THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022 61
forces that were pushing it toward dis-
ruptive upheavals. O’Toole is almost
Hegelian in his understanding of his-
tory as a critical process in which eras
helplessly recruit the agents of their
own undoing. Religion and national-
ism, the cross and the clover, promised
a timeless stability but were actually
subversive forces.
They were subversive because, de-
spite the rhetoric of confidence, they
were anxiously unstable, held together
by a will to hypocrisy; when the defi-
cits of this hypocrisy overwhelmed the
benefits, the will began to wane. Read-
ing this book, I was struck by parallels
with the collapse of various European
Communist regimes. In particular, I
often thought of the jokes, novels, and
allegories that circulated in places under
Communist rule, like Czechoslovakia
and Albania, with their comic, grim
evasions and knowing irony around
doublethink. Josef Škvorecký, as much
as Flann O’Brien, could have produced
the basic script.
Take contraception. The pill, though
illegal in Ireland, had been imported
into the country since 1963, officially as
a “cycle regulator.” As long as no one
spoke the word “contraceptive,” doctors
could conspire with their female pa-
tients in this medical fiction. The Church
connived at this solution, too. “Catho-
lic schools and hospitals would have
ceased to function if teachers and nurses
were not having awful trouble with their
periods,” O’Toole winkingly comments;
pregnant teachers and nurses would have
been sacked. (It was only in the year of
his birth, he points out, that the gov-
ernment lifted its prohibition on mar-
ried women working as teachers.)
O’Toole bundles these hypocrisies
under the delicious term “Connie dodg-
ing.” Cornelius (hence “Connie”) Lucey,
the Bishop of Cork, had demanded a
particularly strict version of Lenten fast-
ing, in which parishioners were restricted
to one meal a day, along with two “col-
lations,” which were understood to be
something like a biscuit, to be had with
one’s tea. A resourceful local baker then
invented a gigantic biscuit for Lent,
known as a Connie dodger. “The law
of God was not defied,” O’Toole ob-
serves. “It was dodged. And so it was
with the Pill.”
One of the liveliest episodes in the
book occurred in 1971, when members
of a new feminist group known as the
Irish Women’s Liberation Movement
(aided, in the legal realm, by the young
law professor Mary Robinson, a future
President of the republic) mounted a
campaign to break the law restricting
the importation of contraceptives. The
women took a train to Northern Ire-
land, with the intention of buying con-
traceptive pills in Belfast and then
openly declaring them at customs in
Dublin. But because they were unable
to acquire the pill in Belfast without a
prescription, they returned with aspi-
rin, confident that the customs guards
would not be able to tell the difference.
Alas, nothing much happened. When
one of the group announced that she
was carrying the banned substance,
O’Toole recounts, the customs men in
Dublin “dropped their eyes, silent and
fussed,” and waved the women through,
as if they hadn’t heard anything. Offi-
cial hypocrisy doubled down; Connie
dodging lived to fight another day.O
’Toole’s book pulses with righteous
anticlericalism, and at its heart lies
his eloquent outrage at what amounted
to a vast religious penal colony. This
network—comprising the ordinary
Catholic schools run by the ChristianBrothers, the more shadowy “mother
and baby homes,” the Magdalene asy-
lums, and the “industrial schools”—var-
iously disciplined and incarcerated boys,
girls, and pregnant or otherwise “way-
ward” women. Of these institutions, the
most notorious, thanks to a landmark
government investigation in 2015, are
the mother-and-baby homes, most of
which were run by Catholic nuns. Un-
married pregnant women were sent to
these homes to deliver their babies, who
were put up for adoption or neglected
unto death and buried in situ. At the
Tuam Children’s Home, which was ad-
ministered by the Sisters of Bon Se-
cours, some eight hundred children were
buried within a decommissioned sew-
age tank, O’Toole writes. Between 1920
and 1977, many hundreds of dead ba-
bies were dispatched from these homes
to the nation’s finest medical schools,
in Dublin, for research purposes.
The Magdalene asylums confined
women who had broken the law and
were perceived to have fallen into sex-
ual immorality. The industrial schools
were boarding schools for problem kids,
who were subdued by regimes of ter-
ror that included flogging, burning, head
shaving, beatings on the soles of the
feet, and being made to sleep outside
overnight. The network incorporated