Civil Rights in Northern Ireland and Friel’s The Freedom of the City

Abstract

The 1960s saw Ireland, North and South, facing new challenges and major evolutions. The Republic emerged from a long phase of economic protectionism ready to embrace an altogether different agenda through Whitaker’s 1958 landmark Programme for Economic Expansion, paving the way for the influx of foreign, mostly American, capital and companies in the following decade. Social evolutions were slower and emigration remained massive, with the population hitting an alltime low of 2.8 million. That the Republic functioned like a Catholic state could be felt when it came to looking at issues of personal morality, which were still dictated by a strict Catholic ethos with a powerful and largely conservative Church whose position had been strengthened by de Valera’s 1937 Constitution. The political system, in which the two main parties, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, were separated less by ideological issues — as both leaned to the right of the political spectrum — than by the stance their founding figures had taken during the civil war on constitutional issues, remained anachronistic, favouring cronyism and provincialism. President Kennedy’s visit to Ireland in 1963 was a major event and a cause for celebration. Preparations to join the EEC were underway, in a move that would alter Ireland’s relationship to Great Britain through joint membership of this union and prove how open to the world Ireland now was, at least economically.