Mick Clifford: In the bleak Ireland of the 1980s, we chased the American Dream. How times have changed

Welcome to America, sonny boy, you have landed in the future. Take that gormless look off your face and pocket your old-world inhibitions. This is the land where you can be truly free and grab the opportunities to be brave. And look around you. Everything, everywhere, is big. Big, big, big. Excuse me sir, one last thing before you go forth on your big adventure. Have a nice day.

So it went when I landed on the shore, or to be more precise, JFK. Drifting through a college degree, I took off to earn a few bob and see where fate might propel me. New York sang and rocked for this young Irish immigrant. 

And guess who was the toast of the town, everywhere from the society pages to the business news on local TV? Yep, the local lad already scripting a version of his life story completely at odds with the facts. Donald Trump epitomised the time and place.

“I’m the number one developer in New York city,” he said in 1988. “I’m the biggest in Atlantic city and maybe we’ll keep it that way.” 

He was wealthy, superficial and presented himself as a paragon of the American Dream. He was accompanied everywhere by his glamorous wife, Ivana. She had big hair and brains and knew how to make a camera melt. They were the royal couple in the bonfire of the vanities that was New York in the 1980s.

America in those days represented everything Ireland wasn’t. It’s difficult to convey to anybody under 40 the different country that Ireland was in the 1980s. The concept of a “failed state” was openly being talked about. Most people just called it a kip. Unemployment was touching 20%. 

Each year, up to 30,000 mainly young people took the boat or plane in search of work. A drab aura hung like a dishwater cloud over the whole island. Unless you were really lucky, a job could only be had through “pull”, as the hard rain of recession never let up.

The church was holding on for dear life to its exalted position. In 1983, it pushed to have a clause inserted in the constitution to ban abortion, even though the procedure was not legal and there was zero prospect of it ever being. 

Three years later, a referendum to the right to divorce was narrowly defeated. Statues were moving, swear to God. And behind high walls, the cruelty towards young women in particular was something from which society turned away.

Up north, the drumbeat of violent conflict was a daily constant. Bombs were going off, men in balaclavas shooting people down in the street. The British state was, correctly as it turned out, suspected of colluding in the murder of some of its citizens. Everything about the conflict reeked of the past.

The cheapening of life, the rush to highlight difference. It all amounted to a dirty and futile effort to, as Paul Bardy referenced in another song, “reach the future through the past, carve tomorrow from a tombstone”. The future was across the Atlantic.

On one level it was all about the dollar. Money was as loose as it was tight at home. Tip that man, tip that woman, put your dollars on the bar. Spread it around because it’s easy come, easy go.

America was winning the showdown with the Soviet Union. By the end of the decades, communism would have fallen and the USA was elevated to the world’s only superpower in a new dispensation that was supposed to signal life ever after in terms of transglobal politics.

Certainly, there were dark corners to the American Dream. The spectre of Aids prompted warnings about unprotected sex and the whispered urban legend concerning the young Irish lad waking up in a strange bedroom with the words ‘welcome to Aids’ scrawled with lipstick on a mirror. 

There was the racism that ensured white Irish immigrants would have the kind of access to the American dreams that was denied native people of colour. But still, the whole place was booming under Ronald Reagan’s aspiration for what he called “the shining city on the hill”.

Roll it on nearly 40 years and observe the evolution of the respective societies, the respective democracies. On Tuesday, the USA goes to the polls to elect its next president. Within a month, the electorate in the Republic of Ireland does likewise to choose the next government. And how are we all doing?

In the interim, this country raised its economic status to the frontline of world nations. There are serious problems, not least the danger of fracturing the social contract through a crisis in housing. But it is a different, more enlightened, caring place than it was in the dark 1980s. 

The church’s power has dissipated. People are allowed to love and legally cement relations with whomever they want. Women can do as they choose with their own bodies, negotiate with their own conscience rather than be dictated to by a religious entity.

