We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958

by Fintan O'Toole, Aidan Kelly (Narrator)

Fintan O’Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government—in despair, because all the young people were leaving—opened the country to foreign investment and popular culture. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with Irish national identity. In We Don’t Know Ourselves, O’Toole, one of the Anglophone world’s most consummate stylists, weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change, showing how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary “backwater” to an almost totally open society—perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history.


Born to a working-class family in the Dublin suburbs, O’Toole served as an altar boy and attended a Christian Brothers school, much as his forebears did. He was enthralled by American Westerns suddenly appearing on Irish television, which were not that far from his own experience, given that Ireland’s main export was beef and it was still not unknown for herds of cattle to clatter down Dublin’s streets. Yet the Westerns were a sign of what was to come. O’Toole narrates the once unthinkable collapse of the all-powerful Catholic Church, brought down by scandal and by the activism of ordinary Irish, women in particular. He relates the horrific violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which led most Irish to reject violent nationalism. In O’Toole’s telling, America became a lodestar, from John F. Kennedy’s 1963 visit, when the soon-to-be martyred American president was welcomed as a native son, to the emergence of the Irish technology sector in the late 1990s, driven by American corporations, which set Ireland on the path toward particular disaster during the 2008 financial crisis.


A remarkably compassionate yet exacting observer, O’Toole in coruscating prose captures the peculiar Irish habit of “deliberate unknowing,” which allowed myths of national greatness to persist even as the foundations were crumbling. Forty years in the making, We Don’t Know Ourselves is a landmark work, a memoir and a national history that ultimately reveals how the two modes are entwined for all of us.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Ireland, Memoir, Irish Literature, Politics, Audiobook

23 pages, Audible Audio

First published September 30, 2021

About the author

Fintan O'Toole is a columnist, assistant editor and drama critic for The Irish Times. O'Toole was born in Dublin and was partly educated at University College Dublin. He has written for the Irish Times since 1988 and was drama critic for the New York Daily News from 1997 to 2001. He is a literary critic, historical writer and political commentator, with generally left-wing views. He was and continues to be a strong critic of corruption in Irish politics, in both the Haughey era and continuing to the present.

O'Toole has criticised what he sees as negative attitudes towards immigration in Ireland, the state of Ireland's public services, growing inequality during Ireland's economic boom, the Iraq War and the American military's use of Shannon Airport, among many other issues. In 2006, he spent six months in China reporting for The Irish Times. In his weekly columns in The Irish Times, O'Toole opposed the IRA's campaign during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

information from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fintan_O...

Reviews

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The ambivalence was in us and in our political culture, in our ability to be amused at our own follies, in the sense of ourselves as a nation of nod-and-winkers. When you are winking, you have one eye open and one closed, and we hadn’t yet decided whether we wanted to look at the country with both eyes open.”

Born in Dublin in 1958 Fintan O’Toole experienced the evolution of Ireland from a backward, rural country to an open society. This change was not easy nor fast but seen through the eyes of this astute and insightful observer, its slow emergence into the modern world is revealed with brutal honesty.

While I was reading this well-written tome (570 pages), a dear friend of mine and a devout Catholic looked at the cover and commented she couldn’t read anything that was critical of the Catholic church. Later, after much thinking about her words, I thought my friend’s “knowing but not knowing” was the crux of this book. This ambiguity was epidemic in Ireland until recently.

O’Toole’s analysis and arguments are expertly woven with anecdotes of his life in Dublin from his early years to the present. The Ireland of his youth was rural, politically and economically isolated. In the 60’s nationalistic zeal eliminated science from school curriculums and replaced it with instruction in Gaelic. The ruling political party, in strong partnership with the Church, wanted the country to be the exemplar of Catholicism, the most pious and virtuous. Contraceptives were banned, but ways to get them were well-known. Abortion was banned, but everyone knew someone shipped off to England. Unwed mothers and their babies were hidden. Impropriety existed and was known in both Church and government. There were two parallel universes.

The author believes there was a “collective consciousness that caused the Church to destroy itself from within”. Sexual assaults on children, mental and physical assaults on both women and children could no longer be accepted. O’Toole concludes that the people realized they were holier, more honest and compassionate than the Catholic hierarchy. Coupled with undeniable accounts of deception and corruption, the government collapsed too.

Irish fiction writers have long had a special appeal to me. The haunted characters, the often nostalgic and resigned acceptance of situations have an allure. O’Toole’s perceptive grasp of modern Irish history and his personal experiences deepen and enhance the stories of all those beloved wordsmiths. I now better understand the world they were and are writing about. Thank you, Fintan O’Toole.

“Perhaps we are learning to live without being so defined. An island capable of living with uncertainties, mysteries and doubt without reaching after fictional certitudes.”
“The ambivalence was in us and in our political culture, in our ability to be amused at our own follies, in the sense of ourselves as a nation of nod-and-winkers. When you are winking, you have one eye open and one closed, and we hadn’t yet decided whether we wanted to look at the country with both eyes open.”

