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

by Fintan O'Toole

Its economic backwardness meant that it could not contain itself – its people, like those of the Blaskets, were leaving for the very thing a holy and romantic Ireland could not provide: ordinary urban, industrial modernity.

sign saying ‘Shortly Available: Undeveloped Country, Unrivalled Opportunities, Magnificent Views, Political and Otherwise, Owners Going Abroad’. One of those most struck by it was the recently appointed secretary of the Department of Finance, T. K. Whitaker, who began work on a document that would shape my life. He later recalled: ‘As far as I remember, the immediate stimulus was seeing a cover of Dublin Opinion.’

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.

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.

They had taken power in the 1930s, in a state whose existence they had violently opposed, with the aid of some impressive mental gymnastics.

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.

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

In May 1957, Ken Whitaker, a Catholic from Northern Ireland who had become secretary of the Department of Finance the previous year at the age of thirty-nine, had begun, quietly and with a small team of officials, to write a 250-page document mapping out what that change would be. Nobody asked him to do it, and he and his collaborators worked in their spare time.97 Whitaker’s motivation was existential – he believed that ‘Something had to be done or the achievement of national independence would prove to have been a futility.’

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. The weird thing is that there was no discussion in the Dáil on Whitaker’s paper and no attack on it by the Opposition or, more importantly, by the Catholic Church.

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

The average age of the Irish troops was eighteen years. Two of the 156-strong contingent were fifteen years old and twelve of them were sixteen. Ireland had sent child soldiers into a country where their use by militias would become, many decades later, an international scandal.

The ideal defence would be a permanent quarantine behind some wall of technology that prohibited entry to the carriers of the disease. But since this was not possible, there had to be a vaccine: an Irish national station. We would get just enough television, in a carefully modified form, to stimulate our national and spiritual immune systems.

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.

‘Ireland’, said Eamon de Valera in 1944, ‘owes more than it will probably ever realise to the Christian Brothers. I am an individual who owes practically everything to the Christian Brothers.’

poet Sean Dunne described the ideal product of the Brothers as ‘a top Irish-speaking civil servant and hurler’.

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.

Even for those who did get to secondary school, the curriculum was dominated by a narrow range of subjects. Half of all teachers of science had no science degree.17 Astonishingly, a second-level school could be deemed to operate a full curriculum even if it did not teach science at all.18 Thus, as late as 1963, only 30 per cent of boys and 14 per

The main ‘foreign’ languages were Latin and Ancient Greek: 90 per cent of males sitting the Leaving Certificate took the Latin exam; just 9 per cent took French, 2 per cent German, while Spanish and Italian attracted negligible numbers. (In 1955, a grand total of two students sat the Spanish exam, and both failed.19)

A member of the committee, Father Jeremiah Newman (later the Catholic bishop of Limerick) ‘objected on the basis that the Catholic Church would never agree to teenage boys and girls travelling together on school buses’.

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.

This decision was, for me, much more revolutionary than any Rising. It influenced my life more than any other political act. O’Malley’s announcement was dramatic in its content, but also in its blunt expression of anger at the class system underpinned by educational apartheid. He spoke of the one-third of children emerging from primary school who got no further education, training or opportunity for ‘cultural development’: ‘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.’

There seemed to be a determination not to take it seriously as an act of violence that might portend worse. President de Valera, in an unprecedented indulgence in levity, reputedly called the Irish Press newspaper, owned by his own family, to suggest the headline: ‘British Admiral Leaves Dublin By Air’.

The official orders issued to the Abbey Theatre were that there should be no O’Casey plays staged during Easter Week because it ‘would not be in keeping with the spirit of the occasion’.10 The Taoiseach, Seán Lemass, personally extended this instruction to RTÉ. In July 1965, he told the minister in charge of broadcasting to check on what programmes were being prepared: ‘to ensure that these programmes will be suitable. (This means in particular no O’Casey).’

‘Through it all is heard the voice of History (Micheál MacLiammóir) speaking in clear, measured, sonorous and authoritative tones.’20 Most adults in the audience probably knew that the voice of History was flamboyantly gay, a fact that was as obvious as it was rigorously unacknowledged. Most probably did not know his real dark secret, revealed after his death: that he was in fact an Englishman called Michael Wilmore who had entirely invented his Irish identity.

