Dublin in the Time of Joyce

I was born in 1925 and grew up in an Ireland that was not greatly different to the country from which James Joyce and Nora Barnacle fled on 8 October, 1904. True, there were changes. We had achieved an independence of sorts from England and twenty-six of the thirtytwo counties in the country were now governed from Dublin. The umbilical cord, however, had not been cut and six northern counties remained and still remain under British rule which has resulted in the festering sore that is Northern Ireland today. We had also experienced a particularly vicious civil war between the forces who, after the war of independence, supported the Treaty with England and those who opposed it. The civil war left bitter memories and divisions and these memories and divisions had an enormous and almost cataclysmic effect on the social and political life of the country until comparatively recent times. During this period when we were slowly coming to terms with the difficulties of governing ourselves and running the country, there was mass unemployment and grinding poverty for a large portion of the population, and the way of life was determined more than ever by the dictates of an autocratic Catholic Church. We had adopted existing British laws and taken on board their civil service and judicial systems and the only real difference was in the people who occupied the positions of power within these systems. The minions of the British Government were replaced by members of the emerging Catholic middle class who looked for leadership and guidance to the hierarchy of that same Church. Molly Ivors and her friends had come into their inheritance. In 1932, after a General Election won by Fianna Fail, the political wing of the anti-treaty Forces in the Civil War, Eamonn de Valera became Taoiseach or Prime Minister, a position he was to hold for an