Empire: World History - 246. Ireland Transformed: From Banning Condoms to Exporting Viagra

Episode Date: April 14, 2025

How did Ireland go from a farming economy to the home of Big Tech and Big Pharma in Europe in a few decades? Why were women imprisoned in “Magdalene Laundries” in Ireland until 1996? How did Irish society grapple with abuse within the Catholic Church? To conclude our series on Ireland & Empire, Anita and William are joined by the brilliant Fintan O’Toole, author of We Don’t Know Ourselves, to reflect on how Irish society has transformed since the 1950s, and how the country’s colonial past informs its future. _____________ Empire Club: Become a member of the Empire Club to receive early access to miniseries, ad-free listening, early access to live show tickets, bonus episodes, book discounts, and a weekly newsletter! Head to empirepoduk.com to sign up. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk  Blue Sky: @empirepoduk  X: @empirepoduk goalhanger.com Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Senior Producer: Callum Hill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening, and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Before we get going with this episode, just to warn you that this will contain references to historic sexual abuse and paedophilia, so listener discretion is advised. Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnand. And me, William Durepoor. You're an excitable man today, aren't you?

Because we've got the brilliant Fintinotool, author of We Don't Know Ourselves On, and it's going to be just the best way to crescendo what has been, I think, one of the most fascinating series that we've done so far. It's an extraordinary journey that we've both learnt so much from. I mean, as we said at the beginning of this series, shockingly little of Irish history is taught in any part of the British educational system.

I certainly, and I think you also have felt that we've done a sort of two-month catch-up of all the stuff we should have learned when we were 13 or 14 and was never taught to us. I mean, a huge and vital part of all our histories. Fenton, welcome. You are such a sublime writer. And I know Willie wants to talk about your own story. And I know, Willie, you were sort of entranced with Fenton's experiences. So I've been reading this wonderful book of Fenton. Finton, for those who don't know his many, many wonderful books, is one of the great men of letters of our time, one of the great public intellectuals of modern Ireland. And I have completely loved his memoir. We don't know ourselves, the personal history of modern Ireland.

And although it hadn't actually been part of our original plan, I've been loving your reminiscences of sort of Ireland in the 50s and 60s, or not your reminiscences, but your research of your, what was going on during your childhood, that I would love to begin by asking you to just give a little sketch of Ireland at that period, because although we've gone forward in Northern Ireland and looked at the 70s and the Troubles and the Good Friday Agreement, we slightly left Southern Ireland with Devalera triumphant, Michael Collins dead, the Civil War resolved in Dev's favour. What happens now in 1950s Island, the world that you discovered when you were researching your and childhood for this memoir. So you've been dealing brilliantly, of course, with empire. And, you know, Ireland being the kind of pioneer, really, of breaking away from empire. And I think that's where you

left the south of Ireland, really, you know, which is in the beginning of the 1920s. And it's a triumph in one way. It is an extraordinary achievement, you know, for a small country to have managed to take on the empire and at least somewhat win. But by the 1950s, by the time I'm born. people are beginning to wonder, was it worth it? And the reason for this is, I mean, Ireland had a really bad run of it. Civil War, 1923, terrible way to start off your new state. It disillusions everybody. Economically, of course, very damaging. Partition had already happened. And remember, partition takes out the industrial base of Ireland. You know, most of the industry is in the northeast, that's gone. So you're left with, and I'm only slightly exaggerating to say a kind of

giant cattle ranch. Right. Its economy, therefore, is largely still a colonial economy. It's basically feeding the English cities, right? Shipping cattle in large numbers over the sea to Liverpool and Stranra. Exactly. You know, that cattle boat is really what sort of haunts people in a way. It's so crude because you're not even getting jobs from processing beef. You're sending these cattle off to be fattened up. And the really haunting thing is that cattle are on the bottom of the boat and the people are on the top. You write Fenton, and it's a figure that is extraordinary. Three out of five children born in Ireland in the 1950s leave the country. Yeah. You know, this is an extraordinary hemorrhage. And, okay, the hemorrhage has been going on for a very long time. I know you've

talked about the famine. You've talked about the mass emigration to the United States and North America. And that's part of the Irish story. But the worst part is in the 1950s, people are emigrating to England and Scotland to a lesser extent. So they're going, people are voting with their feet to, if you've left the empire, you're going back into it, literally. And I mean, growing up, is it that, you know, one day all your neighbours have gone or, you know, the friends that you played with, they just, you know, are people sort of vanishing from your life? The reason we're talking to you, I guess, and I should spell this out, because the last episode, we ended with the Good Friday Agreement. And we've talked about the politics

and the big macro stuff. But this is really to understand the psyche of the people who lived through it and you are one such, and you've examined this yourself. So what was it like being a little boy? And is it as basic as that, you know, so and so from number 23, they're not there anymore and how is this empty out? What does it feel like? Putton puts a lovely list at his father writes of all his cousins, and they're all living in Brighton and Torquay and Liverpool and summer in Canada. Let him tell me then. Shush!

Come on. Would I ever interrupt anyone? So all my father's family, I mean, he had loads of siblings. So they're all in England. You know, I found a list that he had, the addresses, you know, of his siblings. One is somewhere in Australia, you know. And the rest are in Birmingham, London, you know, all that. And therefore my cousins are there.

