246. Ireland Transformed: From Banning Condoms to Exporting Viagra

Purchase new carpet from the Home Depot and get it installed for free right now. Shop the stylish choices and simple pricing of carpet from Home Decorator's Collection, Traffic Master, or Life Proof with Pet Proof Technology. And see for yourself why nobody beats our prices. Enjoy new carpet with free installation right now at the Home Depot. Offer valid October 15th through November 1st, 2026, exclusions apply for licenses at HomeDepot.com/LicenseNumbers. Gray roots entering the chat, uninvited? Garnier's got you. Garnier Color Sensation re-attached covers up to 100% of grays in just 10 minutes. No ammonia, no mess, and the color lasts up to 4 weeks. It's as easy to apply as shampoo. Plus, it's vegan and cruelty-free. 10 minutes, sensational color, sensational price. With those savings, your next girl's night is basically free. Find your perfect match at walmart.com or at a store near you. I get so many headaches every month. It could be chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox on a botchaline mtoxin A prevents headaches and adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those who have 14 or fewer headache days a month. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. A lurcher doctor right away is difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. A lurchic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lugeric's disease, myasthenia-gravis, or Lambert Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botchaline mtoxins as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-800-44 Botox to learn more. Before we get going with this episode, just to warn you that this will contain references to historic sexual abuse and pedophilia, so this and the discretion is advised. Hello, and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arden. And me, William Doreppur. You're an excitable man today, aren't you? Because we've got the brilliant fentanyl tool, author of "We Don't Know Ourselves" on, and it's going to be just the best way to crescendo what has been 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. 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 learnt when we were 13 or 14, and was never taught to us. I mean, a huge and vital part of all our histories. Vincent, welcome, you are such a sublime writer, and I know Willie wants to talk about your own story, and I know Willie Ewyst have entranced with Fentanyl's experiences. So I've been reading this wonderful book of Fentanyl, Fentanyl, Fentanyl, 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 hasn't actually been part of our original plan, I've been loving your reminiscences of Ireland in the '50s and '60s, or your reminiscences of your research of what was going on during your childhood, that I would love to begin Fentanyl 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 Devilera Traumphant, Michael Collins dead, the Civil War resolved in Dev's favour. What happens now in 1950s Ireland, the world that you've discovered when you were searching your own childhood for this memoir? So you've been dealing brilliantly, of course, with Empire and Ireland being the kind of pioneer really of breaking away from Empire, and I think that's where you left the south of Ireland, which is in the beginning of the 1920s, and it's a triumphant one way, it is an extraordinary achievement 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, I don't have a really bad run of it, Civil War, 1923, it's a terrible way to start off your new state, it disillusiones 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. It's economy, therefore, is largely still a colonial economy. It's basically feeding the English cities, right? So. Shipping cattle in large numbers over the sea to Liverpool and Strenra. 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 Finton, 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 famine, you've talked about the mass immigration 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 people are voting with their feet, if you've left the empire, you're going back into it literally. And growing up, is it, you know, one day all your neighbours have gone, or, you know, the friends that you've 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 hour? What does it feel like? It puts a lovely list at his father rights of all his cousins, and they're all living in brighter than Turkey, and Liverpool, and somewhere in Canada. 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, and when it's 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 teaming with kids, actually, because it was a sort of new working class suburb of Dublin, so that there were lots of kids, there wasn't that sort of people who were disappearing, but it was that if people came to visit, you know, 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, you know, we broke away, we established our independence, and then you have, well hold on, are we really independence? 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, you know, he would come home for his break with the rummage 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, you, you valued the, you know, the pennies and the tropony bits that you might have, and again, like, I, 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. So I'm therefore, the, the currencies were completely interchangeable, which meant of course that Irish economic policy, Irish fiscal policy was completely set in London. So you had a sort of hyper nationalist myth about our independence, but the reality was very, very different. Finton, 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 as a whole kind of literature in Ireland about the wonders of electricity. I mean, just, but just think, I mean, Shemus Heaney, for example, I'm writing a biography of Shemus Heaney at the moment, he needs earliest memories, and this is in Northern Ireland's even, you know, in rural Northern Ireland's, is of a pre-electric world. Really? - There's no electricity. - So there's candles, candles, and fireplaces. - Candles and lamps and all that. - Victorian, 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 his mind. - Pete in the fire. - And the Pete fire, you know, the tarf 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. And then I realized, you know, when I was a kid, when we visited Rural Ireland, my grandfather's home place in remote, Oxford, 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 immigrated, 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 very 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, 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's sort of some dovetails and what I wanted to talk about as well, which is 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, you've had this argument, whether it was inevitable or not, but its effect was it separated out Ireland and again, you've told this story in lots 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, it wasn't kind of brutally discriminated against or anything, 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 Mascar - When too confession. - Rosary Mascar, it's everywhere, you know? And therefore, the institutional church, which after all was much older than the state, you know? It was there a long before the state was established it. 