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

by Fintan O'Toole

A huge parcel of modernity was delivered. We tried it on, paraded around in it and eventually caught sight of ourselves in the looking glass. We got to work with the scissors and refitted it around ourselves, shaping it to the hand-me-downs of our own collective experiences: to the pre-existing conditions of national and religious identity, to the realities of our geography as part both of an archipelago with its own very specific historic entanglements and of a wider Europe,

Keats suggested that there is a problem with ‘being incapable of remaining with half-knowledge’. Maybe Ireland has reached the point of accepting that half-knowledge

When I was born, there was no future and now there is no future again.

Now, it is a more positive idea: there need not be a single, knowable future.

Ireland did not start as one fixed thing and end up as another. It moved between different kinds of unfixity. In the hurry through which known and strange things pass, the strange things were sometimes very well known and the known things were often deeply strange. Ireland came to accept that its familiar self had hidden a deep estrangement – of

It brought its global history back home and, in the process, came to be, if not quite at home with itself, then more so than it had been before.

We ended up, not great, maybe not even especially good, but better than either – not so bad ourselves.