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

by Fintan O'Toole

Ireland, in this analogy, was a naturally healthy body. Films might contain toxins that would make it sick. Censorship was a health and safety issue. But for much of the population, hungry for knowledge, these movies, might, on the contrary, be vital sustenance.

In itself, this was hardly a demographic miracle, but the reversal of what had seemed an inevitable decline had great psychological significance. We were no longer vanishing. Sex was fulfilling its crude demographic function.

One woman told him that, when she was first married, ‘it never occurred to me that children or the purpose of marriage had anything to do with sex’. Her husband confessed to being equally ignorant: ‘People just spoke about sex in whispers.’

A third said: ‘Back of everybody’s mind is the notion that there is something wrong with it, something bad. It is deeply ingrained in us. I know that is true of myself and of most people I know.’

This wall of ignorance may have been slowly crumbling by the late 1960s and early 1970s, but much more so in middle-class and urban areas than in rural and working-class ones.

Edna O’Brien, in the same year said that ‘I don’t think I have any pleasure in any part of my body, because my first and initial body thoughts were blackened by the fear of sin: and therefore I think of my body as a sort of vehicle for sin, a sort of tabernacle of sin.’

Ignorance was reinforced by fear. Ireland in the 1960s had one of the lowest rates of children born out of wedlock in Europe. But like so much else about the country, this was deceptive. Young women who were unmarried and pregnant took the boat to England.

‘The fear in these girls has to be seen to be believed. It is only by endless gentleness that we can persuade them that going back [to Ireland] to have their baby wouldn’t be so awful. What sort of society do you have in Ireland that puts the girls into this state?’22

The answer is one in which girls and young women could be incarcerated, potentially for the rest of their lives, for the mere perception of possible or actual moral deviancy.

What specific laws?

For the right clients, documents could be faked to show the adoptive mother as the birth mother, erasing the latter entirely.

The strangest part of this arrangement was that it included a form of literal Americanization. Catholic Americans could effectively buy babies from Irish mother-and-baby homes.

The attraction was obvious: Irish babies, unlike those available for adoption in the US, were almost all white. As an Irish nun put it, ‘Irish children are pure-blooded’.27

The second, even more fearful, form of incarceration was the network of Magdalene asylums where women were held, forced to work without pay in the attached laundries, and often institutionalized for the rest of their lives.

The implication was clear – an ordinary decent female criminal would be shamed by being placed on remand in St Mary Magdalene’s Asylum alongside those who were obviously guilty of sexual immorality.

Many of the inmates were children unlawfully transferred from industrial schools, a vast network of institutions, also under the control of religious orders, in which children whose parents were deemed incapable of caring for them, were incarcerated – trafficked is probably the right word.

How could thousands of girls and women be made to vanish in such plain sight? Sex. The widespread belief – largely false – was that the girls and women who were unseen inside the Magdalene institutions had been prostitutes or, at the very least, loose women. This belief sexualized them, and once that reek of sex had been sniffed in the air, further discussion was unnecessary.

But when sexual immorality is such an unexamined concept, so is sexual morality. When all sex is wrong, no kind of sex can be more wrong than any other.

Everything is unspeakable, so nothing is speakable. This is part of what created a perpetual open season for sexual predation on children.

To the church in particular, child sexual abuse by priests and brothers was sinful and regrettable but indistinguishably so from all other lapses from the vows of chastity. There was no difference between consensual and non-consensual sex. It’s all sex.

In 1971, a woman in Ireland could not, in effect, sit on a jury – that privilege belonged to registered property owners who were almost exclusively male. She could not, if she was a civil servant or worked in a bank, keep her job when she got married. She could not buy contraceptives (unless the Pill was misprescribed as a ‘cycle regulator’). She could not buy a pint of Guinness in a pub – some pubs refused to allow women to enter at all

She could not get a barring order in court against a violent husband. She could not, if she was married, live securely in her own home – even if she paid for the house, her husband could sell it at any time without her consent. She could not refuse to have sex with her husband – the concept of marital rape was regarded as a contradiction in terms.

Is this not a sexual moral?

She could not get a divorce under any circumstances.

Over the course of the 1970s, most of these legal disabilities (divorce very much not included) would be dismantled or ameliorated. Some of this change came from the top: Ireland’s desire to join the European Economic Community meant that it had to be seen to fall into line with western European standards.

The Irish class system had made it possible even for brilliant and self-confident women not to know how systematically misogynistic their own state really was.

This whole idea of taking constitutional challenges was also very American.

Liberals, who thought that the new Ireland could be more like the US or Britain in such matters, did not understand the deep, visceral loathing that they evoked among those who felt that, precisely because Ireland was changing, Catholic morality was a vital redoubt of continuity and distinctiveness.