Where I grew up was sort of teeming with kids, actually, because it was a sort of new working class suburb of Dublin. So there were lots of kids. There wasn't a sort of people were disappearing, but it was that if people came to visit, cousins came home into the area, you know, they spoke with English accents. So you had two stories in your head, right?

You had the official story, which was our great triumph over the English. We broke away, we established our independence, And then you have, but hold on, are we really independent? So the economy was overwhelmingly dependent on Britain. And pegged officially to the pound. The currency is part of the sterling zone. Yeah, so we were still in the sterling area.

This may seem a kind of ridiculous little image, but my father was a bus conductor. He collected huge numbers of coins, right? He would come home for his break, whether we rummaged through, he'd have this big bag of coins. and half the coins were English coins. And I remember as a little kid, you know, you value the, you know, the pennies and the

troupony bits that you might have. And again, like, you know, I was completely familiar with having in my pocket the same kind of things you would have had in your pocket, Queen Victoria, King George, you know, all that stuff because it was one-to-one. And therefore, the currencies were completely interchangeable, which meant, of course, that Irish economic policy, Irish fiscal policy was completely said in London. So you had a sort of hyper-nationalist myth. about our independence, but the reality was very, very different.

Fintin, you give extraordinary figures for Irish poverty, which are incredibly striking. You say how two-thirds of Irish homes had no electricity in 1945, and as late as 1961, 75% of rural homes in Ireland had no plumbing, and 50% had no sort of lavatory whatsoever. The electricity is one thing, because you can kind of understand that as a big heroic story, you know, eventually places get linked into an electricity grid and there's a whole kind of literature in Ireland about the wonders of electricity. But just think, I mean, Seamus Heaney, for example, I'm writing a biography of Shamishini the moment, like, Hini's earliest memories, and this is in Northern Ireland, even, you know,

in rural Northern Ireland, is of a pre-electric world. Really? There's no electricity, you know. So, so candles, candles. candles and fireplaces. Candles and lamps. I mean, it's Victorian, really, in many ways, isn't it? Almost kind of forever. You know, you could stretch back thousands of years in a way, in his mind. Pete, in the fire.

And the peat fire, you know, the turf fire. But in a way more extraordinary to me, a few years ago I was in Kenya and I was watching people hauling water. Both of you know this very well, you know, just the sheer drudgery. And it's mostly women and children who do it, you know, of having to haul water. water. And then I realized, you know, when I was a kid, when we visited rural Ireland, my grandfather's home place in remote Wexford. That's what you did. As a child, you were sent out, you know, to pump water, bring it back. And you saw women doing this all the time. So it was a very, very underdeveloped place. And, you know, this is one of the reasons why people emigrated, right?

People, you see, we knew that there was another world. People were sending back their letters, their postcards from America, you know, from London. So it wasn't like people were enclosed in this fairly primitive world. They wanted those basic aspects of what it was to be a modern person, but they didn't have them. But the picture you paint, Fenton, is not just of a place that is poor and lacking in sort of modern amenities. But also, you describe it as an agrarian theocracy, the hold of the church, the censorship of movies, Casablanca being released without any of the kissing in it. without any of the passion, Joyce being cancelled from the stage.

And also it sort of dovetails into what I wanted to talk about as well, which is, you know, the reason these things were cut out is because of the power of the church, surely. I mean, and what is the place of the Catholic Church at this time? So it's everywhere. So the great tragedy of partition, we can argue, and you've had this argument about whether it was inevitable or not, but its effect was it separated out Ireland.

And again, you've told this story in life. of other post-colonial societies, but it separated out, right? So it meant that neither part of Ireland had to have a pluralist democracy. The north, you had this kind of Protestant state for a Protestant people. And in the south, you had a Catholic state for a Catholic people. So the Protestant minority was, it wasn't kind of brutally discriminated against her, I think, but it was made clear that this was a Catholic country. When I was born, I mean, over 90% of the population was Catholic.

And when I say Catholic, I don't mean just, you know, ticking a box on a census form. I mean, devout. Rosary, mask going, it's everywhere, you know. And therefore, the institutional church, which after all was much older than the state, you know, it was there long before the state was established. It already had control at a time the state was set up

of the education system, the hospital system, whatever primitive forms of social welfare there were. And then it had this kind of moral monopoly. So an example of this I gave when I was writing about this was like the weekend I was born, so I was born in February, 1958. That weekend, the Dublin Theatre Festival, which was the big kind of cultural event, was cancelled entirely for 1958 because the Archbishop of Dublin let it be known that he was unhappy, that there were works based on Joyce's Ulysses, there was a play by Sean O'Casey, the Protestant Communist,

you know, and there was some works by Samuel Beckett, you know, there were things he objected to, He didn't make a statement. He didn't give a sermon. It just filtered out that he was unhappy. And the whole festival was just cancelled as all it took. And families would, I mean, just because it's hard to understand if you live here, we haven't lived with that kind of regimented religion in our modern history. Speak for yourself.

I went to a Catholic school. Well, yes, you did. That's true. That's true. That's true. But the general experience of people here is not that. But in Ireland at the time, and just, you know, paint a picture for people all over the world. The priest held a very high position, you know, no matter at what level, you're talking about, you know, sort of very high up, someone letting it be know that he's not happy and the whole festival collapses.

