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

by Fintan O'Toole

This created a surreal disjunction. ‘Ireland’, as a notion, was almost suffocatingly coherent and fixed: Catholic, nationalist, rural. This was the Platonic form of the place. But Ireland as a lived experience was incoherent and unfixed. The first Ireland was bounded, protected, shielded from the unsavoury influence of the outside world. The second was unbounded, shifting, physically on the move to that outside world. In the space between these two Irelands, there was a haunted emptiness, a sense of something so unreal that it might disappear completely.

Three out of five children growing up in Ireland in the 1950s were destined to leave at some point in their lives, mostly for the shelter of the old colonial power, England.

In 1841, the population of what became the twenty-six-county Irish state was 6.5 million. In 1961, it would hit its lowest ever total of 2.8 million. By that year, a scarcely imaginable 45 per cent of all those born in Ireland between 1931 and 1936 and 40 per cent of those born between 1936 and 1941 had left.23

Militant nationalism needed regular transfusions of young blood to keep it alive, because it led a kind of vampiric half-life, imaginatively and emotionally draining but not visible in any mirror held up to contemporary Irish reality.

In a bitter paradox, Ireland was an agrarian economy that was actually not much good at producing food.

Raising beef on grassland required relatively few skills, so Irish farmers were poorly educated. ‘Rural science’ had been taught in primary schools until 1934, but it was dropped in order to devote more time to the teaching of the Irish language.

Of the 7,000 farmers’ sons who left school every year to take up farming, only 200 received any formal instruction in agriculture. Why? Because, in the 1930s, the Catholic bishops had rejected a proposal to establish 500 agricultural colleges. This was ‘an unnecessary extension of state control into education’. And, from a moral point of view, ‘there was an inherent danger in allowing boys and girls between the ages of 12 and 16 to travel unsupervised to school together’. The plan was abandoned.65

Irish globalization had long been about labour going to where the capital was; now it would be about capital coming to where Irish labour was.

This was the great gamble of 1958: everything would change economically but everything would stay the same culturally.

In spite of these Homeric feats, two out of three homes in Ireland still had no electricity at the end of the Second World War.

Water was a sexual issue. It affected marriages. The bitterly ironic phrase ‘Love, Honour and Carry Water’, parodying the wedding vows to love, honour and obey, was used as an advertising slogan by a supplier of water pumps in the early 1960s.

This was the church’s great achievement in Ireland. It had so successfully disabled a society’s capacity to think for itself about right and wrong that it was the parents of an abused child, not the bishop who enabled that abuse, who were ‘quite apologetic’.

In Irish culture, there were two co-existent attitudes to the sex lives of great men. There was, of course, the official Catholic morality that demanded monogamous heterosexual marriage and the production of faithful Catholic children. But there was also a much older folkloric expectation of the hero (including in the popular imagination idols as diverse as Jonathan Swift and Daniel O’Connell) as a figure of fabulous and unbounded sexual potency.

Bodies had always been the ultimate currency of the Troubles – bodies shattered, torn apart, broken, beaten, tortured, displayed, disappeared. But, from the point of view of the members of the IRA, the bodies in question were other people’s. They belonged to the people they killed.

One obvious answer was that there was a very active Irish-American lobby and that it was important to Clinton. A consequence of two centuries of migration was that Ireland had an outsized presence in the US and thus in the global media. It was also true that the Troubles had the peculiar fascination of white, European Christians killing each other and the epic resonance of a conflict that could be construed as the tragic working out of immemorial history. But the most important truth about the Northern Ireland question was that it was, in fact, answerable. For Clinton, and for Tony Blair who came to power in the UK in 1997, there was something to be won. The Troubles could be ended because they were deeply anomalous.

In all the misery of 1980s Ireland, with its falling population, mass unemployment and large-scale emigration, it was not too easy to grasp that something astonishing was starting. The continuing flow of young Irish people to the States masked the slow tide that was coming in from the Atlantic, the drift, at first a steady current and then a surge, of American multinational investment. The flow was beginning to be reversed: America was coming home to us.

By 2017, US direct investment stock in Ireland totalled $457 billion, a greater investment stake than in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Denmark and Sweden combined.5 There was nothing quite like this in world history. Some poor countries had experienced very rapid development in the late twentieth century, but they had done so primarily by reordering their own societies and developing indigenous industries that could trade on world markets.

Ireland was already becoming far more diverse in religious and ethical belief – by 2016, 10 per cent of the population was non-religious. But this influx meant that, even if the old orthodoxy had not become untenable, the pretence that there was one way of being Irish could not have held. Immigrants came from 180 countries. Polish passed out Irish as the second most spoken language in the home in Ireland. In 1981, 93 per cent of the population was Catholic. By 2016, that was down to 78 per cent. The fastest growing faiths were Orthodox Christianity, Pentecostalism, atheism and Islam. In a very short time, Ireland became a multicultural society.