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book and I’m going to give it such an enthusiastic review that I feel obligated to mention here at the beginning that I received a free electronic copy for review.

I read an article by a movie reviewer once who complained that, while there are seemingly endless ways to criticize a movie, there are only a limited number of ways to praise one. I feel the same way about this book, but I’m going to give this book the same praise that I’ve given to certain great books I’ve read in the past: It’s both informative and just plain fun to read, it’s occasionally quite funny, I read some sections out loud to the Long-Suffering Wife (LSW), and I neglected other books (including some by respected scholars and best-selling authors) that I had in progress in order to enjoy reading this book.

I guess that this book is not for everybody, but more’s the pity for them. As an American of Irish heritage, I come at this book with more interest in the topic than the average guy but also yawning gaps in my knowledge, because, well, I’m busy and life is full of stuff to pay attention to. As a measure of my knowledge of modern Irish history, I offer this: If you threatened to shoot me dead unless I could name three Irish Prime Ministers, I’d probably survive, but if you increased the number to five, my existence would be in serious danger.

There was some Ireland-specific stuff that the author apparently thought his readers would know about (so they are unexplained), but they didn’t make it over the Atlantic, at least not to where I was. I list some of them below, in case your knowledge of things Irish is similar to mine:

-- Oireachtas (Kindle location 1491): roughly analogous to “legislature”, it includes the Irish Prime Minister, the largely symbolic President, and both houses of parliament. Before researching this, I thought that “Dáil” was what the Irish called their Parliament, but that turns out to be the lower house only.
-- Gaeltacht (l. 2245, 2833, 5848): the ever-shrinking areas where the Irish language is spoken
-- camogie (l. 2590): “the distinctively Irish game for women”, looks like hurling or lacrosse if pictures on the internet are any indication
-- the Táin (l. 2953): it took a little while to extract this from Google, but finally I figured out that this probably means “Táin Bó Cúailnge”, a work of Irish literature from the first century CE.
-- Malebranche (l. 3862): Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715), French Catholic priest and philosopher
-- Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann (l. 4040): “Society of the Musicians of Ireland”
-- “the deathless acronym GUBU” (l. 5305): the author explains, immediately adjacent, that this acronym means “grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented”. OK, but why deathless? The Wikipedia entry here explains.
-- seanchaithe (l. 5418): traditional Irish storyteller
-- Iveagh Market (i. 6767): former indoor market in central Dublin, now closed and the subject of a legal battle
-- Tánaiste (l. 7999): deputy head of the government of Ireland

In addition, O’Toole’s wide-ranging vocabulary of words not directly related to Irish culture gave the dictionary function on my Kindle quite a workout. Examples: pookas, metonymy, boreen, demotics, Sodality, caudillo, bonhams, almoners, gallous, carapace, anomie, emollient, subventions, soutane.

All this stuff above required additional research, but I repeat that this book was great fun to read. When possible, O’Toole tries to start a chapter with a sentence that will grab and hold your interest, like “It was me that let the pigs out” (Chapter 13) and “I had no idea I was going to shout ‘Up the IRA’ at the Taoiseach [= Prime Minister], Jack Lynch” (Chapter 15), which often lead into a personal recollection which flows nicely into an explanation of recent Irish history. The sentence about the pigs above leads into an especially interesting and entertaining chapter about O'Toole's childhood encounter with an Irish composer, Seán Ó Riada. I never heard of him before and it turns out he had composed some beautiful music, most famously for the Stanley Kubrick film Barry Lyndon. Hear a bit on YouTube here.

It was interesting to read about what Dublin was like in the author’s childhood in the 1960s. It was more like a small town than it is now (I imagine), and certainly more like a small town than the places I knew where those of Irish heritage in the US occupied en masse during the same period. Unlike the US, in Ireland, everybody seemed to know everybody, and ordinary folks could briefly rub elbows with the great. It was possible for the author, as a child, to know a local sweet shop proprietor who became Lord Mayor of Dublin and was photographed enjoying a joke with President Kennedy in the Oval Office. The author’s father, a bus driver, could one day make an unscheduled stop to pick up Muhammed Ali and entourage, running along a rural bus stop outside Dublin before a 1972 Dublin prize fight. Ali, as was his wont, charmed O’Toole’s father, and also apparently the rest of Ireland as well.

Here is a bit from the book that made me laugh out loud, springing from the fact that Ali apparently had one Irish-born great-grandfather (who knew?):

… while the insistence of journalists on asking him questions about his Irish roots threatened to ignite Ali’s anger, he defused a possible row with a graceful dismissal: ‘You can never tell. There was a lot of sneakin’ around in them days.’ There was no better way to shut down a controversy in Ireland than by hinting that, if you really wanted to talk about it, you would have to talk about sex. (l. 3585)

I don’t want to give the idea, however, that this book is a blarney-laced sentiment memoir. A lot of it is very serious, but there are no abrupt shifts of mood. It just reflects the fact that Ireland, like most other places, is a story of tragedy laced with comedy -- or perhaps the other way around.