But even at the very lowest level, you know, it's the priest. The priest is coming. The doors open to the priest. You refer to the priest. I think you have to remember that what happened through all the history that you've so brilliantly dealt with, you know, Irish identity, or at least, this kind of Irish identity gets associated with Catholicism. So it's not just a religion, it's like a nationality and identity. And it's a compensation right as well. So with all the poverty, with all the underdevelopment, how do you deal with that? You say, well, we are the most Catholic people in the world. We are the exemplary Catholics. We're a shining beacon of spirituality to this material lost world, you know. And it's nonsense. And everybody knows it's nonsense at some level, but it does work and it gives extraordinary authority. So the priests, as you say,

I mean, there were loads of priests. Like the church that I serve mass in, you know, would have had close to a dozen priests. You know, they were everywhere. In a Catholic parish in Scotland where I grew up, we had a whole succession of Irish priests all my childhood. You had so, you were reducing such an excess of them. You exported them. We exported priests. because, you know, because, of course, it was also a career path as well. I mean, you know, in a relatively limited society, you know, the priesthood had an enormous prestige and pretty good life, you know, you had a nice house, you had a housekeeper, you had a car, you had all that sort of stuff.

But the big point of this was to control women and to control female sexuality, you know. So, I want to talk about all of those, but you have an intriguing line that you wrote, which is the church successfully disabled a society's capacity to. to think itself about right and wrong. Yes. You know, so, I mean, what the psychological consequence of this really was that it outsourced morality. Essentially, you did what you were told. You know, at least that's what you thought you were doing.

I mean, of course, there was all sorts of hypocrisy, but hypocrisy is not morality. You know, hypocrisy is kind of getting around the law or getting around the rules. You know, in terms of what people thought they believed, you know, it was, basically given to them. And then this was reinforced by the state. So remember, divorce is unconstitutional. It's not just illegal. It's unconstitutional. Contraception is completely banned. You have, and you mentioned this already, but very heavy censorship of literature, of movies. I mean, Willie mentioned Casablanca, but it's worth to say like in the Irish version of Casablanca, all references to them having had an affair in the past in, you know, in Paris or whatever.

is completely cut out, so you can't understand the plot whatsoever. The film would not have made any sense. I remember as a kid got to movies, they were jump cuts. I mean, we were doing avant-garde cinema long before anybody else was. You'd have these jump cuts completely illogic. But you don't remember. So this control was pervasive. You talked about Albania getting a TV station before Ireland.

We finally got TV in 1963, yeah. And indeed Albania had one. But what would you have seen if you turned on the TV that night? I was only five. I don't remember the opening night. It probably wasn't out there for it. But you would have seen the Cardinal, you know, the first thing. You would say like blessing, blessing television, you know.

So it was pervasive, any organization, any event you went to, like even at a local level, I mean, the priest was there to give the blessing, you know. Everything was conducted under the ages of the church. Fenton, we make joke about this now. But of course there was a very dark side to this. And you talk about the vast religious penal colony. The Magdalene Asylums where 800 children are buried in a tank because these are children that are not wanted and they're basically let starve.

I mean, it sounds like something unimaginable from Chichescu's sort of Romania or something. I mean, the Magdalene laundries have certainly caught the imagination of filmmakers and writers and poets because it is just the demonisation of women who have had the temerity to love is just appalling. How much people know about what was going on in those magdalen laundries where women were separated? They were pregnant and they were discarded by families, taken in, brutalised and then separated from children and God knows what happened to them. In many cases, women who were incarcerated in the magdun laundries were not even pregnant. Sometimes they had had babies outside wedlock. very often they were deemed to be in moral danger or to be posing a moral danger to somebody else.

Wow. So children who were abused, children who were raped, or, you know, flighty girls. Anybody, you know, the priest and the mother, the family sometimes, you know, decided that they wanted rid of somebody, you know. So you had these institutions and I think you ask exactly the right question, which is how much that people know about it. They knew everything about it. These were commercial laundries. I mean, people sent their laundry to be processed by slave labor. This was slave labor. And everybody kind of knew this at one level. The last maglondri took close, which was in 1996, is in the middle of Dublin.

I mean, it's not on some island off the west coast. It's five, ten minutes walk from the general post office, which is like the kind of regard to the center of Dublin, huge institutions. These were all big, big buildings. They were also part of a broader system, as you say, this kind of penal colony system. So you had industrial schools where children were sent. You tell a story about a boy opposite you who steals a bike and just disappears, like something in South America. There was a kid just lived on the road opposite me.

Georgia, he was in school with me. And I think he was eight. Could have been 10, but around that age. And he just disappeared from school. Where was he? And then the word was that he had stolen a bike, allegedly, and he was taken off. And I always knew these words. The letter frack is a place name of a place in Connemara.

Now, Connemara is, you know, very far west, right? It's way out in beautiful, but pretty harsh kind of Western Ireland. There was this huge institution where children were incarcerated under the control of Christian brothers, Christian brothers were kind of lay Catholic order, all men. And this was just one of many, but I always knew these words. I knew these place names because this is what you were threatened with. And of course, they were subjected to appalling abuse and neglect, physical violence, but also huge amounts of sexual abuse.