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 Theater Festival, which was the big kind of cultural event, was canceled entirely for 1958, because the Archbishop of Dublin let it be known that he was unhappy. That there were works based on choices elicis, it was the play by Sean O'Casey, the Protestant communists, you know, there was some works by Samuel Becker, you know, there were things he objected to, but he didn't make a statement, he didn't give a sermon, you know, it just filtered out that he was unhappy. And the full festival was just canceled as all it took, you know? - 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. - You were taught up by monks for 10 years, but yeah. - That's okay, but the general experience of people here is not bad, but in Ireland at the time, 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, it's sort of very high up, someone letting it be known that he's not happy in the whole festival collapses, but even at the very lowest level, you know, it's the priest, the priest is coming in the doors open to the priest. You refer to the priest, defer 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 other development, 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, everybody knows it's nonsense at some level, but it does work. And it gives extraordinary authority. So the priest, as you say, I mean, there were loads of priests like the church that I served 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 till my childhood. So you would do such an excess of 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, in a nice house, you had a housekeeper, you had a car, you know, all that sort of stuff. But the big point of this was to control women and to control female sexuality, you know. - So when 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 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, well, at least that's what you thought you were doing. And 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. Controception 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 that. I mean, in the Irish version of Casablanca, all references to them having had an affair in the past and, 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. - No movies, I remember as a kid called some movies. They were jump cuts. I mean, we were doing avant-garde cinema long before or anybody else was, you know. You know, these jump cuts completely logic. But, you know, 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 down the TV that night? I was only five. I don't remember the opening night, I probably wasn't out there for it, but you would have seen the cardinal, you know. It's the first thing you would say, like blessing television, you know. So it was pervasive, any organization, any event you went to. Like even a local level, I mean, the priest was there to give the blessing, you know. Everything was conducted under the ages of the church. - Finton, 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 children that are not wanted and they're basically let staff. I mean, sounds like something unimaginable from Chichesky'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 demonization of women who have had the temerity to love is just appalling. How much people know about what was going on in those Magdalene Laundries? Well, women were separated. They were pregnant and they were, you know, discarded by families, taken in, brutalized and then separated from children and God knows what happened to them. - In many cases, women who were incarcerated in the Magdalene Laundries were not even pregnant. Sometimes they had had babies outside of 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 asked exactly the right question, which is how much the people know better. They knew everything better. These were commercial Laundries. 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 Magdalene Laundry to close, which was in 1996, is in the middle of Dublin. I mean, it's not on some island after West Coast, you know. It's five, 10 minutes walk from the General Post Office, which is like the kind of garden 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 the boy opposite you who steals a bike and just disappears. because there's something inside the America. - There was a kid just lived on the road opposite me. Georgia, he was in school. me. And I think he was, I think he was eight, could have been 10, but he was, but the round up age. And he just disappeared from school. You know, 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 Kalamara. And Kalamara is, you know, very far west, right? It's, it's way out in beautiful, but, but pretty harsh kind of western Ireland. This is a 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, you know, when I was at school, secondary school, you know, there was a very open kind of pedophile abuser, you know, just would do it every day in class. I mean, kids knew it, you know, sort of 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 the 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 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. 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. And the parish priest would, you know, if there was enough complaints, would say, yeah, 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, it'll be fine. And so there was a massive system of covering up. I mean, the church knew all this. Shuffling around. Shuffling around. And remember, they could send them to America. And those great Boston Globe investigations where a lot of these priests were Irish. Absolutely. You know, and if this was this was a system that they had in place. But the other thing is if ultimately if you were really brave and you went to the cops, you know, what would happen? And I detail one case, for example, where near where I grew up in Kremlin, there was the children's hospital, main kind of children, I suppose, there. And the guy who was the chaplain of the children's hospital was taking photographs 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, this, so these photographs, the British police sent them to the Irish police and they sent 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, you know, and the archbishop says, oh, 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, so this is, you know, it's a cliche, but you know, 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. and it's a little as two minutes. Then clean up with the frigid air dishwasher featuring the industry's fastest normal wash cycle. Shop ball savings now at the Home Depot. Off the belt, you'll have to wait for us to use the only seastro online for details. Grey roots under the chat. Uninvited. Garnier's got you. Garnier color sensation re-touch covers up to 100% of Grey's in just 10 minutes. No ammonia, no mess, and the color lasts up to four weeks. Plus, it's vegan and cruelty free. Ten minutes. Sensational color, sensational price. Find your perfect match at Walmart.com or to store near you. Chronic Migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more, can make me feel like a spectator in my own life. Botox, Onabatch Alinum Toxin A, prevents headaches and adults with Chronic Migraine. