News from a New Republic Author:Tom Garvin The 1950s was a decade of international economic recovery after the disasters of World War II. 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 news... more »paper 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.« less