Adolescence in Modern Irish History. Edited by Catherine Cox and Susannah Riordan

Abstract

This edited collection emanated from a 2011 workshop and represents the first volume to address the history of youth/adolescence in modern Ireland. With this is mind, the editors have wisely chosen to provide a solid and expansive introduction charting the development of the historiography in Ireland, the conceptualization of adolescence, and the trajectory of the volume from “affective revolution,” to the emergence of the teenager. To date, the historiography has tended to focus on the history of education, child welfare, “juvenile delinquency” and criminality, and the emergence of youth culture in the sixties. It has been an urban history primarily, with significant gaps in the rural experience. Institutionalization has been a central trope, due in part to the scandals that emerged in the 1990s surrounding Ireland’s industrial and reformatory school system. The nine chapters in this volume and the introduction go a sufficient way to address this neglect. Many of the themes in the collection are referred to in the final chapter by Mary E. Daly, which provides a broad contextual framework for the preceding work. Daly argues that Ireland is distinctive in certain ways when looking at the history of youth/adolescence. She highlights two issues in particular—the lack of an industrial revolution (and as a result the primacy of the rural/family economy) and the impact of war and revolution from 1914–23. Ireland’s demographics are also referred to—an exceptionally low rate of marriage and high birth rate, as well as the continued emigration of thousands of young men and women until the 1960s. By 1973 when Ireland became a full member of the European Economic Community (EEC), compulsory schooling, urbanization, and outside cultural influences meant “the lives of Irish adolescents were not noticeably dissimilar from those of adolescents in other EEC member states” (213).