Irish Independent 24th October 2006

Our past is another country, for some, but it needs revisiting lest we forget people like Peter
Tuesday October 24th 2006
WE can look back on the Ireland of yesterday as onto another planet. It was a society whose values were largely established by an uncouth, sexually-repressed, xenophobic peasantry, led by a lower middle-class, political elite which took its values from that peasantry.

Those who sought political tolerance and sexual enlightenment, were either intimidated into silence, or forced to emigrate.

The state itself was a coffin ship crewed by deranged celibates, many of them cruel and sadistic, who had been recruited from the ranks of the passengers.

No outsiders were involved here. Independent Ireland made itself what it was: an impoverished, self-pitying, self-regarding, entity whose guard dogs viciously attacked whoever spoke the truth about its ways.

The tranquillity of traditional Irish life was the pauperised peace of the world's only elective totalitarianism.

'Founded on Fear', (Irish Academic Press) is Peter Tyrrell's long vanished account of his life from the 1930s into the 1950s at the height of this consensual despotism, with a splendid and insightful introduction by the UCC academic Diarmuid Whelan.

And Peter's life happened to embrace the historical trinity which was rigorously excluded from the national narrative for so long; life in industrial schools, emigration (and the calamity which befell so many emigrants) and participation in the British army - the three invisible strands of 20th century Irishness.

Peter spent much of his childhood in Letterfrack industrial school, a place of often medieval barbarity, where physical and sexual abuse was the daily portion for the boys.

No excerpt here can do this abominable place justice. In the late 1950s, the philanthropist Owen Sheehy Skeffington persuaded Peter to write his account of his time there.

Sheehy Skeffington stood almost alone in the 1950s and 1960s in his opposition to the regimen of violence which governed our industrial schools (and indeed many others). It is the account which he encouraged Peter to write which forms the basis for Founded on Fear.

The next phase of Peter's life was emigration to England - where he realised how wretched so many Irish were: uneducated, dirty and socially dysfunctional.

BUT even to state this obvious truth is to invite hysterical denunciations. To be sure, a certain innate anti-Irishness certainly existed in Britain.

But overwhelmingly, British anti-Irishness was a response to the appalling conduct of so many Irish - their dirt, their illiteracy, their physical belligerency, their alcoholism, and their violent nationalism. Over a generation later, in my childhood in Leicester, I saw some of the truth that Peter Tyrrell described. The only public drunks were Irish. The only adults who fought in public were Irish. The only men who queued outside pubs first thing in the morning were Irish.

So why is the phenomenon of anti-Irishness just about dead in Britain today?

Is it possibly because we no longer bomb their cities or murder their soldiers or flood their labour market with thousands of illiterate, unskilled drunkards every year, as we used to? In other words, was most anti-Irishness not a human response to the manifest deficiencies of the Irish?

For almost as soon as we removed the Irish deficiencies which were a factor in anti-Irish bigotry, the bigotry seems to have totally vanished.

This is such a heretical stuff that I can already feel hysterical denunciations of those who cherish national victimhood, and whose personal identity is usually intertwined with Ireland's perceived woes.

The Black and Tans, the Famine, Landlordism and the Famine are central to their sense of self. And for most of the history of independent Ireland, such people were intellectually in control.

They allowed no other narrative to be told: and for us to have accepted responsibility for most of our national woes was to have sympathised with British anti-Irishness.

The Tuairim group of the 1960s set about "examining" the uncomfortable realities of contemporary Ireland. It included Donal Barrington, Ronan Keane, Garrett FitzGerald, Miriam Hederman O'Brien and David Thornley. Yet for all its ambitions, its pamphlet on child abuse in Ireland excluded the allegations made by Peter Tyrrell about Letterfrack.

So if such strong-minded individuals did not have the courage to speak the real truth about the past, is it any wonder that the horrors of the industrial schools could have continued so long?

The clergy are an easy target in all this.

But the priests, brothers and nuns did what they did with the tacit and often specific approval of a people who cherished pious ignorance above knowledge, and of politicians who had meekly surrendered power to the Catholic church.

This was the nation that we were.

It is little wonder that Peter Tyrrell's periods in the British army and a German POW camp were relatively comfortable compared with his time in Letterfrack.

MOST strikingly, British officers and Wehrmacht prison guards were usually far more civilized to him than were majority of the Brothers in Letterfrack.

Peter never recovered from the damage done to him in Letterfrack, and he committed suicide by self-immolation in 1967 on Hampstead Heath.

He has left us one of the most powerful testimonies about the real Ireland that has ever appeared.

Diarmuid Whelan deserves our undying gratitude for its publication.

? Irish Independent