Diarmaid Ferriter: Why are Irish people so preoccupied with what others might think?

In an introduction to his latest book, Diarmaid Ferriter looks back to one he published 20 years ago, The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000, and admits the title “now appears provisional”.
Over coffee in a Dublin hotel, I put it to him that he’s chosen an even more portentous word for his new volume, The Revelation of Ireland 1995-2020, and wonder if it’s giving hostages to fortune in sounding definitive about a period so recent and turbulent.
The book covers the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger, the Northern Ireland peace process, the era of tribunals and child abuse scandals, the collapse in authority of the Catholic Church, the post-bailout recovery, and a once-in-a-century pandemic, among other things.
“Maybe I am,” he concedes of the hostage suggestion, smiling ruefully. Then he offers a smaller revelation: that his first choice of title was a very different one: Roaring Inside. That was a quote from Anne Enright’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The Gathering (2007), wherein the narrator is trying to make sense of a traumatic incident in her family’s past. “I need to bear witness to an uncertain event,” she writes. “I feel it roaring inside of me.”
After some reflection, however, Ferriter’s publishers worried that Roaring Inside might suggest a book about “gastric distress”, he says. So they went with the less oblique alternative.
In any case, explains the author, the “revelation” of the title refers mainly to the great opening up of archives, and of the past in general, that has been a feature of the 25 years in question, not to any claim that this is the final truth about the period.
He’s well aware that these subjects, especially the pandemic, which he deals with only briefly, will be revisited in the near or distant future. In the meantime, he makes no apology for trying to turn “the long lens of history” on them: “Because if historians don’t enter that space, others will.”
This brings us to social media, the relentless rise of which has also been a feature of the era under review. Ferriter “hates it”, especially the “Muskisation” of Twitter/X. It’s “vile” and “an assault on history”, he says.
He is himself a total abstainer from social media, unlike many historians, and is not tempted to join the fray: “If you get sucked into that morass, how much time would you spend having to call out lies? How much time would you spend responding to bilious assertions and insults? I understand that it’s a very powerful tool for communication. But you also have to consider who controls it now.”
The new book is divided into seven sections: covering Irish political culture; the peace process; the economy; Ireland’s position in the world; the church; the social contract; and finally a chapter titled Cultural currents and remembrance.
Writing about the economy he found hardest: “you have to cut through the fog of jargon”. And perhaps surprisingly, his conclusions are merciful about what some think the biggest political mistakes of the era, notable the bank guarantee.
“I wouldn’t be black and white about that,” he says. “There was a gun put to our head.” Yes, we were “peripheral” and “small fry” in the grand European scheme, but we couldn’t be allowed to do our own thing because of the “fear of contagion”.
Here and elsewhere, he comes back again and again to the personal element in big events. “I found it very interesting listening to Brian Lenihan, when he was minister of finance at the time of the bailout. He describes having to go out and accept this humiliation on behalf of the country.
“He was thinking historically – given the family that he came from, his parents and grandparents were deeply embedded in the Irish story. Whenever I met him, he didn’t want to talk about politics, he wanted to talk about the history book he was reading.”
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Contrastingly, he also remembers “hearing Enda Kenny saying: ‘we will not have ‘defaulters’ written on our forehead’. And I was thinking, would it be that bad to have ‘we burned the bondholders’ written there instead?’
“There was a preoccupation throughout that period with external validation, which again is very interesting historically. Where do we get that from? Why were we so preoccupied with what others might think?”
He seems surprised by the relative lack of change that followed the crisis. The 2011 general election has been described by some as a “revolution at the ballot box”. But it wasn’t really, suggests Ferriter. “Of course you had the slaying of the dominant political beast, Fianna Fáil – that was very significant because it was one of the most successful political parties in the world.
“But what was it swapped for? It wasn’t a new politics. A lot of political scientists were looking at that space in 2011 and saying: there’s a gap here for something new to emerge. But the electorate wasn’t interested in that. What’s developed instead is a lot of Independents. It’s very fractured.”
The coming of peace to the North was one of the big success stories of the period. And access to the formerly secret official papers has been a boon for the likes of Ferriter.
“Most of my chapter on that has been written from primary source material – State archives in Belfast and Dublin,” he says, which “puts us in the room”.
He recalls a joke US president Bill Clinton made at the time, about he’d rather be on holiday with “Ken Starr” (then prosecuting him over the Monica Lewinsky scandal) than be locked up with the negotiators in Belfast.
“But it’s a great privilege to be in the room. Such is the scale of documentation, the detail. We’re getting the preliminary contacts between the participants, their exchange of insults, the way in which they try to psyche each other out.”
