For centuries, the greatest skill the Irish had was to know how not to know, and the first thing we made it our business not to know was ourselves. Ignorance ensured our peace of mind, and should a figure arise in our midst with an ambition to enlighten us, the forces of the Church and of government, in that order of precedence, would be deployed to shut our ears and cover our eyes. The preferred state of the nation was a state of spiritual and intellectual infancy.

Early on in his masterly, fascinating and frequently horrifying “personal history” of his native country, Fintan O’Toole relates how, in the mid-1950s, the Archbishop of Dublin, the redoubtable John Charles McQuaid, let it be known that he disapproved of the playing in a musical requests programme on the national radio station, Radio Éireann, of Cole Porter’s song “Always True to You” – “But I’m always true to you, darling, in my fashion / Yes I’m always true to you, darling, in my way” – because of what he considered its “circumscribed morality”. The next time the song was requested by a listener, the programme presenter was careful to play it in an orchestral version. McQuaid, whose reign as archbishop and de facto head of the Catholic Church in Ireland lasted for more than thirty years, from 1940, is one of the leading villains in O’Toole’s book.

The prelate’s power was very great, though not limitless, as he himself seemed to imagine it to be. In 1937, when he was still president of Blackrock College, one of the country’s leading Catholic schools, McQuaid advised the then taoiseach (prime minister), Éamon de Valera, a veteran of the 1916 Easter Rising, on the framing of a new constitution for the Irish Republic. That document recognized the “special position” of the Catholic Church as “the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens”. However, de Valera and his civil servants made sure that there would be no established church, and that freedom of religious belief would be encouraged. The article of the constitution according the Church’s special position was later dropped by a referendum vote in 1972, less than a year after McQuaid had resigned as archbishop.

O’Toole, a journalist, historian and academic, is Ireland’s pre-eminent public intellectual. He has written a score of books, ranging in subject matter from the Irish beef trade, the life of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and the birth and sudden death of the so-called Celtic Tiger, to, most recently, the fiasco that was and remains Brexit. We Don’t Know Ourselves is surely his masterpiece: a long, detailed and beautifully executed study of the more or less sad state of Ireland from the year of the author’s birth, 1958, to the present. That O’Toole ends on a cautiously upbeat note is remarkable, given the accounts of wilful blindness, political chicanery, moral duplicity, heedless cruelty, untrammelled corruption and sheer lunacy that course through this book.

In the six or so decades of the period he considers, Ireland, writes O’Toole, “did not start as one fixed thing and end up as another. It moved between different kinds of unfixity. In the hurry through which known and strange things pass, the strange things were sometimes very well known and the known things were often deeply strange”. This captures well the contradictory nature of Irish life and the Irish sensibility, as from the 1950s onwards the country tried to embrace modernity while at the same time vigorously resisting it.

O’Toole has a marvellously sharp eye for the illuminating fact, the telling anecdote, the overlooked or forgotten piece of history; he also has a poet’s gift for figurative language. But he is ever of a practical cast of mind, and his book is a model of inspired, one might even say creative, research.

In a brief prelude, “The Loneliest Boy in the World”, he writes of Gearóid Ó Catháin, born in 1948, who caught the world’s imagination as the last child left on the Blasket Islands, off the coast of County Kerry. For Irish nationalists, O’Toole writes, the Blaskets’ community “was a microcosm of the distinctive culture they had promised to revive – hardy, simple, pious, but rich in memories and dense with stories and songs in the Irish language”. By this time, however, that community was dwindling, as the islanders emigrated, seeking work on the American east coast. When the three-year-old Gearóid was asked in 1951 what he thought would become of him, he replied, “raghad go ’Merica” (I will go to America). He didn’t, though he and the other remaining residents were evacuated from the weather-blasted isles two years later.

Even today the Blaskets, which remain uninhabited, hold an emblematic place in the imagination of romantic Ireland. They also caught the fancy of the eccentric British astronomer Fred Hoyle – the man who derisively coined the term “Big Bang”, a theory he didn’t believe in – when, in 1959, he published a fantasy novel, Ossian’s Ride, set in 1970, in which an Irish industrial corporation discovers a contraceptive pill derived from turf, one of the few natural resources the country has in abundance. Using the resulting profits, the country goes on to become a scientific, industrial and, potentially, a military superpower. Hoyle was more prescient than perhaps he realized. During the time of the Celtic Tiger, through the 1990s and up to the early 2000s, Ireland became a mass exporter of microchips and Viagra – software and hardware, as the pub wits had it.

And there’s more. In 2004, O’Toole discovered, on the release of state papers from 1973, that an American rocket scientist had come up with a plan to establish a space station on one of the Blasket islands. “He intended to use it”, O’Toole tells us, “for the launching of a commercial space shuttle. He claimed to represent a group of scientists and investors, including an astronaut ‘who walked on the moon’ and ‘British astronomer Sir Frederick Hoyle’”.

