Fintan O'Toole

A Personal History of Modern Ireland

We Don't Know Ourselves

'A wildly entertaining but uncomfortable read ... Pitilessly brilliant' JONATHAN COE. 'There will not be much political writing in this or any other year that is carried off with such style' The Times. A TIMESBOOK OF THE YEAR. 'A quite brilliant dissection of the cultural roots of the Brexit narrative'David Miliband. 'Hugely entertaining and engrossing'Roddy Doyle. 'Best book about the English that I've read for ages'Billy Bragg. A fierce, mordantly funny and perceptive book about the act of national self-harm known as Brexit. A great democratic country tears itself apart, and engages in the dangerous pleasures of national masochism. Trivial journalistic lies became far from trivial national obsessions; the pose of indifference to truth and historical fact came to define the style of an entire political elite; a country that once had colonies redefined itself as an oppressed nation requiring liberation. Fintan O'Toole also discusses the fatal attraction of heroic failure, once a self-deprecating cult in a hugely successful empire that could well afford the occasional disaster. Now failure is no longer heroic - it is just failure, and its terrible costs will be paid by the most vulnerable of Brexit's supporters. A new afterword lays out the essential reforms that are urgently needed if England is to have a truly democratic future and stable relations with its nearest neighbours.

Brexit and the Politics of Pain

Heroic Failure

Winner • 2021 An Post Irish Book Award — Nonfiction Book of the Year • from the judges: “The most remarkable Irish nonfiction book I’ve read in the last 10 years”; “[A] book for the ages.” “We Don’t Know Ourselves is a feast: a deeply absorbing chronicle of the 'known and unknowable,' and of the profound transformation of a place.” —Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times best-selling author of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland A celebrated Irish writer’s magisterial, brilliantly insightful chronicle of the wrenching transformations that dragged his homeland into the modern world. Fintan O’Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government—in despair, because all the young people were leaving—opened the country to foreign investment and popular culture. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with Irish national identity. In We Don’t Know Ourselves, O’Toole, one of the Anglophone world’s most consummate stylists, weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change, showing how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary “backwater” to an almost totally open society—perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history. Born to a working-class family in the Dublin suburbs, O’Toole served as an altar boy and attended a Christian Brothers school, much as his forebears did. He was enthralled by American Westerns suddenly appearing on Irish television, which were not that far from his own experience, given that Ireland’s main export was beef and it was still not unknown for herds of cattle to clatter down Dublin’s streets. Yet the Westerns were a sign of what was to come. O’Toole narrates the once unthinkable collapse of the all-powerful Catholic Church, brought down by scandal and by the activism of ordinary Irish, women in particular. He relates the horrific violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which led most Irish to reject violent nationalism. In O’Toole’s telling, America became a lodestar, from John F. Kennedy’s 1963 visit, when the soon-to-be martyred American president was welcomed as a native son, to the emergence of the Irish technology sector in the late 1990s, driven by American corporations, which set Ireland on the path toward particular disaster during the 2008 financial crisis. A remarkably compassionate yet exacting observer, O’Toole in coruscating prose captures the peculiar Irish habit of “deliberate unknowing,” which allowed myths of national greatness to persist even as the foundations were crumbling. Forty years in the making, We Don’t Know Ourselves is a landmark work, a memoir and a national history that ultimately reveals how the two modes are entwined for all of us.

We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

"O'Toole challenges the traditional approach towards the study of the four key plays--Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth--and provides an entertaining and absorbing appreciation of the dramatic qualities of each."--cover.

A Radical Guide to Shakespearian Tragedy

Shakespeare is Hard, But So is Life

25 Years of Irish Life Through the Columns of Fintan O'Toole

A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958

The definitive, blistering polemic on the near-total extinction of the Celtic Tiger, held up as a model for small nations everywhere in the boom.

