A History of Ireland in 100 Objects

by Fintan O'Toole

  Much of the reality—especially poverty and emigration—was winnowed out of this ideal of a noble and ancient culture. (The ironies came home in 1953 when the Blaskets were evacuated and most of the islanders went to live in Springfield, Massachusetts.) The attempt to revive Irish as the everyday language—perhaps always doomed in a society where one in two people would emigrate—failed. Some official policies, such as censorious attempts to stamp out traditions of holding dances in houses and at crossroads, actually damaged the real folk culture.

  Yet there was something genuinely remarkable about the degree to which aspects of an older culture really did retain their vigour. The Irish language outlived predictions of death. Traditions of oral storytelling, exemplified by Sayers and recorded by the Irish Folklore Commission, persisted at least into the era of television. Irish music in its different forms, from dance tunes to slow airs to the distinctive, haunting tones of sean nós singing, continued to sound out—not just in Ireland but in Irish communities abroad. Ancient religious practices, centred on holy wells and holy mountains, carried on, albeit in Christianised forms.

  None of these forms was static—no living culture ever is. Each was open to periodic ‘revivals’ which were in fact re-inventions. What mattered is that they survived even the potentially stultifying embrace of officialdom. They did so because people still had a use for them and could adapt them to their own times. Curachs are still widely used in the west of Ireland, most of them now covered with fibreglass while retaining their traditional shape. Like so much of Irish culture, they are the same only different.

  94. Eileen Gray chair, 1926

  ‘An armrest was omitted in order to leave the body more freedom in movement and to allow it to bend forward or to turn to the other side unrestricted’. So said Eileen Gray of what she called her ‘nonconformist chair’. Or, as Zeev Arum, the furniture dealer who revived many of Gray’s startling designs in the 1970s, put it ‘you don’t need to sit like an emperor to be comfortable’. The chair contains many of the notions at the heart of the Modernist movement in Europe: freedom, individuality, the belief that the form of an object should be determined by its function, the use of industrial materials like tubular steel and aluminium. That its creator was one of the movement’s pioneers yet virtually unknown in her native country for most of her life says a great deal about Ireland’s ambiguous relationship to European modernity.

  Eileen Gray was born in 1878 at Brownswood, near Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford. She studied painting at the Slade School of Art and then in Paris, where she became interested in particular in Japanese lacquer work. In 1917, Gray was commissioned to design the interior of an apartment on Rue de Lota in Paris. She created strikingly innovative objects, including a boat-shaped ‘pirogue’ sofa and the voluptuous leather and tubular steel ‘bibendum’ chair that became a much-reproduced twentieth-century design classic. The Romanian-born architecture critic Jean Badovici wrote that ‘Eileen Gray occupies the centre of the modern movement. She knows that our time, with its new possibilities of living, necessitates new ways of feeling’. Badovici and Gray collaborated on a stark Modernist house, called E-1027, at Roquebrune near Monaco. She also designed the furniture, including the small, circular, adjustable E-1027 table that is also endlessly copied.

  Gray was far from the only Irish artist at the cutting edge of cultural innovation in Europe. Her contemporary in Paris, James Joyce, was a leading figure of literary Modernism. Yet independent Ireland as a whole struggled to assert a place in the invention of a new European identity. Isolation from the turmoil of contemporary Europe, a tendency to locate national identity only in the rural past, the lack of a dynamic industrial base, a strong relationship with the United States and state censorship all contributed to the failure to develop a strong European identity. It was not until the late 1950s that tentative official efforts to rethink the relationship with Europe began; even then the idea of joining the then six-member European Economic Community was largely shaped by the reality that Britain was attempting to do so.

  As it happened, the process was tortuous: Ireland eventually joined on 1 January 1973. Initially, for most of those who voted in a referendum to join the EEC, the main attraction was undoubtedly economic. It took many years before it became clear that Europe might also provide an imaginative space in which the claustrophobic conundrums of Irish (and British) identity might be re-envisaged. The embrace of Eileen Gray as an important Irish artist was a tiny but telling aspect of that shift. The Irish state acquired Gray’s personal collection and her archive on behalf of the Irish people in 2002; it was brought back to Ireland through the efforts of Pat Wallace, former director of the National Museum, and the minister at the time, Síle de Valera.

