Sixties Ireland: Reshaping the Economy, State and Society, 1957–1973 is a remarkable book. Mary Daly, a distinguished historian of modern Ireland, takes on the period that, in the conventional wisdom, has come to be seen as “the long 1960s,” during which the Republic of Ireland underwent a tumultuous wave of modernization. The country purportedly catapulted from a traditional agrarian status to the trappings of a modern European economy and society. Daly seeks to challenge this perspective by delineating the degree to which this rapid progress has been overstated by journalists and popular historians. She does so with a close analysis of the primary engine of change in Ireland, the economy, followed by the effects of economic developments on Irish society, immigration, feminism, the church, and a variety of social policies. She closes with the effects on the party system, Irish foreign policy, and relations with Northern Ireland.

Remarkably, Daly's keen analysis could support a thesis completely the opposite of the one she advances. To be sure, her dissection of letters, memos, government reports, secondary literature, and policy disagreements on a plethora of topics reveals powerful attitudinal, bureaucratic, and ideological forces that opposed modernization. Yet it also reveals a considerable degree of change—enough change to allow for an interpretation of how great the propulsive forces for modernization were from 1957 to 1973. This is not meant as a criticism; on the contrary, it is testimony to just how carefully and fully Daly has presented the debates on policy, the ebb and flow of personality, politics, and public opinion on a wide range of issues during the period.

Daly's insightful coverage of economic issues suggests that political leaders of the time had such an unsophisticated knowledge of economics, or were so clearly prisoners of Éamon de Valera's pastoral vision of Ireland, that emigration became the substitute for growth while Department of Finance regressive policies put a stranglehold on economic advancement. The 1959 adoption of the proposals in T. K. Whitaker's Economic Development (1958) by Seán Lemass (de Valera's successor as Taoiseach) triggered a shift away from protectionism and government investment in industrial development and toward openness to foreign direct investment. Despite the rates of growth achieved in the 1960s, Ireland remained relatively poor by European standards and in particular as compared to the United Kingdom, a poor performer itself during this period. Ireland sought membership in the then European Economic Community and then began to pin many policies and hopes on the notion that membership would greatly aid Ireland's growth. In fact, after so much change in the Irish economy from Economic Development to membership in the European Economic Community, growth was not sustained, and by 1990 the gap between Ireland and the European Union average was the same as in 1960.

In terms of Irish society and culture in the broad view, Daly's position that change was less extensive than usually portrayed is easier to question. Indeed, her own description of Ireland moving from “a country where people knew their place” (125) to a country with rapidly changing consumer behavior, sexual attitudes, access to television and a wider world, and diminishing emigration, reflects change both widespread and rapid. The same can be said for the role and status of women and family law. While the 1950s for women were not all that different than the 1930s, the 1970s were something altogether different, in part because of educational change and in part because the feminist movement was becoming the functional equivalent of the American civil rights movement, opening questions about discrimination in Irish society far beyond “equal pay for equal work” (154).

Though Irish attitudes toward the Catholic Church underwent a sea change in the 1990s and 2000s, that was largely the result of the self-inflicted wound of scandalous revelations of child abuse. In the 1960s, the church was itself undergoing a self-examination with Vatican II and taking a strong doctrinal position on birth control with Humanae Vitae. Neither had much of an effect on Ireland, as the Catholic hierarchy were so conservative and the Irish public so deferential that the kind of theological response generated in other European countries and the widespread ignoring of Humanae Vitae by European Catholics did not materialize so strongly there.

Daly examines the expectation that changes in Ireland would somehow cause a major realignment of the political parties and concludes that basically the array of the parties and their relative strengths remained the same. Her conclusion, supported by political science research, is that the parties morphed into pragmatic power-seeking parties, driven by constituency service, and that the modernizers seeking to purify them ideologically were not successful. For example, Garrett FitzGerald's effort to make Fine Gael into a social democratic party was thwarted by the old guard.

Daly concludes with an analysis of Irish foreign policy and the brief foray into a neutralist position at the United Nations. She reports that nonmembership in North Atlantic Treaty Organization gave way to membership in the European Union and firm allegiance to the western ideological cold war camp. Finally, the effort by Seán Lemass to reset the relationship with Northern Ireland with the reciprocal visits by him and Terrance O'Neill did more to exacerbate tensions in the North, as it roused the ire of Loyalists fueled by the rhetoric of Ian Paisley.

Ultimately what constitutes “rapid change” may be in the eye of the beholder, and there certainly was enough modernization in 1960s Ireland to impress observers. Daly makes the stronger case that the economic transformation in that period was less dramatic than often described. Her case for limited change in the social sphere is less compelling based upon the very details that she so splendidly amasses. Either way, there is no doubt about how well Daly charts the lack of vision, bureaucratic inertia, misguided policy, and ideological fits and starts displayed by Ireland from 1957 to 1973. There was enough official dysfunction to go around.