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

by Fintan O'Toole

In 1988−9 alone, an astounding 70,600 people left the country – 2 per cent of the entire population. Most of these were young – those aged between fifteen and twenty-four made up 69 per cent of the total.16 The slow demographic recovery that validated the revolution of 1958 was going into reverse. By 1986, there were fewer people in the Republic than there had been in 1981. The birth rate was also dropping very rapidly: from 21.9 per thousand in 1980 to 16.6 per thousand in 1987.17

What struck me at the time, though, was how easily the society slipped back into emigration mode. Psychologically, it was now as if the period of my own life in Ireland had been an aberration. What I thought had been banished forever – the instinct to just get the hell out of Ireland when times were bad – had merely itself been in temporary exile.

Irish young people, it seemed, were prepared to put up with any amount of personal disruption rather than contemplate a radically altered future in their own country. This was the great paradox: personal discontinuity was still the guarantor of political and social continuity.

Almost all of the young Corkonians saw their future as bleak: 49 per cent ‘very bad’ and 25 per cent ‘poor’ or ‘bad’. Three-quarters said they had seriously considered emigration. Half said they thought they would actually have to emigrate.19

‘Migration used to be a bad word here’, he told the New York Times. ‘Now, one might see emigration not as a sad and tearful thing, but as a migration within the European community.’22 The image of the new emigrant as a sophisticated, rootless cosmopolitan, hopping between New York, Dublin and Berlin, was false.

The evidence over time, moreover, strongly suggested that, given a choice, even most of well-educated young professional migrants would have preferred to stay in Ireland.

What was occluded was the immobility of many emigrants to the United States, who could not get on a flight to Ireland because they were illegal and might not get back into the place they now called home.

How many illegal Irish were there in the US? The figures used in 1987 ranged from 25,000 to 60,000 to 100,000 to 250,000.24 Figures from the US Immigration and Naturalization Service in June 1987 showed that an astounding 500,000 Irish people had entered the US on tourist visas since 1981. Nobody was quite sure how many had left again.

But in the 1980s, these mechanisms became embedded in a very different domain: money. People who had it could be both inside and outside Ireland. They could take their leave from the obligations of home without ever actually leaving. They could occupy two worlds – the local and the global – in such a way that they owed nothing to either.

1 For more than thirty years, before the Irish banking system eventually collapsed, it had been colluding, on a massive scale, with fraud, tax evasion and routine breaches of exchange control laws.

The desire of the wealthy to evade taxes was by no means unique to Ireland. What was distinctive was that the frauds were so open that it took a conscious effort on the part of the authorities to pretend not to see them.

By the end of 1998, an astonishing 17 per cent of all Irish-held deposits (amounting to IR£7.6 billion) was held by non-residents.

It was not hard to figure out what was going on: very large numbers of people were simply walking into their local bank branch, signing the forms and fraudulently claiming to be resident outside the state. Often the bank staff knew them very well: they were the local farmers, publicans, shopkeepers or small business owners. But they literally pretended not to know them.

This was, at the time, about the size of AIB’s annual profits – the liability could in principle push the country’s biggest bank into the red.

One, never openly articulated, but clearly assumed at the level of unconscious, and therefore especially potent, instinct, was that the rich in Ireland had no sense of social or patriotic responsibility whatsoever. Given any level of pressure, they would evade their taxes and salt their money away offshore. Second, the conclusion to be drawn from this was not the obvious one that the law would therefore have to be enforced with rigour and consistency.

The biggest bogus non-resident of them all was the man who, for long periods of the 1980s, was running the country, Charles Haughey himself.

There is, in the Ansbacher case, an unmistakable correlation between political power (in effect, Fianna Fáil) and regulation, with the Central Bank’s level of scrutiny rapidly diminishing after Charles Haughey came to power. What is important about this correlation is that it was entirely unspoken.

This man, so at ease with all the contradictions of being Irish, so sure-footed in negotiating the divides between tradition and modernity, between country and city, between a Gaelic past and an Anglo-American present, had been trapped and ground down by something as simple and natural as a sexual preference.

They didn’t belong to a set, a clique, a scene, or any of the other things that heterosexual society imagined as going with being gay. Nor did they want to belong to any such thing. They wanted merely to be normal, to live in the same places, have the same friends, do the same things that they would do if they were straight.

The operative law in Ireland was literally Victorian: the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act that made ‘buggery’ punishable by penal servitude for life; and the 1885 act outlawing ‘gross indecency’ under which Oscar Wilde had been imprisoned.

There could hardly have been a more vivid demonstration of the way the laws that criminalized gay men stripped them of their most basic right of citizenship – protection against violence.

He claimed that homosexuals ‘constitute a threat to public health’ because they spread venereal diseases and that ‘homosexual activity and its encouragement may not be consistent with respect and regard for marriage as an institution’. He ruled, as a matter of fact, that ‘The homosexually orientated can be importuned into a homosexual lifestyle which can become habitual.’

The unravelling of the project of economic modernization in mass unemployment and the resumption of emigration had produced a desire to reset the boundaries of social change. If Ireland could not be convincingly defined as a model of economic globalization, it would have to fall back on its previous self-definition as a model of Catholic morality.

