WE DON'T KNOW OURSELVES

It was a real thrill to do a KEEN ON interview with Fintan O’Toole about WE DON’T KNOW OURSELVES, his personal history of contemporary Ireland which came out in paperback today. We covered a lot of stuff and below is the full transcript (please excuse typos) of our conversation. Enjoy!

AK: Hello everybody. It is Tuesday, February the 7th 2023, bright and early in San Francisco, which accounts for the strange shadows on the screen, for people watching. Last year we did an interesting show with the Belfast based historian, Sean Connolly, about how Irish immigration made the modern world. Perhaps it could have been how Irish immigration made the world modern. He has a new book out, On Every Tide: The Making and Remaking of the Irish World. It's a book about how the world, that Irishness, because of the mass immigration of Irish people from Ireland, Irishness was conducted elsewhere. It became something that somehow reflected, was a mirror of a world of immigration or emigration, and identity and travel and the sea were all sort of, in an odd way, bound up with one another. We're reversing that today, we're still talking about Ireland, but the history of Ireland after 1958, when my guest was born, has been turned on its head. Everyone will know Fintan O'Toole, one of the world's leading writers, polemicists, newspaper columnists. He suggests his life was too boring for a memoir, so he wrote about Ireland, which is an intriguing concept in itself. His book, We Don't Know Ourselves, A Personal History of Modern Ireland looks, I think, and maybe he will correct me, at the post history of the world that Connolly was talking about On Every Tide. Irishness conducted elsewhere now has become Ireland as a place which somehow reflects the world. Fintan, Am I being a bit obtuse here or is there some truth to those suggestions?

Fintan O'Toole: No, I think you put it brilliantly and summed it up exactly. You're absolutely right that, of course, the single biggest shaping force in modern Irish history is mass emigration, just getting the hell out of the place. Ireland is still, in 2023, it still has a population lower than the population of the Ireland in 1840. I don't know of anywhere else of which that's true. And you're absolutely right then to think about, you've had this historic process of, effectively, Irish labor going to international capital, going to Britain and America in particular, but also Australia, New Zealand, Canada, elsewhere. And what starts to happen after 1958, through the 1960s and '70s, is a sort of gradual reversal of that process, which is where international capital starts to come to Ireland. And that's really the story I end up telling. But you're absolutely right to pinpoint it because the driving force behind this big change is the sense of despair. I mean, the sense that actually there might be nobody left on the island at all if we don't do something. There were only two countries in Europe that lost population in the 1950s, which is of course the great post-war re-population of Europe. Two countries lost population. One was East Germany, before they built the wall, and the other was Ireland. And Ireland couldn't build a wall.

AK: Yeah, it's interesting, that comparison between Ireland and East Germany in the '50s. Does that make West Germany, just as West Germany was the place all the East Germans ran away to, does that make America Ireland's West Germany?

Fintan O'Toole: Yes. And it had been, of course, for a very, very long time. I think to understand the process that I'm writing about, you have to acknowledge that in a sense, psychologically at least, America doesn't feel foreign to Ireland. Oddly, Ireland defines itself against Britain, of course, and I'm talking about, of course, Catholic Nationalist Ireland, which is the majority and the culture that I grew up in. It's a sort of not being British, is its defining modus operandi. Whereas being American or being close to America is seen as a liberating thing. And when I was five, of course, we had the apotheosis of this idea, which was John F. Kennedy, an Irish Catholic American president arriving to visit Ireland on a state visit, not too long before his assassination. But that's an extraordinary moment when we sort of say, this American modernity is embodied in this glamorous form of JFK.

AK: In a sense, so Irish people could see themselves or they saw the people who had left realize themselves. Of course, you don't need me to tell you this. It was all a bit mythological, to be polite.

Fintan O'Toole: Absolutely. It's an odd thing because for JFK, his Irish roots went back a couple of generations, but he did seem to care about it. His aides were appalled at the idea of him visiting Ireland. What on earth are you spending three days going around cottages and shaking people's hands? Why do you need to do this? But for some psychological reason, he needed to do it. But of course, for Ireland, absolutely. It's completely mythological. But it sort of serves, I suppose, as a necessary sort of myth.

AK: And particularly, given the nature of the Kennedy family business and the nature of the Kennedy family and the father and the war and blah, blah, blah.

Fintan O'Toole: Yeah, we ignored all of that.