How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger

Ship of Fools

Postwar England and the Rise of Nationalism

Politics of Pain

'There will not be much political writing in this or any other year that is carried off with such style' The Times. In exploring the answers to the question: 'why did Britain vote leave?', Fintan O'Toole finds himself discovering how trivial journalistic lies became far from trivial national obsessions; how the pose of indifference to truth and historical fact has come to define the style of an entire political elite; how a country that once had colonies is redefining itself as an oppressed nation requiring liberation; the strange gastronomic and political significance of prawn-flavoured crisps, and their role in the rise of Boris Johnson; the dreams of revolutionary deregulation and privatisation that drive Arron Banks, Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg; and the silent rise of English nationalism, the force that dare not speak its name. He also discusses the fatal attraction of heroic failure, once a self-deprecating cult in a hugely successful empire that could well afford the occasional disaster: the Charge of the Light Brigade, or Franklin lost in the Arctic. Now failure is no longer heroic - it is just failure, and its terrible costs will be paid by the most vulnerable of Brexit's supporters, and by those who may suffer the consequences of a hard border in Ireland and the breakdown of a fragile peace.

The Politics of Pain

Objects don't just have stories, they tell stories. There is a certain paradox that surrounds them. They seem precise and fixed, literally tangible, yet they can put us in touch with the past in a direct and immediate way. What they said to their contemporaries may be different from what they say to us. Whether it's a silver tea urn from Georgian Dublin or an illuminated page from the Book of Kells, historical objects help us gain a more complex understanding of our past. When so much about the past - especially the Irish past - is contested, physical things can provide secure anchors in history. They ought to make things simpler, and yet, when an object is actually examined, this apparent simplicity quickly falls away. Such interesting objects tend to provoke more questions than they can answer. Over the past two years, Fintan O'Toole, the literary editor of the Irish Times, has selected 100 objects - the majority of which can be found in the National Museum of Ireland - to narrate a history of Ireland. These objects have been chosen simply for their ability to illuminate moments of change, development, or crisis. Articles on these historical objects appeared weekly in the Irish Times and are now being collected in book form by the Royal Irish Academy. The book will act as a reminder that people have inhabited Ireland for quite some time and have survived innumerable ordeals and challenges. *** "The objects....span the centuries from 5000 B.C. to 2005....a wooden fish trap from the Mesolithic era, found preserved in a bog in Co. Meath....St. Patrick's Confessio (460-90), the oldest surviving example of prose writing in Ireland....an emigrant's suitcase from the 1950s tells the story of Ireland's diasporic expansion. The final object was selected by readers from a shortlist of ten. A decomissioned AK47 assault rifle, it speaks to Ireland's recent history of strife and commitment to peace; its links with the larger world, and its own unique story." - Sheila Langan, Irish America Magazine, June-July 2013. *** "Thoughtfully written and thoroughly accessible to readers of all backgrounds, A History of Ireland in 100 Objects is both a fascinating browse and a repository of historical highlights made tangible, highly recommended." - The Midwest Book Review, Wisconsin Bookwatch, The World History Shelf, May 2013~

A History of Ireland in 100 Objects

Fintan O’Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government—in despair, because all the young people were leaving—opened the country to foreign investment and popular culture. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with Irish national identity. In We Don’t Know Ourselves, O’Toole, one of the Anglophone world’s most consummate stylists, weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change, showing how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary “backwater” to an almost totally open society—perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history. Born to a working-class family in the Dublin suburbs, O’Toole served as an altar boy and attended a Christian Brothers school, much as his forebears did. He was enthralled by American Westerns suddenly appearing on Irish television, which were not that far from his own experience, given that Ireland’s main export was beef and it was still not unknown for herds of cattle to clatter down Dublin’s streets. Yet the Westerns were a sign of what was to come. O’Toole narrates the once unthinkable collapse of the all-powerful Catholic Church, brought down by scandal and by the activism of ordinary Irish, women in particular. He relates the horrific violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which led most Irish to reject violent nationalism. In O’Toole’s telling, America became a lodestar, from John F. Kennedy’s 1963 visit, when the soon-to-be martyred American president was welcomed as a native son, to the emergence of the Irish technology sector in the late 1990s, driven by American corporations, which set Ireland on the path toward particular disaster during the 2008 financial crisis. A remarkably compassionate yet exacting observer, O’Toole in coruscating prose captures the peculiar Irish habit of “deliberate unknowing,” which allowed myths of national greatness to persist even as the foundations were crumbling. Forty years in the making, We Don’t Know Ourselves is a landmark work, a memoir and a national history that ultimately reveals how the two modes are entwined for all of us.