In August 1982, Eileen Flynn was dismissed from her job as an English and history teacher at the Holy Faith Convent in JFK’s ancestral home town, New Ross, Co. Wexford. She was unmarried with a baby son and was living with the baby’s father, a separated man, Richie Roche. It was accepted by the nuns that she was a ‘gifted teacher’. The letter of summary dismissal referred to complaints from parents about her lifestyle and her open rejection of the ‘norms of behaviour’ and the ideals the school existed to promote.

What had been implicit was now explicit: teachers, even though they were paid by the state, could be sacked if their ‘lifestyle’ was not in keeping with orthodox Catholic ‘norms of behaviour’. This was not a whim of the nuns – it was now the law of the land.

So Clare was not sacked, just as most gay men were not prosecuted or imprisoned. The point of this moment of repression was not to round up deviants or make Ireland an international pariah.

What mattered was the vindication of ‘norms’ and the reinforcement of the church’s ultimate power to set them. That this was what the democratic majority wanted, however, was made completely clear in 1986.

He proposed a change to the Constitution to allow for the introduction of a very restrictive regime for the dissolution of marriage five years after it had broken up. The proposal was denounced by the Catholic hierarchy and by priests from the pulpit. Early polls showing a majority in favour of change were quickly reversed. Divorce was comprehensively rejected in the referendum, by a two-thirds majority similar to the one that had favoured the abortion ban three years earlier.

Nobody really thought that court rulings and referendums restating in such emphatic terms ‘the Christian nature of our State’ would actually change what the citizens of that holy state would do. But they would do it as freaks – and if they did not at least tacitly accept their abnormality, they could be placed outside the law.

Exile, as always, had its double effect. It freed Ireland of the awkward ones and let them find freedom, albeit at the expense of personal and civic belonging. This, too, was power: the system could make its problems go away.

Nothing was really as solid as it seemed. Behind the great conservative victory of the divorce referendum, there were pale shadows and blotchy half-secrets.

The couple seeking an annulment had to convince the diocesan Marriage Tribunal ‘with moral certainty that a defect at the time of the ceremony prevented real marriage taking place’.16 This was another exercise in fiction – the church, and only the church, could make a marriage go away by declaring that it had never been ‘real’ in the first place.

‘The Chernobyl disaster of recent weeks can be a useful reminder of how negative radiation can filter across and permeate society. Divorce legislation has had a somewhat similar effect in the way it has permeated western societies and undermined the stability of married life.’19

The mindset was entirely unaltered: Ireland as a healthy body under constant assault from the diseases of the outside world, modern media as vectors of sickness and corruption.

‘The school Principal reacted angrily to what Stephen said and refused to believe him, telling him that Seán Fortune was going to be a good priest and that if he persisted in saying those things about him, he would be thrown out of the college.’20

In and around the time of the Eileen Flynn case, when the nuns and the courts used the word ‘repugnant’ to describe her life in a consensual adult relationship, at least two boys in the county took their own lives as a result of violent abuse by Fortune.

‘However, they said that they thought that it was a terrible thing for the boys to be saying about a priest and did not understand it.’

The great reaction of the 1980s rested on the certainty that Irish realities were so perfectly compartmentalized that they would never bleed into each other.

But in 1987, the Catholic Bishop of Galway said, ‘God does not work in little compartments.’24 His name was Eamonn Casey and he was right.

I admired him because he had very publicly refused to meet Ronald Reagan when the American president visited Ireland the previous year, 1984. He had been present when the US-backed junta in El Salvador murdered the Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, in 1980 and he fearlessly denounced the atrocities that continued in Latin America.

When I was composed enough to think about what had happened, I had only one thought: this man likes to take risks. Part of it was pure arrogance, a sense of entitlement so ingrained that he was no longer conscious of it. He was too important to follow the rules. But part of it seemed to be a real pleasure in dicing with danger.

The women and men of Galway would, if Casey had anything to do with it, remain fertile.4 It could be said, at least, that Casey had practised what he preached. At that time, his son Peter was ten years old.

It was long overdue that they acknowledge the understandable ignorance of men living celibate lives; that they were not competent to advise the rest of them in the complex matters of marriage relations…

It was, though, increasingly difficult to maintain this kind of absolute control on the limits of discussion. Just as the royal family in Britain had to modernize its image by letting the TV cameras into Buckingham Palace, its equivalent in Ireland – the Catholic hierarchy – needed a bishop who could go on The Late Late Show and sing a song, who could perform in the media circus on its terms.

This surge of devotion in the early 1980s, from the pope’s visit in 1979 through to the divorce referendum of 1986, began to ebb slowly in the second half of the 1980s. But Ireland was still an anomaly in Catholic Europe. It was not just that the Irish were still Catholic. It was that Irish Catholics were more Catholic than their co-religionists in continental Europe.

Ireland, in other words, was less than half as liberal as Europe was on these questions.11 There was simply ‘no evidence of a general process of secularisation operating throughout the 1980s’.12

As always, what mattered was the maintenance of the twin-track Irish mind. Reality could continue on its own sweet way, so long as it was not reflected in what the state said about itself. The façade was much more important than the building. What should be must always outweigh what was. This was the Irish way.

A year earlier, he had pretty much admitted that the restrictions on contraceptives that he had introduced in 1979 were a nonsense.

Yet, when it came to actually reforming those laws, he held the old line: to recognize that young people were having sex outside marriage would be to encourage a promiscuity that was not only morally wrong but unIrish.

He expressed the party’s sense of itself as the bulwark of real Irishness: ‘As ever, we in Fianna Fáil represent the values and traditions that make us Irish, and we will continue to do so.’