I must admit to my shame that I was not aware of what monumental hypocrisy and shameless thievery was embodied in the person of Charles Haughey, who was Irish Prime Minister on and off from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. When I first started to read O’Toole’s characterization of Haughey, I thought he was going a little overboard with the criticism, but later developments as narrated in this book proved that it is almost impossible to overstate his villainy. “To call Haughey a hypocrite would be like calling Rembrandt a portraitist or Mozart a piano player” (l. 4686). Like in many other books, however, it is the bad guys who often make for the most entertaining reading.

I also enjoyed explanations about how certain odd phrases appeared, and then faded, from common use, like

... in the very early 1970s, a new phrase came into our language: we’re into Europe. ‘How’re things?’ you’d ask, and the reply would be ‘Ah sure, we’re into Europe.’ Or ‘Isn’t it a grand day?’ someone would say, and you’d answer, ‘Oh, it is, sure we’re into Europe.’ (l. 3610)

or

When my mother-in-law was happy, she used a phrase she had learned in her childhood in rural Ireland in the 1930s. If you served her a nice dinner, for example, and asked her how everything was she would sigh contentedly and say ‘Ah sure, it’s America at home.’ (l. 7289)

The preceding are only a few of the many matters explored with clarity and a sense of what is entertaining and memorable. The twist and turns of ‘The Troubles’ are clearly explained as they ricochet between tragedy, horror, and low comedy, with an eye for the telling details. Some examples: the fight between the IRA and the family of a dead hunger striker over the manner the corpse will be buried, and a struggle in the mid-1990s over who would light the Belfast city Christmas tree -- President Clinton or the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

The many sins of the Catholic Church and the eventual collapse of its moral, and political, authority are also chronicled clearly and tellingly, as the Irish eventually arrive at “the most shocking realization of all: the recognition by most of the faithful that they were in fact much holier than their preachers, that they had a clearer sense of right and wrong, a more honest and intimate sense of love and compassion and decency.” (l. 8439)

Somewhat strangely for this pessimistic time, the book concludes on a up note about Ireland: “We had a furtive, anxious hidden self of optimism and decency, a self long clouded by hypocrisy and abstraction and held in check by fear. This Ireland stopped being afraid of itself. Paranoia and pessimism lost out big time to the confident, hopeful, self-belief that Irish people have hidden from themselves for too long.” (l. 8356)

This is a great book -- informative and more enjoyable than any other book I’ve read in a while.

As mentioned, I received a free electronic advance review copy of this book from Liveright Publishing Corporation via Netgalley.

[Colleen Browne · Rating 5 out of 5]

With his keen eye for detail and brilliant mind for analysis, O'Toole weaves his own personal biography through the history of Ireland from 1958, the year of his birth, to the present. Being Irish American, I confess to having a lot of the preconceived beliefs about Ireland but when I moved there and married an Irishman, I learned how different it was than what I had imagined. Also, being the same generation as O'Toole, and living in Ireland throughout much of this history, there was much I recognized; but there was much that was new to me. It filled in many of the gaps that were in front of my face but at the same time hidden from me.

When I began reading the book, I spoke to a good friend of mine from Dublin about it. She said it was difficult hearing it because it was so depressing to her. I had, of course, heard of John Charles McQuaid and always associated him with an austere, conservative Ireland where the laity were disallowed from stepping outside the very visibly drawn boundaries of Catholicism in Ireland. I was also aware that De Valera and worked with him to achieve a country that was conservative and obediently Catholic. What I did not realize was how very corrupt he was in his role as leader of the Church in Ireland. By the time I lived in Ireland, he was gone but his legacy lived on.

Reading this exceptionally well written book was like taking a walk through the Ireland that I lived in: the Kerry babies case, the Troubles, the divorce referendum, the country of Haughey, Lenin and Ahern. But it was also the country of Mary Robinson, Michael D. Higgins, and Garret Fitzgerald. There was always a general knowledge that Haughey, in particular, was corrupt, but until reading this book, I did not understand how corrupt. The sad part is that he got away with it- for the most part because it was not until after his death that a tribunal was convened that exposed the depth of his criminality.

There is so much in this book that it would mean writing a book to summarize it all. Suffice to say that O'Toole brings the transformation of Ireland from a poor, third world country, through the referenda, to the Celtic Tiger, to its crash, and to the implosion of the Catholic Church. He ends the book on a hopeful note about a people who have endured a great deal but have come of age and learned to if not embrace then understand the ambiguities in the Irish psyche. I highly recommend this book.

