The Passenger: Ireland

Ireland

A nation, writes Mark O’Connell in his article in this volume, is a work of fiction, built on stories and sustained through acts of collective imagination. How else can we explain the divisive border that splits the island of Ireland – a border that since 1998, the key year of the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to the island, has been invisible? The Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, which have been separate nations for only a century, came about as a result of narratives shaped on the other side of the Irish Sea, in Great Britain, the former colonial power that once again, with Brexit, seems to be upsetting the apple cart and reviving tensions that for years most people had believed consigned to history. A nation, however, is also a physical entity, its landscape: the jagged coastline that has allowed the Irish language to survive in isolated fishing communities – although for how much longer? – the unobstructed view across the ocean towards North America and inland across the green treeless hillsides. And then there are the post-industrial cities regenerated through a growing globalised economy and a net migration that has recently, for the first time in well over a century, turned positive. And at the centre, in the Midlands, the country’s hidden core, its boglands, the peat from which – a particularly dirty form of fossil fuel – has been extracted to depletion, a symbol not only of independence and economic self-reliance but also of the challenges of the energy transition to come. And yet, as Colum McCann reminds us, a country is composed most of all of its people, in which case the future can only be bright, because the people of Ireland – those same people who marched en masse for peace in the 1990s – decided to take things into their own hands and determine for themselves what their nation should be. By finally breaking the cruel hold that the ultraconservative Catholic Church had over the Republic of Ireland they created their own democratic tools to change society from within, restoring to women the right to make decisions over their own bodies and opening up the institution of the family to all who want it, in the process freeing themselves from imposed narratives and proving once more that the Irish people are one step ahead of the politicians who represent them.

Contents

Some Numbers

The Mass Is Ended — Catherine Dunne and Caelainn Hogan

Ireland’s once insular and conservative society has undergone a radical transformation in recent decades. Two writers from different generations discuss the decline of the Catholic Church’s influence and the dismantling of a system designed to oppress women.

Bogland — William Atkins

Before becoming a driver of economic development in the Irish Midlands, peat bogs were considered almost a national embarrassment. Then peat became a source of jobs and fuel. Now that the industry is being dismantled, it is hoped that the revitalised bogs will help in the fight against climate change.

An Ocean of Wisdom — Manchán Magan

In the Gaelic-speaking Gaeltachtaí it is still possible to find in the old Irish words traces of Ireland’s once-flourishing fishing and maritime past – but it is a way of life now in desperate decline.

Talismans — Sara Baume

The artist and writer Sara Baume reflects on the way her country’s built environment has changed amid the legacy of the Celtic Tiger years and a new appreciation of traditional Irish architecture.

Everything That Falls Must Also Rise — Colum McCann

The New York-based Irish writer reflects on the choice he and so many others made to emigrate, leaving their native country behind but carrying it in their hearts for ever.

At the Edge of Two Unions: Northern Ireland’s Causeway Coast — Mark Devenport

County Antrim looks out over the narrow North Channel that separates Ireland from Great Britain and, post-Brexit, marks the border between the EU and UK markets. The BBC’s former political editor in Northern Ireland introduces us to a region hanging in the balance with a foot in two unions.

Suicide of the Ceasefire Babies — Lyra McKee

Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 more people in Northern Ireland have committed suicide than were killed during the thirty-year conflict. Lyra McKee investigates this troubling phenomenon.

What I Learned on My Trip to Westeros — Mark O’Connell

The TV series Game of Thrones, much of which was filmed in Northern Ireland, has given rise to a very particular tourist industry. The Irish writer Mark O’Connell joins a tour of the series’ locations and sees how the magic of a fantasy kingdom is eclipsing the region’s real history.

Citizens’ Assemblies: Experiments in Democracy — Ursula Barry

The recent referenda on marriage equality and abortion that have transformed Ireland came about through a democratic experiment, Citizens’ Assemblies, which were established to help decision-making on issues left unresolved by politicians for far too long.

‘It will not be long, love’— Keiran Goddard

What does it mean to be born and raised in England but understand that Ireland is your spiritual home? Keiran Goddard takes us through a quarter of a century of his life, in which the passage of time has been marked by the lyrics of one of the most famous and heartbreaking of traditional Irish folk songs.

Irish Rugby Is Different — Brendan Fanning

Rugby is a hugely popular sport in Ireland and occupies a special position: it is not divided by the religious and political fault lines between north and south, and the national rugby union team represents the whole island – but class still determines whether or not a child will ever actually play the game.

