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

by Fintan O'Toole

The life blood of the islands was draining away westward, as the people emigrated, in particular to Springfield, Massachusetts, where they found work in the blast furnaces and cloth mills. The ‘names of places spoken of by those who went and returned’ were now American addresses: Van Horn Park and Chicopee, Indian Orchard and Watershops Pond.1

It is apt that Economic Development was published at almost the same time as the great novel of conservative transformation, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard. Tancredi, the novel’s central character, famously explains to his aristocratic uncle why he is going off to fight with Garibaldi’s rebels: ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’ This could have served as the hidden epigraph to Whitaker’s ‘Grey Book’. It was a salvage operation. Its primary aim was not to destroy the Catholic nationalist state, but to keep it afloat.

At the time of my birth, there was a double layer of defence: the economic and the spiritual. I was to grow up in an economy protected from foreign competition and in a culture protected from moral danger.

What those in authority did not understand, and what Byrne lived for, was the logic of a good show, the fact that fireside chats and high-minded discussions put the plain people of Ireland to sleep, while brawls and revelations kept them up and watching.

The first is that his own life represented in microcosm much of what happened in Ireland over thirty years. Brought up in a sheltered, frugal and conservative family environment. Inculcated by the Christian Brothers, the order of lay celibate men that ran the biggest number of schools for Catholic boys, with the values of piety, hard work and patriotism. Emigrating to England along with everyone else in the 1950s. Coming back along with everyone else in the 1960s. Getting richer as the country gets richer. Suffering financial calamity in the 1980s and contemplating emigration again. His personal odyssey, then, followed the same course as the national epic, the same serpentine currents of hope and despair, of excitement and boredom. Because he had been shaped by those conflicting currents, he could be compared by one person to the leader of godless communism, by another to a Christian Brother.

What he was most like, though, was contemporary Ireland: fluid, contradictory, elusive, a country in which the terms either/or were replaced by both/and.

The relative emptiness of his public persona was his greatest strength, preventing him from freezing into any set of unified attitudes, keeping him close to the irregular pulse of Irish life.

Pan Collins, a former Late Late Show researcher, once wrote that her job was to produce a list of possible guests under six different headings: ‘an intellectual, a glamour personality, a VIP, a cynic, a comic and a cookie character’.

‘Man is like a tack because he must be pointed in the right direction, driven hard and then he will go as far as his head will let him.’

The impact of the Brothers on the minds that formed the state cannot be overstated. It was not just in what they taught but in the way they taught it. They stressed that the function of education was to turn raw boys into manly patriots: ‘Ireland looks to them, when grown to man’s estate, to act the part of true men in furthering the sacred cause of nationhood.’ It was not even that they invented and gave currency to a narrative of 800 years of exceptional oppression that fused Ireland’s suffering with Christ’s: ‘In the martyrology of history, among crucified nations’, said the Brothers’ Catechism of the History of Ireland, ‘Ireland occupies the foremost place. The duration of her torture, and the ferocity of her executioner, are as revolting as the power of the victim is astonishing.’

Take up any Christian Brothers’ school yearbook from the decades after Independence and you can almost touch the sense of triumph, the naked delight that Our Boys are taking over the state that Our Boys had made for them. The CBS Synge Street yearbook for 1946−7, for instance, opens with a message from an old boy, now a TD and lord mayor of Dublin, praising the ‘good Brothers who taught me to love God, His Holy Mother and Ireland’.

Todd Andrews, the ex-Synge Street, ex-IRA man, then managing director of the state turf company Bórd na Mona, is, in an obituary tribute to the school’s recently deceased head Brother, most explicit about what is going on: ‘Boys attending Synge Street came from modest homes. They had no influence, no contacts, no background, the auspices were not favourable for their advancement in fields of professional endeavour. Brother Roche foresaw the changing times and the shift of power from the alien to the native… he applied his vitality to equip his pupils to take their part in forming the new regime.’

It was, in the world of the Christian Brothers, about rising from the lower middle to the upper middle class. It was not supposed to be about us – but then, suddenly, it was.

When T. K. Whitaker published Economic Development in 1958, there was one remarkable gap in his thinking about how Ireland could become part of the modern world: education. It was not discussed at all. And yet one of the most obvious ways in which Ireland was backward was that it had failed to keep up with the great expansion of schooling in post-war democracies, and in particular the extension of free tuition to second level. 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 reason was simple: secondary schools, overwhelmingly owned and run by the church, were private institutions and charged fees that most families could not afford. About 5 per cent of secondary students had publicly financed scholarships – a mark of the state’s commitment to education...

‘This is a dark stain on the national conscience. For it means that one-third of our people have been condemned – the great majority through no fault of their own – to be part-educated unskilled labour, always the weaker who go to the wall of unemployment and emigration.’

Cries of pain and black-robed figures belonged together. Violence and twisted sexuality were the expressions of troubled confusion on the part of the Brothers – not because they had a monopoly on any of these things in a society where violence against children and sexual repression were the norm, but because they were themselves secretly and institutionally haunted by their failure to control them.

He added: ‘There may well have been intellectual and social refinements to which we had not access…’24 – a lovely way of saying that they were a rough crowd.

Referring to Christian Brothers

The song was a minor hit in the Irish charts that year, though RTÉ banned the playing of ‘rebel songs’ during the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations.15 There was still an official unease about these ballads glorifying the tradition of republican violence.