The end of the Cold War didn’t have obvious consequences for everyday life in Ireland. The great battle with communism seemed irrelevant to a country that had only gently been brushed by the forces of industrialized capitalism and affected a threadbare neutrality in international politics. Farming was the thing, even if it had gradually become an artificial creature reliant on European subsidies. The national radio station broadcast an agricultural news show, which mostly featured farmers complaining that they were not getting the grants to which they were morally entitled.
At the end of the Cold War, the Irish left was composed on the one hand of radicals slipping gradually into centrist respectability and on the other of sectarians maintaining their faith at the cost of public irrelevance. Some of the latter had difficulty adjusting to new circumstances. I used to own a poster issued by the Communist Party of Ireland (Marxist-Leninist) proclaiming, “In light of the collapse of traitorous revisionist regimes in Eastern Europe, all hail the success of genuine socialism in Albania.” I am not sure what they did after Albania, too, fell off the wagon in 1992. But then again, I am not sure what they did before that, either.
Ireland’s real Cold War was the episodic struggle over the power of the Catholic Church. After Irish independence, Catholicism had secured a stranglehold on the major institutions of social, political, and economic power. For many decades, the Church effectively controlled most of the schools (the main exception being a separate, smaller network run by the Protestant Church of Ireland) and hospitals, even though they were nominally provided by the state. It fought even the mildest social reforms for fear that change might dilute its influence.