The New Spirits of Ireland — Mirko Zilahy

An Author Recommends — Lisa McInerney

The Playlist — Keiran Goddard

Digging Deeper

Kenneth O Halloran is a photographer based in Dublin. He was born in the west of Ireland and is a graduate of the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dún Laoghaire, Dublin, and holds a masters in fine art photography from the University of Ulster, Belfast. O Halloran’s work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times Magazine, The Sunday Times Magazine, Stern, Le Monde, Time, GEO, the FT Magazine and Cosmopolitan. His work has been recognised by the Royal Hibernian Academy, American Photography, Alliance Française and the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize. He is also a winner of a World Press Photo Award, the Terry O’Neill Photography Award and the Syngenta Photography Award. In 2017 he was shortlisted for the Hennessy Portrait Prize. He has exhibited in Dublin at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Royal Hibernian Academy and the National Gallery of Ireland, in London at the National Portrait Gallery and the Photographers’ Gallery and at the Sirius Arts Centre in Cork and Void Derry.

Some Numbers

The authors Catherine Dunne (left) and Caelainn Hogan at Catherine’s Dublin home.

The Mass Is Ended

Over the course of just a few decades Ireland’s once insular and conservative society has undergone a radical transformation. Two writers from different generations meet up in a Dublin garden to discuss the decline of the Catholic Church’s influence, the dismantling of a system designed to oppress women and how Irish people have long shown themselves to be more progressive than their politicians.

CATHERINE DUNNE AND CAELAINN HOGAN

CATHERINE DUNNE is the author of eleven published novels and one work of non-fiction, An Unconsidered People (2003; revised edition 2021), exploring the lives of Irish immigrants in 1950s London. Her novels include The Things We Know Now, recipient of the Giovanni Boccaccio International Prize for Fiction in 2013 and shortlisted for the Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, The Years That Followed, longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2018 and Come cade la luce (‘The Way the Light Falls’), shortlisted for the European Strega Prize for Fiction in 2019. Catherine received the Irish PEN Award for outstanding contribution to Irish literature in 2018 and in January 2021 was decorated as Cavaliere of the Order Stella d’Italia.

CAELAINN HOGAN is an Irish journalist and writer. She has written for international newspapers and magazines covering issues of conflict, migration and marginalisation, reporting from Nigeria, South Africa and Syria during the civil war. Her articles have been published in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The New Yorker, Vice, the Guardian, Al Jazeera English, the Irish Times and the Dublin Review. In 2019 she published Republic of Shame: How Ireland Punished ‘Fallen Women’ and Their Children (Penguin) about the system of institutions run by the Catholic Church with the cooperation of the Irish state in which until very recent times ‘unmarried mothers’ were imprisoned and routinely abused and exploited. She is a recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland’s 2021 Next Generation Artists Award.

There is an image from the recent Repeal the Eighth Amendment campaign that still moves me. Dozens of young women stand together on one of the bridges over Dublin’s River Liffey. Their long banner with the word ‘REPEAL’ in huge letters flutters in the breeze. All of them are dressed in the flowing red robes and white bonnets made famous by the TV series of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

It is a sunny day, everyone is in high good humour, the dramatic red and white of the young women’s costumes is startling against the unusual blue of the sky.

I am in my mid-sixties when I gaze on this tableau vivant; my companion in these essays, Caelainn Hogan, is in her early thirties. She, too, tells me how struck she has been by the joyful and inclusive nature of this whole campaign.

But we are both conscious that we grew up in very different Irelands. We know how the legacy of that earlier country still lives on.

In May 2018, after thirty-eight years, the effective ban on abortion in this country – the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution – is removed. Throughout the campaign, women, often with their partners, tell stories of grief and pain, of sorrow and loss. Stories of hard choices. Stories of fighting for reproductive rights. The wall of silence that once engulfed this country begins, at last, to crack. At first a trickle then a deluge, the complex stories of women’s lives begin to flood into the light.

Irish people – most of them, on this occasion – vote for compassion and understanding rather than the strictures of Catholic dogma. There are tears of joy and relief as women absorb the fact that at last, almost four decades later, the younger generations can now exercise their reproductive choices at home.

It hasn’t always been like this.

*

Back in 1983 there had been a very different campaign. The Abortion Referendum of that year was toxic, divisive and bitter. ‘The past is a foreign country,’ the novelist L.P. Hartley once wrote, ‘they do things differently there.’ That is certainly true of Ireland. This country was, up until the 1990s, a deeply conservative Catholic state. Lawmakers bowed to bishops and archbishops. In every aspect of a citizen’s life – education, health (particularly women’s health), sexuality, marriage and children – the Church held sway.

In 1985, in what was perhaps one of the first acts of defiance of the Catholic authorities, the Irish government had approved the sale of contraceptives. A long battle had been waged to get to that point. In the mid-1970s I used to attend one of the family planning clinics in Dublin. In order to circumvent the law the clinics at that time would accept a ‘donation’ from their patients in lieu of payment for contraceptives – along with the gratitude of thousands of young women who didn’t want to get pregnant.

