A sophisticated but blinkered view on Ireland

We Don’t Know Ourselves. A Personal History of Ireland since 1958

Fintan O’Toole

Head of Zeus

2021 

616 pages

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Fintan O’Toole argues in his new book that we have moved in Ireland in the last sixty years from a restrictive Catholic and nationalist identity to one that is much more expansive and inclusive. He critiques a previous “confusion” of Catholicism and citizenship in Ireland, the spiritual and economic “protectionism” of the 1950s and the “ingenious hypocrisy” of Irish Catholics, particularly in relation to sexual morality.

Ireland, he says, in the ornate prose of his final chapter, “came to accept that its familiar self had hidden a deep estrangement – of exile, of reality, of ordinary experience.” The country allowed itself “gradually, painfully, and with relief’, he writes, “to contract, to shrink away from the stories that were too big to match the scale of its intimate decencies. We ended up, not great, maybe not even especially good, but better than either – not so bad ourselves.” (p. 570). 

O’Toole’s endpoint does not seem, however, like a particularly impressive or even interesting outcome to sixty years of social change, still less to 1600 years of Christian heritage in Ireland, and his title is telling in that respect: “We Don’t Know Ourselves”. While his book has much to say about Catholic Ireland, the casual reader might conclude that it started with Éamon de Valera, rather than being rooted in centuries of ancient tradition. 

O’Toole is an award-winning writer, a highly influential commentator and polemicist in the Irish Times and well-known overseas for his work on Brexit. A graduate in English and Philosophy from UCD and the author of many books, his central place in Irish media and cultural life is assured. He is currently working on a biography of Seamus Heaney.

His book reflects on the transformations in Ireland since he was born in 1958, links his own life to wider developments and takes a chronological approach, starting with the economic despondency and mass emigration of 1950s Ireland. O’Toole ranges widely, from referendum debates to political controversies to the Troubles and the abuse scandals and his book provides a reflective, if strongly ideological, trip down our national memory lane. 

A substantial volume of 616 pages devotes surprisingly little attention to the Irish Times itself. The author’s exceptional analytical powers are applied, in other words, to every other centre of influence in Irish life but not, or at any rate not here, to his own august “paper of record”! 

A major theme is the gap between pious theory and complex reality in Ireland. O’Toole argues that Catholic activists, for example, were more interested in appearances than in the messy complexities of real life. He views de Valera’s Ireland as a failed State and legitimately highlights the economic failures and mass emigration of the 1950s. 

He maintains that our “crushing irrelevance” to other Western European countries became evident when we were not invited to join the new European Free Trade Association in 1959. And while we looked with disdain on pagan England, for many emigrants, in the real world, England represented both opportunity and escape: “In the subterranean reality of ordinary lives, England could be a place to escape tyranny and contempt in Ireland” (p. 31).

There is much to agree with here but also a sense that the theorising is too neat and the generalisations too sweeping. Thus, the argument about a “failed State” seems unjust and un-nuanced. Mass emigration was a great failure and the Whitaker economic reforms of the late 1950s were hugely significant but the earlier 1950s saw important reform too. 

In healthcare, for example, the 1953 Health Act expanded maternity and infant care and free hospital access while the introduction of the VHI system in 1957 was an innovative reform at the time for those without free hospital care. Three changes of Government in the 1950s would suggest that our democratic system was operating effectively and O’Toole’s critique of those Governments arguably downplays the poverty of 1950s Ireland and the economic impact of the Second World War. Fishermen in the rural coastal area from which I come, to give one example, lost valuable fish markets because of the war and never recovered them afterwards. While O’Toole presents Ireland in the 1950s as a cultural backwater, dominated by censorship and Archbishop McQuaid, writers like Brian Fallon in An Age of Innocence (Gill and Macmillan, 1998) have depicted a lively Irish cultural life during that period.

