A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process

by Jonathan Bardon

  Broadcasters and the print media did much to create a more open, liberal and tolerant society. In The Late Late Show Gay Byrne introduced for discussion topics previously considered taboo. Dermot Morgan and Gerry Stembridge on RTÉ radio satirised Haughey and other politicians with devastating effect in Scrap Saturday. Meanwhile on BBC Radio Ulster David Dunseith vigorously challenged bigotry on Talk Back. A group of young lawyers-turned-comedians, calling themselves The Hole in the Wall Gang, lampooned Ulster stereotypes on Talk Back and in 1995 made a particularly effective attack on sectarianism in BBC Northern Ireland’s Two Ceasefires and a Wedding. In the Republic homo-sexuality was decriminalised in 1993. The position of women in the workplace steadily improved, and growing numbers of women were appointed to public boards and promoted to senior positions in the civil service, the professions and the judiciary. The election of Mary Robinson, and then Mary McAleese, as President of Ireland, and Mary Harney as Tánaiste, would have astonished earlier generations. Male politicians prevailed overwhelmingly north of the border, but there too the Women’s Coalition and Sylvia Herman demonstrated that change was possible.

  The people of Ireland faced the new millennium with a confidence that had not been apparent before. The stereotypical view of a quaint island, as portrayed in such films as The Quiet Man and Darby O’Gill and the Little People, had been swept aside by (among others) Ryanair, which pioneered low-cost air travel; Riverdance, a troupe which captivated international audiences when Ireland hosted the Eurovision Song Contest; Bono and U2, and Van Morrison, who had good claim to be in the top tier of rock and rhythm-and-blues musicians; Paddy Maloney and The Chieftains, who brought Irish traditional music to a world stage; actors with international reputations, including Liam Neeson and Pierce Brosnan; and Séamus Heaney, who not only won the Nobel Prize for Literature but also became the world’s best-selling living poet writing in English.

  In the Republic a succession of tribunals exposed the misdemeanours of politicians, financiers, developers and businessmen. Though many felt the process was cumbersome and monstrously expensive, and that those named were let off too lightly, these tribunals appeared to be making sure that this dark episode would not easily be repeated. During the spring of 2008, while so many were anxiously awaiting the outcome of the credit crunch, at least the public finances appeared to be in good condition.

  A year later the Republic’s public finances were in a parlous state. A burst property bubble had thrown the state into a deep recession, bringing in its wake a drastic fall in government revenues. Wealth in financial assets and property between the spring of 2007 and the spring of 2009 had fallen by well over €350 billion—about the equivalent of national income for a year. Anglo Irish Bank, the state’s third largest which had lent an amount equivalent to twice the national debt, was controversially nationalised; and the shares of the two largest, Allied Irish Bank and the Bank of Ireland, had fallen from highs of €19.35 (August 2007) and €18.65 (February 2007) respectively to €0.7 and €0.58 by 1 April 2009. The government conceded that the economy was likely to shrink by 8 per cent, compared with 2–3 per cent in the UK. The US computer maker Dell—responsible for about 4 per cent of the Republic’s GDP—announced in January 2009 that it planned to shift 1,900 manufacturing jobs to Poland where production costs were around two-thirds cheaper than in Ireland. In March 2009 unemployment passed the double digit mark of 10 per cent for the first time since 1997 and was projected to rise as high as 14 per cent by the end of the year.

  In March 2009 Standard and Poor’s agency downgraded the Republic’s credit rating from its previous AAA rating to AA+ with a ‘negative’ outlook. This reflected fears that the government had neither the courage nor the means to take necessary action, particularly when the Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, backtracked on an earlier promise to keep the budget deficit, the highest in Europe, below 10 per cent in 2009. The savage dip in the Republic’s fortunes was due as much to home-grown recklessness as to shock waves spreading out from the hurricane striking international financial markets. During the first years of the millennium funds lent by Irish banks, mainly to developers and home owners, was rising by 30 per cent annually. Household debt as a percentage of GDP had jumped from 60 per cent to almost 200 per cent, the highest figure in the developed world—in short, it appeared that financial institutions had forgotten the cardinal rule of banking that risks should be spread.

