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More The Irish Mail on Sunday March 22 • 2015 March 22 • 2015 The Irish Mail on Sunday More 79
give that
cuckootheboot
T
he figure of the
emigrant looms
about as large as a
figure can loom in
Irish life and lit-
erature – and not
a few ballads too. From the Wild
Geese to the Walworth Farce, the
figure of the hard-pressed Paddy
starting over in a new country –
sometimescomingtoruin,always
to plangent nostalgia – is an ines-
capable one.
ClairWills’sstudyofthesubject
focuses on one particular wave
of emigration, that of the 1950s, a
timewhenagenerationtooktothe
boat in staggering numbers: of the
children born in Ireland between
1931 and 1941, four out of every
five eventually emigrated; more
than half a million (out of a pop-
ulation of less than three) moved
abroadbetween1945and1960.
Writing in 1964, John B Keane
described his own departure
from Listowel: ‘When I boarded
the train that morning, it seemed
as if everyone was leaving. It
was the same at every station
along the way. As we left Dún
Laoghaire, the younger men were
drunk... tragically so, as I was, to
forget the dreadful loneliness of
having to leave home. The whole
scene reminded me of the early
Christian martyrs going out to
face the terrors of the arena.’
Wills’sanalysis,whileacknowl-
edging the trauma of those forced
toleave,takesanuancedapproach
to what can be an understand-
ably emotive subject. She offers
a fascinating survey of how the
debate around mass emigra-
tion was framed in Ireland – the
misgivings of those left behind,
physically and culturally – as well
as exploring how Irish immi-
grants in Britain were perceived
‘over there’ and represented by
contemporary Irish and British
writers.
She starts by pointing out that,
although most accounts of emi-
gration, like Keane’s, present it as
an unalloyed tragedy – and for so
many it undoubtedly was – there
were also some for whom it was
an adventure.
In a society where subsistence
farming was dying out but where
modernisation had yet to create
work for the large unpaid pool
of relatives living on smallhold-
ings, a venture across the Irish
sea, where a booming post-war
economy meant a regular wage
and a much higher standard of
living, was a distinctly pragmatic
undertaking.
For many, it was an escape from
a stratified and complacent soci-
ety quick to assign to others a
life of drudgery. The example of
nursing is particularly interest-
ing. In Ireland in the 1950s, Wills
explains,nursingtrainingwasnot
publicly funded and so was often
confined to the daughters of so-
called ‘respectable’ families.
InEngland,trainingopportuni-
tiesofferedameansofbetterment
for any young woman who could
scrape together the fare over.
This new mobility often horri-
fied those who felt the class from
which they drew their servants
should know their place. One
doctor, William Doolin, even
complained at the time to the
INO that ‘my wife had some trou-
ble with a recalcitrant maid who
threatened to go to England and
take up nursing’. One hopes she
made a clean getaway.
By contrast, the fate of male
emigrants was often far less
favourable, with life on construc-
tion sites offering few chances to
integrate with the local popula-
tion – an existence shown at its
extremes in Tom Murphy’s grim
classic from 1961, A Whistle In
The Dark.
But it’s the chapters in Wills’s
study that deal with anxieties
about women leaving Mother
Ireland that are the strongest
and by far the most compelling.
She describes how there was a
sort of moral panic at the idea of
young girls leaving their simple,
rural homesteads for the urban
centres of England, with its dubi-
A
long with daffodils,
new-born lambs and
lighter evenings, noth-
ing announces spring
more joyously than the first cry
of the cuckoo. The oldest song in
the English language mentions
it – Sumer Is Icumen In (Lhude
Sing Cuccu) – and so do Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Wordsworth et al.
So it’s a shock to be reminded
that, far from being a ­welcome
messenger of pleasant times, the
cuckoo is a bully and a thief. If it
was human, and lived next door,
you’d want it booted out.
It’s long been known that
cuckoos are parasites. Instead
of bringing up their own babies,
they lay their eggs in the nests
of other birds and then watch
from a distance while poor,
over-worked reed warblers,
dunnocks and meadow pipits do
allthemotheringontheirbehalf.
Thecuckoo’satrociousbehav-
iourhasbeenwellknownfor
centuriesbutthehowsandwhys
haveremainedunanswered.How
doesafemalecuckoobreakinto
anotherbird’snestandlayanegg
withouttheownersnoticing?
Whydon’tthehostsfreakout
whentheyspotthere’sanextra
eggintheirclutch?And,per-
hapsmostimportantlyofall,who
cameupwiththisspectacularly
unfairsysteminthefirstplace?
