Customer Reviews

The Transformation of Ireland

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Much of Irish written history speaks to particular, individual events, esp. of the last century: Easter 1916; the war for independence and the civil war that followed; the Troubles that followed those, starting in 1968 or so; the autobiographical accounts of poverty and struggle threaded amid that. What is harder to explain is how Ireland went, from 1900 to 2000, from political and religious oppression to a vibrant and open society, from destitution to the "Green Tiger" economy, from a struggle for political freedom to one for personal freedom. Mr. Ferriter has provided a broad social history that speaks to that. Although the political struggles are mentioned, he explains their impacts, not simply the chain of events. More importantly, he puts those events in context. The footnotes and bibliography show considerable breadth and depth of research; the prose is straightforward. Very worthwhile for anyone interested in Ireland.

As a masterwork of history this is worth comparing to other recent work on other histories, to the likes of, e.g., James McPherson's treatment of the American civil war (Battle Cry of Freedom), or Tony Judt's look at recent Europe (Postwar), as broad-canvas history that does not neglect the social changes or the people caught up in the times. It's a good trend and Mr. Ferriter seems to be in the front rank.

A lecturer at St Patrick's College, Dublin City University, Ferriter, barely in his mid-thirties, has produced a massive compilation of Ireland's 20th century worthy of a professor's lifetime's worth of research and reflection. The fault with this book is its abundance of riches: the level of detail combined with the breadth of topics creates a volume overwhelming the casual reader in its heft. In 760 pages of text (and another 120 adding citations, a bibliography, and index), Ferriter combines his own interpretations of Irish historiography with a survey of past historical study- along with many primary sources from archives, novels, biographies, journalism and memoirs. Ferriter largely builds upon Joe Lee's Ireland 1912-85, often commenting upon Lee's findings before adding his own qualifications. In his introduction, Ferriter explains that due to the rapid changes in the past twenty years, another look at Ireland's momentous shift from First World location with Third World subsistence economy, hero worship, and clerical ethos to the current more multicultural, liberalised, and secularised consumer culture impels his investigation. Ferriter listens to the famed and the nearly anonymous and gives all ample hearing. He avoids grandstanding or polemic even in such treacherously tempting areas as republicanism, priestly scandals, DeValera's visit of condolence to the German Legation after Hitler's death, feminism, or the constant blaming by so many of his countrymen of all their problems on England-even as they often rushed eagerly into its hearty embrace for employment, emigration, and entertainment.

Tom Garvin, paraphrased by Ferriter, teaches how an Irish Republic under DeValera could be revolutionary and reactionary. Those who led it grew up in Edwardian years, full of nationalist yet anti-modern romanticisation of a return to a rural and aesthetic purity. `They rebelled against their elders but, according to Garvin, were sceptical about the possibility or desirability of mass democracy.' (76) Sharing newer findings by historians such as Patrick Maume, David Fitzpatrick, and Peter Hart, Ferriter agrees that clerical conformity guided the rebels along a small-town, `middle-agrarian' perspective often angled oddly against the urbanised cadre that comprised so many of the lower ranks of the IRA.

In his narration of the wars, Ferriter remains fair-minded. Page 234 quotes a Limerick monsignor's witnessing of a Black and Tan atrocity; page 235 informs us that one of those labelled as `agents' killed the morning of Bloody Sunday 1920 was a member of the Veterinary Corps sent over to buy mules for the British army- whose second cousin was Michael Davitt. Fratricidal mayhem expressed pithily. Ferriter shares the dreams of those out in `16 and after without glossing over the hard-headed realism of those with whom they shared bed and board. Seán Ó Faoláin's autobiography Vive Moi! is used well: in it, Séan recounts how his wife Eileen told him and his comrades: `You are all abstract fanatics.' (255)

After the wars came the uneasy peace. Ferriter examines the controversy over Angela's Ashes. Roy Foster castigated Frank McCourt's pose: `if any message is to be read out of the book, it is that you have to get out early as you can and head west.' (qtd. 361) Ferriter adds: `The weakness of this criticism is that it fails to acknowledge that for many this was a necessity rather than a choice.' With the limits on American immigration post-1924, most fled east. DeValera's ideology trapped itself defensively. Protestant Britain equalled Catholic Ireland's foe. That the two nations shared far more than they divided was shunted aside. Morally, the Church formed the bulwark against not only the C of E but the secular forces that were overwhelming nominally Christian England and much of Western Europe in the 1930s. Ferriter refers to Freud's `narcissism of trivial differences' that distorted minor differences to mask major similarities. Those left behind, Ferriter more than once asserts, put on the poor mouth a bit too often. When JFK visited, a red carpet was not laid out for fear it be rained on, at a projected damage of ₤250. Ireland for most of its independence could not have sustained even the stunted prosperity it earned if not for the remittances of its emigrants, the emptiness of its villages, and the lack of competition among those who remained for farms and spouses.

