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In De Valera's shadow, the new Taoiseach (pronounced tea-shook) has labored single-mindedly for decades to break the vicious circle of declining living standards and dwindling population that threatened Ireland's very survival as a nation.
Lemass' bold program of industrialization has already created new jobs and wealth in an economy whose primary product, beef for Britain, has been the same for as long as there have been potatoes to go with it. As new opportunity at home lowers the perilously high emigration rate, the government is finally beginning to rebut the bitter quip that Ireland is "a home for men rather than a breeding ground for emigrants and bullocks." The country's rapturous huzzas for John Kennedy were more than an expression of pride in a Gael made good —to many young Irishmen, he seems more real than the Irish martyrs whose streaked statues fill Dublin's parks with silent declamation. Jack's homecoming epitomized to the Irish the successful distance they themselves have traveled.
Spanglish & Spells. However far they may go, the Irish retain a deep sense of their past and the myths and memories that crowd their wild, lonely land.
"The gods whistle in the air," wrote Sean O'Faolain. "The Otherworld is always at one's shoulder." The Otherworld and the real past are inseparably bound together in the Irish imagination and in the runic place names, from the pagan landmark called Two Breasts of Dana to ancient Waterford, where in 1170 Strongbow, the Norman Earl of Pembroke, clamped 71 centuries of English rule on Ireland. What the mists of legend cannot obscure is that for ages of religious persecution and economic exploitation, through countless risings and reprisals, the Irish slaved, starved and battled for their land as stubbornly as if Ireland itself were the Isle of the Blest.
The remote little island in the Atlantic has cast its shadow across the civilized world since the Dark Ages, when Irish priests and scholars roamed Europe expounding new (and mostly heretical) theologies. In a diaspora even greater than the expulsion of the Jews, more than 3,000,000 Irishmen in the past 100 years have scattered across the world, forming what an Irish writer calls "one of the world's great secret societies, with branches everywhere"—though the society was never very secret. Everyone has his own list of great Irishmen, but there is no denying that the gifts of the Irish have always enriched other countries more than their own. Their talent for politics, for faith, above all for words, gave more brilliant politicians, distinguished churchmen and magical writers to the U.S. and the rest of the world than to Ireland. Perhaps only their talent for fighting, while amply exported, as amply remained at home.
Though in foreign lands, they invincibly stayed themselves; they also showed an uncanny ability to adapt to other cultures, whether in Latin America, where they concocted a lilting lingua franca known as Spanglish, or Down Under, where they developed a spectacular sport known as Australian Rules, a blend of Gaelic football and rugby.
Though there was hardly a country or a field of endeavor where Irishmen failed to make a mark or a mint, the diminishing number of their compatriots at home kept wondering fretfully if they were a vanishing race.