When the 1930s began, Ireland had left civil war only seven years behind, and in fact the assassination of Kevin O'Higgins - its last casualty, in a sense - had taken place as recently as 1927. It goes without saying that the legacy of hatred and resentment left on both sides by this conflict was still seething; there were men (and women too, who were quite often among the Irreconcilables) who had been friends in youth, but who for the remainder of their lives refused to shake hands or even to speak to one another in the street, or in other people's houses.

Yet somehow the decade remained peaceful, in spite of the apparent challenge posed to law and order by the Blueshirts, who turned out, on the whole, to be a paper tiger. General O'Duffy, their leader, who may have seen himself as Ireland's Mussolini or at least its Franco, showed himself ultimately to be an inept politician and faded out quite quickly. The 1930s saw the rise of Nazism in Germany, bloody clashes in Austria between the Rightist regime of Dollfuss and the militant left, a murderous civil war in Spain; France split almost fatally between Leon Blum's Popular Front and the entrenched businessmen and traditionalists. It was a troubled time for Europe, with world war less than a decade away.

In Ireland, however, the bulk of the emerging new bourgeoisie above all wanted peace, respectability and a quiet life. What was later to be called the Grocer's Republic was already beginning to take shape, to the disgust of Sean O Faolain and others who had kept their earlier revolutionary idealism.

The political figures from early in the century, such as Redmond and Carson and others of that generation, were either dead or sidelined. The major event in this field was Eamon de Valera's decision to lead his Fianna Fail party into electoral politics, and he duly won the general election of 1932. This caused consternation among the Cosgraveites, who represented chiefly the professional and upper middle classes and "strong" farmers; they feared a repetition of the Civil War, or at least agrarian troubles and social levelling and upheaval.

De Valera had been excommunicated by the Catholic hierarchy a decade before, and some clerics attacked him and his party from election platforms. They feared the victory of godless republicanism, which in France and other countries had always carried an anti-clerical message.

De Valera, however, turned out when in office to be constitutional and law-abiding. Much land reform and distribution was carried out, and there was a remarkable rural housing drive which did away forever with most of the old mud bohauns and the picturesque, but unhygienic, thatched cottages. Social welfare was increased slightly but remained rudimentary for many years. Dev made his peace with the church, and his 1937 Constitution contained the famous clause about the "special position" of the Catholic church as the religion of the great majority. This has often been denounced as a capitulation to clerical interests, but in fact it was a clever compromise, and certain right-wing clerics and intellectuals were quick to spot it as such and to denounce it.

Finding the Senate troublesome and sometimes hostile to his legislative programme, Dev ruthlessly ejected the old guard and the Anglo-Irish land-owning interests who had tried to establish some kind of new power base there. The Upper House was radically overhauled on a "vocational" basis, but in practice it had been gelded. It never recovered its former prestige, and cynics even described it as "the graveyard of Irish politics", since so many also-rans from the main parties ended up there in lieu of anything better. This also contributed to the steady decline in the quality of Irish public speaking, though Ireland had once prided itself upon the eloquence of its people.

Dev's great blunder was the so-called Economic War with Britain, provoked by his refusal to go on paying the land annuities which had been part of the Treaty settlement. On principle it is hard to blame him for this, but it was clumsily and undiplomatically carried out and brought about harsh retribution when Britain closed its market to Irish agricultural produce. The result of this was the infamous "slaughter of the calves" and general hard times for the Irish farmer, who was still only getting on his feet economically.

Later in the decade, however, Dev brought about a diplomatic coup by negotiating with Chamberlain - an English politician who was generally favourable to Ireland - the return of the Irish ports which Britain had insisted on keeping as naval bases in case another European war broke out (it soon did).

Just as the old guard was fading away in politics, so the great figures of the Literary Renaissance were dying or being relegated to the background. W.B. Yeats was 70 in 1935, and his birthday was attended by some leading English poets including John Masefield.

Yeats lived on, active and productive up to the last week of his life, until 1939 when he died in the south of France. "AE" (George Russell) died in exile at Bournemouth in 1935; the great novelist George Moore had died in London in 1933, and Lady Gregory had died at Coole House the year before.

So the founding fathers of the Literary Revival were thinning out quickly. Douglas Hyde alone lived on through the second World War, as Ireland's first President, but he was little more than a respected figurehead who had long since ceased to count as a literary force.

One of Yeats's final triumphs had been to set up the Academy of Irish Letters in 1932, with much help from George Bernard Shaw, although the playwright had not lived in Ireland since his youth. Shaw, in fact, became its first president, with Yeats as vice-president. It represented a formidable line-up of talent, even if James Joyce had refused from his exile to join it, claiming that Yeats only wanted to use his name.

