We don't know ourselves : a personal history of Ireland since 1958 / Fintan O'Toole.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Prelude The Loneliest Boy in the World (p. 1)
• Chapter 1 1958: On Noah's Ark (p. 7)
• Chapter 2 1959: Modern Family (p. 44)
• Chapter 3 1960: Comanche Country (p. 53)
• Chapter 4 1961: Balubaland (p. 64)
• Chapter 5 1962: Cathode Ní Houlihan (p. 80)
• Chapter 6 1963: The Dreamy Movement of the Stairs (p. 93)
• Chapter 7 1962-1999: Silence and Smoothness (p. 105)
• Chapter 8 1965: Our Boys (p. 114)
• Chapter 9 1966: The GPO Trouser Suit (p. 132)
• Chapter 10 1967: The Burial of Leopold Bloom (p. 153)
• Chapter 11 1968: Requiem (p. 158)
• Chapter 12 1969: Frozen Violence (p. 174)
• Chapter 13 1970: The Killer Chord (p. 183)
• Chapter 14 1971: Little Plum (p. 196)
• Chapter 15 1972: Death of a Nationalist (p. 216)
• Chapter 16 1973: Into Europe (p. 235)
• Chapter 17 1976: The Walking Dead (p. 250)
• Chapter 18 1975-1980: Class Acts (p. 255)
• Chapter 19 1971-1983: Bungalow Bliss (p. 262)
• Chapter 20 1979: Bona Fides (p. 275)
• Chapter 21 1980-1981: No Blue Hills (p. 290)
• Chapter 22 1980-1981: A Beggar on Horseback (p. 304)
• Chapter 23 1979-1982: The Body Politic (p. 318)
• Chapter 24 1981-1983: Foetal Attractions (p. 336)
• Chapter 25 1982: Wonders Taken For Signs (p. 351)
• Chapter 26 1984-1985: Dead Babies and Living Statues (p. 357)
• Chapter 27 1987-1991: As Oil Is to Texas (p. 370)
• Chapter 28 1986-1992: Internal Exiles (p. 380)
• Chapter 29 1989: Freaks (p. 392)
• Chapter 30 1985-1992: Conduct Unbecoming (p. 405)
• Chapter 31 1990-1992: Mature Recollection (p. 416)
• Chapter 32 1992: Not So Bad Myself (p. 431)
• Chapter 33 1992-1994: Meanwhile Back at the Ranch (p. 440)
• Chapter 34 1993: True Confessions (p. 451)
• Chapter 35 1993-1994: Angel Paper (p. 464)
• Chapter 36 1998: The Uses of Uncertainty (p. 476)
• Chapter 37 1990-2015: America at Home (p. 490)
• Chapter 38 1990-2000: Unsuitables from a Distance (p. 499)
• Chapter 39 1999: The Cruelty Man (p. 511)
• Chapter 40 1997-2008: The Makeover (p. 522)
• Chapter 41 2000-2008: Tropical Ireland (p. 533)
• Chapter 42 2009-2013: Jesus Fucking Hell and God (p. 549)
• Chapter 43 2018- : Negative Capability (p. 560)
• Acknowledgements (p. 571)
• Notes (p. 572)
• Credits (p. 599)
• Index (p. 600)

Author notes provided by Syndetics