How Ireland wrote the modern story of progress

One of my vacation habits is to take along a book about the place I’m visiting — which is how I found myself on Ireland’s spectacular Atlantic coast last month, paging through a copy of Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland. O’Toole, a prominent Irish journalist, uses the years of his own life, beginning in 1958, to tell the story of the changes that have taken place in this small, beautiful country on Europe’s northwestern edge.

While I knew that Ireland had up until quite recently been a poor place by European standards, I hadn’t realized just how poor. Within living memory, as O’Toole writes, Ireland was “a vast cattle ranch with a few cities.” Two-thirds of homes still had no electricity after World War II, and, as late as 1961, most rural hous