Over the years I’ve slowly come to dislike Colm Tóibín. He is one of that closed group of Irish writers who, along with Roddy Doyle and a few others, apparently represent all that is great and good (and more importantly permitted) in contemporary Irish literature. As long as they write the right things, and make the right cultural and political noises, they will always be guaranteed a place at the top table. I suppose people like myself wouldn’t be in their “demographic”. For a start their representation of Ireland is largely an alien one. To me at least. In Tóibín’s case I’ve read works by him and just shook my head in bemusement. They are just so – anachronistic. Like “Angela’s Ashes” but with greater literary merit. All that pseudo-psychological Roman Catholic navel gazing coupled with reams and reams of paragraphs analyzing confessional guilt and sexual repression. Well… it’s all just bollocks really, isn’t it?
That’s not my Ireland. Certainly not the one I grew up in, or lived in. And while I’m not old, I’m certainly no kid. Maybe it’s an ideological thing? After all Tóibín is writing for his readership. They have their views of Ireland and Irishness and those views must be echoed and reinforced if success – and celebrity – is to be maintained. His fans are Ireland’s Seonín elite and the like. The like being the British (or certain Americans who prefer their cultural packages in familiar uniformity for easy digestion). That is why he writes what he does. One must measure one’s words to the prejudices and expectations of one’s audience.
So, only an “Irish” author like Colm Tóibín could utter this fatuous nonsense in the pages of the right-wing British newspaper, the Daily Telegraph:
“During the Queen’s historic visit to the Republic of Ireland last year, Tóibín was given the job of introducing her to 10 writers and editors. “The level of her politeness was great. Before her visit I was consulted by the British Embassy about what [the visit] would mean and what it should look like. It was interesting to sit with them and say, ‘Look, there is no downside in this. This is as good as the British are going to get. Her visit is not a problem, it is a solution.’”
Was he comfortable with her decision to bow her head at Dublin’s Garden of Remembrance, given that it is dedicated to the memory of “all those who gave their lives in the cause of Irish Freedom”, in other words the IRA?
“We are embarrassed about that place here. It is ugly because it is used to commemorate people of violence. We came to like the garden less than the people in England did because it had more potential to destabilise our society than yours. You don’t have a problem with having members of Sinn Féin in your parliament. We do.”
Are we embarrassed, Colm? Are we really? Or is it just a small, unrepresentative Seoníní minority like yourself who are embarrassed. Is that who you speak of with your royal “we”? And for whom was the solution? The Irish people as a whole or a small minority with, um, loyalties elsewhere.
“People of violence”? The language of a political infant.
What is wrong with elected members of Sinn Féin being in An Dáil? Are you sure it isn’t uncontrolled democracy that you have a problem with, Colm? After all it was democracy that got them there in the first place. From the people, of the people. Not through the corrupt imprimatur of the amoral business and media elites.
As I said. I dislike Colm Tóibín. And every time he opens his mouth I am more and more confirmed in that.
AN SIONNACH FIONN 
I agree, as always…but, I have to confess…I loved “Angela’s Ashes”. Is that bad?
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Of course not! 😉
To be honest I found “Angela’s Ashes” a bit melodramatic and OTT. There was a certain playing to people’s expectations. Terrible childhood in Ireland, poverty, overbearing Roman Catholic church, indifferent state, repression, blah blah blah. Yes, all of it was true to an extent but I think some of the criticism made of McCourt stands.
But that shouldn’t take away from him. He could write and write well. And his personal life story was an inspiring one and I understand why it resonated so much in the US and amongst Irish-Americans especially. The man made a life for himself where so many others would have given up and he deserves full credit for that.
But the stories of the awfulness of childhood in Ireland have become such a cliché that it is hard to separate the genuine from the apocryphal. Maybe that is why McCourt’s follow up books never reached the same heights of popularity though in some ways they were more interesting? They didn’t match people’s expectations. They wanted more rain and squalor in Ireland, replete with stereotypes.
I should hold my hands up here and confess that I come from a far younger generation of Irish people than McCourt, Tóibín and Roddy Doyle. I’m a Celtic Tiger cub I suppose (though getting a wee bit long in the tooth now). My childhood was in an affluent middle-class suburb of Dublin city. I don’t think I or my siblings wanted for anything growing up. I went to private schools run by the Christian Brothers and never witnessed anything untoward going on.
There is a sort of joke in Ireland now, along the lines of I was never molested by a priest or Christian Brother when I was a child. What was wrong with me? Was I that unattractive?
