The Captive Reader

We are almost half-way through the year and while there are already a number of books in the running for my end-of-year list of favourites, there is only one that is currently in the race for the number one spot: We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole.  A blend of history and memoir, journalist O’Toole looks at the changes in modern Ireland over the course of his life, from his birth in 1958 to the present day (this was published in 2021), an extraordinary period of social and economic upheaval.

I was born in the mid-eighties so my first impressions of Ireland were shaped in the 1990s, when the economy was booming and the country was being shaken by revelations about the Catholic church’s involvement in decades of child abuse and the incarceration of girls and women in the Magdalene Laundries.  While we learned a fair amount in school about Ireland in the 19th Century, given how significantly it impacted Canada – around a million Irish people immigrated here during and after the famine, explaining why every farm town where my father’s family is from in Southwestern Ontario is named after an Irish village – our only 20th century content was a quick overview of the War of Independence and the Civil War to give us context for the Troubles and the ongoing peace talks that were always in the news.

What I didn’t learn in school or through the news, I supplemented with Maeve Binchy books, which it turns out were excellent social histories to cover the changing attitudes of a country that changed incredibly quickly.  As O’Toole says early in his book, “the transformation of Ireland over the last sixty years has sometimes felt as if a new world had landed from outer space on top of an old one.”  Fiction has done a good job of capturing that, but not as good as memoir.

The Ireland O’Toole was born into was a land of emigrants.  The birth rate was low because a generation of child-bearing adults had disappeared, looking for jobs and a future in England or America:

In 1841 the population of what became the twenty-six county Irish state was 6.5 million.  In 1961, it would hit its lowest ever total of 2.8 million.  By that year, a scarcely imaginable 45 per cent of all those born in Ireland between 1931 and 1936 and 40 per cent of those born between 1936 and 1941 had left.

Yet from such hopeless beginnings, O’Toole has seen Ireland ascend (and fall and ascend and fall and ascend – it’s been a turbulent few decades) to become, unbelievably, a country that draws immigrants.  Economically, this is primarily due to huge investment from America (the numbers are staggering – “by 2017, US direct investment stock in Ireland totalled $457 billion, a greater investment stake than in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Denmark and Sweden combined”), which is slightly worrying as a model for a stable economic future but I digress.  That’s a topic for another book.  Economic growth and stability always drive social change and the liberalising of the country has been, if anything, even more extreme.

Seeing the church through O’Toole eyes is fascinating.  Ireland has modernized so fast that, from the outside, it is easy to forget what a stranglehold the church had on all aspects of society.  They taught your children (and beat them, and molested them), they decided what could be printed or shown on film or TV, and they insisted that women and children who transgressed should be shut up in terrifying institutions.  And in their stranglehold, they allowed corruption to flourish, answerable to no one – an inspiration, surely, for the politicians to come.

Reading Maeve Binchy, not generally an author given to shocking her readers, I was always shocked by the corruption of some of the characters and the casual acceptance of it by others.  What to me seemed so over-the-top and unbelievable now, with all these real-life examples laid before me, seems like harsh social realism.  Still bizarre though, wound up in a society trained for generations by the church to pretend that they don’t see what is happening in front of them and to believe they have no power to change it.

That infantilizing of a nation was, O’Toole asserts, the Catholic church’s greatest achievement.  For years, people had had no way of even finding the words to talk about what had happened to them.  When they tried, when families spoke to the church about what had happened to their children, it was with shame and embarrassment rather than outrage:

It had so successfully disabled a society’s capacity to think for itself about right and wrong that it was the parents of an abused child, not the bishop who enabled that abuse, who were ‘quite apologetic’.  It had managed to create a flock who, in the face of an outrageous violation of trust, would be concerned as much about the abuser as about those he had abused and might abuse in the future.  It had inserted its system of control and power so deeply into the minds of the faithful that they could scarcely even feel angry about the perpetration of disgusting crimes on their own children.

The most heartbreaking thing is how widely known the abuses were and how a country chose to live silently with the shame for so long.  Catholicism and Ireland were inexorably entwined.  Everyone knew who the dodgy brothers were at the school, or that when girls disappeared for a few days to England that it was for an abortion that could never be spoken about.  What was then surprising is how quickly the nation embraced changed, how it longed for future generations to have more freedom than theirs had had.  The Irish are great ones for referendums and passed both the 2015 one in favour of same-sex marriage and the 2018 one to legalize abortion with majorities of greater than 60 per cent.  In both cases, O’Toole reports his generation reacting with some surprise to their parents’ votes in favour.  When the abortion ban was repealed, O’Toole was drinking with a politician friend who was happy but conflicted, having not spoken to his elderly, very devout parents who lived on their rural farm, feeling uneasy since he had publicly voiced his support for the repeal.  Their drink was interrupted by a call from his sister, ringing to share her happiness with the result:

Then he asked her how their father and mother were taking it all.  Delighted, she said – sure both of the parents had voted for repeal.  ‘Daddy said he couldn’t bear thinking of all those women coming back from England and not being able to tell anyone what they were going through.’  There had been, all along in the old man’s mind, another history, a history of migrants and absentees, of secrets and silences.  He was, it seemed, glad to let it out at last.

The one thing I’d (naively) not expected to have been so dominant were the Troubles.  I’d always thought of them as specific to Northern Ireland but O’Toole’s memory of his father coming home one day in the early 1970s and saying that it looked like he and his sons would soon be forced to go up north, certain they were on the brink of a war where Irishmen on both sides of the border would be fighting, impressed on me what that level of unrest felt like contained on a small island.  The family had another tense evening in 1972 waiting for O’Toole’s father, a bus conductor, to come home after an IRA bomb exploded near the company canteen and it wasn’t clear who had been killed.  His father was safe but two colleagues died.

It’s moments like that – the family conversations, the memories of certain television programs or exchanges at school – that make this such a vivid and impactful book.  O’Toole does a wonderful job of presenting his country’s history but an even better job of expressing what it was like to live through.