As the title indicates, Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland is the history of Ireland that took place over the timeline of the author’s life span. Since O’Toole was born in 1958, that is when this historical memoir takes place.
Because family and legacy is such an integral part of Irish society, however, the opening chapter stretches back into history before the year of his birth to offer information about how his parents met and married and eventually produced the baby boy who would grow up to become a writer. Although quite specifically about Ireland, the book ultimately becomes something of an exploration of how deeply American culture began to insinuate itself into the daily strains of living. This becomes especially true after the election in 1960 of John F. Kennedy as President. Kennedy’s strong hereditary ties to the land of his ancestors has the effect of deepening the bond between the two nations. The two events occurring in such close proximity to each, the birth of the author and the election of JFK, serve to create a background upon which the story proceeds chronologically, thus becoming both a personal history of the man and a broader history of his homeland.
Most of the chapters are subtitle according to a specific year. For instance, chapter fifteen is subtitled “1972: Death of a Nationalist.” The structure of this chapter is a template for most of the book. It begins with references to pop cultural influences at work on young Irish society at the time—the music of local band Thin Lizzy—before expanding outward to cover what will become one of the most controversial touchstones of the long civil war struggle between Ireland and Northern Ireland, the massacre commonly known as Bloody Sunday.
Occasionally, however, a single chapter will expand beyond a specific year to become a more broadly comprehensive study of a historical issue which cannot be restricted chronologically. Chapter seven is thus subtitled “1962– 1999: Silence and Smoothness.” Although seemingly a chapter which will by necessity be longer, the subtitle actually refers to the years in which Gay Byrne hosted a popular long-running Irish television show called The Late, Late Show. Though covering the most years, this is one of the shortest chapters in the book.
The personal history of Ireland presented through the perspective of the author is one which tends to focus on smaller details rather than exploring much larger complex issues. “1984-1985: Dead Babies and Living Statues” unites two events which took place in two different years. One is the discovery of an infant which had been brutally stabbed to death and abandoned. The other was the strange case of several people witnessing religious statues moving of their own accord. Into this mix is dropped a reference to just one of many violent protests against the film The Last Temptation of Christ which were taking place around the world, including Dublin. The common bond uniting this disparate stories taking place over the course of those two years is that each presented two different versions of an accepted truth. The chapter becomes a commentary on how the glorious literary tradition of fiction writing in Ireland often extends to purported official accounts later disproven as creations of imaginative minds.
Over the course of the sixty years of Irish history which the book covers, many of the most significant events which took place are explored but always within the context of what was going on of personal interest to O’Toole. The pedophilia running rampant within the clerics of the Catholic Church which only really began to come to public light around the turn of the millennium is portrayed in the chapter covering 1968. It is filtered through the author’s own personal interaction with the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid who knew that Father James McNee was a child molester who had built one of the very few private swimming pools in the entire area in which he regularly invited young boys over to enjoy and yet did nothing to punish or control him.
The chapter which combines 1980 and 1981 offers insight into the long history of political corruption in the country. Prime Minister Charles Haughey becomes a symbol of this systemic corruption embodied in the form of a living example of the hypocrisy that is the primary operating procedure. While his government was engaging in the most absurd censoring of American films on the lofty basis or protecting the nation’s residents from decadence and degradation, Haughey was earning 3500 pounds a year while at spending 30,000 pounds a year just maintaining of his luxurious private home.
The personal history of Ireland is one in which the national concerns always filter down to the personal level. The timeline is one which illustrates a significant evolution in the country’s standing among the nations of the world and this standing is unduly influence by the arrival of American pop culture following the election of an American President with deep roots planted in Ireland.
