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.

‘All right. I am no rebel. If the people of this city think it is not for them, I am not upset.’ He added that the festival would now ‘end up in the kind of silly joke for the rest of the world that most things have that happened here. Everyone will feel very smug and very pure here, and they will be wrong as usual.’7

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.

John McGahern, working on a London building site, sat over lunch with a young Co. Clare man reading in his newspaper of another wet Irish summer. Prayers were being offered at Masses for the rains to cease but the young emigrant added his own supplication: ‘May it never stop. May they all have to climb trees. May it rise higher than it did for fukken Noah!’

Most writers lived in Ireland’s intellectual and artistic capital, Elsewhere. Even the playwrights who were to be absent from the now non-existent Dublin Theatre Festival were not present anyway: Beckett was in Paris, O’Casey in Torquay, Alan MacClelland in London. Joyce had died in Zurich.

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. This was nothing as simple, or as stable, as mere hypocrisy. There were people – a small but potent minority – who fully shared the belief that the purpose of life was to free Ireland, speak Irish and be a pious and puritanical Catholic. There were people – a larger but more tacit minority – who thought all of this to be obscurantist nonsense. But most people were capable of living simultaneously in the dreamworlds of Catholic nationalism and of modern material aspirations.

The question Lemass was forced to pose was whether Ireland could even be thought of as part of western Europe. It had always imagined itself to be so, to belong in some profound way, in particular to the Catholic Europe of Italy and France and Spain. But there was a rough awakening to Ireland’s marginal place in Europe. In the tentative negotiations for the formation of EFTA, Ireland found itself in a group of four countries explicitly pleading that they would need very special arrangements because they were too underdeveloped to cope with the rigours of free trade. The other countries were Greece, Turkey and Iceland.

In a bitter paradox, Ireland was an agrarian economy that was actually not much good at producing food. Where were the great fishing fleets of this Atlantic island?

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

Crumlin’s population was ‘equal to that of the City of Limerick’.7 But if this was a new city, the order of its foundational priorities was encoded in the few public buildings: the big police station was built and opened long before any secondary school, dispensary or hospital (for the first few years, there was not even a district nurse). The purpose was obvious: ‘to control the unruly crowds of workless adolescents for whom there are no factories, no technical schools, no secondary schools, no football grounds’.8

‘Somebody told me’, said Dominic Behan, ‘that the man responsible for their design committed suicide. I’m quite sure his death, if at all, was accidental, for no man with a mind like his could ever succeed in anything so calculated as taking a life, even his own.’

This too was, for the older people, a process of estrangement. Vona Groarke, in her poem ‘The Lighthouse’, contrasted the promises of modernity with the image of three elderly women suddenly thrown out of their familiar world: In the village, a crowd of overcoated men sent up a cheer for progress and prosperity for all … And in the length of time it took to turn a switch and to make light of their house, three women saw themselves stranded in a room that was nothing like their own, with pockmarked walls and ceiling stains, its cobwebs and its grime: their house undone and silenced by the clamour of new light.24

The 1961 census showed that at least half of all houses outside urban areas had no fixed lavatory facilities at all, indoor or outdoor. In Longford, for example, there were 1,590 indoor toilets for the county’s population of 30,000 people. In Roscommon 67 per cent of homes had no toilets of any kind.26 Over the country as a whole, just 15 per cent of farmhouses had a flushing toilet.

The problem with him, for the existing system of authority, was that the even greater object of his devotion was entertainment, a more merciless god than any other.

It was significant that the thing most frequently said about Gay Byrne’s broadcasting style by himself and by others was that he asked the questions that the audience at home would want to ask but wouldn’t dare. His achievement was founded on Irish people’s inarticulacy, embarrassment and evasiveness, on speaking for us because we were afraid to speak for ourselves. If we were too embarrassed to have a national debate about contraceptives, The Late Late Show would do it for us.

When I started school in 1962, the church-dominated school system had left the Irish among the worst-educated people in the western world. In the mid-1950s, there were 476,000 pupils in the primary education system, but just 83,000 in secondary and vocational schools, suggesting that more than 80 per cent dropped out of formal education at fourteen, the legal school leaving age.

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.

