(Read a longer version of this story below the Irish Post version)
Ireland through the eyes of a keen observer
Journalist Fintan O’Toole’s book We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland, just published in paperback, explores the roots of the conflict in Ireland and implications of the peace deal that ended the Troubles in the North. JUSTIN CHAPMAN reports in the wake of President Joe Biden’s visit to Ireland
By Justin Chapman, The Irish Post, 4/24/2023
JOURNALIST Fintan O’Toole points out in We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland that the Good Friday Agreement enshrined national self-determination, largely put an end to the armed conflict in the North, and recognised sovereignty and citizenship as a matter of free choice for those living in Northern Ireland.
In his book, O’Toole weaves his personal story into the fabric of Ireland’s history and culture, from his birth in 1958 to the present day, including mass emigration, nationalism, the Troubles, Brexit and more.
Leading into the Troubles, Ireland experienced decades of mass emigration. O’Toole write that three out of five children growing up in Ireland in the 1950s were destined to leave the island. This reporter’s grandparents, who left Ireland that decade in their 20s and landed in Pasadena, never saw their parents again.
“It really was tragic for a lot of families, that they were broken up by mass emigration,” O’Toole said. “The promise was that if we only had our own state, this mass migration would stop, we would be able to do things for ourselves and make life better. And here people were voting with their feet against the viability of an independent Ireland.”
The government opened the country up to foreign capital, beginning a long economic transformation from an agricultural economy to a globalised one.
Up in Northern Ireland, however, trouble was brewing. The Catholic minority there rebelled against civil rights abuses by the UK and Protestant majority, resulting in civil unrest and the armed campaign of the IRA.
O’Toole writes that the eruption of violence in Northern Ireland was “both sudden and slow. On the one hand, very few people expected it. On the other hand, there was the slow burn of “50 years of neglect, apathy and misunderstanding. Nobody thought in 1968 that this was going to go on for 30 years. But it also felt like it could’ve gone on for another 30. It was self-generating.”
The seed that led to the Troubles was the partition of the six counties in Northern Ireland from the rest of Ireland dating back to the 1920s.
Partition “made it possible for [Ireland] to be an ethnic and religious monolith” and lack “the pluralism you need to have a modern democracy,” O’Toole said. “What was left was just an overwhelmingly and, frankly, stultifyingly Catholic country. How do you preserve this idea of being the most Catholic country in the world? By punishing women, in particular. So you had a sexual puritanism, which even by the standards of the time was extreme.”
O’Toole pointed out in his book that Irish people considered the Republic free and the North unfree, but for women who couldn’t buy contraceptives or get abortions in the Republic, the UK was freer.
Today, O’Toole said, the Catholic Church in Ireland is “a hugely diminished institution. The real damage it did was entirely self-inflicted through that appalling handling of all these child abuse scandals. Institutionally, it became rotten.”
Ireland has gone through a transformation socially, politically and economically in a relatively short period of time. Divorce was legalised in 1995, same-sex marriage in 2015 and abortion in 2018, which is quite remarkable when you consider the stranglehold the Catholic Church had on Irish politics and culture not too long ago. “These were markers of a profoundly changed society,” O’Toole believes.
Leaning into its diaspora in the United States and elsewhere, Ireland has developed its Global Ireland brand.
O’Toole, also a professor at Princeton University, said it’s moving to see how many people in the United States claim and are proud of their Irish heritage. “It’s important to them, it’s part of their own identity and it doesn’t make them not American,” he said.
O’Toole, 65, said that while he never thought he’d see Irish reunification in his lifetime, his thinking has shifted in recent years.
“I’m not so sure about that anymore,” he said. “I think there will be a referendum on Irish unity in Northern Ireland within the next 10 years. My worry is that we’re not ready for it yet. We still have quite a lot of work to do. I would much rather we have reconciliation before unity, rather than unifying with a still very divided population.”
He explained that Brexit has made Irish unity more likely, because being in the EU kept Catholics in Northern Ireland reasonably satisfied. A majority of Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU, so Brexit has alienated the Catholic population again.
