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

by Fintan O'Toole

The story of the future was to be that, while Irish firms would face increased competition as protectionism was dismantled, they would be more than compensated for any losses in the home market by their ability to export into Europe and beyond. The first part came true. The second didn’t. Bluntly, Irish business as a whole was not up to it.

What was actually happening was that, because of the failure of the native business class, the Irish economy was becoming more and more dependent on a relatively small number of US-owned multinationals who had set up in Ireland to take advantage of low wages, virtually non-existent corporate taxes and tariff-free access to western European markets.

The upshot was that Ireland was becoming more heavily reliant on American investment even at a time when American multinationals were becoming more reluctant to invest.

My older brother got a job in the mid-1970s in Galway. This in itself would have been strange – in previous decades, the last place you would migrate to looking for work was the West of Ireland. But Kieran’s job was with the American minicomputer giant Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), which set up a plant on the Mervue Industrial Estate in 1971.

Here, far removed from the old, leisurely, “romantic” days of the Claddagh, is the Galway of the seventies. There is a sense of purpose that is almost tangible, a spirit of adventure in the air, a widening of horizons so that Europe is seen as almost on Galway’s doorstep.’

If, like my brother, you could get a job in one of these companies, you were entering America without leaving Ireland: ‘The Irish electronics industry is something of an industrial sub-culture of its own in Ireland. With so many U.S. firms involved in the industry here, many of the plants are run on lines similar to what might be expected across the Atlantic.’

As the rest of the economy imploded, this American enclave seemed increasingly, not just a bright star in a gloomy sky, but a parallel universe.

For most of the 1980s, while the actual Irish economy was in dire straits, Ireland had, officially, the highest rate of growth in industrial output in the developed world.18 But almost all the growth was in pharmaceuticals, office and data processing machinery, electrical engineering and instrument engineering – in other words in the American-dominated multinationals. All other sectors combined had no growth at all.

The heroin epidemic was like a slaughter of the innocents. It went after children and young adults. It was also a repetition of an American nightmare. While the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland had been inspired by the struggle of Black people in the American South, what was happening in Dublin in the early 1980s was a replay of the devastation by heroin of Black communities in urban America a decade earlier.

This meant that the state, which commissioned his report, was leaving itself in wilful ignorance of what was happening. Even as a problem of law enforcement, heroin was largely ignored.

It was to launch a study of the other 90 per cent, ‘aimed at establishing the distinguishing features between the 90 per cent of those in the 15 to 24 age group, living in a north central Dublin area, who do not abuse hard drugs and the 10 per cent who decide to abuse hard drugs’.

But there was also a cultural problem: how did these doomed children fit into any inherited idea of Irishness?

Bradshaw, in that report, reached for the only idea of salvation that was available in Irish political culture: religious redemption. He suggested that deliverance, if it would come at all, would be brought, not by the state but by the church:

Ireland had one way of dealing with unwanted people. When it was no longer available, it had no way at all. There was no Letterfrack or Artane to which to send the children who had become the ideal customers of the kids who, in the previous generation, had grown up in such places.

And then the most interesting thing happened. I could sense that almost every other journalist in the room was becoming intensely irritated, not with Haughey’s refusal to answer the question but with Browne’s persistence.

On the one hand, it was entirely obvious that the country was now in the hands of a man who had been a professional politician since the year before I was born, yet who had a mansion, a stud farm, a yacht, even a private island. On the other, there was nothing about this that could be properly comprehended.

Before the 1970s, you needed relatively little money to be a cut above the social norm. Because the plebs didn’t have much, it didn’t take much more to be better than them.

If you were a normal, well-adjusted person, this hardly mattered. You could get over it. You could get your kicks from the power and prestige of office. You could even flatter your own ego by believing some of your own rhetoric about public service and patriotism and the Irish language and the importance of fostering the national ideal. But if you were shallow and insecure enough to measure your worth by the enormity of your expenditure and the conspicuousness of your consumption, you had a real problem.

It is a great historical joke that just as Catholic nationalist Ireland is coming into its own, it is haunted by Haughey’s attempts to become an Ascendancy squire. It is the revenge of the landlord class. They lost their power. They lost the land. The IRA burned them out. But they left behind a particular image of wealth.

Even as the young pretender of de Valera’s nationalist party, he began to project himself as an Anglo-Irish gentleman. The image generated inevitable unease.

The painful contrast between JFK and de Valera in 1963 had raised this question, not as an abstract topic for discussion, but as a drama of embodiment. Dev, long and lean and old and dour, embodied Irish freedom. JFK, glowing and tanned and young and glamorous, embodied the dream of what that freedom might be for.

There was no going back to de Valera, but there was also no way forward to JFK either.

If he could not skip forward a generation towards American allure, he would skip back a generation to aristocratic Ascendancy. Instead of being post-revolutionary, he would look pre-revolutionary. To pull this off he would have to navigate a very Irish ambivalence.

But it mattered, too, that he was a Gaelic equestrian, that his horsiness was a genetic marker of indigenous Irish nobility. In the biography of Haughey at the front of his collected speeches, The Spirit of the Nation, it is stressed that ‘[His] descent can be traced to the Uí Neill, Kings of Ulster.

They were abolishing the pre-revolutionary past but also rather liked the elitism of the ancien régime.