Political violence no longer features on this island and hasn’t done for over two decades. 

In the 1980s, many among us couldn’t wait to get out. Today, people are queuing up to come in. They come for the work and the freedom and the fabled sense of community that sometimes can fall short. 

Others come to flee poverty under the guise of seeking asylum from oppression, just as many among us entered the USA illegally 40 years ago under the guise of holidaying. Yet more who come here actually are fleeing oppression and these days into the arms of a state where a sense of amnesia permeates large sections of society. Some insist on not remembering why so many wanted to flee this country not so long ago.

Culturally, the old battlelines have faded. A prime example of how these matters are negotiated in this new Ireland was the referendums last March around care and women in the home.

The referendums, despite being backed by the three biggest parties in the State — along with most of the small parties — were defeated. A consensus, albeit highly questionable, emerged that the poll was defeated because the proposed changes were perceived as being too “woke”. How did the three big parties respond? They all backtracked and effectively said, “you don’t like our principles? No problem, we’ll change ‘em”.

Some might see this as craven populism. A more measured assessment is that it represents a desire to govern from the centre, to keep as many as possible on board. So it will go in the election to come. 

Whoever emerges to attain power will govern from the centre. There are nuances with how, for instance, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael might lead an administration compared to Sinn Féin. But not much more than nuances. 

The general thrust of politics in this country today is to push out the extremes and expand the centre. Certainly, there are problems, some very serious, but can anybody claim the country was better off materially, morally even spiritually in the 1980s?

On Tuesday, across the Atlantic, there will be an election following a campaign overflowing with lies and hate. Our old pal from New York, Mr Trump, has risen to expertly exploit the divisions that have grown up in the last 30 years.

“Fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell we’re not going to have a country anymore,” he told the gathering on January 6, 2021, that went on to attack the seat of government. His rhetoric in recent weeks has been just as dark, if not more so.

The American Dream, always available to a limited number of applicants, is now an even more exclusive preserve. Inequality has rocketed. A study published in September by the Economic Policy Institute found CEOs of the largest companies in the States saw their salaries surge by 1,085% from 1978 to 2023, compared to just a 24% increase for typical workers.

With the pursuit of happiness through a decent standard of living thus restricted for many, greater emphasis is now being placed on preserving cultural touchstones. Last week, in the office of Democratic state senator Amanda Cappelletti in the prosperous Philadelphia suburb of Norristown, I saw a prominent display of all the books that have recently been banned in the state. The senator is opposed to the bans.

Hundreds of miles away in rural Pennsylvania, there was on display on the window of the local Republican party’s HQ an image of a human fetus. The Republicans are against abortion and delighted the Supreme Court has rolled back the years, overturning constitutional access to the procedure. 

A feature of Trump’s campaign has been constant referencing to transgender matters. In this day and age?

Meanwhile, back in Norristown and at the far end of the state in the city of Pittsburgh, I saw a number of tented settlements, an increasingly prevalent sight around cities and towns in the USA. (And yes, we have tents in this country but there are also safety nets that simply don’t exist over there). 

Meanwhile, the media, principally TV, heightens the divisions, depicting separate countries in which the other side is variously stupid or nefarious. 

Large sections of the population believe Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, because Trump said it was so. 

Just as 40 years ago, many in this country believed they saw plaster statues moving because God, like Trump, works in mysterious ways.

Something is broken in America. The election is being fought through the politics of nostalgia. Both sides remember the past very different, very faultily, but each want to go back to a time when the world was a more secure place, certainly as far as the American Dream was concerned. 

For anybody with an affinity to the country, it is a sad time, tempered only with the solace the American way has always been to hope and work to get past obstacles.

This country has its own problems and the world these days can change in the blink of an eye. But unlike 40 years ago, the Ireland of 2024 is attempting to look to the future, and doing so with at least a little confidence. 

The America of today, if the election is anything to go by, is the one now harbouring restricted opportunities, clinging to the past and to division. Changed times indeed.