Statistics form the framework of the book, and O’Toole wields them with subtlety and skill. After that relatively lightsome opening on the Blaskets, things rapidly darken, as we are fed a succession of sobering and, in many cases, astonishing facts and figures. Few, for example, would imagine that Ireland in the 1950s, “one of the most Catholic countries on earth, [where] the church preached that the family … [was] an earthly reflection of the Holy Family”, had one of the lowest global marriage rates – “statisticians could not find a comparable country”. Indeed, census figures showed that “the percentages unmarried of all age groups were still the highest in the world”. The Irish were also – and relatedly – achieving records in the numbers of people emigrating, mostly to England and America, in search of jobs and a better life. The figures O’Toole presents are stark. In 1841, before the potato famine that followed a few years later killed a million people and caused another million to leave, the population across the twenty-six counties that would become the Republic was 6.5 million. In 1961, it was down to 2.8 million. “By that year”, O’Toole writes, “a scarcely imaginable 45 percent of all those born in Ireland between 1931 and 1936 and 40 per cent of those born between 1936 and 1941 had left.” Today it stands at close to 5 million, still well below its mid-nineteenth-century height.

Upon those who stayed, Archbishop McQuaid kept a watchful eye, sometimes using aids to sharpen his vision. Wielding a magnifying glass, he told de Valera’s son Vivion, a director of the Irish Press newspaper, that in advertisements for women’s underwear appearing in his paper, “it was possible to see the outline of a mons veneris”. McQuaid also cast a wider safety net. O’Toole was born on February 16, 1958. Two days previously, the board of the Dublin Theatre Festival, due to take place in May, decided to halt a production of Bloomsday, a stage adaptation by Alan MacClelland of James Joyce’s Ulysses. “The board, it is understood, felt that recent ‘adverse publicity’ which had followed the expression of disapproval by the Most Rev. Dr. McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin, made the production … inadvisable.” The Most Rev. Dr. had made his disapproval known not by a public statement but by his declining to allow the opening of the festival to be marked by the celebration of a special Mass. More than half-a-century later, in 2011, two child sexual assault complaints against McQuaid were brought before the Murphy Commission investigating abuse in the Catholic archdiocese of Dublin.

Two months after O’Toole’s birth, an initiative was undertaken that would prove as significant as anything McQuaid had wrought. In November 1958, a team of civil servants in the Department for Finance, led by its secretary T. K. Whitaker, a Northern Irish Catholic, published a plan, “Economic Development”, which was later turned into a white paper, and which, as O’Toole says, “would shape my life” – and the lives of millions of other Irish people. No one had commissioned the plan, and Whitaker and his co-authors worked on it in their spare time. Its aim, deliberately modest, was to double, over an unspecified time, the annual economic growth rate from 1 to 2 per cent. The taoiseach of the day, the forward-looking Seán Lemass, later explained the tactic in his customary laconic manner: “We had apathy in mind when we set our targets”. He knew his country, and its people. As O’Toole puts it:

The Irish plan for industrialization was the opposite of Stalin’s Five Year Plans. Instead of setting impossible goals and urging the workers to Stakhanovite efforts to reach them, it assumed that Irish confidence was so fragile that it needed the gentle encouragement of easy wins.

It was apt, O’Toole remarks, in another of those happy and startling connections he is so good at making, that Whitaker’s plan was published in the same year as Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s elegiac novel The Leopard, set in Sicily at the time of Garibaldi. In the novel, a character famously remarks that, “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”. So it was with Ireland. “This was the great gamble of 1958: everything would change economically but everything would stay the same culturally.” It was an initiative to which even McQuaid could hardly object.

Yet the road ahead was hard, and steeply uphill. In 1961, a national census showed that “of 374,971 dwellings in rural areas, 281,058 (almost 75 per cent) got their water from a ‘well, fountain, pump’ or other non-piped source”. It was almost exclusively the women and children who went to the well and back. One supplier of water pumps in the early 1960s used as a slogan the ironic tag, “Love, Honour and Carry Water”. O’Toole devotes highly evocative, and often provocative, chapters to such momentous developments as the arrival of television in Ireland, on New Year’s Eve, 1961 (before which, as the poisonously antisemitic politician Oliver J. Flanagan indignantly declared in the Dáil – parliament – there had been no sex in the country), the visit of the impossibly glamorous JFK and his wife Jackie in the summer of 1963 (“He didn’t seem to know that while he was looking for a past, we were looking to him as an image of the future”) and the rise of the new, smooth and expensively tailored princelings of Fianna Fáil, the party that held power most of the time until the old order fractured in the 1980s.

The main one of these “new men” was Charles Haughey, who came from a lower-middle-class background and raised himself up to be a parody of an Ascendancy squire, with his fine mansion in north County Dublin, his racehorses, private island and notorious mistress – a judge’s estranged wife and newspaper gossip columnist – even his bowler hat, all paid for by raids on party funds and “sweeteners” of hundreds of thousands of pounds received from rich party supporters. O’Toole’s chapter on Haughey bears the wholly accurate title, “A Beggar on Horseback”.

Meanwhile, the old nationalist ressentiment simmered away. O’Toole quotes from the Christian Brothers’ Catechism of the History of Ireland: “In the martyrology of history, among crucified nations, Ireland occupies the foremost place. The duration of her torture, and the ferocity of her executioner, are as revolting as the power of the victim is astonishing”. As O’Toole has often remarked, Ireland’s true national motto should be the acronym MOPE – Most Oppressed People Ever.

