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

by Fintan O'Toole

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.

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

‘most countries send out oil, iron, steel or gold, some others crops, but Ireland has only one export and that is people’.

That was the dynamic of violence on both sides – the belief that it was inevitable made it inevitable. Violence, that was supposed to be an expression of power, had actually become an expression of powerlessness.