And all of this stuff was going on. There was enormous sexual abuse by priests in parishes as well. So it wasn't just out there. I mean, it was also in people's lives. When I was at school, secondary school, you know, there was a very open kind of pedophile abuser, or, you know, just would do it every day in class. I mean, kids knew it. You know, so if kids knew it, adults must have known, too.

But did the adults then say, look, you know, just don't talk to me about it. It's a church. Just, you know, I don't want that kind of talk around the table, because that's certainly what seems to be conveyed in the literature that's been written subsequently. I think there were two things. I mean, one was that not wanting to confront this, because if you confronted it, you had to do something, and then what could you do?

That's the second thing, right? It was, okay, if you did decide. And some parents did, but what were you going to do? We know from like inquiries and all that sort of stuff. Mostly what people did is they went to the parish priest to say, look, this guy's doing this horrible stuff. The parish priest would, you know, if there was enough complaints, would say, yeah, I'm terribly sorry, you know, we're aware of this. He needs a bit of education.

We're going to send him off, you know, a bit of treatment and he, you know, but it'll all be fine. And so there was a massive system of covering up. I mean, the church knew all this. And shuffling around. systems shuffling around. And remember they could send them to America. And those great Boston Globe investigations are where a lot of those priests were Irish. Absolutely.

And this was a system that they had in place. But the other thing is, ultimately, if you were really brave when you went to the cops, you know, what would happen? And I detail one case, for example, near where I grew up in Cromlin, there was the children's hospital, main kind of children, I suppose, there. The guy who was the chaplain of the children's hospital was taking photo. of children naked. He sent these off to be developed to London. He must have had some sense. This was not a good thing to be doing.

But the shop in London that he sent it to got onto the police. You know, they saw these photographs. The British police then send them to the Irish police, and they send the photographs back. The commissioner of the Irish police goes straight to the Archbishop and says, we've got a bit of a problem here. And the Archbishop says, oh, terribly sorry, but you've done the right thing. I'll sort this out.

he moves the guy out and moves another pedophile into the same hospital. So this is really where the sickness is, the psychosis of this is. It's a cliche, but absolute power corrupts absolutely. And this is the historical irony of the church's dominance, which was that they were so dominant that they became corrupt, arrogant, and ultimately destroyed themselves. You know, that actually then, when all this stuff starts to come out, they had no way of dealing with it. They were used to just having power and then had no way of coping with all of this.

Well, let's take a break here. And when we come back from the break, let's start talking about that loosening of the hold of the church. Because if we're talking about Irish identity, it's such a pivotal part of what Ireland thinks of itself. And indeed, it's something that would have been unthinkable when you were a kid in the 1950s, what then later happens in the 1990s and 2000s. Join us then. Welcome back. So we were talking about the hold, the very tight hold of the Catholic Church. And before you're all writing, we are not suggesting that all Catholics are Peterbiles. So let's just get that out of the way. But there was a problem in the church and in a place where a theocracy is so

very powerful. And, you know, police also bow down to the power of the church. It's very hard to get justice if you are hurt by the church. And that's what Fenton writes so powerfully about. Can we talk about just the regard for women in Ireland? Because, you know, the 1960s, will happen no matter where you go to church. You will see things in magazines that are going to liberate you, the clothes that you wear, what other women are doing. You know, just sort of women's magazines are an enormously destabilising force wherever you have in the world theocracies, you know, anywhere that you go in the world. So what happened, 60s, 70s, 80s, that suddenly starts loosening the grip of the church that you described? As you say, you have to remember

all the time that Ireland, even though you've got all the censorship, it's still very close to England, right? You've got your cousins, your friends, your school friends, or whatever, you know, all this stuff is always coming in and the American stuff. And people are very, very well aware of all that excitement. Rock and roll, you know, all that's hitting in a really big way. And the other thing you sort of have to keep in mind here is that the 60s then things are starting to get going economically. So what happens the year I was born 58? We were saying earlier that a lot of people were beginning to think, was it worth it? Was it worth it? breaking away from the empire. At government level, there's a kind of revolution, really. There's a young guy who is the Secretary of Department of Finance called T.K.

Whitaker, an extraordinary young man, brilliant, who basically says, look, the game is up. We either change radically or we may as well just admit that we were wrong and ask if Britain will take us back more. He doesn't say that explicitly, but that's the message, really. Sounds like Britain with Brexit, though. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot to be learned from this. And so essentially what he pushes through is an opening up of the economy.

So you start inviting in American companies, German companies, whatever. Anybody who will come in will get tax-free holidays to establish industries. So they're trying to industrialize and urbanize. And what they think, I mean, what does the kind of conservative establishment think? They actually think it might be possible to revolutionize the economy while keeping the same culture. You can still keep the kind of protectionist attitude to sexuality, to women's rights, to all those kind of things. But you can bring in all this industry.