The 1985 law was a controversial one, indicating the strength of the relationship between Church and state. The close ties between the two would only begin to loosen when the revelation of systemic sexual abuse within the institution of the Church came to light. This entire country was convulsed by the evidence that emerged and kept emerging from the late 1980s on of the unchecked abuses perpetrated by paedophile priests against young boys and girls. The complicity of the Catholic institution in protecting its own abusers was laid bare: a criminal complicity that began with local priests and bishops and went all the way to the Vatican.

I completed a part-time course in journalism in the early 1990s established by a very well-known and well-connected priest, Fr Sean Fortune. I can still remember the sense of shock and revulsion all of us former students felt when the news eventually broke about his abuse of children. The Church authorities had failed, for years, to prevent this man having access to children, despite numerous anguished reports of his criminal behaviour.

He committed suicide in 1999 while awaiting trial.

There were other reasons, too, that the influence of Catholicism had begun to wane during the 1990s. Universal access to education was one. Sustained economic development was another. Membership of the EU meant an increasing awareness of lives lived in other countries. People had begun to travel more. Irish migrants brought new perspectives and different life experiences along with them as they returned home in increasing numbers. Global communication networks meant that discussions regarding equality and diversity in all its forms were accessed in this country, too.

Back in the early years of the 1980s, though, the influence of the Catholic Church was still pervasive enough to succeed in the campaign to insert a new article into the Irish Constitution. To this end it had had significant support from right-wing Christian organisations in the United States. The wording of this new Article 40.3.3 guaranteed that at all stages of pregnancy ‘the right to life of the unborn’ was ‘equal to the right to life of the mother’.

The debates that followed were deeply troubling. Even in those days everyone was aware that women in this country had abortions. We all knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody else who had travelled to England on a ‘shopping trip’. Or else, we were that ‘somebody else’ ourselves. But those stories were often whispered ones, shared over coffee or confided late at night to a sympathetic ear. In too many instances what felt like a shameful secret lay hidden, remaining unspoken for a lifetime.

The toxic divisions of the early 1980s, the hostility towards women who spoke up, spoke out, made me feel that Ireland was not a good place to be a woman. I wanted to leave. I set my sights on Canada: its equality legislation was light years ahead of Ireland’s. I had worked there for a summer in my mid-twenties and loved its tolerance, its multicultural cities, its openness and its absence of Irish small-townness. I’d started to write when I was there in the late 1970s. I can still remember the cool, dim interior of my favourite library in Toronto. Perhaps it was writing that was drawing me back there, too.

But the visa application was turned down. I was bitterly disappointed. A few years later, in the way that these things sometimes happen, I was relieved. My mother became ill, and I knew then that Ireland was where I needed to be.

Nonetheless, it took some time for me to love the country again.

*

Accompanying the child-abuse scandals of the 1990s was the suffering of generations of Irish citizens who had followed their Church faithfully all their lives. Now everything needed to be questioned. The received wisdom of the past did not stand up to scrutiny. The idols were found to have feet of clay. One after another, certainties came crashing down. It emerged, for example, that the Irish priest and bishop who had stood at the altar beside Pope John Paul II during his 1979 visit to Ireland, both of them exhorting the huge congregation to be better Irish Catholics, had each fathered secret children of his own.

A statue of the Virgin Mary in Bracknagh, County Offaly.

The pain of the faithful was real, raw, palpable, particularly for those who belonged to older generations. My Catholic faith, such as it was, had dissolved years earlier. It did not survive a year – 1972–3, my first time away from home – living and teaching in Franco’s Spain. It had been a childlike faith to begin with; the sort of inherited, untested, blinkered belief of the innocent, a faith that, once challenged, either becomes stronger or fades away.

This cartoon is reproduced with the kind permission of the artist, Martyn Turner.

Mine disappeared, leaving behind only a small flame of fury, a presence that could still ignite and which burned all too brightly during the revelations of the 1990s. The collapse of the institutional reputation of the Church would continue to form the seed-bed, the ashes, from which a new and secular Irish phoenix was preparing to rise.

Part of this seed-bed was the X-Case of 1992.

In February of that year a fourteen-year-old child, pregnant as a result of rape, had travelled to Britain with her parents for an abortion. She was distressed to the point of being suicidal. Her parents had reported the rape to the Irish police (the Garda) and wished to bring foetal matter back home as evidence to help convict the rapist – a respectable, middle-aged family acquaintance. The attorney general was informed of the parents’ plan and immediately obtained an interim injunction stopping the teenager from terminating her pregnancy. Once they were informed of the injunction the parents obediently returned to Ireland with their bewildered, terrified pregnant daughter.

A prominent cartoon of the time shows a child with a teddy bear standing on a map of Ireland facing the Irish Sea. All her escape routes are blocked by barbed wire.

The X-Case caused public outrage. It seemed that the impact of our black-and-white abortion law had finally seeped into the public consciousness at large, and young and old – on both sides of the divide, it has to be said – took to the streets to make their voices heard.

The law stood.

Nonetheless, the strength of public feeling was enough to widen the crack that had already occurred in the bastion of traditional