Category: Books Page 2 of 6

I have just finished reading Fintan O Toole’s latest book, “We don’t know ourselves”, (Apollo Books) which is subtitled “a personal history of Ireland since 1958”.

O Toole was born in that year and he weaves some of his family story into the broader trends in Irish life, that the book describes.

The central theme  is an exploration of Irish hypocrisy.

 Fintan O Toole sees hypocrisy in recent Irish attitudes to religious practice, abortion, the use of violence for political ends, the desirability of a united Ireland, unmarried motherhood, clerical child abuse, the United States and what it stands for, and to a host of other things.

He neatly defines hypocrisy as

 “the tribute paid by realism to piety”.

Hypocrisy is also often a survival strategy and a form of evasive politeness. There are worse sins.

O Toole describes how, in his early life, emigration was a constant feature of the Irish experience.  45% of those born in the independent Irish state between 1931 and 1936 would eventually emigrate.

For some of them, emigration was a means of escaping the constraints imposed, both by the expectations of their extended family in Ireland, and by notions of morality and respectability derived from prevailing versions of Catholic teaching.

These constraints have loosened, and O Toole admits that

“The real effect of the loss of church authority was that there was no deeply rooted civic authority to take its place”.

He does not explore this. If religion is no longer a guide, what is taking its place? Is it individual choice based on utilitarian principles, or is wokeness taking the place of faith?

This might be a topic for Fintan’s next book.

But demolishing hypocrisy, so elegantly done in this book, is an easier task than creating the ingredients for a new and sustainable social contract.

This will be a big part the task that faces the Christion churches in 21^st Century Ireland.  It is their road back to social relevance.   A huge mental and moral effort will be required, and no one else is volunteering to undertake it.

“JFK”, by Fredrik Logevall, (Penguin Books) is the first volume of a two volume biography of the US President who was killed in Dallas in 1963. It covers the period up to 1956 with a lot of personal and family detail.

Kennedy was a moderate student, but one who read widely. He was serious and introspective, but he also used people without much concern for their feelings. This was particularly the case in his relations with women.

 He came from an unnaturally competitive family and displayed great physical courage, both in his wartime service, and in his battle with illness throughout his life.

While his father, Joe Kennedy, supported appeasement and isolationism in the 1930s, JFK , in contrast, supported US military activity abroad, and criticised President Truman for the  “loss” of China to the Communists.

This is a very readable, if slightly long, book.

An unrealistic understanding of the past can lead popular opinion, and politicians, into tragic errors.

Felix Larkin has recently published a collection of essays, entitled “Living with History”, that deals the use and abuse of historical commemorations,  and of official versions  history, in Ireland. 

 Popular opinions about history frequently involve mythologizing certain events, and over simplifying  the choices that were available to decision makers at the time. 

For example, Felix Larkin robustly challenges the popular view, endorsed in his recent book  by the historian Diarmaid Ferriter, that the border was “imposed “  on Ireland, against its will, by the British in 1920.

 Larkin points out that Redmond and Carson had accepted some form of partition in principle in 1914, and again in negotiations after the Rising in late 1916. So also did the majority of TDs, who had been elected under a Sinn Fein banner,   when they accepted the Treaty of 1921 by a vote in the Dail. 

 On each occasion the Irish leaders in question shrank from the prospect of a prolonged and bitter sectarian war, and even more deaths, that would have been necessary to impose a united Ireland on a resisting unionist population. 

 They were realists, facing their unpleasant responsibilities, and realists are rarely suitable subject for romantic historical commemorations.  We are being reminded of this by recent events. I am not sure much has changed. There is still a widespread view that unionists will cease to be unionist once there is a border poll. 

As Larkin sees it, the role of the historian is to debunk myths about the past.

 The historian’s role is to recognize that nothing that happened in the past was necessarily inevitable.  History is the result of an accumulation of a series of individual decisions, each one of which could have been different.  Politicians and citizens are, and always were, the shapers of their own destiny within the constraints that existed at the time.

So the study of history, and the well chosen commemoration of past events, should enable us, by learning from the consequences of   past decisions, to make better decisions in the future.