Neil Blaney, who launched the scheme in 1965, suggested that, when completed, it should be called Árd Glas, from the Gaelic words for high and green, conjuring images of sylvan bliss and grand elevation. But in the enthusiasm of the following year’s jubilee, it was decided instead that the seven fifteen-storey tower blocks should be named after the seven martyred leaders of the Rising. And so, the great monument to the state’s founding fathers turned out to be a row of grey slabs that loomed over the city like giant tombstones, making the new town a necropolis of modern aspirations.

Ballymun

John McGahern was asked by a friend and neighbour in rural Co. Leitrim why he didn’t go to Mass. He said he’d like to but he’d feel a hypocrite because he did not believe. ‘But sure none of us believe.’ ‘Why do you go then?’ ‘We go for the old performance. To see the girls, to see the whole show… We go to see all the other hypocrites!’

In October 1968, the foremost Irish intellectual Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote that ‘The conditions of Derry may be thought of as one of frozen violence: any attempt to thaw it out will liberate violence which is at present static.’

TD Frank Sherwin complained in the Dáil in 1962 that ‘From time to time most obscene and profane language is used on the telephone… Is there any way by which these people can be detected? From what I have seen in the cinema, it is possible to identify immediately the phone from which a call is made. I do not know whether that is peculiar to films. There ought to be an occasional prosecution to stop the use of obscenity on the telephone.’

In 1971, a woman in Ireland could not, in effect, sit on a jury – that privilege belonged to registered property owners who were almost exclusively male.

She could not, if she was a civil servant or worked in a bank, keep her job when she got married. She could not buy contraceptives (unless the Pill was misprescribed as a ‘cycle regulator’). She could not buy a pint of Guinness in a pub – some pubs refused to allow women to enter at all (my grandfather’s local on Leonard’s Corner was colloquially known as The Man’s House); some allowed a woman in if, and only if, she was accompanied by a man; and many refused to serve women pints of beer.

woman could not, as of right, collect the state allowance paid to help her raise her children – the legislation specified that it be paid to the father, who might, or not might not, mandate her to collect it. She could not get a barring order in court against a violent husband. She could not, if she was married, live securely in her own home – even if she paid for the house, her husband could sell it at any time without her consent.

On 21 July, they set off more than twenty bombs in just over an hour in Belfast city centre, including the bus and rail stations, a motorway bridge, a hotel, a bar and a taxi office. They killed nine people and injured 130. Seventy-seven of the victims were women and children. The horror was compounded by the panic of crowds rushing from one explosion into the path of the next. Parts of human bodies were scattered all over city streets.

Because the victims were members of its own community, it was not convenient to claim their murders. They were instead buried in secret graves, precisely so that their fates would be unknown. This strategy of disappearance began in the summer of 1972, its most notorious victim, Jean McConville, the widowed mother of ten children, who was killed and buried in December.

poet James Simmons took up the challenge of making ballads about the unmartyred dead. Ten days after Bloody Friday, the IRA systematically car-bombed the peaceful and religiously mixed village of Claudy in Co. Derry, setting three devices, so that people fleeing from one explosion would move towards the next. Intelligence at the time suggested that the attack had been directed by a Catholic priest, James Chesney, who was believed to be quartermaster of the South Derry IRA.24 Nine ordinary civilians were massacred, including nine-year-old Kathryn Eakin, who was cleaning the front windows of her parents’ shop.

Being European was the ultimate way of not being British. Lemass had set the tone in 1962 in an address to the EEC heads of state in Brussels: ‘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.’

Ireland was tiny – its population in 1971 was still a shade under three million, not much more than that of Paris. Even after a decade of modernization, it was still both relatively poor and highly dependent on the British economy. In 1973, Ireland’s GDP per capita was still less than two-thirds (64.2 per cent) of the EEC average.18 Ireland’s total exports were worth little more than €1 billion, and the economy had a balance of trade of minus €340 million. Moreover, 55 per cent of the total value of exports went to Great Britain or Northern Ireland. Food, drink and tobacco products accounted for over 43 per cent of total exports. Women made up just 27 per cent of the total employed workforce. The amount of new foreign direct investment in Ireland in 1972, the year before the country went into Europe, was the equivalent of €16 million euro. (Thirty-five years later, it was €30 billion.)