AK: That was conveniently swept under the carpet. Fintan, let me extend the East German thing. And we've all, of course, seen the movie, “The Lives of Others”. The story of the East German state is one of snooping of the Stasi, of watching everyone. Remarkably, although very inefficiently, repressive state. Were there similarities, do you think, between the East Germany of Erich Honecker and the pre 1958 Ireland of the Catholic Church?

Fintan O'Toole: So it would be in bad taste to suggest that the repression is anything like what it is in East Germany or in the eastern block. It's not. Ireland is a democracy and it has a constitution, and it has an independent judiciary and a relatively free press and all that sort of stuff. However, the very strong similarity actually is that there is something like a totalitarian ideology. So over 90% of the population is Catholic, and well over 90% of that Catholic population is practicing Catholic. It's seriously Catholic. So you have a racial monolith. I mean, there's almost no black people or very, very few foreigners of any kind, indeed. And you have a religious monolith because of partition, which had happened a hundred years ago. They're Protestants in the North, they're Catholics in the South, so there's no real sense of pluralism. And you have this fusion of church and state, which actually ought to be kind of interesting for Americans right now because there are certainly a lot of people in America.

AK: Yeah. Absolutely.

Fintan O'Toole: This is great thing. I lived through it and I can tell you, it's not a great thing. And actually, oddly enough, it's not a great thing for the church. If you're actually religious, in a way, this triumph where you get the state to do your bidding is, in the long term, the worst thing can happen to you because it creates a kind of absolute power, which is absolutely corrupting. And over the long time, that's what happened to the Catholic Church in Ireland. And now it's gone. It's as a force. Of course, there's still lots of Catholics.

AK: Well, has it gone, Fintan, or did you successfully manage to export it to America? Of course, the Supreme Court here, we have a New Yorker piece about the sins of the High Court's supreme Catholics. The Catholics seem to have taken over the Supreme Court and redone it in terms of abortion and gun rights and other things. In an odd, sort of darkly ironic way, has Ireland exported its pre 1958 self to America, or at least to the Supreme Court and the Republican Party?

Fintan O'Toole: In a lot of both direct and indirect ways, that's absolutely true. So a lot of the people who campaigned to overturn Roe versus Wade, from the start, are Irish Americans and Irish American Catholics. Abortion in particular, at that time, it's hard to remember now, but was seen as a Catholic issue. Most evangelicals were not interested in it. So that sort of long term re-conquest of America, as they would see it in their own ideology, does start a lot with Irish Catholics. And of course, you had a huge number, a disproportionate number of Irish Catholics around Trump, both directly and then indirectly. So a couple of his Supreme Court nominees are from Irish American Catholic backgrounds. So there is that irony that Ireland, of course, ends up getting rid of its ban on abortion by popular votes in 2018. Just at the time when this same ideology that's being, in a sense, defeated in Ireland, is becoming triumphant in America. So there is that long term legacy of Irish Catholicism elsewhere, and it's one of the reasons why there is this kind of a strange disjunction between conservative Irish Americans and contemporary Ireland.

AK: And I don't quite know how it all fits together, but certainly, the court's obsession with abortion speaks to the importance of demography. I couldn't work out, from your book, whether or not you believe that demography is destiny. Demographers always disagree on this. We had one demographer on the show last year, Jennifer Scuba, who argued that demography isn't destiny, and then another one, Paul Morland, who argued that it is. What does the Irish case tell us about the relationship between demography and destiny?

Fintan O'Toole: Well, what it tells us, first of all, is that globalization is a complex process. So globalization is often seen as a process of this thing out there coming to indigenous places, and Ireland being one of those. But of course, demographically, that's very seldom true because people have been migrating for centuries. And so Irish demography is shaped by outwards migration for a very long time, but it does have this paradoxical outcome, which is that the more radical people are personally, in terms of changing their lives, going from West Mayo to Boston or whatever, the less radical the society that's left behind is. So there is a kind of demographic trick there where the declining demography at home feeds into actually a very conservative sort of society because you get rid of your young people, you get rid of a lot of the unhappiness and the unsettlement, and it actually kind of suits a proprietorial class who can just stay in charge, up to a point. But demography, in the Irish case, it sort of is destiny because it shapes everything in terms of why Ireland's like it is in the 1950s and 1960s, but also then shapes the necessity for radical change. There is a demographic crisis, and that crisis has to be addressed primarily by trying to keep people at home. And that's the dilemma of conservatism, is that it wants to maintain the status quo, but you can't maintain the status quo if people are voting with their feet because they want a better life somewhere else. And therefore, it has to change itself in order to be attractive to younger people. I mean, one of the weirdest things is that Ireland is this most Catholic country, it sees itself as the most Catholic country in the world. In the 1950s, it has the lowest marriage rate in the world because it scared everybody off sex, and it's sort of not a place that's good for young people to settle down and start their lives. So actually, this kind of conservatism is ultimately demographically self-defeating.