Nick Davies has spent a life-
time ­puzzling at these mysteries.
Although he’s a Professor of
Behavioural Ecology, there’s
nothing academic about his
approach. Instead of DNA
samples, he relies on close obser-
vation and patient fieldwork.
One of his more grisly rev-
elations is that the first thing
a cuckoo chick does on hatch-
ing is to evict its foster-siblings.
Search underneath a host nest
and you will find a pile of tiny
dead chicks that have been sys-
tematically pushed to their
deaths by their bullying lodger,
who is bigger and stronger.
Thecarnagedoesn’tendthere,
though.Whenamothercuckoo
laysheregg,she’llsnatchone
ofherhost’sandproceedtoeat
thecontents.Thiskillstwobirds
withonestone:thecuckoogetsa
freelunch,andthenestlooksless
crowdedtothereturninghost.
Davies’s book is positively
chirruping with fascinating
information like this. The fact,
for instance, that cuckoos lay
eggs that exactly match those of
their hosts. So cuckoos that live
in an area where there are reed
warblers lay eggs that are green
and spotted, while those target-
ing the nests of pied wagtails
produce eggs that are greyish-
white and speckled.
Why don’t the hosts do some-
thing to avoid this, like, say,
changing the colour of their own
eggs? They do, apparently, but
the cuckoos are clever enough to
spot this and quickly play catch-
up. This is what Davies calls the
‘arms race’ taking place between
cuckoos and their hosts. One
side takes evasive action, and the
other simply adjusts its strategy.
Nature writing is having a
bit of a moment though some
might say the overly poetic
style adopted by some writers
is getting in the way of the facts.
Refreshingly, this isn’t the case
with Davies. He uses words to
explain and enlighten rather
than to embellish. The result is
a fascinating book, even if, in its
own way, it has all the qualities
of a horrible nightmare.
kathryn
hughesnaturalworld
Cuckoo:Cheating
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providesasatireonaspirationand
brandobsessioninthisgolden
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comedyofmannersisoftenvery
funny,vergingonfarce–butit’salso
repetitiveandoverlong.Itultimately
becomesaboutendurancerather
thanenjoyment.Styleaplentythen
but,alas,notmuchcontent.
The Cavendon
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BarbaraTaylorBradford
HarperCollins€25.50
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unmistakable
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DowntonAbbey
inthisupstairs-
downstairsyarnof
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Butthisbeing
theredoubtableBarbaraTaylor
Bradford,thefouryoungwomen
centrestageareafeistierlotthan
theirDowntoncounterparts.From
aristoDaphne,battlingtosavethe
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Cecily,hackingitasafashion
designerinLondon,theseare
likeable,well-drawncharacters
whosefortunesyoufollowwithkeen
interest.Asequeltothebestselling
CavendonHall,itneatlycaptures
thebrittlenessofthedecadethat
dancedandstumbledtowardsthe
GreatDepression.
O
n a September
evening in 2005 a
man called Robert
Farquharson,
recently separated from his wife,
drove his car off the road and
into a small lake near the town of
Geelong in southern Australia.
Farquharson’s three young sons
were in the back. Their father
escaped, and a few minutes
later he was found standing
by the side of the road, soaked
and filthy and demanding to be
driven to his ex-wife’s house to
tell her their children were dead.
A little while later this ex-wife,
Cindy Gambino, and her new
partner, Stephen Moules, would
rush to the lake, and Moules
would dive into the water in a
desperate attempt to save the
kids. But it was too dark, too
cold, too late. Farquharson stood
there watching, asking anyone
nearby if they had a cigarette. It
was Father’s Day.
A couple of days later the
police decided they didn’t buy
Farquharson’s belated expla-
nation for what had happened
– that he had blacked out at the
wheel ­following a coughing
fit – and charged him with the
murder of his ­children: Jai, 10,
Tyler, 7, and two-year-old Bailey.
When the case came to court,
the eminent Australian novel-
ist and true-crime writer Helen
Garner decided to attend the
trial. Like most of us, her initial
reaction was to pray that it was
indeed an accident. The alterna-
tive was too ghastly: that a man
may deliberately drive his chil-
dren into a deep, dark pool and
leave them there to drown while
freeing himself.
The initial trial took six weeks
and the subsequent retrial 11.
It would be almost eight years
john
williamstruecrime
ThisHouseOfGrief
HelenGarner
TestPublishing€18 ★★★★★
stolen lives: Robert Farquharson. His sons Jai, Bailey and Tyler
before the legal proceedings
finally ground to a halt.
