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

by Fintan O'Toole

The eruption of Northern Ireland was both sudden and slow. On the one hand, very few people expected it. By 1965, when Lemass and Whitaker crossed the Border to meet with Northern Ireland’s prime minister Terence O’Neill, the future seemed to lie in a gradual rapprochement between the two parts of Ireland and moves towards practical co-operation in areas like energy and tourism. This was part of what modernity would mean, the arrival of a new set of values in which old animosities would matter much less than practicality and prosperity.

‘the IRA and republicans in general were discredited and shunned… In this atmosphere of defeat and depression, Bradley’s mother had not tried to inculcate any republicanism in him or his brother. It seemed there was no future in it. It was over.’

After the establishment of Northern Ireland in 1921, the British government had left its inbuilt Protestant and Unionist majority to its own devices: systematic discrimination against Catholics in employment and housing and the gerrymandering of local government electoral districts to ensure that, for example, the Catholic-majority city of Derry had a solidly Unionist majority on its council.

While we in Dublin were calling people Balubas, the revolt of Catholics and their allies among liberal Protestants and left-wingers was arguably the first white rebellion to be directly and explicitly inspired by a Black movement.

One of the key turning points in the emergence of the struggle in Northern Ireland as an international story was consciously modelled on a similar moment in US history. In January 1969, a march for civil rights, from Belfast to Derry, was organized by the student-led People’s Democracy group. When it came to Burntollet Bridge, the marchers were viciously attacked by a loyalist mob that included off-duty members of the notoriously sectarian auxiliary police force, the B-Specials.

‘The march was modelled on the Selma−Montgomery march in Alabama in 1966, which had exposed the racist thuggery of America’s deep South and forced the US government into major reforms.’

If the aim was to expose the thuggish sectarianism that was woven into the bland respectability of the Northern Ireland state, Burntollet was a horrifying success. But the analogy on which it was based was problematic. Northern Ireland was not the Deep South.

The self-conscious claim that Catholics ‘viewed ourselves as Ulster’s white negroes’7 was an appropriation of the pain of others.

Ireland was oppressed longer than Afro-Americans

The problem was that, while this was indeed the goal of NICRA, it was not the only agenda. Farrell suggested that the goal of his Irish Selma was also to reopen ‘the whole Irish question for the first time in 50 years’ – in other words, to revisit the partition of 1921 and move towards a United Ireland.

Which was the aim – to reform Northern Ireland or to wipe it off the map? The hesitation between these two purposes would prove to be fatal.

in which the boot of repression would merely be placed on the other foot.

The improvement in relations with the Republic of Ireland was matched by a rise in the number of ‘mixed’ marriages between Protestants and Catholics, itself in part a product of the flowering of a youth culture that transcended sectarianism.

One is an older man called Brendan Kielty, who had volunteered in 1936 to go to Spain – not in the International Brigades formed to support the democratically elected government, but with an Irish Brigade formed by the would-be Irish fascist caudillo Eoin O’Duffy, to fight for Franco.

There is a past in this picture – but there is also a future.

You just had to say it to know that there was something backward about these country people – gub, nit.

I had not yet found the courage to stop going on Sundays, though I knew I would if I could.

Up on the balcony, I felt like I was no longer looking down on it all, but that it was rising towards me.

This turning inwards was one answer to the problem of Irish modernity. Ó Riada, like many young artists and intellectuals, did not see the opening up of the economy as a liberation from repression and stasis but, rather, as the country and its traditions being sold out.

‘The country that was won by such costly sacrifice, that was bought with the blood of good men, is being sold, physically, spiritually with its people, by its people, for the customary thirty pieces of electro-plated nickel silver. This is more than a scandal, more than a disgrace. It is the betrayal of every man who through the centuries took up arms for this country’s freedom.’

He began to evoke An Naisiún Gaelach, the Gaelic Nation, a revitalized version of the early twentieth-century nationalist ideology in which Ireland must be, in the words of Patrick Pearse, not merely free but Gaelic as well.

But Ó Riada, also like many Irish intellectuals and artists, wanted both to reject commercial modernity and enjoy its fruits. He fantasized about building a large hotel on the banks of the Sullane, with an airport beside it to bring tourists into the area to hunt and fish – and listen to his music and that of the local singers.

The easy opposition of good tradition to bad modernity was a refuge from reality, not a way of living.

But he was trying somehow to answer a question that was at the heart of the dilemma of modernity: did Ireland have to be destroyed in order to be saved?

