Challenges to social order and Irish identity? Youth culture in the sixties

In 1967 Fr Walter Forde, an activist in the field of youth welfare work, noted ‘signs of unrest’ amongst Irish youths growing up in the sixties.1 He identified the ways in which they were ‘being influenced by English teenage culture’: First fashions in clothes and hair-styles increasingly follow the English trends. The amount of money spent by them on records, dances and clothes is a new feature in Irish life. Drinking among them too is becoming more common … Second, the recent popularity of beat clubs in Dublin (where all eleven were opened in the last eighteen months) shows their desire to have a recreation of their own.