Itmighthavebeenashorter
legal ­battleifFarquharsonhad
nothadhissupporters.Hislaw-
yer,PeterMorrissey,wentto
extraordinarylengthstofight
forhisclient.Hissistersstuck
byhimthroughout,implacable
intheirbeliefinhisinnocence.
Moresurprisingly,atthefirst
trialatleast,hisex-wifeCindy
testifiedinhisfavour.Sherefused
tobelievehewouldeverhave
donesuchathingtotheirchil-
dren.Sheknewhelovedthem.
In the end, all the legal argu-
ment came down to a simple
question. Did Farquharson’s
explanation ring true? It was up
to the jury to decide whether
they believed in the coughing
fit. I won’t spoil the suspense by
telling you what they decided.
Helen Garner set herself a
harder task – to look into the
heart of the man in the dock: the
man who was hurting after his
wife left him, who resented the
fact that she had kept their good
car and he had to drive his kids
around in an old rust-bucket.
Could an ordinary bloke really
do something so monstrous
to the kids he loved? Garner’s
account wrestles with the awful
truth that love does not protect
us from danger, but can lie at its
very heart.
At the end of this considered,
compelling, oddly beautiful
book, she concludes that what
we are left with is simply our
sadness and our need to mourn
the lost children. But for me that
isn’t quite enough: for what we
are also left with is the knowl-
edge that the potential for such
tragedies is around us every day.
We need to be open to seeing
where these fault lines might
occur, and to try to reach across
them, to avert more cars driv-
ing into more lakes, more fathers
staring into the blackness and
asking for a cigarette.
Lifeonconstruction
sitesofferedfew
chancestointegrate
withthelocals
tragedyandrelief
ofleaving
Mother
Ireland
Fouroutof
fiveyoung
Irishtookthe
boatinthe
1950s–a
calamityfor
manybut
alsoachance
forabetter
life,especially
forwomen
EMigrAnts: Nurse Bridget
Lawlor, above, 1955 and, below,
waitress Mary Wilson, 1953.
Brendan Behan, London, 1956
ous luxuries. Women’s desire for
a standard of living that a small
farm could not possibly offer was
seen by some as a threat to a tra-
ditional way of life that, since the
Gaelic revival, had been glorified
as somehow more authentically
Irish – as well as more virtuous
– than city life.
It’s startling to see some of the
sermonising around the issue.
One priest, a member of the
government’s commission on
emigration, claimed that the psy-
chological causes of emigration
from Co. Clare were ‘the infe-
riority complex’, a ‘poor idea of
patriotism’ and a ‘modern craze
for pleasure’. It’s hard to imag-
ine anyone saying something so
obnoxious about our post-crash
wave of emigrants in Sydney and
Toronto–ifthatisofanycomfort
to them.
A
t the same time,
Wills does not
reducethesubject
into a simplistic
conflict between
a narrow-minded
old guard and brave modernity.
She argues that many of the fears
around emigration were the result
of powerlessness in the face of
large-scale economic change
– in particular the growth of con-
sumerism – that was destroying
previously viable small commu-
nities. It cannot have been easy
to watch the young leave in such
numbers.
Within a relatively short space
– the study is just 190 pages long
– Wills takes in an impressively
broad range of material, with
quotes from sources as varied as
Irish women’s magazines of the
1960s to one fantastically snotty
EnglishHRmanagerwho
declares her Irish
employees to be ‘worse
than any other
immigrants’.
The same breadth
is evident in the extent
of literary works Wills
examines. As well as John
B Keane, Tom Murphy and
Edna O’Brien, she looks at
autobiographical accounts of life
amongIrishlabourersinBritainby
Irish-languagewritersDónallMac
Amhlaigh and Richard Power, as
well as novels by Anthony Cronin
andDavidLodge.Eventhetinyfig-
uresofconstructionworkersinthe
paintings of Frank Auerbach
aremadepartofthepicture.
