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

by Fintan O'Toole

The Blaskets were famous as a remnant of an old Gaelic world, a vestige of an ancient way of life.

For Irish nationalists, it was a microcosm of the distinctive culture they had promised to revive – hardy, simple, pious, but rich in memories and dense with stories and songs in the Irish language.

The life blood of the islands was draining away westward, as the people emigrated, in particular to Springfield, Massachusetts, where they found work in the blast furnaces and cloth mills.

Both parties were fervently Catholic, deeply respectful of the right of the church hierarchy to make binding rulings on all questions of morality, especially those relating to reproduction and sexuality. Both claimed as a priority the revival of the Irish language as the vernacular of the people – and both equally did nothing to stop the death of Irish-speaking communities like that on the Blaskets. Both saw the Irish economy as essentially agrarian and Irish society as properly rural. Both insisted that partition was a great sin and that the lost six counties must be restored to make Ireland whole again. Neither did very much thinking about how this might happen.

Its economic backwardness meant that it could not contain itself – its people, like those of the Blaskets, were leaving for the very thing a holy and romantic Ireland could not provide: ordinary urban, industrial modernity.

There is no history here. Some kind of displacement is happening, but no new place has yet come into being.

They make my parents seem like settlers in an unmapped territory, their wedding staking a claim in land for which there are as yet no title deeds.

The future, as it might be lived out on the island, seemed to very many people a void, a nullity.

the indigenous language he did not speak and that Irish governments had been trying without success to revive as the vernacular for thirty years.

So, she and my father did not emigrate. They got married. And both of these things, in the Ireland of the mid-1950s, were unusual.

But in reality Ireland had a ‘shockingly low’ marriage rate – statisticians could not find a comparable country.

because women got out in even larger numbers than men did.

It was not the owners who were going abroad. 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.

This created a surreal disjunction. ‘Ireland’, as a notion, was almost suffocatingly coherent and fixed: Catholic, nationalist, rural. This was the Platonic form of the place. But Ireland as a lived experience was incoherent and unfixed. The first Ireland was bounded, protected, shielded from the unsavoury influence of the outside world. The second was unbounded, shifting, physically on the move to that outside world. In the space between these two Irelands, there was a haunted emptiness, a sense of something so unreal that it might disappear completely.

The author of the adaptation, Alan MacClelland, was particularly disappointed because ‘I had the play vetted by an authority on moral dogma and I was advised on any blasphemous passages, which I naturally agreed to cut.’

If EFTA were established, Ireland would have to make momentous decisions about its future: to open itself to free trade or remain as a protected but even more isolated space.

He suggested that in order to boost tourism, the country should market to Irish-Americans a festival called Ireland at Home.

All of this was supposed to connect Ireland with its diaspora in America, usually said to number twenty million people – and, more importantly, with its dollars. It failed: Irish-Americans did not answer the call of ‘home’ in significant numbers.

By that year, a scarcely imaginable 45 per cent of all those born in Ireland between 1931 and 1936 and 40 per cent of those born between 1936 and 1941 had left.

While Pan Am and An Tóstal were trying to attract tourists from the US, dispatches from American reporters did not make the place sound like anyone’s idea of fun.

The American-based theatre critic and director Eric Bentley compared Dublin unfavourably to the bombed-out cities of post-war Europe:

‘If the past century’s rate of decline continues, the Irish will virtually disappear as a nation, and will be found only as an enervated remnant in a land occupied by foreigners… Today Ireland is teetering perilously on the brink of near extinction…

The Irish Times ran an editorial in 1956, full of dark intimations that the Irish would become like other indigenous peoples who had lost out in the Darwinian struggle for survival: ‘What matters is that we will disappear as a composite race. We will add our name or names to those of the races that assimilate us; but as an entity, we will cease to exist.’

‘It is suicide to be abroad. But what is to be at home, Mr Tyler? What is to be at home? A lingering dissolution.

Most writers lived in Ireland’s intellectual and artistic capital, Elsewhere.

Ireland is a figment of the Anglo-Saxon imagination, her vices extolled as virtues and her glorious memory perpetuated by Boss Croker and Tammany Hall.

