Published by Gill and Macmillan in 2010, 251 pages. Hardback with Dust Jacket. (S6420WSOU3)
This book provides a detailed and comprehensive history of Ireland in the 1950's......
From the front inside fly leaf: The 1950s was a decade of international economic recovery after the disasters of the Second World War. There was just one exception - the Irish economy actually contracted in those years, and over four hundred thousand people emigrated.
Tom Garvin's survey of the 1950s is an interpretative narrative, based largely on a close reading of contemporary newspaper reports and analyses. He identifies the primary causes of the calamity as a revolutionary gerontocracy that overstayed its welcome; the blocking power of powerful special interest groups who alone benefited from economic protection; and an ideology of rural frugality, buttressed by an under-developed educational system and supported by the moral monopoly of the Catholic Church.
Garvin also traces the rise of the generation that broke this consensus and carried Ireland into the free-trade boom of the 1960s. Their reform prescription was born not just of despair but also of a series of social changes among the Irish middle-class elite that were to prove decisive over time
Condition of the book is generally very good. The dust jacket has one or two very minor scuffs and blemishes but is clean and tidy, the spine is intact and all pages are clean, intact, unblemished and tightly bound. Not price clipped
| Condition | New |