Fintan O’Toole: You have to be middle-aged before you can become middle-class in Ireland

“There are no classes in Ireland,” the economist and statistician Roy Geary sardonically remarked in the 1970s, “because we’re all descended from the High Kings of Tara.”

Yet the story of modern Ireland is essentially about the rise of the urban middle class. And the reason the place feels so unsettled right now is the unravelling of what “middle class” came to mean in Ireland.

It’s a confusing and shifting term because, of course, the middle is defined by its opposing extremes. If the top layer is a landowning aristocracy and the bottom a pauperised peasantry and proletariat, the middle can include everybody from a vastly wealthy industrialist to a junior clerk in a county council office – with all the lawyers, doctors, teachers, big farmers and priests in between.

That was certainly what the amorphous term “middle class” meant in Ireland for a very long time. But I’m thinking of something more specific – and, in a way, more personal.

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As a reverse snob, I resisted identifying myself as middle class. Yet of course that’s what I became.

I was formed in a working-class world characterised by manual labour, low levels of formal education and public housing estates. Yet, by the time I was in my mid-20s, I had left all three of those markers behind.

[ Fintan O’Toole: Is the State producing higher levels of education than it can employ? ]

And that’s what happened to more and more Irish people as the country went through its painful, uneven and in some ways still incomplete process of becoming “modern”. For all the ups and downs, the availability of a middle-class life kept expanding.

My own entry into petit bourgeois nirvana was not quite typical. Ireland was actually very slow to create much social mobility for the urban working class. Mostly what was happening in the 1970s and 1980s was that the children of farmers were becoming middle-class suburbanites.

These families were able to turn the possession of a physical asset (a farm) into the acquisition of an educational asset (a third-level qualification). This in turn allowed one kind of relative privilege (rural property) to be leveraged into another (urban white-collar employment).

The promise of a middle-class life changed everything. Most obviously, because it demanded (for most people) the creation of a dual-income household

This was possible, not just because of the rapid expansion of education, but because there were more and more middle-class jobs for graduates to fill.

In 1973, 30 per cent of those working in the Irish economy were professionals, managers, white-collar workers or self-employed – broadly what we might call the middle class. By the end of the century, the equivalent figure was close to half of all workers.

Conversely, there was a rapid shrinking of manual and semi-skilled working-class jobs and of the number of farmers and farm labourers. This left behind large reserves of urban and rural poverty that have never really been dealt with.

[ Fintan O’Toole: Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael decided to reshape Ireland as a nation beholden to private property owners ]

By the beginning of this century, there was, nonetheless, a clear set of markers for what it meant to be middle class in Ireland. The new Holy Trinity was a white-collar job, a third-level education and home ownership. By the time I was in my mid-20s, I had all three.

For good or ill, this is what made contemporary Ireland. For all the madness – the Troubles, the psychodrama of religious reaction, political corruption, intermittent economic chaos, the social devastation of abandoned working-class communities – Irish society was, to coin a phrase, muddling through by middling up.

The promise of a middle-class life changed everything. Most obviously, because it demanded (for most people) the creation of a dual-income household to pay the mortgage, it revolutionised the place of women in the workforce. Which also, of course, made the control of fertility economically imperative – which in turn undermined religious control of reproduction.

The proportion of Irish people who own their own homes by the age of 30 has halved in this century

Gradually, however, in the 21st century, this process has become more and more problematic. Two big things have happened.

One is that the limits of social mobility in Ireland have become very clear. You could move from the farm or from the council estate into the growing middle class. But it is much harder to move from the lower reaches of that class to the upper.

Ireland has one of the highest percentages in the developed world of people born into the highest income groups who remain there. For all the huge social and economic transformations, our upper middle-class has been remarkable good at seeing off challenges to its dominance. It reproduces itself very efficiently.

[ Fintan O’Toole: The shift back towards landlordism didn’t happen by accident ]

The other big shift is the unravelling of the relationship between white-collar jobs, university education and home ownership. The first two elements of the package still go together, but the third has dropped out.

As everybody knows, home ownership for young people has fallen off a cliff. The proportion of Irish people who own their own homes by the age of 30 has halved in this century.

This is an astonishing decline in itself but it is even more so when you consider that, over the same period, the other middle-class marker, third-level education, has gone in the opposite direction.

Being middle class has become ever more the norm of Irish society. There are, relatively speaking, very few farmers left. The old industrial working class is mostly gone

Two things that used to go together – the degree and the mortgage – are now wrenched apart: more and more graduates, fewer and fewer young homeowners.

In principle, this ought not to matter all that much. There are lots of countries in which you can be securely middle-class without having a university degree or owning your own home.

But Ireland isn’t one of them. Pathways into good jobs (sophisticated apprenticeships for example) are very limited outside of third-level education. And the rental market is both insecure and crushingly expensive.

[ Fintan O’Toole: Ireland’s brilliant education system is a complete fluke ]

Yet one of the big changes which governments have managed to create this century is to put years on the middle class. The term increasingly refers not just to a social grouping but to a generational one. You have to approach the frontiers of middle age before you can become middle class.

The weird thing is that all of this has been engineered by centre-right governments. The “property-owning democracy” that conservatives see as the guarantor of social and political stability has been eroded by their own housing policies.

The social engine that converted a property asset (the farm) into an educational asset (the college degree) and back into a different property asset (the suburban house) has been clogged up by misgovernment.

This has led a successful process of social change into a highly contradictory place.

On the one hand, being middle class has become ever more the norm of Irish society. There are, relatively speaking, very few farmers left. The old industrial working class is mostly gone.

On the other hand, this norm has become ever harder to sustain and ever more concentrated in older age groups. The new normal is now, in the most literal ways, an old normal. For too many young Irish people it has gone the way of the High Kings.