Fintan O'Toole | The Unknown Knowns of Ireland | Edinburgh International Book Festival

they took a gamble on saying could you change the economics could you move people from the countryside to the city could you do all these huge kind of Transformations and stay the same hello what a fabulous size and welcome to Edinburgh International Book Festival my name is Keelan Hughes and I'm thrilled to be here on the first day of what's bound to be an iconic Festival and we're here to discuss this Mammoth inimitable wonderful book and Fentanyl tools we don't know ourselves a personal history of Ireland since 1958 and we'll talk about that in a moment I'll introduce the book in a moment I want to thank um this Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust for sponsoring this event on the sponsorship note we are streaming online so if you're watching this at home and it's a pay what you can program so do consider paying for your tickets or making a donation to Edinburgh International Book Festival so they can continue to do this amazing work and bringing everyone into rooms like this together in a final bit of housekeeping if you haven't turned off your phones or put them on airplane mode now is the time to do it I expect it would take quite a lot to throw Fenton off his game but let's not try um if you're tweeting about the event just try and be discreet um the final 15 minutes will be a q a and it's going to be a mixture of questions that are coming from online which I'll read from the tablets and questions from the audience here so keep that in your mind and try to plug any inevitable gaps in my questioning and they'll be assigning after the event in the signing tent so it's my honor to interview an author whose work I have read and admired since before I knew that newspapers weren't written by just one person um I did a course on theater criticism at Queen's University and saw red Fenton's reviews and thought what's this political reporter doing writing about two men trying to get into a disco in tune and I took from that that theater Productions are just as fit unworthy a subject of analysis and critique as elections that culture and politics and economics can't be kept apart is inevitable try as we might thanks once again to Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust for sponsoring this event and I'm sure there's a master's thesis in who the sponsors were for Fenton's previous books Ship of Fools how stupidity and Corruption sank the Celtic tiger or enough is enough how to build a new Republic just because it makes us squirm doesn't mean it's more comfortable to ignore this may come up again in our conversation and for those who don't know Fenton's work I doubt there is anyone in the room I won't do a show of hands um he's a scarily prolific critic journalist social historian public intellectual political science scholar the recipient of an Orwell prize for journalism and the European press prize for commentary he writes for the Irish Times the guardian the New York Times and the New York Review of Books he's authored some 25 books from heroic failure brexit and the politics of pain to Shakespeare is hard but so is life he teaches at Princeton the book in question we don't know ourselves a personal history of Ireland since 1958 published by head of Zeus it traces 60 years of globalization and cultural upheavals in Ireland touching on sectarian violence on institutional violence corruption and collusion the best Christian in the village obedience that was carefully cultivated by the Irish political establishment in collaboration with the church that's taken generations of Grassroots activism to undermine in the independent David Lynch wrote of this book yes I know all that boring stuff about the liberal hegemony about newspaper economists preaching Progressive sermons like the missionaries of old but really if we must have a hegemony the best by a long way is the liberal kind and to know how it happened here is the Bible personally I don't like the Bible analogy it seems more coming of age than Quest narrative it begins with a year of your birth 1958 and you were born into a shameful impoverished Ireland where people were raising children not knowing that those children were going to leave I think this start given is that three and five would leave um who were born in that year so at the same time as that uh shameful kind of uh difficult economic context there were seeds of change being planted and one of those seeds was a publication from a civil servant called TK Whitaker it was a study of the Irish economy called economic development program for economic expansion fairly dull title but it did change the country completely or at least it was one of the elements that caused that change another of those seeds was the minister for industry and commerce Sean Lamas traveling to Paris to explore joining the nascent European economic Community or the European free trade Association another of the seeds so just bearing these little uh pointers these events in mind this is very much how their book is written um the whim of an Archbishop uh rendered a Dublin theater Festival canceled in what's possibly the original moment of cancel culture this happened in the in the year of uh Fenton's birth and I wondered whether it was the Whiplash of this need to change and the need to stay the same that was the impetus for the book um thank you so much for for uh well thank you all so much for being here it's it's such a delight to be back in physical communion with each other again isn't it and such an honor to do this with with Caleb whose work I've admired so profoundly for for a long time um yeah you know what what was going on in 58 when I was born was was really um as you said this because it was also in that year that uh one of my favorite novels was published which was Giuseppe de la producers the leopard I don't know if you know that wonderful Italian novel which has that famous line where you know the the young guys going off to join the revolutionaries on his his uncle who's the Duke is disgusted and he says you know how can you do this you're betraying us and he says no what you don't understand is that in order for things to stay the same things must change you know and that was very much what was happening in in Ireland in the year of my birth which was this official realization that in a way the game was up so Ireland had become independent 100 years ago this year 1922 either being partitioned which uh meant that the most developed industrialized wealthiest part of the country was in the north that was separated from the south which left the South really as this kind of rural overwhelmingly Catholic and quite underdeveloped country which then tried to do I suppose what nationalists were trying to do in the 1930s you know which everywhere which was to