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 did not consult the minister for finance, Jack Lynch, in advance. More daringly, he did not consult the Catholic bishops. 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. (He also told primary school managers to go ahead and arrange for ‘adequate sanitation and heating’ and send the bill to his department.22) This decision was, for me, much more revolutionary than any Rising. It influenced my life more than any other political act.

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’.

McNamee’s career in Crumlin was a window into the single most important aspect of Irish culture in these decades: the unknown known. Ours was a society that had developed an extraordinary capacity for cognitive disjunction, a genius for knowing and not knowing at the same time.

Behind the absurd comedy, there were consequences for women. The high-dose oestrogen Pill was not suitable for some women but they used it because it was the only form of contraception they could get. At the Irish Medical Association conference in 1978, Dr Mary Henry warned: ‘because of this hypocrisy, women had suffered: too many unsuitable women were put on the pill in the past and were still on it today and Dr Henry saw them when they developed clots in the deep veins of their legs as a result.’15 The tacit arrangement also left women dependent on the goodwill of doctors, most of whom were male and Catholic. Control of their own fertility was a favour to be bestowed on women, not a right to be asserted. It was an intimate lie that required an authority figure to suspend disbelief. Women had no power, except that of playing up to the sexist stereotype of feminine duplicity. The Catholic Church itself was silently complicit with this duplicity – Catholic schools and hospitals would have ceased to function if teachers and nurses were not having awful trouble with their periods.

The new convent schools could not be staffed entirely by nuns – more and more young lay women would have to be recruited. Most of them were, or would be, married and if they obeyed church teaching and had a baby every year, the system would soon collapse. The cycle regulator saved the day.

The most electrifying invention was the Celtic Rock band Horslips. It was somehow perfectly representative of where we were. On one level it was entirely ersatz. It was formed in 1970 by an advertising agency in Dublin that needed a ‘rock band’ for a TV commercial. Three of its own staff played band members. But they needed a keyboard player and somebody knew Jim Lockhart, who was an accomplished multi-instrumentalist with a strong interest in both classical and Irish traditional music.

It was an amazing place, reeking of modernity, with a swimming pool, a language laboratory, a science lab. It was a future that had arrived. But it still contained Brother Plum. He taught Latin, but he also seemed to have been given this special job of supervising the first years. 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.

‘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.

Flanagan, looking around him in 1971, saw that ‘the country was reeking with drink, drugs and sex’.3 Mary Kenny, the women’s editor of the Irish Press, joked that he had been put up to this claim by the Irish tourist board, Bord Fáilte, ‘in order to add a bit of much-needed fleshpots-of-sin glamour to the auld sod’s hick image abroad’.4

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. As early as 1955, London County Council had so many Irish babies left in its care that a dedicated children’s officer was appointed to spend six months each year in Ireland to try to find homes for them.20 Alan Bestic reported in 1969 that ‘So many girls who find they are going to have a baby go to England that social workers and almoners automatically jot down on their papers: “P.F.I.” It signifies “Pregnant From Ireland”.’21 These women were not tourists or emigrants. They were refugees. They fled in terror.

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.

St Mary Magdalene’s Asylum was (and is – the main building still exists) five minutes’ walk from the principle thoroughfare of the nation’s capital, O’Connell Street. It is not hidden away. It fronts right onto the street, a long, imposing three-storey brick façade suggestive of solidity, permanence, normality. It was there – but its residents were not there. They had disappeared into an abyss of memory, dignity, belonging, citizenship, human rights, personhood. They were beyond the reach of the law. 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. Labour laws governing wages and conditions were entirely flouted – slavery is certainly the right word. In Dublin, as in Cork and Galway, these black holes were not at the edge of the ordinary cosmos. They existed side by side with the shops and the offices and the cafés and the pubs, just as the culture of hypervigilance that created them existed side by side with a profound instinct for when to look the other way.

The day after the Bloody Sunday massacre, Bernadette Devlin attempted to interrupt the Home Secretary Reginald Maudling in the House of Commons, after he claimed that the army had ‘returned fire’ against those who were ‘attacking them with firearms and with bombs’. When the Speaker prevented her from doing so, she ran down the gangway shouting, ‘If I am not allowed to inform the House of what I know, I’ll inform Mr Maudling of what I feel.’ She launched herself at him and hit him three times in the face.5 The moment was eloquent: if what was known could not be said, what was felt could be expressed only in violence.

