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

by Fintan O'Toole

Fianna Fáil, at Haughey’s instigation, went so far as to expel one of its most prominent members, Desmond O’Malley, because he abstained on the vote on the Contraception Bill.

Fianna Fáil had inherited from the church the ability to divide the country into us and them, the damned and the saved, the true Irishman and the faithless traitor, a turn of mind greatly assisted by the identification throughout history of Catholicism and Irish nationality.

Fianna Fáil voters had always been characterized by a very high degree of exclusivity and solidarity. The party managed to get its supporters to think of themselves as ‘us’ but also as ‘not them’. Just as the church controlled the idea of what was legitimate and illegitimate in the moral sphere, Fianna Fáil did it in the political sphere.

Politics ceased to be politics and became a secular version of religion. And just as there was one true church, there could only be one true party – ‘the only party with a truly national vision’.

Even after the near-collapse of the modernizing project in the 1980s, amid the resumption of mass emigration and with the Troubles still grinding grimly onwards, Irish people remained weirdly delighted with their membership of this turbulent nation. In 1990, an average of 38 per cent of Europeans said they were ‘very proud’ of their country. More than twice that proportion – an astonishing 78 per cent – of Irish people were very proud to be Irish.

This was the great paradox of the long 1980s, which ran, in effect, from 1979 to 1992. Things were falling apart, but they were also holding together.

It was now a crime to tell a woman the name of an abortion service in London or Birmingham. Phone numbers that could be read in the English phonebook were contraband in Ireland. British-based magazines, like Cosmopolitan, were obliged to print special editions with advertisements for women’s health clinics blacked out.

The point in all of this was not to change anything in the real world. It was to sustain the system of feigned ignorance.

But now this compartmentalization was breaking down. He was exploiting the drama of his friend’s imminent death, personally extracting money from donors, having their cheques cashed and the bundles of notes delivered to his office. None of this was public yet, but it was sitting there, radiating betrayal and cynicism and cold-eyed rapacity. Haughey must have known that, if it was discovered, he would be ruined, not just politically, but morally. That he did it anyway suggests a faith in the inviolability of the boundaries around what could be known in Ireland that had escalated itself to a sense of absolute invulnerability.

He had been forced to resign from the party, and his shenanigans as minister for justice had made him the embodiment of the dark side of Fianna Fáil. But now, with Lenihan on The Late Late Show, the same kind of behaviour was being treated, not just as roguish and amusing, but as somehow quintessentially Irish. The line between national disgrace and national treasure seemed strangely thin.

In such an epistemological nightmare, language becomes a hall of mirrors forever throwing back a distorted reflection on itself, its relationship to reality becoming weirder and weirder. The more Lenihan said ‘my position is perfectly clear’, the more you knew the opposite was the case.

This was where Fianna Fáil had come to: what begins as patriotic mysticism ends up as mere mystification. The little lies were the tip of an iceberg of frozen meanings, empty formulae, dead rhetoric, words designed to obscure rather than elucidate, to mislead rather than to point us in the right direction.

Ireland was still a deeply uncertain place, still subject to the old desire to assert values it knew to be hollow.

Misogyny was encoded in debates about ‘morality’ (abortion, contraception, divorce). It was played out in psychodramas like the Kerry Babies. It was embedded in structures, assumptions, above all in silences. It was not to be stated.

Robinson’s defeat of Lenihan shattered the illusion of hegemony, the feeling that the deep alliance of Fianna Fáil and the church had a permanent hold over Irish culture.

Haughey’s fall was the beginning of the end of one side – the political wing – of the alliance that was holding conservative Ireland together. The other side – the reasserted dominance of a Catholic ideology – began to unravel almost immediately and even more dramatically.

The case became a big international story, in which Ireland did not seem like all the things it wanted to be: modern, progressive, sophisticated. Nor did it even seem holy. It just seemed half-crazy, brutal, barbaric.

The great gulf between what Ireland liked to say about itself in principle and how it wanted to be seen in the everyday world had been cruelly exposed. Very soon, it would be widened to an impossible abyss.

It was significant that the Irish Times was anxious to frame the narrative primarily as being about money, not about sex. In the atmosphere of financial corruption that pervaded the country during and after the Haughey years, it was somehow easier to process pecuniary perversions than bodily transgressions.

Casey had skulked out of Ireland unnoticed on an Aer Lingus flight to New York. (We afterwards learned that he then hid for six months in a convent in San Antonio, Texas, before going to remote rural Ecuador for the next six and a half years.) One of the most visible people in Irish life had vanished.