We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

 

Fintan O’Toole, “We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland," Liveright Publishing, 2023, 570  pp. 

After reading “Say Nothing” this is an excellent follow-up book to understand both the north and south of Ireland and the transformation that has taken place since 1958.  Everyone will be interested in “Say Nothing”; possibly only the Irish will appreciate “We Don’t Know Ourselves.”

NYT Book Review (edited and truncated by me):

One of the many triumphs of Fintan O’Toole’s “We Don’t Know Ourselves” is that he manages to find a form that accommodates the spectacular changes that have occurred in Ireland over the past six decades, which happens to be his life span. The subtitle of the book is “A Personal History of Modern Ireland.” Indeed, it is not a memoir, nor is it an absolute history, nor is it entirely a personal reflection or a crepuscular credo. It is, in fact, all of these things helixed together: his life, his country, his thoughts, his misgivings, his anger, his pride, his doubt, all of them belonging, eventually, to us.

It is impossible to say where things begin or end, but O’Toole takes the year of his birth, 1958, as the launching pad for an Ireland that would turn itself inside out several times over the course of his lifetime. He attributes the beginning of change to a 250-page document written by the Irish economist T. K. Whitaker, who thought it was a good idea for an Ireland utterly lacking in self-confidence “to shut the door on the past,” and open the country economically and culturally to the rest of the world.

And so began the opening and closing of a battery of doors, not least those that led to the almost unimaginable fall from grace of the Roman Catholic Church, the reform of Irish education, the flare-up and eventual quenching of violence in Northern Ireland, a transformation of the Irish economy and a wild shakeout of the national soul.

“The transformation of Ireland over the last 60 years has sometimes felt as if a new world had landed from outer space on top of an old one,” O’Toole writes.

An Ireland of available divorce. An Ireland of gay marriage. An Ireland without bomb blasts. An Ireland finally capable of admitting to the ongoing psychoses, passivity and prejudices that still bind it today, even as it becomes, as O’Toole puts it, “one of the most globalized economies in the world.”

In one chapter, titled “The Killer Chord,” O’Toole is 12 years old and spending the summer of 1970 learning Irish in the Gaeltacht. He unwittingly releases a drift of pigs from a house and later comes across an elegant jumble sale of a man who wields his walking stick like a “conductor’s baton.” The man guides the pigs home with utter assurance and panache. At Mass the next morning, O’Toole sees the same man conducting the choir, and he finds that “the melody was like a meandering river, slow and serene, yet utterly implacable.” The man, it turns out, was the musical genius Seán Ó Riada, who at the time was revolutionizing Irish music from within. O’Toole uses this marvelous cameo to indicate his realization that “the desire for connection was given meaning by the reality that there was still something to connect to, traditions of music and singing and storytelling and language that had their own highly distinctive texture.”

And so it is that O’Toole attributes a distinctive focus, both personal and political, to each unfolding year. The Irish Army in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1961. The entry of the Republic into Europe in 1973. The hunger strikes of 1981. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998. The “grandiose delusions” of the Celtic Tiger in 2008.

O’Toole writes brilliantly and compellingly of the dark times, but he is graceful enough to know that there is humor and light in the cracks. There is a touch of Eduardo Galeano in the way he can settle on a telling phrase. “Being European was the ultimate way of not being British.” “The idea of disappearance hung over the place.” “The violence was strangely weightless.” “There was nothing as simple, or as stable, as mere hypocrisy.” “The Irish economy was most like Humpty Dumpty — bloated, fragile, sitting smugly at a great height and headed for a fall.”

But the real accomplishment of this book is that it achieves a conscious form of history-telling, a personal hybrid that feels distinctly honest and humble at the same time. O’Toole has not invented the form, but he comes close to perfecting it. He embraces the contradictions and the confusion. In the process, he weaves the flag rather than waving it. Near the conclusion of the book, he intones: “What is possible now, and was entirely impossible when I was born, is this: to accept the unknown without being so terrified of it that you have to take refuge in fabrications of absolute conviction.”

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My Notes:

Pg. 180:  One of the key turning points in the struggle in Northern Ireland was the 1969 march for civil rights from Belfast to Derry.  When the march came to Burntollet Bridge, the marchers were viciously attacked by a loyalist mob that included off-duty members of the notoriously sectarian auxiliary police force, the B-Specials.  (This escalated the Troubles to new heights that would last until the Good Friday peace in 1998).

Pg. 239:  The biggest thing that happened to Ireland since Independence in 1921 was its formal entry into the EEC on 1 January 1973.  It was the moment that Ireland became officially a Western country as part of the developed and democratic world.

Pg. 334:  Bobby Sands died on 5 May 1981 while on his hunger strike after sixty-six days without food. 

Pg. 338:  In all, from 1970 to 2019, when abortion was finally legalized in Ireland, at least a quarter of a million Irish women traveled to Britain for an abortion.

Pg. 493:  In the mid-1980s Ireland concentrated on three areas for development: information technology, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices.  This was the new Holy Trinity that would replace the old ones, the religious triad of father, son and Holy Ghost and the ideological troika of land, nationality, and religion.  In the 1990s, as these old systems were imploding in Ireland, the new ones arrived just in time to take their place. The corporate tax rate of 12.5% was a great enticement to corporations. 

Pg. 509:  In 1981, 93 per cent of the population was Catholic.  By 2016, that was down to 78 per cent.  The fastest-growing faiths were Orthodox Christianity, Pentecostalism, atheism, and Islam. In a very short time, Ireland became a multicultural society.