Preparing for trips to Ireland and Norway with books, and what 'We Don't Know Ourselves' reveals about how Ireland nearly disappeared.
Before I travel somewhere, I read about it. Not guidebooks, but actual books, the kind that follow people through their lives and pull the country into view from the inside. This summer I'm doing a stretch in Ireland followed by a week in Norway, and I've been working through a reading list for both.
Norway is where I started, but I haven't finished it yet. Ireland pulled me in. Partly because I have a lot of Irish heritage. Partly because I'm going to see friends who live in Wicklow, and I've learned over the years that showing up having done some homework changes the quality of the conversations you have. Even with a tour guide, if you've done a little research, you can draw the conversation deeper and deeper into what it's actually like to live there. You ask a question, they give you something real back. That dynamic almost never happens when you walk in cold.
The book is called We Don't Know Ourselves, subtitled A Personal History of Modern Ireland, and it's by Fintan O'Toole. The title alone is enough to make you pick it up.
O'Toole was born in 1958, and the book follows his life while running it alongside the wider arc of Irish history. Ireland becoming more modernized, joining what was then the EEC (the precursor to the EU), the Troubles starting up in the North in the '60s and '70s, the 50th anniversary of independence playing out in his childhood memory as a ten-year-old. I'm only halfway through, but it's genuinely well written. It gives you characters to care about while also building out a philosophical view of how Ireland became what it is.
The writing follows his life, so you have characters to care about, but it also builds a philosophical view of why Ireland is the way it is.
I came in with the kind of romanticized, nostalgic view of Ireland that a lot of Americans with Irish heritage carry around. What I didn't fully appreciate was just how rural and economically stalled Ireland was in the 1950s and '60s. I knew about the potato famine, somewhere in the late 1800s, and I knew about the massive emigration that followed: the tenements in New York, the huge Irish diaspora, all of it. That wave is easy to understand as a brain drain in a specific historical moment.
What hit me reading this book is that Ireland kept losing people long after the famine. Decades later. There just weren't good options: not for education, not for career, not for building a life. Young people kept leaving, and the trajectory of the country, if nothing had changed, was to get smaller and smaller until it was essentially a tiny island village that had hollowed itself out.
Ireland's trajectory was to kind of get smaller and smaller and just be a little village island eventually, because they just weren't staunching the flow of young people.
That framing reoriented something for me. You think of Ireland and you think of the culture, the literary tradition, the music. McCourt's Angela's Ashes was the kind of book that laid bare a different truth: real poverty, real shame, real hardship. I actually had a conversation once with an Irish friend from Wicklow, a bit older than me, and when I brought up Angela's Ashes excitedly he almost winced. Not because it wasn't true, but almost because it was: it exposed something his generation felt as a national embarrassment. That reaction itself says a lot.
He almost acted like it was a shame that that book was written. Like it really exposes the shame of our country.
The payoff for this kind of pre-trip reading isn't just knowing facts you can recite. It's that you start to feel the texture of a place before you arrive, and that changes what you notice and what you ask. When I sit down with my friends in Wicklow, I want to compare notes: what do they think about how the country has changed, what did their parents experience, how do they see Ireland's place in Europe now.
A good book gives you the opening moves for those conversations. We Don't Know Ourselves is doing exactly that. It's making me more curious about a place I thought I already understood.