 It should encourage the taking of responsibility, rather than undue submission to victimhood, nostalgia or the blaming of others.

Larkin’s book covers many other topics, the contrast between the ideologies that inspired the 1798 and 1848 rebellions, the successes and failures of the Irish Parliamentary Party, and the varying attitudes of the Catholic Hierarchy to political violence.

 It also explores the appropriation of the religious feast of Easter by the faction of the IRB that launched the Rising, including through the use of religious imagery and notions of blood sacrifice in the Proclamation . 

 Even to this day, in secular Ireland, the 1916 Rising is commemorated on Easter Sunday, whenever that falls under the Christian calendar, rather than on 24 April each year, which is the actual anniversary.  This purely secular commemoration should probably not be conflated with the Resurrection of Christ. Each should be recalled by modern Ireland on their own merits.

Larkin believes democracy should infuse commemoration, so the foundational event of this state should be recognised as the anniversary of the meeting of the duly elected First Dail in 1919. This was a democratically sanctioned event, whereas , as a matter of historical fact, the  1916 Rising was not.

Felix Larkin’s book deserves to be widely read. It gives a very personal perspective, and offers insights that will help all residents of this island, whatever their allegiance, shape a peaceful  future,  free of grievance and myth.

He is a former senior official in the Department of Finance and later in the National Treasury Management Agency. 

All the while, he has also been an historian writing about many topics, most notably the history of Irish newspapers, something he first took up as a graduate student as far back as 1971. 

Felix Larkin’s work on newspapers has given him a unique window into contemporary Irish public opinion, over two centuries.

HAS IT BEEN UNDERMINED BY BREXIT?

This book gives a lively account, by one of the leading diplomats on the British side, of the origins and negotiation of the 1985 Anglo Irish Agreement. It is well written and a valuable contribution to history.

 It also gives a searing insight into Mrs Thatcher’s governing style from the perspective of someone who had to work with her. 

Mrs Thatcher had strong prejudices, mainly of an English nationalist kind. Her eventual acceptance of the Anglo Irish Agreement was a case of her even stronger sense of political realism eventually overcoming her prejudices.

 But it was a stormy process. Mrs Thatcher was difficult to brief and hard to keep on topic. David Goodall describes her “eclectic and discontinuous style of argument”, and how she often adopted a “hectoring and tangential mode, both confusing and dominating the discussion”. 

She saw the nationalist minority situation in the Northern Ireland, as similar to that of the Sudeten Germans in pre war Czechoslovakia, hardly a hopeful starting point.  

That she was eventually won around to a more balanced appreciation of the Irish problem is a tribute to the persistence and persuasiveness of Garret FitzGerald, and also of her own Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe.

 Indeed, Howe emerges as an unsung hero of the whole process, along with his Irish counterpart, Peter Barry. These two men, and their officials, kept the show on the road, despite many discouragements, not least the horrifying attempt by the IRA, to murder Mrs Thatcher herself in Brighton on 12 October 1984. That she could agree something as radical as the Anglo Irish Agreement, so soon after this, showed real statesmanship.

Mrs Thatcher liked and trusted Garret FitzGerald. But he had to overcome deep British fears and prejudices. Goodall says Garret was so convinced of his own and his party’s loathing of the IRA, that he could never understand why, in the eyes of many British people including Mrs Thatcher, Irish nationalism as a whole was tainted with the terrorist brush.

Goodall praises John Hume’s “deep strategic thinking” and his reasonableness in public. But he found him unwilling in private to say what  the Irish government might offer unionists as reassurance that they were not being driven down the road towards a united Ireland.

 This Agreement gave, for the first time,  the Irish government a  formal  Treaty based right to put forward proposals on political, security, legal and cross border issues in respect of Northern Ireland. It was given a means of doing this through an Inter Governmental Conference, which was to meet regularly at ministerial level and which was supported by a Secretariat based in Belfast. 

 By agreeing to this, the UK accepted that Northern Ireland was no longer a purely internal British matter. The UK government also pledged itself to make determined efforts to resolve differences that might arise on these proposals from Dublin.   This was an important breakthrough in psychological as well as legal terms. 