AK: You talked about that as the dilemma of conservatism. What about the dilemma of liberalism or progressivism? It seems like, in a way, you are split too. I don't know whether you really believe your life is boring, I don't think anyone does. But you don't fetishize your life, and you wrote about Ireland, but you wrote about a changing Ireland. And you've written a book which undermines the traditional notions of what Irishness means in a globalized, modern world. The dilemma, I guess, of liberalism is that progressives want collective communal identity, but we live in an age where the self is fetishized. You clearly don't fetishize yourself. What's the connection between this? In Ireland today, has the kind of cult of the self amongst young people, amongst the business class, the new class in Ireland, has it replaced old notions of Irishness? Or is that the division as in America between the liberal coast and an old world between the coasts in America where the collective ideal still exists, both perhaps a little bit in theory and in practice?

Fintan O'Toole: It's a terrific question actually. I would say yes. Of course, a large part of this process of change over time is certainly a process of individualization. So instead of doing what the church tells you and doing what the state tells you, people want to make their own choices. They want to read what books they want to read. They want to have the sex lives that they desire. They want to have economic choices. So definitely, that's part of the process of modernization. I think what's interesting in Ireland though is that, actually, if you look at it all the time, surveys always show that there's still a very strong sense of collective belonging and still a very strong sense of collective values. So most Irish people, when asked in surveys, always say they would prefer the state to have higher taxes if they could produce better public services, for example. They do have a broad sense of being in it together. Some of this is nonsense and some of it is mythologized too. And there are all those tensions that are there. But I actually think Ireland is interesting from the point of view of challenging the idea that conservatives have, which is that culture is something that's fixed and your identity is there and it's something that you can only lose because it was formed sometime in the past, and change can only erode it. Actually, the best thing you can do for somebody's culture and identity is give them a possibility of making a life in their own country. And that's happened to us. And I mean, Ireland's gone from being the worst educated country in Europe, when I was born, to being the best educated country in Europe now. And I don't think having a very well-educated population is something that challenges your identity. I think it gives a lot more people a lot more capacity to contribute and to feel that the culture isn't just something that's done to them, but something that they can actually engage with. So those sort of collective values, I think, do remain quite strong. And the real problem in Ireland actually is a division between two economies. So we got this massive American based economy, which lands on Ireland over time.

AK: Yeah, you're the number one destination for US tech firms for your low taxation. You are the poster child for neoliberalism in some ways.

Fintan O'Toole: Yeah. So Ireland becomes a poster child for neoliberalism, although completely misunderstood. So when Ireland's used in America as, if you only do the things the Irish did, look, they were a basket case, and now they're rich, low taxes and low regulation and low public investments. Do all those things and you'll be rich. It's nonsense. A lot of the change in Ireland has nothing to do with low taxation. It's not a particularly all tax economy overall. A lot of it has to do with public investments. Public investments in education, as we just mentioned, is absolutely critical to the Irish story. Those tech firms don't want to be somewhere where people are not very well-educated, and the tech firms aren't going to pay for the education. So the Irish story is actually much more like a European social democratic model, in fact. But, as you say, you have this huge, it's not just tech firms, I think 24 of the top 25 pharmaceutical companies, most of which are American, are in Ireland, medical technology, medical devices. Those are the kind of three huge areas. And what this does do though, it's a nice thing to have, but it also creates very much a kind of two speed economy. So you've got this very globalized, largely American based economy, and you've got another indigenous economy, which is a lot fuller of people who are not very well paid and who don't have the same opportunity. So it's a success story, but with all of the contradictions of neoliberal globalization, which is, can you use this wealth to create a more equal, more just, more inclusive society?

AK: Yeah, Fintan, in that sense, Ireland's not that different from Poland or Hungary. We've done some shows obviously on authoritarianism, on what Moisés Naím called the revenge of power. How has Ireland avoided the political fate of the return of authoritarianism, the revenge of power in Poland or Hungary? Because just as there are two Irelands, there are also two Polands or two Hungaries. And in many ways, the closest equivalent, I'm guessing, to Ireland, and certainly in continental Europe, is Poland.

