Top Quotes: “We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland” — Fintan O’Toole
Introduction
“As for marriage, it was more unusual in Ireland than anywhere else in the world. Ireland was one of the most Catholic countries on earth, and the church preached that the family based on marriage between a man and a woman was a sacred thing, an earthly reflection of the Holy Family. But in reality Ireland had a ‘shockingly low’ marriage rate – statisticians could not find a comparable country. It also had Europe’s lowest proportion of women in the population, because women got out in even larger numbers than men did. Census figures published two years before my parents’ wedding showed that ‘the percentages unmarried of all age groups were still the highest in the world.’”
“Three out of five children growing up in Ireland in the 1950s were destined to leave at some point in their lives, mostly for the shelter of the old colonial power, England. In 1957, the year before I was born, almost 60,000 people emigrated. This was the latest episode in a slow, relentless demographic disaster. 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.”
“The Constitution created by de Valera in 1937 (with help from McQuaid) distinguished between the de facto and de jure Irelands — the actual one they ruled and the one that should exist as a thirty-two-county entity. The first was explicitly temporary.”
“In 1956, the IRA had begun the ‘Border Campaign’ of armed raids into Northern Ireland, attacking military and police installations, communications facilities and public property. The aim was to ‘fight until the invader is driven from our soil and victory is ours.’”
“In March 1958, Myles a Gopaleen suggested in the Irish Times that the state should establish a new special commission; ‘The objective should be to achieve federal status as the 49th state of the Union. (President Eisenhower will find our golf courses first class.) The preliminary stage will be to become an American possession ranking with Alaska, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. That will give us limited rights of US citizenship.’ He was being facetious but not quite absurd. Six years previously, the report on economic development commissioned by the Irish government from the US consultancy firm Stacy May had pointed to the strategy adopted by Puerto Rico — attracting light industries from the US by offering them tax incentives. The strategy had allowed the island to achieve rapid industrialization from a standing start. In 1956, the IDA reported that, on a visit to the US by its executives, they had been asked whether Ireland could offer similar incentives.”
“They got a small flat in a handsome three-storey red-brick Victorian house in the upper middle-class suburb of Monkstown, on the south side of Dublin Bay. Like refugees, my father and his cousin Vincent loaded everything my parents owned onto a handcart. On a hot June day, they pushed it all the way from Crumlin to Monkstown, eight miles east towards the Irish Sea through the lovely, respectable roads of Rathmines, Rathgar and Donnybrook.”
“And they couldn’t. Their idyll lasted for three and a half years. In September 1957, while they were living there, my mother’s mother Frances died, She was sixty-three. My mother’s father Jack was only sixty-five and just retired from his job working machinery in Power’s whiskey distillery. He was in remarkably good health, especially for a man who smoked shag tobacco and started his morning with a tumbler of his employer’s product, But he couldn’t be expected to live on his own — who would cook his meals and wash his clothes? Mary’s newly married young brother Johnny and his new wife moved in with him for a while, but there was too much tension and they moved out again.
On their fourth wedding anniversary, 4 January 1959, Mary and Sammy and me and Kieran left Eaton Place for 93 Aughavannagh Road. My mother did it out of a sense of duty. My father, I suppose, out of a sense of duty to her.”
The 60s
“When I started school in 1962, the church-dominated school system had left the Irish among the worst-educated people in the western world.
In the mid-1950s, there were 476,000 pupils in the primary education system, but just 83,000 in secondary and vocational schools, suggesting that more than 80 per cent dropped out of formal education at fourteen, the legal school leaving age. The reason was simple: secondary schools, overwhelmingly owned and run by the church, were private institutions and charged fees that most families could not afford.”
“When the government did establish a steering committee to produce a landmark report on investment in education, one of its internal debates was about the suggestion that free transport to secondary schools be provided for pupils in rural areas. A member of the committee, Father Jeremiah Newman (later the Catholic bishop of Limerick) objected on the basis that the Catholic Church would never agree to teenage boys and girls travelling together on school buses. There was a serious proposal about how to overcome the problem: ‘the buses would have a door on each side with a vertical partition down the middle of the bus — one side of the bus would be for girls and the other side would be for boys.’ The partition would be vertical rather than horizontal to avoid comparisons with the race-based system that operated on buses in the American Deep South.
But in September 1966, the most glamourous and charismatic of the new generation of Fianna Fáil politicians, the minister for education Donogh O’Malley, suddenly announced that he was going to introduce free secondary education for all students the following year. He did not consult the minister for finance, Jack Lynch, in advance. More daringly, he did not consult the Catholic bishops. He calculated, rightly, that the measure would be so popular that both the state and the church would have to fall in line with his démarche.”
“This was the church’s great achievement in Ireland. 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.”
“But many Irish Catholic women had already found a special way of not knowing and not sinning: the cycle regulator. From 1963 onwards, the Pill was imported into Ireland to keep menstrual anarchy at bay. Particularly in the middle-class, urban milieu, a woman could learn from her friends that a certain doctor was sympathetic and would prescribe the Pill, not of course as a contraceptive, but for menstrual problems. It turned out that Irish women were unique in the world in their inability to put some discipline on their periods without chemical help. The leading obstetrician Professor John Bonner noted that ‘Ireland would [appear to] have the highest incidence of irregular cycles in women in the history of the human race.’”
“He insisted on the very strict regime of Lenten fasting in his diocese: the faithful could eat one meal and two ‘collations’ each day during the forty days before Easter. A collation was something like a biscuit taken with a cup of tea. Moyra Riordan, who ran the Greendoor coffee shop on Patrick Street in Cork, invented a huge biscuit, and most of the other bakers in the city copied it. The biscuits were known as Connie Dodgers. The law of God was not defied. It was dodged. And so it was with the Pill. By 1968, it was reckoned that five Irish women in every hundred were using the Pill compared with ten in Britain.”
