Word: irishness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...nearly over. A middle class, as conventional and tolerant as anybody's, is now growing up in the cities, and the Charm is being taken over by the Tourist Board. Bogus castles, renovated pubs and professional colorful characters may be all that survive of it, unless the Irish pass a miracle that has defeated other folk people and keep the flower without also keeping the dunghill it grew...
...young Irish today have other things on their minds. For the first time, England has been pushed out of the light, by modern travel, and the European connection can be made. There is strong sentiment for joining the Common Market...
Pessimism may be the last part of the heritage to go. The Irish are leary of hope look at where it got them in the past! But no one under 50 takes refuge in the Patriot Game any more, that truculent dirge over Ireland's glorious failures...
...Irish will probably go on cursing the clergy anyway, or defending them against curses, long after the occasion has passed. Anticlericalism is too good and old a sport to abandon entirely, and the most devout indulge in it the most gleefully. The Irish bishops ("the 26 Popes") have drawn their covered wagons up around divorce and the Pill. Book censorship gets feebler all the time, and is now at about the same mean level it was in the U.S. ten years ago. The young clergy are far less tempted by politics than their elders-or by clanking displays of power...
...would want to live in this rotten country?" the Irish still ask you. But the lip quivers a trifle (get an Irishman to actually laugh and he concedes a point to you). They are not leaving the way they were; or else they're leaving and coming back, trained and with a stake. To keep the place lively, the government has announced some eyecatching tax breaks for writers and artists. After all, they say to the English, "our ancestors were great scholars while yours were still running around in blue paint." Perhaps the next dream of the ahistorical Irish...