Twentieth-Century Ireland by Dermot Keogh

Author:Dermot Keogh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gill & Macmillan

was that the financial support of the entrepreneurial class was very substantial and had become vital and this was a very serious development indeed. The danger seen by a few in the early 1930s had materialised and it seemed to be only a matter of time until this financial dependence would manifest itself in the matter of policy to such an extent that the people would realise there had been a definite shift to the right in Fianna Fáil’s political position.74

That shift was very evident as the decade progressed. Ordinary people witnessed a boom in property speculation while, at the same time, the housing crisis in the capital and in other Irish cities appeared to worsen. The spectacle of conspicuous consumption side by side with real poverty was a contradiction that could not be sustained. While poor people waited for ever on housing lists, the countryside faced ‘horizon pollution’ with the building of monuments to the bad taste of the nouveau riche. For the unhappy wife in Paul Durcan’s poem, the new-found wealth of her haulier-husband was manifest in architectural kitsch:

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