Fintan O'Toole > Quotes

“This may be the last stage of imperialism–having appropriated everything else from its colonies, the dead empire appropriates the pain of those it has oppressed.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“Why, then, were there no photographs of Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl holding hands at the Brandenburg Gate to match the pictures of Kohl and François Mitterrand at Verdun in 1984? Because Thatcher literally carried in her handbag maps showing German expansion under the Nazis. This was a mental cartography that English conservatism could not transcend – the map of a Europe that may no longer exist in reality but within which its imagination remains imprisoned. ‘Europe,’ Barnett writes, ‘moved on from the Second World War and Britain didn’t.’ One might go so far as to say that England never got over winning the war.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“Even as a game of chance, however, Brexit is especially odd. It is a surreal casino in which the high-rollers are playing for pennies at the blackjack tables while the plebs are stuffing their life savings into the slot machines. For those who can afford risk, there is very little on the table; for those who cannot, entire livelihoods are at stake. The backbench anti-Brexit Tory MP Anna Soubry rose to her feet in the Commons in July 2018, eyed her Brexiteer colleagues and let fly: ‘Nobody voted to be poorer, and nobody voted Leave on the basis that somebody with a gold-plated pension and inherited wealth would take their jobs away from them.’ But if that’s not what people voted for, it is emphatically what they got: if the British army on the Western Front were lions led by donkeys, Brexit is those who feel they have nothing to lose led by those who will lose nothing either way.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“His second expedition in 1845 was deeply Brexitlike. As Barczewski explains, it was undertaken in a spirit of blithe optimism: ‘Nothing could be simpler. But the plan ignored the fact that 500 miles (800 km) of the voyage were unmapped, meaning that the actual distance that a ship needed to travel might prove much longer as it picked its way through ice and the Arctic archipelago. This had not mattered in the imaginations of the journey’s planners.’4 If this sounds awfully familiar to anyone who has watched the course of Brexit’s voyage from ‘nothing could be simpler’ to getting lost in unmapped wastelands, it may be because the same attitudes have been at work.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“In a bitter paradox, Ireland was an agrarian economy that was actually not much good at producing food.”
― Fintan O'Toole, We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

“The teaching of Irish was prioritized at both primary and secondary levels, but the attempts to revive it as the national vernacular had failed so badly that the self-mocking joke was that most Irish people were illiterate in two languages.”
― Fintan O'Toole, We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

“This desire to experience the vicarious thrills of humiliation is possible only in a country that did not know what national humiliation is really like. But the problem with wish-fulfilment is that your wishes might end up being fulfilled. In the Brexit negotiations, the idea of national humiliation moved from fiction to reality. There was a strange ecstasy of shame: ‘Britain faces a terrible choice: between the humiliation of a deal dictated by Brussels; and the chaos of crashing out of the EU”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“They opened a place in Irishness for the diasporas that were, in many ways, the truest products of its history. It brought home the reality that had been obscured in the idea of emigration as tragedy and shame: we are a hyphenated people.”
― Fintan O'Toole, We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

“No prospect, no prospect, little prospect – the future was blank and bleak. As the Irish joke had it at the time, the wolf was at the door, howling to get out.”
― Fintan O'Toole, We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

“The bitterly ironic phrase ‘Love, Honour and Carry Water’, parodying the wedding vows to love, honour and obey, was used as an advertising slogan by a supplier of water pumps in the early 1960s.”
― Fintan O'Toole, We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

“An Englishman will burn his bed to catch a flea’ – TURKISH PROVERB”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“In the mid-1950s, there were 476,000 pupils in the primary education system, but just 83,000 in secondary and vocational schools, suggesting that more than 80 per cent dropped out of formal education at fourteen, the legal school leaving age.”
― Fintan O'Toole, We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

“As he confessed in 2002, ‘Some of my most joyous hours have been spent in a state of semi-incoherence, composing foam-flecked hymns of hate to the latest Euro-infamy: the ban on the prawn cocktail flavour crisp.’20 The fact that there was no ban on the prawn cocktail flavour crisp (it is still freely available over the counter) was no impediment to the foam-flecked hymns of hate. On the contrary, being pure fiction made the story beautifully elastic. Like the tale of Marina’s toast, this tiny seed of grievance could blossom into a monstrous oppression.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“Her decision to do so – when she had a working majority in Parliament – was not pure vanity. It was the inevitable result of the völkisch rhetoric she had adopted when she told her first Tory Party conference as leader that ‘if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere’, openly evoking the far-right (and Stalinist) trope of ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ who did not deserve citizenship.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“Militant nationalism needed regular transfusions of young blood to keep it alive, because it led a kind of vampiric half-life, imaginatively and emotionally draining but not visible in any mirror held up to contemporary Irish reality.”
― Fintan O'Toole, We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

