Fintan O’Toole’s new book tells the story of how Ireland, at last breaking the fetters of religion and superstition, created its own conscience.
O’Toole opens his book in 1958, the year of his birth. He was born into the working classes; his father was a bus conductor and his mother became an office cleaner. The family lived in a newish housing estate, “lined by largely identical two-storey working-class dwellings,” in a suburb southwest of Dublin. The modernity of the housing stock was important: the O’Tooles had electricity, running water, and an indoor lavatory.
Seen in hindsight, the three events occupy tellingly different temporalities. The censoring Church already belonged to 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.
They were subversive because, despite the rhetoric of confidence, they were anxiously unstable, held together by a will to hypocrisy; when the deficits of this hypocrisy overwhelmed the benefits, the will began to wane. Reading this book, I was struck by parallels with the collapse of various European Communist regimes.
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 mounted a campaign to break the law restricting the importation of contraceptives. The women took a train to Northern Ireland, with the intention of buying contraceptive pills in Belfast and then openly declaring them at customs in Dublin.
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