“Just because everybody knew the lie for what it was, this did not mean that the sham did not have to be maintained. An importer who described the contraceptive pill as a contraceptive pill would have the cargo seized by customs.
A doctor who prescribed it as a contraceptive was breaking the law. And many pharmacists policed the fiction.”
“Behind the absurd comedy, there were consequences for women. The high-dose ostrogen Pill was not suitable for some women but they used it because it was the only form of contraception they could get.”
“After the establishment of Northern Ireland in 1921, the British government had left its inbuilt Protestant and Unionist majority to its own devices: systematic discrimination against Catholics in employment and housing and the gerrymandering of local government electoral districts to ensure that, for example, the Catholic-majority city of Derry had a solidly Unionist majority on its council.”
“Even a year earlier the image of a thaw in Northern Ireland would have been a hopeful one. The improvement in relations with the Republic of Ireland was matched by a rise in the number of ‘mixed’ marriages between Protestants and Catholics, itself in part a product of the flowering of a youth culture that transcended sectarianism. In the Catholic diocese of Down and Connor (which includes Belfast) the proportion grew during the late 1960s and early 1970s, reaching 25 per cent of marriages by 1971. Something was indeed unfreezing.”
“He taught Latin, but he also seemed to have been given this special job of supervising the first years. What made this interesting was that this suited him best. The younger boys were less likely to know what to do when he started fondling them.
He was right about that. Like all the Brothers, he wore a black cassock, but unlike most of them, he was constantly feeling himself under it. He rubbed himself up against the school desks. He sat down beside boys and put his hand on their legs, working it steadily upwards. If he got a boy to stand beside him, his hand would sneak around behind him and land on the boy’s arse. He did all of this openly, constantly, shamelessly.”
“At the time, I did not realize that this complex life form had evolved over decades, maybe centuries. It was like the way children’s street games and rhymes passed down from generation to generation even though adults ignored them. Many years later, when I had written something about the Brothers, I got a letter from an anonymous man: ‘I went to Synge St. first in ‘36 or ‘37 and finished in ‘41. I am 65 now and can’t remember precisely. That’s not important what is important is the dread and terror that abounded there. Thank God it’s being exposed at last.
The years I spent there made my childhood the most miserable one. It wasn’t though just the beatings from sadists and the humiliation. I recall once, I think I was 9 or 10, being brought up to a little back room and the Brother after remonstrating with me over my crime (I was caught mitching (i.e. not attending school)) told me to take off my trousers and after several slaps on my backside started fondling my penis. It didn’t go further than that. I started to cry. But I’ll never forget the trauma of that event. Believe it or not you are the first and last person I ever related that incident to.”
“It is a startling fact that, up until the reform of the second-level curriculum shortly before I started in Coláiste Caoimhin, the only biological subject to be studied in most Irish schools was botany. In 1966, the Revd Seán 6 Catháin told a public meeting on the poverty of biological education that one reason why we kept away from the biological sciences in our schools was that they could be a bit troublesome — all that stuff about pollination, and so on’.”
“An American woman living in Dublin remarked in the late 1960s that ‘Adolescence lasts longer in Ireland, I think, than it does in any other country because the sexes are segregated so rigidly.’
Ignorance was reinforced by fear. Ireland in the 1960s had one of the lowest rates of children born out of wedlock in Europe. But like so much else about the country, this was deceptive. Young women who were unmarried and pregnant took the boat to England. As early as 1955, London County Council had so many Irish babies left in its care that a dedicated children’s officer was appointed to spend six months each year in Ireland to try to find homes for them. Alan Bestic reported in 1969 that ‘So many girls who find they are going to have a baby go to England that social workers and almoners automatically jot down on their papers: “P.F.I.” It signifies “Pregnant From Ireland”.
These women were not tourists or emigrants. They were refugees. They fled in terror. A Catholic social worker in England described it: ‘The fear in these girls has to be seen to be believed. It is only by endless gentleness that we can persuade them that going back [to Ireland] to have their baby wouldn’t be so awful. What sort of society do you have in Ireland that puts the girls into this state?’
The answer is one in which girls and young women could be incarcerated, potentially for the rest of their lives, for the mere perception of possible or actual moral deviancy.”
The 70s
“The strangest part of this arrangement was that it included a form of literal Americanization. Catholic Americans could effectively buy babies from Irish mother-and-baby homes. This practice was coming towards its end in 1971, but it had gone on for a long time, especially in the decades after the Second World War. It was organized under McQuaid, but facilitated by the state. Official figures suggest that, between July 1949 and the end of 1973, around 2,100 babies were exported to the US. The real figures may be very much higher: the Irish Times reported in 1951 that ‘almost 500 babies were flown from Shannon for adoption last year’ alone. The attraction was obvious: Irish babies, unlike those available for adoption in the US, were almost all white.”
“One of the reasons for this torment was that it remained lucrative. Sister Hildegarde McNulty, superioress of the largest of the homes, Sean Ross Abbey in Co. Tipperary, from which at least 438 babies were exported to the US, admitted shortly before her death in 1995 that ‘donations coming back from American adopters had constituted the largest single source of income’ for the institution. She also admitted to removing and destroying the documents relating to these payments.
The second, even more fearful, form of incarceration was the network of Magdalene asylums where women were held, forced to work without pay in the attached laundries, and often institutionalized for the rest of their lives. The system, which was not particular to Ireland, dated back to the eighteenth century. What is remarkable is that it was not just allowed to continue in Ireland until 1996, but that it was actively renewed in 1960, just as the country was supposedly modernizing. The country may have been opening up, but women were still to be locked up.”
