OPINION:MORE THAN half of us now flaunt the characteristics of middle-class life: home ownership, white-collar employment, third-level and professional education, association with other middle-class people, and a proportion (some say at least one-third) of net income available, after basic food and lodging needs have been met, for education, healthcare, consumer spending and other discretionary items.
But this is a relatively late development. There was of course a pre-history, but the significant first date is 1885, when the first of the Land Purchase Acts started the exodus of the Ascendancy. What happened then fulfilled Chateaubriand’s prophecy: “The aristocracy has three successive ages: the age of superiority; the age of privilege; the age of vanity; once it has left the first behind, it degenerates in the second and expires in the third.”
All across Europe (from Chekhov’s Russia to Lampedusa’s Sicily, not to mention in England, France and Germany) the Ascendancy’s “business model” had been undercut by the globalisation of trade in wheat and meat from the US, Australia and South America. Social and economic space was left for the urbanised professional and business class to expand into.
And a fascinating change of values. Yeats’s “men who ride on horses” loved above all physical courage, style and lineage; they cared less about education, law or honesty, things that the new middle class took seriously. With education came a respect for the new: it was usually the local doctor who bought the first motor car in the district, and middle-class homes were typically ahead of the grander Ascendancy houses with electrical fittings, plumbing and central heating.
The Ascendancy liked the dashing individuality of field sports. The middle class favoured rule-bound team games such as rugby, football and cricket. The Ascendancy thought it sensible to keep tradesmen waiting for their money; the middle class had a fear of debt, and a new respect of money.
In the early years of the State the middle class was still few in numbers. The 1926 census reported that although there were 66,000 farmers with farms over 50 acres and 15,000 clergy and nuns, there were only 2,051 doctors, 1,356 barristers and solicitors and 382 chartered accountants. But they were a vocal group, and one campaign provided a detailed (and in the event officially endorsed) description of middle-class living in 1932.
Since 1912 about one-third of Civil Service pay had been pegged to the cost of living index. When the index came down in the Great Depression, pay followed. The Civil Service Federation argued to the official committee on the cost of living figures (1933) that this was quite unfair, in that the index was over-weighted with items bought only by artisan houses – such as, they sneered, “margarine (third-grade)”. What was more, they argued, “the average civil servant’s household budget includes items which do not appear at all in that of a working-class household. Such items are travelling expenses, life insurance, medical expenses, restaurant meals, books, maidservants, etc”.
Middle-class people, the federation contended, were obliged to frequent different, less price-sensitive shops, and to emphasise “suburban residence, education, holidays, etc” that maintaining a middle-class lifestyle involved. The committee agreed and proposed setting up a separate index based on middle-class spending .
Now it was official. Despite the frequently repeated boosterism that there was no class system in Ireland, there was – anyone crossing the Liffey from Grafton Street to O’Connell Street could see it for themselves. And, as an ESRI report pointed out a few years ago, the middle class, starting with their firm grasp on secondary and third-level education, have long been able “to set their superior resources strategically against whatever changes – in institutional arrangements, public policy, etc – may appear threatening to them.
The middle classes of the Republic have succeeded admirably in this while continuing to espouse the rhetoric of equality of opportunity and denying the reality of class.
The next landmark is TK Whitaker’s famous 1958 study Economic Development. Although devoting a considerable majority of its analysis to the agricultural sector, it in effect liberated Irish industry and created an urban boom. Another step forward for the middle class. Thereafter, as the economy became more and more urban-oriented, there was steady progress. By the 1991 census nearly 200,000 were employed in the greatly expanded “professional and technical” category, including 9,800 accountants, 6,400 medical practitioners and 5,300 lawyers. Only the clergy, at 8,500, had shrunk.
Despite a stiff rearguard action (not least in these pages by John Healy and John Waters), liberal, urban, middle-class ideas and values were the loudest voices in the media and on TV, especially in ads. Just as there had been an earlier shift between the values of the Ascendancy and the middle class, with the latter’s dominance, there was now a shift from a culture of deference to a more individualistic one.
No longer did anyone in a suit automatically receive respect. A vivid example of this was the startling increase in alternative medicine: the number of such practitioners advertising in the Golden Pages shot up from 27 in 1985 to 265 10 years later.
Under the acid attack of the middle-class liberal analysis, many old certainties faded. The image of the archetypal Irish person as a Catholic male countryman went, as did the idea of a deeply religious race; that the Irish language was a unique key to the Irish soul; that it was unnatural that the whole island should not be under Irish rule; that we were prodigious book-readers; and that, as the ISPCC used to declare, “no country in the world counts its children more precious”.
One of the props of self-identity to be bruised was the idea that we were too fine and too sensitive to harbour a crass love of money or goods, perhaps dateable to January 1989, when Irish Business produced the first Irish Rich List. There for the readers to admire were the men (all men) who had made it. At the top, Larry Goodman, with assets of more than £200 million, then Martin Naughton of Glen Dimplex and Tony Ryan of Ryanair; in the next tranche, with £50 million plus, Ben Dunne, Michael Smurfit and the Earl of Iveagh, chairman of Guinness, and the only name remotely representing old money.
A new world was emerging – but since historians generally hate to come too close to the present, readers will have to complete the story for themselves.
Tony Farmar is an author and publisher. His most recent book is Privileged Lives – a social history of middle-class Ireland 1882-1989