Those able to live mid-century in Ireland, contrary to so many ballads, may have regretted their residence. 2.5% of married women were employed, according to reports in 1945. During the `Emergency', only 740 autos were licensed throughout the 26 Counties. In 1954, 64% of Irish remained unmarried. Across the border, in Fermanagh, 58% of occupied dwellings were deemed uninhabitable. Poet Anthony Cronin in the last issue in July 1954 of the quixotic publication of non-conformist intellectuals, The Bell, diagnosed the malaise. `Here, if ever was, is a climate for the death wish.' (462) However, Ferriter relies heavily on Brian Fallon's An Age of Innocence: Irish Culture 1930-60, which argues for a much more vibrant and iconoclastic undercurrent than is conventionally granted those thinkers and writers who stayed.

Even John Charles McQuaid, as John Cooney's biography (reviewed by me) has shown thanks to the opening in the late 90s of archives, had a modicum (at times) of forward thinking despite their own Tridentine limitations. Mary Kenny's Goodbye to Catholic Ireland (reviewed by me) is employed to good efect. Like Kenny and Louise Fuller in her own recent account of the decline of Irish Catholicism since 1950, Ferriter never forgets that such leaders as the Archbishop, Dev and Collins, like us, are prisoners of their own time and training. Heroic missionaries, craven abusers, corrupt pols, ecumenical neighbours. He balances the reality that is recorded against the distortions and stereotypes that too many lazy and facile commentators on Ireland have peddled during the last two decades.

Ferriter quotes Joe Lee again to good effect. Emigration to England helped Ireland, in my analogy, much like Mexico benefits from the $15 billion sent yearly back by American migrants. Lee: `few people anywhere have been so prepared to scatter their children around the world in order to preserve their own living standards.' (472) Perhaps revisionism at its 1989 harshest, but Ferriter accepts the brunt of Lee's attack. Earlier, a late 50s Tuairim study group sought to upend the `contradictory "Sinn Féin" myth in Irish economic thinking.' (543) Patrick Lynch is quoted: `it is because so many emigrate that those who remain at home are able to afford a standard of living that could not be maintained if Irish political independence implied the obligation to cater on their own terms for all the people born in Ireland since the state was established.' Lynch, as would Lee three decades later, exhumes a disturbing truth. Politicians ignorant of economics could not run the capitalist state. The Church, Ferriter documents, repeatedly interfered with social activism, preferring to exalt the poor towards spiritual uplift rather than risk communist-delivered or socialist-tainted tangible but soul-deadening gains. The myth that Ireland wept as her children left for exile, Ferriter's sources demonstrate, must be abandoned for financial triage. Often, the parents were all too glad to see their weans off, perhaps subconsciously to be sure.

Economic fables and political pandering interfere with later Irishmen and women seeking the self-sufficiency trumpeted by the rebels as Ireland's goal. Nationalist legend also sought to trump facts. Ed Maloney's history of the IRA (reviewed by me) is often relied upon as Ferriter's main source for recent developments; it proves much more useful than Before the Dawn does for Ferriter! Fintan O'Toole's 2000 observation is quoted: `the largest number of republican paramilitaries killed in the conflict were murdered, not by the RUC or the British Army, or the loyalist terror gangs, but by their own comrades. The INLA and the IRA have been responsible for the deaths of 164 of their own members. The British Army, RUC, UDR, and loyalist paramilitaries killed 161.' (637) Ferriter efficiently presents all of the complications of the past thirty years in his final section.

Like all of the chapters, chronological division allows him to roam about topics organised under brief captions, these quoting an apropos phrase from the primary source he cites to make his main point for that page or two. While this approach makes the book more like a series of short essays rather than a narrative history in the usual sense, it also slices up the immense text into portions better able to be read at leisure.

This is not a book for beginners into Irish history, but one to enter after you've learned the basics from briefer works. Also, this is not a book to plow straight through, but one to be waded in. Albeit opposite from Don Akenson's idiosyncratic and semi-factual A History of Irish Civilization (reviewed by me), the Canadian and the Irish historians share an ability to serve up heaps of history as digestible bite-size pieces. The nourishment derived from both of these affordable textual repasts should fuel many mental workouts.

(This is excerpted and re-edited from a longer review to be published in the online Belfast-based journal The Blanket.)

