“Ouch!” You’ll say that greater than once when reading Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves. American readers aware of O’Toole from his reviews in The Recent York Review of Books or his work as a drama critic will not be aware that the Irish author can be quite the polemicist. He turns the knife on a powerful array of individuals, political and social institutions, and cultural nostrums within the 600-plus pages of this “personal history” of Ireland from the 12 months of his birth (1958) to the current day.
“My life is just too boring for a memoir and there isn’t any shortage of recent Irish history,” he writes. “Nevertheless it happens that my life does in some ways each span and mirror a time of transformation.” Accordingly, O’Toole brackets his material to deal with events which have occurred in his lifetime; this approach means he can flavor every evaluation with personal memories and reactions, making this a far livelier history than most.
That notion of a private account also gives his arguments something of a Teflon coating: On the few occasions I discovered myself pushing back against his description or evaluation, I used to be faced with the proven fact that that is an Irish writer writing a private history of his experience of Ireland. There’s not quite a lot of rhetorical room there to reply with “Actually, that’s not true.” And is there any more obnoxious cliché than that of the Irish-American weighing in on the auld sod?
O’Toole turns the knife on a powerful array of individuals, political and social institutions, and cultural nostrums within the 600-plus pages of We Don’t Know Ourselves.
The Ireland of O’Toole’s childhood had not modified much within the 4 a long time before his birth, partially because the key engine of change—young people—emigrated in huge numbers every 12 months. Consequently, the Ireland of 1958 was “almost suffocatingly coherent and stuck: Catholic, nationalist, rural,” he writes. But at the identical time, “Ireland as a lived experience was incoherent and unfixed,” because there was a second, less visible reality:
The primary Ireland was bounded, protected, shielded from the unsavoury influence of the surface world. The second was unbounded, shifting, physically on the move to that outside world. Within the space between these two Irelands, there was a haunted emptiness, a way of something so unreal that it would disappear completely.
And indeed, the population of the Republic bottomed out at 2.8 million people three years after O’Toole’s birth; greater than a century earlier, it had peaked at 6.5 million. Three in five Irish children raised within the Fifties were destined to go away in some unspecified time in the future of their lives, a “slow, relentless demographic disaster” that made the nation seemingly impervious to vary.
And yet today, Ireland is a contemporary state, seemingly well-integrated culturally and economically into Western Europe. The population of the Republic is over five million, and by way of gross domestic product, Ireland is considered one of the wealthiest nations on the earth. By almost any financial marker, the Ireland of today bears little resemblance to the poor, rural, traditional nation of half a century ago. “This was the good gamble of 1958,” O’Toole writes, where “the whole lot would change economically but the whole lot would stay the identical culturally.”
“This was the good gamble of 1958,” O’Toole writes, where “the whole lot would change economically but the whole lot would stay the identical culturally.”
The fact has turned out somewhat different, as economic growth brought greater than just financial change. Politically and culturally, Ireland had at all times functioned as an alliance between church and state, and the Catholic Church held enormous sway over education, health care, politics and even the legal supervision of minor vices. The Archbishop of Dublin, O’Toole notes, was not embarrassed to call local radio stations and order bans on songs he considered too risqué.
The arrival of mass media made the situation almost comic. How should church and state respond with the intention to defend the normal morals of the Irish people? Cut out all of the sexy bits of “Casablanca”? Attempt to jam the signals of the British Broadcasting Corporation? Rail against the corrupting influence of European media, only to find yourself with a whole generation of youngsters obsessive about American Westerns? (These had been suitably bowdlerized already by Hollywood in accordance with the Hays Code, largely written by—you guessed it—Irish-Americans.)
The deference long paid to priests and men and girls religious by civil society also began to lose its strength within the Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Seventies because the church showed its clay feet increasingly. Like many Irish children, O’Toole was educated through highschool by the Irish Christian Brothers, and his tales of their brutality match many other equally grim accounts. It was the cane or the leather strap the schoolboys feared; it might not be long before the stories of sexual abuse also became widely known (and O’Toole is quick to notice that physical abuse and sexual abuse often go hand in hand).
