Word: hanlon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Irish-born Thomas J. O'Hanlon, 41, has an additional excuse. He left home in 1957 for the U.S. and is now an American citizen and journalist. (Nearly 10 years ago he became an editor of FORTUNE.) The outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland in 1969 and frequent trips back to his splintered country convinced O'Hanlon "that the Irish had become the most interesting subjects for anyone who wanted to understand and write about the flabby human condition in the last part of the century of industrial man." In 1972-73, he set up temporary residence...
...coexists with savage sectarian hatreds. The calamitous failure of subsistence farming in the 19th century has ensured the preservation of exactly the same kind of subsistence farming in the present. Blessed with a shore line that attracts international trawlers, Ireland has never launched a fishing industry. "Socialism," O'Hanlon writes, "is a nasty word in Ireland, yet it is difficult to think of a non-socialist economic structure where the government's presence is so pervasive." The government encourages undisciplined stock and real estate speculation. No law prevents politicians from voting on measures that might enrich them...
...Irish carefully collects statistics that many other books on the country ignore. Taken together, they only underscore the obvious: Ireland is a marvelously consistent affront to rationality. O'Hanlon knows this. What is more, he does not mind giving the things he deplores their due. In an exasperated chapter on the Catholic Church and its dominion over the republic, he cites Tocqueville's brilliant insight of more than 100 years ago: priest and peasant stood together against the common Protestant landowning enemy. Nothing that has happened since, including England's 1922 exit from the 26 Southern coun...
...church baiters are as fair to the op position as O'Hanlon. Yet he cannot help asking: "Is the quality of life affected favorably or adversely by the power of the church?" His predictable answer is that Ireland would be a better place without church-inspired censorship and brimstone bans on divorce and birth control...
Curiously, O'Hanlon's distaste for the old ways is matched by his distrust of the new. Ireland's energetic attempts to attract industry (and keep some of the natives at home) is described as "the selling of Ireland to foreign investors...