FINTAN O'TOOLE
Fintan O’Toole is an Irish writer, editor, journalist, critic, political commentator and author of books including Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (2018) and The Politics of Pain: Postwar England and the Rise of Nationalism (2019). His latest work, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 (2021), is an expedition into literary self-historicising, approaching the last half-century of Irish history – a period of wholesale societal change – through the frame of his own experiences and those of his family. With TANK, he discusses this unconventional history, as well as how such historical, localised knowledge can inform an understanding of the present and future.
Interview by Masoud GolsorkhiPortrait by Ben Russell
Masoud Golsorkhi In the book, the history of contemporary Ireland sits alongside your own lived experience. What made you choose yourself as a subject for your own work?
Fintan O’Toole There are lots of books about contemporary Ireland and lots of histories – and some very, very fine ones – but I thought there was a story to be told in order to reshape the narrative of that history, and that required an upfrontness about the perspective. This is how I saw it, and this is how it appeared to a family like mine. Conventional history has to talk about what we know, and I was more interested in talking about what we knew but didn’t know. Ireland is in one way very typical of a lot of the world in that it underwent this very rapid process of modernisation and went from being a very agricultural society to being an industrial one, from being a real backwater in the 1950s to being one of the most globalised societies on the planet. Huge, epic things have happened, like the Troubles or the collapse of the Catholic Church, which was inconceivable when I was born. But I thought there was a value in trying to root those huge, epic things in concrete experience. What did that feel like? There’s a value in putting what we know historically against the much more complex reality of people living in two minds as they experience that process of having one foot in tradition and one foot in modernity.
MG I remember seeing the phrase “national psychodrama” in your book Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain, and it seems like it’s your thing now. Could you elaborate on that concept?
FOT I never really imagined myself as a psychoanalyst of nations, but if you’ve lived through the conflicts in Ireland, you cannot avoid the extent to which mental constructs – the stories we tell ourselves and the worlds we invent – are real and have profound effects on what people do and how they live and die. There was a period in the West in which it had a very technocratic sense of how nations work where it was all about institutions. Of course, institutions are hugely important, but I think most people around the world know that the way in which we imagine ourselves has profound consequences. What’s happened in a way is that the United Kingdom and the United States have caught up with the experience of a lot of people in other societies, including Ireland. One of the interesting things about Ireland is that it’s this ambiguous kind of place which is both part of the West and yet has colonial experiences and experiences of religious conflict, which are not thought to be typically Western. Our recent history is trying to escape from the traps of identity politics, and yet you have at present this mobilisation of a very narrow identity politics in Britain. When I wrote the book about Brexit, people would say, “Well, how dare you? What right do you have as a foreigner to write about England?” I couldn’t avoid asking those very basic questions. Why have you got yourself into this collective state where you think the most important thing you can do right now is to set yourself up against an other, the European Union, and that that will somehow solve your problems? If you’re Irish, you know that actually not being them is not enough, you still have to deal with the us.
MG You’ve demonstrated why the Irish have a particular muscle for this kind of reflection that Anglo-Saxon people perhaps don’t possess. The Irish experience of modernity closely resembles the vast majority of the world beyond a few white European countries in that the struggle with modernity coincided with the struggle against colonialism.
FOT The weekend I was born in 1958, Seán Lemass – who was about to become prime minister – went off to a meeting in Paris asking, “Can we get into the European club? Can we be treated as a Western European country?” And he was told, “No, you can’t. You’re way too underdeveloped.” Ireland was classed with Turkey as a fringe country that might have some peripheral relationship to the emerging common market, but certainly could never be a member. So you have, as you say, this contradiction where you want to be independent, but that becomes an economic and political trap for a small country. There were two countries that lost population in Western Europe in the 1950s. One was East Germany, for obvious reasons. The other was Ireland. State building, the social-democratic order, all that stuff associated with the post-war boom is happening and Ireland’s completely peripheral to it. So you have to try to invent a way to be modern while at the same time trying to keep your sense of national identity. Irish people just want to be like everybody else, which everybody does. Human aspirations are not particularly different anywhere. Everybody wants to have a house and a job and money and freedom. But you also have the sense of distinctiveness, the sense that we’re different, which we have fought and suffered for. The real contradiction is that this resolves itself in Ireland around religious identity. We could be sort of modern, but still the most Catholic country in the world. Writing the book, I was amused by the fact that the one big economic success in Ireland in the year I was born was a scheme where entrepreneurial public servants realised that you could run pilgrimages from Ireland to the Marian shrine in Lourdes, France. A rising middle class were looking for something slightly different, but not that different, so they ran flights 24 hours a day to Lourdes so people could go and pray at the shrine. People were trying to find a way to be globalised and modern, but still hold on to what they had. Many people around the world would absolutely recognise that dilemma. Do you become just another bland, homogenised citizen of the world? Or is it possible to honour your history and identity while at the same time succeeding in this globalised struggle?