“In 1971, a woman in Ireland could not, in effect, sit on a jury — that privilege belonged to registered property owners who were almost exclusively male. She could not, if she was a civil servant or worked in a bank, keep her job when she got married. She could not buy contraceptives (unless the Pill was misprescribed as a ‘cycle regulator’). She could not buy a pint of Guinness in a pub — some pubs refused to allow women to enter at all (my grandfather’s local on Leonard’s Corner was colloquially known as The Man’s House); some allowed a woman in if, and only if, she was accompanied by a man; and many refused to serve women pints of beer. (Even in 1978, in a popular pub in central Dublin, a barman accidentally sold me a pint of Guinness for my girlfriend. He could not take it back, since I had paid for it, but insisted on pouring it into two half-pint glasses instead.)
A woman could not, as of right, collect the state allowance paid to help her raise her children — the legislation specified that it be paid to the father, who might, or not might not, mandate her to collect it. She could not get a barring order in court against a violent husband. She could not, if she was married, live securely in her own home — even if she paid for the house, her husband could sell it at any time without her consent. She could not refuse to have sex with her husband — the concept of marital rape was regarded as a contradiction in terms. She could not choose her own legal domicile — if her husband moved to Australia but she stayed in Ireland, she was legally domiciled in Australia. She could not get the same rate for a job as a man. She could not get a divorce under any circumstances.
Over the course of the 1970s, most of these legal disabilities (divorce very much not included) would be dismantled or ameliorated. Some of this change came from the top: Ireland’s desire to join the European Economic Community meant that it had to be seen to fall into line with western European standards.”
“The Troubles in the North were getting worse, much worse than anyone had imagined possible. In 1970, twenty-nine people were killed and that seemed terrible. In 1971, the number would be 180. Most of the escalation in violence happened after 9 August, when the British government agreed to a request from Brian Faulkner’s Unionist government in Belfast to introduce the internment without trial of suspected paramilitaries. Internment was arguably the greatest public policy disaster of the Troubles. Of the 342 people seized and locked up, every single one was described as a suspected Republican. Not one Loyalist was initially interned. Very many of those interned, moreover, were not members of the IRA at all — and those who were belonged largely to the more political Official wing. (The IRA and Sinn Fein had split in 1970, with the majority favouring a policy of contesting elections and taking seats in Dublin, Belfast and London; the minority, which formed the Provisional Army Council, was more militarist, more sectarian and much less interested in electoral politics.) The introduction of internment and the use by the British army of torture-like techniques against arrested men (hooding detainees, forcing them to stand for long periods with their arms against walls, subjecting them to white noise, depriving them of sleep and food) turned Northern Catholics as a whole into a suspect community and made the army, which had initially been regarded as a peacekeeping force, seem much more like an invader.”
“Two days earlier, the British army’s Parachute Regiment had opened fire on the streets of Derry, after an illegal but essentially peaceful civil rights march against internment. They killed thirteen unarmed people, fatally wounded another and wounded seventeen others. It was, as the Derry coroner Major Hubert O’Neill put it, ‘sheer unadulterated murder.’ We could see it on television.”
“The Derry dead were immediately subsumed into history. The events of 30 January 1972 were coupled with those of 21 November 1920, when British soldiers opened fire indiscriminately on players and spectators in Croke Park. The same number of people — fourteen — had been killed. So the same name was given to the day: Bloody Sunday. Even though the victims of this second Bloody Sunday were emphatically not members of the IRA or part of any armed insurrection, this act of naming brought them into the capacious company of the martyred dead and defined the Derry massacre as another chapter in the long narrative of Ireland’s fight for freedom.”
“The car bomb revolutionized the mathematics of urban conflict. It was not just that it multiplied the destructiveness of a single operation. Much more tellingly, it changed the location of risk, diminishing it for the perpetrators at the expense of civilians. (Henceforth, the biggest dangers to IRA members would be from accidental explosions of its own bombs and from being killed by their own side in internecine feuds.)
But the car bomb also diminished blame. Both a literal and a moral distance were created between the act and its consequences. A mode of operation was created: leave the bomb in a high street, walk calmly away, have someone call in a ‘warning’ a few minutes before the car was timed to explode, not so that lives could be saved (it was usually too late for that) but so that the IRA could say it was all the fault of the authorities for not reacting quickly enough. Sometimes, as with a 100-pound car bomb the Provos left on Donegall Street in Belfast on 20 March 1972, killing six people and injuring more than a hundred, the call gave false information that deliberately directed shoppers towards the bomb.”
“It was through the power of the car bomb that they declared their intentions. On 21 July, they set off more than twenty bombs in just over an hour in Belfast city centre, including the bus and rail stations, a motorway bridge, a hotel, a bar and a taxi office. They killed nine people and injured 130. Seventy-seven of the victims were women and children. The horror was compounded by the panic of crowds rushing from one explosion into the path of the next. Parts of human bodies were scattered all over city streets. The image I remembered from the TV was policemen with shovels scooping remains into black plastic bags. The day soon acquired its own name, one that was not part of the Irish nationalist lexicon: Bloody Friday.”
“A rough pattern was emerging. Loyalist murders were often intended to be luridly gruesome. The purpose was to terrify the Catholic population into submission — for that purpose, the more hideous the better. IRA murders were intended to create a more general sense of anarchy, to make it clear that Northern Ireland was ungovernable under British rule. For that purpose, the more impersonal, the more distanced the perpetrator was from the victim, the better.”
