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

by Fintan O'Toole

The teaching of Irish was prioritized at both primary and secondary levels, but the attempts to revive it as the national vernacular had failed so badly that the self-mocking joke was that most Irish people were illiterate in two languages.

‘objected on the basis that the Catholic Church would never agree to teenage boys and girls travelling together on school buses’

But in September 1966, the most glamourous and charismatic of the new generation of Fianna Fáil politicians, the minister for education Donogh O’Malley, suddenly announced that he was going to introduce free secondary education for all students the following year.

He calculated, rightly, that the measure would be so popular that both the state and the church would have to fall in line with his demarche.

This decision was, for me, much more revolutionary than any Rising. It influenced my life more than any other political act.

it altered a future that had been, at our level of society, grimly predictable.

But could the Christian Brothers be the engine, as they had been for the rising Catholic middle class in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of this revolution in social mobility? They knew they had to be – or else someone else might move in and control the process.

They were stuck in the colonial antithesis of wild natives and civilized denizens of the mother country, an antithesis they had merely internalized, imagining themselves as missionaries from a mother country that was also Mother Church.

They had no hold on urban life, on television, or on pop music, no way of coping with the forces that were seeping ineluctably into our souls. Indeed, they could not even cope with Independent Ireland.

But just as often, no attempt was made to evade the irony that in 1960s Ireland, half a century after the Easter Rising they had helped to inspire, the Brothers were still peddling stories about firm-jawed Englishmen facing up to shifty Arabs or squaring off against the natives of Darkest Africa.

Violence and twisted sexuality were the expressions of troubled confusion on the part of the Brothers – not because they had a monopoly on any of these things in a society where violence against children and sexual repression were the norm, but because they were themselves secretly and institutionally haunted by their failure to control them.

When I was their age, the leather was the civilized, routine, impersonal instrument of punishment. It was the baseline of fear. But the real terror was more intimate. It was the child’s dread of an adult out of control.

Hoppy grabbed the boy by the scruff of his neck and dragged him out to the front of the classroom. He started to lash at him with the bata, dancing lopsidedly around him, flailing indiscriminately at his head, his arms, his legs, his backside.

The jabbering boy was told to collect his bag and sent home. Hoppy was back next day. So was the boy. So was the terror. Nobody said anything. Nothing had happened.

My fear of him melted. The heat of his rage became, for me alone, a glow of approval. That was why he savaged the other boy, not me. Even as I was watching that assault and listening to the screams and grunts, I knew that the waxwings had saved me.

To love one’s country and work for it was another fundamental part of the groundwork laid.’

thought the Brothers severe. But in retrospect I realize that they played a major part − only slightly less than my parents − in the formation of my character.’

‘They beat the tar out of us… We were beaten with straps, sticks, even the leg of a chair. We were beaten for failure at lessons and simply, it seemed to me, on principle. They were careful not to leave marks. They generally struck on the hands, the legs, the buttocks and around the body. If they were thumping, they would thump on the body where it would not show. They never hit us on the jaw but across the side of the head…

So Hoppy hadn’t invented it. Perhaps he had learned it from colleagues. Perhaps it had been done to him when he was in school.

The Brothers themselves had always understood that this intimate violence, and the absolute power over the bodies of children that made it possible, easily shaded into sexual abuse.

advised them that ‘all excessively sentimental friendships must be avoided, particularly with the young who are placed in our charge’

This man I saw; I knew the warmth of his smile. Put his statue on the ground, so that when I pass I may see again the smile and feel the warmth that I knew. This man I know; for he honoured us all − our culture, our race, our nation. This was a man.’1 JFK was too intimately known to be consigned to a lonely, pillar-top seclusion.

An American president was now a far more acceptable image of Irishness than an English admiral.

Jfk was irish, nelson wasnt

The fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising was due to be celebrated in April. The Pillar towered forty-one metres over the General Post Office, the headquarters of the rebels, and members of an offshoot faction of the rump IRA had decided that this reminder of Ireland’s former place within the British Empire literally could not be allowed to stand.

The Programme for Economic Expansion was not going well: ‘employment remained virtually static during the first half of the 1960s, whereas the Programme envisaged an increase of 7 to 8 per cent over the decade.

For the teenage Dickiemaniacs, their passion and obsession was an expression of a new freedom from restraint, the stirrings of a rising consumer culture in which you could do what you desired. They were driven by youth and sex and the money in your pocket from a job in a factory or a shop.

