Church and state
CORMAC Ó GRÁDA recommends a biographical, idiosyncratic history of 20th-century Ireland from one of the nation’s leading writers and critics
Prominent Irish intellectual Fintan O’Toole’s latest book merges cameos from a self-proclaimed “boring” life with events, people and changes in Ireland at large over the past six decades. In 2013, the Royal Irish Academy commissioned O’Toole to write A History of Ireland in 100 Objects, and We Don’t Know Ourselves has a similar feel, although here the past is painted mainly through villains, victims, eccentrics and scandals.
O’Toole uses these cameos as metaphors. He remarks, for instance, that the church in which he served mass in his youth has become part of “Ireland’s religious rustbelt”, and recalls earnestly singing a rebel song at a family gathering around the time of Bloody Sunday in 1972, and shouting “Up the IRA” at Taoiseach Jack Lynch a few months later, reflecting the broader impact of that atrocity at the time. A disturbing story about O’Toole’s father’s “most private self, the marks on his skull and inside his head” is about something much bigger: an oppressive regime of industrial schools, mother and baby homes, and mental hospitals.
Growing up in Crumlin, a working-class suburb of Dublin, during the 1960s, O’Toole was one of five children of a bus conductor and a part-time cleaner. Back in 1937, when playwright Brendan Behan’s family left the inner city to move to Crumlin, his father had tearfully asked his wife: “Kits, Kits, did we really have to leave Russell Street for this godforsaken place?”
By O’Toole’s youth, Crumlin had become a community of sorts, disadvantaged but rich in social capital. It was not that different from where one of his villains, long-serving and controversial politician Charles Haughey, grew up on Dublin’s north side. O’Toole’s mild weakness for being “prolier than thou” (in the parlance of literary critic Terry Eagleton) leads him to caricature where he grew up as “Comanche country”.
But O’Toole has travelled far from there. There are hilarious stories of a young Fintan encountering inspirational musical genius Seán Ó Riada herding a neighbour’s stray litter of piglets into their sty in west Cork; of being offered a lift in the 1980s by Bishop Eamonn Casey of Galway, whose driving terrified him, and whose affair with an American woman in the 1970s came to light much later; and of his time in University College Dublin in the 1970s with a philosophy professor and future archbishop of Dublin.
Individuals subjected to the O’Toole treatment, long familiar to readers of The Irish Times, range from anachronistic clergymen and politicians in the 1950s and 1960s to businessmen and politicians of a later era eviscerated as charlatans, hypocrites or criminals. On a more sober note, O’Toole over-credits Ken Whitaker’s 1958 policy document Economic Development with revolutionising the economy by leading to the arrival of US multinationals, but rather marginalises the role of the EU and the Single European Act. He also underestimates the extent of improvements in education and the health service. Brexit doesn’t feature at all.
In O’Toole’s view, the Irish became truly modern when voters, including his father, supported same-sex marriage in a referendum in 2015, making Ireland the first country to do so. The story ends three years later with an end to the constitutional ban on abortion. Even before these defining moments, O’Toole had come to realise that he “had been quite wrong about stability in Ireland, or at least that what I had been right about had now changed beyond recognition”. Only retrospectively could he detect in the speeches of Pope John Paul II during his 1979 visit an “apprehension not so obvious at the time” that peak obedience to the church was in the past.
For over three decades, O’Toole has highlighted the Republic’s failures, hypocrisies and delusions. Here, however, the bottom line is celebratory: “We ended up, not great, maybe not even especially good, but better than either – not so bad.”