“In 1972, 1,853 bombs were planted. Four hundred and ninety-seven people were killed. Just seventy-four of them were members of either wing of the IRA, and many of those had been killed by their own bombs. Just eleven were Loyalist paramilitaries. Most of the dead — 259 — were civilians. They were not martyrs. They had not sacrificed themselves — they had been sacrificed. There was nothing, in our tradition, to sing about. I never sang ‘The Patriot Game’ at parties again.
But the poet James Simmons took up the challenge of making ballads about the unmartyred dead. Ten days after Bloody Friday, the IRA systematically car-bombed the peaceful and religiously mixed village of Claudy in Co. Derry, setting three devices, so that people fleeing from one explosion would move towards the next. Intelligence at the time suggested that the attack had been directed by a Catholic priest, James Chesney, who was believed to be quartermaster of the South Derry IRA. Nine ordinary civilians were massacred.”
“The illusion of classlessness was one of the great strengths of the Irish class system. It had specific historic roots. Irish nationalism defined itself in opposition to England, and one of the things it most disliked about England was its class-ridden nature. Class in Ireland could be associated with snobbery and deference, with the image of an England divided between chinless aristocrats and firm-jawed miners, bowler hats and cloth caps. Since the only remnant of that kind of upper class in Ireland was the vestiges of the old Protestant Ascendancy of landowning grandees that had lost its power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it followed that, having largely marginalized that class, Ireland was a classless society. The relative intimacy of Irish life made display of class pretension difficult (although by no means impossible). The values of old-fashioned civic republicanism made notions of class superiority highly unpopular. Many powerful institutions, from the big political parties, to the Catholic Church, to the GAA, emphasized their classlessness and brought people of all classes physically together. The political system itself was not class-based.”
“Underneath the carapace of egalitarianism, Irish society was rigorous in its policing of the boundaries between farmers and farm labourers, between ‘gutties’ and ‘good families.’ Judges, for example, openly remitted sentences for criminals who had committed serious crimes on the grounds that the miscreant came from a ‘good family’.
Ostensibly, this system ought to have been threatened by economic transformation. What was happening in Ireland was what always follows from industrialization: a shift in the nature of what it means to be well off. Salaries were replacing property as the main source of income. Wealth based on the ownership of land was being exchanged for wealth, based on professional positions. The farmer’s son (and, more problematically, daughter) was becoming a manager, an engineer, a lawyer, a senior civil servant, a journalist. All of this was happening very quickly. There was, in the 1970s, a huge shake-up in the Irish class system and it created a sense of opportunity and mobility. Young people like me were moving up from manual backgrounds into white-collar jobs, especially in the expanding public sector.
But there was also a great continuity — in this radical and rapid transformation, the distribution of privilege was not really altered. Old money turned itself into new money; old poverty tended to persist. The cards were being shuffled, but the winners of the game were not all that different. By 1980, Ireland still had a greater degree of income inequality than most western European countries.”
“Haughey complied with all of these conditions. The bishops also wanted a specific restriction of contraceptives to married couples, but this presented the same legal difficulties as Costello’s proposals in 1974. The formula Haughey used instead was ‘bona fide couples, pursuing bona fide family planning purposes’. They would be allowed to purchase condoms, but only if a doctor, satisfied as to their bona fides, issued a prescription. Ireland became the first and only country in the world to make a condom a medicine. As the Irish Medical Association dryly noted, ‘the prescription or authorization of condoms is not a medical function’. Nonetheless, the legislation passed in July 1979 and came into effect in November 1980.”
“In all, from 1970 to 2019, when abortion was finally legalized in treland, at least a quarter of a million Irish women crossed the Irish Sea for a termination. The number who spoke about it in public was vanishingly small, in private not much greater.”
The 80s
“On the face of it, Ireland in 1981 was still outstandingly religious, in practice as well as in theory. The vast bulk of the population was Catholic and 88 per cent of Catholics went to Mass at least once a week. Nearly a third actually went more than once a week. This wasn’t just a throwback. In my own age group, those aged between eighteen and twenty-six, 79 per cent went to Mass once a week. Ninety-five per cent of Irish people believed in God, 76 per cent in life after death, 55 per cent in the reality of Hell and 58 per cent in the Devil as a real person.” Nearly half of Irish people, compared to just a quarter of Europeans generally, accepted the proposition that ‘there is only one true religion.’ Seventy-eight per cent expressed either a ‘great deal’ or ‘quite a lot of confidence in the church as an institution.”
“I didn’t know it then, but one of Temple Hill’s customers was the best-known priest in Ireland, Michael Cleary. He had been in Crumlin for a while when I was a kid and he had become famous as the Singing Priest, performing shows all over Ireland. He had officiated at that concert in Croke Park in 1972 when I shouted Up the IRA! at Jack Lynch. He had also been the warm-up man for Pope John Paul II at his big youth Mass in Galway in 1979.
Cleary had impregnated his twenty-year-old lover Phyllis Hamilton. After she gave birth to their son Michael Ivor in 1970, Cleary christened him and then a friend of his drove mother and child to Temple Hill. According to Hamilton, ‘I felt powerless to protest; I had no control over what was happening.’ She handed the baby over to a nun ‘like I was handing over my soul’. Three weeks later, when she had not yet signed adoption papers, she wanted her baby back. She called Temple Hill to explain this. The woman who answered the phone (almost certainly a nun) told her: ‘You selfish little bitch. That baby has gone to a very good home and you should be very grateful.’ When she told Cleary she wanted to keep the baby, he ‘went into a rage… and told me how immature I was.’ She signed the adoption papers.