The egalitarianism of the revolution was always more rhetorical than real, but even so it did not sit well with the buccaneering spirit of the 1960s, in which a select few (like Gallagher and Byrne) could rise up from small farms in the West to become fabulously rich. It was much better to recreate an eighteenth-century hierarchy, except this time with good Catholics in the place of the Protestant Ascendancy.

To call Haughey a hypocrite would be like calling Rembrandt a portraitist or Mozart a piano player. His mastery of hypocrisy was mesmerizing, exquisite, magisterial.

There was, of course, the official Catholic morality that demanded monogamous heterosexual marriage and the production of faithful Catholic children. But there was also a much older folkloric expectation of the hero (including in the popular imagination idols as diverse as Jonathan Swift and Daniel O’Connell) as a figure of fabulous and unbounded sexual potency.

Haughey was a womanizer. He was a conservative Catholic husband and father. The story of the outraged husband meting out violent retribution brought these two realities into contact within an acceptable frame of sin and punishment.

As a politician, he was not just a conservative Catholic but a reactionary one.

This doubleness suited the times and enriched Haughey’s claim to be the great representative of the people. In a way, he was. Mores and morals were uncertain: Catholic conservatism was increasingly impossible to live with in private life but not yet dispensable as a marker of public identity. Haughey’s sexual hypocrisy – the way his private life contradicted his political stance as defender of faith and morals – made him emblematic of the state of the place.

On 9 January, he went on television to announce in grim tones that the nation was broke: ‘As a community we are living away [sic] beyond our means… we have been borrowing enormous amounts of money, borrowing at a rate which just cannot continue… We will have to continue to cut down on government spending… so that we can only undertake the things which we can afford.’20

Bodies had always been the ultimate currency of the Troubles – bodies shattered, torn apart, broken, beaten, tortured, displayed, disappeared.

That saga had also reminded the authorities south of the Border just how dangerous this kind of war could be, how the dead or dying body could take a fierce grip on the living. The British government, though, never really understood this.

No one, including Hughes and Adams, ever imagined that the abyss at the bottom of the hill down which they were freewheeling was prisoners wrapped only in blankets, filthy and unshorn, lying amid the maggots and stench of bare, excrement-lined cells.

The most luxurious prison in Europe was turned, by its own inmates, into a hellhole.

As Hughes acknowledged, after the killings began, ‘the half-decent prison officers [were] pulled out of the blocks and you… were left with the hard core of bigots and the Catholic and Republican haters… The tactic of shooting the screws did not work.’7

This flaunting of filthiness went against every instinct of the modernity and respectability for which we as Irish Catholics had been striving.

We also internalized the Victorian truth that cleanliness was next to godliness. Physical and moral hygiene went together – to be spotless was to be free of pollution and defilement.

When I read Ó Fiaich’s statement, I remembered the horror with which she spoke of the conditions endured by the homeless street people of India. It gave us a sensation of revulsion tempered by superiority. We were not like that – and if we had been so in the past it was the fault of the English who had made us poor.

The British government wanted to define the prisoners as ordinary criminals and therefore to name their actions as species of legal delinquency (murder, assault, robbery, kidnap, hijacking) and the IRA itself as a terror gang or mafia racket.

This was, however, precisely why the IRA could not respond to the pope’s plea. Its system of classification was not objective but subjective. In their different ways, the British and the pope used a taxonomy based on action – what was the deed that had been done and how did it fit into the legal codes or the Ten Commandments? The IRA arranged its world according to motivation – why was the deed done? It agreed with Hamlet: ‘there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’

Outside of the code of meanings that the IRA applied to itself, these actions would be, indeed, despicable. Within that code, they were not merely honourable but heroic.

The problem for the IRA and its supporters, however, was that this same claim could then be made by the Loyalists and indeed by the British themselves. The sectarian gangs who tortured and murdered Catholics would not be murderers because their deeds had a political and ideological motivation.

This is the innate difficulty of subjective meanings – everybody has their own subjectivity.

The IRA’s self-image, expressed in the manual for members known as the Green Book produced in 1979 was that it was the army of a legitimate, democratically elected parliament: ‘the direct representative of the 1918 Dáil Éireann parliament and that as such they are the legal and lawful representative of the Irish Republic… The Irish Republican Army, as the legal representatives of the Irish people, are morally justified in carrying out a campaign of resistance against foreign occupation forces and domestic collaborators.’12

But states are not free, even in waging war, to do whatever they like. They are bound by international law. They can’t target civilians, non-combatants or off-duty soldiers. The IRA did this all the time.

The IRA attacked the annual dinner dance of the Irish Collie Club. Collie breeders on the island of Ireland had split after partition – the Irish Collie Club was the Northern Ireland branch and therefore its members could be assumed to be Protestant owners of Protestant dogs.

They could do this only by showing that they could suffer even more pain than they inflicted: you might burn quickly in our firestorm; we will die slowly in the agony of hunger. You are an unfortunate casualty. We sacrifice ourselves. By doing so we show that life itself – including your life – is not the ultimate value.

It collapsed after fifty-three days because the prisoners had not been ready to die. As the original seven entered the killing zone, they realized there was another ‘shock to the system’ – a realization that this was not, in the end, a symbolic act.