We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958

by Fintan O'Toole

The transformation of Ireland over the last sixty years has sometimes felt as if a new world had landed from outer space on top of an old one.

Ireland was owned very securely and very comfortably by a post-revolutionary political elite, by a well-heeled professional class, by big cattle ranchers, and above all by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. The state founded in revolution and civil war had become remarkably stable. But it was a stability sustained by radical instability – to keep it as it was, huge parts of the population had to emigrate, for otherwise the sheer weight of their discontented numbers would drag it down.

In 1957 alone, an astonishing 1.8 per cent of the entire population left the country.

The export of live people and live animals in the same vessels epitomized the economic backwardness of the country.

There was a kind of unspoken pact: people transformed themselves through emigration so that the state and society could stay the same.

This was the great gamble of 1958: everything would change economically but everything would stay the same culturally.

The ideal defence would be a permanent quarantine behind some wall of technology that prohibited entry to the carriers of the disease. But since this was not possible, there had to be a vaccine: an Irish national station. We would get just enough television, in a carefully modified form, to stimulate our national and spiritual immune systems.

there was Dublin’s characteristic fusion of memory, history and fable.

This was a way of functioning – through silence, evasion, creative ambiguity – that could be normal only in a society in which power seems permanent while ordinary life is changing.

While we in Dublin were calling people Balubas, the revolt of Catholics and their allies among liberal Protestants and left-wingers was arguably the first white rebellion to be directly and explicitly inspired by a Black movement.

These women were not tourists or emigrants. They were refugees. They fled in terror.

Being European was the ultimate way of not being British.

The illusion of classlessness was one of the great strengths of the Irish class system.

Ireland became the first and only country in the world to make a condom a medicine. As the Irish Medical Association dryly noted, ‘the prescription or authorization of condoms is not a medical function’.

It meant that we were preserving our unique way of life – the way of ambiguity and unknowing, of dodging and weaving around reality.

Irish governments knew how incendiary the culture of martyrdom could be and how important it was to damp down that fire before it could take hold. The fire extinguisher was ambiguity.

There is little doubt that had the British simply embraced Hilditch’s plan of giving the prisoners both their own clothes and some prison-issue clothing, everything that happened next, and all the deaths it entailed, could have been avoided.

Those statements signed by the Hayes family are arguably the most impressive work of Irish fiction of the early 1980s.

Most of this reality was rendered invisible in the gentrification of emigration. The element of compulsion was played down and the idea of cosmopolitanism and adventure-seeking played up.

The culture of deliberate unknowing had shaped Ireland throughout my lifetime.

People had to leave Ireland physically because so much of its own bourgeoisie had left it morally.

All of this depended on the maintenance of the cognitive dissonance that was so deeply engrained in Irish society.

I thought, as all of this was unfolding, of Ron Ziegler, Richard Nixon’s press secretary, explaining that previous statements about Nixon’s involvement in Watergate were untrue: ‘This is an operative statement, the others are inoperative.’

All of this was very interesting to me. It hinted at the ways in which private and public interests overlapped in Ireland and at the utter indifference of Fianna Fáil to criminality in companies to which it was close.

‘Well, the general teaching about mental reservation is that you are not permitted to tell a lie. On the other hand, you may be put in a position where you have to answer, and there may be circumstances in which you can use an ambiguous expression realising that the person who you are talking to will accept an untrue version of whatever it may be − permitting that to happen, not willing that it happened, that would be lying. It really is a matter of trying to deal with extraordinarily difficult matters that may arise in social relations where people may ask questions that you simply cannot answer. Everybody knows that this kind of thing is liable to happen. So, mental reservation is, in a sense, a way of answering without lying.’2

The success of this makeover meant that, in the first period in its history when Ireland had real and widespread prosperity, there would be no change in its political culture, no reflection on its values, no thought given to anything but the sustaining of the system itself. It may have been dying inside but it glowed with the fake tan of success.

The real effect of the loss of church authority was that there was no deeply rooted civic morality to take its place.

The rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger was indeed a kind of moral tale, but the lesson is not that free-market globalization is a panacea for the world’s ills. It is, on the contrary, that politics, society, morality and collective institutions matter.

For a start, one of the reasons the Irish economy grew so fast after 1995 is that it had grown so slowly before that.

Being prosperous would be replaced by feeling rich.

It was a giant machine for sucking in borrowed money that the Irish used mostly for buying bits of the country from each other at ever more inflated prices and, when they ran out of bits of Ireland, doing the same with bits of other, sunnier islands.

Ireland did not, it seemed, need to do the things that other European societies had done as part of the modernizing process: create robust systems of public provision of housing, healthcare and education.

It was not merely thrust into a twilight zone where it went from the premodern to the postmodern at warp speed.

United Ireland imposed without consent, with the Brits driven into the sea and the Protestants subdued, was not any kind of possible endpoint. It could only be the beginning of another conflict.