One of the nurses in Temple Hill who may have been present that night of the anti-abortion meeting was Jennifer Sadurski. She later recalled for Caelainn Hogan one prematurely born little baby who was delivered from the Coombe maternity hospital in the city. ‘When the trainee nurses went to wash her, they discovered that her name and date of birth had been scrawled in red ink on her back.’ This image of a branded baby haunted her. It was a token of the wider branding of babies as ‘illegitimate’, a practice that continued in Ireland, even on official documentation, until 1988.”
“The visa was named after an Irish-American Democratic Congressman, Brian Donnelly. He sponsored a programme to award 10,000 visas to randomly chosen applicants from round the world. The Donnelly scheme commenced in January 1987. There were 1.5 million applicants from thirty-six countries. Yet, of that first tranche of visas, 4,161 went to Irish applicants. How did one small country get 41 per cent of the prizes in a worldwide lottery?
Young people in Ireland realized that each application had to be filled and signed individually – no photocopies would be accepted. And there was a target date on which the first 10,000 applications would be processed. But nothing in the rules said that only one application was valid. Hence the Donnelly Visa party – get your friends together, supply some drink, give them a template and get them to work on your application forms. Some applicants were known to have sent as many as 500 forms.”
“By the beginning of 1990, 20,000 Donnelly visas had been issued to Irish people. But one strange thing noted on both sides of the Atlantic was that one in four visas awarded to Irish citizens remained unused. Many people were applying for visas without having any actual plans to emigrate. It was just a thing you imagined you probably wanted to have if things got worse. Which they very well might.”
“For more than thirty years, before the Irish banking system eventually collapsed, it had been colluding, on a massive scale, with fraud, tax evasion and routine breaches of exchange control laws. Large sections of the Irish business class, from strong farmers to chairmen of blue-chip companies, were hiding money in offshore accounts or claiming to be living outside the country when they were in fact making that money in shops, pubs, property deals and companies within its borders. While Ireland was suffering from mass unemployment, mass emigration, a squeeze of vital services in health and education and a persistent crisis in its public finances, many of its most respectable citizens were simply going absent from society. The banks were helping them to do so, and the authorities in turn were scrupulously ignoring what was going on.
The scale of the scams can be judged from the amount of tax that was harvested after media investigations had prompted official inquiries. In all, the Revenue was eventually able to identify 34,000 people who had engaged in one or other of five major tax-dodging enterprises. By April 2009, it had recovered €2.5 billion from these individuals. To put this in perspective, €2.5 billion was almost a tenth of the entire Irish national debt in 1987. These people, of course, were merely those who were ultimately caught.
The important point about these rackets, however, is that they were not secret conspiracies, so wickedly brilliant that even the best minds in the public service could not penetrate their dark purposes. The Central Bank and its political master, the Department of Finance, had a very good idea of what was going on. The state authorities knew about widespread organized crime, committed by financial institutions and their customers and did essentially nothing to stop it. The desire of the wealthy to evade taxes was by no means unique to Ireland. What was distinctive was that the frauds were so open that it took a conscious effort on the part of the authorities to pretend not to see them. Not looking was more than an omission. When the crimes were so flagrant, the official eye must have been strained from constant aversion.”
“It was not hard to figure out what was going on: very large numbers of people were simply walking into their local bank branch, signing the forms and fraudulently claiming to be resident outside the state. Often the bank staff knew them very well: they were the local farmers, publicans, shopkeepers or small business owners. But they literally pretended not to know them. They filed their plainly deceitful forms and exempted them from the tax.”
“He had challenged the constitutionality of the anti-gay laws in a series of court cases from 1977 onwards. In April 1983, his appeal reached the Supreme Court. Just a month earlier, four boys aged between fourteen and nineteen were convicted in Dublin of beating and kicking to death a young man, Declan Flynn. They had been preying on men who used Fairview Park on the north side of the inner city, as a meeting point, and assumed that Declan Flynn was one of them. When they came to be sentenced, the judge, Seán Gannon, suspended their (already light) sentences for manslaughter and allowed them to walk free. There was cheering in the nearby flats where one of the boys lived. A group of about twenty teenagers staged a jubilant demonstration that evening, marching behind a makeshift banner that read ‘We are the champions.’”
“In August 1982, Eileen Flynn was dismissed from her job as an English and history teacher at the Holy Faith Convent in JFK’s ancestral home town, New Ross, Co. Wexford. She was unmarried with a baby son and was living with the baby’s father, a separated man, Richie Roche. It was accepted by the nuns that she was a ‘gifted teacher’. The letter of summary dismissal referred to complaints from parents about her lifestyle and her open rejection of the ‘norms of behaviour’ and the ideals the school existed to promote.
In March 1985, Declan Costello, another of the supposed Fine Gael liberals of the 1960s, now turned High Court judge, ruled on Flynn’s claim that her dismissal was unlawful. He found that the nuns were fully ‘entitled to conclude that the appellant’s conduct was capable of damaging their efforts to foster in their pupils norms of behaviour and religious tenets which the school had been established to promote’ and therefore to sack her.”
“Much later, his girlfriend, Annie Murphy, would recall him driving her through villages in Co. Kerry at 65 mph and joking about what would happen if he killed someone: ‘And won’t I do them the honour of giving them the last rites of holy Mother Church? Imagine being sent to heaven courtesy of a bishop.’”
“In 1989, Lenihan’s liver gave out. He needed a transplant, and it was decided that he should go to the Mayo clinic in Minnesota. The Irish health service was not good enough for members of its own government. The board of the state-owned Voluntary Health Insurance company quietly decided that it would pay the full cost. Haughey knew this. He nonetheless asked a Fianna Fáil fundraiser, Paul Kavanagh, discreetly to request a number of sympathetic businessmen to stump up between them somewhere between £150,000 and £200,000 for Lenihan’s new American liver. Eight individuals or companies answered the call — the largest single contribution being £25,000 from Goodman.
