Fintan O'Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was
1958, and the Irish government--in despair, because all the young
people were leaving--opened the country to foreign investment and
popular culture. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with
Irish national identity. In We Don't Know Ourselves, O'Toole,
one of the Anglophone world's most consummate stylists, weaves his
own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change,
showing how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a
reactionary "backwater" to an almost totally open
society--perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in
modern history.
Born to a
working-class family in the Dublin suburbs, O'Toole served as an
altar boy and attended a Christian Brothers school, much as his
forebears did. He was enthralled by American Westerns suddenly
appearing on Irish television, which were not that far from his own
experience, given that Ireland's main export was beef and it was
still not unknown for herds of cattle to clatter down Dublin's
streets. Yet the Westerns were a sign of what was to come. O'Toole
narrates the once unthinkable collapse of the all-powerful Catholic
Church, brought down by scandal and by the activism of ordinary
Irish, women in particular. He relates the horrific violence of the
Troubles in Northern Ireland, which led most Irish to reject violent
nationalism. In O'Toole's telling, America became a lodestar, from
John F. Kennedy's 1963 visit, when the soon-to-be martyred American
president was welcomed as a native son, to the emergence of the Irish
technology sector in the late 1990s, driven by American corporations,
which set Ireland on the path toward particular disaster during the
2008 financial crisis.
A remarkably
compassionate yet exacting observer, O'Toole in coruscating prose
captures the peculiar Irish habit of "deliberate unknowing,"
which allowed myths of national greatness to persist even as the
foundations were crumbling. Forty years in the making, We Don't
Know Ourselves is a landmark work, a memoir and a national
history that ultimately reveals how the two modes are entwined for
all of us.