[Sean O'Donoghue]

To all my Irish friends, especially those who were reared in 60s and 70s Ireland, I highly recommend this book ….book of essays tearing apart the gombeen men and their nazi guru, Archbishop McQuaid, back then. O'Toole has been doing journalism since the 1980s, as well as the odd book, and has a very astute eye for the world he inhabits. He also contextualises much of the world I grew up and was educated in and lots of his putting his finger on a pulse that was not altogether visible to me. The theme of “everyone knows, no one says” runs through the book. Paedophilia amongst the clergy was known to many in high places, Charlie Haughty enriching himself was common knowledge, Haughty's glorification of church and family whilst keeping a mistress was common knowledge….but no one talked publicly….they were all “sensitive issues” and best left undisturbed. One of the most disturbing issues of which he writes was mothers apologising to priests because of their, the mothers', complaints they made to the bishop about the very priests they were apologising to having sexually abused their children. Excellent read....500 pages but broken into shortish essays. Fortunately, the church has now lost their power in Ireland, but the political corruption has carried on.

[Kerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

BookTube prize read. Missing reading for the last rounds of the BookTube prize this year as I took on too much other reading commitments. The prize always brought me out of my comfort zone and into great reading I'd never taken on if left to my own choices. This is another great read due to it.

I will admit I found this book at little daunting at first. But when I commit to something you can depend on me. So I read and listened to some and often read it with my ear pods in listening to it as I followed along. No kidding, there is a lot of recent Irish history here but it is told in a personal way. It begins in the year the author was born, 1958 and continues through to 2018. There is also much reflection on the years before 1958 and how Ireland's greatest export has always been its people. But it is the most recent history that the author discusses.
He does connect it to his own life experience but only as a jumping off point. I did find this as a great way for me of connecting with the history discussed. Without it the book would have been much drier and likely not 5 star.

There is a lot of detail here not only about the Troubles but also about the economy, politics, corruption, education, religion and more. I will admit that some went over my head and was not even absorbed though I did my best. Names and dates about situations I have no interest in (how people hid their money, tax evasion, corruption) did overwhelm me at times but the author always included a human element that kept me engaged in the text.

This is a really great history book. It gave me a fresh outlook and knowledge about a country and its place in the world. Who and what it has been in the past and how it looks to be recognized, not just for its problems, in the future. If you have any interest at all I would highly recommend it.

Thank You BookTube Prize for forcing me to read another great book. And Yes it did move on to the next round (the quarterfinals) and I would expect to see it in the finals.

[Brian Griffith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic book that's part personal memoir, part history lesson, and part psychotherapeutic journalism. It’s both self-depreciatingly honest and frankly celebratory concerning the story of modern Ireland.

O’Toole’s tale begins as he comes to consciousness in the late 1950s, in a nation isolated by “the moral protectionism of [Bishop] McQuade’s repression and the economic protectionism of high tariff barriers instituted by the Fianna Fail government ….” While growing up in the 1960s, he feels how that need for self-protection affects all public and private relations around him. It requires a show of unity in the face of external foes, with restoration of some lost spiritual purity. As an American woman in the 1960s observes that “Adolescence lasts longer in Ireland, I think, than it does in any other country because the sexes are segregated so rigidly.” When Father Joseph O’Connor returns from the surprisingly reformist Vatican II council in 1965, he announces to his parish in Dublin, “Allow me to assure you. No change will worry the tranquility of your Christian lives.”

Of course almost every young person also seeks to escape the confines of the past. The young people are leaving Ireland in droves, seeking exactly the things that protection of Ireland’s purity denies them. O’Tool explores the social and personal walls that block people from knowing each other. He also tells, with slowly mounting enthusiasm, how these walls have come down, with hypocrisies exposed, false hopes dashed, and Ireland much the better for it.

O’Toole is a great investigative reporter, giving highly insightful chapters on numerous episodes of recent history. There are plenty of villains and heroes. As for heroes, he highlights some of the female leaders who have helped to largely transform Irish society. He features Mary Raferty’s electrifying 1999 documentary States of Fear, which exposed the horrors of child abuse in the nation’s clerically-run reformatory and residential industrial schools. He relates the victories of Mary Robinson, Ireland’s first female president, who oversaw the decriminalization of homosexuality, contraception, and divorce. Near the end, O’Toole reflects on the 2015 referendum that overwhelmingly approved legalizing gay marriage. His own father had demonstrated the turn to accepting people openly rather that keeping who they are secret, behind walls of conventional shame. Concerning the referendum his father had told him, “Sure of course it will pass. Everybody knows somebody who’s gay.”

I want to give an example of how appreciative O’Toole gets toward Ireland’s cultural opening, and flourishing of creativity it brings. This is his review of the 1990s theatrical performance Riverdance:

Riverdance was as much a redefinition as a reclamation of Irish tradition. What made it so exhilarating was the sense, not so much of invention, as of recognition. The slickness, the confidence, the professionalism may have been a far cry from the Irish immigrant dance halls of the 1950s in New York or Boston, where ceili bands alternated with swing orchestras, and jigs and reels were thrown in with rumbas, waltzes, sha-chas and tangoes. But the cultural mix was the same. Ireland and America, folk art and Tin Pan Ally, the pure and the hybrid, never had bee, for most Irish people most of the time, distinct entities. What Riverdance was saying was not only that this was okay, but it was sort of splendid. Cultural promiscuity was a lot more fun than cultural purity.