  95. Emigrant’s suitcase, 1950s

  In the 1950s, a popular Irish song was Sigerson Clifford’s gently nostalgic ballad, ‘The boys of Barr na Sráide’. It recalls the author’s childhood friends in the Kerry town of Cahirsiveen and praises them as the ‘men who beat the Black and Tan’. Then, almost as a matter of course, it mentions that they are now scattered: ‘And now they toil on foreign soil, for they have gone their way / Deep in the heart of London town or over in Broadway’.

  Emigration was one feature of Irish life largely unchanged by partition and independence. (Some of it was directly related to political turmoil: the Protestant population of the 26 counties declined by one-third between 1911 and 1926 and significant numbers of Catholics north of the border were displaced by violent attacks.) The Great Depression that began in 1929 limited the numbers going to the US; Britain, ironically, became the primary destination. The Second World War gave a large boost to migration to Britain—about 120,000 people from the island of Ireland joined the British armed forces; roughly 60,000 of those were from the south. Another 170,000 went from the south to take up jobs in the war economy. It was expected—and, by government ministers, feared—that many of these would return after the war.

  Instead, more migrants left for Britain and elsewhere. Three out of every five of those who came of age in Ireland in the 1950s emigrated. Young men, typically with little more than primary education, left to work on building sites (plentiful during post-war reconstruction) and factories. Women worked in factories too, but they were also drawn by the possibilities of higher-status jobs as nurses, teachers and civil service clerks. The suitcase, often a shabby cardboard box with handles, was the most resonant Irish object of the time.

  In spite of very high rates of fertility (helped by the banning of artificial contraceptives), the population of the 26 counties declined to a low of 2.8 million and Ireland was left with the lowest known marriage rate in Europe. One contemporary study, The vanishing Irish, claimed that ‘if this ominous trend continues, in another century, the Irish race will have vanished, much like the Mayans, leaving only their monuments behind them’.

  It was impossible to avoid the sense that independent Ireland had failed. Its agricultural economy—largely characterised by small farms and labour-unintensive beef production—could not hold young people increasingly aware of the opportunities offered by urban, industrial life. A policy of protectionism was supposed to create thriving Irish industries but failed to do so. Mass emigration thus raised fundamental questions about the long-term viability of Ireland’s hard-won independence. If the break with Britain was not to be written off as a failed experiment, something had to change. In 1958, a white paper called ‘Programme for economic expansion’, written by the secretary of the Department of Finance, Kenneth Whitaker, called for the end of protectionism and the opening up of Ireland to foreign multinational investment. It would transform, not just economics, but every aspect of Irish life.

  96. Washing machine, 1950s

  The wringer on top of this washing machine makes it look laborious to use, but in the 1950s the manufacturers, Servis, advertised it with slogans like ‘a wringer so easy, a child can wring a blanket’. The placing of the upright tub inside a sleek, white cabinet was, at the time,
the height of domestic modernity. In an Irish country kitchen, this British-made appliance was an object from a brave new world.

  In a roundtable discussion on Irish feminism in 2010, journalist Geraldine Kennedy asked a group of women ‘What invention changed any of your lives most?’ Mamo McDonald, born in 1929 and long a leading figure in the Irish Countrywomen’s Association, replied without hesitation ‘the washing machine’. Washing machines had been available to wealthy households in Ireland since the mid-nineteenth century. By the 1940s electric machines were reasonably common in the more prosperous parts of urban Ireland, though still described as ‘luxuries’. The really large-scale social impact of the washing machine had to await not just the availability of cheaper automatic machines after the Second World War, but general access to both piped water and electricity in Ireland’s still largely rural society.

