How Ireland Blundered Into the Modern World

The same forces that stalled a national transformation ended up fueling it.

- Cullen Murphy

Early in the pages of We Don't Know Ourselves, Fintan O'Toole's masterful “personal history of modern Ireland, I came upon a moment in O'Toole's life that intersected unexpectedly with my own. The date was Tuesday, March 8, 1966. In a Dublin bedroom in the chill dark of early morning—1:31 a.m. exactly—O'Toole's mother, given to premonitions, awoke and exclaimed, "God, what was that?” Then came the sound of a distant explosion.

I, too, heard the explosion. My American family had moved from the United States to Ireland for several years. I was a schoolboy, a little older than O'Toole; our home was a mile or so from his. As everyone soon learned, an IRA splinter group had blown off the top of Nelson's Pillar, an imposing column in O’Connell Street that some saw as a symbol of British oppression but most regarded as a convenient landmark and an elegant viewing platform. I had paid my sixpence and spiraled up the interior staircase many times. Now the Pillar was a ragged stump. Thinking back on the moment, O” Toole writes:

My father got us up early that morning and we took the bus in to see the wreck of Nelson. He said it was a big thing, an event we should remember. He took us right up close to the base where huge lumps of stone were scattered randomly like pebbles. Nobody stopped us. My father picked up a small piece of the granite, it's outside worn grimy by the murk of the city, its inside glistening with newly revealed speckles of quartz, a secret self, hidden within the monument until the shock of the explosion so violently brought it to life.