“Writers are often loners; journalists are sociable.” So says Mary Kenny, but in self-identifying as gregarious journalist rather than introspective author, she does herself less than justice. She is undeniably good company, and has been an active and influential journalist for many years, both in London and Dublin; she has also produced thought-provoking books on Ireland’s relationship with the British monarchy and the decline of Catholicism in the Emerald Isle, an adept stage-play about Winston Churchill and Michael Collins, and a moving memoir. Some of this material is revisited in The Way We Were, but her latest volume implies that along with sociability comes a certain wish to stir things up, embodied in the Irish word “divilment”.
The form this takes is to make the case, implicitly and often explicitly, that the advent of a new-look Ireland – involving disgraced priests, diminishing Mass-attendance, same-sex marriage, and an increasingly diverse populace in ethnic and cultural terms – has come about at the expense of a loss of old-style faith-and-fatherland identity, and that this is not altogether a good thing. The first half of the book is an idiosyncratic and entertaining ramble through Irish history since the foundation of the Free State in 1922; the engaging style, humorous asides and salty recollections from family lore and her own misspent youth do not disguise stiletto barbs aimed at commentators whose views of old-style Catholic Ireland are less rosy than hers. These include the journalist Niall O’Dowd, the novelists John Banville and Edna O’Brien, and above all the cultural critic Fintan O’Toole, whose coruscating personal history of modern Ireland, We Don’t Know Ourselves, should be read along with Kenny’s oeuvre – if only to see just how differently Archbishop John McQuaid or Frank Duff (founder of the Legion of Mary) might be viewed from another Irish angle. So too with the profiles of devout Irish personalities which close the book.
There is of course much else to the story Kenny tells, and she casts a wide net. There are drily funny insights about dynasticism in Irish politics, the legendary world of journalism that revolved around Dublin’s Pearl Bar in its glory days, and the way that public figures such as General Eoin O’Duffy and Taoiseach CJ Haughey could lead scandalous sex lives while preserving profiles of superficial respectability and Mass-going conventionality. This is true in a few cases, but they were very few; there is a tendency in this book to overplay “turning a blind eye” into a likeable and easy tolerance, while underestimating the repression, unhappiness and enforced hypocrisy which characterised so much of 20th-century Irish life. The contrasting treatment of the television chat-show host Gay Byrne, particularly in his attempt to humiliate Bishop Eamonn Casey’s lover and mother of his child, is one of the instructive points where Kenny’s treatment might be read against O’Toole’s.
Another case in point is that of Archbishop McQuaid, whose Olympian assertion of political authority over social policy during the 1950s and 1960s takes the breath away. This is part and parcel of an era when the Aer Lingus fleet of aeroplanes were routinely blessed by Catholic clergy, and incoming governments pledged loyalty on behalf of the Irish people to the Vatican, but it is not an era for which it is easy to feel much nostalgia. On the glaring question of the position of women, Kenny is as astute and incisive as one would expect from someone who was a pioneering and prominent feminist in the 1960s and 1970s, and a guiding light in the Women’s Liberation Movement. But she sometimes tempers the wind to the shorn lamb rather too indulgently. The late Brian Lenihan Sr is held to have lost his bid for the Irish presidency due to “an ill-judged interview”: in fact he admitted to having tried to circumvent the Irish constitution by pressurising the then-president to act in the interest of the Fianna Fáil party, and then lied about it. Similar elisions occur elsewhere; John McGahern’s searing novel The Dark does not simply represent “the dominant father-figure in Irish fiction”; it deals with violent sexual abuse.
Sexual abuse was for many years the suppressed secret in Irish religious history, along with the cruel treatment of unmarried mothers in institutions run by the Church. Kenny deals with this in full measure, using personal testaments to chilling effect – though she rather plays down the damning findings of large-scale enquiries into the matter, and reiterates the point that illegitimacy was also frowned upon in Britain. So it was, but not to the same criminalising effect. It is undeniably true, as Kenny points out, that the Church provided educational and health services which let an impoverished and frugal fledgling state off the hook, and that the relationship with Rome was the centre of Ireland’s diplomatic world before the advent of the EU. She determinedly presents the credit side of the balance, and is unequivocally appalled at the errors and crimes associated with the institutional Church, such as its protection of paedophile priests by moving them around the system. But her determined relativism tends to an acceptance of what others might see as arrogance and over-entitlement – while one must appreciate the comfort and sustenance she has derived from a faith that she describes (borrowing a phrase from the writer Francis Spufford) as “the matrix of my culture”.
This book should be read for its contrarian views, its liveliness of style, and its original insights; an act of contrition should be imposed on Columba Books, though, for light-touch copy-editing, allowing many repetitions and mistakes of nomenclature. But the larger arguments give pause for thought. The idea that the Catholic government of Ireland was “market-led”, a response to a felt need rather than imposed from above, does less than justice to those who chafed under this dispensation, argued against it, and in some cases helped bring it down – Sean O’Faolain, Hubert Butler, Mary Robinson, Conor Cruise O’Brien and Colm Tóibín come to mind. Not all of them were observant Catholics, but they were no less Irish and patriotic for that. There is sometimes an assumption here that Irishness and Catholicism are indivisible – which grates on this lapsed-Protestant Irish reader.
While reading The Way We Were I heard of the death of my old and dearly-loved friend, the writer and publisher Carmen Callil – half-Lebanese, half-Irish, all-Australian. Like Mary Kenny, she was a pioneering feminist, educated by Catholic nuns, but unlike Kenny this turned her against institutionalised religion for life. Some of its assumptions stuck, though; when we first met she told me that if I was a Protestant I couldn’t be properly Irish. This provoked the kind of spectacular row on which great friendships are often founded; I think I told her I would like to wring her neck for saying it. She handsomely listened to the arguments and changed her mind. I would like to make Mary Kenny change her mind about some of her opinions, without having to wring her neck. But it is possible that she adheres to them out of divilment. And there is always room for that, in Ireland and elsewhere.
Dr Roy Foster was Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford
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