ABSTRACT
THE CONCRETE AND OFTEN COLOURFUL details of life we have observed among the New Dubliners reveal the results of urbanization in Ireland. People who migrate from the countryside to the city change. They reorganize their lives, modify their behaviour, sentiments and values, and thus adapt themselves to the new and distinctive urban way of life. On the family level these changes are complex and pervasive, touching not only the structure of relationships between members of the nuclear family itself, but also the relationships that the family as a group has with other groups in the community. But this process, though complicated, is clearly not a haphazard one. A high degree of recurrence is observable in the patterns of change that have taken place in family relations within the span of two generations. Regular changes in one sphere of the New Dubliners’ family life have quite consistently resulted in regular changes in other spheres so that the total design of the New Dubliners’ family is clearly different from that of the countryman's family. In short, urbanization produces in the family systematic and ordered changes which we must now analyse. But certain basic theoretical notions have conditioned both our observation and the preceding description of family life in Ireland, and will govern our analysis. So we will first examine this conceptual framework and then present our conclusions.