The truth was that Ireland in the early 1970s wasn’t much of a catch for the EEC. As de Gaulle’s sojourn and the phenomenal popularity of Heinrich Böll’s Irish Journal in Germany suggested, the country had a certain sentimental appeal. But much of that was tied up with the very things that so many Irish people – and particularly Irish women – were trying to get away from.

Ireland became the first and only country in the world to make a condom a medicine.

It was entirely understood that the solution was ridiculous – why else would it not apply in ‘any other country’? Nobody else would have doctors writing prescriptions for condoms because it was mad. But this was a good thing. It meant that we were preserving our unique way of life – the way of ambiguity and unknowing, of dodging and weaving around reality.

Another way of understanding these subtleties would be to recall the deft way in which a landmark moment in Irish broadcasting was allowed to happen. On Wednesday 4 April 1979, six months before John Paul’s visit, RTÉ broadcast a sober, sensitive but in its own way revolutionary radio documentary made by Marian Finucane. It was called simply Abortion. It was a straight, non-judgemental account of a young woman’s journey to England to have an abortion. But the very subject created alarm. The station’s editorial committee instructed the head of features, Michael Littleton, to determine ‘the suitability of this item before it is transmitted’. Littleton, a fine and supportive editor, asked Finucane for the tapes and told her: ‘I want to listen to that to see if it is suitable for transmission.’ As Finucane later recalled, ‘He came back, and he came over to me and said, “That’s OK: the sound quality is excellent”. He never said another word to me about it. And it went out.’ She was somewhat taken aback by the brevity of his response and the absence of any real reaction to the content of a groundbreaking documentary. ‘In retrospect’, she later reflected, ‘I think he was making another point altogether.’8 This is the way things worked. Littleton did not defy the instruction from the editorial committee. He pretended to think that the order to check its suitability for transmission related to technical sound quality. He did not commit himself to any praise for Finucane’s work – he...

These were all good, professional journalists. But Haughey’s money was not really a journalistic question. It was, like child abuse or abortion or Magdalene Laundries, one of those things that was both known and unknowable.

Large chunks of dirty old Georgian Dublin were being pulverized by Haughey’s friends and replaced with such hideous second-hand imitations of the international modernist style as Hawkins House, O’Connell Bridge House and Liberty Hall.

Labour Party’s David Thornley, told the Dáil that ‘There are absolutely no circumstances in which I would vote for abortion. I regard it as murder…’4 Yet here, too, there was the Irish solution to an Irish problem: distance and silence. The unspoken and unspeakable compact was that Irish women would have their abortions elsewhere, mostly in England. And, when they came back, they would not talk about it. This had obviously gone on for a long time.

Father Simon O’Byrne. He explained to me: ‘Some people have this idea that a little child has a child’s soul. The soul does not occupy space; the soul is spiritual whether the person is ninety years of age or ninety seconds, the soul, when it leaves the body, is a full mature soul knowing all the mysteries and all the things that we don’t know. The soul is created at the instant of conception. That is the teaching of the Church.’ But the church didn’t really believe that a foetus was a person with a soul in the same sense that a ninety-year-old woman might be. If it did, how could Father Marx carry around and display the ‘little bodies’ in glass bottles? Should they not be buried in a churchyard with a headstone and prayers and solemn ceremony? The truth was that babies were disposable, not just before they were born, but afterwards as well. Temple Hill was part of the system that included the Mother and Baby Homes. Many of those homes did not even bother to record the burials of the huge numbers of babies who died in their care. This was, according to the church’s own canon law, perfectly fine. Of the Bessborough home in Cork, the commission of investigation into Mother and Baby Homes noted in 2019 that ‘More than 900 children died in Bessborough or in hospital after being transferred from Bessborough. Despite very extensive inquiries and searches, the Commission has been able to establish the burial place of only 64 children. The Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesu...

In the Tuam Children’s Home, run by the Sisters of Bon Secours (Good Help), around 800 children were buried in a structure ‘built within the decommissioned large sewage tank’. Between January 1920 and October 1977, the bodies of more than 950 children, almost all of them ‘illegitimate’, were sent to the medical schools at University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland for the purpose of anatomical studies. Church-run institutions were among the main suppliers. Some of these babies were never buried. The commission noted tersely that ‘It may be that stillborn infants were preserved as “wet specimens” for display purposes in medical schools.’