MG You’re describing this process where politics is buried to resurrect economics as a fundamental ordering system for society, but like a zombie, politics always comes back up. I think British people are very shocked when Boris Johnson says, “Fuck business.” But that’s been said everywhere. Economics is good to a point, but eventually people in power reach for a different set of tools.
FOT And that process is exacerbated when the promise of economic change is not fulfilled, or fulfilled in very qualified and unequal ways. One of the things we know about economic globalisation is that it does produce enormous wealth. This is certainly true of Ireland. I would much rather live in the Ireland of today than in the Ireland I was born into. I’m not nostalgic for a kind of autarchic, inward-looking, repressively Catholic culture. I’ve spent most of my life trying to banish it as much as possible. But we have to be equally sceptical of the promise that if the country gets rich, everybody in the country gets rich. It’s very easy to become nostalgic about the past and say, well, we were all more equal when we were truly English or truly Irish or whatever it is. It is made easy and appealing by the failure of the promise of equality, particularly in the “Global West”, for want of a better term. We see how sharp the distinctions have been in terms of who has benefited from the new wealth and who hasn’t. That breeds resentment which then feeds into a sense of anger, alienation and victimhood. The fascinating thing for me, being Irish, was to watch Britain imagining itself as a victim. You can’t understand Brexit unless you understand that mobilisation of victimhood, this idea – delivered with no sense of historical irony – that the European Union was a conspiracy of colonial overlords working against Britain.
MG Is there something in the Irish experience that the rest of us can learn from?
FOT I want to make it clear that if we’ve arrived at anything, it’s out of doing everything wrong. We’ve had a horrific civil conflict on a really small island between identical people, between white Christian people who live the same lives a few streets away from each other. We know all about how murderously absurd identity politics can become because we’ve learned the hard way, and it’s not over yet. But I think there’s a couple of things. I’m in the United States at the moment, and the separation of church and state, which was at the foundation of the United States, is now being challenged in the most profound ways. One half of the political system no longer accepts this separation. I’ve lived in a theocracy and you really don’t want to go there. The honouring of religion by keeping it far away from politics is certainly one of the lessons the world can take from Ireland. A second lesson is the possibility of plurality. The new right is built on this anxiety about a lack of cultural definition, that if it’s not a binary choice between them and us, then we’ve lost everything. The Republic of Ireland has become one of the most fluid places on Earth over the last 30 years. As I said, it’s gone from being this very traditional, Catholic, agricultural society to being the opposite of all of those things. It was a place with a very strong sense of its own identity, which of course itself was partially manufactured and came out of 19th-century nationalism, but the fear of conservatives in Ireland was always that if you open the doors then the floodgates will come in, you’ll be swept away and you’ll be nothing. And actually, nobody in Ireland feels less Irish. This idea that people can’t live with contradiction and multiplicity and a sense of belonging that is fluid and open is false. The Belfast Agreement has one of the most wonderful definitions of belonging where it says, “It is the birthright of everyone in Northern Ireland to be Irish or British or both, as they may so choose.” I’ve never seen something like that anywhere else. We haven’t entirely lived up to that ideal yet, but I think that out of the suffering there is a reaching out for a notion of the “or/ both”. I was born into an emigrant society, a society of people that just left, and Ireland’s now a society where 17% of the population were born elsewhere. People get very pessimistic about whether we learn anything from history, but if you grew up in a diaspora society, an emigrant society, you have the capacity to say that somebody whose grandfather was from County Mayo in America who still identifies as Irish has a right to do so. And if you say that, then you recognise that somebody who comes from Poland or Latvia or Lithuania or Nigeria has a perfect right to have that affinity and sense of identity, as well as an Irish one. The Irish story is not one of perfect achievements by any means, but it is an interesting story about the possibilities of letting go of a distinctive, rigid, overly prescriptive sense of your identity – and that being not just OK, but hugely liberating. ◉