We Don’t Know Ourselves...may appear a daunting doorstopper of a book, but it is leavened by the brilliance of O’Toole’s insights and wit, and by the story of his own life, which he expertly intertwines into a larger historical narrative. O’Toole’s Ireland is, familiarly, a nation of grand myths and discordant realities ... O'Toole...sees the country’s shift with an eye that is simultaneously critical and compassionate ... He returns repeatedly to Ireland’s ties to the United States, and astutely interprets moments such as John F. Kennedy’s 1963 visit ... O’Toole’s account ranges well beyond historical grandees to include minor celebrities ... frank moments punctuate this dense book, and these, more than strict reminiscence, constitute the personal nature of his history. O’Toole’s is a wildly ambitious project, one that accounts for inevitable partiality precisely through this invocation of the personal. It is a winning gambit.
One of the many triumphs of Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves is that he manages to find a form that accommodates the spectacular changes that have occurred in Ireland over the past six decades, which happens to be his life span ... it is not a memoir, nor is it an absolute history, nor is it entirely a personal reflection or a crepuscular credo. It is, in fact, all of these things helixed together: his life, his country, his thoughts, his misgivings, his anger, his pride, his doubt, all of them belonging, eventually, to us ... O’Toole, an agile cultural commentator, considers himself to be a representative of the blank slate on which the experiment of change was undertaken, but it’s a tribute to him that he maintains his humility, his sharpness and his enlightened distrust ... We have experienced decades of half-apertures, of which we have been neither entirely in nor out. But O’Toole manages to navigate the astonishing transformation of a valley of squinting windows into something far more kaleidoscopic ... The book begins, much like the era it represents, a little precariously. Instead of the focused burn that we come to find, the opening is a bit shaky, unconfident, more historical litany than the complete focus we begin to exult in later on. But O’Toole quickly settles down and makes a pact with his reader ... O’Toole writes brilliantly and compellingly of the dark times, but he is graceful enough to know that there is humor and light in the cracks. There is a touch of Eduardo Galeano in the way he can settle on a telling phrase ... But the real accomplishment of this book is that it achieves a conscious form of history-telling, a personal hybrid that feels distinctly honest and humble at the same time. O’Toole has not invented the form, but he comes close to perfecting it. He embraces the contradictions and the confusion. In the process, he weaves the flag rather than waving it.
O’Toole’s sweeping, intimate book...is in a category all its own, a blend of reporting, history, analysis, and argument, explored through the lens of the author’s sensibility and experience ... astonishing in its range. Every chapter takes up a specific topic ... The chapters move forward chronologically. What unites them all is O’Toole’s moral presence and literary voice: throughout, a sly, understated humor; when needed, passion and even anger. In the end, surveying what Ireland has become during his lifetime, he manages an optimistic note, one that is not merely asserted but earned ... I came away from We Don’t Know Ourselves seeing modern Ireland more convincingly portrayed and explained than ever before.
... reading Fintan O’Toole’s new book...is like reading a great tragicomic Irish novel, rich in memoir and record, calamity and critique. The book contains funny and terrible things, details and episodes so pungent that they must surely have been stolen from a fantastical artificer like Flann O’Brien ... public events have the irresistible tang of the actual, and around them O’Toole—who has had a substantial career as a journalist, a political commentator, and a drama critic—beautifully tells the private story of his childhood and youth. But because the events really happened, because they are part of Ireland’s shameful, sometimes surreal postwar history, they also have the brutishly obstructive quality of fact, often to be pushed against, fought with, triumphed over, or, in O’Toole’s preferred mode of engagement, analyzed into whimpering submission. His great gift is his extremely intelligent, mortally relentless critical examination, and here he studies nothing less than the past and the present of his own nation.
While his sweeping, authoritative and profoundly intelligent book sees modern Ireland through the lens of his own life and that of his family, it also offers sharp and brilliant analysis of what form change took when it arrived in Ireland ... 'We believed that the south was free,' O’Toole writes, 'the north unfree.' But any sentence like that in this book is set up to allow ironies, ambiguities to emerge ... His book finds a shape for the strength of the implosion [of the old Ireland] and offers a coherent and intriguing way to understand the mixture of mayhem, strange energy and puzzling order in the Ireland of the past 60 years.
