The Changing Face of Ireland

At the beginning of the 1990s, monolithic Ireland, fixed fast for half a century in the thraldom of confessional statehood, began a rapid transformation. The Catholic church was the first pillar of state to totter - of state, yes, for the church in Ireland had been for centuries as much if not more a political than a spiritual institution; indeed, as we have subsequently discovered, the Holy Ghost, which for long we had thought our reigning spirit, turned out to be a rare bird indeed within these shores.

The ecclesiastical power-failure in Ireland was precipitated by media revelations of scandals within the church, scandals which the church authorities had succeeded in covering up for decades even though many people, including many journalists, knew of them. Why the long, forbearing silence over the doings of peccant bishops and paedophile priests, and why suddenly the rush to print? Besides the draconian libel laws under which they were compelled to operate, Irish newspaper editors since the foundation of the state in the 1920s had gone in fear of being on the receiving end of what used to be called a "belt of the crozier", that is, a public rebuke from one of our princes of the church, who were among the most powerful and arrogant public figures in the country, or were so until the early 1990s, at least. One could lose one's job at the wave of an episcopal wand. However, even Ireland felt a waft of the winds of change that blew across Europe after the toppling of the Berlin Wall. There is no exact equivalent in the English language, or in the Irish, for the word glasnost, but suddenly things were being said aloud in Ireland that we had thought we would never hear uttered in public.

The unfolding of events in Ireland is never a rising curve but rather a series of bumps, at each one of which we feel a jolt like that which the sleepwalker experiences on being violently awakened. Something occurs, and opening our eyes and expecting to see our known and cosy if somewhat stifling bedrooms, we find ourselves instead teetering on a vertiginous staircase in the midst of unfamiliar and electric light. The rude awakenings the Irish spirit has suffered over the past 15 years have been both unnerving and invigorating. In a country so spellbound by religious and secular authority, the shocks we experienced throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s might have been expected to precipitate a national trauma, but no: roused from the sleep of centuries, we rubbed our eyes, gave ourselves a shake, and went on down the stairs to join the wild party that had begun in the rest of Europe at the end of the 1980s, even if, on the way down, we were afflicted by an uneasy sense of all that we have lost by having gained so much.

If this sketch of how we have handled our recent history smacks of approval, it is not intended to be so. It might be suggested, to put it no more strongly, that the fact that there has been no crisis in Irish public consciousness following the revelations of clerical scandal and widespread political corruption is an indication not so much of maturity as of moral laxity. Was it ever otherwise? In the 1950s, as the writer Anthony Cronin has pointed out, it was neither the church nor the state that the intellectuals of those days considered the enemy, but the Irish people themselves, sunk as they seemed to be in "suffocating conformity and stasis".

In recent times we Irish have discovered in ourselves, to our intense bemusement, a depth of cynicism hitherto barely suspected. Or perhaps cynicism is not quite the word. We do take the long view. Contemplating the church and state upheavals of the past 15 years, many would echo what the Chinese revolutionary leader Zhou Enlai is reputed to have replied when asked if he considered the French Revolution to have been a success or a failure: it is too early to say. An Irish novelist who lives in the heart of the country reports a neighbour remarking apropos the revelation of some new church enormity, "Ah, it was always the same; first it was the druids and now it's this lot."

New wealth washes at old memories. In the lush 2000s, it is easy to forget how meagre life was before we became a major exporter of computer software and Viagra, and how that meagreness persists in the darker pockets of the Irish psyche. The people in Inge Morath's photographs of rural Ireland in the 1950s would hardly recognise as their direct descendants the partying youngsters depicted by Stuart Franklin in the Dublin of 2003, yet when one looks closely at both sets of pictures one easily sees the family resemblance: there is the same tentativeness of expression, the same faintly desperate dreaminess, the same longing, the same air of having been, to echo Philip Larkin, pushed to the side of their own lives. Part of the legacy of so long a colonisation - the first Anglo-Norman robber barons crossed from Wales to Ireland in 1169 - is our sense of deracination within our own country. The language we speak is not our own, even after a century and a half of English: listen to any Irish conversation, at whatever class level, and you will clearly hear the suppressed melodies, as well as the hesitations and disjunctions, of the deep grammar of Gaelic.

Only the dourest curmudgeon would deny the improvements that have occurred in Irish life since the 1950s - or, indeed, since the 1960s, for Ireland took a long time before it began, ever so tentatively, to swing - even if those improvements were expensively bought. At the beginning of the third millennium the young know a freedom, intellectual, spiritual, financial, that their parents would not have allowed themselves to dream of. So what, the young will say, if the price is high? Nothing will come of nothing, as Shakespeare's very old king observed.

Northern Ireland is the chronic illness that has been afflicting the Irish body politic for the past three and a half decades, and which has been there for far longer than that, if one counts the centuries before 1969 when the cancer lay more or less dormant. The Irish have a special gift for euphemism - the second world war was known here as "The Emergency" - but the Troubles were a terrible time in the North in the 1970s.

The release of energy in Northern Ireland in the 1970s had its effects in the South. Yes, we sang, some of us, the IRA recruiting songs, yes, we burned, some of us, the British embassy - but did we know what we were doing, what a terrible beauty, in Yeats's by now clichéd formulation, we were helping to unleash? The South's indignation over the North's torments did not last long. As the photographs here of the Northern struggle show all too clearly, violence has an awful sameness to it. When you have seen 10 street riots, you have seen them all. Yet something of the pathos persists even now. The pictures of all those young men and women, hardly more than children, most of them, in their flares and flowered shirts, heaving stones and Molotov cocktails at British soldiers, the majority of whom, for their part, were hardly older than their assailants, are a testament to waste - wasted energies, wasted opportunities, wasted lives.

The fragmentary moments collected here provide a kind of kinetic vision, a peep-show display, of five and a bit decades in the life of a country - or two countries, depending on the shade of your politics. The philosopher Roland Barthes suggested that the peculiar potency of the photograph rests in the fact that the people in it are dead, or soon will be. Donovan Wylie's empty rooms, pregnant with presence, have the look, appropriately, of last things, last places - us or those curtains, one or the other will have to go - the final spaces awaiting Cartier-Bresson's children of the 1950s and Stuart Franklin's young party-goers of the 2000s alike. All go into the dark. Let us be thankful for these remnants of the light of other days.