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

by Fintan O'Toole

What was being summoned up by this savage incantation was what my parents, in their own much less dramatic way, were experiencing that year: a deep anxiety about how marriage and the family were supposed to work.

What she wants is a nuclear family. But she can’t have one.

But it is equally obvious that Irish people in 1959 did not think about Sive as being ancient and exotic. They responded to it as social realism.

This was not the version of marriage Irish people were seeing in the American movies to which they flocked. Modernity meant falling in love, courting, getting married and starting a household with Daddy, Mammy and the kids – not with old grandmothers and orphaned girls.

On the other hand, one of the attractions of emigration was precisely that in London or New York one could do the modern thing: fall in love, get married and have a house without ‘a group of persons’ other than one’s own kids. And people who stayed, like my parents, wanted this, too.

Within the space of a single generation – from the 1950s to the 1980s – the patterns of the traditional extended family dissolved and were replaced by the norms of the nuclear unit.’

Yet while there is no future in Ireland for them, there are hints in the play of a different, emerging Irish future – an American one.

But if this was a new city, the order of its foundational priorities was encoded in the few public buildings: the big police station was built and opened long before any secondary school, dispensary or hospital (for the first few years, there was not even a district nurse). The purpose was obvious: ‘to control the unruly crowds of workless adolescents for whom there are no factories, no technical schools, no secondary schools, no football grounds’

Out here it was pioneer territory, a kind of Ireland, suburban and working class, not known before. It seemed to many a blank space, physically and emotionally.

Since the 1930s, domestic modernity had been gradually working its way into the Irish countryside in the form of electricity. Rural electrification had been one of the few real innovations of the independent state

In spite of these Homeric feats, two out of three homes in Ireland still had no electricity at the end of the Second World War.

their house undone and silenced by the clamour of new light.

People who had moved to Crumlin from the old Georgian tenements of inner-city Dublin had lived with a communal toilet at the back. One formerly grand house, 14 Henrietta Street, had ninety people living in it with three toilets. Outside the cities, sanitary facilities were often even worse.

Reports of women having to haul buckets of water for two miles to and from a pump or well were commonplace.

His pumping time equalled almost eleven and a half 48-hour weeks per annum.’30 This sucking up of time also spoke of the wrong kind of timelessness, of a way of life that was intolerably unaltered over many centuries.

But we drew our water instantly from taps and made it privately in a little indoor room with the door closed. That didn’t feel like Siberia, or the Wild West or Comanche country. It felt modern.

Congolese independence was intended by the Belgians to result in ‘a façade of black rule, behind which white interests – economic, political and religious – would continue, as heretofore to exercise power and dictate events’

By becoming strongly aligned with the UN’s attempts to support real independence, Ireland, in its first real intervention on the world stage, found itself arrayed against the very countries – the US and the western European powers – it was seeking to join with in its new age of industrial modernity.

These emotional connections outweighed the realpolitik of Ireland’s aspirations to belong to ‘the West’

The Irish army was a tiny, rundown force of 7,000 men that had seen no military action since the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923. It showed.

While the official imagery was that of Catholic and national martyrdom, Irish reporters also reached for another (by now equally familiar) trope – the Balubas as American Indians.

But it was as nothing compared to the bizarre disjunction between what happened and how it worked its way into life and language in Ireland. Irish people simply could not process the Niemba massacre. It could not be integrated into their sense of who they were and how they acted in the world. It belonged in movies like Prisoners of the Congo, not in the mental world from which the soldiers came.

This strange facetiousness deflected the shock of a home front as unprepared for its exposure to a foreign world as the Irish troops themselves had been.

The Irish were supposed to be patrolling some kind of imaginary border between civilization and savagery, but it was shifting, porous and ambiguous – not just on the ground in Katanga, but in Ireland itself.

The main reason for Hammarskjöld’s choice was, paradoxically, the very uncertainty of Ireland’s place in the world – European, but not really; anti-colonial but also anti-communist; in but not quite of the west.

The Irish soldiers thought they were in the Congo as peacekeepers and a large part of what they did was in fact pacific – guarding refugee camps and the UN mission. But the UN’s role was expanded in March 1961, on foot of a Security Council resolution demanding the withdrawal of all foreign officers and mercenaries from the Congo. Since these mercenaries were the hard core of the secessionist forces in Katanga, this was an implicit mandate for conflict with them and the well-armed native militias they led.

Over five days, he and his comrades killed about three hundred of the attackers. Under Quinlan’s brilliant command, they lost not a single man. But attempts to reinforce them failed, and they ran out of water, food and ammunition.