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It's the number one prescribed branded Chronic Migraine preventive treatment. A lurcher doctor right away is difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lugeric's disease, Myastthenia Gravis, or Lambert Eaton Syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit Botox Chronic Migraine.com or call 1-800-44 Botox to learn more. Welcome back. We were talking about the hold, the very tight hold of the catholic church, and before you're all right in, we are not suggesting that all catholics appeared above. 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 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 Finton writes so powerfully about. Can we talk about just the regard for women in Ireland? Because the 1960s will happen no matter where you go to church. You will see things in magazines that I'm 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 destabilizing force wherever you have in the world, theocracies, 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 this censorship, it's still very close to England, right? You've got your cousins, your friends, your school friends, you know, all this stuff is always coming in, and the American stuff, when 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 and 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 the Department of Finance called T.K. Whittaker, 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. I didn't say that explicitly, but that's the message really. And it's like Britain with Brexit though. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there is a lot to be learned from this. And so essentially, when 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, you know, to establish industries. So they're trying to industrialize and urbanize. And what they think, I mean, what does 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 know, by, you know, 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, right? So, 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 I before you came on, I was having a chat to Finton because the fabulous author Anne N. Wright 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 phase. So I mean, let's start with 1983, which is not that long ago. It's nothing. 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 urbanized culture, which is emerging. You have a very brilliant feminist movement. The Irish women's liberation movement is fantastic. You know, you have women who just don't give a damn, who are challenging, who are not afraid. But they are the great heroes, I think, of modern Ireland, although they don't get their due. But they did think, for example, famously, in the early 70s, they are organized a train to go to Belfast, to buy contraceptives, to come back and tell the customs authorities, we've got contraceptives, are you going to arrest us? 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 but aspirants. You'll see these documentaries, you know, this great moments of challenge. Actually, it's a 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 that things are moving. You've had an opening up of education, free education. I mean, I talked 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 people remember, it's how charismatic I remember that so well to knock to knock to Dublin. I mean, it was the biggest outdoor event or sent me anyway in Europe. Since the Second World War, it was the mass. He had a mass in Dublin, upair mass, there were over a million people at the mass, right? You know, in the Pope mobile. The Pope mobile. 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 Richard. He was beautiful. He looked like everybody's worth his 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 moment. I mean, he has these crowds of millions of people coming out. I mean, it was overwhelming. I remember thinking, oh, God, we're screwed now. You know, an example of this is that you could, you could do a great study of all the boys called John Paul. So the birth rate rose. People stopped us. It's not like a couple of years. It's not like Jopel Jones, the drummer of that example, but yeah, well, it'd be nice to think they were named after, let's add them, but actually, I think it might have been the Pope by heights and disappointed. They, you know, so it has this kind of real reactionary moment, right? And then also the economy starts tanking in the 1980s for all sorts of reasons. So the modern, modernizing project is in real trouble. So then you have a sort of 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, militants lay Catholics. This is the line in the sand. And 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, does 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 that, around the country, something that Irish superstars and film and music, Neil Jordan is 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. So it's increasingly difficult to whisk young girls away and put the slave labor into laundry. 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, and 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 Ann N. Wright, the novelist was so good, actually 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 give in conservative Irish people and you say, well, what would you do if your kid was raped? And you want you have to remember here. And this is, this is what characterizes Ireland, right? Is that of course 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 poly-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 had an abortion? No. They did, but they didn't know she had an abortion, right? 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 good, the great thing about Ireland is that 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 neighbor. And so once you break those silences, and this happened as well with, so remember, homosexual activity between men was illegal in Ireland's up to the early 1990s, mid 1990s. But then Ireland becomes the first country in the world 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, all right, I hear 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 change 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 know, presidential election. President was always kind of held by Fena Fall, which was the big kind of conservative nationalist party. And the Fena Fall 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, 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, 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 allotment of the Bishop of Kool-Way. It's hard to understand. I mean, talk about a breast taking story. This story was done by my own newspaper, 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 Amon 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 the story that he had been paying with diocesan funds for the support of his son, whom he had with a woman in America. And then she was called Annie Murphy. And she comes on TV. And she's also, actually, you've got Mary Robinson, who's sort of proud feminist. You've got Annie Murphy, who turns out to be like a really, really powerhouse of a woman who's not taking any shit from anybody. And it's not sorry. And it's not ashamed of yourself. And it's 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 breathtaking story. I mean, it was absolutely unbelievable. But also the church again didn't know how to deal with it. So actually, most people around would say, well, okay, it was, 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 stories about child abuse, so this didn't feel like that at the time. But the church, however, didn't know that they spirited them away in the middle of the night. You