  Governments did nothing to rein in the boom. They put through a new tax rule, Section 23, which encouraged developers to build by allowing them to offset construction costs against tax. ‘Benchmarking’—a process driven by major beneficiaries, politicians and the civil service—exploded the cost of the public service and resulted in public service pay being significantly ahead of that of the private sector. Salaries rose correspondingly and Irish university professors, for example, were being paid an average of about €136,000 a year compared with a UK average of €75,459 in 2009. The social partnership agreements drove up pay rates in the private sector and hoteliers, in particular, argued that increases in the minimum wage to over €9 per hour severely dented the Republic’s economic competitiveness. Payments to elected representatives were exceptionally lavish by European standards and the public sector appeared bloated, with an estimated 800 state agencies known as quangos. During the boom no senior figure in the establishment shouted stop. The Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority clearly did not do its job to curb banking excesses.

  It was clear that hard decisions would have to be taken to restore international confidence and to manage the hardship, household debt and social turmoil created by rapidly rising unemployment and business failure. By joining the euro zone the Republic had given up control of monetary policy and therefore devaluation was no longer an option. The supplementary budget of April 2009 created the National Asset Management Agency to buy up to €90 billion of property and development loans at a discount. Thus the Republic was the first state in the euro zone to adopt a ‘bad bank’ model to repair its banking sector and to free up lending. It remained to be seen whether Fianna Fáil and its coalition partners had done enough to address the state’s problems—without having a solution forced on the Republic by the European Union or the International Monetary Fund. With such an exceptionally uncertain future before it, Ireland at least was entering the economic blizzard with a well-educated and comparatively young population.

  In Northern Ireland a whole generation had at last grown up with little or no experience of political violence. Given the breathing space of real peace, the northern economy made a remarkable recovery. Early in the new millennium levels of unemployment in the region had dropped to historically low levels. Construction firms, for example, developed a prowess sufficient to win numerous valuable contracts overseas. Visible signs of progress down the Lagan valley and into Belfast included: the expansion of the Sprucefield complex south of Lisburn; the development of the Titanic quarter as a financial centre, with Citibank leading the way; the transformation of a run-down part of Belfast city centre to become the ‘Cathedral Quarter’; the success of Ikea (throwing open its doors in December 2007) in attracting bus- and car-loads of customers from as far away as Kerry; and the opening of the Victoria Centre in March 2008. The north–south bodies, envisaged in the Good Friday Agreement, began constructive work. Relations between Belfast and Dublin, and between the governments of the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, had never been better.

  Building developments were the first high-profile victims of the recession in Northern Ireland. Here houses prices had risen as fast as anywhere else in the UK on the assumption that violence in the previous century had kept them depressed. As in the Republic, an almost frenzied boom in building developments ensued. By the autumn of 2008, however, it seemed that it would be a long time before apartments and other dwellings close to completion would be sold or rented. It was claimed that around 2,200 jobs had been created by the Northern Ireland investment conference in Belfast in May 2008 and
that this was ‘just the tip of the iceberg’. However, job losses began to mount as the year drew to a close. Many firms, such as the French car parts firm Montupet in Belfast, attempted to avoid redundancies by shortening the working week. About 2,000 joined the dole queues in February 2009 and in just four days, at the end of March and the beginning of April, 2 per cent of the region’s manufacturing workforce lost their jobs: nearly 1,000 in aircraft manufacture at Shorts Bombardier in east Belfast, Newtownards and Newtownabbey; more than 200 at the car parts firm Visteon at Finaghy in south-west Belfast; 95 at FG Wilson’s engineering plant at Larne; and around 90 at Nortel communications in Newtownabbey. The contraction of the retail industry was cushioned to some degree by the influx of shoppers from the Republic taking advantage of the fall in sterling’s value against the euro, particularly in Newry, Enniskillen and Strabane. Supported by the Treasury in London, the devolved administration had to manage belt-tightening on a very modest scale by comparison with that being inaugurated in Dublin. Nevertheless, the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s funding gap of £70 million prompted a Downing Street inquiry in the spring of 2009.

  After the expansion of the European Union to include more states from central and eastern Europe, only Ireland, the United Kingdom and Sweden permitted an unrestricted inflow of migrant workers. Once again people began to move from east to west, and soon more people in Ireland were speaking Polish and Cantonese or Mandarin than Irish in everyday conversation. Even in the quietest western villages the person behind the counter in the corner shop or filling station was likely to be from Poland or Lithuania. Towns such as Ballybofey, Co. Donegal, acquired their own dedicated Polish-speaking internet cafés. The census of 2006 in the Republic showed that, out of a population of some four million, around 400,000 were born outside the island. Sometimes immigrants and migrant workers were treated with as much unkindness as the Irish who had previously settled in cities overseas. On the whole, however, these fresh waves of newcomers settled in comfortably, well on their way to becoming ‘New Irish’. The town of Gort, Co. Galway, for example, became virtually an outpost of Brazil without provoking the slightest opposition from local people.

