A country in fast-forward

We went from poor to rich, conservative to progressive, miserable to happy - but what is it that led to Ireland's remarkable change of fortune, asks Roy Foster

At the Fianna Fáil ardfheis of 1998 the party leader and taoiseach of the Republic, Bertie Ahern, memorably observed, "The cynics may be able to point to the past. But we live in the future."

While this Spielbergian concept may have surprised some of his hearers, he was expressing the zeitgeist more profoundly than perhaps he knew. Even if we are in some doubt about living in the future, we know we live in "contemporary history". There are those who think historians should not trespass into it, and, though several have written studies of Ireland carrying the story up to 2000, it is considered a risky endeavour. But there is no "30-year rule" of the mind, no self-denying ordinance that stops us from analysing things that have happened over the last generation. And what will preoccupy historians in the future - where we now apparently live - is the transformation of Ireland during the closing decades of the 20th century. It should be possible for a historian to look at the latest period in Irish history from a historical standpoint, as opposed to that of a sociologist, or an economist, or a political scientist - though the insights of all these disciplines must be employed.

There are already sources available (the reports of investigative tribunals, Dáil debates, a plethora of statistical studies, the memoirs of the 1960s generation); and it may be enlightening to juxtapose such evidence with testimony from other, less conventional sources, as Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change, 1970-2000tries to do. But there is also a sense that we are experiencing history in fast-forward mode, as transformations accumulate in economic practice, in social and religious experience, in cultural achievement and in political relationships, both at home and abroad.

What was the expected Irish future around 1970? In 2000, the Central Statistics Office published a volume called That Was Then, This Is Now: Change 1949-1999, which showed - unsurprisingly - that the Ireland of 1949 might have existed on another planet when compared to the country at the turn of the millennium. But the same would be true for most European countries. For Ireland, it is the rate of change in the last 30 years of the 20th century that is most bewildering. Partly because of the archaic nature of life in Ireland up to then, the shock of the new could only be all the more radical.

Much as the sheer lack of accumulated industrial encumbrance enabled the Irish economy to leapfrog into the microelectronic age, the sudden embrace of revised moral codes allowed the new Irish laws on homosexuality to become, at a stroke, more liberal than those in Britain. Perhaps because so much of the Irish stereotype (and the tourist brand-image) conjures up an unchanging land where time stands still, the Irish faculty for changing practices or expectations with bewildering rapidity has been underestimated.

LAWS RELATING TO metric measures, or European-style car registrations, or smoking in public, or the use of plastic carrier-bags, are passed with a speed and a lack of recrimination that would not be possible in the more cautious political culture of Britain (or England, at least: here, as in other areas, new-look Scotland presents some intriguing parallels to Ireland). This is in part due to the relentless centralisation of Irish government; Joe Lee has astutely pointed out that this is one way in which Ireland remains wedded to a British rather than a European model.

But there are other suggestive questions of political culture behind this readiness to adopt change, indicated informally by a senior civil servant who advised the government on European policy-making: "We don't have a bureaucratic system like the French or the Germans. We're just opportunistic future-grabbers." When did the future present itself to be grabbed?

Looking back, we can see that certain statistics suggest where change was likely to begin; for one thing, the 1971 census recorded the first population increase since the foundation of the state, and the demographic profile of Ireland over the next 30 years was not only to become exceptionally young but also to demonstrate a level and variety of immigration whose effects have been phenomenal. The other kind of transforming immigration would be the inflow of capital, and in analysing Irish change there is an understandable tendency to give great weight to the idea of "Waiting for Microsoft".

But offshore investment is only part of the story, and though Luck and the Irish begins with the economic miracle, there are other motors of change that must be measured - in the areas of religion, family patterns, sexual attitudes and politics. Accompanying this has been, as in the early 20th century, a striking efflorescence in the creative arts. The achievements and insights of writers are themselves part of the story, and so is the marketing of the culture industry.

Nothing is irreversible (while the number of multimedia companies in Dublin quadrupled between 1997 and 2001, they subsequently went into a symmetrically steep decline).

