Irish literature: Tradition and modernity

Abstract

Lamenting the erosion of traditional values, a disillusioned Irish politician is reputed to have complained that there was no sex in Ireland before television. The national television service was inaugurated in 1962. So, assuming that Philip Larkin was right in dating the beginning of sexual intercourse to 1963, sex came to Ireland a full year before it reached the United Kingdom. Sex was only one of the foreign arrivals that came to Ireland during the sixties. Under the expansionist polices of Taoiseach Sean Lemass and his economic adviser T. K. Whitaker, the protectionist strategies of the de Valera era were reversed and an open economy fuelled by international markets and foreign investme..