A review by tucholsky
We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland by Fintan O'Toole

5.0

An absolute towering masterpiece. In 1963 John F Kennedy toured Ireland and repeated the old cliche that "the greatest export from Ireland is it's people". Statistically true perhaps but,as this book shows, Ireland's greatest and most enduring export is the awful stereotype of the Irish people which it privately hates but which publicly it props up and bathes in. You read chapters in this book of actual history and then think"there was an episode in Father Ted that featured that" and then the next chapter comes along and you realise "there was another episode about that". It highlights how many disgusting stereotypes are propped up by people with such a romanticised dewey eyed idea of the stereotype itself. In the hands of a brilliant lucid journalist the 1000+ pages fly by. We see not just Ireland's but also Fintan O'Toole's gradual recognition of truth. From the young man buttonholes Jack Lynch in 1973 with "Up the RA" to the man who recognises them instead, and their equally fascist polar opposites, as just violent Scum, whose war kills bus drivers, who happen to be collateral damage, cleaners in offices and barracks, who happen to be collateral damage, or 15 year old Irish boys whose father happens to own a boat rented by a member of the British Royal family. Yeah more collateral damage. Gradually the facts he remembers or reads of in his younger years such as their lauding of the likes of IRA heroes like Sean South come up against the reality and futile acts of the man and his dirty far right thinking and anti-semitism. His ,and Ireland's,  jolly endearment of the flamboyant Bishop of Galway turn into the subsequent discovery of the latters long standing disregard for his parishioners and the Catholic teachings with his long running American female partner. And when his hypocrisy is found out the friends he has in the elite, like the odious Gay Byrne, round on her to blame rather than the bishop who fancied a bit of what he would deny the young priests under his management. Another Scum Charles Haughey got away for years with his corruption. However the facts were in the open. His country pile and estate ate up an enormously larger figure than his salary. Everybody knew. Nobody did anything or rather, Everybody did nothing. Therein is the theme of the book. Ireland, held back by a stubborn, adherence to a religious body which pretended to care for but which regarded its people with contempt, a political elite that saw the job as a means to a personal fortune (thankfully changed in more recent years) but craved public adoration as long as it didn't pry into politics, a lack of ambition and reality and a people so subservient to the belief in their global uniqueness and indispensability that they didn't notice the far off dust cloud of progress getting ever more minute in the distance ahead of them