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

by Fintan O'Toole

Both the British and the Provos were looking for hard and fast distinctions, clean lines of separation between criminality and legitimacy.

But the Irish government, which was every bit as hostile to the Provos as the British were, had the advantage of the Irish culture of ambiguity.

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.

The governor, Stanley Hilditch, seemed to be ready to implement a perfectly orchestrated exercise in deliberate indefinition. The prisoners would be issued simultaneously with their own clothes, to be supplied by their families, and with prison-issue ‘civilian-style’ clothes.22 They would be at once criminal and not criminal. At this point, in effect, the IRA in the prisons had been defeated.

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. Instead, on 23 January 1981, the prison authorities refused to issue their own clothes to the prisoners who had been co-operating with them. Those prisoners, who were now in clean cells, smashed up the new furniture they had been given. The cycle of violence within the prison began again, with the more brutal warders beating prisoners in retaliation.

What Sands was saying was not just that he would die. It was that he would probably die in vain. This was a process of purification.

To pull back as the abyss approached would be to betray those who had already made the sacrifice. In this way, the logic set in motion by Sands would continue to work its way long after his own death.

What Irish governments had always been determined to avoid was the fusion of nationalist with Catholic martyrdom. They understood, simply because they were steeped in the history of blood sacrifice from Easter 1916 onwards, that when these two currents met, there would be an explosion.

In perhaps the most telling image, an angel spreads its golden wings over both a prostrate, naked hunger striker and a kneeling uniformed IRA volunteer whose Armalite points heavenwards.29 The sanction of heaven itself is conveyed, not just to the hunger strike, but to the IRA’s armed struggle.

Now the complexities of the Troubles and its thousands of dead were boiled down to ten men who would die on the hunger strike. And not even that – it did not take very long for most of the ten to fade from memory and the entire drama to be concentrated into the body of Bobby Sands. History was shrunk down to the passing of time.

Sands was showing, in the most visceral ways, the truth of his predecessor Terence MacSwiney’s insistence that it was those who could suffer the most, not those who could inflict the most, who would win.

For many Northern Catholics, the point now was to save Sands’s life and the belief was that if he won the election, Margaret Thatcher would have to back down and the pall of the hunger strikes would be lifted. Most of them were not willing to vote for the IRA; but most of them were willing to use their votes to stop several IRA men from dying. This was an ambivalence the British did not understand.

If Sands’s martyrdom sanctioned the IRA’s killing, did sympathy for him and admiration for his courage necessarily translate into an acceptance of the cruel deaths of others at the hands of his comrades? For most Irish Catholics, it did not.

The fact that, as he put it, ‘only two IRA candidates had been elected to the Republic’s parliament’ dispelled ‘any lingering doubt about the southerners’ views… After ten years of bitter conflict in the North, Southern Ireland wanted the IRA war to end rather than the IRA to win.’33

Ten men achieved a terrible finality, but outside the prison, nothing was concluded. If anything, these deaths gave new life to the Troubles. Bobby Sands had set an undeniable example of absolute implacability. To be unyielding was also to be relentless.

The OECD forecast that among its twenty-four member countries, ‘Ireland would have the lowest rate of growth in 1982, the fourth highest rate of unemployment, the second highest rate of inflation, the worst balance of payments deficit, and the highest level of debt repayment.’

The implosion of the modernizing project seemed to confuse even the most basic categories of knowledge and understanding. The big world of history collapsed down into the little world of the body.

Running parallel to the dirty protests and the hunger strikes was the emergence in the Republic of the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign (PLAC) demanding a referendum to amend the Irish constitution to outlaw abortion. The practice was already illegal in Ireland, under the Offences Against the Persons Act of 1861.

In its way, this was a perfect system. It did what Catholic Ireland always wanted to do – to construct two parallel universes, two truths. It could be said, with reasonable accuracy, that there was no abortion in Ireland, unlike, of course, in godless England. But Irish women, provided they could afford to travel, could have abortions and be grateful for England’s godlessness.

It’s at moments like this, when you find yourself under pressure to make a choice you are not prepared for, that your hidden instincts reveal themselves.

This wasn’t just a throwback. In my own age group, those aged between eighteen and twenty-six, 79 per cent went to Mass once a week. Ninety-five per cent of Irish people believed in God, 76 per cent in life after death, 55 per cent in the reality of Hell and 58 per cent in the Devil as a real person.7 Nearly half of Irish people, compared to just a quarter of Europeans generally, accepted the proposition that ‘there is only one true religion’.

lower numbers on the devil and hell?

On a scale of one (never justified) to ten (always justified), abortion ranked at 1.7 for Irish people. (In all of western Europe, it scored four.)9 To put this in context, this meant that Irish people on the whole rated abortion as being only slightly less reprehensible than having sex with a minor or political assassination (1.4).

What the idea of an anti-abortion amendment offered was an illusion of control over the future. Legalized abortion in Ireland did not exist as a present-day concern. But by making it a constitutional impossibility, it would seem like something that could never happen. And if it could not happen, then Ireland could never be the kind of society in which such a thing was thinkable. The amendment would itself abort an impermissible Irish future.

The 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling by the US Supreme Court was thus a precedent that, in the minds of the anti-abortionists, loomed over Ireland. This was one way in which Ireland must not be allowed to become Americanized.

There has long been in Irish Catholicism an ideology of compensation – if Ireland was poor and static, that made it all the holier. Its very dreariness could be a spiritual beacon, lighting up the fallen world.