While this book contains a mountain of statistics, the statistics do not address the real issues in the transformation of Ireland; it only addresses the social issues. the book comes up short with regard to economic, political, educational, and technological issues that were at the real heart of the transformation.

Capping off the shortfalls is the dragging style of the presentation. It take perseverance to finish the book.

The book is a 3-star at best - or maybe lower.

This work is indeed an impressive compilation of facts and figures from 20th century Ireland. It does give many original sources, even if the author tends to refer to or quote from alternative secondary sources. The book requires of the reader to know in advance the significant outlines of Irish history in the 20th century, because many of the most significant events are commented on, but not actually recounted or explained in detail. And secondly, it doesn't really seem to capture what went on, i.e. the actual process of transformation that this work is supposed to describe and interpret.

A specific problem is the way in which Ferriter avoids the serious issues which arise out of Church-state interaction in the 20th century. In his efforts to find a balanced position, he falls over backwards. For example: to attempt to relativise the extensive censorship of books and films, as well as everything else, as being not uniquely Irish at that time, is not quite true. The banning of pornography and violence happened extensively in other countries too, of course; But how many other countries tended to ban any reference to divorce, contraception or illegitimacy, for instance? How often was Casablanca banned in post war western countries, merely by virtue of the fact that its central characters were not married to each other?! To suggest that such censorship was in accord with majority opinion is possibly true, but seriously problematic: does a majority have a right to decide on what everyone else is entitled to read? And was that whole business of censorship, an approach as close to 'thought control' as was achieved in 20th century Europe, not a seriously contributive factor to the poverty and backwardness of Ireland in relation to other countries in Europe? ALL of the media were significantly under Catholic control: it was only when television came in in the 1960s that this hegemony was broken.

The role of the Church-State complex is seriously underestimated by Ferriter: there was hardly a non-state organisation of any significance which was not significantly under the control of the Catholic Church, and government ministeries were much more likely to follow instructions from the bishop than vice versa. Ireland was not a clerical or theocratic state in the constitutional sense, but it was effectively so, given that most senior civil servants, and so on would have been found every Sunday in the front benches of the Church. Including the police commissioner, as we know from the Murphy and Ryan reports.

All in all, a valuable work of reference, no more, no less. But the real story of the transformation of Ireland in the 20th century is yet to be written.

I was very disappointed in this book. While this does represent the trend of Irish history (combing sociology, anthropology, history and literature) I was hoping for much more of a history of Ireland and an economic and political look. This is really the SOCIAL transformation of Ireland and I was disappointed that very little analysis was put on economics and their tremendous growth since the European Union. If you are looking for just the history see the Oxford History of Ireland.

Whatever his fellow Irish intellectual colleagues may indicate on the book cover to the contrary, Diaramid Ferriter's, The Transformation of Ireland, is not a readable book. Its length is long, its chapters, paragraphs, sentences, and words likewise. Diaramid has not a simple seven-word sentence in him.

It was once said that Catholicism is what everyone, everywhere at all times always believed. The contribution of its Catholic heritage to Irish character seems to be that every Irishman is always wrong about every thing at all times and every Irishman knows exactly what is wrong about what every other Irishman is saying. It is this inalienable right to be disagreeable, contentious and argumentative that Diarmid pitilessly chronicles in his encyclopedic book: an infinite panorama of discord. One is grateful that, indeed, time runs in one direction only for its spares us learning how, for example, de Valera would have disagreed with contemporary Irish feminists. All other generational, intra-generational and intergenerational disagreements are fair game for inclusion in The Transformation of Ireland

Howsoever the British may have tyrannized the Irish people, one cannot but observe that the Irish, in learning their language and publishing books such as this, have extracted some fit measure of revenge upon the people who spake the tongue that Shakespeare spake. Diaramid, according to the book-cover, is a "lecturer" at Dublin University. That's an understatement. To his credit, it can be said that judging from the numbing comprehensiveness of this book, he works hard at it. Puts me in mind of Hubert Humphrey, of whom Lyndon Johnson said, "Hubert prepares for delivering a 2-hour speech by taking a deep breath."

An occasional reference to the population of Ireland, somewhere around 3.5 million people, gives me cause to ponder. That is about the population of metropolitan Boston. How could so few people make so much fuss as has Ireland in the 20th century? Two salient facts provide a clue. One is that for most the 20th century the Irish were staggeringly unexposed to education. And second (and related) Ferriter notes Ireland's lack of any liberal humanistic tradition, such as played a role in most other European nations. Consider for a second, "Irish contributions to science." Can you think of one?