put up high tariff barriers Keep the Country behind them and hope that it would kind of develop independently but the problem was that you couldn't keep the people in two countries in Europe lost population in the 1950s in the 50s was the Great era of course of population rebounding after the horrors of the Holocaust the Second World War the repopulating of Europe is going on all over the place only two countries lost population one was East Germany for obvious reasons and the other was Ireland and the Irish government couldn't build a wall you know it's the East German solution was to build a wall they would have built a wall if they could actually I mean they really would if they if they'd been practical that's exactly what they would have done but they couldn't do that um and so the place was being bled dry of its young people people were just leaving they were coming to Britain they were going to America they were going to Australia because the life they were leading just just wasn't you know people actually people were they've been globalized in a way for a long time that emigrated they knew that there were better lives available elsewhere you know and they were going to those lives so you had this um project really which is very top down you know so it came as you said from really one civil servant senior civil servants who happened to be young and brilliant uh supported by one government Minister who was a kind of hero of the 1916 Rising he'd been in you know I think about people had been in politics at this stage for for 40 years you know but but saying look if we don't change we can't keep things the same the Catholic nationalist Ireland that we not know and love is not viable and so we have to do something big in order to try to make it viable and so what they did was really they they took a Gamble which in a way is the sort of story of the book which is they took a gamble on saying could you change the economics could you move people from the countryside to the city could you do all these huge kind of Transformations and stay the same you know could you still have this kind of power structure which was church and state you know being the most Catholic country in the world I mean that they were you know Whitaker for example who did this was a was a very devout Catholic you know and really did believe somehow that you could beat the odds you know that and and the fascinating thing really is is not that in the end the gamble turned out to be lost it's loud lost right you you couldn't keep Holy Catholic Ireland with all the chains that was going to go on but it's also how long it took for the gamble to fail you know that actually for most of my life sort of looked like they were kind of pulling it off in a weird way and it's the weirdness the strangeness The Surreal nature of this I suppose that's what I was trying to get at and telling the story okay and the the title we don't know ourselves it it I don't know whether it's a Scottish um a reader as well get the double meaning of that but in Ireland if you say we don't know ourselves it can be because you've um managed to fix the shower pressure um and you're just delighted with your new situation we don't know ourselves we don't recognize ourselves from the misery and we were in and then the double meaning um the more a pertinent one for uh for the negative side of the book you know we don't know ourselves as in we fail to know ourselves or we choose not to know ourselves um and on on that foreboding side um I mean to say the double meaning is also to say that the book is very funny it is actually very funny even though um if you were to list kind of the topics that come up in it uh you would run a mile um but so so one of those on the on the forwarding side is um the Archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuade I don't know how well known that name is over here but certainly even as a child I would have known that name and shivers would have run up my spine and you served for him you served mass and so he was a a bishop with the power to phone up an MP to turn up at his residence and to hear his take on a proposed policy um and I grew up hearing these stories of these awful autocrats um and um I came to understand though that the evil wasn't couldn't be centered on just a few men that the evil was institutionally embedded and the public who had to negotiate public institutions you know through schools through hospitals and they were rendered complicit which is a passive way of saying they were complicit and so in writing about this clerical abuse you describe the genius for knowing and not knowing at the same time the known unknowns and I wonder if we should be talking about how um Trauma from a violent State begets willful blindness and collusion from its citizens yeah I mean I suppose it's a story that you could tell in in a lot of societies you know we we all know that there's there's plenty of capacity in different societies to to um avoid things that we we do really know but prefer not to know or pretend we don't know because if we know them we have to confront them you know but I think I think Ireland Irish culture was particularly good at this you know I think it was deeply deeply rooted it was the way the culture operated You could argue it's one of the ways in which the culture was very creative actually because avoidance is quite creative you know you you get around things you create other worlds you find um strategies really for for for avoiding reality um but also very very dark you know it's it's so I don't know I mean you mentioned this guy John Charles McQuade so he he was the Archbishop of Dublin when I was born and as you mentioned like the Dublin theater Festival which would have been like the equivalent of the the Edinburgh Festival you know it's the big cultural event it was just cancels the weekend I was born because there were Works in it by James Joyce or an adaptation from James Joyce and a new player by Sean O'Casey I mean two of the greatest Irish writers of the 20th century you know um and McQuade indicated his displeasure like he didn't make a statement or a sermon or you know he just made it known that he was unhappy and the whole thing was just canceled you know and this was the power you know it was a kind of power that was so uh deeply rooted that it didn't need to express itself really very much you know it was just there so people um had you know he he but but they themselves and the people who you use the word evil and I don't think it's wrong I mean I I tell the story in the book I I serve mass for this guy I was a good Catholic Altar boy you know and he came to I grew up in a kind of working-class suburb of Dublin and he came and I mean the only equivalence I can think of would be a medieval town you know where the Monarch arrives on on progress somewhere