Given this state of mind, and the injustices inherent in the Northern Ireland state, violence was inevitable. O’Toole, who for years reported on the Northern “Troubles”, writes with insight, anger and compassion about the long and bloody campaign by the Irish Republican Army and the equally ferocious reaction to it by Loyalist paramilitaries and the British army. As he points out, from the very start, in the civil rights campaign of the late 1960s, the strategy of the nationalist side was ambiguous. “Which was the aim – to reform Northern Ireland or to wipe it off the map? [i.e. to achieve a fully unified thirty-two county Ireland.] The hesitation between these two purposes would prove to be fatal.” Into the gap created by that hesitation stepped the IRA, which at the time of the civil rights marches was practically moribund, but which rapidly developed into a fearsome and ruthless guerrilla army.

For the most part O’Toole maintains an admirably even and controlled tone, but in the face of some horrors the firmest restraint must give way to passionate denunciation. Writing of child abuse and the Church’s handling of it, he notes Archbishop McQuaid’s successor, Dermot Ryan, recording privately on his dealings with the parents of children as young as six who had been raped by a priest. In several cases, the parents were “quite apologetic” and as much concerned for the priest as for his victims. “This”, O’Toole writes,

was the church’s great achievement in Ireland. It had so successfully disabled a society’s capacity to think for itself about right and wrong that it was the parents of an abused child, not the bishop who enabled that abuse, who were “quite apologetic”. It had managed to create a flock who, in the face of an outrageous violation of trust, would be concerned as much for the abuser as about those he had abused and might abuse in the future.

The book also delves into that strange double state of mind in which a people can at once know and not know things. Everyone knew that children were being abused, in many cases by the religious. Everyone knew that the so-called industrial schools and the Magdalene laundries were slave labour camps in which children and young women were at the mercy of sadists and outright lunatics. The great crusading journalist, and O’Toole’s friend, Mary Raftery (1957–2012) set out in 1998 “to tell the whole story of a system that incorporated fifty-two institutions and incarcerated something close to 50,000 children”, O’Toole writes. Everyone knew this system existed, and at the same time they managed not to know. This was not an exclusively Irish phenomenon. We have only to think of Germany in the Second World War, of Turkey and the Armenians, of Bosnia, of Rwanda, and many other places where atrocities occurred and were routinely ignored or denied.

Ireland was shaken from its sleep by an utterly unexpected agency. In 1992, the Irish Times broke the story that a highly popular and publicly very visible bishop, Eamonn Casey, “energetic, garrulous, at home in the world”, had carried on a long affair with an American woman, by whom he had a seventeen-year-old son, and, as it was revealed over the coming days, that he had “borrowed” some £70,000 from the parish purse to fund the relationship. The shock to the nation’s nervous system was severe, but, in the end, liberating. At the time there were suggestions that Nelson’s Pillar, which had stood in the centre of Dublin until it was partially blown up by the IRA in 1966, should be rebuilt; the question was, whose statue might be set atop it? One irreverent suggestion was that the statue of Daniel O’Connell, the man who secured Catholic emancipation and who is known therefore as the Liberator, should be moved from his plinth down the road and put on the new pillar, while the country’s latest Liberator, Bishop Casey, should be erected in his place. The city fathers declined to take up the idea.

But a belief system inculcated over centuries is not so easily discarded. In his closing chapters, concerning the decade-long outbreak of mass economic hysteria from which sprang the Celtic Tiger, O’Toole notes how, once again, in another area of national life, the Irish managed to know and not know what was really going on. Long before the crash of 2008, politicians, economists, bankers and anyone in Ireland willing to look calmly at the financial state of the country, knew the boom couldn’t last. In August 2000, O’Toole writes, the International Monetary Fund warned that Irish property prices must inevitably fall, yet in the six years that followed, those prices doubled. And still we were daily assured by the financial wizards that it would be all right, that the most we might suffer would be a “soft landing”. We were cautioned too that “talking down the economy” might actually damage that economy, that “those who saw what was happening and spoke of it were in fact creating the very problems they perceived”. Whatever you say, say nothing.

O’Toole spots an old template reapplied. “It struck me at the time”, he writes,

that all this was very churchlike. The church had always covered things up because to expose them would be to commit the sin of “giving scandal”. Scandal was not the appalling behaviour of churchmen. Rather, the revelation of that behaviour was much worse because it damaged the faith of the flock and therefore endangered their immortal souls. In the post-Catholic culture that was emerging at this time, this notion had simply migrated from religion to politics.

If, after all this time, after all the crises and revelations and reports from boards of inquiry, after all the heart-searching and breast-beating, we still don’t know ourselves, we have only to look into the mirror Fintan O’Toole holds up before us to see ourselves plain, unmasked and unadorned. It would be a salutary and perhaps even a redemptive act of self-scrutiny.

John Banville’s latest novel is April in Spain, 2021

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS at the TLS Shop