[Cherisa B · Rating 4 out of 5]

A terrific read and an interesting basis on which to build a work of modern history - one’s own lifetime and personal experiences and recollections as reflective of a nation’s story.

[audrey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting for both the breadth and depth of modern Irish history -- aka does most of what it says on the tin -- and violently let down by the author's insistence on philosophizing about what every anecdote means in the Larger Scheme of Things.

The central crux of the book is that the author waffles on at great length about how Ireland runs on two parallel and inter-dependent tracks: there's what's real, and then there's what people want to be real.

That is objectively true, both for Ireland and everywhere else, along with such earth-shattering realizations as the sky is sometimes blue and sometimes grey, or that water is sometimes a liquid and sometimes a vapor.

The problem is that there's about 350 pages of waffles here, along with 200 pages of interesting anecdotes. I filled up on waffles really quickly, and wished for more anecdotes. When the author's writing about what really happened, and what he remembers happening, and what was reported happening, we're good. But when we slip into the magical realm of "And here we are again, the two modes of Irish history...see there's what's real, and then there's what people want to be--"

My dude, you have already explained this concept. A lot. 200-odd pages of lot. Tell us more stories.

I did learn quite a bit from the anecdotes, especially with regards to how much more violence the Troubles involved, and how deeply the Catholic Church dominated Irish politics. And I also learned that it turns out there's two modes of Irish history: what's real, and then there's what people want to be--

Oy.

The sections on abortion in Ireland were particularly interesting, given that abortion was wildly illegal in Ireland until 2018, and the book features stories of the lengths that politicians, the Church, and regular people all went to to maintain a polite fiction that no one was having abortions (because they were illegal).

It feels unfortunately instructive given where the United States is right now with the legal stance on abortion -- and even more so where you see they could go with it. (Spoiler: there's a sub-basement to this basement). So that was useful. As was the author's epic takedown of Michael Flatley's Celtic Tiger show.

But again, I wanted more stories and fewer waffles, a sentiment I think I've never before uttered.

(Content notes: child death, child harm, churches behaving badly, no, even worse than you'd imagine, medical trauma).

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

"...the single most important aspect of Irish culture in these decades: the unknown known. Ours was a society that had developed an extraordinary capacity for cognitive disjunction, an genius for knowing and not knowing at the same time."(pg 168)

O'Toole comes back to this unknown known notion multiple times in this remarkable personal history. Often starting with personal anecdotes from his own childhood, youth, and early adulthood in working class Dublin, he relates his memory to Ireland at the same moment. His story is a pathway to the larger story of Ireland during his lifetime, from 1958 to the present day. Each chapter focuses on specific years or short spans of time.

Brilliantly scripted and researched, he covers what you would expect: Bloody Sunday, IRA, the hunger strikes, language politics, and multiple chapters on the Catholic church and the various institutions and long shadows in cultural and political life (Magdalene laundries, Church sex abuse, the tightly woven fabric of politics and the Church), but also ventures into some interesting side notes of Irish identity, organized crime and the drug trade, music and art, rural vs urban debates, development and infrastructure, and the 90s economic boom.

As I was midway through the book, I already knew WE DON'T KNOW OURSELVES would be on my BEST OF 2023 list. Highly recommended!

5/5*

Sidenote: The retrospective style of the book reminded me of another book I enjoyed earlier this year: Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945–1955, while Aftermath focused on a smaller span of years and a Germany's re-building/identity crisis after losing a war and the atrocities of their war crimes, there were some great insights into the small life of everyday people. Jahner's book was not as personal as O'Toole's (still, O'Toole's would not be called a memoir per se...) there are some interesting parallels in style. If you enjoyed one, you may very well enjoy the other.

[Robert Craven · Rating 3 out of 5]

This memoir reminded me very much of the Polish journalist / writer Ryszard Kapuscinski's 'Imperium'. O'Toole casts an eye back on Ireland's history through his own lifespan and career. Born in 1958 in Crumlin two events happened that year; the then Taoiseach (Prime Minister) travelled to Europe to explore joining the nascent EEC, and the IRA raided a barracks in England, stealing weapons.
This twin track weaves through the upheavals of the 1960's, 70's and 80's on both sides of the border right up to the beginning of the Celtic Tiger. (And its disastrous aftermath.)
The book is very well written, but, AND it is a BUT. It plays safe on its sacred cows it chooses to examine; the usual suspects of cute hoors and chancers than ran the country can be found in any current Irish political memoir. He had an opportunity here to look at the role of the The GAA, but glances over it. And as a musician in Dublin in the 1980's and 1990's the behemoth of the band U2 gets a single sentence. Like the Catholic church, and the political cults of personalities, the band stifled and sidelined generations of pretenders to the crown with equal ruthlessness.
It may interest some, but at times reads like your dad reading articles out loud from the newspaper and expecting you to remain enthralled.
A good read, but not anything like assured insights of Orwell, Kapuscinski or Fisk.

