![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I decided to get a jump on March reading (Irish History Month, no longer short-book February) by picking up a book I’d borrowed from my father: Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland.
O’Toole was born around the same time as my father, which provided a certain reading experience for my dad, an Irish-American Catholic growing up in postwar suburban Connecticut. I am thirty years younger than both of them so the reading experience was quite different for me; I only started having that “oh yes, I remember what was going on over here during that time” and “I think I heard about that while it was happening” kind of comparative experience right toward the end, when he was talking about things like the gay marriage referendum and the repeal of the constitutional abortion ban. For the rest of it I was pretty squarely Reading About History Times, which suited me just fine as I enjoy reading about history times.
O’Toole is a very engaging writer. Most of the chapters start off with an attention-grabbing anecdote–sometimes personal, like the time he accidentally let the pigs out on a summer trip to the Gaeltacht and the pigs had to be rescued by Sean O Riada, but other times more traditional newspaper-article type teases–which he then ties into the larger analysis of whatever aspect of Irish life and politics in whatever year or years the chapter covers. He’s also got a good handle on that sort of dry, respectable humor that really good reporters ought to have, where they are funny without doing anything as overt as making jokes.
We Don’t Know Ourselves is largely a chronicle of the various hypocrisies, self-delusions, bits of wishful thinking, and self-defeating romanticism of post-Independence Ireland, including his own journeys of disillusionment with such pillars of Irish society as the Catholic Church, the Fianna Fail party, and militant nationalism (more specifically, the tradition of venerating doomed blood sacrifice to make songs about over figuring out how to actually win material political victories). In the hands of a less skilled and thoughtful writer it could be possible to conclude that independence was a mistake, or that the Irish really are as ungovernable and uncivilized as their critics say, with their slavish devotion to a backward, medieval faith and their affinity for doing terrorism. O’Toole is, fortunately, not that writer. He writes insightfully and sympathetically of the shame and insecurities that gave rise to the bad psychological habits of the Irish–the colonial survival mechanism of knowing things without acknowledging them, an increasingly maladaptive habit that festered until the country broke open–while being unsparing about the human toll of the various things Ireland looked away from for decades, from the physical and sexual violence of the Church institutions that ran so much of Ireland’s social infrastructure to tax evasion. (The tax evasion was a really big problem.)
The nuance, the attention to detail, and the determination to look through rhetoric and sentiment and justification to find the human element in every story, was really thrown into sharp relief when I was fortunate enough to have tickets to the Wolfe Tones’ farewell concert in Boston fall into my lap immediately upon finishing this book. The show was enjoyable but did not exactly showcase a coherent political analysis, being a celebration of Irish militant nationalist history without regard to its contradictions and carefully calculated to avoid offending the political sensibilities of current Irish-Americans essentially regardless of what they were, or at least to keep everyone so hyped that they don’t notice that they sort of offended everyone’s political sensibilities regardless of what they were. The show started off with a (regrettably very good) Boston police pipe-and-drum parade band that barely fit on the stage and then, following a reading of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic in its entirety, went into a slideshow about the Easter Rising that began off with a photograph of an Irish Volunteers recruitment poster railing against the excesses of the “Peelers” (i.e., the cops). A very kumbaya-esque let’s-all-hold-hands-and-pray-for-peace-and-brotherhood type ditty (“Give Me Your Hand,” maybe?) segued seamlessly into “Come Out Ye Black and Tans,” a nationalist classic about getting into street fights with either the actual Tans or maybe your racist neighbors, depending on how you want to read it; it’s a bit ambiguous. “The Streets of New York” was dedicated to an NYPD police officer and was followed up almost immediately with a rendition of “Joe McDonnell,” a song about one of the hunger strikers, whose chorus begins “And you dared to call me a terrorist while you looked down your gun.” Pro-peace, pro-cop, and pro-terrorism all at the same time! Erin go bragh!