It was resented deeply by unionists, but was a necessary step on the road towards acceptance by unionists of equality between the two traditions, without which the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 could never have been negotiated, with the inclusion of unionist political parties.

From an Irish government point of view, the goal of the Agreement was to combat northern nationalist alienation from the state and its security services and this persuade them  to disavow any support for the IRA campaign and support the SDLP rather than Sinn Fein. The Agreement did not achieve this goal at the time, and the SDLP’s political distinctiveness was later blurred by the Hume/Adams dialogue.

At the time of the Agreement , Northern Ireland was under direct rule from London. The UK wanted to devolve powers to a Northern Ireland Assembly, but the SDLP was not willing to participate because of the way in which the power sharing government, established in 1973 at Sunningdale , had been brought down by a Loyalist strike. The SDLP would not re enter the Assembly without stronger guarantees on power sharing and  north/ south arrangements, and it looked to Dublin to get such guarantees for  them, which  eventually came about through the Good Friday  Agreement.  

  The Agreement also contained an incentive to Unionists to share power with the SDLP in a devolved administration because it said that the Irish government would give up its right to “put forward proposals” under the Agreement , on any subjects that were devolved to a  power sharing Administration.  So Unionists had a simple choice- share ministerial power with the SDLP, or put up with Dublin being involved. 

One of the British goals in the negotiation was better cooperation between the security forces and this was to be an important part of the work of the Inter Governmental Conference. Garret FitzGerald’s idea of mixed courts, including judges from the South sitting on sensitive cases involving terrorist offences in Northern Ireland, did not , however , make it into the final Agreement. 

On the long term status of Northern Ireland, the Agreement reaffirmed that a majority, at that time , wished to remain in the UK,  but it  added that if, in future, a majority

 “clearly wish for and formally consent  to the establishment of a united Ireland”

 both governments would give effect to this.

 This wording is more nuanced than that of the Good Friday Agreement , which leaves less room for negotiation and preparation for such a radical step, and does not even require formal consultation with the Irish government before a border poll might be called..

Goodall tells his readers that when he first came to deal with the Northern Ireland question,  he thought then that

“the circumstances of Northern Ireland were such as to make it impossible  for it to function contentedly , either as an integral part of the UK tout court , or as part of a united Ireland”

If that was true in 1983, it is unfortunately still true today. 

The “aspirations” of the two communities, which loom large in this and subsequent Agreements negotiated between the two  governments, are fundamentally contradictory.  Both the Good Friday Agreement and the Downing Street declaration talk of respect  for unionist and nationalist “aspirations”,  even though these aspirations contradict one another, and for one to succeed, the other must fail. Perhaps the focus on aspirations of this nature was a mistake

 As long as the unionists and nationalist communities are defined, and described by themselves and others ,  in terms of  their competing and contradictory “aspirations” around the constitutional status,  it is hard to see Northern Ireland, of the island as a whole, “functioning contentedly”, as Goodall put it.  

 Brexit , and the pressure for an early border poll, have combined to sharpen the divide even further. Perhaps it is time for the two governments, and the parties in Northern Ireland,  to  move away from seeing their  task in terms of finessing  two incompatible aspirations for the future, and  decide to focus instead on goals which unionists, nationalists, and the middle ground between,  would be  content to achieve together and be proud of achieving.

It is also worth asking whether Brexit,  by  the resulting Anglo/Irish  political tensions it has brought, and the deep structural divergence it will create between the neighbouring islands, has undone the achievement of 1985.

I recently read  “Eden. The life and times of Anthony Eden”  by DR Thorpe.

Anthony Eden was  a brave and effective British Foreign Secretary in the 1930s.

He resigned in February 1938 because the Chamberlain government was not taking a sufficiently robust stand against Mussolini, who had invaded Abysinnia in defiance of the League of Nations. 

He continued to oppose the efforts of Chamberlain to avoid war, by doing business with Hitler and Mussolini over Czechoslovakia.

For a time, Eden was even considered as an alternative to Chamberlain  in the event that Chamberlain was forced to resign as Prime Minister.

An opinion poll take in March 1938 showed that Eden had 38% support as a potential successor to Chamberlain as Prime Minister, whereas Churchill , who did become Prime Minister in 1940, had only 7% support!