you know because it really was monarchical and I was serving Madison we'd we'd done special training you know it was very exciting very theatrical but uh the I was walking up the road that morning and this huge car I mean the biggest car I'd ever seen was outside the parish priest house the parish priest had died he was a friend of McQuades that's why he was serving them he was saying the mass and I I was walking up the road and and there was this huge car which was fascinating but also then there was this strange site where there was this man in a uniform who was kneeling on the pavement at the side of the car and as I got closer I could see sticking out of the side of the car two shoes and I thought oh he's and he was polishing these shoes and then as I got closer I rest the shoes were still attached to the feet of the Archbishop I mean it was just astonishing you know even as a seven-year-old kid I mean it was just that's not is that what Jesus was about you know a man having to kneel on the Pavements shining the shoes of this powerful princeling you know and I thought it was also wonderful I mean it was also you know I've never experienced it in my life you know when he came back after the mass to us and he was charismatic and he just oozed kind of majesty and power you know and I felt he talked to us and he was he was a beautiful brown eyes and he kind of looked at you and you felt encompassed and some sort of wonderful way and what I didn't know then was that he knew so not very long before that he had the Scotland Yard had got on to the police in Ireland to say that the the chaplain of the Children's Hospital which was just down the road from our church um had sent photographs or sent a roll of film to be developed in London of naked pictures of children in the hospital uh of their genitalia frankly and they you know what happened then was the Scotland Yard got onto the commissioner of the police in Dublin who got onto the Archbishop right didn't say let's go and arrest this guy and get him out of out of this position where he's a danger to children now let's talk to the Archbishop to avoid any problem for the church the film was handed over to the Archbishop who basically let this guy continue I mean just decided that no no it was it you know it was not worth it for the church to have any possibility of Scandal and and then of course continually doing this kind of stuff so it's this this is the doubleness which I think does become a kind of evil you know which was that they could maintain a sense of absolute sanctity and spiritual power while at the same time being extraordinarily cynical about the use of that power um and and really not caring about kids like me you know who who are the ones who are you know in in danger from precisely the people that he he had placed there and kept there yeah violating the very reason for entering their profession along the way you know just teaching basic Humanity yeah yeah and there's so much to discuss with this book um it's it's any one subject I could speak with Fenton for for hours at length on on this I really recommend you read it yourselves and so I'm sorry that there's going to be a little bit of jumping but um so chronologically moving on say from that period of um of your Youth and I guess that would have been in the 60s that you were embroiled with McQuade but a little later on or perhaps very early in that in that Century uh or in that decade and there was um another stepping stone of change which was a sort of stone through the window and from sectarian violence beginning um to really ramp up in in Ireland so one of the events that coincided with Fenton's birth was the masked members of the IRA raiding a British Camp endorse it and then very close to home indeed in 1972 there was a scare in your own family Fenton's dad was a bus driver and there were was a bomb a car bomb planted near cie which is the bus headquarters at the Depot which killed two bus conductors and there was a second bomb also that caused major damage to Liberty Hall so I guess you would have been 14 and that same year in in the book you mentioned shouting up the IRA at Jack Lynch in Crow Park so the book is excoriating when it comes to sectarian violence particularly when it comes to the IRA and I suspect there this has something to do with the timing of the book's publication and the fact that you have a big American readership and that maybe there's certain things that need to be be heard and this this is why we need hours because this doesn't come up in the book so I can't really question you about it but um nonetheless and I wonder how that proximity of violence um to yourself and your own household altered your sense of Ireland's future then through the troubles and then as a young journalist on the positive side how surreal it must have been to be covering the 1998 Good Friday agreement yeah you know um as you say we could talk about the troubles for a long long time but the aspect of it that maybe is kind of interesting is from my point of view is again it was this strange doubleness right so um we grew up as sort of ordinary Catholic kids with nationalism you know as it was as much in the water as Catholicism was you know it was and they refused together as as this was your identity this is who you were um and a big part of this was was martyrdom you know uh the idea like we were told as kids that the highest aspiration you know one was to be the Archbishop and the other was to be a martyr for Ireland you know and they were kind of like the same thing there were two aspects of the same sort of Holiness um and but by by 1966 which was the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising which you know it all seemed just like a story you know it was in songs and there were big kind of documentary films in 66 on the state TV and it was all fantastic but it was oddly unreal you know it and so it was it you could kind of indulge in this sort of stuff without it having any consequence the IRA had become a joke uh and the in the Republic in the Republic and actually largely in Northern Ireland as well I mean if you talk to people from even from kind of very Republican families they tell you that some of them didn't even know that their father for example had been in prisons because he wouldn't talk about it you know imprisoned in the 1940s because it was a thing that was it seemed like it was over um and then suddenly it wasn't over and it it and then what happens is that the story you know the story of martyr doorman dying for Ireland which of course also implies killing for Ireland becomes real it's happening and this again this kind of cognitive dissonance you know that's that's what's supposed to happen isn't it and then I you know I was telling the stories you say but I've started all in favor I thought it was a wonderful