HISTORY: News from a New Republic: Ireland in the 1950s By Tom Garvin Gill & Macmillan, 234pp. €24.99A new look at what's regarded as the darkest decade in our modern history throws light on the trials of today

THE 1950S IS NOW universally regarded as the darkest decade in the history of the Irish state. It was a time when economic stagnation, mass emigration and the overweening power of the Catholic Church led some to question whether independence had been worthwhile. Tom Garvin in his latest exploration of this state’s history focuses on what the newspapers of the 1950s tell us about the country at that time. In a typically original approach he challenges many of the now conventional assumptions about the decade.

For him the 1950s were far more complex than received wisdom would have it. He defines it as a decade in which modern Ireland began to emerge as people questioned why independence had failed to deliver economic and social freedom for the majority of the population. His heroes are the elements of the political, business, trade-union and intellectual elite who dragged the country belatedly into the modern world of free trade, open debate and consumerism, leaving behind the narrow horizons defined by economic protectionism and the obsession with partition that defined the outlook of so many of the aging revolutionary generation.

Garvin emphasises that the modernisers had to overcome many difficult obstacles. He says that while the 1950s have been presented in journalism, academic work and popular culture as “a society in which the thrashing of children, cruelty to animals and an essentially superstitious popular religious culture held sway” the reality was that the system worked for two-thirds of the population.

He also points to the fact that despite repression and censorship there was a relatively lively intellectual and cultural life and that a very large minority of people enjoyed a “somewhat bucolic but leisurely life-style” and another large minority enjoyed a more modest version of the same thing. One of the key points is that the modernisers had to fight popular opinion, which was largely reactionary and opposed to change.

The contradictions inherent in the 1950s lead Garvin into some contradictions of his own. He insists that his hero, Seán Lemass, formed the view back in the 1920s that free trade was the way forward for the economy. That is hard to square with the record of Lemass as the rigid enforcer of a highly protectionist regime from the early 1930s to the late 1950s while he was minister for industry and commerce.

Lemass may not have had much choice in the 1930s, when the world turned protectionist, but he surely could have done more in the decade and a half after 1945 to persuade Fianna Fáil to ditch the suffocating policy if he really believed it was the wrong one.

Garvin acknowledges the contribution to modernisation made by some leading members of the two inter-party governments between 1948 and 1957, but he still tends to give almost all the credit for the creation of a more open economy and society to Lemass and to Fianna Fáil for finally seeing the light.

The initiative taken by the Fine Gael minister Dan Morrissey in setting up the Industrial Development Authority, opposed tooth and nail by Lemass, and the far-sightedness of minister for finance Gerry Sweetman in introducing the low corporate tax rate and appointing Ken Whitaker as secretary of the Department of Finance deserve more than passing references.

So too does the forward thinking of the Labour Party leader William Norton, demonised in Noel Browne’s self-serving memoir, who prodded the Labour movement in the direction of accepting free trade and European union.

Garvin writes with verve and wit. His description of Sinn Féin of the 1950s as “the illegitimate little half brother” of Fianna Fáil is just one example of his style.

The author’s provocative approach is evident in his summing up when he draws some parallels with the present and suggests that “magical thinking” has not been abolished just because the semi-pagan superstition and belief in divine intervention that characterised Ireland in the 1950s have gone into retreat.

He says that nowadays superstition disguises itself in the “fascination with UFOs, homeopathy, placebo medicines, unnecessary operations, managerial pseudo solutions to non-problems, much of economics, quack diets, fake educational degrees, global warming, touching wood and not believing anything you read in the papers”.

A more immediately obvious parallel between the Ireland of the 1950s and today is economic depression and the wide-scale disillusionment, bordering on despair, at the failure of political leadership that brought us to this pass. Another and maybe not so obvious parallel is the selfish stance of powerful vested interests, as well as the disparity in the impact of the recession on different generations.

In the 1950s the interests and obsession of the older generation dominated political debate and policymaking, and the young fled the country in despair. Today, despite the economic whirlwind, much of the older generation are comfortably off, secure in their property and pensions, and determined to protect their privileges regardless of the consequences. Meanwhile the young are leaving school and college with little hope of jobs, economic security or any better prospects abroad.

What Garvin’s exploration of the 1950s shows is that things are never as hopeless as they look. What is required now is courageous and visionary leadership at all levels of society to persuade people that the sacrifices being asked of them are worth making. With luck we are living through the darkest hour before the dawn rather than beginning a slide back into the kind of poverty we thought had been put behind us for good. One way or another, Garvin has done a service in illuminating the debates that helped the country get through the despair that threatened it half a century ago.

Stephen Collins is Political Editor of

The Irish Times