This is a fine study of an
absorbing subject. And
Wills’s focus on a short
period of such a long-
lived problem allows us
to see in detail quite how
much – all the questions
of national identity, com-
munity and class
– is tied up in
the debate on
emigration.
country
girl: Author
Edna O’Brien
TheBestAreLeaving:
EmigrationAnd
Post-WarIrishCulture
ClairWills
CambridgeUniversityPress €27
★★★★★
sheena
davittSocialhistory
books
78
V1 V1

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Best Are Leaving

  • 1. More The Irish Mail on Sunday March 22 • 2015 March 22 • 2015 The Irish Mail on Sunday More 79 give that cuckootheboot T he figure of the emigrant looms about as large as a figure can loom in Irish life and lit- erature – and not a few ballads too. From the Wild Geese to the Walworth Farce, the figure of the hard-pressed Paddy starting over in a new country – sometimescomingtoruin,always to plangent nostalgia – is an ines- capable one. ClairWills’sstudyofthesubject focuses on one particular wave of emigration, that of the 1950s, a timewhenagenerationtooktothe boat in staggering numbers: of the children born in Ireland between 1931 and 1941, four out of every five eventually emigrated; more than half a million (out of a pop- ulation of less than three) moved abroadbetween1945and1960. Writing in 1964, John B Keane described his own departure from Listowel: ‘When I boarded the train that morning, it seemed as if everyone was leaving. It was the same at every station along the way. As we left Dún Laoghaire, the younger men were drunk... tragically so, as I was, to forget the dreadful loneliness of having to leave home. The whole scene reminded me of the early Christian martyrs going out to face the terrors of the arena.’ Wills’sanalysis,whileacknowl- edging the trauma of those forced toleave,takesanuancedapproach to what can be an understand- ably emotive subject. She offers a fascinating survey of how the debate around mass emigra- tion was framed in Ireland – the misgivings of those left behind, physically and culturally – as well as exploring how Irish immi- grants in Britain were perceived ‘over there’ and represented by contemporary Irish and British writers. She starts by pointing out that, although most accounts of emi- gration, like Keane’s, present it as an unalloyed tragedy – and for so many it undoubtedly was – there were also some for whom it was an adventure. In a society where subsistence farming was dying out but where modernisation had yet to create work for the large unpaid pool of relatives living on smallhold- ings, a venture across the Irish sea, where a booming post-war economy meant a regular wage and a much higher standard of living, was a distinctly pragmatic undertaking. For many, it was an escape from a stratified and complacent soci- ety quick to assign to others a life of drudgery. The example of nursing is particularly interest- ing. In Ireland in the 1950s, Wills explains,nursingtrainingwasnot publicly funded and so was often confined to the daughters of so- called ‘respectable’ families. InEngland,trainingopportuni- tiesofferedameansofbetterment for any young woman who could scrape together the fare over. This new mobility often horri- fied those who felt the class from which they drew their servants should know their place. One doctor, William Doolin, even complained at the time to the INO that ‘my wife had some trou- ble with a recalcitrant maid who threatened to go to England and take up nursing’. One hopes she made a clean getaway. By contrast, the fate of male emigrants was often far less favourable, with life on construc- tion sites offering few chances to integrate with the local popula- tion – an existence shown at its extremes in Tom Murphy’s grim classic from 1961, A Whistle In The Dark. But it’s the chapters in Wills’s study that deal with anxieties about women leaving Mother Ireland that are the strongest and by far the most compelling. She describes how there was a sort of moral panic at the idea of young girls leaving their simple, rural homesteads for the urban centres of England, with its dubi- A long with daffodils, new-born lambs and lighter evenings, noth- ing announces spring more joyously than the first cry of the cuckoo. The oldest song in the English language mentions it – Sumer Is Icumen In (Lhude Sing Cuccu) – and so do Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth et al. So it’s a shock to be reminded that, far from being a ­welcome messenger of pleasant times, the cuckoo is a bully and a thief. If it was human, and lived next door, you’d want it booted out. It’s long been known that cuckoos are parasites. Instead of bringing up their own babies, they lay their eggs in the nests of other birds and then watch from a distance while poor, over-worked reed warblers, dunnocks and meadow pipits do allthemotheringontheirbehalf. Thecuckoo’satrociousbehav- iourhasbeenwellknownfor