thing that you know the area was killing people and it was great and then suddenly as you say there was this incident there was a bomb in Dublin that came really close and it was outside the canteen for the bus workers and this before mobile phones you know so you just hear this and and my dad was out there's no way of contacting him you know we didn't have a phone in the house and that sort of hours of sitting there waiting you know was he going to come home or not and and hearing that two two bus conductors had been killed and others you know and I sometimes remember the sound of the key in the door you know just that and the sense of relief but it changed you because then you thought oh you know this is human this is not a big story about martyrdom and violence you know it's a story about what happens to real people and so this kind of strange disjunction really I think is is where there's that great line in what I think is the greatest Irish play you know Playboy the Western World sings play but um where which is so prescient about all this isn't it you know because the story is the guy who comes and gives the great story about how he's killed his father and everyone thinks he's great and then the father's not really dead he comes in and he attacks the father and tries to kill him and then they think he's a murderer you know it's horrible how dare you do this I'm the Great Line you know is Peggy and Mike who's in love with him says but there's a great gap between a gallus story and a dirty deed and we existed for quite a few years in that gap between the sort of lovely Brave story that we had internalized and the Dirty Deeds that were that were happening you know and again you've got you I think that's also where this idea of Unknowing or not knowing and I think what a lot of the Republic Day the south of Ireland did was decided in a way not to know I mean decided to withdraw from what was going on in Northern Ireland and you may say that's very um disreputable thing to do but it's so close and so intimate but it was almost as if people had no other way of dealing with it other than to as it were I kind of pretend it wasn't happening and hope it stays up there it stays away from us uh so yeah I I think we also lived through that and then you know um I think that was important because there was this realization that something else had to be done you know and that is this gradual emergence in the 1990s of possibility and what was the possibility the possibility was that actually all this doubleness and doublethink could be made positive so rather than double think being the negative thing that it was you could there was a version of doublethink which is actually about accepting doubleness accepting that Irish identity and belonging had different aspects of different different meanings and that wonderful phrase you know in the Belfast agreements which I still adore you know it's great bit of drafting it says and maybe it's the key in the Belfast agreement says it is the birthright of everyone in Northern Ireland to be Irish or British or both as they may so choose and that or both you know that sort of getting to a point where you can accept that your identity is multiple and chosen and that you could choose otherwise you know that's the great uh Genius of the Belfast agreements actually I think and also why some of us get so angry when we see it being screwed with by you know by brexit frankly yeah absolutely and there was one other type of um everything sits under this doubleness in a way but um I wanted to bring up in uh in in Scotland I know because it's an issue here as well um I so I believe you're the first in your family to go to college is that right and and I often think of access to education as having to do with class um because class has to do with access and um your book dispels the notion that Ireland was ever classless which is something that sometimes comes up um especially from English interviewers and there's really an anger steaming off the page um in the chapter on the Dunn crime family and and the early 80s heroin epidemic in Dublin and undergaret Fitzgerald's government so it was a social disaster that decimated um many lives in the inner city it's a I found a really powerful section of of the book especially in light of the current drug crisis in Ireland um can you I guess describe that capacity uh perverse capacity from for compartmentalization yeah you know the the strange thing about these stories often is that they contain lots of different other narratives that kind of come together and so one thing I try to do in the book is is to tell you a story about my old family or the place I grew up in and then kind of open it up and and so this chapter starts with with two young boys wandering around London and one of them being stopped by a policeman and you know who are you and are you lost and and then they discover that these two kids have been hiding in a basement in London uh and these were kids they lived just around the corner from where I grew up um and and they were called The Don brothers or there were two of the Dunn Brothers and they had basically fled this and there was a real worry about they were missing you know so nobody where they were and their mother was around the place where everybody was kind of the poor you know with poor mother and it turned out that they basically fled um and there were kids of great resourcefulness that somehow managed to Black their way over to London and they were living off scraps you know they were really clever little little boys and um they were sent off to what were called industrial schools and the industrial schools were part of this hellishness and again also part of this knowing not knowing so Ireland had in order to be the most Catholic country in the world or in the universe you had to have vicious repression right you know you had to actually terrify the people who were out of line or didn't fit so you had this archipelago of repressive institutions you probably heard the Magdalen laundries where you know young girls who were in moral danger or posing a moral danger to others we're locked up and enslaved I mean I use the word advisory they were enslaved they were forced labor in these laundries they're not paid with no legal process often you have the mother and baby homes which were really still kind of grappling with where where you know young women who were pregnant uh out of wedlock were secrets of the way given code names numbers and their babies taken off them then when the baby was born to be adopted and sent elsewhere but then you had these industrial schools which is where kids were sent um and they were hell holes absolute hell holes everybody knew about them everybody knew I I don't remember not knowing two words so through as long as I have memory of language I remember