In a sense it reflects two realities. The one that sexual and physical abuse did happen in disproportionate levels and is a black mark against the Irish state and Irish society in general. The other is that it didn’t happen to most of us and certainly few under the age of 40.
The other thing, with Tóibín and Doyle, is that they write more for an international readership than an Irish one. At least that is how I feel. Both have literary ability, Tóibín perhaps more so in terms of his ability to capture places and particular times. But their representations of Ireland and Irish life. Yes, I see things I recognise. But more often I don’t.
Doyle has his own merits and has better grasp on certain aspects of Irish society. The novels he wrote in the 1980s and early ‘90s are in some ways prophetic in their depictions of working class Dublin life. Not so much of what they were then as what they have become now. And he was one of the few authors to even recognise such people existed. However, like Tóibín, one can’t help but feel the ideological devil sitting on his shoulder whispering away into his ear with every stoke of the pen or click of the keyboard, especially of late.
When the British nationalist newspaper The Daily Telegraph is reviewing Roddy Doyle’s (counter-historical?) “Henry Smart Trilogy” in embarrassingly gushing terms you gotta know that something is wrong.
But here I am wittering on. Sorry! 🙂
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“My childhood was in an affluent middle-class suburb of Dublin city”.
“sexual and physical abuse didn’t happen to most of us and certainly few under the age of 40”.
I have the impression (and may be wrong here) that sexual abuse was mainly limited to poor children in industrial schools and state care. They had no one to speak up for them. Middle class children had potential in their parents and in any case were meant to be the backbone of the state that upheld the status quo.
Physical abuse in terms of caning and other forms of corporal punishment as well as psychological abuse probably happened to everyone who was at school everywhere in the British Isles until the mid-70s-early80s.
The horrors in Ireland were magnified because they were carried out by people who set themselves up as the moral authority, while abusing children, exploiting the special role within the state and so on
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Good points, Anne, and well worth making. Though institutional sexual and physical abuse was widespread in certain sectors of Irish society during a period in our history I think it is safe to say that it fell in a disproportional manner on the most vulnerable in terms of “class”, socio-economic backgrounds, etc.
It doesn’t mean that middle class kids weren’t being abused. But it does mean that the abusers in positions of authority more often targeted those they saw as “vulnerable”. One just has to look at the Jimmy Savile case to see evidence of that.
I am, of course, not referring to abuse within families here. That is another matter, and in its way, a more disturbing and for those effected psychologically more terrible form of abuse.
Though all abuse of this type is terrible. One is always aware of inadvertently lessening the abuse suffered by others, or introducing a hierarchy of victim-hood. That is certainly not my intention. The abuse of children, in whatever circumstances, is reprehensible and all victims are equal in their pain and suffering.
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There is a group of people, in all nations that have been colonized, who prosper by imitating and joining the colonizing State and its ruling administration. India had it’s “Anglo-Indians”, Algeria, as Franz Fanon so eloquently wrote, it’s “Assimilated Ones” (Black skins, White Masks”,) and also in Ireland, with it’s now almost sunk without trace “Anglo-Irish” class. They persist after decolonization, stranded in a culture that has moved on, clinging to a kind of reinvented hybrid identity, performing in public as the link between the colonized and the colonizers, “Interpreting” the one to the other, and vice versa. Ex-British colonies are full of them. So it is in Ireland, purveying a kind of “Ersatz” Oirishness, to the host community and the defeated Colonizers. The English elites had a scornful attitude to them, but found them useful. In Ireland’s case, they perform an important function, being polite about the unmentionable National Genocide of the “Famine” and the other 800 years of blood, the three million dead and the three million fled of the Green Shoa, something proportionately worse than the Jewish losses of recent times, and all the other unfortunate” Incidents.” It is all about memory and forgetting, and providing a nice Bourgeois interface to the former oppressors,and a pre-packaged identity for the Irish Diaspora, which clings desperately to what it has almost lost, as memory dims, and those from the “Old Country” die off. How useful, how convenient. But these people are cultural Quislings. They are those who trimmed to the cold wind that blew through Ireland these last 100 years. Now, the centenary of the 1916 blood sacrifice looms ever nearer, and most of the Irish political class flinch from its raw truth ever more fearfully. Time, I think, to let loose the ghosts of the 16, and let them speak for themselves. We do not need these people, and their parasitical grip on the Irish Soul.
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