O’Toole reserves a special circle of hell for any form of church authority, and his treatment of the Christian Brothers reaches far past a “personal history,” a curious moment within the book when his evidence seems to contradict his point. He quotes Éamon de Valera, a hero of the 1916 Easter Rising and Ireland’s most distinguished politician for a long time: “I’m a person who owes practically the whole lot to the Christian Brothers.” He quotes Charles Haughey, one other distinguished Irish politician: “What the Brothers do is lay foundations for practically every aspect of 1’s life.” But neither quotation—or various others—is used to indicate the nice the Christian Brothers intended or completed; they’re as a substitute, to O’Toole, evidence of just how awful the violence was. Only a person beaten into submission, we are supposed to conclude, could be so unable to articulate what had been done to him.
In any case, whatever iron grip the Christian Brothers or every other religious order had over its pupils has turn into a thing of the past in Ireland. Once it became clear that sexual abuse (in addition to other horrors just like the Magdalene laundries and the mistreatment of so many other vulnerable adults) had occurred throughout many hybrid church-state institutions, the Irish were even quicker than many other modern societies to shrug their shoulders and wave farewell to traditional religious adherence.
O’Toole even finds a cabbie who has bought a vacation flat in Cape Verde, a rustic he has never visited and can’t find on a map. “ investment,” he declares.
A somewhat different gospel rose to the fore within the Nineteen Nineties and 2000s, because the Celtic Tiger economic boom promised prosperity, a more cosmopolitan worldview and integration into the world economy. O’Toole even finds a cabbie—all good journalists know to interview the cabbie—who has bought a vacation flat in Cape Verde, a rustic he has never visited and can’t find on a map. “ investment,” he declares.
“Ireland became a large-scale version of a TV makeover show,” O’Toole writes, “with the ‘before’ pictures showing a slovenly, depressed wretch and the ‘after’ images a smiling bling-bedecked beauty, who went on to begin her own self-improvement course for similarly abject little countries.” And the brand new gospel didn’t brook dissent: “To state the plain was to be a heretic.”
When the worldwide economic crisis of 2008 once more relegated Ireland to the ranks of European charity cases, O’Toole writes, the Irish were strangely accepting of their fate: “There was a chilly but effective consolation within the return of the hardly repressed—this was a drama that may very well be shaped as a medieval morality play. That drama had three acts—sin, punishment and redemption.”
“In 1958, and for a lot of a long time afterwards, there was this sense that, if it didn’t pretend to know itself thoroughly and absolutely, Ireland wouldn’t exist in any respect.”
Today, Ireland has recovered economically, to a big extent, from that crash. And while the culture might superficially resemble that of 1958, it has modified dramatically. Within the last decade alone, public referendums have legalized abortion and same-sex marriage; Mass attendance and spiritual vocations are each in steep decline; immigration (to Ireland, not from it) is a growing reality, particularly within the megalopolis that’s now Dublin. In 2017 Ireland became only the fourth country on the earth to have an openly gay head of state.
Even the seemingly intractable political morass of violence and revenge represented by the Troubles looked as if it would have an end in sight with the passage in 1998 of the Good Friday Agreement between the British and Irish governments, in addition to many of the political parties in Northern Ireland, on the political way forward for Northern Ireland.
“In 1958, and for a lot of a long time afterwards, there was this sense that, if it didn’t pretend to know itself thoroughly and absolutely, Ireland wouldn’t exist in any respect,” O’Toole writes within the book’s final pages. “Ireland didn’t start as one fixed thing and find yourself as one other. It moved between different sorts of unfixity.” And it’s O’Toole’s evaluation of the peace accords that captures most aptly that change in Ireland over the course of his lifetime.
When the Irish Republican Army agreed to sit down on the negotiating table without insisting on the reunification of all 32 counties as an absolute requirement—ever the sine qua non of I.R.A. politics—the group’s leaders were tacitly admitting that the rallying cry of three generations of freedom fighters was not seen as a practical possibility. However the people of the Republic, O’Toole notes, “roughly accepted it.” Today you’re more likely to search out an Irish-American singing the old rebel songs than the Irish themselves. Why?
“Certitude was what you killed and died for,” O’Toole writes. “Doubt was what you would live with.” From economics to religion to social change to cultural ferment, that formulation is likely to be as succinct an outline as any of the journey of Ireland to the current day.