know, he was literally ended up in Ecuador. It was the power of the church. They just, you know, they didn't know how to handle it. And actually, I think most ordinary Irish Catholics were like, well, actually, we're better at 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's the 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 too poor, too backward. It was not sort of a member of this rich club. But there was kind 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 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 letting 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, you know, that's kind of pretty big thing for a small country with the kind of history that you've been talking about, you know, 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 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 been really taken off. So all 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. There is more American investment in Ireland in absolute terms, not in proportional terms, in absolute terms, and 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. Right, we don't do the industrial revolution. We skip that we don't do the industrial revolution. We skip that this. We go from the big beef farm to Intel, you know, to Amazon. Yeah, Amazon. Well, they're all there. I mean, you name an American company that chances are it's 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, a joint place, Monaco, Lycanstein, and Luxembourg. Second place is Bermuda and Switzerland. Third place jointly is Ireland, the Cayman Islands. It's absolutely nuts. And it's the head of Singapore, Norway, the United States, Qatar. I mean, how does that happen? Okay, so this is this is this is very Irish, right? So we're still telling stories, right? So Irish GDP is a leprechaun 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 off talking about the Catholic church, right? Bear in mind that by the late 1990s, all the Viagra in the world is being made in Skibery. It's not that true story. It's absolutely true. I mean, and all the Botox is made in Westport in County Mayo. Westport? Yeah. These are very 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 for workers and then corporate taxes. And the same is happening to some extent. So slightly less or less, but still huge with tech corporations. Very interestingly, late 1980s, just beside the headquarters of the Catholic church, which is in Manuson County, Kildair, 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 Manuson County. Alongside the rival being Taiwan, presumably. Yes. And of course, they've passed out now, I think. But through the 1990s, you have all this kind of stuff feeding through. And Brexit then just specifies it, because London goes into stasis and paralysis. And whenever you're going to double in now, there are cranes everywhere. Everything's being rebuilt. Can 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 has 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 to British rule. So both of those, you know, I mean, James Joyce said there were, 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. You know, 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 get 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, 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 was 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 her weeks ago, is Jane said very competently that she thought that the Northern Irish question would resolve itself with the people of Northern Ireland voting to join a richer Ireland. I mean, it's now when you get a doublet, 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. Has 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 islands. 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 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, you know, they want some 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. You know, it was inspired by the American Revolution, by the French Revolution, by those democratic ideas. The United Irishman, and yes, of course they use sexist terms, they were men, largely, but they talked about uniting in the common name of Irishman Catholic Protestant and Decentre. 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. Finteno 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, you're the same kind of stories Canada, you know, so we were our export was ourselves, you know, 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, you know, it's, it's certainly not the weather. So my last trip to Dublin, I didn't bring an umbrella every meal I had was sitting in a pub. You absolutely soaked to the skin. But one 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 deficits 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 Colin 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 the Nietzsche and I completely mangled. Say the name again properly with a good Irish accent. Colin Tobin, I apologise to the many people that have pointed out that both the Nietzsche and I mangled the comb and I need to mangled the toy bins. You're an I've got to mangled too. So in 1841, there were 8.1 million people on the island. Right now, there are around 7.7 and a half maybe. So by 2040, we should finally have repopulated the island. It's been an absolute wild ride. Thank you so much. And a happy ending to this miserable story. We've had somebody glue me episodes. A really, very, very grateful. It's a perfect way of ending such 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 absolute perfect. And we are coming back to you with a new mini series. What's it going to be? Drumroll, William Durham Paul. 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 is Victorian Narcos. And then in the process, the whole of the Far East gets colonised. From this comes, for example, the French going into Cambodia Vietnam and in 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. Goodbye from me, William Durham Paul. Paul Savings are happening now at the Home Depot. Save up to $500 on select appliances. Plus, enjoy free delivery when you spend $998 or more. From prepping to cooking to cleaning up, fridge air has you covered. The custom flex temp drawer switches from fridge to freezer. With more than 15 cooking modes, including Stonebeck pizza mode, you can enjoy restaurant quality pizza in as little as two minutes. Then clean up with the fridge air dishwasher featuring the industry's fastest normal wash cycle. Shop Paul Savings now at the Home Depot. Off the belt, you're October 21st. You only see store online for details. Mr. Monopoly here. Miss me? Monopoly is back at McDonald's with millions of prizes. A 2027 cheap cherry? A carnival cruise vacation? Gift cards from Tordash and Best Buy. Feel then play in the McDonald's app. Get your bag! No purchase necessary. 50US and DCH18+. See [email protected] for rules and [email protected]/amoe for info and playing without purchase by mail by November 2nd. Chants card gameins November 8th. Gameins November 22nd, 2026. See rules for prize details. Monopoly is a registered trademark of Hasbro. Hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I don't know if you've heard, but Mint's premium wireless is $15 a month. But I'd like to offer one other perk. We have no stores. That means no small talk. Crazy weather we're having. No, it's not. It's just weather. It is an introverts dream. Give it a try at MintMobile.com/switch.