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In 1845, before the potato famine decimated its population, Ireland was Western Europe's most densely settled country; since then, its 9,000,000 inhabitants have dwindled to 2,824,000.
Ireland is the only nation in Europe whose population has shrunk in that time. While Irishmen left the country in waves, they entered it in a trickle, for Ireland has the lowest marriage rate, and one of the lowest birth rates, in all Europe. To the Neo-Malthusian, the Irish would seem models of ecological balance. In a country where food production is barely increasing, 66% of all Irish males between 20 and 39 are bachelors, and vast numbers of men and women die single.
"Holy Ireland." The exodus from Ireland, which Novelist George Moore ironically justified by calling Ireland "a fatal disease" from which "it is the plain duty of every Irishman to dissociate himself," continued after the country won its independence from Britain in 1921. As in most other newly liberated countries, the men who took over were romantic revolutionary heroes, steeped in the Otherworld but ill prepared by experience to meet the practical challenges of building a modern nation.
"When Drake was winning seas for England," in Poet Patrick Kavanagh's rueful lines, "We sailed in puddles of the past." For the most part, Ireland's postliberation politicians and intellectuals seemed determined to ignore the seas for the puddles. For years they kept up the strident outcry over partition and winked at endless, squalid raids on the Ulster border. Ireland, after all, was a divided country for decades before such latecomers to partition as Germany, Korea and Viet Nam.
In many refreshing ways, the land has remained true to its leaders' vision of a pastoral "Holy Ireland." The Irish spend only one-fifth as much yearly ($8,000,000) for defense as New Yorkers pay each year for garbage collection. They do not support a single superhighway, nightclub, parking meter, strip joint or subway. The suicide rate is Europe's lowest. Crimes of any kind are few and getting fewer—although the authorities admit that the nation's commonest transgression, larceny of pedal cycles, bears watching.
Porther & Shamrock. In economic terms, Ireland's insular ideal proved disastrous. True to the aims of the Sinn Fein (Ourselves Alone) movement, the government in the '30s discouraged foreign investment in Ireland, raised some of the world's highest tariff barriers to exclude British goods and protect new, highly inefficient domestic industry. The result of its belt tightening was a rising tide of emigrants that by 1956 reached 600,000, highest since the 1890s.
Among those who stayed on, there was a paralyzing sense of frustration and fatalism. Life was not only hard—it was dull. To many Irishmen, the perverse, pervasive mediocrity of their culture was typified by Gaelic-worship.
The dying Gaelic tongue had become the badge of Irish nationalism during the revolution—though few of its leaders could speak it. Even before 1949, when the Republic of Eire was established, the government had made Gaelic language study compulsory in the schools, even encouraged students to take other subjects entirely in Gaelic.