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

by Fintan O'Toole

The murder of a working-class kid from Dublin didn’t quite fit the story of heroic resistance to oppression in the North. But the British didn’t acknowledge it either. When he was buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery, it was without military honours.

The problem was that Tommy McCann was us, too. We all knew kids who joined the British army or had fathers who had served in it.

Even for my schoolfriends who did not have these familial connections, the brutality of his murder, the dumping of his body like a carcass, the pitiful funeral, the inability of his mother to grieve in public, left a profound unease. Is this what the fight against British imperialism was going to look like, hooded kids, crying for their mothers, being shot in the back of the neck?

The Officials, increasingly influenced by Marxist ideology, wanted to pursue a more social class-based political strategy and in particular to allow Sinn Féin members to contest elections for the Dublin, Belfast and London parliaments and take their seats if successful.

Their leadership worried about the likelihood that conflict on the streets of Northern Ireland would descend into a sectarian bloodbath. The Provisionals (known as the Provos) had no such qualms and were committed to a much narrower, purely military, struggle for a United Ireland.

Both were illegal in the UK and Ireland, but some streams of public and political opionion in the Republic were still sympathetic to the Provos, who were seen as less of a thre...

remember feeling a sense of elation at the first reports that the bomb had gone off, the delicious savour of revenge. The Officials claimed at first that they had killed at least twelve British officers, a number that roughly matched the Derry dead.12 Justice had been served and the world had been put to rights. And then, as the names and occupations of the real victims emerged, I felt dizzy with nausea.

Because the Abercorn was Catholic-owned and the dead and mutilated were Catholics, we thought at first that this must be the work of Loyalist paramilitaries. This was easy enough – it was an absolute outrage, savage, indefensible. When it became clear that the IRA had done it, it just seemed incomprehensible. How did maiming random young women balance the moral scales against Bloody Sunday? Since I had already decided, when I thought it must be the act of the other side, that this was monstrous, it was impossible to change my mind now.

It was not, I think, just the force of The Wolfe Tones or the absurdity of the politicians’ football match. It was also that, at that moment, I thought that the war was over and that the IRA had won.

There was even a wistful realization that people might miss the excitement of the violence.

had no such worries. My father my brother and I would not be going up North with guns. My Up the IRA! was a valedictory salute, but also a cry of relief. A foreordained future had been averted. Any number of new ones were possible – for me and for the island.

There was no mention at all of the risk to innocent civilians. What mattered was the diminished chances of the IRA’s volunteers being confronted by, and therefore having to engage with, the army or the armed police. This is a reality that the Provos would later try, with great success, to hide under heroic images of brave volunteers shooting it out with heavily armed Brits.

But the car bomb also diminished blame. Both a literal and a moral distance were created between the act and its consequences. A mode of operation was created: leave the bomb in a high street, walk calmly away, have someone call in a ‘warning’ a few minutes before the car was timed to explode, not so that lives could be saved (it was usually too late for that) but so that the IRA could say it was all the fault of the authorities for not reacting quickly enough.

They killed nine people and injured 130. Seventy-seven of the victims were women and children.

The day soon acquired its own name, one that was not part of the Irish nationalist lexicon: Bloody Friday.

It was a major, major operation but we never intended to kill people. I feel a bit guilty about it because as I say there was no intention to kill anyone that day… I don’t hold myself personally responsible for all that took place there… but certainly I take some of the responsibility.’

Loyalists used car bombs for mass killings, too, but this style of intimate murder, revelling in extreme and individualised cruelty, was distinctive.

Loyalist murders were often intended to be luridly gruesome. The purpose was to terrify the Catholic population into submission – for that purpose, the more hideous the better. IRA murders were intended to create a more general sense of anarchy, to make it clear that Northern Ireland was ungovernable under British rule. For that purpose, the more impersonal, the more distanced the perpetrator was from the victim, the better.

The purpose of their operations was to create a zone of radical uncertainty, in which some of the victims were undead, condemned to hover like ghosts between existence and oblivion. This was a special kind of torment in a Catholic culture, the endless torment of the unquiet grave whose occupant can neither rest nor depart, of the bereaved who cannot grieve.

But there is no clap for Mac Stiofáin. It is not, Glassie believes, that the drinkers are out of sympathy with his impending martyrdom or the IRA. It is rather that they are discomfited by the sudden irruption of the present into the past, of a barbed and living history into the heroic version of the ‘struggle’ encoded in the songs.

The young man had disrupted an unspoken code of manners. Inferences about the present may be drawn from the past, but they must remain at the level of inference. Emotions that may be enjoyed when they are formalized in a ballad are not enjoyable when they are spoken in a political rallying cry. The passage of time has filtered out all the ambivalence and unease about acts of violence, so that when they have been enshrined in song they are pure and simple.

Most of the dead – 259 – were civilians. They were not martyrs. They had not sacrificed themselves – they had been sacrificed. There was nothing, in our tradition, to sing about. I never sang ‘The Patriot Game’ at parties again.

It was two other bus conductors, George Bradshaw and Thomas Duffy, both fathers of little children, who had been blown to bits. But I knew I was never again going to feel that such people were somebody else.

But for the Americans who came with the boxers, Ireland was disappointingly unexotic.

was absolutely amazed at your hotels. I never dreamt you would have lifts; in fact, I was quite disappointed when I discovered I would not have to ascend long wooden staircases leading on to some rafter-type apartments. I reckoned on hotels being similar to enlarged farmhouses, with not another building in sight.’