  McDonald recalled that the ICA ‘carried out a campaign for water in the home and urged rural women not to marry a farmer unless he installed water in his house as well as his byre…“why would you be bothered putting it into the kitchen, wasn’t she well fit to carry a few buckets”, [was the] sort of attitude’. The other necessity for washing machines in the home was electricity. In 1925 there were 161 separate local electricity systems in Ireland; these were subsumed into the new state-owned Electricity Supply Board in 1927. The success of the ESB, embodied in the pioneering hydro-electric scheme at Ardnacrusha on the Shannon river, led to the connection of 240,000 consumers by 1945. The huge post-war electrification scheme to connect to the system the 400,000 rural homes still without power was one of the great achievements of independent Ireland.

  Peter Sheridan, in his memoir 44: Dublin made me, recalled the arrival of the washing machine in his working-class home: ‘It’s a dream machine…the housewife’s friend and more reliable than a husband’. The machine liberated women from the time-consuming, back-breaking drudgery of washing clothes (and nappies) by hand.

  Organised feminism, from the early 1970s, challenged the idea that a woman’s role was confined to the home. In the long term, the contraceptive pill, though only fully legalised in Ireland in 1993, may have had a more revolutionary effect, but the easing of the domestic burden wrought by the arrival of the washing machine was an important prelude to more high-profile changes in the status of women: the lifting (in 1973) of the ‘marriage bar’ that forced women to leave public service jobs when they married; the right to sit on juries (1976); the right to a share in the family home (1976) and equal pay (1974). There was, by the end of the 1970s, even the hope that washing machines might also be of interest to men.

  97. Bloody Sunday handkerchief, 1972

  The plain white handkerchief is distinguished only by the small letters spelling out “Fr E Daly”, sewn into it by the mother of its owner, a Catholic priest in Derry. On Sunday, January 30th, 1972, Edward Daly waved the hanky as a plea for troops to stop shooting while a group of men tried to carry a 17-year-old boy to safety. Jackie Duddy had been shot from behind as he fled from British army paratroopers who fired on a demonstration organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. He was one of 13 unarmed men shot dead that day; 17 others were wounded, one of whom subsequently died. Photographs and television images of the harrowing scene made Fr Daly’s white handkerchief perhaps the most emblematic object of a 30-year conflict.

  On the face of it, Northern Ireland, the semi-autonomous entity within the United Kingdom created in six northeastern counties in 1920, was surprisingly successful. It survived bitter nationalist opposition to partition and the vicious sectarian conflict that raged at its birth. Utterly dominated by the Unionist Party, it was, as Northern Ireland’s first prime minister, James Craig, declared in 1934, “a Protestant Parliament and Protestant State”. When, in 1965, Taoiseach Seán Lemass travelled to Belfast to meet his northern counterpart, Terence O’Neill, it seemed as if Northern Ireland’s legitimacy was in effect secure.

  Beneath this veneer of stability, however, was a profound problem: a third of the population was Catholic and suffered discrimination in public employment, in the allocation of public housing, in the operation of the electoral system and through the activities of the wholly Protestant Ulster Special Constabulary.

  O’Neill sought to bring about reforms after 1963 but was thwarted by a backlash led by the militant Free Presbyterian preacher Ian Paisley. Catholic expectations had been raised and then dashed;the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was formed in 1967.

  Unionist leaders, in response, insisted that the civil-rights association was merely a front for the (in reality moribund) Irish Republican Army, which they said was determined to destroy Northern Ireland.

  Conflict escalated through a number of phases: police and loyalist attacks on civil-rights marches; sustained riots, especially in Derry; intercommunity violence along sectarian fault lines; the British government’s decision in August 1969 to send in troops to keep order; the emergence of a militant new “provisional” IRA and of loyalist paramilitaries; and the disastrous introduction of internment without trial in August 1971.

  It scarcely mattered that the civil-rights association’s initial demands were conceded: after Bloody Sunday, Catholic alienation and Protestant reaction were reinforced by each new atrocity. Of these there was no shortage: the death toll rose from 26 in 1970 to 171 in 1971 and to 480 in 1972.

