‘This is one of the worst days in Irish history!’
I remember the first day of January, 1973 as though it were last Monday. I was 17, studying (or, mostly, not) for my Leaving Cert, which I was to sit the following June. Over the Christmas holidays, as was my practice, I travelled with my father on his ‘stagecoach’ runs, helping with the mailbags and newspapers, emptying the pillar boxes, acting as door-opener for passengers, and generally riding shotgun. Normally, the mailcar was a clamour of argument, disagreement, insults, laughter and the occasional shouted ‘Yahoo!’ This day it was different — funereal, mainly in deference to my father’s mood, which was uncharacteristically morose. ‘This’, I heard him say to passenger after passenger, ‘is one of the worst days in Irish history!’ The decision to join the ‘European Common Market’, voted on by the Irish people the previous May, and carried by a landslide of 83 per cent to 17, with a turnout of 70 per cent, came into effect that day. My father, who had been one of 211,891 Irish people to vote against joining, believed membership would lead to the destruction of the Irish farming and fishing industries, and make us the paupers of Europe. He insisted that the required trade-offs — especially the exchange of sovereignty and natural resources for infrastructure and subsidies — would erode our longterm capacity for self-sufficiency, bringing with it renewed dependency, deceptively easy money, increasing debt and a degeneration of our political class. He was right on every score. If he were alive today, he would take no pleasure in his ‘vindication’, even though the evidence is to be seen all around.
This perspective was as though in my blood, and I articulated it for many years, encountering a high degree of abuse and ridicule along the way. The argument against Ireland’s membership was especially unpopular during the 1980s and early 1990s, when large amounts of structural and cohesion funding became available and Ireland was a net beneficiary of community largesse.