And you don't have to be a Marxist to know that actually economic change does change everything else. So you have this kind of shift in the 60s, which is already happening, and it forces increasing liberalization. It's a pretty slow pace. I mean, we're talking about well into the 1990s, for example, before contraceptives, become fully available. Yeah, so contraceptives is one thing, but abortion. So before you came on, I was having a chat to Fenton, because the fabulous author Anne Enright and I did something many years ago. And we were talking about two very important years. 1983 and 2018, just looking at those two

islands in abortion law, tell us a lot about the changing face. Let's start with 1983, which is not that long ago. It's really not that long ago. What was going on? What were the attitudes? around abortion in 1983, and why is that such an important date? There's an increasing kind of urbanised culture which is emerging. You have a very brilliant feminist movement. The Irish Women's Liberation Movement is fantastic. You have women who just don't give a damn, who are challenging, who are not afraid. They are the great heroes, I think, of modern Ireland, although they don't get their due.

But they did a thing, for example, famously in the early 70s, they organized. a train to go to Belfast to buy contraceptives, right? To come back and tell the customs authorities, we've got contraceptives, are you going to arrest us, right? Typically in Ireland, it turns out they didn't realize that you have to have a prescription to get contraceptives in Northern Ireland. They didn't get anything, they bought aspirants, and they brought them back.

You'll see this on documentaries, you know, this great moments of challenge. Actually, it's sort of weird. And then the customs authorities pretend not to understand what's going on. This is very Irish, right? So anyway, so that's challenging. things are moving. You've had an opening up of education, free education. I mean, I'm talking about second level education. I'm the first generation of people in Ireland who got free second

level education. But that leads to more and more people going to university. You know, you've a lot of change going on. And the church is getting kind of worried. They bring in the ultimate nuclear weapon, right, which is Pope John Paul II. I don't know if people remember how charismatic. I remember that so well, to knock. To knock to Dublin. I mean, it was the biggest outdoor event, or said to me anyway, in Europe since the Second World War, which was the mass, he had a mass and told an open-air mass. There were over a million people at the mass, right? And the Popemobile. The Pope-Mobile, all that. And, you know, he was stunning. I mean, he was a superstar. Well, I mean, for people who don't know, because we've

had a few Pope since then, I mean, but he was a rock star Pope, wasn't he? I mean, he had that sort of angelic face. He was Polish in origin. He was beautiful. He looked like everybody's Bertha's original granddad, very sort of, you know, peaceful and kind. But he knew how to work a crowd. He was fabulous. And he was extremely conservative. And it's actually, if you look back now, so he has this ecstatic moments. I mean, he has these crowds, millions of people coming out. I mean, it was overwhelming. And I remember thinking, oh, God, we're screwed now. An example of this is that you could do a great study of all the boys called John Paul. So the birth rate rose. People stop music. This does not include John Paul Jones, the drummer of Ned Zeppelin. Yeah. It'd be nice to think they weren't out after Led Zeppelin, but actually I think it might have been the Pope.

I hate to disappoint you there. So it has this kind of real reactionary moments, right? And then also the economy starts tanking in the 1980s for all sorts of reasons. So the modernizing project is in real trouble. So then you have a sort of very, a very big kind of Catholic reactionary movement. You have extraordinary stuff going on around the country. You have the Virgin Mary starts appearing all over the place, giving messages. You have all that kind of, but the abortion thing is decided really by, you know, militant lay Catholics. This is

the line in the sand. Now remember, abortion is already completely banned. It's life imprisonment, right? There's no reason for this at all. But they say, let's put it into the Constitution. And it was really a way of saying, thus far have you gone, but you will go no further. We are still in charge. And you're never going to change it. If it's in the Constitution, look at it, it's in a tablet of stone, you're never going to be able to change it.

Yeah. And it was very bitter, very emotional. But the interesting thing is they pushed it too far because they thought, well, everybody is going to do this. And they did. They won two to one. It was 66% to 33% in the vote. But 33% was quite a lot, actually.

You know? And you got the emergence of people like Mary, Robinson coming out and saying, no, we're not doing this. It's wrong. And, you know, being incredibly articulate and persuasive about why this was wrong. It pushed things so far that it actually showed that there was another Ireland. There was an opposition. And this we should remember is the time that you too is beginning to fill stadiums around the country. You're suddenly our Irish superstars in film, in music, Neil Jordan's producing all those extraordinary movies.

Absolutely. I mean, everybody knows in a way that this is grotesquely hypocritical. You know, and remember also what's beginning to happen is that that whole architecture of repression, which we've spoken about, is being dismantled, right? So it's increasingly difficult to whisk young girls away and put them as slave labour into laundering. People can see, you know, there are cameras now,

there's TV now, you know, even though you've got it, later than Albania. You've got it now. And once you've got it. But then you've got, I'm just going to jump forward to 2018, where, you know, before it was one third that said, this is not okay. And then there was a chance to look at it again in 2018. And this is what Anne Enright, the novelist was so good at. She said, not since the troubles had we seen such unification that everybody was talking about it. So it was the only thing everyone talked about, but such division. So division in families, through generations, where mothers wouldn't speak to their kids anymore because they were voting in different directions,

to have that much further that families can split apart. You're going to have to explain that because to a lot of people, they won't get it. You can disagree agreeably, but this wasn't agreeable in many respects. Not really. I mean, it was an identity issue, really. You know, it was never really about abortion, you know, because actually the weird thing is if you actually talk to, you even conservative Irish people and you said, well, what would you do if your kid was raped? And what you have to remember here, and this is, this is, this is, is what characterizes Ireland, right, is that, of course, a hypocrisy, right? So the abortion rate in Ireland,

you have to keep this in your head, was pretty much the same as it was in Holland all through this period, right, through the 60s, through the 70s, through the 80s. Why? Because people went to England, women went to England. So there were loads of abortions, right? And in fact, conservatives in Ireland, hypocritically, were quite happy with that because they didn't have to confront the issue in Ireland. they could say, oh, we have no abortion here. We are the most holy Catholic country in the world. So that was eating away. People knew that.

