One of my vacation habits is to take along a book about the place I’m visiting — which is how I found myself on Ireland’s spectacular Atlantic coast last month, paging through a copy of Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland. O’Toole, a prominent Irish journalist, uses the years of his own life, beginning in 1958, to tell the story of the changes that have taken place in this small, beautiful country on Europe’s northwestern edge.

While I knew that Ireland had up until quite recently been a poor place by European standards, I hadn’t realized just how poor. Within living memory, as O’Toole writes, Ireland was “a vast cattle ranch with a few cities.” Two-thirds of homes still had no electricity after World War II, and, as late as 1961, most rural houses lacked indoor toilets or hot water. In 1961, Ireland’s population was just 2.8 million, the nadir after decades of decline going back to the 19th century.

Yet the country I visited had become one of the most prosperous and educated in Europe: a largely liberal, progressive society that now attracts immigrants instead of losing emigrants. The Irish themselves would say it’s still far from perfect, but it has become something few could have predicted when O’Toole was born in 1958.

One of my goals at Good News is to counter our built‑in bias toward bad headlines by spotlighting the slow, compounding improvement over time that is too often missed. Ireland’s arc over the past 70 years captures that story as few other countries have.

From poverty to prosperity

Then: Ireland’s gross national income (GNI) per person — what individuals actually earned on average — in the early 1970s was around $2,000, the........

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