Like everyone who lived through 1980s Ireland, I have mixed feelings about the experience. Yes, life was a little simpler then, but what about the Viking pillaging, the regular outbreaks of plague and the risk of being eaten by wolves?
When Cillian Murphy told The Irish Times a couple of weeks ago that Ireland in the 1980s was “like the f**king dark ages”, he probably didn’t expect to be taken literally as well as seriously. But that is where we are now.
Murphy was doing his promotional duties for Small Things Like These, the screen adaptation of Claire Keegan’s novella set in New Ross in 1985. His comment, the film itself and, retrospectively, even Keegan’s book have come under fire from socially conservative commentators such as David Quinn, who argues that Ireland in the years before its progressive turn is now being caricatured to the point of absurdity.
The reality, he suggests, is that many if not most people were free to live their lives as they wished, without being oppressed by what the Boomtown Rats, in Banana Republic, called “the black and blue uniforms, police and priests”.
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Everyone has their own life experiences, of course, and Quinn is correct that “an awful lot of people were having an awful lot of fun”. If you were young and living in an Irish city in 1985, the clammy grip of Jansenist Catholicism was already faltering. But not if you were living in some other parts of the country, and definitely not if you were gay or had an unwanted pregnancy or had contravened some other moral diktat.
The truth remains that the 1980s in Ireland were dark. Not pillage-pestilence-starvation dark, but they were marked by appalling political violence, a long economic slump, cronyism and corruption, soaring emigration and bitter schisms over the demarcation lines between public and private morality. To these you can add the Kerry babies, Anne Lovett, moving statues and the viciousness of the abortion referendum. Frankly, the place was a kip.
As I recall it, there was also a pervasive cynicism and pessimism about the country’s future. What now seems obvious, but was invisible at the time, was that the mid-1980s were a moment of flux, a hinge point in the emergence of the country we know now. Cultural and social shifts were starting to happen but had yet to reach critical mass. The old regime still appeared intact, although it was actually rotting from within. It all made Ireland a weirdly disorienting, pre-postmodern sort of a place, where Bono and Macnas rubbed shoulders with Fr Michael Cleary.
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born,” the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci wrote in his prison cell in the 1930s, after being jailed by Mussolini’s regime. “In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” He could have been describing the Ireland of 1985.
Where Quinn and others do have a point is in highlighting the one-dimensionality with which this twilight era is depicted in contemporary culture. To me this seems less true of Keegan’s original story, which is an extraordinarily subtle piece of work, than it is of the film version, whose scary mother superior (played by Emily Watson) undercuts the original text’s point about the way social conformity is enforced.
My colleague Derek Scally, whose book The Best Catholics in the World explores this subject better than most, makes a strong case against the idea – commonplace these days – that a small coterie of villainous clerics and other authority figures were responsible for all that repression and intolerance. He draws parallels with the attitudes of many Germans to their past lives under a totalitarian regime, who portray themselves as innocent victims.
Such systems of control, he argues, can survive only with widespread co-operation and complicity, but that uncomfortable truth soon gets buried once the system has collapsed. In a recent opinion piece he criticised the depiction of the terrifying nuns in the screen version of Keegan’s story. That critique overlaps a little with Quinn’s, although the two probably differ in what conclusions to draw.
But now that the Make Ireland Great Again brigade have made a cause celebre out of Small Things Like These, conspiracy theories are in the air. “Operation trash Old Catholic Ireland never sleeps,” the right-wing website Gript complained recently, channelling the spirit of the rioters at the opening night of The Playboy of the Western World. The spirit of Old Catholic Ireland, it seems, still walks among us. Give me a cartoon nun any day.