Its main raison d'etre, though this was not spelled out, was to fight the growing menace of literary censorship, which had been legally established in 1929 and in the next 20 years was to grow into the scourge of the Irish intelligentsia (Joyce's books, incidentally, were never banned; though those of most of the leading short-story writers and novelists were). In practice, however, the academy never achieved much against the embattled stupidity of the censors, and it did relatively little except to award occasional medals and to hold annual dinners in Jammet's restaurant which were famous for convivial wine-drinking.

That eventful year of 1932 also saw another event which mattered far more to the ordinary citizen and has taken its place in Irish folk memory - especially in Dublin. This was the Eucharistic Congress, capably organised by the Irish church and attended by Catholic delegations from many countries; it gave Ireland the kind of pageantry which it had not enjoyed since the old Vice-Regal days and Queen Victoria's visit in her old age. Emotionally, however, it went much deeper than those, and while many deprecated it as a grand circus or promotion of Catholic triumphalism, it genuinely touched the popular imagination.

Among those attending from overseas was the writer G.K. Chesterton, who was welcomed almost like visiting royalty. Nothing like the congress in terms of public spectacle was seen in Ireland until the visit of the current Pope half a century later. (One man who had reason to be less enthusiastic was Lionel Fleming, who covered it for this newspaper and so had to attend innumerable Masses - not much fun for the son of a Co Cork Church of Ireland rector.)

In the theatre, the Abbey had already passed its golden age - arguably Lady Gregory and Yeats had kept control of it for too long, but there was no obvious successor to either. Sean O'Casey had been in exile in Britain for several years, Synge was long dead, and the best-known playwrights of the next generation were Lennox Robinson and T.C. Murray. George Fitzmaurice, a genuine original, was generally slighted by the professional theatre and never reached the audience he deserved.

However, a new wind of innovation came with the foundation of the Gate Theatre by Micheal MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards, both of whom were in fact English (it is a self-manufactured myth that MacLiammoir came from a Cork family) but threw their joint talents into the service of their adopted country. They also found a new playwright, Denis Johnston, who had been rejected by the Abbey (something which made good publicity) and for several decades was regarded as one of the most innovative dramatists in the English-speaking world.

Among the poets after Yeats, Padraic ??? Colum had been living abroad for many years and so had James Stephens. The void was filled by the emergence of a new generation which included Austin Clarke, F.R. Higgins, Patrick Kavanagh and Padraic Fallon, all of whom were born within the last years of the old century or the early years of the new one. (Louis MacNeice was scarcely seen as an Irish poet and was generally identified with the "difficult" verse of Auden and the other 1930s leftist writers in Britain.)

It was the golden age of the short story, with Liam O'Flaherty, Frank O'Connor, Sean O Faolain and various others at the peak of their creativity; the novelists included Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O'Brien, Brinsley MacNamara, and a number of others who once counted but no longer do. Samuel Beckett's early novels gained no more than a small coterie of success and were caviar for the general public.

Painting remained conservative, in spite of the introduction of a watered-down form of Cubism by Mainie Jellett and certain others; Jack Yeats, however, had already built up a considerable reputation as well as a personal legend - and in Dublin, everything ultimately came down to personalities. His great rival was Paul Henry, who then ranked almost equal to him, though Henry's best days were already behind him and his western landscapes were becoming stereotyped and predictable (which may be the reason so many people like them). Irish art had traditionally looked towards Paris, but the influence of Picasso-based Modernism was slow to make its way in Ireland. It was not until the founding of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1943 that something like a genuine Modernist movement began, though that was soon overshadowed by the post-war emergence of American art.

There had been a fashion, coinciding with the rise of the so-called Revisionist school of historians and critics about 30 years ago, to write off Ireland in the first three decades of (relative) independence as introverted, provincial, dominated by censorship, sexual prudery and, of course, the Catholic church.

The church was certainly powerful and it sometimes abused that power, but my own firm conviction is that most of its power derived ultimately from the people who believed in it and saw it as an essential part of their whole racial, national and ideological identity. Whatever its faults, it was a people's church - too much so, in fact. As for censorship, as I have already written elsewhere, it was certainly severe and often plain stupid, but censorship existed in all other Western countries, and it was in Britain and America that Joyce's books were banned, not in his native country.

Neither does the charge of deliberate insularity or "isolationism" really stand up to examination. The modern world of travel and communications was only taking shape then, and Ireland overall was probably much more internationally conscious in 1935 than it had been in, say, 1910, when it had thought and behaved like a backward province of Britain. We played an honourable part in the League of Nations, and we were also instrumental in reshaping the British Empire into the Commonwealth - in each of which de Valera, too often damned as a chauvinist, took a leading role.

Irish newspapers were literate and well informed, and Radio Eireann, though operating on what nowadays would seem minimal funding, did much valuable work - particularly when measured against today's anodyne television culture. Is it not high time that we stopped speaking and writing so censoriously of the (fairly recent) past and applied our critical faculties to our own epoch?