ONE of the discarded ideals of the Irish revolutionaries of 1916 was that the country should be self-sufficient.
One of those revolutionaries, Éamon de Valera, later became taoiseach and then president.
He maintained a vision of an Ireland untainted by the filthy modern tide. Independence from Britain meant running the country in such a way that it required nothing from Britain.
So we had a protectionist economy. If Ireland needed spades it could make spades. Historian JJ Lee joked that De Valera thought he could look into his own heart and see what the Irish wanted.
By such a reserved method of discernment he discovered that they wanted sugar beet.
His Ireland was an Ireland of devout, Gaelic-speaking Catholic believers, fine healthy country people, hardworking, clean and decent.
And the law didn’t just protect us from foreign trade but also from foreign moral influences.
So we had censorship of books, mostly ‘dirty’ books, books that treated sexual interactions between people as normal and unregulated by the church.
Even in the 1960s many in Catholic Ireland warned of the moral danger facing those who were leaving the country, though many had no choice but to go.
The particular danger was England where religion had died out, and with it ordinary neighbourliness, where it was normal, we were told, not even to know the name of the people who lived next door.
This was a harsh and ill-informed stereotype. Along with it came the view that the Irish who crossed the Irish Sea in search of employment would be led astray into sexual frivolity, prostitution and disease.
Indeed some of us did indeed live more liberally than we might have done at home where contraception was illegal south of the border and where ladies who ran B&Bs would ask couples if they were married and refuse double rooms to them if they weren’t.
The last time I faced that sanction was in the 1980s.
The idea that Ireland should not trade with the outside world was interwoven with the idea that we should stay among our own and build a free and proud nation that needed commerce with no other.
In reality, that Ireland could not feed its own people.
The vision of a nation that could be a home for us all was a delusion. Our young emigrated in huge numbers, the girls to be nurses in London, Glasgow and Manchester, the men to be labourers building the cities of England and Scotland and the railways connecting them.
Those who went to America were likely doomed never to see the homeland again.
The image of the immigrant in America was different from that of the immigrant in England. England, in the mythology was still a dirty sinful place while America was a land of hope, welcome and possibility.
Ireland’s main export was its people. And those people sent part of their earnings to help the families they had left behind and thereby contributed in a small way to the uplift of the Irish economy.
We had songs like a plaintive wail calling on the immigrant in America to keep the faith. The ideal of the young decent Irish now was of people who would not forget their mothers when they went abroad.
‘Write a letter now and then, and send her all you can/ And don’t forget, where e’er you go, that you’re an Irish man.’
It was not a good economic model. It wasn't how De Valera had foreseen the country's development and in the face of the stark awfulness of the failure of the concept of independence that inspired it, Ireland chose, in the 1950s, to open up and invite the world in.
The new plan was to bring in foreign investment. Big companies, facilitated by low corporation tax would provide jobs and the young would stay at home. It works better than the old plan, though still there is an outflow of ambitious youth,
And that model is threatened now by Trump's call on American companies to return to the US and provide jobs for the people there.
Modern Ireland is as far from De Valera's vision of cosy homesteads as India is from Mahatma Gandhi's similar vision in which devout peasants would weave their own clothes. Both favoured sustainable village life over economic growth and urban expansion.
Both sought to preserve deep religious traditions woven into the rituals of home-life and cottage production.
Now in Ireland we must look around the world and see who will come and invest and give us work if American companies decamp and immediate obvious targets of our attention, beyond Europe must be China and India. China already has Huawei and TikTok in Ireland.
Ireland once cherished a dream of self-sufficiency and that dream was untenable. The fantasy of our superior moral character was almost our undoing.
In our cultural tastes, our food, our travelling and in our thinking we became a little bit American and a little bit British and a little bit European. In our future we may be a little more Asian.
Malachi O’Doherty’s latest book
How To Fix Northern Ireland is published by Atlantic Books
See More: Eamon De Valera, Ireland