This was because Eden had been in the public eye, while Churchill had sidelined himself because of his reactionary views on self government for India.

When Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940, he invited Eden to be his Foreign Secretary. He was thereafter considered to be Churchill’s heir apparent.

Eden played an important role in cementing the alliance with the US, which was important to the eventual victory over Germany.  On the other hand , it was the Soviet Union, which Hitler foolishly attacked in 1941, which did the biggest share of the fighting.

Churchill was reluctant to leave the stage and did not resign as Conservative leader until 1955, when Eden eventually took over as Prime Minister. 

His term of office in remembered for the failure of the Anglo French attack on Egypt in 1956 to prevent the Egyptian government taking over the Suez Canal. 

Oil supplies to Europe came through the Canal , and Eden saw the Egyptian leader, Nasser as similar to Hitler and Mussolini.

 In reality, even if the Canal was nationalised, it would still have been in Egypt’s interest to keep it open to fee paying shipping, including British and French shipping. The Anglo French intervention was really an exercise in the sort of imperialism which the French and the British had conducted for the previous century or more.

 Crucially, the British and French did not clear the attack with the Americans, who  used  massive economic pressure to force the French and British to withdraw. 

This episode showed that European powers , like the UK and France, could not act alone militarily any more.  Whereas in the 1930’s the US was isolationist, in the 1950’s, it wanted to call all the shots. In military terms this remains the case today. Europe depends on America for its defence.

Eden was Prime Minister when the Messina conference met in 1955 to launch what became the European Common Market. Eden sent a representative, but the UK did not commit itself to anything, whereas the other six nations did so, and eventually drafted and signed the Treaty of Rome, the founding Treaty of today’s European Union.

At the time, Eden would have seen Britain as a global player, and not on a par with a politically unstable France or with recently defeated Germany and Italy. One wonders if the present UK government sees things in a similar way to Eden. 

In a way, Eden’s problem was that his view of the world had been shaped in the 1930’s, and he did not adjust to the world of the 1950’s.

I have just finished reading “Truman” by David McCullough, a biography of the man who was President of the United States from 1945 to 1953. Truman grew up in a family in western Missouri, near Kansas City, which was beset by financial difficulties which deprived him the opportunity to go to university.

He opened a clothes shop which failed. He worked as a farmer for half a decade, with modest success. He joined the army in 1917 when the US entered the World War, leaving his sister to run the farm on her own.

It was in the war that Truman’s leadership qualities became evident and, on return from the war, he was encouraged to enter local politics with the support of the Pendergast machine, which controlled Democratic Party politics in his part of Missouri. At that time the Democratic Party was dominant in Missouri politics, in marked contrast to the present situation.

Truman was staunchly Protestant in his religious outlook but was able to work well within the Pendergast machine, which was dominated by people of Catholic and Irish ancestry.

Truman, and his family, would, like much of western Missouri, have had Confederate sympathies and one of his heroes was Robert E Lee. But he was the first Democratic President to promote civil rights for African Americans, so much so that he was opposed in the 1948 Presidential Election by a Southern Democrat, Strom Thurmond.

In many ways he was an accidental President. As Vice President, he became President when Franklin Roosevelt, who had just been elected for a fourth term, died. The death was not unexpected, but Roosevelt had done nothing to prepare Truman for his responsibilities. The way in which he was selected by Roosevelt was casual to the point of being irresponsible. Truman proved to be a more straight talking and uncomplicated leader than Roosevelt had been. He was an effective decisionmaker.

One of the attractive things about this book is the way it describes Truman’s daily life. Apart from his time in Washington, he lived with, and in a house belonging to, his mother in law in Independence, Missouri.

He was devoted to his family and much of the material in this book comes from his letters to his wife, daughter and cousins.

Harry Truman was President of the US when it was at the height of its powers. He made sure that the US would play a leading role in containing the advance of Communism and in promoting the Marshall Plan to help Europe recover from war.

Derek Scally is an Irish Times journalist, based in Germany for the last 20 years, and he has written “The Best Catholics in the World, The Irish, the Church and the end of a Special Relationship” which was published recently.

