Books 2024: A Portrait of Ireland’s 20th-Century Evolution

Book: We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

Author: Fintan O’Toole

Reviewed by: Kevin Conboy, retired partner, Paul Hastings LLP; former president, Irish Chamber of Atlanta

This is quite a tome. It was named one of the Sunday Book Review’s 10 best of 2022. It is lengthy, and while there are two eight-page photo sections, those are not counted against the 570 pages. The font is small.

O’Toole is Ireland’s most prominent political and cultural writer. He was born and grew up in Dublin, spent much of his life in Ireland, and now moves back and forth between homes in Dublin and Princeton, N.J., where he teaches. He has written primarily for The Irish Times, but has written for many other publications and written more than 20 books. In my judgment, it is fair to say that he is Ireland’s David Brooks. A reviewer described him as “an agile cultural commentator.”

While O’Toole writes in the book that his own life is too dull for an autobiography, and so he wrote this book on Ireland’s recent history, I am going to provide a couple of autobiographical points so that my viewpoint is clear.

I am Irish-American, but not Irish. I am of 100 percent Irish descent, and one of my grandparents, my maternal grandfather, was born in Ireland, and so I qualify for and have Irish citizenship. I served as the first president of the Irish Chamber of Atlanta for ten years. One of my daughters received her master’s degree from Trinity College in Dublin. I have met the last six or seven Prime Ministers of Ireland (the PM is called in Irish the “Taoiseach”). I visited Ireland for the first time in 1982, and then between 2000 and 2016, I visited Ireland more than 20 times. I’ve connected with Irish relatives, due to the fact that my grandfather’s uncle, Michael Connaughton, went down on the Titanic. So I have a keen interest in the topic.

We Don’t Know Ourselves was written primarily for an Irish audience. Unless you are Irish-born or have resided there for a length of time, you will find yourself perplexed by some local Irish and Gaelic terms, especially pertaining to geography, history, Irish popular culture, retail outlets, food and the like. More than one reviewer has suggested that if you want to understand the book and modern Ireland, it would be best to keep Google or Duck Duck Go or some other source handy for translations into American English. I am rather familiar with Ireland and life in Ireland but I felt this need very strongly.

This “Personal History of Modern Ireland” tells the story of Ireland from 1958 (the date of the author’s birth) to roughly the present. It covers all things Irish: economic, political, cultural, religious, etc., during this period of incredibly rapid transition from a substantially agricultural, Roman Catholic, isolated and rather poor nation (despite its educated and literate population and remarkable writers, musicians and others), an isolated outpost of Europe on the westernmost point of the continent, connected primarily to the United Kingdom and the United States by immigration, to a highly prosperous, highly developed, highly educated member of the European Union; in fact the second most prosperous country in the EU after Luxembourg.

Having visited Ireland first in 1982 and seeing it repeatedly during the Celtic Tiger years and after, my shorthand description of the changes in Ireland is that, in a generation, Ireland had moved from the status of Portugal, to Switzerland.

The book is huge— sprawling, in fact. To complete this review I will take on just two more topics, briefly: the issue of corruption, dishonesty, and “things not being what they seemed,” and the Roman Catholic Church.

First, O’Toole contends that Ireland is a land of contradictions. For example, Charles Haughey, who served on and off as Taoiseach in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, portrayed himself as a devout, Church-going conservative. In fact, he was thoroughly corrupt and despite his close relations with Church leaders, was open about his mistress of many years.

These contradictions and inconsistencies prevailed in matters of the economy as well. For example, in a single year, 2015, Ireland’s GDP increased by 26 percent; its exports doubled between 1995 and 2000.

For a number of years, Ireland produced all of the world’s Viagra.

One reviewer of the book called the Irish people “willfully ambiguous”; reviewer and distinguished Irish novelist Colm Toibin, in his review in The Guardian, wrote that, “If O’Toole’s book has a thesis, it is that nothing can be easily pinned down, no fact fully trusted. And no lie can be completely untrue.”

Second, regarding the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland: I have been saddened over the years as a “Cradle Catholic” that Ireland has in very large part (like very much of the rest of Western Europe) rejected the Catholic Church. Baptisms, weddings and funerals are not uncommon, but the other trappings of Catholic practice have diminished to a very large extent.

While O’Toole does not dwell on it, he explains that the corruption of the Catholic Church in Ireland started at the top, was pervasive and overwhelming, and was never confronted, only silently tolerated. The corruption involved mistreatment of orphans, beatings of school students, sexual misbehavior of a wide variety, including the grooming of young men for abuse and recruitment of the seminarians themselves to become priests’ accomplices in these acts. Until I read this book I did not fully understand how bad things were for the faith in Ireland.

I read the book because I received three emails in a month, from friends who didn’t know each other, telling me to read this book right now. (They knew of my interest in things Irish.) If you are similarly interested in things Irish, you too will want to read this book. It’s not an easy read, but it is worth it.

Editor’s notes: Global Atlanta will receive a 10 percent commission on any purchase of this book through the links on this page. 

Each year, Global Atlanta asks influential readers and community leaders to review the most impactful book they read during the course of the year. This endeavor has continued annually since 2010.

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