But this is the power of silence. We all knew that hundreds of thousands of Irish women had had abortions. The figures in England showed us this. Did most people know a woman who'd had an abortion? No. Well, they did, but they didn't know she'd had an abortion. Because women didn't talk about it. You didn't talk about it.

And what happens, gradually, the intimate, the good thing about Ireland, the worst thing about Ireland is, it's very intimate, and the great thing about Ireland is, it's very intimate. And ultimately, intimacy, when people start talking, people say, oh, you're not a monster, you're my sister, you're my friend, you're my workmate, you're my neighbour, you know. And so once you break those silences, and this happened as well with, so remember, homosexual activity between men was illegal in Ireland up to the early 1990s, mid-1990s. But then Ireland becomes the first country in the to bring in same-sex marriage by popular vote. Why? Because you know people, right? Once people start

saying, well, actually, I'm gay, you know, oh, right, you're my friend. So that sort of turned around in the 2010s and actually became much, much more potent. And in 2018, then, there was the vote to take out this ban on abortion from the Constitution. From the Constitution. It is no place there, right. And it was passed two to one. And the thing we realized was that if you looked at the demographics of the vote, a lot of people who voted to put it in in 1983 must have voted to take it out in 2018. So in many cases, they were the same people. Fenton, in your book, you finger the 1990s, or even the year 1990, as the great turning point in modern Irish history. And you say there are three crucial events in that year which changed the whole tenor of everything.

Tell us about that. Probably the biggest thing really was the election of Mary Robinson as president. The president of Ireland isn't like the President of America. It's not an executive presidency, but it is the head of state and therefore kind of represents what people think the country is. And you had this extraordinary shock. You had a presidential election. The President was always kind of held by Fianna Foll, which was the big kind of conservative nationalist party.

And the Fianna Foll campaign, for all sorts of reasons, imploded. Mary Robinson got elected. And that sort of really electrified the place. You know, people just started thinking, oh, well, that's who we are now. You know, this feminist lawyer. Super articulate. Super articulate, brilliant person.

You know, and actually people started kind of feeling much, much more proud of that, actually. And it sort of gave permission almost for Irish people to start thinking that that's the way they wanted to be. And then you get the elopement of the Bishop of Colway. Tell us that whole story. It's hard to understand. I mean, talk about a breathtaking story. This story was done by my own newspaper at the Irish Times, but it was so wrapped up. I was in the dark. I mean, it was so carefully controlled. The Bishop of Galba is a guy called Eamon Casey, and he was a particularly charismatic. He was the kind of populist bishop. He was the guy who would go on the TV programs and sing a song and all that sort of stuff. And turned out the Irish Times got this story that he had been paying with diocesan funds for the support of his son, whom he'd had with a woman in America. And then she was called Annie Murphy, and she comes on TV. And she's also, like so you've got Mary Robinson, who's sort of proud feminist.

You've got Annie Murphy, who turns out to be like a really real powerhouse of a woman who's not taking any shit from anybody and is not sorry and is not ashamed of herself, you know, and is sort of saying, well, you know, this is what happened. The thing was that she was pressured to give up her child, which was the way the system would have worked. Child would have been taken away, adopted. It would have never happened. And she didn't. She kept her child. And that's what created the problem for the church. I mean, that was a breast-taking story. I mean, it was absolutely unbelievable, but also the church, again, didn't know how to deal with it. So actually, most people in Ireland would say,

well, okay, it was terrible. They shouldn't have done it. But look, it was consensual. It was an adult, at least. We were beginning to get inklings of the stories about child abuse, so this didn't feel like that at the time. And the church, however, didn't know that they spirited him away in the middle of the night. He was literally ended up in Ecuador.

It was this sort of, you know. The power of the day. church. But they just, you know, they didn't know how to handle it. And actually, I think most ordinary Irish Catholics realize, well, actually, we're better of being Catholics than they are, because we forgive this guy. And isn't that what we're supposed to do? Can I, if I may, just pull you on to matters economic rather than spiritual, because Ireland's relationship with Europe has been a really defining factor in the difference now between being Irish and being English. So just talk us through, you know, all through the sudden roar of the Celtic tiger, all of that sort of self-doubt

that you've talked about kind of falls away when money and companies start coming in. So Ireland joined the European Union in 1973 with the United Kingdom, effectively. So United Kingdom and Denmark were the three sort of been six-member club and then they led in these three other countries. Ireland would never have been allowed in if it wasn't for the fact that it was kind of seen as sort of adjunct to the UK. I mean, Ireland was two. poor, too backward. It was not sort of a member of this rich club. But there was a kind of of understanding, well, Ireland's really part of the UK economy, which it was, and it was almost out of pity, you know, that if Britain joins the European Union and Ireland doesn't,

Ireland is completely screwed. And it's small, and it was kind of a little pet, you know, it was kind of let in, and how lucky we were, you know, because that really is crucial. It changes everything really ironically. We were led in because of Britain. But trade shifts and Ireland ceases to be dependent on Britain. We were talking about, like, was independence worth it? Well, at a simple level, it becomes worth it in 1973 because you've got an equal seat at the European table with France and Germany.

