The period between the 1950s and the 1970s is generally held as an era of profound transitions in Irish society, marking the end of Eamon de Valera's traditional Catholic nationalist Ireland and generating the birth of a new modern postnationalist Irish state. Luke Gibbons (1996: 82) asserts that the year 1959, in which Seán F. Lemass was appointed Taoiseach, is "with revisionist hindsight taken as the annus mirabilis of modern Ireland… dispelling the mists of traditionalism which had obscured the path to progress and industrialisation… [and breaking] with the protectionist policies of the previous generation [in order to extend] an open welcome to foreign investment and multinational capital". The Republic's 1973 entry into the European Union (then EEC) consolidated these developments, exposing its society to what Gibbons (82) tellingly describes as "the ways of the world". There is, then, a distinct turning point or rupture posited to have occurred during this epoch, which is based on what Fredric Jameson (2002b: 25) describes as "a powerful act of dissociation whereby the present seals off its past from itself and expels and ejects it". In this regard, Joe Cleary (2007: 8) argues that "post-1960s "Lemass's Ireland" [is set up against] de Valera's Ireland [as] its repudiated antithesis".