... [a] masterly, fascinating and frequently horrifying 'personal history' ... We Don’t Know Ourselves is surely his masterpiece: a long, detailed and beautifully executed study of the more or less sad state of Ireland from the year of the author’s birth, 1958, to the present. That O’Toole ends on a cautiously upbeat note is remarkable, given the accounts of wilful blindness, political chicanery, moral duplicity, heedless cruelty, untrammelled corruption and sheer lunacy that course through this book ... O’Toole has a marvellously sharp eye for the illuminating fact, the telling anecdote, the overlooked or forgotten piece of history; he also has a poet’s gift for figurative language. But he is ever of a practical cast of mind, and his book is a model of inspired, one might even say creative, research ... Statistics form the framework of the book, and O’Toole wields them with subtlety and skill ... For the most part O’Toole maintains an admirably even and controlled tone, but in the face of some horrors the firmest restraint must give way to passionate denunciation ... we have only to look into the mirror Fintan O’Toole holds up before us to see ourselves plain, unmasked and unadorned.
O’Toole’s book also gave me insights into the virulent racism that ran through my community ... O’Toole convincingly traces these unfortunate traits to a toxic mixture of religion and politics in my ancestor’s Catholic Ireland -- an Irish stew of corruption, delusion, and deceit where wrong and right nestle comfortably together in the same pew. Insightful and penetrating beyond his own experience, O’Toole raises questions about the perilous mix of religion and politics ... O’Toole demonstrates sharp writing and gifted story telling talents ... O’Toole reinforces his insights with a wide range of reporting ... After reading We Don’t Know Ourselves, I placed it on my bookshelf with a deeper understanding of myself and my origins.
We Don’t Know Ourselves is a remarkably original, fluent and absorbing book, with the pace and twists of an enthralling novel and the edge of a fine sword, underpinned by a profound humaneness. O’Toole insists the book is a not a memoir, and that is true, but it contains a rich vein of personal and familial experiences ... O’Toole has a ball in dissecting Charles Haughey and his psychology, and it makes for a gripping portrait; fittingly, given the degree to which Haughey’s 'mastery of hypocrisy was mesmerising, exquisite, magisterial', he writes about him more than any other politician.
In We Don’t Know Ourselves, the years proceed chronologically and thematically ... This achieves the neat trick of conferring both authority and deniability. When O’Toole wants some credibility, he can say, well, I was there, and if anyone asks for more evidence to back up any claim, well, it’s just a personal story. The form is something of an illusion, hiding as much as it reveals ... By far the book’s strongest sections are those on the Catholic Church and 'the vast system of coercive confinement' they ran in concert with the Irish state ... O’Toole’s usual method of analysis is a combination of literary criticism and psychoanalysis: taking a snappy quote, a well-chosen anecdote, and spinning it out into an elaborate theory on the way things were then. Sometimes these assessments have a ring of truth to them, particularly when accompanied by evidence. Frequently, they do not, and several declarations are, on second glance, unknowable, inscrutable, preposterous, or banal ... What bills itself as penetrating, original history instead regularly resolves into a series of just-so stories about Ireland that pander to the received wisdom of Irish liberals ... O’Toole’s secondary sources mostly come from canonical and establishment scholarship of the last fifty years. There seems to be little room to engage with the path-breaking work of brilliant young Irish academics ... One of the strangest tics that afflicts the Irish people (see how easy this is?) is a tendency to imagine that they are perfectly unique. There is no occurrence so mundane that someone will not declare it could only happen in Ireland. O’Toole has spent many years psychoanalyzing the Irish, and he, too, seems to regard us as one-of-a-kind ... One does not have to be a supporter of the campaigns of the IRA, or even particularly nationalist, to wonder whether O’Toole might not have an especial hatred for Republican violence above that of all other combatants ... Pick virtually any book that O’Toole has written in the last thirty years, and you’ll see its preoccupations turn up as a chapter. His ideas have not changed, nor has his analysis. They may have been innovative and thought-provoking three or four decades ago, but they have become the same old story that Ireland’s liberal establishment tells itself. It is long past time for a new one.
... an illuminating, provocative and very entertaining look at how Ireland has changed over the author’s lifetime ... And there are, despite the author’s modesty, a few entertaining episodes from his own life ... O’Toole is penetrating on the class system which Ireland pretends not to have ... Some of O’Toole’s targets are of the soft variety. He is, for instance, very mean about poor Michael Flatley ... A small quibble: there are a few errors that are surprising in a book of this quality ... But overall, even if you don’t agree with much (or even any) of what Fintan O’Toole says, you are likely to enjoy reading this book. People may argue with the substance, but nobody could argue with the style—a piece of Irish duality that the author may appreciate.
