Current Affairs: Global Ireland: Same Difference By Tom Inglis Routledge, 304pp. £13.99Tom Inglis's classic book on Irish Catholicism, Moral Monopoly, explored one kind of transformation in Irish life; his new work treats globalisation as an issue affecting history, society and culture.
As a sociologist, he tells us that he has decided to reverse one of the basic mantras - never to work from the particular or anecdotal to the general. Ireland is his case-history, and personal experience is often instanced.
There is a strong argument for this: Ireland is a potentially illuminating arena for examining cosmopolitanism, "glocalisation" and other buzz-words of the moment, and the consciousness of the individual in a society undergoing radical change is an irresistible subject for autobiographers and novelists as well as sociologists.
Inglis bravely pushes the boat out quite far. He begins with some broad-brush history, not only invoking (rather too simply) how we "aped our colonial masters", but examining self-imposed limitations that continued after independence. This is particularly the case with religion, where he is, as usual, brilliantly insightful.
The Catholic "habitus" (a world-view that was psychological and emotional as well as theological and doctrinal) is evoked - a concept derived from the French sociologist Bourdieu, and much used by Inglis in previous work. Bourdieu has since denounced globalisation emotionally, but Inglis's use of the term is more nuanced.
Global Ireland suggests that religious attitudes have endured in Ireland more than Moral Monopoly implied, and Inglis offers a new emphasis on what the Catholic world-view meant for Irish selfhood. It is worth questioning, though, whether this created a sense of national psychology that is specifically Catholic-Irish; the 1950s social mores he describes would be instantly recognisable to a southern Irish Protestant born at the same time. While Northern Ireland is not part of his brief, it is worth remembering the sociological and anthropological studies that find close parallels between the social practices of the two communities, separated though they are.
BUT INGLIS IS dealing with much more than religion. Other motors of change, notably emigration and immigration, have inflected the Irish meaning of globalisation. His own research into prejudice within Ireland 30-odd years ago confers a uniquely interesting angle on this transformation. Some of the New Irish are certainly following the time-honoured tradition of becoming more Irish than the Irish themselves, but this book does not suggest it is universal. And if not, can the balancing-act be sustained whereby Irish people attempt to combine global and Irish culture in a way that makes them "the same but different"?
Above all he concentrates upon consumerism and what it means for Irish attitudes. "Whereas Irish national difference was created through a reinvention of the past, contemporary individual difference is mainly created in and through the media and the marketplace." Thus the culture of mortification, repression and death has been replaced by that of self-fulfilment and self-adornment. But Inglis points out - and this is the fulcrum of this carefully thought-out book - that the internationalisation and cross-boundary commodification of everything from clothes to cappuccinos, powerfully present in Irish life, has - so far - coexisted with specific Irish practices and values (even if they are only paid lip-service). Keeping this balance is the key to Irish differentiation, though much has been lost with the old "habitus" that made it attractive - the intimacy of rural life, for instance, and the absence of huge disparities of wealth.
RURAL DEPOPULATION, AND the changed nature of Irish farming, deserve more attention than they get. But the final section of the book returns, engrossingly, to a concrete case of suburbanisation. Inglis takes as a case-study Ballivor, Co Meath, a town whose proximity to the metropolis has brought dramatic change - starting in the 1970s with a large Japanese-owned factory (now closed). Here we see how globalisation alters actual lives, as well as the effects of the revolutions in Irish car use and urban sprawl. Ballivor's schoolchildren exemplify hybridisation or "creolisation" of culture, notably in sport, where soccer mania co-exists with a powerful GAA presence. But there are also signs of class division, and a divide between incomers and established residents.
In national terms, Inglis assesses the "guardians" who sustain Irish cultural capital - the GAA hardly less than the church. The broadsheet media and "high culture" receive less attention than they might, but he does show how the process can be facilitated as well as threatened by the communications revolution.
Thus the All-Ireland series is beamed into bars all over the UK and North America, and Irish music morphs into "world" music - globalisation indeed. Ireland can now feed an avid appetite for shopping, driving and using mobile phones just as much as anywhere else in the world, and more than most; Inglis is trying to show how this has come to make us think and feel.
The celebrated Economist survey of 2005, which put Ireland at the top of the "happiness" league, is referred to more than once, but one suspects Inglis is sceptical. In Ireland as everywhere, and perhaps more than in most places, those conducting surveys are at the mercy of being told what people think they want to hear. Knowing how to listen, and reading the underlying signs, are the qualities needed. They are continually evident in this engrossing and intelligent book.
Roy Foster is Carroll professor of Irish history at the University of Oxford; his latest book is Luck & the Irish: A Brief History of Change 1970-2000