centuriesbutthehowsandwhys haveremainedunanswered.How doesafemalecuckoobreakinto anotherbird’snestandlayanegg withouttheownersnoticing? Whydon’tthehostsfreakout whentheyspotthere’sanextra eggintheirclutch?And,per- hapsmostimportantlyofall,who cameupwiththisspectacularly unfairsysteminthefirstplace? Nick Davies has spent a life- time ­puzzling at these mysteries. Although he’s a Professor of Behavioural Ecology, there’s nothing academic about his approach. Instead of DNA samples, he relies on close obser- vation and patient fieldwork. One of his more grisly rev- elations is that the first thing a cuckoo chick does on hatch- ing is to evict its foster-siblings. Search underneath a host nest and you will find a pile of tiny dead chicks that have been sys- tematically pushed to their deaths by their bullying lodger, who is bigger and stronger. Thecarnagedoesn’tendthere, though.Whenamothercuckoo laysheregg,she’llsnatchone ofherhost’sandproceedtoeat thecontents.Thiskillstwobirds withonestone:thecuckoogetsa freelunch,andthenestlooksless crowdedtothereturninghost. Davies’s book is positively chirruping with fascinating information like this. The fact, for instance, that cuckoos lay eggs that exactly match those of their hosts. So cuckoos that live in an area where there are reed warblers lay eggs that are green and spotted, while those target- ing the nests of pied wagtails produce eggs that are greyish- white and speckled. Why don’t the hosts do some- thing to avoid this, like, say, changing the colour of their own eggs? They do, apparently, but the cuckoos are clever enough to spot this and quickly play catch- up. This is what Davies calls the ‘arms race’ taking place between cuckoos and their hosts. One side takes evasive action, and the other simply adjusts its strategy. Nature writing is having a bit of a moment though some might say the overly poetic style adopted by some writers is getting in the way of the facts. Refreshingly, this isn’t the case with Davies. He uses words to explain and enlighten rather than to embellish. The result is a fascinating book, even if, in its own way, it has all the qualities of a horrible nightmare. kathryn hughesnaturalworld Cuckoo:Cheating ByNature NickDavies Bloomsbury€25★★★★★ THE BEST NEW fiction The Insect Farm StuartPrebble AlmaBooks€18.75 Whenhisparents aresuspiciously killedinahouse fire,20-year- oldJonathanis forcedtoabandon universityto careforhis mentallydisabledolderbrother, Roger,whoispreoccupiedwith theinsectshekeepsinashedon theirallotment.Roger’sobsession develops,Jonathan’sjealousy abouthisabsentwifeincreases, andthenJonathanwakestoa nightmare:implicatedinamurder ofwhichhehasnomemory.Setin aworldbeforeCCTVandmobiles, thiscleverlyplottedthrilleris compulsivelyreadable.Prebble maintainsthecreepinessand uneasethroughout. Style JosephConnolly Quercus€29.50 Terenceisa connoisseurof designandwomen; hiswifeAmyis solelyconcerned withturningtheir 10-year-oldson intoastar.Ina successionof ­ un-narratedvoices,Connolly providesasatireonaspirationand brandobsessioninthisgolden ageofcelebrity.Thisperceptive comedyofmannersisoftenvery funny,vergingonfarce–butit’salso repetitiveandoverlong.Itultimately becomesaboutendurancerather thanenjoyment.Styleaplentythen but,alas,notmuchcontent. The Cavendon Women BarbaraTaylorBradford HarperCollins€25.50 Thereisan unmistakable flavourof DowntonAbbey inthisupstairs- downstairsyarnof 1920sYorkshire. Butthisbeing theredoubtableBarbaraTaylor Bradford,thefouryoungwomen centrestageareafeistierlotthan theirDowntoncounterparts.From aristoDaphne,battlingtosavethe ancestralhome,tobelow-stairs Cecily,hackingitasafashion designerinLondon,theseare likeable,well-drawncharacters whosefortunesyoufollowwithkeen interest.Asequeltothebestselling CavendonHall,itneatlycaptures thebrittlenessofthedecadethat dancedandstumbledtowardsthe GreatDepression. O n a September evening in 2005 a man called Robert Farquharson, recently separated from his wife, drove his car off the road and into a small lake near the town of Geelong in southern Australia. Farquharson’s three young sons were in the back. Their father escaped, and a few minutes later he was found standing by the side of the road, soaked and filthy and demanding to be driven to his ex-wife’s house to tell her their children were dead. A little while later this ex-wife, Cindy Gambino, and her new partner, Stephen Moules, would rush to the lake, and Moules would dive into the water in a desperate attempt to save the kids. But it was too dark, too cold, too late. Farquharson stood there watching, asking anyone nearby if they had a cigarette. It was Father’s Day. A couple of days later the police decided they didn’t buy Farquharson’s belated expla- nation for what had happened – that he had blacked out at the wheel ­following a coughing fit – and charged him with the murder of his ­children: Jai, 10, Tyler, 7, and two-year-old Bailey. When the case came