Reading Fintan O’Toole’s transporting We Don’t Know Ourselves is an experience close to hunger; even at 600-plus pages, there is so much richness here you want to gulp it right down ... It’s an epic story that O’Toole tells through both sweeping narratives and intimate detail ... Ireland’s nearly unfathomable historical lacunae points to one of O’Toole’s themes about all the things the Ireland of his youth did not want to know. This framing of Irishness will be confusing for many readers, who take the country’s vaunted storytelling tradition at face value. The Irish spirit, as conveyed through its literature, revels in the richness of language, gutsy wrangling with the fundamentals of life, and the willingness to say it all. The confounding part—at least for those of us who, even if able to claim membership in the island’s world-spanning diaspora, have never lived among the Irish—comes from O’Toole’s description of the things that his famously loquacious people do not say ... O’Toole is even more cutting when describing Ireland’s relationship with the IRA’s terror campaign waged against Britain and their own countrymen to the north. These sections are the closest he comes to disgust, laying out a lengthy indictment of the IRA’s war crimes and a skillful fileting of their supporters’ hypocrisy ... While O’Toole laces into some targets with icy sarcasm, he is overall a generous and sympathetic observer, with an appreciation for human inconsistency ... We Don’t Know Ourselves lucidly illustrates the Ireland that was and the 'blank and bleak' future its people thought was ahead of them.
Among the many traditional histories and current political commentaries, this book stands out ... O’Toole reserves his most scathing criticism for the hypocrisy of the last defenders of [the] old order, above all the Catholic Church. The author, perhaps Ireland’s foremost public intellectual, employs a unique combination of intimately personal narrative, piquant facts and figures, and sharp (often ironic) commentary to describe the experience of this transformation.
... [a] dense and lively chronicle...elucidated with the acuity and sardonic wit that we might expect from this veteran journalist and critic ... The overall tone is irreverent, yet never glib. Mr. O’Toole can certainly skewer the likes of Charles Haughey, for instance, as the erstwhile prime minister poses in equestrian regalia, squires his mistress around, or pockets money donated for a colleague’s liver transplant. But these characterizations are deployed to illuminate the broader, more complex history that Mr. O’Toole knows so well and explicates so clearly. Indeed, We Don’t Know Ourselves, like the best of this author’s journalism, is a model of unflagging research and thoroughness ... vignettes prove as entertaining as they are enlightening, but We Don’t Know Ourselves is perhaps chiefly a call to account—for crimes committed in the name of nationalism or moral purity and for the convenient myopia that facilitated those crimes ... For all its weight, this is a buoyant work. And the leavening agent is, to a large extent, Mr. O’Toole’s own story, which he relates with novelistic flair.
... engrossing ... With deep research, a journalistic eye for detail, and a series of revealing personal anecdotes, he paints a vivid and affecting portrait of Irish life, touching on politics, religion, economics, and pop culture. The result is a comprehensive work of social criticism that tells the story of a country that was once so fixated on maintaining an idealized vision of its past that it almost gave up on the prospect of a better future ... a powerful book, not just for what it says about Ireland, but for what it has to teach us about national identity in general. It’s a lesson that feels particularly relevant in the United States today.
Fintan O’Toole introduced me to a different Ireland in his masterful We Don’t Know Ourselves ... O’Toole’s book also gave me insights into the virulent racism that ran through my community ... O’Toole convincingly traces these unfortunate traits to a toxic mixture of religion and politics in my ancestor’s Catholic Ireland—an Irish stew of corruption, delusion, and deceit where wrong and right nestle comfortably together in the same pew. Insightful and penetrating beyond his own experience, O’Toole raises questions about the perilous mix of religion and politics ... O’Toole demonstrates sharp writing and gifted story telling talents ... He puts the 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland into a nuanced context reserved for a skilled journalist with a keen, experienced eye.
Tracing the course of the nation from 1958, the year he was born, into the 21st century, O'Toole shows with devastating detail how the Irish people's willfully blind, secretive disposition shielded them from acknowledging what was going on all around them ... This powerful book is a lucid, highly informative amalgam of memoir, national history, economic, social and cultural observation, and behind-the-scenes political intelligence. O'Toole is superb in describing how a nation of steadfast unknowers remained determinedly oblivious to the mind-boggling coverups, scams, property speculations and financial schemes that brought down both the Church and the economy.
