Whatever you say, say nothing

There were two sectarian states in place in the 1950s, North and South, inward- looking and ostensibly secure, secretly content with one another despite public claims and utterances. Each could point the other out in self-justification. They demanded that they be unquestioned and unexamined, and the demand was given widespread, mute acceptance. In the South individual speech and thought were equally discouraged. The moral climate can be glimpsed in the warning catchphrases: A shut mouth catches no flies; Whatever you say, say nothing; Think what you say but don't say what you think; The less you say, the more you'll hear; Mind you, I have said nothing. The demand for this subservience was driven most powerfully in the Republic by the Catholic Church. Against the whole spirit of the l9l6 Proclamation, by l950 the State had become a theocracy in all but name. The Catholic Church controlled nearly all of education, the hospitals, the orphanages, the juvenile prison systems, the parish halls. It is difficult to think of an area of life that its power and influence did not enter, unless it was among writers and intellectuals, and they did not count.

Church and State worked hand in hand. Women and single men were in a lower scale in the public services, a higher scale was in place for married men. Retirement on marriage was compulsory for women. The breaking of pelvic bones took place during difficult births in hospitals because it was thought to be more in conformity with Catholic theology than Caesarean section, presumably because it was considered more natural. Minorities had already been deprived of the right to divorce. Compulsory Irish was advocated as a means of keeping foreign corrupting influences out, but the Catechism was taught in English. The huge waves of organised devotion that marked the Marian Year of l954 were thought to be a greater triumph of Irish Catholic and national solidarity than the Eucharistic Congress of l932. Many of the new housing estates built at the time in the major towns and cities had a shrine or Marian grotto at their centre, or at the gable end of streets. The Mother and Child Scheme is so well known as to need no telling. There were individual politicians, such as Jack McQuillan and Noel Browne, who tried to fight this tide, but they were easily sidelined or driven out. Sean Lemass had already started to work for change from within the system, but the results had no immediate effect and would not be felt until long afterwards.

With Catholic Ireland triumphant and unchallenged at home, the image that went round the world was Ronnie Delaney falling on his knees at the end of the race after winning the gold medal at the Melbourne Olympics in l956, blessing himself and raising his gaunt face to heaven in a prayer of thanksgiving. In his brilliant and provocative history, Ireland 1912-1986, Joe Lee writes: "Few people anywhere have been so prepared to scatter their children round the world in order to preserve their own living standards."

BETWEEN l95l and l96l well over 400,000 people emigrated, far more than in any other decade in the entire century, nearly all of them to Britain. They were young, poorly educated for the most part, ill prepared. Names like Holyhead, Chester, Crewe were burned into the national consciousness; but this was a silent generation, and it disappeared in silence. The men sold their physical strength, the women their willingness to work long hours. They came home in summer, especially the women, bringing their children, and sometimes their English husbands.

"Cheers, Pa!" the English son-in-law said manfully when his wife's father took him to the pub and bought him a pint. "Lord, son, don't cheer in here or we'll get put out," ran the joke of the time. The boats were hardly better than cattle boats, and the boat to Liverpool did carry cattle in its hold. The trains were no better. Strangely, these emigrants were looked down on by the new elite that had done well out of Independence: it was somehow all their own sin and fault that they had to go into unholy Britain to look for work. People did not live in Ireland then. They lived in small, intense communities, and the communities could vary greatly in spirit and character, even over a distance of a few miles; and I believe the real pain or emptiness for many exiles was that the places they had left were far more real to them than where their lives were taking place and where their children were growing up with alien accents. There was a hidden bitterness, but sometimes it was not so hidden.

I heard it expressed cleanly on a London building site in l954. Many of the men were sent their Roscommon Heralds or Western Peoples from home every week. They read them greedily and often exchanged them at work. During a break from work a man was reading aloud from one of these newspapers. Another wet summer in Ireland was turning into a disaster and prayers were being offered in all the churches for the rains to cease. A young Clare man was in our gang. "May it never stop," he said without a trace of humour when the reading finished. "May they have to climb trees. May it rise higher than it did for fukken Noah." People do not live in decades or histories. They live in moments, hours, days, and it is easy to fall into the trap of looking back in judgment in the light of our own day rather than the more difficult realisation of the natural process of living, which was the same then as it is now.

