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by ehnto 992 days ago
1970s Ireland was very homogenous, which is to say white. It wasn't until the 90s that immigration began flowing in the other direction to a meaningful degree. So while I agree with you, it was unlikely a problem at the time.

Although that doesn't cover gender or class discrimination so I suppose that was still an issue.
2 comments
rsynnott 992 days ago
Oh, we absolutely still had discrimination, particularly against Travellers, but also there was very strong though largely unacknowledged classism. And then of course there were _women_; after a good start (Ireland was one of the first countries to grant equal universal suffrage), we spent the next few decades barely acknowledging that women were people.

However, in 1970, people here just weren’t all that ‘banked’; when I was a kid in the late 80s/early 90s, it was still fairly common for people to not have bank accounts, and certainly in 1970 postal savings accounts would have been more common than bank accounts. Today they’re ~universal (very few employers would consider paying by any means other than bank transfer) but it was a different story 50 years ago.

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kmonsen 992 days ago
Or more importantly in Ireland, religions based discrimination
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rsynnott 992 days ago
This is about the Republic of Ireland, where that wasn’t a huge factor (there was definitely some; comments in the newspapers from 1961 when Dublin got a Jewish mayor are eyebrow-raising, but it wouldn’t have been a huge issue for something like this). You’re thinking of Northern Ireland.

That said, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Ireland in 1970 certainly did have other forms of discrimination which would’ve been much more relevant here.

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alephnerd 992 days ago
Interesting enough, one of Israel's presidents was an Irish Jew - Chaim Herzog [0]. If you listen to his speeches, you'd think you were listening to an announcer on RTE [1].

This has absolutely no bearing on the article and it's content.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Herzog

[1] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3BWL66PUf7c

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fullspectrumdev 992 days ago
More so an issue in NI than RoI, even back then according to older relatives the division was a lot less in RoI.
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