In this utterly fascinating and ultimately disturbing book about modern Ireland, Fintan O’Toole, the Irish Times journalist, is at his best as a reporter and commentator ... Tracking the story of modern Ireland by pinning important cultural moments to personal events in his life allows O’Toole to humanize and particularize complex historical realities. O’Toole’s cast of characters—priests and politicians, businessmen and revolutionaries, his father Sammy, a bus conductor and his mother Mary, a worker in a cigarette factory—is epic ... O’Toole makes this book both deeply personal and rigorously objective at the same time.
What’s personal about his latest book sustains his blend of anecdote, research, op-ed opining and critique of Ireland’s psuedo-secular cant, Church-State collusion and clerical corruption. His previous collections of his journalism pepper his own experiences into his analyses, and this marks him as a steady producer of what purports to be anti-establishment freethinking. But We Don’t Know Ourselves persists in presenting O’Toole as at the vanguard of what, nearing half a century now, has evolved into a new creed. That the global enterprises that have brought both jobs and immigrants through the nation’s self-promotion as an tax-haven full of eager educated young knowledge workers represent its true orientation: towards Europe, turned away from Brexit ... O’Toole skimps on nuance and settles for naysaying too often when defining 'normal' as any condition which has sundered tradition, severed admittedly elusive and troubling allegiances and abandoned supervision over a demoralized, and then suddenly rich-on-paper, and then poor-again populace. His neighbors, untethered to custom or control, languish amid the lucre of a capitalist and consumerist, at best agnostic, millennial nation of a dramatically and rapidly less homogenous and certainly increasingly international diversity among its residents ... Now that his fellow men and women have caught up with the hegemony that already overtook Britain, America and then Europe, O’Toole tallies abundant benefits. Still, a few cautious readers might count the costs.
... sparkling ... What O’Toole shows, with precision, colour and empathy, was how it all broke down—slowly at first but then with bewildering speed. Ireland had to face the things it had always known, but never wanted to acknowledge ... This is not a memoir in any conventional sense, yet in the first half we encounter O’Toole as a Zelig-like figure with an amusingly personal chain of connections to the great events and characters ... He presents a scathing critique of the Irish body politic in the 1980s and 1990s, encapsulated by a Byzantine story of beef exports to Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad that brought down a government for reasons nobody seems really to understand. There are villains, for sure ... But even there O’Toole avoids blanket condemnation or stern moralising. He is capable of constructive ambiguity himself ... This is an uplifting, almost playful read, with suggestive analysis lying beneath skilful vignettes.
In essence, O’Toole’s book is the story of how that [old] Ireland died and a new Ireland was born. It’s a familiar tale, and in many ways his book is an old-fashioned Whiggish history, a paean to progress. Darkness gives way to light, superstition and repression to secularism and modernity. Is he too harsh on the old world, then? Probably not. Indeed, I read much of the first half of this book with horrified fascination, unable to avert my eyes from the awful details ... Yet his book is never oppressive, not least because O’Toole occasionally lightens the tone. He has a nicely wry section, for example, on the enthusiasm for American westerns when he was growing up ... Perhaps inevitably, the second half of O’Toole’s book, from roughly the early 1980s onwards, lacks the power of the first. The story feels more familiar, the landscape less exotic ... Even O’Toole’s tart analysis of Bertie Ahern’s political persona...feels just a little shop-worn. It would be unfair to be too critical, though. This book’s early chapters are among the best I’ve read about Ireland in the decades after the Second World War, at once evocative, moving, funny and furious.
Being there or thereabouts at these crucial times may be the hook for this 'personal history', but the most significant of all these situations was the fact that his father was a bus conductor, and he was raised in Crumlin. And from this all else flows—the moral authority of one who did not have access to Ireland’s labyrinth of inside tracks ... Like a Shakespearean actor 'giving' his Richard III, Fintan 'gives' his Haughey magnificently ... Hell, I guess we’re all partial to it, though Irish readers may already know Dickie Rock was 'the Irish equivalent of Elvis Presley or Cliff Richard'. And in any sort of history of modern Ireland we’d expect a section on Denis O’Brien, and we mourn its absence. But we trust that Fintan won’t let us down out there, on the big stage. And yes, I know all that boring stuff about the liberal hegemony, about newspaper columnists preaching “progressive” sermons like the Missioners 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, this is the bible.
... a forceful account of how Ireland entered the modern age, beginning with his own personal history, which he effectively ties in with an almost year-by-year recounting of what happened in his country during the late 20th century ... In O'Toole's case, sharp reporting makes good history.