That the climate was insular, repressive and sectarian is hardly in doubt, but there is also little doubt that many drew solace from its authoritarian certainties. And, in a society where the local and individual were more powerful than any national identity, much of what went on was given no more than routine lip service. The people it affected most were the new emerging classes closely linked to Church and State - civil servants, teachers, doctors, nurses, policemen, tillage inspectors. Most ordinary people went about their sensible pagan lives as they had done for centuries, seeing all this as just another veneer they had to pretend to wear like all the others they had worn since the time of the Druids. A ruined ballroom near where I live stands as a monument, its curved iron roof rusted, its walls unpainted. A local man, Patsy Conboy, built it with money he made in the US, and he hired famous dance bands all through the l950s. It was the forerunner of the Cloudlands and the Roselands and all the other lands, and he called it Fenaghville. In spite of being denounced from several pulpits, Fenaghville prospered and Patsy Conboy became a local hero. People came by bus, by lorry, hackney car, horse trap, on bicycle and on foot to dance the night away. Couples met amid the spangled lights on the dusty dance floor and invited one another out to view the moon and take the beneficial air. "There wasn't a haycock safe for a mile around in the month of July."

All the money Patsy Conboy made on the dancehall was lost in two less rooted ventures, a motorcycle wall of death and an outdoor, unheated swimming pool. It might have helped if they had been denounced. Today the climate has swung to an opposite extreme in that everything religious is now held in deep suspicion. A new injustice may be replacing the old. It should be remembered that many who entered the Church at the time were victims themselves. Brothers were recruited then at a very young age, generally from poorer families glad to give over their upbringing into the respectability of the cloth. Many young men and women entered the convents and the priesthood for high and idealistic reasons, but with the stigma of leaving then so strong, what chance had they in an ancient, ruthless, autocratic organisation? "An only life can take so long to climb/ Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never", Philip Larkin wrote in Aubade - if indeed those beginnings were ever wrong.

Dublin was more a provincial capital than a city then, much smaller, friendlier. It was easy to fall into conversation with people; sometimes it was harder not to. We walked everywhere, cycled, hopped on buses. An old comedian of a conductor would wallop the bell and shout out "Lodger's Rest!" as the 54A approached Lawrence Road with its evening load of civil servants. It was an exciting place to be young and have intellectual interests. There were good secondhand bookshops. One book barrow in particular, on a corner of Henry Street, was amazing. Many of the books on the barrow would now be described as modern classics. How the extraordinary Mr Kelly acquired them we never asked. There were inexpensive seats at the back of the Gate Theatre, and many pocket theatres, often in Georgian basements. Out in Dun Laoghaire there was the Gas Company Theatre, where we had to walk through the silent showroom of gas cookers to get to see Pirandello, Chekhov, Lorca, Tennessee Williams.

THE city was full of cinemas. I remember seeing Julius Caesar with Gielgud and Brando playing to full houses in the Metropole. At weekends, cinema tickets were sold on the black market. One such black marketeer, a pretty girl I knew, showed me a fistful of unsold tickets one wet Sunday night shortly before eight o'clock and said: "If I don't get rid of some of these soon - and at bloody cost at that - I'll have to let down me drawers before the night is out." And there was the tiny Astor on the quays where I first saw Casque d'Or, Rules of the Game and Children of Paradise.

We paid little heed to the pieties of Church and State. The Censorship Board was thought to be a joke. Even an obscene book, we would argue, could not be immoral if it was truly written. Most of the books that were banned, like most books published, were not worth reading, and those that were worth reading could be easily found and quickly passed around. There is no taste so sharp as that of forbidden fruit. This climate also served to cut out a lot of the pious humbug that often afflicts the arts. Literature was not considered "good". People who need to read, who need to think and see, will always find a way around a foolish system, and difficulty will only make that instinct stronger. Hatred of Britain, like Civil War politics, appeared to be part of an old foolishness. British institutions, like Penguin Books and the Listener, were windows among other windows on the world.

I think of the decade beginning with the lighting of the paraffin lamps as darkness came on, the polishing of the globe, the trimming of the wicks, the adjustment of the flame, as it had been done for generations. By the end of the decade every house had electricity. Most people had radios, very soon they would all have television. The world that had stayed closed and certain for so long would soon see nothing but change.

Novelist John McGahern has abridged and written an introduction to Letters of J.B. Yeats, edited by Joseph Hone, published by Faber next month.