letter frack and dangan and these were places the places where two of the most notorious industrial schools were because you're always told if you don't behave yourself you're calling the letter Frack or you're going to you know so we're meant to be hellish and so what happened to these Don boys was they were sent into this industrial school system and then they emerge from that horror uh you know 15 years later and they were they were sort of around the place they were kind of selling um selling dope you know and then suddenly kids who went to buy Doper saying we've got this new thing you know which will give you a free sample of which was heroin I mean nobody knew what heroin was I mean nobody the Innocence the sort of vulnerability that was there and of course a lot of Western Europe was being flooded with heroin because the result of the Afghanistan Wars and and the Iranian Revolution all that stuff was going on yes so and they were they were marketing it I mean they actually just they they gave samples away free and then this became very quickly like wildfire and I think something similar happens in Edinburgh parts of Edinburgh parts of Glasgow but you know like wildfires just you had this epidemic of of heroin um but but what was terrible about it was both that it was these kids you know doing it and it was there was an element of sort of Revenge on society you know um and there was also then this as you say Caitlin the government saying we don't know about this it's not happening you know again it's extraordinary ability to say well because it was happening to Working Class People uh it it literally nothing was done it it was just no you know heroin is something that you know is happens in America it doesn't happen here and so it was allowed to take root um it's still a huge problem in Dublin it's never gone away you know um and that was really when you started to get this bitterness I think this this very obvious sense for a lot of these working-class communities that they you know the state literally didn't care about them if it just did not care what was happening to them and of course it was only when the drug problem started to you know get into middle class areas that it became an issue so it was a it was a very dark example really of that that ability of state to to just completely ignore the reality that was having such an effect on the lives of so many young people and you think they just didn't know how to deal with it so uh they just chose not to they didn't want to know and then they didn't you know once when they started thinking about it they really didn't know what to do about it they commissioned a report from an English guy who came and talked to people about it and he said really I don't know what you're going to do but maybe the church might be the only people who could deal with it um I mean you know that like so it was this idea of a society that you know well the church is where our uh our refuse goes you know so so maybe the church could build more like industrial schools and bring all these kids into them and wouldn't that be a way of getting it off the streets or something you know that was the only kind of imagined solution and the church didn't want to know because the church was smart enough to realize that that wasn't going to work even if they tried it you know yeah imagine the progress we could have had so that the 90s was a period of wrecking balls and and of laying foundations very literally um I was five when Mary Mary Robinson became president um and you can bet that that informed my young girlhood my view of women in the world um especially with Mary mcaleese I thought you had to be called marionette of a five minute syllable name yeah that's all you know um but in the Years following them there were other kind of elements of the wrecking ball in the 90s so Bishop Eamon Casey fled Ireland for the U.S and the tribunal on the corrupt former t-shock Charles hahi got underway a documentary series produced by Mary rafty on the industrial schools that you mentioned already was with that was aired it took another decade for Mary Rafferty's findings in that in that series to be kind of validated and and recognized and there was an official report into sexual abuse in the Dublin archdiocese then and cut to 2015 looking at the time and Ireland voted in favor of gay marriage um by referendum 2018 there was a ban on abortion that was lifted by referendum thanks to astonishing campaigns that outshone the international Evangelical coins poured into the no campaign Charlie hahi told a magazine called hot press in 1984 that he was not at all worried about a youth revolt I wouldn't be all that worried about an explosion he said you see if you go back to 1968 all the campuses in America were exploding and you had the French situation well that's all suddenly changed there's a big reversal now among young people they've become a lot more cautious not conservative but much more committed to trying to find their own way in life than trying to change society what do you make of these today when it comes to revolt on the island of Ireland as distinct from U.S campuses well you know what what really changed in Ireland were uh you know to me like the great sort of turning points actually was when a group of young feminists went on the train from Dublin to Belfast to buy contraceptives and they did this as a public demonstration contraceptives were banned in Ireland of course you know under the church as was divorce uh abortion was life imprisonment um and so in 1970 this this group of feminists went you know they just you know did it as a as a public demonstration really and they went up to buy contraceptives in Belfast with the idea that they would bring them back and they would challenge the Customs authorities who were at the railway station to take the contraceptives off them or to arrest them and it was a fabulous event I mean you know I I was a teenage boy and it was the first time sex you know like the sort of notion contraceptives were things to do with sex yeah they were you know and these fabulous women um did this and it was really Brave and funny it was also utterly surreal because it happened that they didn't realize that to get the contraceptives when Belfast you needed a doctor's prescription to buy the pill and they didn't have it so they bought aspirin and so they pretended that they had so they were kind of you know fake pills and the Customs Authority so they insisted that these were pills and they should be arrested and Customs authorities pretended not to hear them you know so I was just it was a very Irish event you know it's where like actually nothing was really happening but they they produced this spectacle really which which was showing up the absurdities you know and increasingly that was what was going on you know which