It’s undeniable that the Tones are a forcefully good time; O’Toole has a hilarious anecdote about himself as a teenager watching a Wolfe Tones concert and finding himself unexpectedly yelling “Up the IRA!” at the Taoiseach immediately afterwards. But being surrounded by the whitest crowd I’ve ever seen in Dorchester clapping for the BPD and yelling “ooh ah up the ‘ra” while a very 1990s-looking PowerPoint of grainy old photos of the patriot dead played behind the band was for sure a bit over-the-top, and I could feel a critical little ghost Fintan O’Toole sitting in the back of my mind, possibly having a nosebleed. (We left after a very drunk woman in a Free Palestine shirt–featuring a keffiyeh-masked militant with a rocket standing back-to-back with a balaclava-masked Provo with an Armalite–was gently removed by the mostly-Black theater staff–the only Black people on the property–after they asked her to stop putting her handbag on the stage about twelve times, and we decided we’d had enough of a politically weird experience to keep busy analyzing it for the rest of our lives.)
Where was I? Right, actual history.
This book clocks in at about 500 pages and I feel like if I got going I could probably write 500 pages about it, but I’d end up carefully rereading the whole thing in the process, and that might be a project better put off a bit, at least if I want to get through other books this year. I found this book unputdownable enough that I stayed up too late reading it more nights than one; at the same time, because it touches on so many different things, I also spent a lot of time looking stuff up on my phone (starting with aerial photographs of Crumlin and going through a bunch of music on Spotify and the artwork of Jim Fitzpatrick), and staring off into the middle distance while my brain struggled to tie in the things I was reading about here to all the others scattered bits and pieces that make up Irish history in my brain–here’s what O’Toole says, and here’s what Rory Carroll said in There Will Be Fire, and didn't Patrick Radden Keefe also talk about that in Say Nothing, and sure there was just an episode about film censorship on The Irish History Podcast, and hey look it’s Michael D. Michael D. Up On His Bikeldy Higgins!
At any rate, I understand why my dad’s been talking my ear off about this book for months and why he insisted I read it, and I may find myself becoming completely insufferable about it too!
O’Toole was born around the same time as my father, which provided a certain reading experience for my dad, an Irish-American Catholic growing up in postwar suburban Connecticut. I am thirty years younger than both of them so the reading experience was quite different for me; I only started having that “oh yes, I remember what was going on over here during that time” and “I think I heard about that while it was happening” kind of comparative experience right toward the end, when he was talking about things like the gay marriage referendum and the repeal of the constitutional abortion ban. For the rest of it I was pretty squarely Reading About History Times, which suited me just fine as I enjoy reading about history times.
O’Toole is a very engaging writer. Most of the chapters start off with an attention-grabbing anecdote–sometimes personal, like the time he accidentally let the pigs out on a summer trip to the Gaeltacht and the pigs had to be rescued by Sean O Riada, but other times more traditional newspaper-article type teases–which he then ties into the larger analysis of whatever aspect of Irish life and politics in whatever year or years the chapter covers. He’s also got a good handle on that sort of dry, respectable humor that really good reporters ought to have, where they are funny without doing anything as overt as making jokes.
We Don’t Know Ourselves is largely a chronicle of the various hypocrisies, self-delusions, bits of wishful thinking, and self-defeating romanticism of post-Independence Ireland, including his own journeys of disillusionment with such pillars of Irish society as the Catholic Church, the Fianna Fail party, and militant nationalism (more specifically, the tradition of venerating doomed blood sacrifice to make songs about over figuring out how to actually win material political victories). In the hands of a less skilled and thoughtful writer it could be possible to conclude that independence was a mistake, or that the Irish really are as ungovernable and uncivilized as their critics say, with their slavish devotion to a backward, medieval faith and their affinity for doing terrorism. O’Toole is, fortunately, not that writer. He writes insightfully and sympathetically of the shame and insecurities that gave rise to the bad psychological habits of the Irish–the colonial survival mechanism of knowing things without acknowledging them, an increasingly maladaptive habit that festered until the country broke open–while being unsparing about the human toll of the various things Ireland looked away from for decades, from the physical and sexual violence of the Church institutions that ran so much of Ireland’s social infrastructure to tax evasion. (The tax evasion was a really big problem.)