As with Niemba and the Balubas, there was no collective Irish story into which the experiences of Willie and those 150 other men and boys could fit. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that there were two stories – tradition and modernity – and they belonged in neither of them.

The trouble with Jadotville is that it failed to produce a single martyr. There was no solemn cortège, no praying crowds on O’Connell Street, no requiem High Mass for McQuaid to perform.

Belgium, France, Italy and Luxembourg ‘considered that Ireland’s underdeveloped economy would make it unsuitable for full membership of the E.E.C.’

could not at the time understand how poignant this was: television re-enacting a cultural form – the long, slow, intimate, elaborate art of narration – it was about to destroy. The seanchaí by the fireside would be replaced by the box of flickering images in the corner of the room or high on the wall of the pub.

This, the authorities imagined, was what we would want to watch on the box: the flickering images of the old culture, magically transported from the rural west into a kitchen in suburban Dublin.

This was the paradox: if kids like me, the children of a modernizing Ireland, were to be protected from having our national and spiritual outlook perverted by English influences beamed at us through the TV screen, we had to be exposed to a safer kind of television. The conceptual model was inoculation.

We would get just enough television, in a carefully modified form, to stimulate our national and spiritual immune systems.

But the truth was that no one could be sure what the idea of a distinctive culture would mean in the new world Ireland was entering, what could or should be preserved, what might be lost.

Just as the importation of American capital was much more acceptable than an influx of British businesses, it was decided that, if I and all the other kids of the new Ireland had to watch television, it would be much better if the images and accents we would see and hear came from a westerly direction.

Giving the keys to the house to an American was not at all the same thing as surrendering them to the Saxon stranger. It could be construed as a return of the exile, a making whole of what had been sundered. And it hinted at a fantasy future in which we would all look as gorgeous (and be as rich) as Grace Kelly but still be as holy and Catholic as we assumed her to be. To watch this homecoming on the new medium of TV was to be reassured that aspirations to modernity could be reconciled with traditional devotion and historical continuity.

suggesting that growing up in Boston naturally gave him a ‘considerable depth of insight to [sic] the Irish people, their likes and dislikes, their history and their culture’.19 If an applicant had suggested that growing up Catholic in Birmingham or Glasgow had given him a special feel for Irish moods and desires, the scepticism would have been overwhelming. But Eamonn Andrews, in supporting Roth, suggested that his actual ‘lack of first-hand knowledge of Ireland’ could be compensated by ‘his catholicity, and his Irish ancestry’

They were American and therefore exempted from vigilance. They came as part of a package that included American investment and the embrace of consumerism.

His pleasure must have been genuine: he gave our shopkeeper half an hour on a day when he was receiving reports of the abuse of civil rights protestors by police in Birmingham, Alabama.

When John F. Kennedy arrived at Dublin Airport on the evening of 26 June 1963, he conjured up an image of a broken and scattered family being reunited.

In de Valera’s eyes, the young man who had come down from the sky was a fulfilment of a millennium of Irish historical oppression. Bizarrely, he evoked an image of JFK as an ancestral avenger, summoned from the deep past to smash the foreigner.

In this squaring of the circle, the idea of foreignness itself melted away. An Irish president born in Brooklyn came to do homage to an American president ‘from’ New Ross.

He called him ‘a distinguished son of our race’ and told him frankly, ‘We are proud of you, Mr President.’

He greeted Kennedy, not as President of America, but as ‘the first citizen of the great republic of the west, upon whose enlightened, wise and firm leadership hangs the hope of the world’

On the other hand, the instant after, the meaning of that sentence would clarify itself in the mind: ‘If we Kennedys hadn’t got the hell out of here, even I’d be a no-good schmuck like you.’

Was he savouring the secret triumph of his power, that he was inside the White House, while we, poor Paddies, were standing outside the railings concocting false images to hide our failures?

Again the hands went up and again we claimed the honour of having scattered our families. And again we were rewarded with that blinding Kennedy smile:

For decades, the people in those crowds had listened to politicians and churchmen talking about the shame of mass emigration. Yet here, on the streets of our cities, at the prompting of this showman’s ploy, we were holding our hands up to claim it, to wave it before the world. So desperate were we to respond to the first citizen of the great republic of the west, that we could not be restrained from claiming our own disgrace.

Our hunger for his glamour, for his success, for his ease with the world and the flesh, was open, palpable, sometimes pathetic. But he, too, may have had both personal and political desires which only we could fulfil.