to court, the eminent Australian novel- ist and true-crime writer Helen Garner decided to attend the trial. Like most of us, her initial reaction was to pray that it was indeed an accident. The alterna- tive was too ghastly: that a man may deliberately drive his chil- dren into a deep, dark pool and leave them there to drown while freeing himself. The initial trial took six weeks and the subsequent retrial 11. It would be almost eight years john williamstruecrime ThisHouseOfGrief HelenGarner TestPublishing€18 ★★★★★ stolen lives: Robert Farquharson. His sons Jai, Bailey and Tyler before the legal proceedings finally ground to a halt. Itmighthavebeenashorter legal ­battleifFarquharsonhad nothadhissupporters.Hislaw- yer,PeterMorrissey,wentto extraordinarylengthstofight forhisclient.Hissistersstuck byhimthroughout,implacable intheirbeliefinhisinnocence. Moresurprisingly,atthefirst trialatleast,hisex-wifeCindy testifiedinhisfavour.Sherefused tobelievehewouldeverhave donesuchathingtotheirchil- dren.Sheknewhelovedthem. In the end, all the legal argu- ment came down to a simple question. Did Farquharson’s explanation ring true? It was up to the jury to decide whether they believed in the coughing fit. I won’t spoil the suspense by telling you what they decided. Helen Garner set herself a harder task – to look into the heart of the man in the dock: the man who was hurting after his wife left him, who resented the fact that she had kept their good car and he had to drive his kids around in an old rust-bucket. Could an ordinary bloke really do something so monstrous to the kids he loved? Garner’s account wrestles with the awful truth that love does not protect us from danger, but can lie at its very heart. At the end of this considered, compelling, oddly beautiful book, she concludes that what we are left with is simply our sadness and our need to mourn the lost children. But for me that isn’t quite enough: for what we are also left with is the knowl- edge that the potential for such tragedies is around us every day. We need to be open to seeing where these fault lines might occur, and to try to reach across them, to avert more cars driv- ing into more lakes, more fathers staring into the blackness and asking for a cigarette. Lifeonconstruction sitesofferedfew chancestointegrate withthelocals tragedyandrelief ofleaving Mother Ireland Fouroutof fiveyoung Irishtookthe boatinthe 1950s–a calamityfor manybut alsoachance forabetter life,especially forwomen EMigrAnts: Nurse Bridget Lawlor, above, 1955 and, below, waitress Mary Wilson, 1953. Brendan Behan, London, 1956 ous luxuries. Women’s desire for a standard of living that a small farm could not possibly offer was seen by some as a threat to a tra- ditional way of life that, since the Gaelic revival, had been glorified as somehow more authentically Irish – as well as more virtuous – than city life. It’s startling to see some of the sermonising around the issue. One priest, a member of the government’s commission on emigration, claimed that the psy- chological causes of emigration from Co. Clare were ‘the infe- riority complex’, a ‘poor idea of patriotism’ and a ‘modern craze for pleasure’. It’s hard to imag- ine anyone saying something so obnoxious about our post-crash wave of emigrants in Sydney and Toronto–ifthatisofanycomfort to them. A t the same time, Wills does not reducethesubject into a simplistic conflict between a narrow-minded old guard and brave modernity. She argues that many of the fears around emigration were the result of powerlessness in the face of large-scale economic change – in particular the growth of con- sumerism – that was destroying previously viable small commu- nities. It cannot have been easy to watch the young leave in such numbers. Within a relatively short space – the study is just 190 pages long – Wills takes in an impressively broad range of material, with quotes from sources as varied as Irish women’s magazines of the 1960s to one fantastically snotty EnglishHRmanagerwho declares her Irish employees to be ‘worse than any other immigrants’. The same breadth is evident in the extent of literary works Wills examines. As well as John B Keane, Tom Murphy and Edna O’Brien, she looks at autobiographical accounts of life amongIrishlabourersinBritainby Irish-languagewritersDónallMac Amhlaigh and Richard Power, as well as novels by Anthony Cronin andDavidLodge.Eventhetinyfig- uresofconstructionworkersinthe paintings of Frank Auerbach aremadepartofthepicture. This is a fine study of an absorbing subject. And Wills’s focus on a short period of such a long- lived problem allows us to see in detail quite how much – all the questions of national identity, com- munity and class – is tied up in the debate on emigration. country girl: Author Edna O’Brien TheBestAreLeaving: EmigrationAnd Post-WarIrishCulture ClairWills CambridgeUniversityPress €27 ★★★★★ sheena davittSocialhistory books 78 V1 V1