[Jill S · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's difficult to know what to write about a book this good. Not only is O'Toole's writing complex and interesting and engaging, but his history and analysis and interpretation is so excellent it makes me insanely jealous that I didn't (and could never have) written this book.

If you are at all interested in modern Irish history - political, economic, social, international relations, and, above all, how the Catholic church (or the notion of the Catholic church) dictated all of these elements, this book is an absolute must read.

[Joe O'Donnell · Rating 3 out of 5]

As one of Ireland’s foremost public intellectuals and most prominent journalists, you would imagine Fintan O’Toole would be well placed to construct a history about the transformation of the country over the last 50 years. In “We Don’t Know Ourselves”, O’Toole links the pivotal political, social and economic changes in Ireland since his birth in 1958 to personal episodes from his own life. Part-historical study, part-polemic, and part-memoir, “We Don’t Know Ourselves” is sweeping and often commanding in its analysis but – perhaps surprisingly given the pedigree of its author – it is in many ways unsatisfying.

According to Fintan O’Toole’s analysis, if you want to comprehend the economic and political stagnation of Ireland from the 1950s to the late 1980s – and the subsequent social upheavals of the 1990s – you first need to understand the two forces which dominated Irish life during that period: the Catholic Church and the Fianna Fáil party. The dominance and dead hand of this self-reinforcing duopoly was responsible, according to O’Toole, for the suffocating consensus that prevailed in post-independence Ireland. Out of this conservative hegemony came all the ills of that grim era: economic stagnation, mass emigration, political corruption, clerical sex abuse, and culture wars over contraception, divorce and abortion.

If there is a central theme running through “We Don’t Know Ourselves”, it is that of hypocrisy, particularly on sexual morality. O’Toole sees Irish society of that time as being blighted by ‘open secrets’, where people would know corruption or the abuse of power was going on, but they would look the other way. In this way, the ills of the society were seen but also not seen; they were both “known and unknown”. The paradox of this doublethink was that it kept the conservative monolith in power for decades after one might have thought it would have fallen (at least compared to any other country in Western Europe), but when it did fall it crumbled at an incredible speed.

Where “We Don’t Know Ourselves” fails to convince – and where Fintan O’Toole seems to lose the run of himself – is when he tries to refract every event in Ireland during the last half-century through the prism of ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown knowns’. By trying to concoct a unified theory of Ireland over the last fifty years, O’Toole frequently ties himself in knots with overwrought analogies and overblown hypotheses. Too often, “We Don’t Know Ourselves” seems to be trying too hard. This is how we O’Toole ends up wandering down cul-de-sacs like a bizarre passage drawing parallels between the IRA’s blowing up of Nelson’s Column in 1966 and the showband singer Dickie Rock, or a later section that tries to present an excruciating analogy about the charmed lives of Gerry Adams and James Bond. A particularly ludicrous example of this approach is where O’Toole postulates that the fabrications by the Garda ‘Heavy Gang’ during the Kerry Babies were somehow influenced by the Seanchaí tradition of imaginative storytelling rather than, you know, straightforward police corruption and expediency.

But O’Toole’s real blind spot is with the Northern Ireland Troubles and, more specifically, with how they originated. He appears quite comfortable nailing the Provos for their fixations with martyrdom and the physical force tradition (albeit with some justification), but far too infrequently analyses the environment from which they emerged (i.e. Stormont intransigence and discrimination, British Government negligence). In a book that can be adept in taking on the great monoliths of twentieth century Ireland in ‘The Church’ and Fianna Fáil, it is puzzling that “We Don’t Know Ourselves” has so little to say about the similar reactionary bastion of Ulster Unionism in the North-East of the island.

Where Fintan O’Toole is much more astute is on social class – and on dispelling the illusion that Ireland was ever some form of classless society. When dealing with the petty snobberies, however subtle, of Ireland’s class system, O’Toole writes with a cold controlled fury. This can be seen most clearly in his chapter on The Dunne crime family and the early 80s heroin epidemic in Dublin, a social catastrophe that engulfed at least generations in the inner cities but that was almost studiously ignored by the establishment of ‘official Ireland’.

Fintan O’Toole does, at least, provide a more rounded picture of the venal Charlie Haughey than that presented in Gary Murphy’s recent biography. But, it is astonishing how little space he accords to the grassroots activists and campaigners who fought against the Church-FF monolith for so many decades and who did so much to bring about its eventual destruction. This is a galling omission by somebody, like Fintan O’Toole, who would consider themselves to be a member of the progressive left.

