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Casey had, of course, urged Murphy to
give the child up for adoption. Peter
was not her child, he had admonished
her in the hospital, but God’s. What
right did she have to keep a boy who
had been born in sin? O’Toole writes
that, with the Irish Times story, “a code
of silence had been broken forever.”
Connie was not dodged; this time, it
was Connie who had dodged.
Politically, change was also under
way. In 1990, Mary Robinson was
elected President, after a brutal cam-
paign that exposed the nation’s religi-
ose misogyny. A Fianna Fáil parlia-
mentarian asked at a rally if Robinson
was going to set up an abortion-refer-
ral clinic in the Presidential residence;
Prime Minister Haughey, the Fianna
Fáil leader, claimed that Robinson was
just fronting for a “Marxist-Leninist
Communist Party”; and a government
minister, Pádraig Flynn, accused her
of faking “a newfound interest in the
family,” and wondered aloud about her
bona fides as a mother and a wife.
O’Toole notes that this kind of mor-
ally presumptuous misogyny worked
when it remained unspoken, as part
of the general contract of hypocrisy.
The mistake was speaking it so bla-
tantly, since to do so “revealed the re-
ality obscured by the rhetoric, a deep
contempt for women. It triggered a
visceral rage that had been built up
over generations.”
Robinson’s election, according to
O’Toole, broke the reflexive alliance of
the Church and the Fianna Fáil Party,
debunking the notion that both had
some kind of moral monopoly over Irish
culture. Haughey—whose florid, sharp-
eyed face, with its ruddy wattles, proved
an icon for an era—resigned as the Fi-
anna Fáil leader in 1992. A government
tribunal, held in 1997, revealed that he
had funded his lavish life style from
other people’s pockets and shielded his
wrongdoing via a shell company based
in the Cayman Islands.
A year later, the Good Friday Agree-
ment, announced by the Irish and Brit-
ish governments, largely ended the
armed conflict between Catholics and
Protestants. On both sides, all political
prisoners who accepted the Agreement
were to be released. Simultaneous ref-
erendums were held: in Northern Ire-
land, seventy-one per cent of voters, a
majority of Protestants and Catholics,
voted in favor of the Agreement; in Ire-
land, ninety-four per cent did so. Para-
military organizations agreed to disarm.
The Agreement bound the signatories
to accept the principle of self-determi-
nation; namely, that they must “recog-
nize the birthright of all the people in
Northern Ireland to identify themselves
and be accepted as Irish or
British, or both, as they may
so choose.” Both govern-
ments moved to allow cit-
izens to hold simultaneous
British and Irish passports,
which pushed the Irish to
amend their constitution
thus: “It is the firm will
of the Irish nation, in har-
mony and friendship, to
unite all the people who
share the territory of the island of Ire-
land, in all the diversity of their identi-
ties and traditions.”O
’Toole’s commentary here is espe-
cially acute. He points out that
these words allowed for the reconcili-
ation of two compound identities, Cath-
olic/Irish and Protestant/British, that
had once seemed immutably at odds,
and, in consequence, broke any neces-
sary link between Irishness and Cathol-
icism. Identity could now be plural and
open-ended. This prospect was still
largely conceptual, perhaps, but, thanks
to the enormous investments from
America and elsewhere which had been
pouring into Ireland since the nineteen-
eighties, Irish society was indeed being
transformed. Something unimaginable
in 1958 was coming to pass: mass emi-
gration was being reversed. A quarter
of a million people flocked to an eco-
nomically revivified Ireland between
1995 and 2000. Foreign-born inhabi-
tants grew from six per cent of the pop-
ulation in 1991 to ten per cent in 2002.
Once the European Union allowed the
free flow of people and labor, in 2004—
later to be one of the main engines of
Brexit—Irish society began to diversify
rapidly. By 2016, O’Toole informs us,
seventeen per cent of the population
had been born elsewhere.
In J. F. Powers’s novel “Morte D’Ur-
ban,” a priest named Father Urban is
put under moral pressure when a woman
undresses in front of him. He averts hiseyes, and keeps them averted. “It was
like tearing up telephone directories,
the hardest part was getting started,”
Powers jokes. Change in postwar Ire-
land was a bit like that, except in moral
reverse. Ireland was slow to throw off
its repressions and deceits, slow to un-
seat a theocratic system that insisted
on votive masses to bless theatre festi-
vals, and slow to overturn
a moral arrangement that
coddled molesting priests
and murderous, secretive
institutions. The nineteen-
eighties, so violently trans-
formative in Thatcher’s
Britain, produced little ev-
idence of general secular-
ization in Ireland. The Irish
reaffirmed the prohibition
on divorce in a 1986 refer-
endum. But when the process began
for good, in the nineteen-nineties, the
establishment phone book, as it were,
got ripped up very fast indeed. The key
dates fall on O’Toole’s closing pages
like accelerating hammer blows: Mary
Robinson’s election (1990); Eamonn
Casey’s flight (1992); the tribunal on
Charles Haughey (1997); a documen-
tary series, produced by Mary Raftery,
on the industrial schools, titled “States
of Fear” (1999), which was such a pow-
erful exposé that the government began
discussing the possibility of making a
formal apology the day after its screen-
ing on Irish TV; the governmental re-
port (2009) that confirmed Raftery’s
reporting, and, in the same year, an of-
ficial report into sexual abuse in the
Dublin archdiocese. These were fol-
lowed by happier events, moments of
triumph not just through suffering but
over suffering: the 2015 vote in favor of
gay marriage, the 2018 referendum that
lifted the ban on abortion.
What happened? Ireland became
normal. “To be normal was a wonder
that deserved celebration,” O’Toole
writes. Is it possible to say how in a sen-
tence? He makes a brave effort, in what
may be the most moving line of the
book: “This, I think, was what really
changed: ordinary Catholics realized
that, when it came to lived morality,
they were way ahead of their teachers.”
O’Toole leaves unspoken the gaping
implication: and perhaps way ahead of
God Himself?