Fintan O'Toole: There's huge parallels between Ireland and Poland, historically, psychologically, culturally, Catholicism, romanticism, the sense of being the most oppressed nation in the world, all that stuff. But you're absolutely right. The difference for Ireland, I think there's a couple of factors. I think one is there is an intense awareness of Ireland as itself a migratory culture. Of course, this is true of Poland as well, but perhaps it doesn't seem to have quite the same effects. But you can't be Irish and not have either yourself experienced being a migrant or have brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts who are migrants. Migration is so much part of our own history. This, of course, doesn't necessarily stop people from complaining about migrants, but it does act as a barrier, I think, to an anti-immigrant way of positing Irish identity. A second factor is demographic. I mean, Ireland's a very underpopulated country. And again, we're just kind of very aware of that. Population growth is not seen as swamping or a threat, The far right tries to use the Ireland is full stuff, but it's not. So anybody goes to Ireland, it's one of the least densely populated countries in Europe. And I think a third factor is the success of globalization that everybody knows that Ireland's economic success is usually to do with being in the European Union, it's usually to do with foreign investments. Foreign investment, a lot mean of people come to Ireland to work for those multinational companies. So there is some sense of mutual interest. And the last factor I think is just that Sinn Féin, which is the nationalist party, used to be the sort of political wing of the IRA, is the sort of growing party in the Republic of Ireland. And Sinn Féin blocks the space. It's a sort of nationalist party, blocks the space where the far right would be, but is not itself a far right party. For historical reasons, it's anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, it has all that kind of rhetoric, and that sense of itself as being on the left. So all those factors, I think, so far have made it difficult for the far right to get a foothold. But there's a lot of anti-immigrant agitation going on at the moment. There's a lot of disgruntled Catholics. I mean, the story I'm telling, in a way, is about the sort of collapse of what was a monolith. But the collapse of monoliths doesn't make the people who are very attached to that monolith disappear. I mean, there's probably still 20% of the population which deeply regrets the loss of conservative Catholic Ireland. So those factors are there. And I wouldn't be complacent about saying that you couldn't have a rise of the right in Ireland, but I still think those other factors probably outweigh that danger right now.

AK: A few years ago, before COVID, I came to Ireland. I was making a film, How to Fix Democracy, and we looked at Irish experiments in Citizens' Assemblies, particularly in terms of the abortion issue. Ireland is innovating politically in some ways. It's not just borrowing other people's models. How important should we treat the Irish Citizens' Assemblies and other political experiments in refining 21st century democracy?

Fintan O'Toole: To me, they're hugely important. I mean, the abortion issue was a very good example. I fully expected that debate in 2018 to be very divisive. I mean, I was pretty sure that people overall would probably vote to remove the ban on abortion from the Constitution, which I obviously, as a liberal, approved of. But I still thought it would be quite nasty and very divisive and difficult. And quite honestly, it wasn't that divisive or difficult. And the reason it wasn't was because, as you mentioned, there was a Citizens' Assembly, which is a sort of random assembly of citizens, a hundred people just kind of chosen. It's a weighted sample of the population. They get to debate and deliberate with experts on what they would recommend. And people were very surprised when they recommended actually a very radical kind of reform of the abortion laws. But the critical thing was that then it sort of took away, from conservatives and from the rights, the ability to say, this is being foisted on you by the elites. I mean, I don't need to tell you how powerful the rhetoric of anti-elitism is on the right. And Citizens' Assembly is a really, really good way of actually dealing with the perception that elites are foisting these things on you because this is being done by your fellow citizens. And it's really important that the bargain has to be that politicians, in a way, have to surrender a certain amount of control over this public discourse because you have to genuinely commit yourself to saying, well, okay, whatever the deliberations of the Citizens' Assembly might be, they are going to be taken extremely seriously and they are going to form the basis for how we try to deal with this issue in legislative or constitutional terms. But I do think they're hugely important. And I've always had this very simple sense. I once served on a jury, a murder jury, and it just struck me, if we trust citizens to literally adjudicate on issues of life and death, really complex, really difficult emotional questions, random citizens, we just say, we think it's okay that you can decide this. And I remember being on a murder jury and thinking how impressive it was. And it was a standard smattering of people, unemployed to professionals, to whatever, really took the task seriously. And in democracy, we have to believe that actually, given power and given respect and given dignity, ordinary citizens are actually really capable of being very serious about the way they deliberate. I think if that's true of juries, I think it should be true of democratic deliberation in a broader sense.