This was real authority: McQuaid never even made a public statement, yet he effectively forced the abandonment of what was supposed to be an international showcase for Irish theatre.

It was taken for granted that anti-Catholic sentiments should not be spoken aloud on stage. And there were no serious protests from Ireland’s small core of artists and intellectuals.

Yet McQuaid’s umbilical lasso did not just capture and confine Ireland. It also held it together.

The idea that McQuaid and his vast network of lay and clerical informants were always looking meant that Ireland had not yet succumbed to non-existence.

In the ideology of militant nationalists, that meant it had not come into being at all. It was illegitimate – as of course was its evil twin, the Protestant-dominated statelet of Northern Ireland.

That state was ambivalent about its own existence.

They had taken power in the 1930s, in a state whose existence they had violently opposed, with the aid of some impressive mental gymnastics.

The Constitution created by de Valera in 1937 (with help from McQuaid)

The main difference between the Dublin government and the IRA on this score was one of degree. For the former, the Ireland it ruled was a liminal state, hovering between the colonial past and the future of full freedom. For the latter, the existence of this ghostly entity could not be acknowledged at all.

In McQuaid’s ideal Ireland, there would have been no plays, in South’s new republic, there would have been no movies either.

In a country with brutal censorship of books already in place, it had launched a campaign to ‘Stop Foreign Publications’, and further censor material that was ‘not merely anti-Catholic or anti-Christian but definitely and deliberately Pagan’

The Unionist government in Northern Ireland was not shaken – if anything the IRA’s aggression helped to sustain its insistence that Catholics were inherently treacherous and deserved the second-class status imposed on them.

It was replaying its own history, if not quite as farce, then as surreal psychodrama.

and martyrdom had a powerful emotional radiance in a culture shaped by the fusion of political myths of blood sacrifice (especially those of the 1916 Rising) with the religious drama of Christ’s death and resurrection. Dying for Ireland imposed on the survivors a moral obligation to mourn.

Hagiographic tributes hailed him as ‘an exemplary and very fine type of young Irishman’ whose ‘blood will fire us to a renewed enthusiasm to bring to fruition Seán’s finest dream – an Ireland free and Gaelic’

the moral duty of every young person was to engage in holy war against both the Protestants of Northern Ireland and the Masonic−Jewish−Communist forces of Hollywood.

The Catholic hierarchy declared it a mortal sin to ‘co-operate with or express approval of’ any organization that ‘arrogates to itself the right to bear arms or to use them against its own or another state’, but South and other martyrs were given huge public Catholic funerals that were attended, as well as celebrated, by the clergy.

The very appeal to the young to be fired by the blood of the martyrs with ‘renewed enthusiasm’ for the cause implicitly conceded that enthusiasm was waning.

There were people – a small but potent minority – who fully shared the belief that the purpose of life was to free Ireland, speak Irish and be a pious and puritanical Catholic. There were people – a larger but more tacit minority – who thought all of this to be obscurantist nonsense. But most people were capable of living simultaneously in the dreamworlds of Catholic nationalism and of modern material aspirations.

But people did not stop speaking English and start speaking Gaelic. The cinemas remained full. Young men and women continued to emigrate to English cities in search of a life better than the one they had in Catholic nationalist Ireland.

While the IRA’s crusade to drive out the ‘invader’ maintained a desultory existence, it would, in 1962, call the whole thing off and blame its failure on ‘the attitude of the general public whose minds have been deliberately distracted from the supreme issue facing the Irish people – the unity and freedom of Ireland’.51 In this at least the IRA showed some glimmer of realism: the Irish people were indeed in a state of long-term distraction, radically uncertain about how to define themselves.

one that hankered after a pure, Gaelic and Catholic Ireland to which Whelan and his priest were traitors and another that shared at least part of its identity with working-class people in Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham.

But it is a reasonable bet that many had stood in both crowds, reciting the same litanies.

While nationalism and religion sucked up almost all the oxygen, those dull, technical talks were exposing the existential dilemma of the project of Irish independence.