But was it merely going to end up as an Americanized, homogenized dependency, stripped of its cultural distinctiveness and national independence?

At the heart of this fantasy was despair at the possibility of reaching any kind of acceptable compromise between authentic Irish art and the new Ireland: one of them would have to go.

These flights were driven by a deep pessimism: there was no authentic way of being Irish in the cities, in the English language, in a European modernist tradition.

We had an equal and opposite prejudice. In the city, the rural world was obviously inferior. We all watched – because there was nothing else to watch – RTÉ’s rural soap opera, The Riordans, set on a farm.

This was what the desire to reconnect with a Gaelic past could look like if you were an urban Irish kid: a hypnotized search for lost leprechauns.

The odd thing is that, for a large part of that half of the population that was under twenty-five, the dilemma of whether to try to relate to these indigenous traditions or embrace international modernity was partly solved by an unlikely cultural force: the rise of the hippy.

It is hard to fathom that for us the big conflict was not the emerging disaster north of the Border. It was hair. The idea of letting it grow contained within it every possible kind of growth, from darkness towards enlightenment, from square to hip, from childhood to adulthood, from dependence to independence.

What the Brothers could not grasp was that the desire to be hippyish was actually encouraging us to take an interest in the very thing they supposedly wanted to promote: the idea of a distinctive Irish culture.

In the search for an alternative, anti-establishment aesthetic, the notion of a pre-Christian ‘Celtic’ world promised a kind of authenticity that dovetailed with the international counterculture. It manifested itself in everything from jewellery, to the invention of ‘Celtic rock’, to the graphic art of Jim Fitzpatrick.

It couldn’t have been more phoney and it couldn’t have been more real. How could this strange brew make any sense? All I knew is that it made more sense to me than anything else did.

First, Savile was English, a DJ and TV personality for the BBC. The Troubles were raging in the North and we were supposed to be against the English. But no one seemed to think his controlling presence was strange – even Charles Haughey, who as I remember it, waved us all off as we began the ten-mile walk from the city centre.

We did not know then that he was one of the most prolific child rapists in British history, but it would not have come entirely as a shock if someone told us.

Their yoking together of American rock and roll and Irish traditional music expressed exactly the way so many of us were living.

What made this interesting was that this suited him best. The younger boys were less likely to know what to do when he started fondling them.

He did all of this openly, constantly, shamelessly.

‘You’re a queer. You’re a homo. You’re bent.’ Plum just kept looking at him calmly, steadily, silently. He simply refused to react and told us to turn to another page in the Latin grammar. David was defeated.

Most of us could walk like circus performers across tightropes that were strung between private knowledge and public acknowledgement. The only ones who ever looked down were those who were badly abused, and they became even better at suppressing reality.

‘Don’t get close to those Brothers, it’s not healthy.’ I was hurt and mystified. But why? My father didn’t want to say why. He just repeated that it wasn’t healthy.

They knew and kept sending?

So my father knew that there was something wrong, something dangerous, about the way these men might treat a boy. But he did not, could not, do anything with that awareness.

Plum would sense out the vulnerable boy, the kid who got into trouble, the kid whose father had died. The evil thing would be deflected away from me. I was grateful for that, so I said nothing either.

‘You are the first and last person I ever related that incident to’ – not a lover, or a wife or a husband, or a friend. This was a phrase most Irish journalists would hear at some point.

The suggestion seemed to be that a priest calling women to ask about their intimate lives might be entirely legitimate – the big problem with Father Malachy was that he was not a priest. The church, especially through the confessional, had natural ownership of Ireland’s sexual secrets. Which meant, of course, that it also had complete possession of its own.

The paradox of this paranoid style was that, when sex was not open to discussion or acknowledgement, everything was hyper-sexualized. There was no proper arena for sex, no place in which to contain it. So it could bleed out in everything. It lurked everywhere.

Flanagan claimed in 1966 that ‘Sex never came to Ireland until Telefís Éireann went on the air’, a statement that became proverbial as ‘there was no sex in Ireland before television’.5 The claim was widely ridiculed, but it was not entirely foolish.

As Flanagan put it in 1971, ‘It is popular in Ireland and in Europe, to speak on sex, divorce and drugs. These things are foreign to Ireland and we want them kept that way.’

Very large numbers of Irish people would have agreed that the right place for sex as an activity was in the marriage bed and, for sex as a subject for discussion, it was in the confession box.

There ought to be an occasional prosecution to stop the use of obscenity on the telephone.’