was that Irish people were living with absurdity you know and this is you mentioned the book is funny and somebody says like some of it is funny in a kind of grotesque way because and this is a round of way of answering about you know that the real question from say 2015 if you look back is how did it all go so fast you know how does this incredible power which is this Fusion of church and state it has spiritual power psychological power political power economic power How does it go in really it seems to melt away in in less than 10 years and it does so of course because it was already so absurd you know that everybody knew it and this is Again The Knowing not knowing thing you know that that young people I mean My Life as a young person in Dublin was not that different from the life of a young person in London or in Edinburgh or in Boston you know we did the same sorts of stuff um except that the state sort of said no you know they're not this is not happening right you know we will if you put up a calm down machine then the students union will come and take it out you know because of course you couldn't be having sex or we know you're having sex but we're never going to bring in a law saying that this is okay to sell contraceptives because then we will be admitting that we're we're not the most Catholic country in the world so this kind of absurdity was going on for a long time one of my favorites episodes of Irish history is that um in the 1970s up to the early 80s Ireland had the highest rate of menstrual problems in the known world some Irish women just could not control their menstrual cycles what was wrong with them you know this became a kind of subject of international comments you know what what you know and of course what what turned out was that um if you knew the right doctor you could get the pill prescribed as a cycle regulator it was not to do with the Tour de France it was it was it was you know and of course it was the pill for contraceptive purposes it could not be prescribed for contraceptive purposes so a way around this right was that well you know of course if you have menstrual problems you can you can get the pill so the list of symptoms I think I I listened you know was like you know putting on weights losing weight you know um you know having spots not having spots but I mean any possible thing could be put down to you know the irregularity so this was a way of dealing with the stuff so I think in a way you know you already had lots and lots of people who are who are leading very complex lives I mean in in one way of though you have to hand it to conservatives in order because they were right about one thing I mean there was nonetheless in say in the 1980s and there was only one homosexual I was a man called David Norris he was a really Brave heroic man who went on television and said you know I'm homosexual and he challenged the states he he took um the law of the Oscar Wilde laws were still in place some of the laws under which Oscar Wilde was prosecuted were still a place and David went to the courts and the court said these laws are perfectly right because we're a Christian Society and you can't I mean it's shocking I mean really Dreadful judgments but in a way the concerns are right because there was only one homosexual now and the place is full of them the dance a place is full of them now you know it's like you know and they were right that's you know that that because you know what what they were afraid of was was of course they knew that you know homosexuality all sorts of other strange things were going on in the country but so long as you didn't admit us there was this idea that somehow it wasn't happening or it wouldn't happen and from their perspective they would say you know if David Norris hadn't been allowed to go on television we would never would have had all this problems you know like so you had this kind of absurdity this surrealism really of of what people knew to be the case and and and what the official story was and I think what was the safety valve was always emigration safety valve was how did you deal with all this well people who just found it too absurd are too insulting like I have a chapter in the book about a very close friend of mine who was gay you know and who was the most Irish person I ever met he spoke Irish he taught in our in Irish she was he was brilliant linguistic he did a great job he was the official translator in the parliament translating from English into Irish and he just said to me I'm leaving I'm getting out and I couldn't understand you know why he was leaving I said it's not because you're gay is it and he said yeah I just can't stand it anymore I just can't take the fact that I'm a second class citizen in my own country that you know the law still treats me with contempt and of course huge numbers of people like that were leaving all the time I'm just you know women gay people but all just a lot of people just couldn't stand hypocrisy anymore and really what turns is the economic change in the late 90s when Ireland starts getting richer you know the the Celtic tiger is happening people start coming back and because they start coming back or they cease to leave I think that's what you get this kind of build up of very highly educated very smart people who are just not going to stand for it anymore you know and I think that's what leads you up to 2015 where Ireland becomes the first country in the world to bring in same-sex marriage by popular vote you know that happened elsewhere by parliaments or or courts um and 2018 where you got the reversal of the anti-abortion clause in the uh in the Constitution by popular vote both Happening by two to one both Happening by votes in both rural and urban Ireland both happening with older people as well as younger people you know voting in the same way uh to a very large extent this transformation was Unthinkable uh in to official Ireland but I think it was really almost like just an acceptance of reality rather than a transformation of the reality right I'm aware of time this is the last question I'm going to ask and then I'll have a peek and see are there questions here although I would love to ask you 10 000 questions from what you just said um but on the on the on the fear that there is this culture of self-mythologizing I mean now our contemporary Ireland we have become extremely good at um being morally adaptable at shimmying around things and finding our way around things and we're good at um protecting our privilege or at least we have been um and so those things um are you know what can what can lead to success in a neoliberal economy um and so I do want to just ask about the U.S economic influence because it's ubiquitous in Ireland and we have been talking about the economic transformation a huge amount of that came from the U.S direct