The people who raised and contributed what may have been as much as £265,000 for Lenihan’s liver acted in good faith, believing that they were saving the life of a popular national figure. But the whole thing was essentially a scam perpetrated by Haughey. He knew that the full cost of Lenihan’s direct treatment would be borne — as indeed it was — by the VHI. Other expenses amounted to around £70,000. So he helped himself to most of the money ostensibly raised for the operation: probably about £200,000. He spent it on handmade shirts from Charvet in Paris, dinners with Terry Keane at Le Coq Hardi and the general upkeep of his extravagance. The cheques were signed, blank, by his acolyte Bertie Ahern.
Not that Haughey was not thinking of the Lenihan family. On the morning of her departure for the Mayo Clinic, he sent Lenihan’s wife Ann a gift of £200 — 0.1 per cent of the money he had stolen from the fund he established for her husband’s treatment. There was something magnificent in this depravity. Haughey had wept openly when told of Lenihan’s plight.”
The 90s
“This $117,000 came from the funds of the Galway diocese and was transferred via an escrow account in New York to Murphy in Connecticut. The negotiations were handled by a priest in Brooklyn, Monsignor James Kelly, who was also a lawyer. On the books of the Galway diocese, Casey had entered a transaction in the Reserve Fund over which he had personal control, a fictitious ‘loan’ to a person who had no involvement in the affair at all. Here was another case of the familiar practice of bogus accounting, another piece of funny paper. So this was not about private life, but about low standards in high places. We were comfortable with that.
It was also not wrong. As Murphy gradually told her story, it was indeed as much about money as about sex. The view from the bishop’s bed, as she was able to recall it, was a new angle on the sumptuousness and luxury of life at the top of the clerical ladder. There was nothing shocking in the notion that some bishops lived in palaces, ate like kings and behaved like princes, that they were waited on, flattered and pampered. But this was seldom described because outsiders did not get close enough to do so. Murphy was one outsider who became privy to a world whose sensual delights were supposed to exclude sex but that legitimately included the best of food and drink, the finest places to live, the swankiest sports cars, the handmade shoes, the clothes brought straight from Harrods of London.”
“On 15 December 1993, just two months after the Shankill and Greysteel massacres, Reynolds and the British prime minister John Major signed the Downing Street Declaration, a sweetly crafted ‘agreed framework for peace’. It made clear that the British government had no ‘selfish, strategic or economic interest in holding onto Northern Ireland, that it would uphold the wishes of the majority there on whether to support continued membership of the Union or a United Ireland and that this self-determination was a matter for agreement between the two parts of Ireland to be reached on the basis of consent.”
“The scale of this inflow was staggering. In the twenty-five years after 1990, US companies would invest roughly $277 billion in Ireland; the comparable figure for Brazil is $92 billion; for Russia $10 billion; for India $32 billion; and for China $51 billion. By 2012, Ireland, which was 1 per cent of the EU economy, accounted for 11.5 per cent of sales by US affiliate companies in Europe. 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.
There was nothing quite like this in world history. Some poor countries had experienced very rapid development in the late twentieth century, but they had done so primarily by reordering their own societies and developing indigenous industries that could trade on world markets. There was no Irish equivalent of, for example, South Korea’s Samsung and no imaginable native political and industrial culture from which such an enterprise might emerge. The Irish Great Leap Forward was powered almost entirely from without. The template of Ireland’s development was not organic expansion — it was seduction.”
“One thing that it became impossible to know about this new Ireland was how rich it really was. Other countries could get some rough idea of their wealth by dividing their gross domestic product (GDP) by their population numbers. But Irish GDP, or even its gross national income (GNI), were unmoored from Irish reality. The low corporate tax rates gave multinational companies an incentive to declare as much of their global profit in Ireland as possible. This could be done by having an Irish-based entity ‘purchase’ components from branches in other countries at artificially low prices, so as to make the Irish operation more lucrative. Over time, as Ireland became the location of more sophisticated processes, most of this was no longer about physical components, but about intangible assets like patents and intellectual property. The movement of these vast intangible assets into a small economy could create astonishing spikes in GDP, most spectacularly in 2015, when Irish GDP grew by 26 per cent, a miracle that was also mostly a mirage.
In most countries, GDP, representing all the activity recorded in the economy and GNI, representing the activity that really took place, are more or less the same. In Ireland, from the 1990s onwards, the two diverged ever more widely. In 1995, real GNI was 8 per cent lower than GDP. In 2019, it was 40 per cent below.”
“By 2017, Ireland was ranked third in the world (among countries with populations of more than half a million) behind only Qatar and Singapore.
The descaminados of the 1950s had become richer than the Americans they had envied or the Europeans they were too poor to join. But this was fiction. In reality, measured by actual individual consumption per capita, Ireland was not in the top quarter of EU countries — it was in twelfth place, still behind all of the original six EU member states. Indeed, in 2019, actual consumption in Ireland was about 95 per cent of the EU average. Nor was Ireland really catching up with America. In 1950, consumption per person in Ireland was 47 per cent of that in the US. By 1981, it had risen to 50 per cent. By 2007, it had reached 68 per cent. It then fell again to 60 per cent. When it came to the simple reality of what Irish people could actually afford to buy with their incomes, we never actually had America at home.
This is not to say that becoming an average western European country was not fabulous. To be normal was a wonder that deserved celebration.”
