Ireland Exposed

So contends Fintan O’Toole, in his aptly titled historical memoir, We Don’t Know Ourselves.

A longtime contributor to the Irish Times, O’Toole is one of the most articulate and best-informed writers working today, both on Ireland and modern British history.

We Don’t Know Ourselves is a sweeping, deeply personal narrative that intertwines the author’s life with Ireland’s transformation over the past six decades.

Born in 1958, O’Toole uses his experiences growing up in working-class Crumlin, one of the large exurbs that grew up around Dublin in the decades after the Second World War, to explore the broader social, political, and cultural upheavals that have reshaped Irish society from the mid-twentieth century to the present day.

The central theme of the book is Ireland’s paradoxical self-understanding.

The doublethink O’Toole discerns is particularly evident in his treatment of the Catholic Church, state censorship, sexual repression, and emigration. He describes how the church’s dominance shaped both personal lives and national policy, creating a culture of silence and shame around issues like contraception, abuse, and illegitimacy.

Throughout We Don’t Know Ourselves, O’Toole returns to the denial and fragmentation of the national psyche. He shows how public narratives often mask deep contradictions between modernisation and tradition, nationalism and globalisation, and morality and complicity.

For example, during the Celtic Tiger boom in the 1990s and 2000s, Ireland presented itself as a cosmopolitan, forward-looking nation. Yet this prosperity was built on shaky financial foundations and often ignored persistent social inequalities and moral compromises.

O’Toole also traces Ireland’s slow confrontation with its darker histories. He examines how scandals involving industrial schools, the Magdalene Laundries, and clerical sexual abuse forced a reckoning with long-suppressed truths.

We Don’t Know Ourselves argues that these revelations shattered myths about Irish innocence and virtue, compelling society to re-evaluate its institutions and values.

Despite its often grim subject matter, the book is not a tale of despair.

O’Toole highlights moments of progress and resistance – such as the legalisation of divorce, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and the referendums on marriage equality and abortion – which show that Irish society is capable of change.

Stylistically, We Don’t Know Ourselves blends first-person journalism and historical analysis with sharp wit and emotional depth. The prose is intimate yet expansive, offering a textured view of both personal memory and Irish experience.

While O’Toole covers a wide range of themes, two are particularly important to the present conjuncture.

One is the startling corruption that persisted at the highest levels of Irish government during the last three decades of Fianna Fáil’s political hegemony. This manifested in slightly different ways over the successive administrations of Charles Haughey, Albert Reynolds, and – after a three-year interlude under Fine Gael – Bertie Ahern.

The end of Ahern’s tenure roughly coincided with the opening of the 2008 financial crisis. In Ireland, the downturn saw the early stages of a decline in home prices that would finally result in the bottom dropping out of the tub in 2010.

This, in turn, contributed to a crisis in the Irish banking sector, which nearly caused the entire Irish economy to collapse.

The most significant consequence of this crisis was subjecting Ireland to the Troika’s demands for punishing debt service and eliminating any possibility that Fianna Fáil would ever regain the dominant position it had long held in Irish politics.

The result of this in contemporary political terms was the rise of Sinn Féin as a viable political movement in the Republic. The party had never been able to get much traction in the South, both because it was something of a one-trick pony and because of its connections to the atrocity-riddled modern history of the Irish Republican Army.

The fall of Fianna Fáil dealt a body blow to the cartel party system. Sinn Féin responded by transforming itself into a centre-left party focused on bread-and-butter issues beyond its enduring commitment to a unified Ireland.

While that latter process is mostly outside the remit of O’Toole’s book, his explanation of how it came about is thorough and compelling.

The second theme that resonates powerfully right now concerns Irish culture. According to O’Toole:

What, after all, was the special quality that had made Irish culture so rich? It was never a sacred hoard of precious inheritances that must be guarded from the depredations of change. It was, as far back as one could trace it, a constant set of negotiations in which whatever was valued had to be recast and reimagined in the light of new challenges – literacy arriving into an oral culture, Christianity embedding itself within paganism, Vikings bringing both new threats and new ideas like cities and money, English imposing itself on a Gaelic linguistic landscape, emigrants having to create hybrid identities in foreign cities. There was no Irish culture outside this constant process of translation and fusion, of preserving things by remaking them.

This is precisely the point that needed to be made, both about the status of Irish culture and about processes of cultural transformation in general. The neurotic obsessives who pursue ethnic or cultural “purity” tend to treat culture as an essence that could persist unchanged if defended with the appropriate vigour.

O’Toole destroys this specious account of Irishness, instead making the case for an understanding of culture that is supple, complex, and ever-changing.

It is not surprising that there should be an obsession with cultural purity in a country that has seen both devastating colonial domination and the formation of one of the most extensive diasporas in modern history. It is the great merit of We Don’t Know Ourselves to counteract this reactionary mindset, showing that Irish culture is the product of constant change.

This mode of perception is crucial in the current moment, during which Ireland is witnessing the growth of anti-immigrant sentiment based on the premise that an influx of foreigners constitutes a danger to Irish culture.

O’Toole’s argument aligns with the forceful pushback against this xenophobia, with counterdemonstrations in support of immigrant rights dwarfing the anti-immigrant gatherings.

Commenting on the anti-immigrant disturbances in Belfast in August 2024, Irish-language rappers Kneecap offered a particularly devastating critique of people coming up from Dublin to pile on.

“The ones with the Irish flags, they were all coming up from Dublin,” noted Mo Chara. “Where was this influx of people coming up from Dublin during the Troubles?”

“A lot of them down south are worried about the dilution of Irish culture,” Moglai Bop added. “But when there was no protection for the Irish language, there was no legislation, and we were out marching in the streets, I never saw any of them who came up for the latest protest in Belfast protesting for Irish language rights, something that was directly affecting the dilution of Irish culture.”

“It’s very ironic for Irish people to be worried about immigration, considering that we’re probably the biggest immigrants in the world,” Mo Chara concluded. “I think it’s very, very hypocritical.”

Here, the two rappers demonstrate their agreement with O’Toole. What he does with historical argument, Kneecap does in their musical practice.

Kneecap’s project is founded on an open attitude toward culture.

The band has done important work stripping the antiquarian veneer off the Irish language. If Gaelic is to survive, it cannot remain the language of poets, politicians, and the shrinking Irish-speaking regions of the country. It has to be the kind of language that one can use to order a pizza, chat in the bar, and perhaps even buy drugs.

Kneecap’s promotion of Irish is not meant to make Ireland a place that excludes. Instead, they project a vision of Ireland as an inclusive, multicultural state. The result will not dilute Irishness but enrich it with the creative synergy We Don’t Know Ourselves describes.

Fintan O’Toole’s book is a mirror for Ireland to scrutinize itself and discover a vibrancy and dynamism that otherwise might have been missed.