“The irony is this was a situation brought about by people who are unionists, not by Irish nationalists,” he said. “This misconceived unionist project actually did more harm to the UK and Northern Ireland’s place within it than the IRA managed to do through 30 years of violence.”
Justin Chapman is an award-winning journalist, author, actor, and politician. He writes for Alta Journal, Huffington Post, LA Weekly, and many other publications.
LONGER VERSION:
The Evergreen ‘Irish Question’
Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole’s new book explores Ireland’s troubled history as President Biden visits the island during the 25th anniversary of the peace deal that ended the bloody Troubles in Northern Ireland and LA gears up for another Ireland Week
By Justin Chapman
April 10 is the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, which ended the decades of brutal sectarian violence between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles. More than 3,600 people died in the bombings, shootings, kidnappings and other indiscriminate acts of terror that began in the late 1960s and ended in April 1998.
President Joe Biden, who has Irish ancestry, will visit both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland to celebrate the peace anniversary for five days starting April 11. When United Kingdom Prime Minister Rishi Sunak invited Biden to visit Northern Ireland on March 13 during a summit at the Point Loma naval base in San Diego, in which Sunak, Biden and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced an enhanced security partnership including developing nuclear-powered submarines, Biden accepted and replied, “It is my intention to go to Northern Ireland and the Republic.”
Until Sunak announced the Windsor Framework on February 27, which is a deal to govern the movement of goods between the UK/Northern Ireland and the EU/Ireland and thus avoid a hard land border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, it was unclear if Biden would be making the trip.
Ever since Brexit in 2016, many were concerned that the re-establishment of a hard border would result in the Troubles Redux. Due to the Northern Ireland Protocol, an agreement between the EU and former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson that inspections and customs checks be conducted between Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland) and Ireland, rather than at the land border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, a sort of de facto border existed in the sea between the two islands.
This meant Northern Ireland was somewhat cut off economically from the rest of the UK, which angered the unionists and reignited violence from loyalist paramilitaries. Under the new Windsor Framework deal, among other things, goods from Britain destined for Northern Ireland will enter through a new “green lane” with minimal custom checks and paperwork, while goods that are or may be headed for Ireland and thus the EU will go through a separate “red lane” with more extensive checks. Brexit has put the Good Friday Agreement to the biggest stress test in its quarter century existence.
What the historic peace deal did, Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole pointed out in his epic 2022 book We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland—just released in paperback in February—was enshrine national self-determination, end the armed conflict and recognize sovereignty and citizenship as a matter of free choice.
The agreement also laid bare the futility of the Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) and various loyalist paramilitaries’ campaigns of bloodshed, though factions from both sides continue that violence to this day.
“These people have very, very little public support, but sadly we know—and you know it from the States, too—very small groups of people with arms can cause mayhem and de-stabilize things,” O’Toole said. “But I don’t think we’re ever going back to the Troubles. I just don’t think anybody really wants that. A hard border, if it had been reimplemented, which really is what the Brexit people wanted to do, would have been disastrous, because a border is an easy target.”
In 2017, then-Irish Ambassador to the United States Daniel Mulhall told this reporter that the Irish government “is determined to avoid any form of border in Ireland, which would be economically disruptive and politically risky.”
‘Voting with their feet’
In his book, O’Toole weaves his personal story into the fabric of Ireland’s history and culture, from his birth in 1958 to the present day, including mass emigration, Catholic nationalism, the Troubles, Brexit and much more. The book is a thorough exploration of how the Irish story speaks to the larger human experience. O’Toole is a long-time columnist for the Irish Times, a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Guardian and the author of 19 books.
Leading into the Troubles, Ireland experienced decades of mass emigration. O’Toole wrote that three out of five children growing up in Ireland in the 1950s were destined to leave the island. This reporter’s grandparents, who left Ireland that decade in their 20s and landed in Pasadena, never saw their parents again.