“Between 1995 and 2000, a quarter of a million people arrived in Ireland, about 7 per cent of the entire population at the time (3.6 million in 1996). Around half of these were Irish migrants returning from their exile of the 1980s. But there were also people from a wide variety of nationalities and ethnicities. Between 1991 and 2002, the share of foreign-born people living in Ireland rose from 6 per cent to 10 per cent (though about 1.3 per cent were born in Northern Ireland). In 1992, a grand total of thirty-nine people sought asylum in Ireland; in 2000, the total was 10,938. After 2004, when citizens of the new EU states in central and eastern Europe were allowed free movement into Ireland, people from Romania, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia also began to arrive.”
“James Hanlon was in my father’s life because of the industrial school system. He was two when his own father, Patrick, died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-four. All that he ever seemed to know about my grandfather was that he had worked in the Paul and Vincent animal feed mill on the Liffey quay; that he had left school long before he was fourteen and had not attended regularly, yet that he was thought to be an avid reader and great wit. When he died, his wife Maggie was left with Kevin, Rita, Eileen, Paddy and my father. She was thirty-two.
The matriarch of the clan was Maggie’s formidable mother Ellen. We just knew her as Great Granny Winders. She was in her eighties when I was old enough to remember her, but she was still beautiful with iron-grey hair and big dark brown eyes. Everyone was still afraid of her. She had kept things together by working as a cleaner and she had Maggie and the kids under her command, too, doing whatever cleaning jobs she told them to do.
When my grandfather died, Great Granny Winders issued her decree: Maggie could not look after all of those kids and some of them would have to go into the industrial schools. Maggie was determined that this would not happen. Even then, and even in the conditions of poverty and precariousness she was used to, she must have known that there was something worse, that the system of care run by the very church she was so faithful to was cruel beyond the bounds of acceptability. But what choice did she have? The only salvation for my father and his siblings was for her to marry quickly. Who would take on a widow with five kids aged between two and eleven? Only a bad prospect: James Hanlon. He was a casual docker, part of the brutal system where men turned up every day for the ‘read’ by a stevedore who might or might not hire them to unload or load a ship. If he got work, he was paid in the pub (with an obligation to buy drink for the stevedore). If he didn’t, he went to the pub to drink off the humiliation. He was known for a famous feat, which was to drink twenty pints of stout, jump in the Liffey, swim over and back, and go back to the pub. Maggie married him surely knowing exactly what he was like. She did it to keep my father and his brothers and sisters out of the industrial schools.”
“Objectively, the clerical church was dying. Between 1966 and 1996, vocations to all forms of Catholic religious life fell from 1,409 to 111, a decline of 92 per cent. In 1984, the number of new diocesan clergy ordained was 171; in 2006 it was 22 and in 2012 it was 12. During the 1990s the once-great seminaries in Dublin, Thurles, Kilkenny, Waterford and Carlow all closed, leaving only Maynooth.”
The 21st Century
“Astonishingly, just 4 per cent of the growth in the Irish population between 2002 and 2006 took place in the five main cities combined. The result, especially in relation to Dublin, was a vast expansion of the effective area of the city. Large swathes of Wicklow, Wexford, Meath, Louth, Westmeath, Carlow, Offaly, even Cavan and Monaghan, became parts of outer Dublin. The very concept of Dublin became extraordinarily diffuse. As early as 2001, the president of the Royal Institute of Architects in Ireland, Tony Reddy, pointed out that ‘Greater Dublin could occupy an area the size of Los Angeles by 2010', even though it would have just a quarter of the American city’s population.’“
“[It was an] extraordinary decision, in the age of global warming, to create an almost completely car-dependent society. With very limited fossil fuel resources of its own, and a share of energy from renewable sources that was less than half the OECD average, Ireland became one of the highest per capita carbon emitters in the world. Ireland’s total energy consumption increased by 83 per cent from 1990 to 2007 – a bad enough record. But transport energy use increased by 181 per cent. The future that Ireland was imagining was an American motopia of the 1950s in which petrol was dirt cheap, guilt-free and infinitely available.”
“The rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger was indeed a kind of moral tale, but the lesson is not that free-market globalization is a panacea for the world’s ills. It is, on the contrary, that politics, society, morality and collective institutions matter.
There is no doubt that Ireland’s economic performance in the late 1990s was genuinely remarkable. The rate of unemployment in the fifteen European Union countries as a whole remained more or less static throughout the 1990s. In Ireland, it was cut in half, from a desperately high 15.6 per cent to 7.4 per cent (and shortly afterward to less than 5 per cent). The level of consistent poverty fell from 15 per cent of the population to 5 per cent. The overall value of Irish exports more than doubled between 1995 and 2000. The number of people at work in Ireland also doubled, from just over a million in 1988 to 2.1 million in 2007. In the country that had dreaded total depopulation, the population rose at a phenomenal rate. While the rest of the EU added one person to every 1,000 between 1998 and 2008, Ireland added ten.”
“For a start, one of the reasons the Irish economy grew so fast after 1995 is that it had grown so slowly before that. As the historian Joe Lee noted in 1989, ‘No other European country, east or west, north or south, for which remotely reliable evidence exists, had recorded so slow a rate of growth of national income in the twentieth century.’ Much of what happened in the 1990s was simply that Ireland, integrated into the European single market, caught up with the living standards of the region it belongs to – western Europe – and got to where it should have been all along. The energy unleashed by this process, combined with the advantages of not being weighed down by an old heavy industrial base, allowed Ireland (temporarily) to outperform those European neighbours. But, in a longer perspective, all that was happening was a regional levelling-out.