Of the 342 people seized and locked up, every single one was described as a suspected Republican. Not one Loyalist was initially interned. Very many of those interned, moreover, were not members of the IRA at all – and those who were belonged largely to the more political Official wing.

All of this was part of a narrative that most people in the Republic accepted in one form or another. We believed that the South was free, the North unfree. Many of the women involved in the contraceptive train stunt would themselves have accepted this.

It was meant to demonstrate that, for women, the North was in fact a lot more free than the South. The point was that they could buy in Belfast the means to control their fertility that were denied them in Dublin. It drew on a very different idea of freedom.

This was also, somehow, perfectly attuned to the state of Ireland. The state, in the form of the customs men, pretended not to see non-existent sexual contraband.

I was going to wander off, but then Cleary announced the ballad group The Wolfe Tones. They were four big hairy men with big round badges on their jackets that said Up the IRA. They already occupied a lucrative niche market in recreational republicanism, belting out the sentiments that could not be spoken on the radio but could be sung.

They roared to an end, clenching their fists and waving them in the air. They shouted Up the IRA! and stalked off holding their instruments as if they were heading straight for the barricades.

When he had passed about two yards ahead of me, I heard myself shouting at him: Up the IRA! He didn’t turn around.

I didn’t know what had come over me. It was something about the passion of those Wolfe Tones songs being followed by the farce of the politicians’ football game. The disjunction had opened up a black hole and I had been sucked into it for a moment. All I knew about how I really felt was that I did not know how to feel about what Irish politics meant at that moment.

‘Mary, we have to face it. Me and the boys are going to be up in the North, fighting. It’s coming. There’s no choice now. It’s just the way it’s going to be. It’ll be them or us. We have to be ready for it.’

My father was not given to such gestures. He had always been sceptical of Irish nationalism. His own family connections to England, and indeed to the British army, made him acutely aware of the complications that Anglophobia elided.

In the end, the Catholics of Derry and Belfast were our people and we would have to take up arms to defend them. Choices and ambiguities would evaporate.

The very fact that thirty-one civilians had been shot while no soldiers had come to any harm underlined the plausibility of these accounts. But the army claimed that they were responding to attacks from snipers and nail bombers, that over 200 shots had been fired at them, and that at least four of those killed were wanted terrorists. (They were not.) It was this attempt to create an alternative reality that gave the event its apocalyptic quality.

It was not just that innocent people had been so openly murdered by the British state. It was that an official fiction was being woven in real time, right in front of our eyes. The dead would not even be truly remembered – they would be buried in lies.

Foreshadowing

The events of 30 January 1972 were coupled with those of 21 November 1920, when British soldiers opened fire indiscriminately on players and spectators in Croke Park. The same number of people – fourteen – had been killed. So the same name was given to the day: Bloody Sunday.

this act of naming brought them into the capacious company of the martyred dead and defined the Derry massacre as another chapter in the long narrative of Ireland’s fight for freedom.

Within the British and Unionist worlds, it could be imagined that telling lies about what happened would diminish it. Within the Irish nationalist world, it magnified

I closed my eyes and felt my way into that darkness. I was the dying O’Hanlon. He and I were singing from the threshold of an afterlife that was both spiritual and political.

Mary said, ‘You sang that with such passion. You’re going to carry the torch.’ Nobody seemed at all bothered that Mary had been in the British army. I know I wasn’t. The incongruity was scarcely worth noticing. Ambiguities were being swept away.

The lord mayor of Cork, T. J. O’Sullivan, told protestors that ‘If they want murder, they’ll have murder – one of theirs will go for each of ours.’6 O’Sullivan did not represent the IRA, Sinn Féin or even Fianna Fáil. He was solid Fine Gael stock.

‘Will you join me in saying the Rosary? The Rosary has saved Ireland in the past and it will save it again now.’9 But this time, nobody was interested. The conflagration was much more satisfying. It was also, in its way, more modern, more American.

The IRA and their supporters had characterized Lynch as a quisling whose government was failing to protect the beleaguered Catholics of the North. It was not impolitic to let the immediate rage burn itself out against British, rather than domestic, targets.

This was the moment, nonetheless, when Catholics in the Republic might have been fused with their Northern brethren in a single nationalist revolt.

‘Well I was never up there, and I’m inclined to think of them as different people, with the accent and all, but when I saw their photographs in the paper and thought they could be our men complaining or making a protest about something down here, and to have them all gunned down, it would be terrible, and I felt outraged that the British should do this and I felt that whatever the rights and wrongs, they would know how we felt when we burned down their embassy.’

The massacre had made it all too easy to conclude that there would have to be a reckoning and that the Unionists, the Protestants, the British, could be reckoned with only by violence.