Fintan O’Toole was born in 1958, and he takes that year as a starting point for this book. It happened to be in that year that TK Whitaker produced his white paper on economic expansion, which was the beginning of the end of the era when independent Ireland tried to be aloof from the heathens beyond the water, with dreams of cultural purity and economic self-sufficiency, and set out to rejoin the world. The book carries on as it started, juxtaposing personal O’Toole milestones and episodes with what was happening in the country as a whole.
It’s a fascinating read and a very funny exposition of what a bonkers country Ireland was; a place where madly contradictory things always seemed to be happening at the same time. The leitmotif is our habit of having something absolutely monstrous going on in plain sight while we all silently agree to act as though it just isn’t there. It’s a great little country for indoor elephants. Nobody will bother you, and if you eat all the cornflakes, it seems, more cornflakes will be got without anyone saying a word about how they’re disappearing. Only some of the elephants, of course, were harmless. Others include the brutal injustices inflicted on children and adults who were made to disappear into the “industrial schools”, the “mother and baby homes”, the Magdalen laundries and the nastier variants of emigration. It’s a hard one for us to face up to – that the human propensity to see nothing while people right next to us vanish, to frame institutionalized cruelty as charity, to be generally friendly and decent and yet callously indifferent at the same time – affected our society, and that parts of it remained in place for so long. But face up to it we must. And in that, too, we rejoin the world, or at least the rest of Europe, where we are not the only country that selected certain groups of people for harsh mistreatment.
The fascination of the book for me has a lot to do with our age difference. I am 8 years younger than Fintan, the youngest of our family by quite a way; my siblings are around his age. My big brother, for example, was sad about the loss of Nelson’s Pillar, because he knew it, but has always disliked the red-and-white striped chimneys in Poolbeg, because they came along later. In contrast, I never knew the Pillar, as it was blown up a few months before I was born, but always felt the chimneys were a friendly presence, especially because they were well visible from my secondary school in Clontarf; I never knew the city without them.
As that youngest child, mainly surrounded by older people, generally wanting to be more grown-up than I was, I remember hearing names and words spoken in earnest, sometimes heated, tones on the radio … “Sunningdale”, “Merlyn Rees”, “Bernadette Devlin”, ”Vanguard”… the Troubles, Women’s Lib, the Oil Crisis … social issues of the day on The Riordans … snatches of chat among relatives … not knowing what these things were about, and being shielded from whatever the big’uns thought wasn’t fit for my consumption, but registering the moods and the feel of the times. So the stories in the book fill in a lot of gaps; things that feel intimately familiar but that I didn’t, couldn’t understand at the time. The other aspect that is revelatory is due to our different social backgrounds: the O’Tooles were working-class Catholics in Crumlin, and we were middle-class Protestants in suburban north County Dublin. Maybe you have to be of my generation to understand how segregated we were then. In a country of over 90% Catholics, I simply did not know any Catholics until I went to secondary school. In my childhood I can only remember being inside a Catholic church once, and it might have been a mistake. In everyday life, of course, outside of schools and churches, we were all in the same world, in shops and as neighbours and in many ways, everything was completely normal, and yet by some unspoken magic rules there were ways we didn’t interact, spaces we mutually avoided, things we never mentioned. So this led to the strange experience of having friends in school and university who had this other world of experience that I both knew a flavour of and simultaneously didn’t have the slightest clue about. Fintan helpfully describes it from the inside, having been an altar boy and gone to school with “the Brothers” …
The feeling I had reading about these years was one of having ambiences of my childhood gently and successively picked up by sequences of facts and events. The picture in my mind is one of a hand papermaker lifting a screen out of a vat of pulp, picking up fibres as it comes, and it works both ways: it makes me appreciate what was going on, and it also gives me a delicious sense of the timeline of my own emergence into the world. I would say it reaches a sort of culmination with two events that marked my becoming a teenager: the Pope’s visit in 1979 and the hunger strikes of 1981. Each of these moments seemed like a show of strength but as Fintan explains, they both contained seeds of unravelling of things that seemed hard and fixed. Neither the Pope nor the IRA were as much in charge of events as they seemed.
From then on, the feel of the book becomes more normal to me because this was the time when I was beginning to experience current affairs for myself and among my peers. At that time, too, among other voices, Fintan himself was increasingly present as a columnist. I’d say I became specifically aware of him about the time I left the country, which was 1988, and I see now that that was when he joined the Irish Times. The general drift of what he was for and against coincided closely with the consensus of my generation. I confess I galloped through this bit somewhat. I found it gratifying that he mentions the economic situation in the late 80s and early 90s, and the resulting wave of emigration, which I was part of. It’s nice to not be forgotten, maybe especially by someone whose own career was doing alright at home at the time. Although I didn’t leave in a coffin ship – I went off to do a higher degree and have a professional career – it was still a phase where it just looked like there were no opportunities at home. That emigration came back with a bang seems to have been a shock to the national psyche. And then the country tipped into the helter-skelter of the Celtic Tiger, changing so much from one visit to the next that I often felt: first I left home and then home left me.
In the end, the title is a bit tongue-in-cheek. For all the turbulent change, we do know ourselves, or at least some of us do come to know ourselves, reasonably well; the relative prosperity and opening-to-the-world that we grew up in has given us space to do so (some of us, obviously, and unfairly, more than others). It is possible to navigate this history with a sense of ordinary decency. And parallel to Fintan, whom the youth of today tend to take little digs at as a slightly boring, well-meaning voice of conventional wisdom, the country has in some ways actually matured and become less insecure in itself. The overall effect, for me, is quietly encouraging now in what seems, internationally, a dark enough time. And I would say it helped reconcile me a bit with adolescent me. Many events and tendencies of my early adult life were largely conditioned by the contexts I grew up in.
If you want to understand modern Ireland, this book should be near the top of your reading list. If you already know the history, it will fill you in with a lot of stuff you don’t find in other books. And I think it would work the other way round, too: If you don’t know much of the history, you could use the episodes as springboards for other reading. 14/10 would recommend.
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