While I share Fintan O’Toole’s contempt for the hypocritical political and religious elites who stultified the country for so long, I am sceptical about his thesis that Ireland – for the period that “We Don’t Know Ourselves” studies – was an exceptionally terrible place. Many of the horrors and crimes he presents here were hardly unique to this country during this period, even in a Western European context. The feeling that this book left me with was less “We Don’t Know Ourselves”, and more a case of “Maybe we’re not that special".

[Olive Fellows (abookolive)]

I've tried this twice now, and it's just not happening.

This is more of a "DNF for now" kind of book, though; I'm not opposed to trying this at another time in my life, especially since this is one of the 25 nonfiction books I wanted to read this year and people seem to really love it, but I can't do it right now. I think I just need to accept that.

[Jennifer (not getting notifications) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a great book to read on our Ireland trip.

[Mike Bessant · Rating 5 out of 5]

First rate exploration of Ireland's modern history and what it means to be Irish. For someone who was born in 1958 and brought up in Ireland under the Catholic education system, much of this book resonated with my own experience. Fintan O'Toole writes with wisdom, humour and honesty, casting a forensic eye over Ireland's social, political and religious spheres and it's relationship with the outside world. Essential reading.

[Caoimhín Ó Ghlaisne · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 ⭐
I've been reading this for a while. The country has come a long way but Bertie said it best; A lot done, more to do.

[Beanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This Isn’t a book for everyone. It may not make sense for those who don’t have a lived experience of being Irish. Fintans references and “irishisms” will be lost on many.

For me, having grown up in Ireland in the 1970’s, Fintan flung me back to the Ireland I left almost 25 years ago. I found it so hard to rate this book because many of the stories were so raw … so real and seeped into every fiber of who I am as an Irish person, much of which I did not want to be reminded of: the claws of the Catholic Church, that reached far and deep into every aspect of our lives; the utter brutality through a veneer of piety and sanctity. The iron fisted control of the Church over the legislature right into the 1980’s catapulted me back to my youth growing up in Ireland and the PTSD of Catholic guilt that all people who grew up in Ireland are held captive to. From stories of sexual freedom or lack thereof - Ireland was the first country to make the Condom available through medical prescription only prevailing until 1979, to the horror of sexual abuse, the corruption of Charles Haughey who was revered by many despite holding the country hostage to his greed, and almost incestuous relations with the Catholic establishment… at times it felt utterly depressing and pessimistic and I wonder how the hell we all managed to survive.

Fintans account felt too scholastic, too academic and lacked one key aspect which defines the Irish spirit - our sense of humor and ability to forge our way forward - that Indomitable Irish spirit that wins through no matter the hardship.

So … I will give it a solid 3 stars and wanted so much to give it 5 but my heart didn’t sing when I finished this book … or maybe it did - but not in the way I expected it to. I survived his book and the raw depressing account of life in Ireland, but I also survived as an Irish person abroad and am fiercely proud of our land and what we battled through and the identity we carved for ourselves on the world stage… something Fintan never acknowledges.

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not normally my cup of tea, I was curious about why this personal overview of the sweeping changes in the Irish social, cultural and economic fabric of the past 60 years would be named by the New York Times as one of the 5 best non-fiction books of 2022. And I saw it described as magisterial. “Oh, all right,” sez I, “I’ll bite.” And it was indeed magisterial, deeply researched and very engrossing, enlightening, even at times entertaining, demonstrating how (the jacket blurb says it best) “Ireland, in just one in lifetime, has gone from a reactionary ‘backwater’ to an almost totally open society—perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history.”

[Conor Beirne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every chapter has something different for the country to be embarrassed about

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting look at modern Irish history from a personal perspective and how Ireland developed as a modern state with its own complexity

[Johann (jobis89) · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars. Thoroughly enjoyed this well-written account of the history of modern Ireland and O’Toole’s own personal history. Both were interweaved perfectly.

[Vivian Tannam · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my opinion this is a book that every Irish person should read. It's an angry book and rightly so. Fintan goes through in great detail and even greater clarity the story of us as a nation and a people. The fact that he and I are of the same vintage makes it , for me, even more relevant. He is describing my Ireland and my people. Events that for me are still so clear are described so well. At times I felt utterly depressed when reading this book and wondered If I could go on but I did and am so glad I did. I was so relieved in the end that there was a hopeful nite for us as a nation and a people. Please read this book

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

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

[The Atlantic]

"In a book that is at once intimate and deeply reported—sharp in its judgments and its humor—Ireland’s finest journalist chronicles his country’s painful emergence into the modern world. Stand-alone chapters (on emigration, schools, television, contraception) form a coherent arc: from O’Toole’s childhood in working-class, tradition-bound Dublin to his reporting on Ireland’s overwhelming embrace of same-sex marriage by referendum ... Central to 'We Don’t Know Ourselves' is the uneasy coexistence of opposites: of an inward-looking past and an outward-looking present, of knowledge and denial."

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/arc...