“It really was tragic for a lot of families, that they were broken up by mass emigration,” O’Toole said. “By 1958, it reached a psychological crisis level. The promise was that if we only had our own state, this mass migration would stop, we would be able to do things for ourselves and make life better. And here people were just getting out and voting with their feet against the viability of an independent Ireland.”
The government opened the country up to foreign capital, beginning a decades’ long economic transformation from an agricultural society to an economy that attracted mostly American information technology, pharmaceutical and medical device multinationals, drawn to the island for its nearly non-existent corporate tax rate.
Up in Northern Ireland, however, trouble was brewing. The Catholic minority there rebelled against civil rights abuses by the UK and Protestant majority, resulting in civil unrest and the armed campaign of the IRA, which wanted to end British rule of Northern Ireland.
O’Toole wrote that the eruption of violence in Northern Ireland was “both sudden and slow. On the one hand, very few people expected it. On the other hand, there was the slow burn of ‘50 years of neglect, apathy and misunderstanding.’”
He said that while his father was a rational, non-emotional man, after the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972, when British soldiers opened fire on unarmed demonstrators and killed 13 people, the reality of the situation hit home.
“I remember my father coming home and saying to my mother, ‘Look, you’re going to have to get used to the fact that myself and the boys, we’re going to be up in the North fighting.’ It was just becoming that kind of tribal civil war mentality,” he said.
But it got complicated for those who sympathized with the Catholic minority because “the IRA started doing horrific things” like indiscriminately killing civilians.
“Apart from the moral issue, politically speaking it was very stupid because it just alienated its natural support base,” O’Toole said. “It certainly was horrible for the British to massacre innocent people, so why is it okay for us to massacre innocent people? They put bombs in cafes and pubs repeatedly. Nobody thought in 1968 that this was gonna go on for 30 years. Not only did it go on for 30 years, but it also felt like it could’ve gone on for another 30 years. It was sort of self-generating.”
He added in the book that if the IRA’s “armed struggle was an attempt to bring about a united Ireland by force, it had failed completely.”
‘The Irish way’
The seed that led to the Troubles, of course, was the partition of the six counties in Northern Ireland from the rest of Ireland dating back to the early 1920s. That partition had other ripple effects, as well.
Partition “made it possible for [Ireland] to be an ethnic and religious monolith” and lack “the pluralism you need to have a modern democracy,” O’Toole said. “What was left was just an overwhelmingly and, frankly, stultifyingly Catholic country. Well over 90 percent of people were Catholic, almost all white, mostly rural. How do you preserve this idea of being the most Catholic country in the world? By punishing women in particular. So you had a sexual puritanism, which even by the standards of the time was extreme.”
O’Toole pointed out in his book that Irish people considered the Republic free and the North unfree, but for women who couldn’t buy contraceptives or get abortions in the Republic, the UK was freer.
Indeed, the title We Don’t Know Ourselves refers to the “typical Irish form of double-mindedness, a system of compartmentalization that kept two contradictory realities alive by keeping them ostensibly apart.” There was a “cognitive dissonance that was so deeply engrained in Irish society.” Contraception, divorce, adultery, even child rape by priests, could co-exist with a Catholic nationalism that pretended none of those things happened in Ireland. “Reality could continue on its own sweet way, so long as it was not reflected in what the state said about itself,” he wrote. “The façade was much more important than the building. What should be must always outweigh what was. This was the Irish way.”
He cited the example of parents of children as young as six who had been raped by a priest who were apologetic to church officials “about having to discuss the matter and were as much concerned for the priest’s welfare as for their child and other children.” He added that “that’s when you got real power, because you’re inside people’s heads. You make the victim feel like they’re the ones to blame.”
Today, O’Toole said, the Catholic Church is “a hugely diminished institution” in Ireland, nearly “entirely through its own fault. The real damage it did was entirely self-inflicted through that appalling handling of all these child abuse scandals. Institutionally, it became rotten.”
