The middle decades of the twentieth century are too often and unfairly reduced to certain tropes within Irish historiography. Popular opinion often records a ‘dark decade’ of the 1950s with relentless emigration and grinding poverty giving way to the slow march out of protectionist policies and into the 1960s of economic expansion and the positioning of Ireland within international political discourse. Recent studies into the diverse, complex, and fascinating cultural changes that affected life in Ireland during the 1950s and 1960s are repositioning this period within fresh new historical debates. One area of investigation producing many new rich insights from these middle decades is youth studies. Two new valuable contributions include Carole Holohan's Reframing Irish youth in the sixties and Eleanor O'Leary's Youth and popular culture in 1950s Ireland.
Holohan's monograph expands her recent body of work which has focused on youth and social change, and more latterly, poverty from mid-century Ireland onwards. This volume focuses on the ‘long 1960s’ of c.1958 to c.1974 and on the social change which defined the ‘youth’ of the period. Holohan clearly defines all cohorts within the study and marks the change in trajectory of contemporary historical reconceptualisation of youth as a demographic category, between those who are defined as ‘child’ and ‘adult’ within the state (pp 3–5). Holohan defines the sixties as typified by ‘accelerated rather than transformative change’ (p. 11) and draws on international (in particular American and European) examples of post-war development and social and cultural change as experienced in Ireland, albeit in a contrasting social and economic landscape.
The book is structured into two sections, with the former addressing youth in political, cultural, and economic discourse, and the latter half investigating parallel responses of adults and official authorities to youth in Irish society. The opening chapters address the increasing interest of authorities, within both government and Catholic church hierarchy, towards the emerging youth of Ireland from the 1950s. The control of the succeeding generation was scrutinised in order to demonstrate practically the modernity of a ‘new’ and international republic. Focusing on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising, Holohan reframes the memory of the Rising within a modern and unaffected generation, those defined as ‘practical patriots’ in the eyes of the state – practical in so far as they serve a new role as educated, malleable assets towards the achievement of the modern Irish state.
This is perhaps the early evidence of neo-liberal policy by marking economic development through the commodification of a pliable youthful generation who embody economic nationalism as opposed to the insular and traditional ‘male’ nationalism of bloody rebellion. As an opening chapter, it is a standout contribution and offers much to current debates on commemoration, memory, and gender. In particular, the reframing of education and school curricula by successive governments to ‘remember’ certain versions of history prioritised a type of youth that would legitimise the future through renewal.
Chapter two addresses youth, education policy and employment and progresses the argument around official policy and youth opportunity in terms of access to education and opportunity. A strong case is made for links between class division and educational opportunities, with vocational training aimed at working-class (male) youth, rather than ongoing and free secondary education as a viable option, which was seen as the preserve of the growing middle-classes.
Chapter three addresses the transnational influence of popular culture, such as showband, beat, and folk music, and the media through which they were received and assimilated by an eager Irish youth. This chapter reveals a fascinating reappraisal of the image of vernacular Irish youth culture and its outward projection in the social/public space, pastimes, music, and clothing. The place of juvenile delinquents, of youth within the law, and protection of youth are addressed at length.
Youth magazines and the development of an idealised ‘image’ of youth is mapped against imported magazine culture and also imported music forms such as rock and roll. Further examination of dance-hall culture, showband dances, Teddy boys culture and other formats reveal the extent to which the body and image were used by the youth of the time to present their own culture and identity, with more access to foreign influences through magazines, cinema, television and music than any previous Irish generation.
O'Leary's study relates exclusively to the 1950s and the framework of popular culture as its vehicle of investigation. The book offers a refreshing introduction and overview for the volume – one that does not seek to tell of a history of youth in the past but instead interprets the past through the perspective and lived experience of youth during the 1950s, giving voice to those within this fluidly written history. O'Leary confidently redresses historiographical imbalances that have previously resulted in ‘history of elite media experiences rather than history of mass-media experiences’, notwithstanding the theoretical difficulties in forming boundaries on the scope of what construes ‘popular mass culture’ (pp 4–6). The volume is divided thematically rather than strictly chronologically and individual chapters address education and opportunity, employment and emigration, cinema and dance hall culture, magazines and print culture, rural and urban spaces and clubs and associations.
Contextual information is accounted for within ‘local vs global’ case-studies, with the ‘authentic’ representation and image of Irish youth in the 1950s a central concern to O'Leary's study. Contrary to many other traditional assertions, O'Leary argues that ‘In many ways the Irish experience of social change in the 1950s followed very similar patterns to other western nations’ (p. 60).
O'Leary gives new and insightful accounts of the use of film, television, cinema and music as a means for youthful rejection of a passing Irish state, in favour of an international and increasingly global (and urban) Ireland. The body, for instance, became the fulcrum of this rejection of conservatism, through the adoption of American and British fashion culture, hairstyles, and mannerisms of a liberalising and sexually aware generation.
O'Leary also investigates the function and occupation of public space and the utilisation of space, both rural and urban, in and as an act of collective identity formation and peer communication. The outlets afforded for consolidation of youth identity through associations, such as Macra na Feirme, the Catholic Youth Clubs, as examples, further the consideration of the battle for control of youth in Ireland and also the competition for the leisure time where consumption of popular culture could be patrolled. The censorship of printed popular culture, such as comic books, is supported by the examination of a range of fascinating publications of the period. O'Leary does not just add to the debate around the internationalision of youth culture in the 1950s (a facet widely acknowledged by many historians), but does so through thorough investigation of a broad and hugely varied range of primary and archival sources as well as periodicals that rarely, if ever, get fair attention.
Neither volume, however, addresses in any great detail (or at all) the critical interventions that theatre and literature were having on youth at this time. Where official censorship was restricting access to literature and film that were deemed indecent by the Catholic church, a vibrant pocket theatre movement in Dublin expanded from the mid-1950s, including the Pike Theatre and the 37 Club, offering late night revues and satire, cabaret and music as well as important meeting places for young bohemians and artists. Holohan outlines the hugely detailed and varied archival material upon which her arguments are based. O'Leary equally mined rich arrays of primary sources but is more prone to larger sweeping statements that would benefit the reader by clarifying sources through more and detailed footnotes. O'Leary has, however, in her voluminous appendices created large tracts of hugely valuable data and tables which will benefit other studies that both these volumes will foreground. Holohan also outlines the potential of (and also the need for) an oral history project that should yet be carried out on the youth of the 1960s, another pressing and important future project.
Both of these volumes are important new additions to the scholarship and historical re-evaluation of two critical decades of the mid-century development of modern Ireland. They study a social grouping which might not have been in positions of power and decision-making, those who might not have been voters, owners of property or means to independently develop wealth, or those who were yet in a place of stasis within wider networks – often outside of formal education but not yet married adults or in employment, but who will be, arguably, the most prominent generation born in Ireland since the foundation of the state.
The generation of the 1950s and 1960s also wielded most means and opportunity to affect change for the country they inherited from the previous revolutionary generation. How they developed their ideas, received culture, discussed ideas, socialised, were educated, grew relationships, would shape the adults they would become and offer the earliest intervention into the vision the future Ireland would become.