But in his sermon at McQuaid’s funeral, his successor as Archbishop, Dermot Ryan, acknowledged that perhaps ‘his statements of doctrine seemed insufficiently nuanced to rest easily on the consciences of his hearers’.34 He defended this inflexibility as a consequence of McQuaid’s saintly devotion to ‘absolutes’. Watching a very feeble, blind Eamon de Valera, still president, arrive at the cathedral for the Mass, I realized that the era of absolutes was fading.

Stagg’s widow Bridie wanted a private funeral. According to Garret FitzGerald, who was then the Irish minister for foreign affairs in a coalition government headed by Fine Gael’s Liam Cosgrave, she was ‘threatened by the IRA with being shot through the head if she pressed her view’.

By the time I graduated, after three years at UCD, the World Bank had, in 1978, recognized Ireland as one of the eighteen industrial market economies in the world. This did not mean that Ireland was particularly rich. By 1980, per capita income in Ireland was still the third lowest in the European Union, ahead only of Portugal and Greece. It was $3,027, compared to $6,656 in the US, $5,516 in Germany and $4,500 in the UK. But just being in this league at all was an amazing transformation. In twenty years, Ireland had gone from being an agrarian economy where cattle was king to one that could be understood as part of the international capitalist industrial order.

Underneath the carapace of egalitarianism, Irish society was rigorous in its policing of the boundaries between farmers and farm labourers, between ‘gutties’ and ‘good families’.

A month before the pope’s visit, on 7 August 1979, the IRA had what it would always regard as its best day. At Mullaghmore, on the Sligo coast, it murdered a seventy-nine-year-old man, a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, a fifteen-year-old schoolboy and an eighty-three-year-old woman. The ground for these executions (the word the IRA itself used) was that the old man, Louis Mountbatten, was a cousin of Queen Elizabeth. Later that day, at Warrenpoint, the IRA set off two massive 800-pound bombs, the first killing six British soldiers, the second killing a dozen more. Most of the dead were from the hated Parachute Regiment, which had inflicted the equally murderous violence of Bloody Sunday in Derry. The graffiti declared the triumph of revenge: ‘Thirteen dead but not forgotten / We got 18 and Mountbatten.’ They did not mention the schoolboys or the old woman.

The story of the future was to be that, while Irish firms would face increased competition as protectionism was dismantled, they would be more than compensated for any losses in the home market by their ability to export into Europe and beyond. The first part came true. The second didn’t. Bluntly, Irish business as a whole was not up to it. It turned out that ‘into Europe’ wasn’t so great a blessing after all. There was no great cohort of young, thrusting Irish entrepreneurs ready to take on the world.

But if you were shallow and insecure enough to measure your worth by the enormity of your expenditure and the conspicuousness of your consumption, you had a real problem. You had to go higher. And the only real notion of what an upper class might look like was the memory of the very class that de Valera and Lemass and all the other revolutionaries had destroyed, the old Protestant landowning Ascendancy. It is a great historical joke that just as Catholic nationalist Ireland is coming into its own, it is haunted by Haughey’s attempts to become an Ascendancy squire.

The painful contrast between JFK and de Valera in 1963 had raised this question, not as an abstract topic for discussion, but as a drama of embodiment. Dev, long and lean and old and dour, embodied Irish freedom. JFK, glowing and tanned and young and glamorous, embodied the dream of what that freedom might be for.

gang of property speculators that was systematically destroying Dublin. Haughey was funded in particular by John Byrne and Matt Gallagher.

There was something deliberately provocative in Haughey’s flaunting of his wealth, but also fiendishly clever. His money became a question of form (the way he spent it), not of substance (the way he got it).

Haughey’s salary was £3,500 a year. The wage bill for the staff at Abbeville alone was £30,000 a year.

The eight single-storey buildings known from their shape as the H-Blocks were, ironically, at the centre of ‘the most up-to-date and luxurious prison in Europe’. The complex had sophisticated training workshops and classrooms, a fine indoor sports hall, two all-weather sports pitches, a hospital and a dental clinic.

Brendan Hughes, the IRA commander in the H-Blocks, recalled the ‘shock to the system’ – ‘Here I was that morning being called “Mr Hughes” or “O/C” [officer in command], now being called “704 Hughes” and dumped in a cell.’2 What followed was a process of acceleration that no one really planned.

In and around the time of the Eileen Flynn case, when the nuns and the courts used the word ‘repugnant’ to describe her life in a consensual adult relationship, at least two boys in the county took their own lives as a result of violent abuse by Fortune.