In April 1963, the up-market Irish women's magazine, Creation, ran a feature on the latest ideas for dinner parties. This was a time when a new Irish middle class was inventing itself. The First Programme For Economic Expansion was well under way. American money was pouring in. John F Kennedy was due to drop from the sky soon. Fridges and televisions were filling the forlorn alcoves of kitchens and sitting rooms.
Large chunks of dirty old Georgian Dublin were being demolished and replaced with such charming edifices as Hawkins House, O'Connell Bridge House and Liberty Hall. The ESB was planning to demolish much of the Georgian terrace on Fitzwilliam Street and replace it with an altogether more dignified building by the up-and-coming Sam Stephenson. There were plans to fill in the manky old-fashioned Grand Canal with cement. Dinner parties were, for many, an astonishing notion. Mostly, men met their mates in the pub and women had a cup of tea and a chat. If you had visitors to the house, they were entertained with beer and whiskey and tea and sandwiches and a sing-song. So what were you supposed to do at a dinner party?
In the interests of its readers, Creation went to the experts. The new minister for justice Charles Haughey and his lovely wife Maureen, daughter of the Taoiseach, Sean Lemass, explained what would happen at a typical dinner party for six to eight people chez Haughey.
The glamorous couple would offer you, Creation informed the women of Ireland, "their special favourite, Steak Fondue. Small cubes of very tender raw steak, well seasoned, are placed on a platter. Then each guest, using a special two-pronged fork selects his pieces of steak and cooks them at the table exactly to his taste, in hot melted butter in the chafing dish. A variety of sauces and a tossed salad complement the dish." The lucky guests, added the magazine, "find Steak Fondue a very amusing novelty".
I imagine the average Fianna Fail voter reading this in 1963, when the average Fianna Fail voter still had a dinner of meat and spuds in the middle of the day, might have been like the man in the Bob Newhart comedy sketch to whom Sir Walter Raleigh has been explaining the use of tobacco. ("Tell me this again, Walt, you put the weed between your lips and set it on fire?") You wha', Charlie?
People are waiting for their dinner and you give them raw meat? And they have to cook it themselves? And somebody's taken two prongs off the fork? What's a chafing dish and do you put the red sauce and the brown sauce and the Yorkshire Relish in it with the butter?
But then, the average Fianna Fail voter probably wasn't reading Creation in 1963. Or if she was, she was reading it for a glimpse of an exotic new world, way out on the horizon of aspiration. The amusing novelties of our very own nouveaux riches were still far beyond the reach of most people, especially in Fianna Fail's heartland.
This was, after all, a time when more than half of houses in the countryside had no fixed lavatory facilities of any kind, indoors or outdoors. In the county of Longford, with a population of 30,000, for example, there were 1,600 indoor toilets.
When, later in 1963, the Haugheys advertised for a nanny (the pay was £5 a week), they stressed their house had both television and central heating. Clearly, these were still impressive possessions. And yet, in no time at all, fondue sets were what everyone dreaded getting for their wedding present from a maiden aunt. Perfectly plebeian people had been through their fondue phase and come out the other side. The garages and garden sheds of suburbs and small towns all over Ireland were full of them.
Within a few years, producing a fondue set at a middle-class dinner party would be an appalling lapse of taste, like having flying ducks or the Crying Boy on your wall or Mantovani on your Bang and Olafson stereo. People like the Haugheys would be mortified if you produced a copy of Creation from April 1963.
SNOBBERY, in other words, was getting harder. Before the 1970s, you needed relatively little money to be a cut above the social norm. Because the plebs didn't have much, it didn't take much to be better than them. Simple things like having dinner parties, knowing a bit about food, drinking half-decent wine, qualified you as a member of a social elite.
If you were a Minister, you could afford mohair suits rather than shiny nylon, tender steak instead of hairy bacon, melted butter rather than Stork margarine. You could send your kids to the Jesuits and the Sacred Heart sisters. You could maintain a status higher than what you came from.
But as more money came into the State and the middle class got larger, a ministerial salary, though enough for a comfortable life, was not enough to place you at the top of the social hierarchy. The magazines no longer gushed about your fondues.
If you were a normal, well-adjusted person, this hardly mattered. You could get over it. You could get your kicks from the power and prestige of office. You could even flatter your own ego by believing some of your own rhetoric about public service and patriotism and the importance of fostering the national ideal.
But if you were shallow and insecure enough to measure your worth by the enormity of your expenditure and the conspicuousness of your consumption, you had a real problem. The ordinary delights of the nouveaux riches were no longer enough. You had to look like Old Money.
It is a great historical joke that just as Catholic nationalist Ireland is coming into its own, it is haunted by Haughey's attempts to become an Ascendancy squire. It is the revenge of the landlord class. They lost their power. They lost the land. The IRA burned them out. But they left behind a particular image of wealth. The Big House. The horses. The exotic property in the West. How amusing it would have seemed to them that one day the State would be run primarily for the purpose of allowing the Taoiseach to ape the old gentry by becoming, literally, a beggar on horseback.
The problem was, of course, that all that stuff is fearfully expensive, too expensive, as it happens, for most of the old Ascendancy. There are self-made men who can afford it, but Haughey wasn't one of them. Yet how else could a man of destiny separate himself from the grubby consumers?
The rise of affluence in Ireland upped the ante on privilege from televisions and central heating to mansions, islands, racehorses, yachts and helicopters. If only steak fondue had remained an amusing novelty and mark of impossible sophistication, we wouldn't be pestered with tribunals now.