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has been very loudly lauded. Glowing review by James Wood, Top 10 Books by New York Times. It deserves every accolade. A brilliant look at the last 60 years of Irish history through the personal eyes of O’Toole (the book is pitched as a memoir of sorts) it gives an engrossing account of Ireland as it went through radical change, from an incredibly conservative, Church dominated nation, with politicians robbing the public coffers, to a radical political climate that has seen mass social change and ideological challenges to the neoliberal hegemony. A fantastic read.

[Suzy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this and fully understand why it was a NY Times top book of 2022. I loved how O'Toole used his own life to explore the history of Ireland.

Why I'm reading this: This was in NY Times' top 10 books of 2022. It meets my criteria of "must listen" (over 500pp), but I have a hard copy on hand as well. Narrated by a favorite, Aiden Kelly.

[Pat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Being born just a few years after Fintan O’Toole my life has also ‘spanned and mirrored’ the time of massive transformation covered in this great work.
While harrowing to be reminded of our recent past, it’s an excellent exploration of the ‘young adult’ that Ireland is becoming

[Eoghan O'Brien · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not normally a fan of the "narrative history" style, but I really loved this book.

"The ambivalence was in us and in our political culture, in our ability to be amused at our own follies, in the sense of ourselves as a nation of nod-and-winkers. When you are winking, you have one eye open and one closed, and we hadn’t yet decided whether we wanted to look at the country with both eyes open."

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

No work of non-fiction since Antony Beevor's Stalingrad has engrossed me so thoroughly for so many pages. To discuss it here would be to violate it.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

We Don't Know Ourselves
Fintan O'Toole

It is not those who can inflict the most, but those who can suffer the most who will conquer.

This was a well written and interesting biography on recent Irish history through the lense of a journalist. While the book is lengthy it is hardly exhaustive. It is beset with a lot of inside knowledge and I don't think it was written with a global audience in mind.

The topics that I found enlightening were:

1. The IRA prisoner hunger strikes of the 1970s. If you have seen 'In the Name of the Father' you will already have a good background but the fight over Stagg's body was riveting.

The fight over Stagg's body in 1976. The Provos planned to parade Stagg’s corpse from coast to coast in ‘a “military” funeral from Dublin to Co. Mayo’. To prevent this, the Irish government arranged for the plane bringing it back to Ireland to be diverted from Dublin to Shannon. Bridie Stagg, who had flown to Dublin, had her hotel room invaded for three hours during the night by men seeking to ‘persuade’ her to hand the remains over to the IRA, but she refused.6 Next day the body was flown by Air Corps helicopter from Shannon to a field next to the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows in Ballina. The coffin was carried, not by Stagg’s family members, but by four detectives from the Special Branch. Children in the primary school nearby were ordered to stay indoors. The church gates were locked. The only mourners allowed in for the reception of the body were a small number of policemen. One elderly local man doffed his cap and knelt on the gravel on the road outside the church. The burial became one of the most concentrated security operations in the history of the state, with Gardaí, troops in riot gear and even the Air Corps controlling the town as the body was taken from the church to the cemetery. On a headstone hear the entrance to the graveyard, someone had daubed ‘Shame on Cosgrave’s body-snatchers'. Police were left to guard the grave ‘because of fears the remains might be interfered with’. They were still there in early August, keeping a ‘round-the-clock vigil’ when the state, presumably concluding that this could not go on, had the full length of the grave ‘filled with reinforced concrete’.14 The government would later say this was to ‘prevent desecration’ but it was obviously to stop the IRA from digging up Frank Stagg. It didn’t work. In November 1977, ten members of the IRA, in the middle of (of course) a dark, wet and squally night, dug up Stagg’s body. They removed it by digging a tunnel from a nearby grave and burrowing their way under the concrete shield. They carried it to the Republican plot and, with the help of a Catholic priest, reburied it beside Gaughan’s grave. It was like a daring prison break, except for a corpse.

2. Bloody Sunday 1972

3. Temple Hill Catholic Mother's Home - some of you may be familiar with the topic. It is shocking.

Temple Hill was part of the system that included the Mother and Baby Homes. Many of those homes did not even bother to record the burials of the huge numbers of babies who died in their care. This was, according to the church’s own canon law, perfectly fine

4. Catholic Priest scandal, multiple chapters.

5. Poverty, multiple chapters

6. Birth Control and Abortion

7. The burial of Leopold Bloom. Bloom was one of many little known Jewish and Lithuanian WW2 heroes who migrated to Ireland.

8. The interest fraud crisis of 1988. In the 1980s the legislature passed a law that required banks to automatically and proportionally deduct taxes from bank deposits that were gaining interest. When it was found that non-residents in Ireland were immune then within one year nearly 20% of Irish citizens fraudulently claimed to the banks that they were not Irish. It did not say if anyone was prosecuted.

9. The 1994 IRA West Belfast Shankill fish shop bombing and then UFF countered the massacre with their own massacre.

10. Gerry Adams, Bill Clinton and the Belfast agreement.

4 stars