Fintan O. Toole Livres

Fintan O'Toole's history of Ireland in his own time. Ireland has changed almost out of recognition during the decades since O'Toole's birth in 1958, and this is his very personal vision of recent Irish history.

"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"-- Provided by publisher

'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.

This new book on the work of Fintan O'Toole, the internationally acclaimed theatre critic and cultural commentator, will offer percussive analyses and assessments of the major plays and playwrights in the canon of modern Irish theatre. Fearless and provocative in his judgements, O'Toole is essential reading for anyone interested in criticism or in the current state of Irish theatre.The format of this book is unusual in that it provides the reviews themselves, the editors' assessments of these reviews and of O'oole's critical practice, an in-depth interview with O'oole and a controversial afterword by him.

Features historians, lawyers, economists and writers who come together to put a coherent case: that although the Irish economic collapse has resulted in national humiliation, renewed emigration and a decline in living standards for the majority of the population, there is still hope that the country can be reformed and renewed.

A year in the troubled British Isles, leading up to the aftermath of Brexit (or not, as it may prove).

For twenty years, Ireland's economic miracle was supposed to be the envy of the world. Low taxes, light regulation and an 'anything goes' attitude seemed to have created boundless prosperity. And then, as in Iceland, the glittering palaces vanished in the heat of the global financial meltdown. For years, those with economic power had been investing in a gigantic property bubble. In Ship of Fools Fintan O'Toole tells the story of this dizzying rise and sickening fall. Ireland may have had a tiger economy, but those in charge of it had not lost their taste for sweetheart deals, back-handers and bribery. This is the essential analysis of Ireland's economic suicide.

This collection of essays is drawn from Fintan O'Toole's writings over two decades. Its portraits of people - talk-show hosts, priests, children, pop stars - and its reports of social and political upheaval, reveal a country still in search of itself, but more at ease with its complexities.

The Republic of Ireland, which declared itself in 1949, allowed the Catholic Church to dominate its civil society and education system. Investment by American and European companies, and a welcoming tax regime, created the 'Celtic Tiger' of the 1990s. That brief burst of good fortune was destroyed by a corrupt political class which encouraged a wild property boom, leaving the country almost bankrupt. What Ireland needs now is a programme of real change. It needs to become a fully modern republic in fact as well as name. This disastrous economic collapse also allows us to think through the kind of multiculturalism that Ireland needs, and to build institutions that can accommodate the sudden influx of migrants who have come to Ireland in the past 15 years. The State should take over the entire education system, for which it pays already, and make it fit for the 21st century. The political system is dysfunctional and is one of the main causes of the debacle we have just experienced. Ireland needs constitutional reform. Politicians have been let get away with murder, and there is a fatalistic sense that nothing can change. The country needs to encourage participation in, and oversight and knowledge of politics, to make people feel that they have a right to challenge the old party machines and to make a difference. It is their country, after all.