That's kind of pretty big thing for a small country with the kind of history that you've been talking about or the recent weeks. So it gives a kind of confidence. And then critically, and this happens kind of slowly, and it's not a simple process, it's up and down. But Ireland does become the major locus for America. American investment. So if you're a big American corporation, you want to sell into the European

Union. Ireland is very attractive. It has very good tax rates for you. It has English-speaking workers. You have, we mentioned, education has, you know, really taken off. So all of these kind of things are making Ireland very attractive. And so gradually by the late 1990s, and certainly now, it's hard to get your head around this, but there's more American investment in absolute terms in Ireland than there is in China and India put together. That's cracker. Say that again. I had never heard that. Say that again. There is more American investment in Ireland in absolute terms, not in proportional terms, in absolute terms than there is in China and India put together. Okay, just my brain is just going, okay, carry on, continue, right?

Effectively what happens is we go from being pre-modern to being postmodern with nothing in between. We don't do the industrial revolution. We skip that bit. We go from... Great Space Age. You go almost straight from the big beef farm to Intel, you know, to Amazon. Amazon, well, they're all there. I mean, you name an American company that chances are its European headquarters is in Ireland. I've got in front of me, Fenton, a list of GDP per capita by country. And in the current list this year, Ireland is number three in the world.

Number one is Monaco, Joint Place, Monaco, Littgenstein and Luxembourg. Second place is Bermuda and Switzerland. Third place jointly is Ireland and the Cayman Islands. It's absolutely nuts. And it's the head of Singapore, Norway, the United States, Qatar. I mean, it's, how does that happen? Okay, so this is very Irish, right? So we're still telling stories, right?

So Irish GDP is lepracon economics, I think somebody called it, right? So Irish GDP is one of the few countries in the world where GDP means nothing. Why? Because it's American money. Yes, this stuff is declared in Ireland, but the profits go back to America, right? So Ireland's real GDP is a lot less than it looks. But there is a spill. I mean, you're right.

So profits get siphoned off to America, but they still do have to pay tax. And that money does swish all over Ireland then, doesn't it? I mean, Ireland at the moment has an embarrassment of riches. I mean, it has this kind of huge tax surplus, which it gets from American corporations, basically. So, I mean, we started all talking about the Catholic Church, right? Bear in mind that by the late 1990s, all the Viagra in the world is being made in Skiborine. It's not. Is that true story?

It's absolutely true. I mean, and all the Botox is made in Westport in County Mayo. Westport? Yeah. There's a huge. Huge industries. I mean, so it's not just that they're exporting to Europe, but they're also exporting back to America. So, of course, this creates very good jobs. It creates taxation, both from workers and then corporate taxes. And the same is happening to some extent. So slightly less of example,

but still huge with tech corporations. Very interestingly, late 1980s, just beside the headquarters of the Catholic Church, which is in Manusin County, Kildare, a company called Intel sets up an even bigger campus than headquarters of the Catholic Church. By the early 1990s, the most sophisticated manufacturing plant in the world is Intel's Fab in Minute, you know. Alongside the rival being Taiwan, presumably. Yes. Well, and of course they've passed out now, I think, you know.

But through the 1990s, you know, you have all this kind of stuff feeding through. And Brexit then just superfires it because London goes into stasis and paralysis. Whenever you go to Dublin now, there are cranes everywhere. Everything's being rebuilt. Can I, can I, I, I mean, we could talk to you for hours and hours and hours and hours. You are brilliant. But we're coming to the end of our time together. With all of that, with all of that sort of, you know, the change coming out of the chrysalis

and now being sort of a wash with money and it being cool to be Irish, Irish people being very proud of and, you know, never doubting that what we did was right anymore, I'm guessing. What does it mean to be Irish now today? What does it actually mean? And how much does the past, that colonial past that we've looked at for the last 10 weeks, how does that haunt or not haunt Ireland today? So in some ways that colonial past is off our shoulders. And I would include the dominance of the Catholic Church, funny enough, as part of,

because you can only understand that in the colonial context, you know, where the church became the alternative state to British rule. So both of those, you know, I mean, James Joyce said there were these two empires that he was trying to escape from the Roman and the British. And you could say we've escaped the Roman Empire and we've certainly escaped the British Empire. However, of course, there's the hugely unresolved question of Northern Ireland. So if you're thinking about the future,

you can't take it completely out of the context of Ireland's relationship with Britain. We are joint custodians of Northern Ireland, whether we like it or not. And this is the tragedy of Brexit. Ireland and Britain were working together so brilliantly, you know, throughout the 1990s into the 2000s, finally kind of getting over all that stuff, you know, the chips were off our shoulders and the condescension was beginning to lift from Britain towards Ireland. It felt good, and then Brexit comes along and makes it all a mess again. But we still have to deal with it, right? So we still have to deal with how do I, as someone who grew up in Catholic nationalist Ireland,

acknowledge the right to a British identity of people who are also, in my view, Irish, and have as much right to be Irish as I am. And all the brilliant stuff that you've dealt with about Ireland and Empire is still there. You know, we have to accept that that's also part of our history, our traditions, our past. So, Finton, as a last question, when we started this series with the wonderful Jane O'Mire, how many of a weeks ago it is, Jane said very confidently that she thought that the Northern an Irish question would resolve itself with the people of Northern Ireland voting to join a richer island. I mean, it's now when you go to Dublin, the airport is so much fancier than

