This study is a natural elaboration of his primary work on why modernisation took so long to take hold in Ireland. He has chosen the 1948–62 period because he believes that it was a crucial one of transition in the Republic, a sort of coming of age. The decade opened with Ireland as an avowedly agricultural economy and it closed with the transformation to industry and services well under way. Garvin tracks the debate as to how the economy should be developed, a battle between modernisers focused on industry and exports and traditionalists still wedded to farming. This, perhaps, is his most significant contribution to an understanding of how Ireland was modernised, although his dissection of developments in education are no less valuable.

The witnesses he produces are not so much the three main newspapers as, more accurately, their journalists and commentators. Now the first problem with this approach is that what is written in newspapers doesn’t necessarily reflect the opinions of the mainstream of the population, writers being, as he says, ‘statistically atypical or mildly peculiar people and somewhat to the left’. On the other hand, each of the three papers was editorially conservative, albeit with a different take on conservatism, and this acted as a corrective. He labels them accurately so that the modern reader can understand where they are coming from editorially. The Irish Independent, with the largest circulation, he describes as a staunch defender of the emergent professional middle class, the Fine Gael paper and usually anti-statist and anti-socialist (it still hadn’t exorcised the ghost of William Martin Murphy). The Irish Press, the official organ of the Fianna Fáil party, was, according to Garvin at least, relatively forward-looking and developmentally minded, hence the most wholeheartedly modernist newspaper of the three Dublin dailies (which will come as a surprise to many of my vintage). The Irish Times he accurately describes as ex-unionist, with a deep-rooted commitment to agrarianism but with a counterbalancing sympathy for organised workers (it had not yet found its role as the voice of an educated liberal Ireland). These three papers are supplemented at times by referrals to minor journals, weeklies and pamphlets. That he has read widely of their respective columns is not in dispute, but the other problem with his methodology is that of selection. To what extent do his extracts fairly represent the tenor and thrust of the whole? Is he guilty of special pleading? The answer, to my mind at least, is that Garvin faithfully represents the Ireland of the fifties as it was and arrives at conclusions that correspond with the evidence he adduces.