A quick way to understand modern Ireland would be to say that its dominant party, Fianna Fáil, founded a century ago, tried and failed to create two new social classes. It then succeeded, partly by accident, in creating an entirely different social class – which it is now, bizarrely, dissolving.
The first failed effort was the creation of a peasantry. One of the party’s founding aims was “the distribution of the land of Ireland so as to get the greatest number possible of Irish families rooted in the soil of Ireland”. This was Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a republic made up of sturdy citizens who were free and independent because they had their own land.
It was not in itself an ignoble aspiration but it came about 150 years too late. And it was not compatible with the Catholic Church’s insistence that every married woman must go forth and multiply without let or hindrance. Smallholdings and very large families don’t go together. Contraception would have been rather helpful to the fulfilment of Fianna Fáil’s social aims – but it was anathema to the party’s religious values.
Thus while Fianna Fáil did largely complete the job of transferring land from the old landlord class to the former tenants, the farms that resulted from this process were destined for eldest sons only. The rest of the children – often upwards of half a dozen – had to go elsewhere.
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Hence the need to create a second social class: an industrial proletariat. Thus, while the party’s founder Éamon de Valera said that Fianna Fáil depended on “small farmers most of all”, he added that it might also be “regarded as a labour party”.
This was not fanciful. Fianna Fáil did try to use high tariff barriers to create a protected industrial base. And in literal terms it did much to build a working class – in the kind of public housing estate I grew up in, people moving from small farms mixed with families moving from inner-city tenements to form a new kind of suburban proletariat.
The problem, though, was that this process of urbanisation and industrialisation was not able to move quickly enough to absorb those who couldn’t or wouldn’t stay on the farm. Partly, this was due to bad luck – the Great Depression and the second World War were not great times for underdeveloped countries trying to make the leap into the industrialised world.
Since urban industrialisation couldn’t come quickly enough to Irish people, they went to it instead. There was a rapidly-forming Irish proletariat – but it was in Boston and Birmingham, Dagenham and Dorchester. There was a vicious circle: protected Irish industries depended on a home market that was going abroad.
Hence the TK Whitaker/Seán Lemass revolution of 1958: the opening of Ireland to outside investment and to world markets. It was a second attempt to create an industrial working class and for much of the 1960s and 1970s it was highly successful.
So successful, though, that it is easy to forget it didn’t really last for very long. What Whitaker and Lemass were imagining was, basically, factory work. Instead of labouring on assembly lines in urban England or America, young Irish people would do those jobs in Dublin and Tralee and Galway.
If you look back on the founding document of this revolution, Whitaker’s Economic Development, there is a glaringly conspicuous absence: education. It’s not discussed at all. The unspoken assumption was that most boys and girls would continue to leave school at 14 and go into the factories that were to be built with foreign capital.
Those who actually did so faced a bleak long-term future. The industrial working-class that Fianna Fáil conjured in the 1960s and early 1970s was decimated by the effects of Ireland’s membership of the European Union, by the oil crises of the 1970s and by the long depression of the 1980s.
The rise of AI is breaking the link between a university degree and a good white-collar job: entry-level positions for graduates are rapidly disappearing. AI may be as bad for the middle class now as deindustrialisation was for the working class in the 1980s
Thus, neither the peasants nor the workers of Fianna Fáil’s imagination fully came into being. Small farms were increasingly unviable and the working-class housing estates built in the 1930s and 1940s were blighted by unemployment. But something else was moving in, gradually but inexorably.
It was the very thing that had been left out of the Whitaker/Lemass dream – education. Donogh O’Malley more or less bounced the Fianna Fáil government of which he was a member into the (shockingly belated) introduction of free second-level schooling. And the Irish people grasped the opportunity with a fierce determination: over the course of two generations, we transformed ourselves from the worst- to the best-educated population in Europe.
[ Ireland’s governing philosophy is learned helplessness – and it is getting worseOpens in new window ]
What this educational revolution created was a new class that was neither Dev’s peasants nor Lemass’s workers. We became a middle-class society. The increasingly dominant social group was formed within a new holy trinity: university degree, white-collar job, mortgage.
This is the protective triangle within which Ireland could be remarkably stable even while it was undergoing tumultuous change. It was not what de Valera or even Lemass imagined and it was never thoroughly planned. But third time lucky: having failed with the peasants and the workers, Fianna Fáil succeeded in creating the Irish middle class.
And then it proceeded to throw a huge spanner in the works. In tandem with Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil has taken down one side of the triangle: the mortgage. The proportion of Irish people who own their own homes by the age of 30 has halved in this century.
Now, the other two parts of the holy trinity are looking increasingly dodgy. The rise of AI is breaking the link between a university degree and a good white-collar job: entry-level positions for graduates are rapidly disappearing. AI may be as bad for the middle class now as deindustrialisation was for the working class in the 1980s.
The great problem for Fianna Fáil is not its historic failures. It is that, with its disastrous housing policies, it lost touch with its own successes. It created a middle class but has little to say to a generation that cannot enter it.
