new lives ‘across the water’.
The following statistic is a stark reminder of how things were: ‘Of every 100 girls in Connacht aged 15–19 in 1946, 42 had left by 1951.’2 To what kind of life and loving one wonders. Indeed, the statistics become a story in themselves: ‘About 400,000 souls left in ten years for Britain, and to a lesser extent, for Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand.’3 During post-war reconstruction in Britain, 634,000 Irish men and women settled in the UK; but if one stretches this cohort to include the period 1931–61, ‘Irish-born’ residents in Britain increased from 505,000 to 951,000 which, if one considers the numbers of those who returned to Ireland during the Second World War, is really quite staggering.
On a wider front, though, 1950s America and the momentum that was building up throughout that society, as well as the first mass moves towards civil rights and an end to racial segregation in the States, would politicise the English-speaking world by the end of the decade. The example of the civil rights movement in the United States would create an unstoppable cultural dynamic towards equality of races and religions with the separation of church and state.
In Ireland, the 1950s was probably the last decade in which both parts of the island, the ruling political parties and the pre-eminent role of the churches, could withstand this shifting of power in the western world. Fifties’ Ireland was the beginning of the end for that unhealthy relationship, while the literature and drama of the period mark a threshold between the short-lived past of an independent Catholic Ireland and the emergence of a more modernising free state or republic that simply had to reconnect with Europe and, more pressingly, with its British neighbours, if it (‘Ireland’) was to survive. This is exactly what started to happen under the strategic shifts of economic policy initiated by T.K. Whitaker and others within the Department of Finance and in the mostly Dublin-based intellectual and political elite.4 (A process poetically dramatized a few years later in Thomas Kinsella’s long poem ‘Nightwalker’.)5
In Northern Ireland, in a landscape still scarred by Nazi bombs, as I well remember growing up there, and its after-effects (Belfast had been blitzed in 1941 with the loss of approximately 1,000 people),6 the momentary possibility of opening up and producing an egalitarian civic society (notwithstanding the abortive IRA campaign, Operation Harvest, during the 1950s) stuttered and stumbled into the mid-sixties before the hope of a just society was snuffed out with the eruption of the Troubles.
There are two parts to the Irish story of the 1950s – a Northern and Southern dual-narrative which sometimes interconnects but more often diverges – and it is a story that has not really been told. In 1950s Belfast, many enjoyed and prospered in the stability and quality of life provided by good schools, functioning well-run hospitals, and proliferating new roads that led into blossoming suburbs; diversifying new ‘tech’ factories sat alongside the traditional heavy industries of shipbuilding, aircraft manufacture, tobacco, mills and suchlike.7 However, these industries, we now know, were becoming increasingly untenable and in a couple of decades would be extinct. A completely traditional way of industrial life, with its customs, work practices, housing and expectations was eliminated, and along with this disappearance the exposure, at almost exactly the same time, of a bigoted and repressive system of government that was blind to the poverty and inequality in its treatment of its Catholic minority and the urban poor of both religions.
The political world was redefining the power blocs of the Cold War – in Korea, in Suez, and in what became known as the Iron Curtain, behind which previously autonomous states had been colonised by the Soviet Union and would remain so for fifty years, despite brave attempts at liberation in Hungary which were ruthlessly repressed.
On the island of Ireland, the old wounding partition aside, the ingrained grievances of poverty, injustice and the dreadful inner-city housing conditions in both capitals seemed beyond the ability of either church or state to remedy. Ireland’s difficulty became Britain’s opportunity and, as we know, emigration flourished into a way of life. The statistics say it all.
On the cultural front, however, much was happening in Ireland and to Irish writers based abroad. Alongside the list Brian Fallon provides in his essential portrait, An Age of Innocence: Irish Culture 1930–1960,8 one can add the achievements of Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin and Kate O’Brien. According to Terence Brown’s study Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2002, the early fiction of Edna O’Brien, in The Country Girls (1960) and The Lonely Girl (1962), charts an emerging pattern of ‘a brief idyll of youthful discovery followed by disillusionment before sending them [O’Brien’s country girls] on to the more exotic attractions of London, but the young woman or man from a rural background who sought to establish a family in the city was confronted there by adjustment to the novel ways of urban family life’.9 Brown goes on to point out that by the 1950s, ‘despite the slow rate of economic growth in the country as a whole, Dublin has been transformed from the elegant, colourful, and decaying colonial centre of English rule in Ireland into a modern if rather dull administrative and commercial capital’.10
This change would work its way into the livelihoods of many but it would also push others towards a kind of subculture: a halfway house between the past and the emerging present, and the setting for such ‘hesitancy and uncertainty’ was the public house. This subculture for writers has been explored with intimate detail and knowledge in memoirs such as John Ryan’s Remembering How We Stood,11 the excellent Dead as Doornails by Anthony Cronin,12 and in Eoin O’Brien’s The Weight of Compassion & Other Essays.13 The local rows, gossip and personality clashes between Dublin-based writers, such as Patrick Kavanagh and the younger Brendan Behan, was more often than not drink-related.
Drink became the arbiter of authenticity; a counter-cultural shelter, a public house for private lives, with its holy hours, after hours, Sunday closings and other licensing controls creating a lifestyle all its own, and lasting mythologies: Such and such is a terrible man. (Footage of a drunken Flann O’Brien being interviewed one Bloomsday bears the marks of an embittered and caustic self-parody that is itself tragic-comic.) Alcoholism, an affliction of the fifties, was as much a feature of the time as the polio epidemic of 1956 or the political collapse some years earlier of Noel Browne’s Mother & Child Scheme in 1951.
Brendan Behan’s success in the fifties – indeed the 1950s was very much his decade, with The Quare Fellow (1956), Borstal Boy (1958) and The Hostage (1958) – was based upon an ebullient verbal art that seemed to challenge the official sentiments of the time – in Ireland but also in Britain and the United States. As his Borstal Boy hit the note of 1950s’ break-through, shared in novels of the period, or in a play such as Look Back in Anger (1956) by John Osborne, Borstal Boy turned the tide on English complacency and through the sheer energetic verve of his language, Behan manages to sound like a Beat poet in full flow – one minute irreverent, aggressive, the next meditative and accepting, while mocking conventional wisdom in an almost Wildean play of grievance and entitlement:
Jesus, if they’d only let me sit there and sew away, I could be looking down at the canvas and watching my stitches and seeing them four to an inch, and passing the time myself by thinking about Ireland and forgetting even where I was, and, Jesus, wasn’t that little enough to ask? What harm would I be doing them? If any of them was in Mountjoy, say, and I was there with a crowd of Dublin fellows, I wouldn’t mess them about, honest to Jesus Christ I wouldn’t, no matter what they were in for. And that James, that was a proper white-livered whore’s melt.14
If the fifties were Behan’s, as a one-time militant republican, jailed in England at age sixteen in the late 1930s, he came to understand England and condemn much of what was hypocritical in the Irish. His death in 1964 in his early forties makes its own telling point about the traps that were on offer in the unfolding decade of television and mass-produced popular magazines.
For, like Dylan Thomas, who had died as a result of alcoholism before Behan in 1953, and Elvis Presley, who died after him, Behan had become that most modern phenomenon: a celebrity. In the infamous live interview with Malcom