The nuance, the attention to detail, and the determination to look through rhetoric and sentiment and justification to find the human element in every story, was really thrown into sharp relief when I was fortunate enough to have tickets to the Wolfe Tones’ farewell concert in Boston fall into my lap immediately upon finishing this book. The show was enjoyable but did not exactly showcase a coherent political analysis, being a celebration of Irish militant nationalist history without regard to its contradictions and carefully calculated to avoid offending the political sensibilities of current Irish-Americans essentially regardless of what they were, or at least to keep everyone so hyped that they don’t notice that they sort of offended everyone’s political sensibilities regardless of what they were. The show started off with a (regrettably very good) Boston police pipe-and-drum parade band that barely fit on the stage and then, following a reading of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic in its entirety, went into a slideshow about the Easter Rising that began off with a photograph of an Irish Volunteers recruitment poster railing against the excesses of the “Peelers” (i.e., the cops). A very kumbaya-esque let’s-all-hold-hands-and-pray-for-peace-and-brotherhood type ditty (“Give Me Your Hand,” maybe?) segued seamlessly into “Come Out Ye Black and Tans,” a nationalist classic about getting into street fights with either the actual Tans or maybe your racist neighbors, depending on how you want to read it; it’s a bit ambiguous. “The Streets of New York” was dedicated to an NYPD police officer and was followed up almost immediately with a rendition of “Joe McDonnell,” a song about one of the hunger strikers, whose chorus begins “And you dared to call me a terrorist while you looked down your gun.” Pro-peace, pro-cop, and pro-terrorism all at the same time! Erin go bragh!
It’s undeniable that the Tones are a forcefully good time; O’Toole has a hilarious anecdote about himself as a teenager watching a Wolfe Tones concert and finding himself unexpectedly yelling “Up the IRA!” at the Taoiseach immediately afterwards. But being surrounded by the whitest crowd I’ve ever seen in Dorchester clapping for the BPD and yelling “ooh ah up the ‘ra” while a very 1990s-looking PowerPoint of grainy old photos of the patriot dead played behind the band was for sure a bit over-the-top, and I could feel a critical little ghost Fintan O’Toole sitting in the back of my mind, possibly having a nosebleed. (We left after a very drunk woman in a Free Palestine shirt–featuring a keffiyeh-masked militant with a rocket standing back-to-back with a balaclava-masked Provo with an Armalite–was gently removed by the mostly-Black theater staff–the only Black people on the property–after they asked her to stop putting her handbag on the stage about twelve times, and we decided we’d had enough of a politically weird experience to keep busy analyzing it for the rest of our lives.)
Where was I? Right, actual history.
This book clocks in at about 500 pages and I feel like if I got going I could probably write 500 pages about it, but I’d end up carefully rereading the whole thing in the process, and that might be a project better put off a bit, at least if I want to get through other books this year. I found this book unputdownable enough that I stayed up too late reading it more nights than one; at the same time, because it touches on so many different things, I also spent a lot of time looking stuff up on my phone (starting with aerial photographs of Crumlin and going through a bunch of music on Spotify and the artwork of Jim Fitzpatrick), and staring off into the middle distance while my brain struggled to tie in the things I was reading about here to all the others scattered bits and pieces that make up Irish history in my brain–here’s what O’Toole says, and here’s what Rory Carroll said in There Will Be Fire, and didn't Patrick Radden Keefe also talk about that in Say Nothing, and sure there was just an episode about film censorship on The Irish History Podcast, and hey look it’s Michael D. Michael D. Up On His Bikeldy Higgins!
At any rate, I understand why my dad’s been talking my ear off about this book for months and why he insisted I read it, and I may find myself becoming completely insufferable about it too!