Nor is it insignificant that the idioms and metaphors used by those creative writers who have used the new Ireland as their canvas often involve corruption, incest, exploitation and disorientation, while the themes of inequity, inequality of opportunity and the fracturing of social integuments are as prominent in Ireland as in any other boom economy. But the economic and psychological boundaries that defined the country have altered and expanded: Ireland has been declared by the National Competitiveness Council, at the time of writing, the most globalised country that ever yet was seen.

What has changed, perhaps decisively and forever, is a question of attitude. In 2004 the Economist cheerfully ranked Ireland's "quality of life" as the best in the world, a conclusion arrived at by feeding economic statistics and family patterns into a computer along with such factors as life expectancies and divorce rates. The result was a top score of 8.33 out of 10, beating Switzerland and Norway into second and third place. Gratifyingly for many Irish people, the UK languished at 29th.

As this vividly illustrated, Ireland was now identified as the location of happiness - an increasingly fashionable concept for economists and sociologists. After centuries of victimhood and misfortune, by the early 21st century the Irish had got lucky: not only in lifestyle and earning power but in sport, music-making, international literary acclaim and even (thanks to global warming) the weather.

Luck and the Irish tries to chart some of these changes and their implications, without predicting how far all this apparent good fortune is likely to exist in steady state. There is also a large area where the Irish experience from 1970 was not identified with feel-good economics and sunny expectations of a liberal future opening out into pluralist new horizons: for much of the period under review, the country's image was inseparable from violence in the North. And if, for the Republic, 1972 ushered in an era of change symbolised by constitutional alterations regarding Europe and the position of the Catholic Church, as well as the impending retirements of archbishop McQuaid and president de Valera, the year also saw Bloody Sunday in Derry and ended with bombs in Dublin and the establishment of the Special Criminal courts. This book is about the Republic of Ireland. But one central question concerns the connection between seismic change south of the Border and the eventual acceptance of the necessity for change in the North, as well as the whole question of the relation between the two political entities. Paul Bew has written about the stealthy advance of "partitionist history" - the way that historians project into the past the assumption of the Border, with which we have all grown up but that formally entered Irish history only in 1920. One of the themes of this book concerns the extent to which the period sees the entrenchment of that partitionist history, and the acceptance of a partitionist attitude in "the South".

In the language of the sociologists and economists, Ireland has become a "Flexible Developmental State", but how far does flexibility - and development - stretch? Again, images from Irish writing come to mind, strikingly (from the poets Paul Muldoon and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill) the traditional idea of a magic island appearing in the Atlantic, whose outline and boundaries expand or disappear in the act of observation.

SURVEYING THE FLUCTUATING contours of contemporary Irish history, and charting the diverse energies that have driven it through a period of flux and change, recalls, again, FSL Lyons's definition of Irish "culture and anarchy": "a diversity of ways of life which are deeply embedded in the past and of which the much advertised political differences are but the outward and visible sign". Conflicting cultures, in this view, were crammed together in an island too small to hold them.

Written in the late 1970s, Lyons's analysis emphasised that - in the early 20th century at least, and by implication even in the present day - the resources of the country were stretched to breaking point by the resultant tension. If regarded from the early 21st century, these intense conjunctions can be seen as a sign of strength, not weakness. Borders have expanded in various ways, not least by the intense interest in Ireland sustained by the Irish diaspora, projecting back images of the island to itself. This book may itself be part of that process.

Certainly, one of the striking changes that it surveys is the alteration and expansion of the Irish national narrative in several ways: the perception of the North, the internationalisation of the economy, the shattering of the Catholic Church's "moral monopoly". It is possible that the 1990s may come to be seen by future historians as the period when the resources of the country - cultural and political as well as economic - expanded in a way that made them able to accommodate what Lyons diagnosed as the anarchy threatened by competing cultures. But it is also possible that the last convulsive quarter of the 20th century might be seen in Ireland, North and South, as not so much a Great Leap Forward as a series of interconnected crises, whose outcome must remain unknown.

This is an edited extract from Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change, 1970-2000, by RF Foster, published by Penguin/Allen Lane