  I conclude by recalling an incident which reminds me that for long we Irish have been more concerned about what divides us than with what we have in common.

  A quarter of a century ago, keen to catch fish in Lough Melvin, I launched a ten-foot flat-bottomed boat at Kinlough, Co. Leitrim. Soon a vicious westerly storm blew up and, unable to row back, I was in imminent danger of being swamped. My only hope was a small island ahead of me. I made it.

  Then I realised that this was a place where cultures had met, clashed and blended. The island is an artificial one, a crannog, constructed during the Iron Age. On it is the ruined castle of the McClancys where in 1588 the Armada castaway Francisco de Cuellar and his men in a snowstorm successfully resisted the English Lord Deputy, Sir William Fitzwilliam. Looking behind me I could see a line of buoys across the lough marking the unlikely frontier between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland.

  Later I reflected that, in addition to arctic char and salmon, this lough is home to four distinct species of trout—sonaghan, gillaroo, ferox and brown trout. Though they spawn in the same rivers, they do not interbreed. In short, there is more genetic diversity in the trout of this medium-sized lake in the north-west of Ireland than there is among all humans living on this earth.

  JONATHAN BARDON

  2 April 2009

  REFERENCES

  Where the title of a book, article or pamphlet is not given, the complete reference will be found in the bibliography.

  EPISODES

  1. Viney, 2003, pp 15–60; Cabot, 1999, pp 50–65; Waddell, 2000, pp 8–11.

  2. Woodman, 1981, p. 92; Waddell, 2000, pp 11–16; Bardon, 1992, pp 2–3; M. J. O’Kelly in Ó Cróinín (ed.), 2005, pp 65–8.

  3. Waddell, 2000, pp 25–53; Harbison, 1988, p. 25; Bardon, 1992, pp 5–6.

  4. Waddell, 2000, pp 57–65, 68–72.

  5. Waddell, 2000, pp 179–222, 225–75; Harbison, 1988, pp 114, 153.

  6. O’Kelly, 1954, pp 105–55; Waddell, 2000, pp 218–21.

  7. Mallory & McNeill, 1991, p. 156; Bardon, 1992, p. 9; James Carney in Ó Cróinín (ed.), 2005, pp 460–66.

  8. Waddell, 2000, pp 314–16, 325–354; Barry Raftery in Ó Cróinín (ed.), 2005, pp 140–70.

  9. Kinsella, 1970, pp 61–3; James Carney in Ó Cróinín (ed.), 2005, pp 468–72; Mac Niocaill, 1972, pp 3–4.

  10. Cary & Warmington, 1929, p. 43; Bardon, 1992, pp 10–11; Barry Raftery in Ó Cróinín (ed.), 2005, pp 175–6.

  11. Marsh, 1966, pp 23, 29, 34; Kathleen Hughes in Ó Cróinín (ed.), 2005, pp 301–9.

  12. Marsh, 1966, p. 44; Kathleen Hughes in Ó Cróinín (ed.), 2005, pp 309–15.

  13. Mac Niocaill, 1972, pp 42–9; Byrne, 1973, pp 41–2, 122–3; Dáibhí Ó Cróinín in Ó Cróinín (ed.), 2005, pp 231–4; Ó Corráin, 1972, pp 28–42; O’Meara, 1982, p. 110.

  14. James Carney in Ó Cróinín (ed.), 2005, pp 451–2; T. M. Charles-Edwards, ibid., pp 337–50; Byrne, 1973, pp 13–15; Gantz, 1981, p. 1.

  15. Nancy Edwards in Ó Cróinín (ed.), 2005, pp 238–54.

  16. O’Meara, 1982, p. 102; Kelly, 1997, pp 219–47; Nancy Edwards in Ó Cróinín (ed.), 2005, pp 265–73; Donnchadh Ó Corráin, ibid., p. 582.

  17. Roger Stalley in Ó Cróinín (ed.), 2005, pp 726–7; Adamson, 1979, p. 19; McNally, 1965, p. 127; Diarmuid Ó Laoghaire in McNally, 1965, p. 44.

