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

by Fintan O'Toole

While Clinton’s envoy, the saintly George Mitchell, did the hard, patience-sapping work of chairing the negotiations, the knowledge that the president’s gamey eye was always watching created for the participants the idea that they were not just making history but transcending it.

In most countries, GDP, representing all the activity recorded in the economy and GNI, representing the activity that really took place, are more or less the same. In Ireland, from the 1990s onwards, the two diverged ever more widely. In 1995, real GNI7 was 8 per cent lower than GDP. In 2019, it was 40 per cent below. We were back, in other words, with double realities – the way things seemed to be and the way they were – and the gap between them was getting steadily larger.

The state of Irish culture as the country completed its transformation from basket case to poster child of hyper-globalized modernity can be summed up in three dances.

Nobody could name it – or at least not fully − until my friend Mary Raftery did in 1999 in her documentary series States of Fear. Three years earlier, Louis Lentin made a powerful film, Dear Daughter, centred on the experiences of Christine Buckley, Bernadette Fahy and a few other survivors of the industrial school for girls in Dublin, Goldenbridge, run by the Sisters of Mercy.

If history, as Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus had complained, was a nightmare from which he was trying to awake, where better to open one’s eyes on the new day than on a simulacrum of Ireland dredged up from the bottom of the Persian Gulf?

As the property editor of the Irish Times, Orna Mulcahy, noted of one of the iconic (doubly iconic in being, in the end, unbuilt) developments of the boom years, Sean Dunne’s would-be ‘new Knightsbridge’ in the swanky Dublin district of Ballsbridge: ‘I dug out the architects’ drawings from the bottom of a heap under my desk and yes, there it was: sunshine, flooding the imagined plazas and courtyards and bouncing off the glass of towering apartment blocks. Pert-breasted women strolling around in T-shirts and sunglasses.’ Even the underground shopping mall was filled with palms, orchids and cacti. The sense of direction was madly askew. As Mulcahy noted, ‘On the property developer’s compass, you see, there is no north… the vast majority of balconies built during the boom faced south – even the many that actually looked due north and enjoyed direct sunlight about once a year.’9

In other countries, global warming was a threat. In Ireland it was a fantasy.

In 2009, the Ryan report into the hideous abuse of children in the industrial school system was published. It was followed, that same year, by the Murphy report into clerical abuse and cover-up in the Dublin Catholic archdiocese. Two worlds were dying together. The sudden and dramatic end of the great delusion of infinite Irish progress towards the nirvana of endless abundance converged with the long, agonized death throes of Mother Church. Ireland found itself at once post-boom and post-Catholic. The time zone it inhabited lay between two bitter aftermaths.

The permanent place that had replaced the temporary shed-like structure where my mother had married my father was now itself overtaken by time, stranded in a future that was, when I served Mass there, unimaginable. It was a factory of faith that had now become part of Ireland’s religious rustbelt, a temple of a lost culture whose meaning was, to those who inhabited its hinterland, increasingly obscure.

When the fall did come, the Fianna Fáil-led government, headed by Ahern’s chosen successor Brian Cowen, simply could not grasp what was happening. Its entire reaction was based on incomprehension. It was cognitively impaired. Since the 1960s, Fianna Fáil had linked itself, financially and morally, to the property developers who epitomized the native resurgence. This co-dependency had embraced the bankers who funded those developers, especially Fitzpatrick’s brash, upstart Anglo Irish Bank. It could not believe that these gods were failing. It chose instead, with dreadful consequences for the Irish public, to believe that they were merely experiencing some temporary troubles. What the gods needed were more sacrifices.

The scale of the public money put into the banks was – and remains – scarcely comprehensible. By the end of 2018, the state had spent €66.8 billion directly on the banks and a further €22 billion to service the debts it entered into in borrowing much of this money.8 That’s €100 billion taken from a working population of 2.2 million. For this, the people got assets and income worth about €48 billion. Around €42 billion, in other words, was sucked into a black hole.

In 2013, it was calculated that Ireland, with less than 1 per cent of the EU population, had paid 42 per cent of the total cost of the European banking crisis.11

In the general election of February 2011, Fianna Fáil was destroyed.

This was a big moment. One half of the alliance that had dominated Ireland since the 1930s, the institutional Catholic Church, was already on its knees. Now the other half was brought to the same level. And it was clear that neither of them would ever return to their old positions of dominance, either jointly or individually. The system had been broken. Or, more accurately, it had broken itself by mocking the faith that its adherents had placed in it.

There was, of course, the old alternative of voting with one’s feet. Emigration started up again: 420,000 people left Ireland in the five years between 2011 and 2015.

The Fianna Fáil TD I was having a drink with was both happy and sad. He had, against the grain of most of his party, supported repeal and he was pleased that it had passed so emphatically. He was sad because he had not spoken to his elderly parents, who were in their eighties, for a few weeks. They lived on a small farm. They were devout Catholics. They belonged to the old world that was now vanquished. Since he had come out in favour of repeal, he had felt uneasy with them. He avoided talking in particular to his father about the subject, certain that it would lead only to awkwardness and upset. While we were chatting, his phone rang and he answered it. It was his sister at home on the farm. I couldn’t help overhearing the conversation. She was very happy with the result, too, and they talked about that. Then he asked her how their father and mother were taking it all. Delighted, she said – sure both of the parents had voted for repeal. ‘Daddy said he couldn’t bear thinking of all those women coming back from England and not being able to tell anyone what they were going through.’ There had been, all along in the old man’s mind, another history, a history of migrants and absentees, of secrets and silences. He was, it seemed, glad to let it out at last.

Everybody knows – words of liberation. That campaign for same-sex marriage was the best I had ever seen because that’s really all it said. It was not about revelation. It was all about recognition: you know us, you are us, we are you. But what was being recognized was not just the wonderful and ordinary variousness of Irish lives and desires, it was Irish society’s other secret self – not the one that contained all the darkness and in-turned violence, but the great secret of intimate grace.

What is possible now, and was entirely impossible when I was born, is this: to accept the unknown without being so terrified of it that you have to take refuge in fabrications of absolute conviction.

When I was born, there was no future and now there is no future again. Back then, it was a distressing thought, an alarm bell that awakened energies of change. Now, it is a more positive idea: there need not be a single, knowable future.