investment so um there's so many things I would love to say I'm just um burning up by not knowing that I won't be able to ask them but um so foreign direct investment uh there was in the past 30 years it's been fueled that economic change has been fueled primarily from that so in 2017 us direct investment stock in Ireland totaled 457 billion that's a greater stock and invest investment than in Germany France Italy Spain Belgium Denmark and Sweden combined just to put the you know the Shivers on you and Karl Marx warned that if you change the economy you change the country or culture and is modern Ireland a case in point do you think we're worrying really reluctant to talk about the cost of Outsourcing this change and this influence yeah you know so the the Faustian pact if you like really is that um you know all of this change is underwritten really by as you say foreign directs Investments particularly American right so so our Ireland becomes really the the the American base in the European Union you know one of the reasons why Ireland will never leave the European Union apart from maybe a lot of other more positive ones is that you know so much of that investment is dependent on being in the European Union that's why it's there um and it is extraordinary uh so uh Ireland uh for example during the pandemic the Irish economy grew rapidly why because it's specialized in three things one is Pharmaceuticals the other is medical devices and the other one is is I.T um you know they're huge hubs for American investments in those three areas all of which of course benefits enormously from the pandemic um so it's very surreal you know it's it's it's you've got this kind of huge uh economic technological scientific infrastructure that kind of landed on top of this place um and at one level it's underwritten all of this kind of social transformation most of which to my mind is for the good on the other hand it it it it creates a new version of this doubleness because you've got two economies two places you know if you go to Dublin now you'll you you'll still see you know a lot of poverty a lot of other development and you'll see you know the global headquarters the European headquarters of all I think of any major American tech company for example yeah because to participate in neoliberal economics as we're doing yeah you get with us massive inequality that's part of the equation and you get you get in your So you you're both part of the world of course which is massively unequal but also you get within your own country you get that same inequality and not just inequality but also like two completely different narratives you know as to what what's what's growing what's doing really well so the house that I grew up in you know which was housing for poor people basically in the 1930s all those houses are now bought by Google Executives or you know by people who are working for major multinational companies so the people who used to live in those houses have nowhere to live you know that that kind of stuff is going on all the time um and there are strange things like nobody for example like example the unknown knowns you know like my friends forever you know nobody knows what Irish GDP is nobody can tell you we got figures but like one year recently the Irish GDP grew by 23 in one year which was just to do at some companies like apple moving stuff around you know and and so actually figuring out like what's what is Ireland what's what's actually ours what you know what do we produce as opposed to all this kind of mystery of money that floats around this kind of global system uh so so that that definitely does kind of produce its own version of this Neurosis but to be quite honest it's a version of the Neurosis I would rather have than the one that I grew up with well well played um so I'm going to take a question from the audience this doodle thingy is broken and so someone will come out and probably uh replace it but if there may be a roving mic there yes there's one on either side thank you um so do I see any hands oh yes brilliant thank you I think I'm really enjoying the book Thank you the problem in reading it is I'm suffering so much gestures idea of it all being top down that must have been a receptive layer there for for Change and at the same time I'm presuming that receptive layer consisted the audience for your development of your critical facilities because you weren't writing or talking to air yeah did you say anything about that where you felt the change yourself personally and what areas not just in theater but are with that um thank you very much for it's it's a great question yeah when I said it's top down I'm at the kind of the program was you know uh because I think by you know in the late 50s when I was born I think most Irish people who were unhappy um emigrated you know that they just dealt with it in a kind of Despair it's kind of fatalism you know the idea that Ireland was going to change much probably wasn't on the agenda and so what happened then in the 60s was a lot of people came back you know they were devices I mean people really did want this change absolutely they were desperately hungering for us you look at the great writers of that time you know the Edna O'Brien and Tom Murphy and Brian Friel and you know and so on and so on and you you pick up this this anger this this hunger very very definitely there you know and and so I mean when I started writing um in in the 80s uh you know it it there was it wasn't that hard actually to say these things you know someone said how could you say these things in Catholic Ireland but actually as you as you imply there was very much a kind of uh appetite for it um and and uh I mean Ireland's always been a fantastic place to write you know because people read and they respond and they you know there's a it's there's a real sense of of you still feel you're part of some kind of community I'm sure you feel it as a novelist too you know that there's there's there's there's a response out there um the one thing and I I deal with this book the one thing I never ever wrote about I never said I'm not a shameful thing at all was that I was married in a registry office why didn't I say this because it's fine for me I was writing for the Irish Times I was fine my wife taught in the Catholic School and so right up to the time she retired I couldn't say by the way I did a really interesting thing in the early 1980s when not very many people did it which was got married in restaurants it was a funny story could have told that about you know no couldn't say it because she could have been sacked and the law of the land a teacher was sacked for having a lifestyle not in keeping with the Catholic religion whom we called Eileen Flynn the courts when she went to court the original court judgment the judge said you're really