Good thing the good old days are gone

States measure their progress by epic abstractions: sovereignty and territory, population numbers and gross national product. But people think of progress differently. For individuals, the gap between the past and the present is measured in more concrete things - the years you live, the illnesses you survive, the loved ones you lose to disease and premature death, what you can buy with the money in your pocket.

While many of the abstract problems of Irish statehood may seem to remain depressingly constant, by most of these measures, Ireland has journeyed light years since 1949.

As a timely reminder of this truth the Central Statistics Office this week marked its 50th anniversary by publishing That Was Then, This is Now, a statistical comparison of Ireland in 1949 and now. For anyone inclined to complain about the undoubted problems of growth and retreat into the mists of nostalgia for a kinder, gentler Ireland, it provides a stern dose of realism. If nostalgia is a vampire that sucks all the enjoyment out of the present prosperity, the book is both a fistful of garlic and a phalanx of crucifixes.

There are, at a superficial level, statistics that do seem to point to a more idyllic society. Ireland in 1949 was certainly a rural nation, with 60 per cent of the population living in the countryside, in villages or in small towns. Dublin was half its present size and Galway was a town of just 20,000 people. Reported serious crime was astonishingly low, with just one murder (a young farmer poisoned by his sister), 16 car thefts and two armed robberies. Irish prisons held just 580 inmates.

Only two per cent of births occurred outside marriage. Traffic problems were unknown, with just 15,000 cars registered in 1949. The twin robbers of time, the television and the phone, were still, for most people, almost unknown. Television, of course, was practically non-existent, while the average number of phone calls in the State in 1949 worked out at one per person per fortnight. Now, even excluding the ubiquitous mobiles, we make an average of six calls a day.

On the surface, then, the State was living up to its self-image of frugal comfort and easy conformity. In the frantic, congested 21st century where crime is an ever-present risk and almost 30 per cent of births are outside marriage, it is easy to be lulled by this vision of a cosy, rustic world. But beneath this apparent idyll, there were some brutal realities.

The starkest of them concern the most basic aspects of life - survival. One thing that older people do not need to be reminded of, for example, are the aching gaps in their own families. Not for nothing are family photograph albums haunted by absences.

In 1949, one child in every 16 born did not live to see his or her fifth birthday. (The ratio in 1998 was one in 136.) Around 100 women a year were dying in childbirth, compared to an average of one a year now. Tuberculosis, pneumonia, flu, whooping cough and other infectious diseases cast a deep, dark shadow. Life expectancy for men and women was just over 60, compared to 72 and 78 respectively now. Small wonder that in spite of a birth rate over twice as high as it is now, the population of the State was in serious decline because of the combined effects of emigration and early deaths.

Nor was the image of stable family life suggested by the low number of births outside marriage without its dark side. The official figures for 1949 show five cases of infanticide, a number that, given the secrecy of the crime, is almost certainly no more than a signpost to a much larger problem. An astonishing 6,000 children were detained in industrial schools, 1,500 more than the number of students that sat for the Leaving Cert.

If married women were at the centre of the home, it was partly because they had few choices. There were only half as many women in the paid workforce then as there are now. Women were obliged to give up their jobs in the public service and the banks when they got married, and over 80 per cent of professional women were either nuns, nurses or teachers.

NOR, for the most part, was the home itself anything like the nostalgic image of the spotless, neat-as-a-pin domesticity that featured in the American sitcoms. Two-thirds of houses had four rooms or less. Conditions were so primitive that it must have been a struggle to maintain even basic levels of hygiene. In 1946 (the nearest year for which statistics are available) nearly half of all households had no toilet and 400,000 of the 660,000 households had no running water. Just over 100,000 households had a bath or a shower. Whatever about our pure and clean souls, our bodies were probably not quite immaculate.

Nor were our minds especially well developed. The book reminds us how extraordinarily narrow the educated elite really was. There were fewer than 8,000 third-level students in 1950, compared to 112,000 in 1998. That figure hints at the broader inequality and lack of opportunity that made emigration a necessity for hundreds of thousands of talented men and women and ensured that almost 3 per cent of the entire Irish GNP in 1949 was made of up of emigrants' remittances.

Moreover, it is not even as if the conservative rural Ireland of 1949 was very good at doing the least that might be expected of - creating a vibrant agricultural industry. For all the effort and heartbreak that had gone into the creation of the State that became a Republic in 1949, it was still, in economic terms, essentially a colonial outpost of the British Empire, sending 90 per cent of its exports to Britain, two-thirds in the form of food and livestock. Nearly 320,000 farms created an agricultural industry worth only £128 million a year.

Altogether, the book shows that the only things that were rare in the Rare Oul' Times were health, education, opportunity, comfort and money; and that the best thing about the Good Old Days is that they are gone. These may not be the best of all possible times, but compared to life in 1949, they are not bad at all.