We Don't Know Ourselves by Fintan O'Toole
Witty, incisive, educational, it's obvious why this book has been so highly praised.
Before I start this review, a quick PSA to say that I’m busy on both Wednesday and Thursday this week so my next post will be next Sunday.
Over the past year, I've been trying to address the gaps in my knowledge of history: I only studied it to the age of 15, so those holes are pretty extensive. This book was a no-brainer as I find Fintan O'Toole's columns in the Irish Times educational and enlightening, and I wanted to read his take on modern Irish history. The book has been widely praised and was the An Post Book of the year in 2021, and included in the New York Times list of the 10 best books of the year in 2022.
Starting in 1958, the year of O'Toole's birth, the early chapters follow a pattern. The author recalls an incident of his personal history, for example riding Ireland's first escalator in 1963 (“the effortlessness had the thrill of sin”). He then links the story to a pertinent event in Irish history, most of which are specifically Irish. There's a chapter on bungalows, for instance, which are probably the most common form of residence in rural Ireland.
You might think that this involvement of personal history in the story of a country wouldn't work, but O'Toole and his family have connections to a number of significant figures and the personal insights work to illuminate the state's history. His father, a bus driver, meets Mohammad Ali when the boxer is on a training run in Ireland; the young Fintan serves as alter boy at a mass presided over by the all-powerful Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid - more on him in a moment. O'Toole grows up near to the drug dealers who introduced heroin to Ireland and he gets a lift from the reckless, risk-loving Bishop Eamon Casey, famous for being at the centre of Ireland's first major clerical scandal. If all these links sound unlikely to you, they'll be plausible for anyone who has grown up in a small country where everyone knows everyone else and the famed six degrees of separation can be reduced to three or four.
O'Toole's analysis of current affairs is always worth reading and here he applies his skills to parse the contradictions in Irish culture, a world of “known unknowns”, where people both do and don't acknowledge what's right in front of their faces. For instance, he points out that while people commonly say they have no knowledge of the Magdalene laundries - oppressive 'reform' institutions for unmarried mothers and 'fallen' women - the laundries in Dublin, Cork and Galway were all in prominent city-centre locations (and it's not mentioned in the book, but they were employed by many major, reputable businesses). Another example is the situation whereby Irish people voted in a referendum in 1983 to amend the constitution so that an unborn child had rights equal with the mother as a protection against abortion being introduced to the country...and then voted in another referendum that women should receive information on how to arrange an abortion abroad. So, Ireland could maintain its status as an abortion-free country, ignoring the fact that at least 6,000 women were travelling overseas for an abortion each year. (That figure comes from UK abortion clinics who recorded the addresses given by women; it's thought that some didn't give an Irish address, so the true figure may be even higher.) Another “known unknown” was Charlie Haughey, Taoiseach for most of the eighties, proclaiming his belief in the sanctity of marriage before a referendum on legislation to introduce divorce. At the same time, his long-term mistress was writing a weekly gossip column about her affair with 'Sweetie' in the Sunday newspaper with the highest circulation in the country. I could go on, but I think you get the picture.
O'Toole also looks at the symbiosis between the Catholic church and Ireland's must successful political party, Fianna Fail. These institutions are represented by the two men who dominate this book, Archbishop McQuaid and Charlie Haughey. The archbishop seems to have been everywhere in the fifties and sixties. As one of the heads of an institution that wasn't merely spiritual but also ran essential Irish services like hospitals and schools, he had an outsized influence on the state. One of the reasons that Ireland doesn't have an equivalent to the National Health Service is that McQuaid nixed a plan to provide universal healthcare for mothers and babies, believing it would encourage immorality. McQuaid's power extended further into the cultural realm, too. As O'Toole puts it, “Ireland didn't have censorship laws. It didn't need to”. TV producers lived in fear of a call from the archbishop or his representatives. McQuaid was also a hypocrite. As the same time as he was trying to suppress any discussion of sex in the culture, he was also moving child-abusing priests from one parish to another to prevent their crimes becoming known too widely (another known unknown).
