, as southern

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Nordic Irish Studies

Protestants have come to form an increasingly integrated element of the

Republic; and the two groups are beginning to look more and more alike. The notion of smooth linear change is relevant only to the South, of

course. Northern Ireland is another matter: the stranglehold of the Catholic Church on public and private life was not, for instance, an issue there, and so the social upheaval experienced south of the border from the jettisoning of religious authority did not occur in the North. Moreover, the situation there appeared to backtrack - to the old days of armed struggle

- and harden during the decades under consideration in the book, before the

many years of behind-the-scenes machinations by Britain and the Republic finally began to pay off, around the turn of the millennium, in the form of

'power-sharing \

Foster balances these perspectives deftly. On the one hand, Northern nationalists regarded the South 'with an odd compound of resentment, yearning and a sense of abandonment' (103), expressed most vehemently by Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, who warned a bemused Dublin audience not to 'even try to put us out of this nation - or we'll leave you without a blade of grass' (133). On the other hand, the Republic carefully manoeuvred its way along a political tightrope: while publicly continuing to insist on the necessity of a 'unitary state', many of its wisest politicians were actually preparing to abandon the old claim to the six north-eastern counties - enshrined in de Valera's constitution - in favour of 'joint authority' in the North. The future of the island, they realised, lay in

recognising and cementing the border, not in diluting it; and this view was

clearly shared by their voters, 96 per cent of whom endorsed the 1999 referendum on abandoning Articles 2 and 3. In other words, the successful

blurring of difference within the Republic went hand in hand with a deliberate entrenchment of division without.

What is more, Foster acknowledges that while the (southern) Irish may be shedding their religious and national differences, they have simply installed others in their place. Thus, there exists an 'urban-rural divide' that is as much ideological as geographical; a quarrel is being conducted between 'elitist snobs' wanting to preserve sites of archaeological importance and people with 'local connections' looking to develop their

land; and there are even those, in this land of microelectronic revolution, who choose to be inspired by a nostalgia for a mythological, heroic past, a

nostalgia which, in its updated version, blends post-modern 'Celticism' with an 'anti-modernist [. . .]. imagined Ireland of the 1950s' (152). It seems that Ireland can find a way out from its historical, sectarian

predicament, but that other conflicts will inevitably arise in its place.

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Book Reviews

Foster has a remarkable ability to convey enormous amounts of

painstaking research in a highly readable and engaging manner, which makes his writing accessible to historians and non-historians alike. He is also skilled at delving beneath the surface of events, refusing to take things at face value, and accumulating the (sometimes sordid, often personally motivated) happenstance that goes to form history. The chapter on The

Party Fight and Funeral' is particularly entertaining and past-paced: detailing Fianna Fail's place in Irish politics, it follows the spectacular and

gripping ups and downs of the cartoonishly buffoon-like figure of Charles

Haughey. A thoroughly corrupt man who viewed politics as a means of

amassing a personal fortune, he not only did much to impede the peace process in the North - standing trial, for instance, for illegally importing arms for the IRA - but also regularly diverted party funds into his own

pocket, buying Georgian mansions, yachts and even an island. Foster tells us:

From Haughey's own point of view, he seems to have felt that not

only did he deserve the lifestyle of the rich and famous but that it was in the national interest for him to live it to the hilt. [. . .] he was

spending like a prince for the good of the country's image. (76)

And his personal ambition and uninhibited, rollercoaster ride to the good life certainly foreshadowed the country's later path to prosperity.

Foster only briefly puts a foot wrong in the last chapter, during a fairly hurried and uncharacteristically unnuanced appraisal of the literary, musical and cinematic successes of the last thirty years, in which

everything is 'remarkable'. However, he is soon back on surer ground,

doing for the marketing of modern Ireland what he so brilliantly does for its

politics. Taking such diverse examples as the phenomenon of the Irish pub, the imagery promoted in tourist brochures and historically-branded house

models - which, bearing the names Tnishboffin' and Tnishdooey',

combine thatched roofs with sun lounges - he explains that 'the way

Ireland has been sold over the last thirty years is part of modern Irish culture and has rebounded upon the island itself in the shape of pre ordained and received images of history-as-kitsch' (155). The luck of the

country, it seems, has been partly the result of a pragmatic manipulation of the dregs of Romantic Ireland. In light of the recent economic downturn, however, a similarly insightful coda on the prospects of this luck would be most welcome.

BRYNHILDUR BOYCE

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