60 THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022
indoor lavatory. In a book rippling with
extraordinary facts, here are some of
the starkest: at the end of the Second
World War, two-thirds of Irish homes
had no electricity. In the countryside,
especially, development was sluggish.
The 1961 census revealed that nearly
seventy-five per cent of rural homes
didn’t have plumbing. At least half
these houses “had no fixed lavatory
facilities at all, indoor or outdoor.”
O’Toole remembers visiting his ninety-
eight-year-old great-grandmother in
County Wexford: her house had re-
cently been electrified, but the toilet
was a dry outhouse that had a plank
with a hole in it, and water was brought
from a distant pump.
Politically, the Ireland of his child-
hood appeared to be remarkably sta-
ble. It was the triumphant survivor of
its Easter Rising struggle, in 1916,
against British colonialism, culminat-
ing, six years later, in the establishment
of the Irish Free State; a wily evader
of the ravages of the Second World
War (it stayed neutral); a newborn dem-
ocratic republic where ancient Catho-
lic identity and ancient national iden-
tity were fruitfully locked together in
place. The state was presided over by
its aging founding father, the noble and
deeply pious Taoiseach (Prime Minis-
ter) Éamon de Valera, who had led
forces against British soldiers in the
Easter Rising and had been a British
prisoner of war. De Valera’s party, Fi-
anna Fáil (Soldiers of Destiny), had
comfortably dominated Irish politics
since soon after its formation, in 1926.
But Ireland, in O’Toole’s telling, was
in crisis, more of a fragile agrarian the-
ocracy than a modern democratic re-
public. It was not de Valera who was
really in charge but the zealous magni-
fier of women’s private parts, the Arch-
bishop of Dublin, John Charles Mc-
Quaid. (O’Toole includes a photograph
of de Valera on his knees, kissing Mc-
Quaid’s ecclesiastical ring.) Crucially,
the country was shrinking. In 1961, its
population was less than half the size
it had been in 1841. “Three out of five
children growing up in Ireland in the
1950s were destined to leave at some
point in their lives,” O’Toole notes.
Oddly, given the country’s ardent Ca-
tholicism, Ireland had very low rates of
marriage—perhaps because it also pos-
sessed the lowest proportion of women
in Europe (women emigrated faster
than men). It had a severely uneducated
populace (most pupils dropped out of
school at the age of fourteen), and a
limited, colonial economy, based in large
part on exporting beef and other cattle
products to Great Britain. “The state
founded in revolution and civil war had
become remarkably stable,” O’Toole
writes. “But it was a stability sustained
by radical instability—to keep it as it
was, huge parts of the population had
to emigrate, for otherwise the sheer
weight of their discontented numbers
would drag it down.”O
’Toole uses his birth date to plot
the country’s tensions and contra-
dictions, drawing the reader’s attention
to three symptomatic events that oc-
curred in the week of his birth. Two
days before he was born, the Dublin
Theatre Festival struck “Bloomsday,”
an adaptation of Joyce’s “Ulysses,” from
the schedule, when Archbishop Mc-
Quaid made his disapproval clear by
refusing to mark the festival opening
with a special votive mass. (Samuel
Beckett withdrew his play in protest.)
The second event, while O’Toole’s
mother was in labor, took place in En-
gland. Masked members of the Irish
Republican Army (I.R.A.) raided a Brit-
ish Army camp in Dorset, and bound
and gagged ten young soldiers. The ep-
isode was relatively trivial, but it por-tended many years of murder and sor-
row. Meanwhile, the government’s
minister for industry and commerce,
Seán Lemass—like de Valera, a veteran
of the 1916 Easter Rising—flew to Paris
to discuss the possibility of Ireland’s
joining the newly proposed European
Free Trade Association, a precursor to
the European Union.
Seen in hindsight, the three events
occupy tellingly different temporalities.
The censoring Church already belongedto the superstitious past, though the
members of the clergy didn’t know it,
of course, and had not yet even begun
to cede their immense authority. The
I.R.A. raid opened the long chapter of
terroristic violence, perpetrated by both
Catholics and Protestants, known as
the Troubles—most of it confined to
the British province of Northern Ire-
land and to the British mainland—that
more or less came to an end in 1998,
with the Anglo-Irish Good Friday
Agreement. The ministerial trip to Paris
set in motion an economic expansion
and an integration with the rest of Eu-
rope that is open-ended and ongoing.
The three events occupy the past, the
finite present, and the unlimited future.
Also: religion, violence, and identity.
Was Ireland just a curious, dusty little
annex of the Catholic Church—its na-
tional vestry, essentially—or a modern
nation willing to join a large, techno-
cratic, increasingly secular political bloc,
whose laws and mores were bound to
conflict with Irish bans on abortion, di-
vorce, and contraception? In a state that
fused Catholic identity and republican
nationalism, would sectarian political
violence—violence done in the name
of Catholics against the Protestants of
Northern Ireland, and in the service of
the “unfinished” Irish revolution of
1916—bind Catholicism and Irishness
ever more intensely together or pull
these identities apart? The sixty-year
development that O’Toole so dexter-
ously tracks is one in which an isolated
religious nation becomes—slowly, then
suddenly—a hospitably “normal,” sec-
ular one, and in which Catholicism and
Irishness are no longer seen as synon-
ymous. This sundering eventually made
religiously sectarian violence not just
difficult to defend (the modern Irish
government never had a lot of time for
the I.R.A.) but, finally, incoherent.
Like most nations, but more acutely,
the Ireland of the late nineteen-fifties
and the sixties was torn between isola-
tion and community. Most important,
it had to navigate a path between the
claims of the Church and the secular
appeal of the new. The country’s appar-
ent strengths—its population’s ethnic
and religious homogeneity, its battle-
scarred unity against the old colonial
aggressor, the romantic brilliance of
its self-mythologizing—were the very