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

by Fintan O'Toole

‘Ireland is still old Ireland, but it has found a new mission in the 1960s, and that is to lead the free world, to join with other countries in the free world, to do in the 1960s what Ireland did in the early part of that century.’

In Wexford town, he warned communist oppressors everywhere that they would ‘do well to remember Ireland’ and its long and ultimately successful fight against ‘foreign domination’

He talked about loyalty to faith and fatherland. He talked about endurance and fortitude. He talked to us as if we were plucky little South Vietnam, a God-fearing peasant people who would always be loyal and always endure.

He didn’t seem to know that what we wanted was to drive cars like his, to wear dark glasses like his, to be beautiful like him and Jackie, to be rich and happy, to shop in malls and bowl in alleys.

If he had listened to the bells of St Nicholas Collegiate Church playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ as he drove through Galway he might have understood better what faith and fatherland really meant to us.

He told us that ‘most countries send out oil, iron, steel or gold, some others crops, but Ireland has only one export and that is people’

The authorities were terrified of something worse: that the Americans might notice.

‘My attitude, and the attitude of a lot of my countrymen, was “That guy is ‘us’… from us, we are of him! There’s the success!”

In this moment, the deference that had been so deeply ingrained in Irish society collapsed under the weight of the need to touch JFK.

The grief of Kennedy’s assassination was profound, but it also brought relief. Grief was the emotion we could best handle. Martyrdom was familiar.

‘Our consolation’, de Valera told the nation in an address after the murder, ‘is that he died in a noble cause’, a formulation that made no sense but that linked him to Ireland’s patriot dead.

It was a strange moment of world history: an American president buried with the honours of a foreign country’s patriot dead, a thing that had never happened before and hasn’t happened since.

Gay Byrne’s extraordinarily central place in Irish life was due, not to his own obvious skills – the flow of language, the plausibility, the urbanity – but to their opposite, to the culture of silence which surrounded them.

With them, he was something else altogether: the voice in which the unspoken could be articulated, the man who gave permission for certain subjects to be discussed.

And here was a man who had made it in England with Granada TV and the BBC but still wanted to come home, a man who could talk on equal terms with suave foreigners yet still be one of our own, who could mention sex and nighties and contraceptives and still be a good Catholic.

The problem with him, for the existing system of authority, was that the even greater object of his devotion was entertainment, a more merciless god than any other.

We were literally making a show of ourselves, with Gay Byrne as the cast of thousands.

The image was one out of de Valera’s Ireland. But he didn’t present The Late Late Show as a cosy fireside chat. On the contrary, and long before it became the fashion in television elsewhere, it went out of its way to make television itself a star,

And it gradually filled up with the very ‘squalid domestic brawls’ that de Valera had warned against on the opening night of Irish television, presenting the good, the true and the beautiful only insofar as they added to the mix, kept the audience amused and the ratings up.

The authorities – the bishops, politicians, county councillors, GAA officials, Vocational Education Committees – realized very quickly what was afoot but had great difficulty doing anything about it.

but objectors knew better than to accuse Byrne himself of being dirty or morally low and were thus left flailing at abstractions.

The first is that his own life represented in microcosm much of what happened in Ireland over thirty years.

His personal odyssey, then, followed the same course as the national epic, the same serpentine currents of hope and despair, of excitement and boredom.

Byrne, like his country, was both traditional and modern, both conservative and liberal, Catholic and materialist.

This aspect of his showing off made his programmes a form of light entertainment, making the more serious and unpalatable parts of them just a part of the package, in which the man with AIDS would be followed by a song and dance after the commercial break.

He could ask the hurtful, nasty, embarrassing questions because it’s in the script, because it is the part he’s playing, because the interviewee is playing a part, too, and is not to be thought of as a bundle of real fears and emotions.

The imaginary things that affected imaginary people were the materials from which church and state constructed their version of Irish reality.

The implicit message was always the same: if serious things were to be discussed, they should be discussed on serious and predictable programmes, where the ground rules had been worked out in advance.