By the time of the abortion referendum campaign, there was significant public knowledge of the church’s habit of dumping the bodies of babies in unrecorded mass graves.

The novelist Joseph O’Connor, who was then in his final year at UCD, encountered the photographer sent out by the IDA: ‘He wanted images of handsome and clever looking students who would be willing to dress up in tweed jackets and Laura Ashley frocks, and peer into the lens of his Leica and smile and forget about the fact that they would never be able to get jobs in their own country… Payment was involved, I understand.’

While Ahern was signing these blank cheques, young Irish citizens were on their way to becoming the greatest form fillers in the world. In 1987, when Haughey was back in power, a bureaucratic act that most people dread became the centre of a unique form of social life. It was perhaps the first truly indigenous genre of indoor entertainment to be developed in Ireland since the days when The Late Late Show replaced the seanachaí. It was called the Donnelly Visa party. It was, in a way, a subgenre of gambling: the point was to win a lottery by improving your odds. The prize was a green card that would allow you to get the hell out of Ireland and settle legally in the United States. The visa was named after an Irish-American Democratic Congressman, Brian Donnelly. He sponsored a programme to award 10,000 visas to randomly chosen applicants from round the world. The Donnelly scheme commenced in January 1987. There were 1.5 million applicants from thirty-six countries. Yet, of that first tranche of visas, 4,161 went to Irish applicants. How did one small country get 41 per cent of the prizes in a worldwide lottery? Young people in Ireland realized that each application had to be filled and signed individually − no photocopies would be accepted. And there was a target date on which the first 10,000 applications would be processed. But nothing in the rules said that only one application was valid. Hence the Donnelly Visa party – get your friends together, supply some drink, give t...

In 1988−9 alone, an astounding 70,600 people left the country – 2 per cent of the entire population. Most of these were young – those aged between fifteen and twenty-four made up 69 per cent of the total.16 The slow demographic recovery that validated the revolution of 1958 was going into reverse. By 1986, there were fewer people in the Republic than there had been in 1981.

Noël Browne, then the Labour Party’s spokesman on health, made a speech in which he suggested that ‘The judgment of the Catholic clergy on matters of sex and heterosexual relationships could not be trusted… It was long overdue that they acknowledge the understandable ignorance of men living celibate lives; that they were not competent to advise the rest of them in the complex matters of marriage relations… It is also true to say that consciously, or otherwise, many of them have chosen their celibate lives because they find the whole subject of sex and heterosexual relationships threatening and embarrassing.’

No one in the parliamentary party – even the generally outspoken Conor Cruise O’Brien – supported Browne. What he had said was obviously true, but it was also unsayable.

But what actually happened was not the point. As always, what mattered was the maintenance of the twin-track Irish mind. Reality could continue on its own sweet way, so long as it was not reflected in what the state said about itself. The façade was much more important than the building. What should be must always outweigh what was. This was the Irish way.

I remember my sisters, as they came into their teenage years, always looking great when they were going out because there was enough money to buy them stuff that looked new, up to date. There was a world of difference between a knock-off and a hand-me-down.

the journalist John Lyttle, whose father Tommy ‘Tucker’ Lyttle was a big noise in the murderous Ulster Defence Association, evoked this brilliantly in 1996: ‘we were living inside the reports we saw on the television news, which had the odd, almost Brechtian effect of distancing you from things you might have actually participated in: a riot, for example. The result was a kind of documentary unreality. That, and a sort of vicious glamour which would increasingly loosen moral constraints and permit previously unimaginable behaviour. Men who traditionally read only thrillers, spy novels, war books and James Bond − like my father − and whose cinematic tastes ran to gangster flicks… and the rough justice of the Western, now had a chance to star in their own home-grown, patriotic versions of heroic fantasies.’

A crucial part of this process was the exploitation of Adams’s own talent for ambiguity. To spend time with him, as I occasionally did, was to be more deeply baffled by him, to understand less than before what he really thought or felt. He had grown up with a father who was a serial paedophile, and he had the traumatized child’s ability to compartmentalize experience. This had allowed him both to participate in violence and to seem coldly aloof from it.

Thus Gerry Adams the godfather of terrorism was replaced by Gerry Adams the tree-loving, wine-drinking celebrity politician.