lucky they're not in as in an Islamic country because a woman like you would be stoned you know and this is in the 1980s this is you know so you had this kind of weird viciousness on the one side and as you say this kind of hunger of people um and in the middle I think the in the middle is the interesting stuff in a way which is which is people who have found all these ways of getting around stuff you know John mcgahern the great novelist told me this thing about when he when he went to live in in rural County electrum he didn't go to mass and this was noticed of course you know and one of his neighbors said John you're not drawn to Mass and why not and John said well you know I I don't believe and I'd feel I'd be a hypocrite and the farmers had some but sure John none of us believes we just go to see all the other hypocrites and that was the sort of middle grounds you know in a way and it's that middle which eventually decided to stop being quite so hypocritical I think laughs I'm going to give you about five minutes to um deal with this question like I think it'll be the last thing we'll I'll be able to pose to you because it's an impossible question um to answer so good luck um how long do you think it will take for you a United Ireland do you think that brexit has helped I find this so funny I don't know the ethnicity or the background of the person who's asked this question but this is the thing that I get asked as a writer all the time I'm sure it happens to you how long especially if it's an American person asking the question as if it's an inevitability which in its in and of itself is interesting yeah I mean I I I always used to say I didn't think I would say it in my lifetime uh and probably as I get older my lifetime gets shorter I think you know but I I I I wouldn't I would not be surprised if it if it happens in my lifetime 64 so if I have a good spam you know if I get another 20 years uh I I think I think the movement is in that direction it was already in that direction in a way demographically in in Northern Ireland um uh and brexit has you know really changed everything um I I wanted Northern Ireland that the whole thing to be just left live for as long as possible and two generations of boredom would have been really good for Northern Ireland you know just getting on with stuff just living life you know um and the brexit stuff is just so horrible in a way that it's kind of raised all these existential questions again for people to force them back into it um but there's still the doubleness worst scenario isn't it really for Northern Irish loyalists what a grim something it's horrible you know if I was a unionist in order I I would be very very depressed and angry about this thing because their own leadership they supported brexit can you imagine you know like just even thinking about your own self-interest as a group of people why would you do this to cause all this trouble but there's still the wonderful Irish doubleness about all this you know which is if you ask people in polls in the Republic do you want the United Ireland yes absolutely you know what would you do for United Ireland nothing I mean absolutely nothing you know you you put you've qualified in any way like would you pay more tax no but like even stuff like would you change the national anthem but I don't know if you've ever heard our national anthem like it's really terrible you know like for a musical people I don't know how we ended up with this awful din um like I would chase the national anthem I would pay to change the national anthem you know but but no no we wouldn't change the national anthem would you change the no the flag no like nothing so once you start making it a reality people say oh well you know do I really want it and so it's it's another one of those great examples of the sort of the rhetorical Universe you know has one set of meanings and and what really happens it has another one but what I'm very afraid of is that we want to have a choice what I'm very afraid of is that you know the UK breaks up and in a way Irish Unity is sort of forced at a pace where people are not ready for and given The History of Violence given the potential for for a great difficulty I just don't want to be the generation of Southern Irish people who take over the North I want to see a process of I don't want to see subtraction where two becomes one I want to see addition where the multiplicity of Irish identities the pluralism the possibilities of of different voices different ways of being Irish is kind of celebrated and given some kind of institutional form um so I I I wouldn't want you know to end my life as someone who's kind of imposing my my culture on somebody else I I I I I would love to see the possibility of this irishness the Irish Constitution is now wonderful it says it is the aspiration of the Irish Nation to unite in Harmony and friendship all the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland in all the diversity of their identities and traditions and it's a lovely definition of national aspiration you know isn't it I mean it really is you know and but but how do you do that how do you how do you represent diversity in a in a polity that's the question we all face in the 21st century isn't it in a way uh but I think I think Ireland has a decent chance of finding a way of doing it here here okay okay I want to just thank thank Fenton for this um incredible capacity he has to synthesize so much so much history so much story and and to to be present in the moment and nonetheless um It's a Wonderful book um you'll all find it in the Bookshop and there will be a signing so please stay seated while I take uh Fint into the signing uh table um but most importantly I want to thank you for all showing up never underestimate the importance of readers for writers without the readers nothing would be written and you need we need you and so thank you for showing up and I hope that you enjoy this first day of what's bound to be a fabulous Festival just to close on in Fenton's words he says and that to accept the unknown without being so terrified of it that you have to take refuge in the fabrication of absolute conviction that that's what we're we're trying to do thank you very much [Applause] [Music]

Channel: edbookfest

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Keywords: edinburgh international book festival, edinburgh book festival, book festival, edbookfest, fintan otoole, fintan otoole author, fintan otoole book, fintan otoole interview, fintan o'toole, fintan o'toole author, fintan o'toole book, fintan o'toole interview, we don't know ourselves, we don't know ourselves book, we don't know ourselves fintan o'toole, fintan o'toole we don't know ourselves

Id: 3ggJdwRLCHo

Length: 59min 5sec (3545 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 21 2023