My upbringing – I was brought up in Wexford – was completely abnormal. We never had an outside toilet. I went to boarding school at eight. We never had any difficulties. We were never hungry. My situation in the 1960s and 1970s was completely unrepresentative of mainstream society. I didn’t do the Leaving Certicate, as l left school to return home because my father was dying of cancer.
I’m 65 now. I have four grown-up children, and have a fifth grandchild on the way. I live in Ireland by choice. I think it has a number of overwhelming advantages. Living in a population of five million people is so much more personable than living in the UK with 60 million people. The quality of life in Ireland is absolutely unequalled in many terms, including moderate climate. The intimacy of Irish life is something I cherish, I’m very much a people person. The other huge advantage we have, that we absolutely denigrate and take for granted, is that we speak the English language. This is a passport for young people to go anywhere.
There have been two or three major changes in Ireland over my lifetime. The first is the displacement of religion. This has had a huge upside in terms of the authoritarian impact of the Roman Catholic Church. However, we’ve probably reached a point now whereby we’ve moved from an authoritarian regime as regards the way we live, to a nice happy medium in the 1990s and 2000s of live-and-let-live in terms of marriage equality, to a situation now where there’s a disrespect for organised religion.
The other big change I’ve seen is that people do things much later in life. Life expectancy has changed, people settle down much later in terms of parenting, in terms of getting a home. And that whole thing of doing things much later – I think the jury’s still out on whether that’s wise or not. If you’re 40 and you start to have kids, will you have fertility problems? If you’re 40 and start a mortgage, will you be paying a mortgage into your pension lifetime?
‘I’m very fortunate. But I can see the younger generation are getting screwed over’
My sister is the only woman from her secondary school class not living in Australia, and she emigrated to Switzerland
Sarah Webb: By age 12, I was reading Stephen King and all kinds of dodgy horror books
‘The best thing about Ireland is that people will put themselves out of their way to help you’
The other huge change has been for women. I came from a well-to-do Protestant family and my grandmother would have had staff in her house. Even into my mother’s time, women like that had children and they had help. They didn’t do the ironing. They didn’t do the cleaning. And they mightn’t have even done the cooking or the washing up. That has all changed for my wife, and for my daughter especially, who is a mum in her 30s with three kids under five and who is a principal of a school. Our societal expectation of women is to be super-mum of the year and to have a career as if they had no children. The pressures, the responsibilities and the obligations have become much, much harder on women, and I would say on young couples in general. The pressure to have dual-income parents is something that did not really exist, certainly in the last century. That burden has fallen on women more especially and more acutely for those 20 years that they’re full-time parenting as well as full-time working.
There was a time, unbelievably, which I can vividly recall when there were no mobile phones. People spend perhaps half their day looking into a mobile phone. It opens up so much access to information. But I think people haven’t factored in there’s a difference between information and knowledge. I think people have lost the sense of common sense in a lot of things.
The other thing I’ve noticed in Ireland is that we don’t have leaders anymore. We just have managers. I can think of lots of people in the semi-State, politics, the Civil Service, business who were absolute leaders and set the tone. Now we just have systems and layers of red tape. We cannot get anything built, because everything has to go through the most tortuous planning process. There will never be someone like [Charles] Haughey again, and that’s a great thing. I don’t idealise Haughey, I can see his absolute failings in terms of enriching himself, but he did have an ability to get things like the International Financial Services Centre done, which wouldn’t have existed but for political action. For a small country, we have completely lost our agility.
[ Ivan Yates: ‘I could count on two hands the number of nappies I’ve changed’Opens in new window ]
If you delay a project by three to five years, you are effectively doubling the cost of it. This is really coming down on a new generation that aren’t able to afford to put a roof over their heads, are permanent renters, and who won’t have a defined benefit pension. The boomer generation, who are nearly always the objectors, have screwed over an entire next generation of adults. And they have no understanding of it, no remorse, except for maybe “why are 30-40 per cent of 30-year-olds still living with their parents?” That’s as far as it impacts on them.
I still say that Ireland is the best place to live. I’ve seen good times. I’ve seen crashes. I’ve been through bankruptcy. I’ve seen all the ups and downs that life can bring. I’m very fortunate in many respects. But I can see the younger generation are getting screwed over.
In conversation with Jen Hogan. This interview, part of a series, was edited for clarity and length. The podcast Paths to Power, hosted by Ivan Yates and Matt Cooper, is available now on podcast networks.