So Ireland as a whole decided to take possession of him. During that visit, it was revealed that Ali’s maternal great-grandfather, Abe Grady, was an O’Grady from Co. Clare. The Limerick Leader reported that ‘To-day there’s many an O’Grady from Clare, who regard Muhammad Ali as one of their own.’

just the usual Irish impulse of elevation by association, not fundamentally different from the absorption of JFK as ‘one of our own’.

Except JFK was Irish and Ali wasnt

The Grady part of his heritage in fact contained a more complex history than he knew at the time. Abe Grady was not a slave owner. He had married an emancipated African-American woman in Kentucky. And, while the insistence of journalists on asking him questions about his Irish roots threatened to ignite Ali’s anger, he defused a possible row with a graceful dismissal: ‘You can never tell. There was a lot of sneakin’ around in them days.’

For Ali, the connection was political, not genealogical. His desire to meet Bernadette Devlin reciprocated the identification of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland with that in the US.

But in Ireland the attempt to possess Ali as a child of the Irish diaspora raised questions that were still unanswerable. Did this make Ali Irish-American, like JFK or Grace Kelly? How did being Black cohere with Irishness?

Ali was majority black not Irish

‘It was not considered likely that the treaty requirements for free movement of workers would have any significant effect on the Irish labour market.’6 It was not a controversial claim. Nobody thought ‘free movement’ of people would mean an influx of white Europeans, never mind of people of African or Asian ethnicity.

I remember finding the notion of Ali’s Irishness amusing and absurd. I said to a friend: ‘If Muhammad Ali and General de Gaulle are Irish, maybe everybody in the world is.’

His only explanation for his presence was: ‘I feel, perhaps because of the Irish blood running in my veins, that it is an instinct which attracted me towards Ireland at this time. One returns to the place of one’s origins.’7 De Gaulle’s mother, it turned out, was descended from Patrick McCartan, an Irish Jacobite who fled to France in 1689.

He chose Ireland precisely because it meant nothing. Jean Guéguinou, the diplomat who was dispatched from Paris to help de Gaulle with his arrangements, later explained that ‘Ireland was a neutral country. It was a place without political significance for him at the time.’8

Without de Gaulle, the prospects of Britain and therefore Ireland being admitted to the European club were suddenly much brighter.

The biggest thing that happened to Ireland since Independence was its formal entry into the EEC on 1 January 1973. It was the moment at which Ireland became officially a western country, fixed in space at last as part of the developed and democratic world. This was all the more important because, unofficially, it was not quite either of those things. It was not economically developed in the sense that its new partners like France or Germany were. And its democracy, though institutionally very well established, was not as certain as it looked. It had within it two great subversive forces – its own traditions of violence and martyrdom; and the continuing confusion of citizenship with Catholicism.

‘Ireland belongs to Europe by history, tradition and sentiment no less than by geography. Our destiny is bound up with that of Europe… Our people have always tended to look to Europe for inspiration, guidance and encouragement.’

Forty students from local technical schools were sent to Moosburg, outside Munich, to be trained, but the rest of the workforce was made up largely of local farm boys. Five German foremen were employed to control them.

Imagine if these were English foremen blowing whistles at Irish workers, yelling at them and banging their heads off the wall. This would have been a great scandal, an intolerable new chapter in the long history of oppression and domination.

Or imagine that this was not Ireland but any of the European countries that had been occupied by Nazis just twenty years earlier. That would not have ended well either.

The image is interesting for its Catholicism – one of the most reassuring things about the EEC from an Irish perspective (and one of the least reassuring from a British) was that it was largely a Catholic project. But it also suggests a willingness to accept tough love if it came from the Continent and not from Britain.

The great contradiction in all of this was that this hope of escaping British domination was utterly dependent on what would happen to Britain. One thing almost no one really thought about was the possibility that Ireland would find itself committed to joining while the UK remained outside.

The Taoiseach Jack Lynch told Monnet that ‘such a move would be disastrous for the Irish economy’. This was not an exaggeration. Ireland would lose its preferential status in the British market without having enhanced access to European ones.

Worst of all, ‘something has made its way to Ireland, that ominous something known as The Pill – and this something absolutely paralyzes me: the prospect that fewer children might be born in Ireland fills me with dismay.’

If Ireland was valued for its difference, its backwardness, its smells and safety pins and teeming children, its religiosity, why spoil it by making it just like the rest of the western world?

On top of that, there was the small matter of an incipient civil war. Ireland made much – not without justification – of its standing as a stable democracy. But there was no telling where the increasingly vicious Troubles of the North might lead.

The story as it unfolded was breathtaking: Haughey, as minister for finance, had used money voted for the ‘relief of distress’ in the North to support a plan to import arms from the Continent and smuggle them to the then embryonic Provisional IRA in Belfast.

All of them were acquitted. Haughey declared to his ecstatic supporters that the whole affair had been ‘a political trial’.20 The successful defence was immensely damaging to the Irish state – that the attempt to import the arms was not illegal because it was an official government action, known about in advance by Lynch.

The Arms Trial affair had thus become another great node of uncertainty. It presented two possibilities, each scarcely credible. One was that Lynch had smeared his own ministers, Haughey and Blaney, to consolidate his political position. The other was that Haughey, the most senior minister in the cabinet of a democratic republic, had used official funds to help create a private army across the Border.

Or perhaps the truth was that there was no fixed truth, that this whole thing had happened because the state itself, in these early years of the Troubles, simply did not know what it was supposed to feel or think or do. Caught between the mythology of Catholic martyrdom with which I had grown up and the reality of what a private Catholic army would mean, it inhabited a swampy terrain where there was no firm footing. Maybe Lynch both knew and did not know.