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

by Fintan O'Toole

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.

@fotoole's ability to illuminate history that I lived through and thought I understood is astonishing.

After O’Malley’s expulsion, Haughey’s sidekick and press secretary P. J. Mara told political correspondents: ‘There will be no more nibbling at my leader’s bum.’ He added the Italian fascist slogan: ‘Uno duce, una voce.’

If the same incidents are presented as scandalous and sulphurous, then that is what they are. Because we didn’t know what to think, the message must lie in the medium. Gay Byrne, as only he could, gave permission for a culture of fixes and favours and drinking and debauchery, to be understood as colourful rather than as dark.

Pádraig Flynn, recently returned from a visit to the Crazy Horse cabaret in Paris (‘the best nude show in the universe’), paid for by Haughey’s former press handler Frank Dunlop, now a lobbyist, took a hand in the campaign.16 Flynn went on the radio to accuse Robinson of faking her commitment to her own family, ‘changing her image to suit the fashion of the time and having a new found interest in the family… none of us who knew Mary Robinson well in previous incarnations ever heard her claiming to be the great wife and mother.’

This, I think, was what really changed: ordinary Catholics realized that, when it came to lived morality, they were way ahead of their teachers. The flock was much more sophisticated than the pastors.

Goodman’s companies (though not Goodman personally) engaged in a series of systematic frauds: attaching bogus EU stamps to meat, stealing vast quantities of beef that the EU had purchased from farmers to keep prices high and selling it to its own commercial customers in Britain, paying its workers large parts of their wages off the books and in cash so as to avoid tax.

Formulae of words were being written down by officials on what the Irish referred to as non-paper and the British called angel paper – documents that had no status, that could be disowned or made to disappear but that occupied the liminal zone where possibilities might germinate.3 Hume was the moral and intellectual driving force.

Once Protestant and British identity in Northern Ireland was accepted as a genuine reality, and not a mere figment of false consciousness, it became increasingly obvious that violence would serve merely to harden that identity.

What, though, did any of this have to do with the United States? Essentially, America’s role was to supply the drama. Clinton instinctively understood that his own charisma, his willingness to pay attention, lifted local deal-making into a stratosphere of global importance. It addressed one of the big problems of peace – how do you come down from the high of violence?

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.

If the armed struggle was an attempt to bring about a United Ireland by force, it had failed completely. The constitutional situation, from a British point of view, was unchanged by a quarter of a century of suffering and death. In fact, from the IRA’s point of view, it was now appreciably worse because the Irish state, as part of the deal, had given up its territorial claim to Northern Ireland and replaced it with an aspiration to unite ‘in friendship and harmony’, the people who share the island. The veteran nationalist politician Seamus Mallon called the 1998 peace talks ‘Sunningdale for slow learners’13 but it was best for everyone else to avoid such blunt truth-telling.

But from the mid-1980s, the Industrial Development Authority developed a more sophisticated strategy of trying, not so much to attract this or that company, as to build clusters of world-leading companies, most of them American, in these three fields: information technology, pharmaceuticals and medical devices.

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.

There was no Irish equivalent of, for example, South Korea’s Samsung and no imaginable native political and industrial culture from which such an enterprise might emerge. The Irish Great Leap Forward was powered almost entirely from without. The template of Ireland’s development was not organic expansion – it was seduction.

Its art of attraction was based on its people, the young and well-educated workforce it could provide, and on its politics: the Republic, for all the dramas of the 1980s, had a strong cross-party consensus on the importance of keeping the multinationals happy. But the honey coating was the corporate tax rate that settled, in the mid-1990s, at 12.5 per cent.

The dominant structure of thought and feeling, the fusion of nationalism and religion that gained hegemony through the alliance of Fianna Fáil and the Catholic Church, was falling down. It was a centre that could no longer hold. But on the other side, it could not merely be replaced by a new monolith. This impossibility was rooted in two processes that changed Ireland radically in the late 1990s.

One of them was the reversal of the thing I had always known, the thing that had loomed so large at the time I was born that it had forced change on a brutally conservative system: mass emigration.

The other imperative driving the need for a new kind of identity was the possibility of a solution to the Troubles.

They opened a place in Irishness for the diasporas that were, in many ways, the truest products of its history. It brought home the reality that had been obscured in the idea of emigration as tragedy and shame: we are a hyphenated people.

The then minister for education, Brian Lenihan, visited Artane in 1967. When he was about to leave, a number of the boys had assembled on the school steps behind the brothers. One of them, Anthony Burke, stepped forward. He said to Lenihan: ‘They beat us every day. Stop them beating us.’ Lenihan turned to his chauffeur and said: ‘Get me out of this fucking place.’

Flanagan went on in 1947 to compare the system both to slavery and Nazism, describing the industrial schools as places ‘where little children become a great army of child slavery in workshops, making money for the institutions that give them a little food, a little clothing, very little recreation and a doubtful education’.

Fianna Fáil, even though Bertie Ahern did issue a formal state apology, would ensure that the orders were protected from the financial consequences of their depredations. But this new order of knowledge – this is what happened to me – could not be undone. The consignment of lived experience to the margins of official reality had been crucial to the culture.

Ahern ensured, also in 2002, that the religious orders who had run the industrial schools would be effectively indemnified from the cost of claims by their victims. He made an agreement with eighteen religious congregations that, in return for some token payments, the state would pay all those costs. By 2015, the state had paid out €1.5 billion to settle claims. The religious orders had stumped up €192 million.

This idea of Ireland as a liminal space, between one continent and another, its proximity to continental Europe a mere detail, was, of course, highly political. It was intended to identify Ireland as an outpost of American values at the physical and political margin of European ideals.

Much of what happened in the 1990s was simply that Ireland, integrated into the European single market, caught up with the living standards of the region it belongs to – western Europe – and got to where it should have been all along. The energy unleashed by this process, combined with the advantages of not being weighed down by an old heavy industrial base, allowed Ireland (temporarily) to outperform those European neighbours.

In essence, the real boom lasted from 1995 until 2001. What made it real were two tangible forces: sharp rises in output per worker (productivity) and in manufacturing exports. Both of these forces began to wind down in the new millennium.

What made the real end of the Celtic Tiger after 2001 disastrous, however, was the decision of the Fianna Fáil-led government to replace one kind of growth with another. Ireland had become prosperous because its workers were unusually productive and because its economy was exporting stuff that people wanted to buy. The government decided that it would stay prosperous by going for what the National Competitiveness Council would later summarize as ‘growth derived from asset price inflation, fuelled by a combination of low interest rates, reckless lending and speculation’.

The disintegration of the Celtic Tiger coincided with the final collapse of the Catholic Ireland. 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.

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 specific conceptual error was to confuse liquidity with insolvency.

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.

On the morning of that referendum result in 2015, it had struck me that ‘We had a furtive, anxious hidden self of optimism and decency, a self long clouded by hypocrisy and abstraction and held in check by fear. This Ireland [has] stopped being afraid of itself. Paranoia and pessimism lost out big time to the confident, hopeful, self-belief that Irish people have hidden from themselves for too long.’