  Attempts to end the violence, most notably the Sunningdale Agreement of 1973, which led to a sharing of power between unionist and nationalist parties, failed. The conflict settled down into an apparently acceptable level of obscenity: 3,529 people had died by 2001. Most – about 1,800 – were civilians. Nationalist paramilitaries killed more than 2,000; loyalist paramilitaries more than 1,000; and state security forces more than 360.

  It took a long time and a lot of blood before the plea for a truce contained in Fr Daly’s improvised white flag was heeded.

  98. Intel microprocessor, 1994

  In 1994, when Intel launched the Pentium processor that was central to the emergence of the personal computer as an everyday consumer product, more than half of worldwide processor production was based at Leixlip. Over the next decade, the Irish plant produced one billion Pentium chips. Intel went on to invest over €6 billion at the site, making it the most technologically advanced industrial location in Europe.

  Such a development was unimaginable in the 1950s—and not simply because no one predicted the rise of information technology. Ireland was a declining economic backwater, with little sophisticated industry, few global trade links and a poorly educated workforce. The road to Fab 10 began with Ken Whitaker’s previously mentioned ‘Programme for economic expansion’, written in 1958. It was a catalyst for changes that by then were already under way—a shift from economic protectionism to an attempt to attract foreign investment through low corporate taxes. It also provided cover for a major policy shift by the dominant Fianna Fáil party, whose leader Seán Lemass backed Whitaker’s strategy.

  Change was gradual and, for a long time, seemed likely to shore up rather than threaten established institutions. Nevertheless, the economic boom of the 1960s prepared the ground for a relatively smooth transition to membership of the European Union in 1973.

  The belated introduction of free secondary education in 1968 began the formation of a more skilled workforce. Most importantly, Ireland ceased to be a primarily rural society.

  Ireland’s adjustment to globalisation was by no means easy. The process ran into severe trouble in the 1980s: new jobs failed to keep pace with a burgeoning population and the decline in older industries in the face of international competition. US-led investment took off again in the mid-1990s, however, just as Intel was launching the Pentium. Ireland became the number one location worldwide for US information technology companies and number three for chemicals—exemplified by Pfizer’s decision to manufacture its hugely successful Viagra drug exclusively in Ireland. Such investment brought energy, prestige and optimism. As Irelan
d moved into the twenty-first century, its long history of conflict, emigration and poverty seemed, at last, to be over.

  99. Anglo Irish Bank sign, 2000–2011

  On 20 April 2011 a small crowd gathered at St Stephen’s Green in Dublin to watch this sign being taken down outside the headquarters of Anglo Irish Bank. They gave a ‘small cheer’ as it was dismantled. When the sign had been erected over a decade earlier, its design drew on iconic objects of Ireland’s past:

  Based on early Irish references such as flint arrowheads, typography from the Book of Kells and crafted gold artefacts, the simplicity of the image sets the tone for a more cohesive corporate identity programme and spearheads measurable improvement in brand awareness.

  By the time the sign was removed, Anglo Irish had certainly achieved a very high level of brand awareness—as one of the most notorious banks in world history. It was founded in 1964, but by 1987, its first full year as a publicly quoted company, it had loans of just £92 million and profits of just £1.45 million. At its height in 2007 Anglo was theoretically valued at over €10 billion; its annual profits hit €1.2 billion. Most of that growth was concentrated in the first seven years of the twenty-first century, during which its share price rose by 2000 per cent. Over 80 per cent of its loans—it lent a staggering €18 billion in 2007 —were related to property. The bank epitomised the vast Irish property bubble that burst with ruinous consequences in 2008.

  The Irish economy had begun to grow rapidly from 1995. The expansion of world trade following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening up of China; the boom in information technology; a young and increasingly well-educated population; favourable tax rates that continued to attract multinational corporations; and social changes creating a huge increase in the number of women in the workforce—all were factors in a surge of prosperity.