“My parents’ wedding photographs always remind me of a frontier town in an old Western.”
Fintan O’Toole, longtime journalist and writer, uses his lifetime as the scope for this recent history of Irish history. It’s partially a memoir too, but only in the sense of using his specific impressions and experience to serve the larger question of what was it like to live through the changes the country went through in the 65 years or so of the book. The style here is mostly serious, well-researched and earnest, but with a periodic wryness and irony about it. But because the history covers some pretty atrocious events and people, the seriousness matters too. A large theme of the history involves interrogating the self-serious moralism of the Catholic church, its influence on the dominant ruling party, the conservatism (and Conservatism) of much of Ireland’s national government throughout the scope, and its failures to live up to its moralism (which is presented as an arrogant moral superiority).
There’s lot of new information for me here, and a lot of events I either didn’t know about or knew very little about. He mostly spends a single chapter investigating singular moments or series of moments, but then longer investigating connected events. There’s several chapter related to the “Troubles” and sectarian violence. There’s several chapters about the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, especially related to abuse scandals. And there’s several chapters related to birth control, women’s health and privacy, and of course abortion. One of the prevailing themes through much of the chapters on birth control is the idea that there was a lot of public performance of these strict controls but a kind of blinders put on for actual real life. As an American, I hope for the same as the next two decades pan out, but Catholicism and right-wing Protestant fundamentalism aren’t exactly the same thing.
One of the best chapter details the subversiveness of television when it hit Irish shores.
In general, this is a somewhat curated look at recent Irish history and quite enjoyable. I think you might need to be of a general political bent to enjoy it, but I enjoyed it, so it matters little to me if others didn’t.
