A Culture of Deliberate Unknowing
The title of the book derives in part from this theme. The author presents a portrait of Irish history as being a society permanently stuck in an attitude of don't ask/don't tell on a variety of issues. The knowledge of the perverse behavior within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church was either known or suspected by large portions of the masses but remained a secret not discussed openly for decades. Due to the influence of Catholic morality, birth control was a sin even as condom use and even abortions were known to be available. Ireland refrained from taking sides in world wars while getting increasingly violent in its own seemingly endless civil war. The history of Ireland presented in this subjective overview is one in which citizens expressed one view publicly while believing the opposite privately on issue after issue.
The Collapse of Catholic Influence
The book is a history of modern Ireland which the author effectively dates as stemming from the year of his own birth, 1958. He contends that his generation is the single one within which the once all-encompassing influence of the Catholic Church waned and all but evaporated. For most of its existence, the Catholic Church was the dominant power within the country, far surpassing any political faction. The morality imposed by the Church influenced everything from social attitudes to laws. The author contends that within one single generation rising to power over the latter part of the twentieth century, Catholicism lost its firm hold. This loss of once-supreme authority is the result of American pop culture entering into daily discourse, an endless litany of scandalous revelations about Church corruption and hypocrisy, and an economic boom in the 1990s which forged a stronger secular identity among younger citizens than the country had ever experienced before.
The Origin of Post-Truth
The turbulent assault on facts which has characterized American society since 2016 gave rise to the term "Post-Truth" to describe the state of uncertainty that many term a kind of madness. This tome reveals that every aspect which constructed the Post-Truth Era in America had already been firmly in place in Ireland more than half a century earlier. O'Toole observes that while a lie is generally regarded as the opposite of the truth, in Ireland at the midpoint of the last century "the lie was a free-floating entity, two opposite signifiers with no real signified" while "the truth itself lacked credibility." The state of the nation had become one in which facts were not to be trusted at mere face value while it was also understood that no lie could be completely untrue. This mindset created the foundation for instability since progress depends upon a strong belief in the possibility of changes resulting in improvement. Ireland's history of stagnation before the second half of the twentieth century is directly linked to this ambiguity toward factual truth.
