Journalist and author Fintan O’Toole blends a history of modern Ireland with memories of his own life, which began in 1958 when he was born in Dublin.
He starts by pointing out that after the Irish Civil War ended in 1923, two virtually identical nationalist political parties emerged:
Both parties were fervently Catholic, deeply respectful of the right of the church hierarchy to make binding rulings on all questions of morality, especially those relating to reproduction and sexuality. Both claimed as a priority the revival of the Irish language as the vernacular of the people – and both equally did nothing to stop the death of Irish-speaking communities…. Both saw the Irish economy as essentially agrarian and Irish society as properly rural. Both insisted that partition was a great sin and that the lost six counties [today’s Northern Ireland] must be restored to make Ireland whole again. Neither did very much thinking about how this might happen.”
Thus, he argues, Ireland “emerged into the world of the postwar boom as a backwater and an irrelevance.” Nevertheless, Ireland became remarkably stable. But, he notes, in order to sustain that stability, large numbers of the population had to emigrate, “for otherwise the sheer weight of their discontented numbers would drag it down.” The Ireland that remained in place “was almost suffocatingly coherent and fixed: Catholic, nationalist, rural.” It was isolated and shielded from “the unsavoury influence of the outside world.” Moreover, the church-dominated school system, he contends, “had left the Irish among the worst-educated people in the western world.”
O’Toole tells many anecdotes about growing up in that atmosphere, and although he often contrasts his experiences to what the Irish in America went through, my Irish Catholic childhood in Chicago sounds very similar to O’Toole’s.
There were some unexpected sources of that commonality. For example, O’Toole writes, when Ireland finally got its own television station in 1961, more than half the programs were imported from America. Thus both Irish and American kids were exposed to and influenced by the Cisco Kid, Donna Reed, Mister Ed and Bat Masterson. When John F. Kennedy was elected US President, the Irish President Éamon de Valera hailed Kennedy as a representative of Ireland, calling him “a distinguished son of our race.”
Eamon de Valera and John F. Kennedy by Noel Montayne, National Library of Ireland
But Ireland was stagnating, which contributed to the large numbers of people leaving. Even before 1958, O’Toole writes, “almost everyone except de Valera knew that the dream of frugal self-sufficiency was over. Unless things changed, there would be no national self, sufficient or otherwise.”
In May, 1957, Ken Whitaker, Secretary of the Department of Finance, began – in his own spare time – to map out a document advocating change and outlining the steps needed to effectuate it. A year later, a full draft of his 250-page document, “Economic Development,” was printed and circulated among the ruling elite. Known as “the Grey Book,” it proposed steps for Irish industrialization and job creation, the welcoming of foreign participation in development, importing of skilled workers, and entrance into the global economy. Most importantly, it received de Valera’s blessing.
The aim of Whitaker’s book, O’Toole clarifies, was “not to destroy the Catholic nationalist state, but to keep it afloat.” The economic ramparts could come down, O’Toole writes, but no one in government was about to challenge the hegemony of the Church. This was the great gamble, O’Toole observes: “everything would change economically but everything would stay the same culturally.” He adds: “Along with 60,000 other children born in Ireland in 1958, I was to be the tabula rasa on which this great experiment would be conducted.”
Alas, it seemed the harbingers of doom had a point: letting in the outside world, even just for business purposes, opened a lot of doors the Church would have preferred remained shut.
Letting in the Outside World: Pharma hub: Ringaskiddy from the air, showing (from bottom) Biomarin, Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson Biologics and Hovione via Independent Ireland online
Two themes dominate most of the book. First, the Irish had a remarkable capacity to entertain simultaneously two contradictory perceptions of reality. He writes about how in Ireland there developed a system of “two parallel universes” – one in what was supposed to be true and in which people spoke to each other as if it were true, and a second which everyone knew was actually true but seldom if ever acknowledged. There was a horrified public-facing reaction to abortion, yet it was common and secretly condoned to go to England for such a procedure. There was the myth of the sanctity of priests, and there was the reality of a great deal of child abuse committed by the clergy. There were strictures against masturbation, and then there was what every young boy actually did. But maintaining the fictional universe was critically important to those who lived in it.
My own mother, American-born but a first-generation Irish Catholic, would tolerate no holes poked in the fabric of her rosy views of Catholic doctrine and of the clergy who promulgated it. Yet she was a very intelligent woman and a voracious consumer of the news. I always marveled at how she managed the compartmentalization of dual realities with such fluidity and ease.
Me kissing the Blarney Stone in Ireland, supposed to endow the kisser with the “gift of the gab” which most Irish already have without kissing the stone
The Irish are known as such good story-tellers in part because this is what they have always had to be!
The second dominating theme was the overwhelming influence of the Catholic Church in both political and personal life. But that influence dissipated precipitously in a single generation. The cause was a combination of factors including the exposure of “hideous abuse of children in the industrial school system”; revelations about the cover-up of sexual clerical abuse generally; diminishing appeal of priesthood; and the invasion of permissive attitudes through television and other modern media. O’Toole notes that since the Irish had been taught to identify morality with religion, “there was no deeply rooted civic morality to take its place.”
From 2015 article in the Irish Mirror entitled “Catholic churches facing mass exodus as lack of priests and falling attendances threaten closures”
O’Toole writes cogently about the rise and fall of the “Celtic Tiger,” as Ireland’s meteoric economic rise in the 1990s, fueled by the influx of big Pharma and high tech manufacturing, gave way to a collapse in the real estate market in the 2000s.
This is an excellently written book about a fascinating corner of the world. Both readers of Irish descent and non-Irish will find it vastly entertaining and informative.
Rating: 4/5
Published in the U.S. by Liveright, 2022
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