We Don’t Know Ourselves: a Personal history of Ireland Since 1958 by Fintan O’Toole, reviewed by Fiona Rintoul

Head of Zeus, £25

Review by Fiona Rintoul

In June 1963, US president John F Kennedy visited Ireland, his ancestral home. His sometimes sentimental posturing during the visit to what he called this “green and misty isle” and the people of Ireland’s response to him spoke volumes not just about the fledgling Republic of Ireland’s struggling economy and place in the world but about the collective Irish psyche of the time. The country both craved modernity and abhorred it.

“Kennedy’s allure was universal,” writes Fintan O’Toole in We Don’t Know Ourselves: a personal history of Ireland since 1958, “but in Ireland he was both a disguise and a mirror.”

Kennedy was Irish but not Irish. The president of Ireland, the elderly and pious Éamon de Valera, was proud, as a father might be, of “the young man who had come down from the sky” and in awe of this “star performer” who “knew tricks that we were too naïve, too excited, too grateful to see through”. Kennedy showed what an Irishman could become, but also what Ireland was not. Modern. Economically successful. Tanned and sexy. A lure for immigrants rather than a source of emigrants.

“If that guy was us, we were grand,” writes O’Toole in this clear-sighted chronicle of modern Ireland, which brilliantly blends memoir with political and social history. “It was not that simple, though. Kennedy was also way above us, and in this gap there was room for hysteria.”

This hysteria duly erupted at a garden party at de Valera’s official residence in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, where the US president was mobbed by the great and good of Irish society. They charged across the “miserably wet” lawn towards him, jostling the frail and distraught de Valera and ripping a bishop’s cape. “That tear in the bishop’s scarlet cape was a rent in the fabric of Irish society. A rising middle class, not knowing what to do with itself, was a force beyond control.”

Author Fintan O'Toole

In We Don’t Know Ourselves, O’Toole, a journalist and academic as well as an author, probes that tear, turning upon his native land the glinting scalpel he wielded in Heroic Failure and Three Years in Hell: the Brexit Chronicles to dissect the post-imperial psychosis in England that culminated in Brexit. He is unsparing but never cruel as he charts his own journey from altar boy to chronicler of sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church, alongside his country’s passage from occupying “a special place in the world as the exemplary Catholic nation” to becoming a modern European Union member state that has embraced a woman’s right to choose and gay marriage.

The personal clarifies the political. The struggle for nationhood and to step out from the shadow of a larger, more confident neighbour is perfectly encapsulated in the affirmation that O’Toole finds as a youngster in the manufactured Celtic rock band, Horslips: “They sounded to me, not just normal, but a revelation of my own normality.”

O’Toole’s life also illuminates universal themes of class and modernity. He was the first person in his family to go to university and earn a living by “the manipulation of symbols, not from cleaning offices or keeping order on buses or any of the things my family had done through the ages” – a working-class trajectory that has been repeated throughout the Western world. That shift in life experience and financial means inexorably brought with it a scrapping of old ways and beliefs, as Pope John II appeared to recognise during his 1979 visit to Ireland.

“The Pope did not say directly that Ireland’s faithfulness was linked to its relative poverty, that the country was much more religious than the rest of western Europe because it was less developed economically. But he strongly implied it in his warnings about the coming times.”

In Ireland, embracing modernity meant wrestling with uncomfortable truths. There was a reckoning, not just with the crimes of the Catholic Church, but with the societal hypocrisy that had made them possible. “Hypocrisy was the tribute realism paid to piety,” writes O’Toole. “This was the seed of destruction that was already present in 1968: the church was not the counterweight to our hypocrisy. It was the greatest hypocrite of all.”

There is a lot of anger in this book – though it is always controlled and leavened by humour. O’Toole is angry with the priests who abused his classmates, with the laws that prevented women obtaining contraception and forced unmarried mothers to give up their babies for adoption, with the “culture of deliberate unknowing” that ultimately seeped beyond the church into the banking system and the finances of the legendarily corrupt Taoiseach Charles Haughey.

There is anger with British duplicity in the north of Ireland over Bloody Sunday but also with the IRA’s solipsistic mythmaking, which reached its apotheosis in the Long Kesh hunger strike of 1981. For O’Toole, the “fusion of nationalist with Catholic martyrdom” in the aftermath of Bobby Sands’s death “was both repellent and utterly inevitable”. This harked back to “the two great subversive forces” within Ireland that were essentially being quashed when the country joined the EEC and became a part of the democratic and developed world: “its own traditions of violence and martyrdom; and the continuing confusion of citizenship with Catholicism”.

This confusion perhaps came to an end with the 2018 abortion referendum, when Ireland voted by two to one to remove the ban on abortion that had been placed in the constitution in 1983 – a result that O’Toole describes as “exhilarating”. Despite the demise of the Celtic Tiger economy and the great crash of 2008, modernity had won.

Told in beautiful, crisp prose and enlivened by anecdotes from the front line, We Don’t Know Ourselves is the story of that victory – with all its ups and downs. Balanced and fearless, it is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand modern Ireland – or thinks that they already do. For in 21st-century Ireland, there are few certainties. It is “an island capable of living with uncertainties, mysteries and doubts without reaching after fictional certitudes”.