AK: Fintan, the Irish history of mass emigration might have ended, but of course, that doesn't make the end of the chapter of mass immigration. And in fact, if anything, things are much worse than they were 50 years ago, before 1958. We did a show last year with a young Irish journalist, as it happened, Sally Hayden, about the 21st century slave trade on the shores of the Mediterranean. I'm not sure if you're familiar with her work, My Fourth Time, We Drowned. Really impressive book. She's a very impressive young woman. Is there a particular sensibility in Ireland to the suffering of migrants these days, particularly from North Africa, from the Middle East, from Africa, given Irish history and the central role of emigration?

Fintan O'Toole: Yeah, Sally's book is a brilliant book. And I hope people do read it. It's really powerful. It actually won the Orwell Prize in Britain last year. I mean, very, very deservedly. And I just think it's a great piece of work. So I think we have to say that, in Ireland, like everywhere else, there are different and distinctive traditions. There's an appalling tradition of Irish racism, not just in Ireland, but in Irish America, of othering. Ireland has a shocking record in terms of bringing in refugees. Ireland took almost no Jewish refugees, for example, in the 1930s from Europe. And it was one of the places that might have been safe for Jews, and did not do so for purely ethnic and religious reasons. Right up front, official policy was anti-Semitic. So there are terrible histories actually, of Irish behavior in relation to these questions. But there is also a countervailing culture, which, to be fair, some of it is rooted in the positive side of religious identity. Some Christians do take their religion very seriously as being…….

AK: So they should. If they don't, then they're not seriously religious.

Fintan O'Toole: Absolutely.

AK: Religion is not something you can just wear on your sleeve and pull in and out when you feel like.

Fintan O'Toole: Absolutely. But it's important, I suppose, when I'm telling a story, which in a sense is anti-church, to also say that this is not anti-religious. And so, there are very fine religious traditions of care and compassion and openness. The big force in Irish psychology and in the shaping of modern Ireland is the famine of the 1840s. It's the big demographic catastrophe, of course, as well.

AK: Which isn't made up. It's genuine. It's not mythology.

Fintan O'Toole: It's actually genuine. It's not mythologized. If anything, it was downplayed. When I was a kid, there was a lot of shame still around it. Famines leave shame in their wake. But I think with the reawakening of historical work about the famine, it's pretty central to the way Irish people think about themselves. And we were those dirty, poor, diseased migrants.

AK: You were North Africans before the North Africans.

Fintan O'Toole: Absolutely. I mean, we were not nice people to see arriving on your shores if you were in Boston in 1847 or 1848, or in New York or in Glasgow or Liverpool or wherever else. The destitution that was delivered to so many Irish people created exactly the sort of immigrants that people didn't want. So it is quite hard to be Irish and to turn your back on people who are in similar circumstances now. Doesn't mean that some people don't do it. I really don't want to romanticize or mythologize Irish compassion. There's racists in Ireland, there's xenophobes in Ireland. The complicated thing at the moment, Andrew, of course, is the Ukraine situation. Ireland has been proportionally very generous in terms of taking Ukrainian refugees in. There's getting on for a hundred thousand, which is a lot in a population of 5 million. And by large, the public response has been fantastic and really terrific. I spend a lot of time in a village. I'm lucky enough to live in a village in the west of Ireland, [inaudible 00:32:20], the village is 200 people, and there are 300 Ukrainians. The local school, the local community, and they've just been terrific about it. However, it has to be said that if those people were black or brown-skinned, if they were Syrians or Afghans or if they were Sudanese, would people feel the same way about 300 of them in a village of 200 people? No, they wouldn't.

AK: And it's the same as in Hungary or certainly in Poland. Couple more questions. I know you got to run. Oscars are coming up next month. I'm not sure if you're an Oscar guy, but it could be the year of Ireland. The Banshees of Inisherin is one of the hot favorites. Andrew Sullivan described that he liked the movie as off the coast of modernity. What is it about Ireland and the movies? And how does that fit in, given the nostalgia? I mean, Banshees of Inisherin, of course is not a nostalgic movie. It doesn't romanticize Irishness. I think it really very much should be a movie that should be watched in sync with reading your book. Did you see the film? And what is it about movies and the Irish?