  18. McNally, 1965, pp 125–6; William O’Sullivan in Ó Cróinín (ed.), 2005, pp 526–30.

  19. Dáibhí Ó Cróinín in Ó Cróinín (ed.), 2005, p. 217; McNally, 1965, p. 125; Adamson, 1979, pp 19, 74–5.

  20. Todd, 1867, pp 3, 51, 224–7; de Paor, 1964, p. 132.

  21. Bardon, 1984, p. 2; Todd, 1867, p. 52; Annals of Ulster, AD 919.

  22. F. J. Byrne in Ó Cróinín (ed.), 2005, pp 630–31; Todd, 1867, pp 79–81.

  23. Bardon, 1984, p. 4; Todd, 1867, pp 159–61, 179, 191–3; Dasent, 1911, p. 327.

  24. Olivia O’Leary in Bardon, 1984, p. 28; Patrick F. Wallace in Ó Cróinín (ed.), 2005, pp 814–40; Ó Corráin, 1972, pp 131–50.

  25. Ó Corráin, 1972, pp 150–74; Scott & Martin, 1978, p. 25; Orpen, 1994, p. 11.

  26. F. X. Martin in Cosgrove (ed.), 1987, pp 47, 73; Orpen, 1994, pp 23, 25; Scott & Martin, 1978, p. 27.

  27. Scott & Martin, 1978, pp 57, 65, 67; Orpen, 1994, p. 111.

  28. Scott & Martin, 1978, pp 77, 78; F. X. Martin in Cosgrove (ed.), 1987, pp 82–7.

  29. Scott & Martin, 1978, pp 97, 103; F. X. Martin in Cosgrove (ed.), 1987, p. 57; O’Meara, 1982, p. 106.

  30. Scott & Martin, 1978, pp 115, 177; F. X. Martin in Cosgrove (ed.), 1987, p. 99.

  31. Scott & Martin, 1978, p. 237; Orpen, 1968, II, p. 236; Bardon, 1984, p. 8.

  32. O’Donovan (ed.), 1856, AD 1210; Sweetman & Handcock, 1886, p. 169; Bardon, 1984, p. 8.

  33. James Lydon in Cosgrove (ed.), 1987, pp 166–7; Deane (ed.), 1991, I, pp 150–52.

  34. R. E. Glasscock in Cosgrove (ed.), 1987, p. 222; Kevin Down, ibid., pp 455–60, 465, 469, 471, 475.

  35. Freeman (ed.), 1983, pp 3, 57–8, 131–133; Orpen, 1968, III, p. 276.

  36. Freeman (ed.), 1983, AD 1315; James Lydon in Cosgrove (ed.), 1987, p. 284; Sayles, 1956, pp 95–100; Bardon, 1985, p. 4.

  37. Freeman (ed.), 1983, pp 251, 253, 259, 261, 263, 281, 283, 317, 325; O’Connor, 1959, p. 25.

  38. Kelly, 2001, pp 3, 12, 24, 34, 47.

  39. Hayes-McCoy, 1937, p. 32; Calendar of State Papers, Henry VIII: Correspondence, III, p. 11.

  40. James Lydon in Cosgrove (ed.), 1987, p. 271; J. A. Watt, ibid., pp 371–2.

  41. J. A. Watt in Cosgrove (ed.), 1987, pp 388–9.

  42. Dorothy M. Carpenter in Haren & de Pontfarcy (eds), 1988, pp 100, 106–12.

  43. Dorothy M. Carpenter in Haren & de Pontfarcy (eds), 1988, pp 109–11, 115–16.

  44. Lydon, 1963,
pp 141–6; E. Curtis, ‘Unpublished Letters from Richard II in Ireland, 1394–5’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, XXXVIII (1927).

  45. Cosgrove (ed.), 1987, pp 531–40; Lydon, 1963, pp 143–146; Katharine Simms in Lydon (ed.), 1981, pp 230–31.

  46. Edwin C. Rae in Cosgrove (ed.), 1987, pp 768–9; Simms, 1977, p. 140.

  47. D. B. Quinn in Cosgrove (ed.), 1987, pp 645, 649; Connolly, 2007, pp 4–5.

  48. MacCorristine, 1987, pp 16, 26, 54; Connolly, 2007, pp 86–90.

  49. MacCorristine, 1987, pp 110, 117, 121, 130–31; Maxwell, 1923, pp 94–5.

  50. J. A. Watt in Lydon (ed.), 1981, p. 209; Ellis, 1985, p. 187; Maxwell, 1923, pp 122, 123–4, 126.

  51. Calendar of State Papers, Henry VIII: Correspondence, III, p. 15; Lennon, 1994, pp 148–52; Maxwell, 1923, pp 98–9, 103–4, 112–14.