Over the past half-century Ireland has been transformed, particularly south of the border. But the North, too, has come a long way since the Province was run by retired Guards officers with clipped accents and patrician views.

Some of the changes have resulted from external forces. The balance of agriculture and industry within the Republic's economy made Ireland a major beneficiary of European largesse. And Whitehall and Westminster — belatedly realising that the sectarian violence in the North was, in part, the product of poverty — began to pour resources into what had been the most neglected part of the United Kingdom.

Ireland became irresistibly attractive to foreign investment while at the same time a home grown and almost spontaneous mood for change influenced every aspect of Irish life. In Luck and the Irish, R.F. Foster describes both causes and effects in 200 or so pages that combine continual entertainment with the erudition of a professor of Irish history at Oxford.

Progress from “most distressful country” into a Celtic version of Wirtschaftwunder could not have come about without Ireland abandoning many old superstitions. The relationship of material progress to theological enlightenment was personified by Garret Fitzgerald — academic, Taoiseach and, like many Irish politicians of his generation, the son of a 1916 revolutionary.

When we attended the European Community's Foreign Affairs Council, he always hurried off to early Mass before the meeting on Sunday morning. But Foster tells us, he was happy to admit that in the 1960s “Irish Catholic intellectuals were more and more inclined to ‘do their own theology'”. It was that admirable intellectual independence that enabled him to resist advice — or instruction — from Pope Paul VI in March 1977. By his own account: “The Pope's uncompromising theme was that Ireland was a Catholic country — perhaps the only one left — and that it should stay that way... Told of the need to avoid alienating Protestant opinion in the North, the pontiff responded that he knew how tragic the situation was there — but that could not be a reason to change any of the laws which made the Republic a less Catholic state.”

The most obvious example of the laws that His Holiness wished to keep in place was the prohibition of birth control. The campaign for women's emancipation, in which planned pregnancy was an essential part, had a liberating effect on all Irish society — as well as providing a new source of talent and energy in the form of previously second-class female citizens. When Foster quotes Ann Marie Hourihane — “You didn't have to be a socialist to be a member of the Irish Left, you just had to want contraception” — he demonstrates that reform is contagious. Demolish one prejudice and other barriers to progress fall.

The expansion of the Irish economy — both North and South — was immensely accelerated by the end of terrorism and bipartisan government in Stormont. It is easy to forget that although peace was a long time coming, the wisest politicians made regular, if tentative, steps towards rapprochement many years earlier.

In 1969 Jack Lynch persuaded Fianna Fail to amend its constitution so that, instead of demanding “the unity and independence of Ireland as a Republic” it aimed at achieving “in peace and agreement the unity of Ireland and its people”. Relatives of the dead and maimed may regard such linguistic adjustments as little consolation for the hurt of the next 30 years — described by Foster as the IRAdemonstrating its desire to unite the two people by “bombing them to extinction”.

One of the many delights of Luck and the Irish is its treatment of the rogues and miscreants of recent Irish history — none of them more blame-worthy, in an Irish blarney sort of way, than Charles Haughey, who, despite (or perhaps because of) his behaviour, became a national icon.

Other politicians in other countries have behaved worse and escaped to survive and prosper. But Haughey — recipient of gifts from businessmen for whom he had done favours and a million-pound debtor who relied on his status to save him from bankruptcy — spent the spoils of his malpractices in a flamboyant Irish fashion. He bought racehorses, Georgian mansions and a whole island.

No Irish politician could behave like that today and survive. Ireland has moved on. A great deal of romance has gone. But romance never paid the bills or bought the groceries.

Luck and the Irish, by R.F.Foster

Allen Lane, £20

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