The book considers the battle between the post-1960s cultural and sexual revolution and traditional Irish Catholicism and the gap between pious theory and “real life” is exemplified, O’Toole argues, by the issue of abortion. Thus, the proposers of the 1983 pro-life or eighth amendment are seen in reductive, even cartoonish terms as wanting to show that Ireland was still “holy, Catholic and a beacon to the world” (p. 350). We had ensured that there would be no abortion in Catholic Ireland and could therefore turn a serene blind eye to the thousands of women travelling each year for abortions in Britain. 

However, if the Eighth Amendment had merely been pious Catholic aspiration, it would hardly have aroused the opposition that it did in 1983. For many years, the Amendment did protect the lives of unborn babies – in the sense that the abortion rate was significantly lower than it would have been in the context of an Irish abortion regime. This argument has been reinforced by the sharp rise in the Irish abortion rate since Repeal. On the point of alleged hypocrisy in 1983, the Irish State had no control over the abortion regime in the UK but was entitled to legislate in its own jurisdiction.

Mr O’Toole has written thousands of words about abortion but has never seemed to fix his gaze on the humanity of the unborn. The flippant title of his chapter on the Eighth Amendment debate in the 1980s (“Foetal Attractions”) does not do justice to an issue that has provoked huge controversy across the world, and is re-emerging internationally as a matter for debate. Irish journalists were extremely vocal on abortion while the Eighth Amendment held sway here but now that a liberal abortion regime has been achieved, their collective attitude seems to be: “Nothing to see – move on there.”

O’Toole’s passages on the North bring the reader back to the horrors and traumas of the Troubles, from Bloody Sunday to the terrible Provo car-bomb campaign to the hunger strikes and loyalist killings, and to the self-sacrificing work for peace of people like John Hume.

O’Toole’s pages here are an analytical tour de force, for example, in his dissection of how the IRA justified its campaign. On the other hand, he is a Dubliner who was not generally resident in the North during this period and his Northern chapters, while analytically impressive, lack the authority that comes from deep personal experience of the Troubles. Nor does his book properly acknowledge the courageous work done, year after year, by the Catholic Church in opposing the “armed struggle” and preventing a possible slide into full-blown civil war. 

A notable feature of the media narrative in Ireland in recent decades has been the endless repackaging of controversies relating to “Catholic Ireland’, and more specifically – to mention just two examples –  to a long-deceased Dublin archbishop – John Charles McQuaid – to Gay Byrne’s Late Late Show, or to the “contraceptive train” to Belfast in 1969. 

No-one could produce a more sophisticated version of the media narrative than the most prominent Irish commentator of recent decades, so O’Toole’s book offers one indication of where the Church now stands in the public square. He legitimately highlights the grave abuse scandals that so damaged victims and the Church itself but pays little attention to the good that the Church did, and does, for example, through the outreach of countless Irish missionaries who brought the light of Christ to other nations. 

Frank Duff famously worried as far back as the 1960s about the materialism of Irish Catholics and few Catholics today would wish to paint our recent past in rose-tinted colours. One might also acknowledge a certain isolation in Catholic Ireland in the 1950s and lack of preparedness for future challenges. 

Cardinal Cahal Daly’s memoir (Steps on my Pilgrim Journey, Veritas, 1998) reflected on the pastoral challenges he witnessed in France in the 1950s and suggested that Ireland was then shielded from some of those challenges by a certain geographical isolation and time-lag. 

Catholic Ireland in the 1950s, and even more recently, now seems like another universe. By the same token, however, the constant media scolding about its iniquities may itself be running out of road. O’Toole’s analysis does provoke thought by offering extensively researched chapters on major developments since the 1950s but one might wonder about its usefulness in contributing to reflection on where we go from here. 

His somewhat vague conclusion presents the country’s uncertain identity and future as a largely positive phenomenon: “there need not be a single, knowable future” (p. 570). Many ordinary Irish people today, however, have, arguably, an uneasy sense that things are not going well in many critical areas, both morally and economically, and that the nation is likely to face very choppy waters in the years ahead. Perhaps, while acknowledging both the positive achievements and grave scandals of the past, the time has come to fix our gaze firmly on the challenges and injustices of today!