Word: irishmen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...government is finally beginning to rebut the bitter quip that Ireland is "a home for men rather than a breeding ground for emigrants and bullocks." The country's rapturous huzzas for John Kennedy were more than an expression of pride in a Gael made good -to many young Irishmen, he seems more real than the Irish martyrs whose streaked statues fill Dublin's parks with silent declamation. Jack's homecoming epitomized to the Irish the successful distance they themselves have traveled...
...remote little island in the Atlantic has cast its shadow across the civilized world since the Dark Ages, when Irish priests and scholars roamed Europe expounding new (and mostly heretical) theologies. In a diaspora even greater than the expulsion of the Jews, more than 3,000,000 Irishmen in the past 100 years have scattered across the world, forming what an Irish writer calls "one of the world's great secret societies, with branches everywhere"-though the society was never very secret. Everyone has his own list of great Irishmen, but there is no denying that the gifts...
Though there was hardly a country or a field of endeavor where Irishmen failed to make a mark or a mint, the diminishing number of their compatriots at home kept wondering fretfully if they were a vanishing race...
Ireland is the only nation in Europe whose population has shrunk in that time. While Irishmen left the country in waves, they entered it in a trickle, for Ireland has the lowest marriage rate, and one of the lowest birth rates, in all Europe. To the Neo-Malthusian, the Irish would seem models of ecological balance. In a country where food production is barely increasing, 66% of all Irish males between 20 and 39 are bachelors, and vast numbers of men and women die single...
Among those who stayed on, there was a paralyzing sense of frustration and fatalism. Life was not only hard-it was dull. To many Irishmen, the perverse, pervasive mediocrity of their culture was typified by Gaelic-worship...