Ideologies Are Not Your Friends

Figures

Figures 1 and 2: Auschwitz 1989

Figure 3: 2007 Book cover and design influence

Figure 4: Presenting Africa Centre Report to Office of An Taoiseach (2004)

Figure 5: 2009 Book cover featuring Rotimi Adabari Mayor of Portlaoise

Figures 6 and 7: Reception at Áras an Uachtaráin to mark launch of An Irish Century

Figure 8: Tom Garvin

Figure 9: Cover of Irish Adventures in Nation Building featuring characters from the League of Volunteers comic

Figure 10: Ideological influences on social policy

Figures 11 and 12: Covers of 2007 co-edited book and of Mick Rush’s 2015 monograph

Figures 13 and 14: Author with Denis Dillon and their 2011 co-authored book

Figures 15 and 16: Author and his dog Loki 2019

Figure 17: Matt Fanning’s Shebeen 2021

Figure 18: Memorial stone in Roslevan Ennis County Clare

Figure 19: Matt Fanning and Mossie

Figure 20: Book cover featuring Irish citizenship ceremony

Figure 21: 2023 Book cover

Figures 22 and 23: Writing desk made by Matt Fanning and bookcases made by author

Figure 24: Jiufen (2014)

Figure 25: Mary Fanning

Acknowledgements

This book is dedicated to my wife Joan and our children Caitriona, Éilis and Ellie in whose shadows I live, but whose stories are not mine to tell, to Tom Garvin and Gabriel Kiely who gave me life-changing gifts of encouragement, and to the memory of my colleague and friend Mick Rush.

Books by Bryan Fanning

Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland

Evil, God, the greater good and rights: The philosophical origins of social problems

The Quest for Modern Ireland: The battle of ideas 1912–1986

New Guests of the Irish Nation

Immigration and Social Cohesion in the Republic of Ireland

Lessons for the Big Society: Planning, Regeneration and the Politics of Community Participation (with Denis Dillon)

The Books that Define Ireland (with Tom Garvin)

Sociology in Ireland: A Short History (with Andreas Hess)

Histories of the Irish Future

Migration and the Making of Ireland

Diverse Republic

Three Roads to the Welfare State: Liberalism, Social democracy and Christian democracy

Public Morality and the Culture Wars: The Triple Divide

Migration and Social Policy in a Changing World: Histories, Challenges and Dilemmas

Edited Books

Ireland Develops: Administration and Social Policy 1953–2003 (with Tony McNamara)

Theorising Irish Social Policy (with Patricia Kennedy, Gabriel Kiely and Suzanne Quin)

Immigration and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland

Care and Social Change in the Irish Welfare Economy (with Michael Rush)

Globalisation, Migration and Social Transformation: Ireland in Europe and the World (with Ronaldo Munck)

Studies: An Irish Century 1912–2012

Immigrants as Outsiders in the Two Irelands (with Lucy Michael)

CHAPTER 1 Introduction

My academic career has mostly focused on trying to understand how migration has changed Irish society and upon the ideologies and beliefs that have shaped understandings of social problems. I became fascinated by the software of ideas and intellectual histories that hummed in the background of the places where I lived and worked. I have wrestled with social problems and with the theories and beliefs that shaped understandings of these within academia, amongst policy makers and in politics. As well as promoting my own arguments and analyses I have written a lot about the viewpoints of others, and much about beliefs I do not share. I have done so, of course, through the prism of my own experiences, enthusiasms, hopes and anxieties.

Ireland has been the centre of my world. It is where I grew up and where I have lived ever since, except for a gap of ten years between 1985 and 1995. Much of what I wrote is concerned with how Ireland has changed or with understanding the Irish past. This book makes the case for a broad conception of Irish Studies that includes the social sciences as well as the study of Irish history, literature and culture. It examines Irish arguments about politics and national identity from social science perspectives, but also through the lens of intellectual history. This book offers an account of what it has been like to work on these topics as an Irish academic writer. It is also a book about outside intellectual influences upon debates that have played out in Irish academia, politics, and society.

Context is particularly important in a book that is preoccupied with ideological and intellectual perspectives. My vantage point was a relatively privileged Irish Catholic suburban smalltown one. I grew up in Ennis County Clare and received my education in a Christian Brothers’ primary school, in a secondary school run by a religious order and in an excellent town library which was named after Eamon de Valera. It had a small museum attached which had, on permanent exhibition, a 1947 Dodge that he had purchased from Sean T. O’Kelly for his personal use during the 1950s. As a small boy I always stopped to admire the Dodge – more glamorous than my father’s Ford Cortina – every time I went to the library. I practically lived there during the summer holidays from school. One Sunday as a child I saw de Valera arrive at the Franciscan Church in Ennis for Mass. He was chauffeured to Ennis that day in a Rolls Royce. de Valera had a strong Clare connection. He had been first elected to Parliament in an East Clare by-election and, after independence, he represented the county in the Dáil for several decades.

The Northern Ireland conflict played out on television in the background alongside the moon landings and the Vietnam war. I remember our class being taught in 1971 by our teacher, a Christian Brother, to sing The Men Behind the Wire: ‘Armoured cars and tanks and gun came to take away our sons, but every man must stand behind the men behind the wire’. At home I imbibed more moderate versions of Irish nationalism. The political allegiances of my parents and their contemporaries had been shaped by a civil war for control of the nation state. My father kept his political opinions to himself. As a teenager I taped an interview with his mother Ellen Lamb about the War of Independence, when her family home was a safe house for IRA men on the run. Whenever the Black and Tans came to search the house, according to family legend, a framed print eulogising the faith and patriotism of the Irish Volunteers was taken down from the wall and hidden.¹ This print passed down thought the generations to my uncle Paddy Fanning and then to my brother Conor. Ellen opposed the Treaty but her much older husband, my grandfather who died before I was born, was a Free Stater.

My mother Mary was a Fine Gael supporter, although her father Martin Nolan had sided against the Free State during the civil war. He came from Monard in Tipperary near Soloheadbeg, where his friend Dan Breen led the ambush that kickstarted the War of Independence on the same day, 21 January 1919, that Sinn Féin established Dáil Eireann. Martin emigrated to the United States in 1927 where he met my grandmother Josie Ryan, but they returned to Tipperary in 1932 during the Great Depression. He bought back a copy of Martin Haverty’s 838-page History of Ireland: Ancient and Modern which was published in New York in 1867. This charted the story of Ireland, using a Biblical timeline that dated the creation of the world to 4004 years before the birth of Christ, up to the establishment of Fenian movement in the United States. It ended with an expression of hope that Ireland would become an independent nation state. Some years ago, my mother got hold of this family relic and gave it to me.²