He more or less suggested that Ireland could help to save America from damnation: ‘If we as a people mark our respect for the life and dignity of the unborn, who knows what ripples may flow throughout the world which has lost its reverence for life in the womb’.19

But the church didn’t really believe that a foetus was a person with a soul in the same sense that a ninety-year-old woman might be. If it did, how could Father Marx carry around and display the ‘little bodies’ in glass bottles? Should they not be buried in a churchyard with a headstone and prayers and solemn ceremony? The truth was that babies were disposable, not just before they were born, but afterwards as well.

By the time of the abortion referendum campaign, there was significant public knowledge of the church’s habit of dumping the bodies of babies in unrecorded mass graves.

FitzGerald, who many looked to as the leader of liberal Ireland, immediately agreed to their demands for an anti-abortion amendment and pledged the full support of his Fine Gael party.

‘Let’s say that in the last couple of years in this country we have seen an unprecedented rise in the number of people who call themselves gay. By natural law we couldn’t have so many misfits in society. And I don’t mean misfits psychologically. They are − there’s something wrong with people who think they are gay if they are not actually physically deformed. There couldn’t be that many physically deformed people in society.’

One was that the people pushing for the amendment were motivated by a deep belief that Ireland was being infiltrated from without by foreign forces who, as the pope had warned in 1979, saw the corruption of its innocence as a great prize. Abortion was a cipher for the nexus of evils that included contraception, homosexuality and extramarital sex. The other was that this paranoid vision, based on a denial of the realities of the way Irish people were actually living their lives, would undoubtedly triumph. It offered a refuge from the psychic disturbance of the apparent failure of the modernizing project.

The Garda said they were looking for a thin man who was around twenty-five years old, five feet ten inches in height, with wavy, dark brown hair.

One of the trials of the job was that he was now responsible for wording a brief amendment that would define the beginnings of life and confer full citizenship on a foetus. Even for a man whose colleagues would give him a first edition of Finnegans Wake to mark his fifty years at the Bar, this was a conundrum.

It added to the feeling that the state, under Haughey, had gone out of control and become prey to obsessions and suspicions, plots and counterplots. Nothing was incredible, nothing was neatly contained within the bounds of likelihood. The unbelievable was entirely possible; the real was hard to believe.

There was just one problem. The following evening, the body of Joanne’s dead baby was found on the farm. It could not have been thrown into the sea off Slea Head and washed up across the bay on White Strand. It was there on the farm, exactly where Joanne said it was. But the Gardaí were undaunted. Their narrative inventiveness was more than equal to the task of elaborating the plot to take account of this unexpected twist.

What they became involved in was not so much an investigation of reality, more the amplification of sordid shards of real life into a lurid fable, a gripping yarn that could also be understood as a parable of the workings of evil in the world.

Simple blood group tests quickly established that Hayes could not have been the mother of the White Strand baby and that Locke could not have been the father.

Years later, showing an unusual degree of insight, the interrogator who created this nightmarish vision, Gerry O’Carroll, described the story as ‘a catharsis, it was symptomatic of a dead Ireland… It was a witch hunt’.12 It was in fact a symptom not so much of a dead Ireland, as of an undead culture, one that was moribund but desperate to revive itself. The moving statue is an inanimate object that is eerily alive.

Joanne was the embodied nightmare of uncontrolled female sexuality: she had in fact conceived three times by Locke (the first baby being miscarried before she brought Yvonne to term). Superintendent Courtney described her directly as a woman of ‘loose morals’.

It was no coincidence that what was projected onto Joanne Hayes was the image so recently invoked during the abortion referendum: the sinful woman as baby killer. (What was not noticed was that, in having sex without protection, Hayes was, in the eyes of conservative Ireland, committing one sin but avoiding what was, for the church, the even greater one of using contraceptives.)

But mostly the petitions were more personal, more reflective of the daily troubles of this bleak time. ‘Our Blessed Lady, please bless all of my family and help us sort out all our problems. Make Mam, Dad, better again and let us be one big family together forever.’ ‘Please, please, help Jim to stop drinking and give us peace in our home.’ ‘Sacred Heart of Jesus, grant all my intentions and help me pay my bills.’

The slogan between them said ‘People Are To Ireland As Oil Is To Texas’.

The Young Europeans ad suggested to American corporations that they ought to set up in Ireland, that their capital should flow to where the labour was, and employ the new, enthusiastic highly educated workforce that was emerging from the late Irish baby boom of the 1960s and from the rapid expansion of secondary and university education. This had been the success story of Irish modernization. By 1984, 850 foreign companies were operating manufacturing facilities in Ireland. American investment alone over the previous twenty-five years had totalled $4.6 billion, and American companies now provided 18 per cent of all manufacturing jobs.

It

also, though, called to mind Dallas and the sleazy, corrupt world of J. R. Ewing. If people were to Ireland as oil was to Texas, who might Ireland’s

It was perhaps the first truly indigenous genre of indoor entertainment to be developed in Ireland since the days when The Late Late Show replaced the seanachaí. It was called the Donnelly Visa party. It was, in a way, a subgenre of gambling: the point was to win a lottery by improving your odds. The prize was a green card that would allow you to get the hell out of Ireland and settle legally in the United States.

Hence the Donnelly Visa party – get your friends together, supply some drink, give them a template and get them to work on your application forms. Some applicants were known to have sent as many as 500 forms.9

Many people were applying for visas without having any actual plans to emigrate. It was just a thing you imagined you probably wanted to have if things got worse. Which they very well might.

During the 1970s, more people came into Ireland (largely Irish families who had emigrated to Britain returning home) than left it. This hadn’t happened for well over a century.

In spite of all the upheavals, the party remains true to itself, its integrity of purpose is assured. National unity may be unattainable, the revival of Irish a bad joke, economic self-sufficiency jettisoned thirty years ago, but in emigration there was still one Great National Goal that had emotional and rhetorical power.