Fintan O'Toole: Yeah, it's an interesting story, I think, because Ireland had very little of an indigenous film industry for a very long time. There was various efforts to get one going, but really kind of failed. So of course, a lot of the imagery of Ireland in the cinema, the two great Irish film directors are John Ford and John Houston, but of course, they're Irish Americans, and so they filter the Irishness through Hollywood very often. I mean, The Quiet Man is the most successful representation of Ireland, if you want to look at it in those terms. So the struggle to present images of yourself, of course, is one that all small cultures really, really have to engage with. And Ireland is so self-aware, there's such a history of us presenting images of ourselves that we think other people will like.

AK: I mean, that was probably captured most of all in Branagh's Belfast, which I know a lot of people found rather saccharin.

Fintan O'Toole: I have to admit that I did too. I think there's some wonderful things in it, but I thought, as a version of The Troubles, it is pretty bland. And so, how do you present your own story? And this has been one of the great arguments of Irish culture, really from the beginning of the 20th century. Good Irish writers, good Irish playwrights, not so much in film at that time, but over time, they're always accused of being inauthentic or being….

Andrew Keen: It's a compliment really, in retrospect, isn't it?

Fintan O'Toole: Yeah, exactly. And it goes right back to John Synge and The Playboy of the Western World causing riots. And I always think of a thing that William Butler Yeats said when there were riots about Sean O'Casey's play, The Plough and the Stars, and how it represented the Irish Revolution. And Yeats said, "There's a difference between mature nations and immature nations." He said, "Mature nations have national pride and immature nations have national vanity." And the difficult thing with Ireland and the movies is how do you separate vanity from pride? So the pride is a saccharin image. It's sort of wanting to show yourself in a good light. And sorry, the vanity rather, is that. The pride is saying, actually, we're quite willing to show ourselves in all our ugliness and dirt and vileness, and almost exaggerate the extent to which Ireland is a dark place. Martin McDonagh does that, I think.

AK: Yeah, it's a good film, isn't it?

Fintan O'Toole: It's a really good film. And what's fabulous about it to me is that it sort of takes a landscape which has been mythologized. That's a very mythic kind of landscape, and it sort of inhabits it with strange people. And they are strange and odd. But you got to hand it to a director and a writer. If you get four performances like you get in that film, something must be going right.

AK: Yeah. I mean, it goes out of its way to be unbelievable.

Fintan O'Toole: Yeah, it does.

AK: It takes pride in being unbelievable. Finally, speaking of believability, unbelievability, creativity. Your book, which is just out in paperback, and it's got on all sorts of best lists. And one of the intriguing reviews was by James Wood in the New Yorker, James Wood is a very distinguished fiction reviewer. He said in terms of your book, "It's like reading a great, tragic, comic Irish novel." And I'm curious, I, recently with my daughter, watched the Baumbach version of White Noise, which of course is borrowed from, or not really even borrowed, I don't know what it does to DeLillo's White Noise. And then yesterday there was, or earlier this week, there was a big rail crash in Ohio, lots of smoke. It was almost a replay of DeLillo's White Noise. And DeLillo's always been very good at inventing the world before it actually happens. When it comes to that and fiction, you are obviously very well versed in Irish fiction and in non-fiction. Is there much difference these days, Fintan, between writing good fiction and non-fiction? The two are so bound up with one another, and does that fit into your vision of 21st Century Ireland in a good way of being a place where truth and trust aren't particularly coherent anymore? In other words, to read fiction, we read non-fiction, and to read non-fiction, we read fiction, particularly about Ireland.

Fintan O'Toole: I completely agree. For good and ill, it's one of the great things about the culture, which is that, for me, it's never been possible to disentangle. I'm a journalist by trade. I fully believe in evidence and truths. I know there is a distinction, but also very aware of the fact that the public world and our collective perceptions of ourselves are formed by fictions. The important thing is to know the fictions, to understand the fictions, to have a sense of how fiction works. And I hope if there's a kind of positive thing in the book, because the Irish mentality was sort of psychotically fictional. It was all about not knowing [inaudible 00:39:23] we knew, and beginning to be able to absorb and accept your own reality. That's been done for us just as much, and maybe even more by fiction writers, by playwrights, by poets than it's been done by journalists or politicians. And when I think of who told the truth about Ireland, I look more to Edna O'Brien and John McGahern.

AK: And it's true about America, obviously, with the DeLillos of the world, he tells a truth that becomes true after he writes it.

Fintan O'Toole: Yes, and it becomes true because they're picking up on the unsaid and the unseen. They have that capacity to sense those presences maybe before the rest of us can articulate them or acknowledge them.