Chapter Two
Risktaker If things were tight for the Reynolds family in Rooskey, it was the same for most people who lived in the Ireland of 1952. The 1950s are known as a ‘lost decade’ in Irish economic life. The decade was frequently described as one of ‘doom and gloom’. As if to demonstrate this, unemployment and outwardbound emigration continued at a high rate, with 500,000 people leaving the country in the 1950s. In the years 1949–56, the European economy grew by 40 per cent, whereas, in Ireland, the increase was a mere 8 per cent. Ireland was not able to take advantage of the Marshall Plan, the massive American aid plan, to the same extent as countries which had been actively involved in the Second World War, because of the country’s wartime neutrality. Albert Reynolds makes the reality of life plain in his autobiography: It was a very difficult time in Ireland. The economy was in a dreadful state, there was very little employment and the majority of young people – people of all ages in fact – were still being forced to emigrate to countries across the world: Britain, America, Australia, Canada. My brother Jim was one of them. Joe was running the family farm and business, which provided work for only one person and his family, so Jim left to start a new life first in Canada, then in Australia. But I had no desire to leave Ireland – quite the opposite: I was determined that I would not be forced to leave and that, come what may, I would make my future in my own country. It would have taken a particularly tough mindset to believe that one could stay in Ireland in the 1950s and make a living. Right up to the early 1970s, -8-
