An unflinching look at Ireland and its capacity to “know and not know” at the same time, this book explores colonization, famine, British occupation and rule, entry into the European Union, and Ireland’s fascination with America. The most challenging aspect of this duality is how the nation both knew and turned a blind eye to rampant corruption, historical clerical abuse, indentured servitude, industrial schools, and the infamous Magdeline Laundries. This is juxtaposed on the recent changes to divorce law, equal marriage, and abortion reform. - Helen

Irish journalist Fintan O'Toole takes the Billy Joel approach to the history of his nation by starting with the year of his birth. In 1958, when O'Toole was born, the republic was lead by conservative veterans of the Irish war for independence who prioritized cultural causes over all else. The even more conservative Catholic church leaders aimed to make Ireland the model of their form of Christianity. As a result, Ireland was an economically depressed and isolated nation among the most impoverished in all of Europe facing a crisis of massive emigration.

Coincidentally, the Irish government initiated plans for modernizing Ireland in 1958. Over the course of O'Toole's life the country has gone through remarkable change that's seen the fall of solid institutions and the people of Ireland voting to legalize abortion and same sex marriage. Part of the change comes from looking to the United States, makers of Western films the Irish saw themselves in leading to the popularity of Country music. The presidency of John F. Kennedy and his visit to Ireland also stirred a feeling of Irish pride. American investment in tech companies also propped up the success of the Celtic Tiger economy and the inevitable crash of 2008. Looking to Europe also helped as Ireland worked their way through the process of joining what would become the European Union.

But the biggest change is in the Irish people themselves. One of O'Toole's recurring themes is the unwillingness to talk about the rot in the system that everyone knew was there. In politics, the fantastically corrupt taoiseach Charles Haughey's governed through the 1980s and into the early 90s before scandals finally damaged his party. The Church would be rocked by learning of the secret families of famed bishops, the abuse and incarceration of children in Christian Brothers Schools and Magdalene Laundries, and worst of all the hierarchy turning a blind eye to priests' sexual abuse of children. The Troubles broke out in Northern Ireland in 1968 and endured for 30 years adding a daily toll of violence to Irish life. For generations a united Ireland was the only officially acceptable solution, but decades of violence changed the mind of people to support the peace agreement of 1998 that allows for a gradual reunification if the people of Northern Ireland chose it.

O'Toole observed many of the events he describes in the book from afar as a child and young adult (sometimes just watching on TV). But as he becomes a journalist he's often in the thick of things and is a first person witness to the historical changes in Ireland. While not an autobiography, O'Toole uses his personal experience to enhance the history. For example, he talks about how his family and community felt in 1972 that the Irish republic wouldn't inevitably have to fight in a war in the North, which thankfully didn't come to pass. They also thought suspension of the unionist government in Stormont that year meant the Troubles were over, which unfortunately also proved to be false. All told it makes for a fascinating and detailed history of modern Ireland. ( )

A rather wonderful history of modern Ireland seemingly effortlessly linking O’Toole’s personal experiences to a broadly chronological political, cultural and historical description of Ireland from about 1958 (perhaps an arbitrary date, but O’Toole’s year of birth). It provides a great mix of personal history, yarns and historical analysis, with the well chosen anecdotes lifting it beyond dry narrative history to a well told tale. I was reminded of Annie Ernaux’s The Years, although this is much more relatable to a British reader, and reverses Ernaux’s impersonality into something much more engaging.
I’ve been reading quite a few books by Irish authors over the past few years and this is book is to supplement my understanding. Although I have read a history of Ireland from the Ice Age, I still need to go back and read about the Home Rule movement and civil war.