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There’s also all the “tedious” but vital civil service work, “the drafting process”. Those involved “are not household names, obviously, but they’re trying to come up with something that might be the basis of agreement”.
“And we also have transcripts of the phone calls between Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair – that’s very interesting, because you get a sense of the personal relationships at play.”
Ferriter had a great urge “to do justice to the complexity of the North”, to redress “the partitionist way of thinking” still pervasive in the Republic.
So along with the “avalanche” of official material, he found himself turning to poets and novelists to “excavate the space around the peace process and beyond it”.
People like Michael Magee, “a young writer in his early 30s trying to make sense of what his parents had been through, but also what was transmitted to the next generation”. There were great insights in the work of Anna Burns and David Park too.
He also mentions the journalist Lyra McKee. “Before her brutal murder, she was doing research on suicide: between 1998 and 2014, there were 3,709 suicides – more than were killed [in the Troubles]. Absolutely staggering.”
McKee “was very interested in upending that ‘Ceasefire Baby’ label, as if everything had been resolved, as if their life had been a breeze.” On a related but lighter note, he went to see the Kneecap film recently and loved it: “I really like what they’re doing – they’re not tolerating this ceasefire babies label either. They’re giving it a good kicking. That and the hypocrisy of those who claimed to be pure keepers of their community – we’ll shoot you for dealing drugs but if you sell the drugs on our behalf, we’ll protect you.”
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Peace in the North aside, was he struck by any outstandingly good political decisions made in the 25 years?
“Yes. Ironically maybe, it comes right at end. I didn’t deal at length with the pandemic because it’s too much to take on and too recent. I know there’s going to be a future exploration of what was done and why.
“But it struck me that there was a decency at work there, that the resources of the State were mobilised to ensure people did not fall too low.
“That they were guaranteed a basic income. That our health service finally became a national health service overnight, when the minister for health, now Taoiseach [Simon Harris], announced there would be no distinction between public and private patients.
“Now, of course, it was temporary, but you also had a determination to try to create a sense of solidarity and community, which you can still do in a small country.”
The pandemic response proved we could “mobilise the resources of the State to ensure that we take the business of being a republic seriously”, he thinks.
“That’s been a problem for us for too long. What constitutes a decent republic? We’re far too preoccupied with superlatives. Remember this mantra about being the best little country in the world in which to do x, y, and z?
“We don’t have to be the best. Why can’t we just be decent and take the social contract seriously? I think that was done in 2020. I don’t want to romanticise it – I’m sure mistakes were made. But there was a sense of purpose then.”
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This, “the idea of a grand design”, was missing from most of the period in question, he laments: “I quote Niamh Breathnach when she became minister for education in 1992. She was told by her party leader Dick Spring: make equality the spine of your departmental effort. And she went in the first day and asked them: what’s your philosophy of education?
“And they said: we don’t do philosophy [he laughs]. I thought that was brilliant – in a bleak way. It reminded me of Tomas Derrig who was minister for education in the 1930s and said it’s not my duty to philosophise about education. But if it’s not his duty, who else was going to do it?”
Ferriter can’t understand this reluctance on the part of executive power to think big thoughts and set out grand designs, a task seemingly devolved in recent decades to our presidents. “They tend to craft an overall vision for their presidency. Whether it’s Mary Robinson and inclusiveness. Or Mary McAleese and bridge-building. Or Michael D Higgins on the social contract.”
The new book represents an era in Ferriter’s life too. His first child Enya was born the day The Transformation of Ireland was published and turns 20 the same day the new one makes its official appearance. She’s now studying history (of all things) and shares the book’s dedication with Ferriter’s two younger daughters, Saorla and Ríona.
At 52, despite back and knee surgeries, he still runs regularly – four days a week, for sanity, he says: “I love it; it’s completely addictive, as you know.” He also swims a lot, in the sea (“but I don’t have a dry robe”). He writes in the mornings mostly, because “I’m useless by 9pm”.
I remind him that in a profile 20 years ago, he was asked to imagine what he’d be doing now. Not still teaching, he thought. But he is, as a UCD professor, and enjoys it, with reservations (mostly to do with education’s management culture).
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He and his wife Sheila Maher still also spend holidays in a rented cottage in Louisburgh, and continue to “love that part of Mayo”. On the other hand, contrary to a prediction of colleagues 20 years ago, he has not acquired an interest in gardening.
“I’m not allowed to be a gardener,” he laughs. “I developed an aversion to mowing grass back in the 1980s. It used to be my job and I hated it. But somebody in the home, much more accomplished, has now taken over that.”
The Revelation of Ireland is published by Profile Books. Diarmaid Ferriter will be in conversation with Olivia O’Leary on Thursday 5th September in the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire. Tickets from www.paviliontheatre.ie