“you’ve thrilled yourself with these dark imaginings you end with the ultimate in wish-fulfilment: the EU is a front for a German cabal and this will save Brexit. It is hard to overstate the extent to which Brexit depended on the idea of who really runs the EU: German car manufacturers. For some of those at the top of the Labour Party, the idea of the EU as a mere front for the bosses and moguls of Europe was a reason to be secretly pleased that Brexit would allow Britain to escape their clutches and build socialism in one country.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“A Council of Education had been established in 1954 to consider the possible reforms of second-level education, but it sat so long that its members began to die off before it could issue a report.11 When it finally did report in 1960 (the report was not published until 1962), it remarked contentedly of secondary schools that ‘The dominant purpose of their existence is the inculcation of religious ideals and values. This central influence, which gives unity and harmony to all the subjects of the curriculum, is outside the purview of the State…”
― Fintan O'Toole, We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

“This is one possible answer to the deflationary sensation so perfectly captured in a question mark in Jane Gardam’s novel of the dissolution of the Raj, Old Filth: ‘When empires end, there’s often a dazzling finale – then—?’31 Well, perhaps empires don’t quite end when you think they do. Perhaps they have a final moment of zombie existence. This may be the last stage of imperialism – having appropriated everything else from its colonies, the dead empire appropriates the pain of those it has oppressed.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“This was the church’s great achievement in Ireland. It had so successfully disabled a society’s capacity to think for itself about right and wrong that it was the parents of an abused child, not the bishop who enabled that abuse, who were ‘quite apologetic’. It had managed to create a flock who, in the face of an outrageous violation of trust, would be concerned as much about the abuser as about those he had abused and might abuse in the future. It had inserted its system of control and power so deeply into the minds of the faithful that they could scarcely even feel angry about the perpetration of disgusting crimes on their own children.”
― Fintan O'Toole, We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

“In the hurry through which known and strange things pass, the strange things were sometimes very well known and the known things were often deeply strange.”
― Fintan O'Toole, We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

“The great Marxist historian of England, E. P. Thompson, writing in the Sunday Times in the run-up to the 1975 referendum, gave this disgust an explicitly anti-Common Market turn, brilliantly fusing English puritanism with anti-capitalist politics: ‘It is about the belly. A market is about consumption. The Common Market is conceived of as a distended stomach: a large organ with various traps, digestive chambers and fiscal acids, assimilating a rich diet of consumer goods… This Eurostomach is the logical extension of the existing eating-out habits of Oxford and North London.’8”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“The future treaty which you are discussing has no chance of being agreed; if it was agreed it has no chance of being ratified; and if it were ratified, it would have no chance of being applied. And if it was applied, it would be totally unacceptable to Britain. You speak of agriculture which we don’t like, of power over customs, which we take exception to, and institutions, which frighten us. Monsieur le president, messieurs, au revoir et bonne chance.6”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“While we slept five-to-a-room, priests had nice, spacious houses. The parish priest's was by far the grandest on the estate. Even better, groups of curates lived together in what seemed to a ten-year-old boy the perfect circle of male pals. Priests had housekeepers to look after them – like having a mammy who was not the boss of you. They had cars – very rare in Crumlin. And they had prestige – people looked up to them and they could wander into any house at will for a cup of tea or a plate of rashers and eggs.”
― Fintan O'Toole, We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

“On moving in, families found that other visions of respectability had come into play: houses specifically designed for very large families had just two small bedrooms, and yet the designers had seen fit to take up precious space with that most Victorian of bourgeois domestic ideals – a parlour.”
― Fintan O'Toole, We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

“the far-right is the white man’s #MeToo movement. Not only am I not guilty, but I am in fact a victim.”
― Fintan O'Toole, The Politics of Pain: Postwar England and the Rise of Nationalism

“Over the past twenty-five years, the English have built up a national grudge – perhaps due to disappointed expectations after winning the War – and now it is so firmly established that the country resembles one of those Strindbergian households where everybody nags and tries to make everybody else miserable. On the other hand, the Germans at the end of the War had the same advantage as Britain at the beginning – of facing a crisis situation that left no room for resentment or petulance. The result was the German economic recovery. Meanwhile, like spoilt children, the English sit around scowling and quarrelling, and hoping for better times.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“And as well as the sore tooth, there is the broken umbrella. A nation state is, first and foremost, a shelter. In the hard rain of neoliberal globalization, people know that they cannot be fully protected. But they do reasonably expect an umbrella over their heads. The problem is that the umbrella is broken, its material tattered, its struts sticking out like bared bones. The welfare state that kept self-pity at bay has been relentlessly undermined. Its basic promise – security against poverty and indignity – is, for too many, hollow.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“He continued, sombrely, to evoke the more recent memory of the Great War: ‘the four names which have really engraved themselves on the popular memory are Mons, Ypres, Gallipoli and Passchendaele, every time a disaster. The names of the great battles that finally broke the German armies are simply unknown to the general public.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“One genuinely distinctive aspect of Englishness had long been a decidedly uncontinental taste in food. George Orwell, trying to explain the English character in 1944, wrote, ‘The difference in habits, and especially in food and language, makes it very hard for English working people to get on with foreigners. Their diet differs a great deal from that of any European nation, and they are extremely conservative about it. As a rule, they will refuse even to sample a foreign dish. They regard such things as garlic and olive oil with disgust, life is unliveable to them unless they have tea and puddings.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“In spite of these Homeric feats, two out of three homes in Ireland still had no electricity at the end of the Second World War.”
― Fintan O'Toole, We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland