We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland by Fintan O’Toole

Liveright, 624 pp.

By James O’Shea

I’ve been to Ireland many times, and between work trips and bike rides have traveled to nearly every corner of the island. Fintan O’Toole introduced me to a different Ireland in his masterful We Don’t Know Ourselves.

Not many experiences beat the thrill of cycling down the bog road adjacent to the peaks of Connemara with the wind to my back and a mist in my face. Or biking up mountains to oversee the Lakes of Killarney, then speeding down toward a pint of Guinness in Kenmare, near my ancestral home.

My great-great grandfather, Jeremiah, left County Kerry as a young lad sometime in the shadow of “the Great Famine.” He went to New York City but soon headed for Canada and married Mary Ann O’Sullivan, a wee lass from County Kerry. After a few years, they moved to Kerry Patch in heavily Irish St. Louis, Mo., where I grew up.

Jerimiah’s extended family created the insulated world of Irish Catholic Democrats in which I grew up. We were the demographic majority and I felt sorry for the kid down the street whose dad was a Republican, Lutheran banker.

But O’Toole immersed me in an Irish culture that complimented – but also differed from -- my cloistered enclave. Friends and relatives would flock to saloons to hear Irish tenors croon “Danny Boy” to boozy audiences and toast the old sod on St. Patrick’s Day.

Few yearned for the green turf that their starving ancestors had escaped. I once offered to send my mom, proud of every drop of her Irish blood, on a trip to Ireland. She emphatically insisted: “No, why would I want to go there? All they eat is mutton.”

O’Toole’s book also gave me insights into the virulent racism that ran through my community. Many a family gathering involved stories about our Irish ancestors arriving in America only to find racist “No Irish Need Apply” signs when seeking a job. Yet I was raised in an atmosphere where most of the people in my neighborhood practiced the same kind of racism against Blacks.

Once our parish priest, an Irishman who delivered his sermons with a brogue, showered his Sunday Mass sermon with the N word, vowing to oppose any attempt by the archbishop to desegregate Catholic schools in the 1950s.

I scanned his “flock,” the same Irish Catholics with bitter memories of those “No Irish Need Apply” signs. They sat there, nodding their heads in agreement as they clasped their prayer books or slipped the beads of their rosaries through their fingers. I left church a confused nine-year-old wondering about my neighborhood: “What about all this stuff about everyone being equal in the eyes of God?”

O’Toole convincingly traces these unfortunate traits to a toxic mixture of religion and politics in my ancestor’s Catholic Ireland -- an Irish stew of corruption, delusion, and deceit where wrong and right nestle comfortably together in the same pew.

Insightful and penetrating beyond his own experience, O’Toole raises questions about the perilous mix of religion and politics.

O’Toole begins his account with his birth into a Dublin working class neighborhood that resembled mine in America. He was reared Catholic, as was I, and we were both were educated by the Christian Brothers, a tough order of would-be priests who could deliver a punch as well as a lecture on archaic Catholic values.

O’Toole focused his talents on thoroughly examining the contradictions and challenges of a neighborhood broader than mine: that of Ireland, a nation that evolved from an impoverished pariah island of thatched huts and insular politics to the more complex, sophisticated yet vexed country it is today.

O’Toole demonstrates sharp writing and gifted story telling talents -- no doubt honed during his many years as a journalist and critic for the Irish Times and other publications, including The New York Review of Books. He puts the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland into a nuanced context reserved for a skilled journalist with a keen, experienced eye.

He writes frankly about the island’s struggle to become a respected part of the European Union, the plague of emigration; suffocating censorship; demeaning treatment of women; archaic sexual mores; cruel treatment of vulnerable children; worship of martyrdom; corruption and priestly pedophilia -- all reinforced by this unhealthy alliance of religion and politics.

The Irish press covered many of these subjects, usually after they spilled into public view spawned by the tribunals and official investigations that scandal fathers.

O’Toole’s book provides lurid details of the disgraceful conduct but enlarges the discussion by delving into the philosophical footings laid by the Catholic Church that made these unholy practices possible.

“This was the Church’s greatest achievement in Ireland,” O’Toole writes. “It had so successfully disabled Irish society’s capacity to think for itself about right and wrong.” Priests, politicians, parents, bothers, and sisters shielded themselves from the misconduct surrounding them, embracing the idea of the “unknown known,” the phrase Donald Rumsfeld employed in claiming the lack of evidence linking Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to weapons of mass destruction. “Ours was a society that had developed an extraordinary capacity for cognitive disjunction,

O’Toole writes, “a genius for knowing and not knowing at the same time.”

O’Toole reinforces his insights with a wide range of reporting, including a childhood recollection that reveals how the “unknown known” could overshadow brutality in the hands of the Christian Brothers. “When I was ten and in third class, we had a teacher called Hoppy because he had a limp,” O’Toole writes. The Brother angered easily and almost anything could set him off. One day Hoppy was writing on the blackboard, his back turned to the class. The room was silent because the students we were so scared of him. O’Toole continues: “It was only because of this silence that, when I dropped my pencil on the floor, the sound hung in the air. Hoppy spun around: ‘The next boy who drops a pencil will get the bata.’ The bata was his bamboo cane. It whistled like a dive bomber and struck like a whip.”

A boy next to O’Toole had placed his pencil in a shallow indentation carved at the top of the desk to hold it, but it rolled down the desk in slow motion and fell to the floor. “The noise, inaudible in ordinary air, was in that echo chamber of apprehension ear-splitting,” O’Toole recalls. “Hoppy grabbed the boy by the scruff of his neck and dragged him to the front of the classroom. He started to lash at him with the bata, dancing lopsided around him, flailing indiscriminately at his head, his arms, his legs, his backside. The kid began to scream and fell to the floor, curling up in a fetal position. Hoppy just kept flogging him. His face was purple and there was spittle on his lips. Even under the squawks and whimpers coming from the heap on the floor, I could hear his low grunts but could not tell if they expressed effort or pleasure.”

The beating only stopped when the school’s head Brother intervened. “The boy was sent home,” OToole writes. “But Hoppy was back the next day. So was the boy. So was the terror. Nobody said anything. Nothing had happened.”

O’Toole reports that the church-run industrial school system was created to handle children who ran afoul of the law as well as those abandoned because their parents had taken to the drink. Indeed, O’Toole notes that the famed Monsignor Edward Flanagan, a Galway native and founder of Boys Town in Nebraska, once toured the industrial schools and likened them to the experience of enslavement that epitomized Nazi rule.

Irish parents, the police and Catholic authorities knew about the behavior of brothers like Hoppy, and pedophile priests who were even worse, O’Toole writes. The crimes and misconduct were covered up, just as they were in America. The Church had allies, O’Toole explains, including politicians of both its major parties.

To illustrate this alliance, O’Toole digs deeply into the career of former Taoiseach (Prime Minister), the late Charles Haughey. In several meticulously reported sections of his book, O’Toole documents Haughey’s corrupt, scandalous rise from a lower-middle-class Christian Brothers boy to the leader of Fianna Fåil, one of Ireland’s two main political parties and a force that aligned solidly with the wishes of the Church.

O’Toole details how Haughey mined the deep pockets of property developers who systematically destroyed Dublin, wrecking stately Georgian houses to pave the way for their building boom. Haughey kept a mistress and flaunted his wealth, acquiring mansions, a stud farm, yacht, and a private island off the coast of Kerry.

Haughey, O’Toole writes, dismissed journalists’ questions about his money and trysts, maintaining that this was ridiculous trivia, especially when the country faced serious issues. (Many of which he caused, O’Toole notes.) Although his errant ways were widely known or suspected, Haughey became a popular political figure and four-time prime minister.

The psychology of what O’Toole describes as the “unknown-known” stunted Ireland’s growth, both cognitive and economic, for decades. Finally public scandal jolted its heavily Catholic citizens to face a future they could no longer ignore.

The scandals involved sex, pedophilia, corruption, and deceit. But O’Toole dissects the one that really forced Ireland to reckon with the unknown-known, the downfall of the lateEamonn Casey, the charismatic and powerful Bishop of Galway.

Casey fled the country after being exposed for dipping into the Galway diocese for $117,000 to keep his mistress, Annie Murphy, with whom he had a son, from releasing a video of the lovers in the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York. O’Toole reports that the bishop even urged his lover to put their baby son up for adoption because “he had been born out of wedlock in sin.”

“As Murphy gradually told her story,” O’Toole writes, “it was indeed as much about money as about sex.” The view from the bishop’s bed, as Murphy depicted it, provided ordinary Irish Catholic citizens with a rare look at the sumptuous and luxurious life “at the top of the clerical ladder.”

The Casey scandal and all others forced a reckoning for the Irish people, O’Toole observes. The Catholic hierarchy was just like them, vulnerable humans that struggle with financial and moral problems common to all Irish men and women. It was a church made by men, mainly white men, not of gods and they could do wrong.

O’Toole ends his account on a hopeful note.

The scandals and events he had witnessed since his birth in 1958 had changed his country. “Ireland did not start as one fixed thing and end up as another. It moved between different kinds of unfixity. 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. Ireland came to accept that its familiar self had hidden a deep estrangement – of exile, of reality, or ordinary experience. It did not start out as isolated and become globalized. It brought its global history back home and, in the process, came to be, if not quite at home with itself, then more so that it had been before,” O’Toole writes. “We ended up, not great, maybe not even especially good, but …not so bad ourselves.”

After reading We Don’t Know Ourselves, I placed it on my bookshelf with a deeper understanding of myself and my origins.

James O’Shea, former executive editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, is the author of three books, including The Deal From Hell, a non-fiction narrative about the tragedy that sent the Tribune Company, owner of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, into the hands of real estate mogul Sam Zell and bankruptcy court. O’Shea is also a co-founder and former editor of the Chicago News Cooperative, a journalistic start-up that produced Chicago news for its own website and the Midwest edition of The New York Times. Prior to his news management career, O’Shea was a reporter, editor and Washington correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the Des Moines Register. He has served as the Howard R. Marsh Visiting Professor of Journalism at the University of Michigan.