How Ireland wrote the modern story of progress

One of my vacation habits is to take along a book about the place I’m visiting — which is how I found myself on Ireland’s spectacular Atlantic coast last month, paging through a copy of Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland. O’Toole, a prominent Irish journalist, uses the years of his own life, beginning in 1958, to tell the story of the changes that have taken place in this small, beautiful country on Europe’s northwestern edge.

While I knew that Ireland had up until quite recently been a poor place by European standards, I hadn’t realized just how poor. Within living memory, as O’Toole writes, Ireland was “a vast cattle ranch with a few cities.” Two-thirds of homes still had no electricity after World War II, and, as late as 1961, most rural houses lacked indoor toilets or hot water. In 1961, Ireland’s population was just 2.8 million, the nadir after decades of decline going back to the 19th century.

Yet the country I visited had become one of the most prosperous and educated in Europe: a largely liberal, progressive society that now attracts immigrants instead of losing emigrants. The Irish themselves would say it’s still far from perfect, but it has become something few could have predicted when O’Toole was born in 1958.

One of my goals at Good News is to counter our built‑in bias toward bad headlines by spotlighting the slow, compounding improvement over time that is too often missed. Ireland’s arc over the past 70 years captures that story as few other countries have.

Then: Ireland’s gross national income (GNI) per person — what individuals actually earned on average — in the early 1970s was around $2,000, the mark of a small, still largely farming-based economy, while the US was more than twice that.

Now: Ireland’s modified GNI per person has soared to around $60,000, thanks in large part to its success in attracting huge amounts of foreign investment, especially from major tech companies like Meta and Apple. (Economists use a modified GNI per capita precisely because those multinational companies shift a large portion of their profits to Ireland, in part for tax reasons; modified GNI strips that out, better reflecting what Irish households and businesses actually earn.)

Then: In 1961, life expectancy was around 70 years, and infant mortality hovered at 30 deaths per 1,000 births — a figure comparable to what we might see today in a poor country like Laos.

Now: Life expectancy has climbed to about 83 years, while infant deaths have plunged to just 3.4 per 1,000. Almost every Irish child now gets the chance to live a long and healthy life.

Then: Emigration has always been part of the Irish story, as Irish-Americans like myself know well. But it wasn’t just a 19th-century phenomenon. Well into the second half of the 20th century, Ireland was still losing its young people in droves because it simply had no work for them. In the 1950s, an estimated 15 percent of the country left.

Now: The situation has largely reversed, with roughly 12 percent of the country’s residents now non-Irish citizens as of 2022. Where once Ireland’s greatest export was the Irish, today it’s become a place that attracts capital, ideas, and people.

Then: Into the mid‑1950s, O’Toole writes, data suggests more than 80 percent of pupils left school at age 14, in part because secondary education charged fees most families couldn’t afford. But that began to change in 1966 when the Irish government decided to make secondary education free for all. For the generation of Irish children like O’Toole, whose father was an unskilled manual laborer, the opportunity was life-changing.

Now: By some standards, Ireland can claim to be the most educated country in the world, with more than half its population between the ages of 25 to 64 holding a bachelor’s degree or higher.

Then: Ireland in the early 1970s was governed by highly conservative laws: Homosexuality was criminalized, divorce was banned, and abortion was unthinkable. The Catholic Church censored pop culture, and women had shockingly few rights: They could not keep government jobs if they got married, could not buy contraceptives for birth control, and often couldn’t even be served a pint of beer at a pub.

Now: Ireland’s social advances have been even greater than its economic ones. More than 60 percent of the country voted for marriage equality in 2015, while two-thirds voted to repeal the constitutional ban on abortion in 2018. The Catholic Church has utterly receded as a controlling force, in no small part because of shocking revelations about abuse. How far has Ireland come? In 2017, Leo Varadkar — the gay son of an Indian immigrant — became Ireland’s taoiseach, or prime minister.

Then: Northern Ireland was engulfed in three decades of the Troubles, a conflict that claimed over 3,500 lives, most of them civilians caught in bombings, shootings, and political violence. This trauma spilled across the border, overshadowing daily life and straining both economies.

Now: Since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, officially recorded crimes have fallen steeply — 2024–’25 saw just 95,968 offenses in Northern Ireland, the second-lowest level since 1998–’99. The border between the north and south, once tense and hardened, is now all but invisible.

The Irish story of progress is hardly an unbroken one. The past 70 years have seen booms followed by busts — never more so than after the 2008 global recession, which hammered the Irish economy and led to widespread suffering. But even then, Ireland proved far more successful than many of its fellow European nations in bouncing back. That’s part of the Good News story — not ignoring the crashes, but holding them against the long-term record of human progress. Ireland’s story, with all its detours and its new problems today, like a serious housing crisis, is a case study in exactly that.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!