There was also amnesia about why Ireland had changed. Feminism, for example – the long struggle against the control of female sexuality and reproduction by the Catholic Church and Fianna Fáil – was a sine qua non for the miraculous doubling of the workforce. Paradoxically, the Ireland of the late 1990s and early 2000s reaped enormous economic benefits both from the repression of women before the 1970s and from their subsequent relative liberation. The old culture produced a demographic boom – Irish fertility had been startlingly high well into the 1980s, with the result that there were a lot of youngsters around in the 1990s. At the same time, however, those fertility rates dropped dramatically as women gained more freedom, allowing ever larger numbers of mothers to join or stay in the paid workforce. Rather grotesquely, Ireland was also reaping the economic benefits of mass emigration in the 1950s, which meant that many of the elderly people who should have been in Ireland were actually in the UK and elsewhere.
Nor was it easy to recall that Irish governments themselves did things to make the boom possible, the very mention of which would have caused the average Republican senator in the US to call for an exorcism. One was to invest heavily in the expansion of state-funded third-level education. A rare reason to be cheerful after the bursting of the Irish bubble was that 42.3 per cent of the population aged twenty-five to thirty-four had completed third-level education, the second highest rate in the EU.”
“In 2006, when the boom was apparently still at its height, David McWilliams had coined the term ‘ghost estate’ to describe empty or unfinished housing developments in out-of-the way places. They, too, like Saint Bernadette’s, had been built on pure faith. They were acts of devotion shrines dedicated to the fervent belief that anything you constructed anywhere would repay the true believer through the magic of ever-rising property values. Between 1991 and 2006, the number of households in Ireland had increased by 440,000. The number of housing units had increased by 763,000. The 2011 census showed that 230,000 housing units were empty (not including holiday homes).”
“Another thing that carried on regardless was the shopping trip to New York or Philadelphia or Boston. Through the boom years, it had become normal to fly across the Atlantic once or twice a year and spend a long weekend in the megastores, malls and outlets. Woodbury Common in New Jersey, Franklin Mills near Philadelphia and Wrentham Village outside Boston were suburbs of middle Ireland. I remember in Macy’s in New York, when you went to get your discount card as a foreign visitor, they didn’t even ask for your passport anymore. They just asked: ‘You Irish?’ and you nodded ‘of course’. This craze did not slow down as the portents of doom were gathering – it accelerated. In 2007, New York City alone received 291,000 visitors from Ireland. In 2008, 520,000 Irish residents flew across the Atlantic. That was more than twice as many as in 2000. It was also close to one in eight of the entire population.”
“Blame was collectivized – but only up to a point. All Irish people were responsible for the debts of a few Irish casino banks; no international agencies were responsible for pumping money recklessly into those banks.
The wages of sin was a kind of political death. In December 2010, Ireland’s existence as a sovereign state was effectively suspended. In return for a €67.5 billion package of loans, a Troika of international institutions – the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission – took over the direction of Irish fiscal and therefore of political and social policy. The local administration operated under strict supervision. It was obliged to implement a savage programme of what one influential figure in devising it, the German government adviser Professor Hans Kastrop, later called ‘overblown austerity measures’. In an economy that had shrunk by 10 per cent in 2009 alone, this was insane. Unemployment had already shot up from 4.5 per cent in 2007 to 13.5 per cent in 2010, and was evidently still rising. The rate of child poverty was doubling. Nevertheless, under the Troika programme Ireland continued to put money into its banks – €17 billion was injected after the international consortium took charge. But wages, pensions and jobs were cut in the public sector and there were savage cuts to welfare benefits, healthcare and education. There were sharp tax rises, including for low-paid workers. Even among those now in charge, there was an acceptance that much of this went too far, too fast. Ajai Chopra, the IMF’s member of the Troika, later suggested that the cut of €6 billion implemented in 2011 ‘was more aggressive than warranted by the weak state of the economy’.
But rationality was not the point. The operative ideas were punishment and purgation.”
“In the general election of February 2011, Fianna Fáil was destroyed. It suffered by far the biggest defeat for any outgoing government since the formation of the state. It lost more than half its vote and its number of seats dropped from seventy-one to twenty-one. This was a big moment. One half of the alliance that had dominated Ireland since the 1930s, the institutional Catholic Church, was already on its knees. Now the other half was brought to the same level. And it was clear that neither of them would ever return to their old positions of dominance, either jointly or individually. The system had been broken. Or, more accurately, it had broken itself by mocking the faith that its adherents had placed in it. The church corrupted its own holiness. The nationalist party could not even maintain the sovereignty of the nation. These were breaches that could never be repaired.
But even with Fianna Fáil’s collapse, there was no real political challenge to the Troika’s punishment programme. Fianna Fail’s votes went largely to the trad-itional, and entirely likeminded, opposition party, Fine Gael, and to the Labour Party which promised to challenge the new regime but, when it took office under Fine Gael’s cheery and palliative leader Enda Kenny, contented itself with implementing it. It was obvious that Sinn Fein, which won 10 per cent of the vote in the Republic in that 2011 election, would now become the main political alternative, with predictable long-term consequences for politics on the island as a whole. But for the moment, it was able to do no more than articulate dissent along with an array of smaller leftist parties.
There was, of course, the old alternative of voting with one’s feet. Emigration started up again: 420,000 people left Ireland in the five years between 2011 and 2015. Most of them were young. Those who were not among the recent European migrants who now returned to their home countries headed off mainly to Australia, Canada and the UK.”
“On 26 May 2018, I was sitting in a pub across the road from Dublin Castle with a Fianna Fáil TD from the West of Ireland. We had both been in the castle for the official declaration of the results of a referendum to remove the ban on abortion that had been placed in the Constitution in 1983. The result was stunning: the Eighth Amendment was repealed by the same majority – two to one – that had passed it thirty-five years earlier. The choice to repeal was endorsed, moreover, in almost every part of Ireland there was no great difference between the cities and the country, no epic cleavage anymore between the new and the old, the traditional and the modern.”