The Bungalow Bliss chapter reminded me of the house that my parents had built in the early 1970’s which was personalised with Yorkshire stone cladding around the doorway and a long Yorkshire stone fireplace taking up about half the lounge wall. Vernacular houses in our area had traditionally been whitewashed local stone cottages, with thatched, later slate, roofs, very like those described by O’Toole. ( )

An unusual ‘memoir’ in that Fintan O’Toole produces a memoir of Ireland and its issues over the period of his lifetime. There are bits of himself in there, but he realises that the significant stuff isn’t about him; it’s about what went on whilst he’s been around, some of which he had some involvement in, or of which he had some particular view (in an observational sense) and thus has some insight, which adds the personal dimension to it. So he’s both an observer and, incidentally, a participant. No chest-thumping here. No ego. Quite a bit of good reportage written with the benefit of time providing a more complete context. The writing is elegant… One of those books that’s worth reading for the pleasure of reading, not just for the benefit of the knowledge offered. ( )

Thorough history of 20th and 21st century Ireland, as both memoir and critical essays. The government, politics, Catholic Church, the Troubles, abortion, child abuse, financial situations and arrangements, myths and illusions, etc. ( )

This is a wonderful book. It examines the history of Ireland for the last 50 years, a period of massive economic and social change. The story is fascinating in itself, and also has wider ramifications. All nations tell themselves stories, and this book examines how those stories have affected one country. The book is also a terrific read -- I kept saying to myself "just one more chapter". Fully deserves all the critical praise that has been heaped on it. ( )

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

(JAB) ( )

A history of Ireland since 1958, the year of his birth. O Toole uses personal and family history, along with events in the Catholic Church, government, moral issues to tell of the changes in Ireland. Well written and of particular interest to me (only 4 years older and with Irish parents). ( )

After finishing We Don't Know Ourselves, I looked up the current history syllabus for the Leaving Cert (the state exam taken at the end of secondary education in Ireland). While it has changed in some ways from when I sat the exam in the '00s, the chronological terminus for the course seems roughly the same: you end the course with "Politics and society in Northern Ireland, 1949-1993" and "Government, economy and society in the Republic of Ireland, 1949-1989."

This boundary meant that there's a chunk of the history of the late 80s and early 90s I was very hazy about: events that happened too recently to have made it onto the history syllabus, but that had happened long enough ago I had only the haziest and most partial memories of them. As a small child, I remember pieces on the Six-One News about Ansbacher Cayman and the Beef Tribunals and Brown Envelopes and on and on, and having no idea what any of them meant or why they were such a big deal.

What I'm trying to say here is that reading the first few chapters of We Don't Know Ourselves, covering the 50s-70s filled me with all the old, expected anger—wildly misguided social and economic policies that forced emigration and separation on so many families, including mine; the industrial schools and the Magdalene Laundries; a photo of Dev literally genuflecting to kiss the ring of the odious John Charles McQuaid—I wasn't expecting to be as blindsided as I was during the chapters about my historical blindspot of the late 80s and early 90s.

Repeatedly as I was reading I felt the urge to call my parents and ask them "Did you truly know about all of this as it was happening? Were you aware? Were you talking about this with other people? What did people think about the hypocrisy and the corruption and the blatant fucking effrontery of it all?" It was revolting. Americans right now are—rightfully!—agog about George Santos and his sociopathic grifting, but we had an actual head of government who preached conservative Catholic morality and fiscal self-sacrifice while fucking the wife of a Supreme Court Justice and stealing money from the fund collected to pay for one of his closest friend's life-saving liver transplant.

Read that sentence back to yourself: what! the! fuck!

(We Don't Know Ourselves is an excellent argument, by the way, for revising the Leaving Cert History curriculum to go through at least the collapse of the boom. Teenagers today need to have a basic grasp of the sheer madness of the '00s/early '10s, because it's so fundamental to understanding the Ireland of the '20s and beyond. There's a good reason why O'Toole titles his chapter about the economic collapse as "Jesus Fucking Hell and God".)

Fintan O'Toole isn't aiming to write a comprehensive history of modern Ireland, so there is plenty that's left out or only touched on in passing. There are times when he labours a bit too much to fit everything into his organising theme of national knowing/willing unknowing, and I'm not sure it's such an exceptionally Irish thing as he presents it here. But these are relatively small quibbles, and the book as a whole is worth reading even if just for the cold and righteous anger with which O'Toole dissects the national culture of silence about child abuse and the sucking void of narcissistic hypocrisy that was Charles J. Haughey. ( )

The bits that are actually personal are few and far between and O'Toole gets very repetitive by the end. ( )

A combination of history and memoir that works. A bit long for my interest in the subject, but the book is good. ( )