Belfast's airport. It feels a buzzy, rich and wealthy place. Can you envisage a future whereby you have a majority of people in Northern Ireland voting to join a United Ireland, or do you think that's still pie in the sky in a long way from resolved? I think the direction of travel is clear. Northern Ireland was set up to have a Protestant majority that was the whole function of it and it doesn't anymore and won't ever again. It already doesn't? It already doesn't. I didn't know. There's neither a Catholic nor a Protestant majority in Northern Ireland, which is wonderful. They're both minorities. How's that the case? So increasing numbers of people say, I don't care, I don't want to be identified, green and orange, Catholic and Protestant, particularly young people,

are the others, you know, I love the others. The others will decide the future of Northern Ireland and therefore of the island. So I would guess maybe in about 10 years time there may well be a border poll. And we know that about 40% of people are going to vote to stay in the UK. And about 40% of people are going to vote for a United Ireland. The other 20% are going to decide. And they are younger, they're more open, they're more persuadable. They want somebody to tell them, how is this going to make my life better?

They don't want to say this is a tribal allegiance I have going back to the Celts or going back to the empire. They want something which is actually substantial. The real question, I think, is what kind of Ireland could that future be? And you did a brilliant episode on the 1798 Rising. And I think in a way we have to go back to that lost opportunity. This was one of the great revolutions that failed. It didn't happen. It was inspired by the American Revolution, by the French Revolution.

by those democratic ideas. The United Irishmen, and yes, of course, they used sexist terms. They were men, largely, but they talked about uniting in the common name of Irishmen, Catholic, Protestant and dissenter. And that idea of a pluralist republicanism is the very thing we didn't get when the Irish state was established. Partition stopped it. It didn't have to come into being and didn't. And that's really what we have to go back to is a sense of a shared Irish. identity. You say in your brilliant book, and we should, as we're drawing to a close, mention it again, we don't know ourselves, Fintinot-Tools, personal history of modern Ireland, which I highly, highly recommend. But towards the end of that, you make two crucial points. You say that Ireland,

which all your childhood was hemorrhaging its people to America, to Canada, to Scotland, to England, is now you have net migration into Ireland. And secondly, that now 17% of the population of Ireland was born elsewhere. Extraordinary turnaround. And, you know, it's impossible to overstate the psychological importance of that, you know, because, again, as you've dealt with brilliantly, you know, we've had centuries of mass migration outwards, you know, but this is a place you leave. And of course, you know, like America, Australia, the same kind of stories, Canada, you know.

So we were, our export was ourselves, you know, and, and, Really, the last 25 years, we have had, you know, very substantial inward migration, as you say. And to me, this is the sign of success. You know, people are complaining about migration, you know, everywhere. But people don't migrate to a place if they think it's rubbish. They think they can make a better life there. And if they're migrating to Ireland despite the weather, despite the rain, there has to be something. There has to be something, you know.

Absolutely. It's certainly not the weather. My last trip to Dublin, I didn't bring an umbrella. Every meal I had was sitting in a pub. Absolutely soaked to the skin. But one thing it might be worth ending on, you know, is that by the likelihood is in 2040, we will have finally made up the deficit of population since 1840. Really? Ireland is the only country in the world whose population is still lower than it

was in 1840. You talked to Colm Tobin about the famine. You know, you had 8.1 million people on this island. We should say also an apologise here because we haven't yet. Both Anita and I completely mangled say the name again properly with a good Irish accent. Column Tobin. I've apologized to the many people that have pointed out that both Anita are neither and I mangled the comb and Anita mangled the toy bins. Your name gets mangled too. So we're But, you know, so in 1841, there were 8.1 million people on the island. Right now, there are around seven, seven and a half maybe. So by 2040, we should finally have repopulated the island.

It's been an absolute wild ride, Fintanoteau. Thank you so much. And a happy end due to this miserable story. We've had so many gloomy episodes. I'm really very, very grateful. It's a perfect way of ending such a. a wide-ranging series that we've done on Ireland, starting from Tudor, England, taking us right up to the Good Friday Agreement and looking beyond absolutely perfect. We are coming back to you with a new mini-series.

What's it going to be? Drumroll, William Durham-Poor. What are we doing? Because this is your baby. I'm flying tonight to do a little bit of research. I'm off to Hong Kong to research the opium wars. The whole business of how the West fights a war to have the right to sell narcotics to China. Narco wars. Narco, it's Victorian narcos. And then in the process, the whole of the Faris gets colonised. From this comes, for example, the French going into Cambodia and Vietnam and Doshin. That whole story comes out of this.

So it's a completely life-changing story and not many people know it. It is, as my son would say, a banger of a story. It's a banger. Banger of a story. Anyway, do join us for that. Till the next time we meet, though, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye for me, William, Durempul.