By Estelle Shanley
Those who read Irish American News are familiar with the writer Fintan O’Toole.
Much of his work currently appears in American highfalutin periodicals. Giving him his due when writing about Ireland he shivers down to earth shoveling out in spades what he thinks is right or wrong in the Emerald Isle.
He knows a lot and is fearless. Several years ago he penned a book entitled: Listen, We Don’t Know Ourselves, a personal history of Ireland since 1958.
It is not a memoir, nor a history of modern Ireland but a provocative and entertaining book of how Ireland has changed, socially, politically, and economically since his birth in 1958.
It is a terrific read, published by Head of Zeus and available.
It should come as no surprise his tackling the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church and O’Toole highlights several examples worth revisiting.
He cites the story of a woman sacked from her job as a teacher in New Ross for having a child outside of marriage. This occurred at the same time, in the same diocese that several priests, were repeatedly raping children.
Ironically, nothing was done when complaints surfaced.
O’Toole was also critical of Republican justifications for their actions during the Troubles. The Provos claimed there was a war on, but complained their opponents did not follow peacetime rules. He argues when it was war it suited the Provos but not war when it didn’t. “It’s not war when you are outraged by failures to adhere to due legal process after you’ve been caught with plastic explosives in your car.
He asks is it war when you drag sixteen-year-olds out of flats in impoverished Catholic ghettoes and maim them for life because everyone knows they are guilty of “anti-social behavior?”
As a reporter, spending time in Belfast talking to mothers whose sons were “lifted” during the night without a warrant from their beds and taken to the Crumlin jail and interrogated for hours without sleep or food.
One mother announced through her rage and grief, “it was like a death without a corpse.” As their sons were taken away, everything in their bedroom, a clock, a watch, books, family photographs, and all small objects were also lifted.
Sometime later I visited the Crumlin Jail and spoke with one of those boys who had been told his mother had died and if he would give them the information they needed they would release him to attend the funeral.
We sat on chairs at a long table in a very large jail entryway and a guard perched in a tall chair (there was a ladder!) so he could control and see everything that occurred on the floor.
The guards walked around and around stamping loudly which made conversation difficult if not impossible. There was no doubt, this was war.
O’Toole lists a number of the worst atrocities perpetuated by the Provisional IRA, including the bombing of a hotel. “If this was war, there were war crimes, he wrote.
Charles Haughey also came under fire with a charge of hypocrisy who is said to have accepted vast sums from wealthy businessmen to allegedly fund his lavish lifestyle. O’Toole points out “he was a man of infinite pride without sufficient self-respect to keep him from becoming a kept man.”
I once had the privilege of attending an Irish family’s lavish wedding with my academic husband. I was seated beside Haughey and he leaned over whispering in my ear, “The next time you come to Ireland, leave the professor at home!”
O’Toole missed an opportunity to skewer him fully!
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