He added that the cynicism with which abusers were moved around to other churches where there were “fresh fields of kids to abuse” is still “very upsetting. And they just did this again and again and again, over decades, and then lied about it when they were challenged on it. It’s very hard for any of us to get our heads around. It’s a terrible story. It really is very, very dark. It’s sad for believers, someone like my mother, to have to confront the fact that these people were lying to you for so long, that they didn't really practice what they preached. And very often, it was the very opposite of what they were preaching.”
‘A profoundly changed society’
Today, of course, Ireland is a much different country than most of the history O’Toole writes about. Divorce was legalized in 1995, same-sex marriage in 2015 and abortion in 2018, which is quite remarkable when you consider the stranglehold the Catholic Church had on Irish politics and culture not too long ago. As O’Toole put it, “these were markers of a profoundly changed society.” Ireland has gone through a transformation socially, politically and economically in a relatively short period of time.
Leaning into its diaspora in the United States and elsewhere, Ireland has developed programs and public diplomacy efforts under the Global Ireland brand. In 2019, Ireland opened a new consulate in Los Angeles, its seventh in the United States. Leo Varadkar, the Taoiseach of Ireland (prime minister, pronounced TAY-shuh), visited LA and officially opened the consulate alongside then-LA Mayor Eric Garcetti, who was just installed as U.S. Ambassador to India.
Since 2017, LA has been the site of a week of events celebrating Irish culture—including performances and talks on Irish music, theater, visual art, film, TV, sports, animation, technology, food, fashion, business, trade and more—known as Ireland Week, which returns this October.
“California accounts for about 15 percent of all the U.S. imports into Ireland,” said Orla Keane, Irish consul general when the LA consulate opened. “There are 2.5 million people in California who claim to have Irish descent.”
O’Toole, who is also a professor at Princeton University, said it’s moving to see how many people in the United States claim and are proud of their Irish heritage.
“It’s important to them, it’s part of their own identity and it doesn’t make them not American,” he said. “Right-wing conservatives think of culture and identity as something that’s just been given to us from the past and it’s fixed, and therefore the only thing that can happen to it is it’s going to be diluted or taken away from us. And actually, the Irish story is a really fascinating one of how, through transformation and change and dealing with new circumstances, their culture has actually grown, has become more global. It is in LA, it’s everywhere. And it’s not any less Irish for any of that—it’s more so.”
‘Reconciliation before unity’
Back home, as Northern Ireland and Ireland celebrate 25 years of peace since the Good Friday Agreement was enacted in April 1998, the island remains split in two, as Biden’s visit to both sides of the (non-existent) border will highlight. Keane pointed out that the agreement “is clear that a decision on the united Ireland question could only be made as a result of a referendum that all of the people of Northern Ireland take part in.”
O’Toole, 65, said that while he never thought he’d see Irish reunification in his lifetime, his thinking has shifted in recent years.
“I’m not so sure about that anymore,” he said, adding that the aspiration for a united Ireland is a perfectly legitimate one. “I think there will be a referendum on Irish unity in Northern Ireland within the next 10 years. My worry is that we’re not ready for it yet. It has to be a much larger process of reconciliation, of recognizing that there are different ways of being Irish and that they’re all legitimate. We still have quite a lot of work to do. I would much rather we have reconciliation before unity, rather than unifying with a still very divided population.”
He explained that Brexit has made Irish unity more likely, because being in the EU kept Catholics in Northern Ireland reasonably satisfied. A majority of Northern Ireland actually voted to remain in the EU, so Brexit has alienated the Catholic population again.
“Northern Ireland has stayed, in some respects, economically inside the EU, which means it’s different from Britain,” O’Toole said. “If you were a unionist and you wanted Northern Ireland to stay part of the UK, as the majority of the Protestant population does, Brexit is the stupidest thing you could have done. The irony is that this was a situation brought about by people who are unionists, not by Irish nationalists. This misconceived unionist project actually did more harm to the UK and Northern Ireland’s place within it than the IRA managed to do through 30 years of violence.”
Watch an interview with O’Toole and this reporter on the Pasadena Media TV show “Well Read with Justin Chapman.”