Declan McGonagle

Kim Levin

"Reflecting the seismic changes in Ireland's political, social, economic, and cultural realities of the 1990s, contemporary Irish artists have begun to redefine identities, raising questions about the relationships between male and female, urban and rural, North and South, history and the present. The struggle over identities, which used to marginalize Ireland and societies like it, has now become central to debates around the globe." "This strikingly illustrated book presents a reading of Irish art in the 1990s and examines the repositioning of Irish identity in works drawn primarily from the collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin." "The artists examined, including Kathy Prendergast, Willie Doherty, and Alice Maher, have initiated a dialogue with their own society and others beyond Ireland, using painting, photography, sculpture, video, and installation to explore subjects ranging from the personal and poetic to the political. Their concerns - and the way they are conveyed through non-traditional materials and new interpretations of more conventional media - link these works to new art being made elsewhere in the world." "This publication accompanies an exhibition touring the United States and Canada."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

From the Poetic to the Political

Irish Art Now

Shane Hegarty

This bestselling book recreates the actual course of events during that tumultuous week, based on contemporary witnesses, memoirs and later recollections. It adds up to the most comprehensive and accessible account of Easter Week in print and has received praise in all quarters.

The Irish Times Book of the 1916 Rising

After the Ball

Three Years in Hell

A provocative new biography of the man who forged America's alliance with the Iroquois William Johnson was scarcely more than a boy when he left Ireland and his Gaelic, Catholic family to become a Protestant in the service of Britain's North American empire. In New York by 1738, Johnson moved to the frontiers along the Mohawk River, where he established himself as a fur trader and eventually became a landowner with vast estates; served as principal British intermediary with the Iroquois Confederacy; command British, colonial, and Iroquois forces that defeated the French in the battle of Lake George in 1755; and created the first groups of "rangers," who fought like Indians and led the way to the Patriots' victories in the Revolution. As Fintan O'Toole's superbly researched, colorfully dramatic narrative makes clear, the key to Johnson's signal effectiveness was the style in which he lived as a "white savage." Johnson had two wives, one European, one Mohawk; became fluent in Mohawk; and pioneered the use of Indians as active partners in the making of a new America. O'Toole's masterful use of the extraordinary (often hilariously misspelled) documents written by Irish, Dutch, German, French, and Native American participants in Johnson's drama enlivens the account of this heroic figure's legendary career; it also suggests why Johnson's early multiculturalism unraveled, and why the contradictions of his enterprise created a historical dead end.

William Johnson and the Invention of America

White Savage

From one of the most perceptive observers of the English today comes a brilliantly insightful, mordantly funny account of their seemingly irrational embrace of nationalism. England’s recent lurch to the right appears to be but one example of the nationalist wave sweeping across the world, yet as acclaimed Irish critic Fintan O’Toole suggests in The Politics of Pain, it is, in reality, a phenomenon rooted in World War II. We must look not to the vagaries of the European Union but, instead, far back to the end of the British empire, if we hope to understand our most fraternal ally—and the royal mess in which the British now find themselves. O’Toole depicts a roiling nation that almost ludicrously dreams of a German invasion, if only to get the blood going, and that erupts in faux outrage over regulations on “prawn-flavored crisps.” A sympathetic yet unsparing observer, O’Toole asks: How did a great nation bring itself to the point of such willful self-harm? His answer represents one of the most profound portraits of the English since Sarah Lyall’s New York Times bestseller The Anglo Files.

The Politics of Pain: Postwar England and the Rise of Nationalism

The Work and Times of Tom Murphy

The Politics of Magic

Few figures are more respected and quoted internationally than Fintan O'Toole, both as a controversial and provocative political commentator and theatre critic. This extensive collection brings together a wide range of his writings going back to 1980. It provides a privileged insight into the great moments of contemporary Irish theatre, marking the contributions of playwrights (Carr, Murphy, Friel, McGuinness), directors (Hynes, Byrne), actors (Hickey, McKenna), and designers (Vanek, Frawley). It also demonstrates his unsettling of the usual "canon," with his thoughtful arguments promoting certain playwrights who deserve to up be there with Ireland's best, including Antoine O'Flatharta, Paul Mercier, Dermot Bolger, and David Byrne.

Fintan O'Toole

About

Books

Join the club