But to the men who blew up Nelson’s column, Liam Sutcliffe and the Christle brothers, Mick and Joe, freedom was very much specific to Ireland. It was about the Border.

This, it seemed, was what history was: strange and unusual events that just detonated without warning, leaving mute, jagged traces.

I had expected obliteration, annihilation. Instead, the bulk of the column was still standing, like a tree whose upper branches had been crudely lopped off, but whose trunk remained, intact but forlorn, or like a great sign pointing nowhere. And the violence seemed random, almost aimless.

The thing was both gone and still there. Which was much more apt than I could possibly have understood at the time.

And the public response to the event was odd, too. There seemed to be a determination not to take it seriously as an act of violence that might portend worse.

Nelson may have famously lacked an arm and an eye in real life but in his symbolic death he became Hydra-headed. What was meant to be a story ending – the metaphorical conclusion of British Ireland – was merely the unspooling of other yarns.

It was overwhelmingly male: very little attention was paid to the prominent role of women in the real events, with only Constance Markievicz featured. It was also constrained by the instruction from the RTÉ Authority that the whole episode must be presented as ‘a nationalist and not a socialist rising’

This structure was full of tensions. On the one hand, it seemed to do exactly what the state did not want: to suggest that the Rising was not safely in the past. It was now

Above all, the format of Insurrection was American. It was an Irish version of a US original: the long-running series You Are There, in which Walter Cronkite in the studio anchored ‘live’ coverage of the battle of Hastings or Joan of Arc, the death of Socrates or the capture of Jesse James.

The bet with Insurrection was that, filtered through this American technological modernity, the vivid immediacy of the recreated Rising would not encourage us to think about the unfinished business of the past, but, rather, take pride in the transformed Ireland in which we were growing up.

And the other was that The Magnificent Seven won. They were not led away by the bandits to be executed. And that made the story much better than the heroic failure of the rebels. I liked the happy ending.

But if you look closely at the record label, the song is credited as ‘The Black And Tan Gun (Nobody’s Darling But Mine)’. It is in fact a version of a classic American country-and-western song, written by Jimmie Davis, later governor of Louisiana, in 1934, and recorded as the B-side of ‘When It’s Round-Up Time In Heaven’

Did it seem at all strange to them: Irish nationalist martyrdom filtered through second-hand American country kitsch and re-exported to Irish immigrants in America? Or did that very oddness make a kind of sense of their own condition, half there, half here, suspended between versions of the past that functioned on either side of the Atlantic?

It was that the very fact that this could be done spoke of a sense that the Troubles were in fact over. When the Black and Tans could be assimilated into old-timey country music, they had become harmless.

We’re back in Dublin. It’s all over. I liked that – no more Troubles. I could make them feel sad and then happy.

Aiséirí ‘traced the story of the Irish Republic from the American War of Independence to the execution of Roger Casement in August 1916, with a brief coda that referred to Irish neutrality during World War II’18 – a rather telling starting point.

The message was that what Pearse and Connolly and McDermott had really died for was the brave new Ireland of the 1960s that would have such people in it. That Ireland was not up in arms to reclaim the Fourth Green Field of Ulster, but revelling in the wonder that it had its own engineering works, its own airline, its own TV station.

Scarcely noticed by most of the public, twelve men and one girl staged a hunger strike in Dublin throughout the week, to protest about ‘the death of the Gaeltacht, economic dependence on Britain, partition and emigration’

In his official anniversary address, de Valera expressed the hope that Ireland would ‘become again, as it was for centuries in the past, a great intellectual and missionary centre from which would go forth the satisfying saving truths of Divine Revelation…’ He expressed the fear, on the other hand, that Ireland might ‘sink into an amorphous cosmopolitanism – without a past or a distinguishable future’

It was as if George Washington had almost been humiliated in an election on the fiftieth anniversary of 1776.

And what future could lead from them that would still be ‘distinguishable’ from that of any other country or culture?

That ‘traditional practices… dying out’ was, in his eyes and presumably in those of most of his listeners, a good thing could be taken for granted. But where would that leave church and state, whose authority rested on traditions of religious faith and of national identity?

and noted in particular that its inspiration did not come from the new towns, constructed in Britain after the Second World War: ‘for a closer parallel to Ballymun… you have to look at America…

But to think of this strange new place as American was much better than to admit that the new Ireland was going to look rather like much of urban Britain.