Man, talk about "how times have changed."

Ten things an Irish woman could not do in 1970 (and be prepared to ...

(From the article)

What dominated our news and much of our conversations during the 1970s (at least in the early years), was the deteriorating crisis in Northern Ireland. When I think of that decade I remember the initial hope that something would be settled quickly rather than letting it drag on fuelled by appallingly bad political decisions, thuggery, and deeply imbedded hatred. Seamus Heaney remarked that in the early 1970s ‘there was a promise in the air as well as fury and danger’. But in Northern Ireland any nervous sense of hopeful expectation quickly soured; as Heaney recalled: ‘Soon enough it all went rancid.’ In John Montague’s poem The Rough Field, he observes: ‘In the dark streets, firing starts.’

But there was much more to the 1970s that the tragedy in the North. In his fascinating Ambiguous Republic - Ireland in the 1970s,* Diarmaid Ferriter brilliantly appraises that tumultuous time where the old ways of doing things were being challenged. It was, he says, a time when ‘old moulds were broken’.