His perspective on the subject is shown in the dedication of the book to his parents, “with thanks for their belief”. 

 Aged 44, he says he is “a member of the last generation to have a full Irish Catholic childhood”.

 He served as an altar boy at Mass in his North Dublin parish, but now admits to having a “shaky grasp on Roman Catholicism”.

This is an honest book and painful reading, all the more so because the author is not fundamentally unsympathetic to Irish Catholicism. He sees that it had given meaning and purpose, to the lives of successive generations of Irish people.

He conducted hundreds of interviews with members of Church, from Cardinal Sean Brady, to the head of the Sisters of Mercy, to the people still active in his own old parish in Edenmore. He draws them out  on their understanding of the events that influenced the decline in practice and faith among Irish Catholics over the past 60 years . He also interviewed victims of clerical sex abuse, inmates in mother and baby homes, and women who lived out their lives in places like the Magdalen laundries. 

Inevitably the picture is selective. The focus is on those who suffered, or were treated unjustly in church settings. 

There is no counter factual in the sense  that the book does not explore what might have happened if these church run institutions had never existed, and people were left to their fate. 

There are no international comparisons either. The book deals with early twentieth century Irish Catholicism, as if it was something completely unique for its time. Many of the abuses and cruelties the book identifies were found in other cultures too. 

 It is hard for a reader to quantify how uniquely “Irish”, or “Catholic”, the problems were. My own view is that none of the abuses cited are unique either the Catholicism or to Ireland.

The author accepts that priests and nuns have taken the blame, not only for the failings of some among them, but also for the failings of wider Irish society. 

 Ireland was much poorer financially when some of the abuses occurred. But lack of money is never an excuse for turning a blind eye to rape or cruelty.

 Class distinctions abounded, and “respectability” was at a premium. This encouraged silence about embarrassing things. It allowed “knowing,” but simultaneously not “really knowing”, that certain things were going on. In a sense, people decided not to “know” things that they had persuaded themselves they could do nothing about.

 In this, the church reflected the evasions of Irish society, just as much as the other way around. But it is human nature that, when failings are finally exposed, the anger is often directed at others, or at the system, rather than channelled into an examination of one’s own assumptions.  

 It is true that Irish society was shaped by strict, and sometimes unforgiving, notions of sexual morality, which were inculcated by the Catholic Church. But such notions were not a particularly Irish, or even Catholic, thing. Victorian morality, and Victorian hypocrisy, was to be found on our neighbouring island, and further afield too. It just survived a decade or so longer in Ireland.

It was Irish families, not Irish priests or nuns, who banished unmarried daughters, when they became pregnant.   

It was cash strapped Irish governments which, in the early years of the state, were content to allow  religious orders to take on the responsibility for running reformatories, and  other institutions to shelter people, whose families  who could not, or sometimes would not, look after them. 

This book is impressionistic rather than scientific. The author allows the interviewees to tell their story. It does not provide a roadmap to redemption for the Irish church, or for Irish society, but it contains some hints.

 Although the author thanks his parents for their belief, he admits that religion was never discussed in his home when he was growing up,” let alone personal faith”. That job was left to the school. 

So it is no wonder that, when the scandals came along, people could stop going to Mass and feel good about it, without thinking what they might be losing. The role played by religious practice in providing guard rails within which one could live a good and sane life had never been discussed, or even put into words, and was thus too easily cast aside.

 As Bishop Paul Tighe told the author, the church discouraged people from asking questions. 

“We became a lazy church, and we are reaping that legacy now” he said.

The author, who lives in Germany, might usefully have studied the Catholic Church there over the last century. That might show whether there are lessons Irish Catholicism could learn, or could have learned. Equally he might have established if the Irish case is really as exceptional, as his provocative book title implies. 

While this book will annoy some people, it may be a spur to the necessary heartfelt and rigorous discussion about the role of faith in our society, a discussion Irish people have been postponing for a long time.

It should also prompt us to ask whether this generation of Irish families, like the previous ones, is also capable of turning a blind eye to family responsibilities. The example comes to mind of elderly relatives and neighbours left unvisited in nursing homes. Now the running of these homes is no longer delegated to nuns, but to for profit corporations!