Then there's Haughey, who crops up everywhere in the seventies, eighties and nineties. Here he is amidst the chief mourners of a person he didn't know but who was considered important; now on trial on charges of illegally importing arms to support the IRA in Northern Ireland (he was acquitted); then appearing on TV in the early eighties to tell the nation that “we are living beyond our means”, something he knew plenty about given that he was at the time running up an overdraft worth £1.1 million. (For comparison, my mother's salary at that time amounted to £1 per hour, and she paid tax of over 60% on that). Finally, he appears at a tribunal investigating corrupt payments to politicians, shrunken and conceding nothing, although it's estimated that he received over £8 million in kickbacks throughout his career.
O'Toole looks at in-depth at the long-term consequences of the culture of secrecy and hypocrisy that McQuaid, Haughey and all their assistants encouraged to flourish. In the church, a seemingly never-ending stream of scandals in the nineties and naughties destroyed a lot of the church's power, but not all of it: the church still controls the vast majority of primary and secondary schools, and still has involvement in some hospitals. While Irish society has modernised at speed, we're still dealing with the consequences of those scandals today. In politics, Haughey presided over a corrupt system whose culture continued even after he left, and which O'Toole links to the banking collapse of 2008/09.
We Don't Know Ourselves is a brilliant book, by turns incisive, witty, and surprising, packed with memorable anecdotes and rigorous analysis. It's also easy to read. If I were going to find fault with it - and this is really nitpicking - I would say that I preferred the structure of the earlier chapters where each chapter is structured around one year. As the story progresses, it becomes a bit more episodic, and there is slightly less personal history as the narrative focuses more closely on the Catholic Church and Fianna Fail. I missed some of the whimsical moments recorded earlier in the book (there's a chapter on the country's love for country and western music). However, I think it's the perfect book for anyone who wants to learn about modern Irish history and culture.
What I've been reading this week
As predicted, I finished All That it Ever Meant by Blessing Musariri. I didn't feel very connected to the characters early on in this story, but it all comes together in the final third of the book, and it's beautifully written and moving. The ending is so good that I found myself thinking it was brilliant and that I could fully see why the book had received the accolades it did. I'm hoping to post a review on this one on Instagram later on this week.
The weather has been perfect here for the last two days, and today was just like summer, so I treated myself to The Summer Girl by Elle Kennedy. This is the third in her series on the fictitious resort of Avalon Bay. Cassie has returned to Avalon Bay, the town she grew up in, for one final summer, and she's determined to finally have a summer fling. She meets Tate in inauspicious circumstances (he's getting dumped while she's hidden by a sand dune and unable to escape). However, they soon become friends and then something more.
I like the Avalon Bay series in general, but I particularly loved this book. Cassie is a particularly endearing character, with a tendency to babble at inopportune moments and a sometimes quirky way of looking at the world (sample line: “The tall shadow lifts a hand and drags it through his hair. Either that, or he's petting a tiny cat that's sitting atop his head.”). There's also an adorable pair of six-year-olds, a stoned salesperson who names the turtles in his shop after celebrities, and the welcome return of characters from the earlier books. I'll also be writing about this one for Instagram.
I also caught up on my Vilette listen-along. I’m still undecided about Lucy’s character. This a chapter that the Audrey guide describes as a make-or-break chapter, in which the reader discovers that Lucy has been concealing some information. Some people lose sympathy with her at this point when they discover just how unreliable she is as a narrator. That has never bothered me, but what does frustrate me is something else first revealed in this chapter, which is Lucy’s tendency to make life more difficult for herself than it needs to be. The previous chapter details her struggles and loneliness when she spends the summer break by herself totally friendless… and in the next chapter, you discover that she could have reached out to some friends, and chose not to do so! And even while I was indignent all over again with her for this failing (it really annoyed me the last time I read Vilette, too), she was distancing herself mentally from those friends by saying they weren’t soul mates, effectively. Similarly, she doesn’t really like teaching and doesn’t earn a lot doing it, but when later offered the opportunity to be a ladies’ companion to a young girl whom she likes at three times the salary, she turns the offer down, explaining it to the reader by saying she prefers to keep her independence. (Surely she could secure more of that vaunted independence by earning a higher salary and saving as much as possible?) Having said that, the author has a specific reason for maintaining her role as a teacher, which will be revealed in due course.
Next up is That They May face the Rising Sun by John McGahern, which will be a re-read for me. This has just been adapted as a film, and I wanted to remind myself of the book. It follows the year in a life in a rural Irish community, and it's my favourite of his works.
Have a lovely week. I’ll be back next Sunday with some more nonfiction in the form of The Divided Self by RD Laing.