The Social Affairs Unit - Web Review: Review of Luck and the Irish by Roy Foster

The Social Affairs Unit - Web Review: Review of Luck and the Irish by Roy Foster

"This enlisting of economic stagnation in the service of moral immobility had been part of the conscious intention of the founders of the Republic of Ireland. Challenged by a journalist over the likely tendency of an economic policy of self-sufficiency to lower Irish standards of living, [Eamon] De Valera rebuked the assumptions underlying the claim:'You say "lower" when you ought to say a less costly standard of living. I think it quite possible that a less costly standard of living is desirable and that it would prove, in fact, to be a higher standard of living. I am not satisfied that the standard of living and the mode of living in Western Europe is a right or proper one.'"