Byrne, who made his way up in Irish society solely through his ability to entertain, always presented entertainment as uncomfortably egalitarian. Anyone can speak so long as they speak engagingly enough and anything can be said so long as it’s gripping enough.

He was, of course, right to be concerned, for in Gay Byrne’s pluralist republic of entertainment, the Archbishop would come to owe his authority, not to traditional wisdom, but to his ability to sing an old song and the politician’s power could be diminished by his inability to tell a good yarn.

Civics, in theory, was about society and how it worked but, in practice, about good behaviour, decorum, the way you comported yourself.

Us Crumlin kids were the first boy. Through work and prayer and hard discipline, we might become the second.

‘interest, instruct and inspire the boys of our Catholic schools, to create in them a taste for clean literature, to continue the character-forming lessons of their school days, to fire their enthusiasm for what is noble and good, to inflame their love of country and to help in preserving them as devoted children of Our Holy Mother the Church.’

Craven’s favourite rebuke to a naughty pupil was to tell him that he ‘would never die for Ireland’

Not to buy Our Boys was to side with those who kicked Papist dogs, to be the boy who slouched against the bus stop, a disgrace not just to your school, but to your country – Catholic Ireland.

It summed up more precisely what they stood for: the right direction, hard driving, going far. Or, translated into Irish, Catholic faith, strict discipline, social mobility. Out of these three things, they made not just an educational system, but an Ireland. They shaped, not just a notion of a country, but many of the conditions in which that country had come into existence.

At the centre of this world was Ireland, and arcing out of Ireland like shooting stars were lines leading to Australia, North America, Argentina, Africa − the contours of a spiritual conquest that had begun in 1802 when Edmund Ignatius Rice founded the Christian Brothers in Waterford. Shining over it all was the five-pointed radiant star of the Brothers’ logo. It was our Empire, our answer to the British maps of the world in which its colonial possessions glowed scarlet in every continent, while the rest skulked in dull and watery hues.

‘Without the groundwork of the Christian Brothers’ schooling, it is improbable there would have been a 1916 Rising and certain that the subsequent fight for Independence would not have been successfully carried through.

The Jesuit Belvedere College supplied five ex-pupils to the ranks of the rebels; the Christian Brothers’ O’Connell Schools supplied 125.

Three of the five members of the IRA executive elected in 1917, including the chief of staff, Cathal Brugha, were in the same category.

The impact of the Brothers on the minds that formed the state cannot be overstated. It was not just in what they taught but in the way they taught it. They stressed that the function of education was to turn raw boys into manly patriots: ‘Ireland looks to them, when grown to man’s estate, to act the part of true men in furthering the sacred cause of nationhood.’

‘In the martyrology of history, among crucified nations’, said the Brothers’ Catechism of the History of Ireland, ‘Ireland occupies the foremost place.

The underlying idea of their schools was that, if driven hard and pointed in the right direction, their pupils could rise as Ireland itself was rising.

service. A study in 1963 found not only that 60 per cent of senior civil servants had gone into the administration straight from secondary school, but that ‘three-quarters of the administrative, executive and clerical classes received their secondary education from the Christian Brothers’

Did the men of 1916 die so that good CBS boys could aspire to be principal officers in the Department of Posts and Telegraphs?

And yet one of the most obvious ways in which Ireland was backward was that it had failed to keep up with the great expansion of schooling in post-war democracies, and in particular the extension of free tuition to second level. When I started school in 1962, the church-dominated school system had left the Irish among the worst-educated people in the western world.

The reason was simple: secondary schools, overwhelmingly owned and run by the church, were private institutions and charged fees that most families could not afford.

Nor, when I was born, was there much prospect of radical change. A Council of Education had been established in 1954 to consider the possible reforms of second-level education, but it sat so long that its members began to die off before it could issue a report.

Most civil servants had completed their education at sixteen and were recruited directly from school, a system, ‘reminiscent of… Tsarist Russia where those who ran the empire were recruited at 14 and kept well away from awful places like universities’

The small minority who managed to complete secondary schools were not encouraged to learn contemporary European languages. The main ‘foreign’ languages were Latin and Ancient Greek: