When Fintan Met Derek: RTÉ Documentary Puts Irish Whiggism Under the Microscope

The rhetoric was trite.

The narrative was stale.

But while the hour-long RTÉ biopic on the life and times of Fintan O’Toole didn’t tell viewers anything new about the person it was covering it nonetheless revealed a lot about the boomer liberalism championed by Tara Streets’ chief bien pensant. 

Born during the ‘modernising’ Lemass years, or as he put it when Ireland “abandoned the fantasy of self-sufficiency”, and retiring right as replacement migration begins to consume Irish life, O’Toole’s trajectory is a good timepiece for the last half-century of social change and the truisms that enabled it. 

Spliced with reels and reels of Irish women dancing at crossroads and the grinning footage of Bishop Casey the documentary ‘Fintan O’Toole: A Life in Our Times’ grabbed all the low-hanging fruit it possibly could in the fifty minutes it was on air Wednesday night.

Ignoring the northern quadrant of our island under the Orange jackboot, O’Toole began his televised yarn by declaring that Ireland was at the time of his birth “monolithic and overwhelmingly Catholic.”

Pushing open doors his entire adult hammering away on issues from contraception, anti-republicanism, and migration, O’Toole’s role in our discourse has been to legitimise ideas already signed off by the Irish elite, pathologising all those in opposition.

O’Toole said it best when he stated, “In all my years working here [The Irish Times] not once has somebody said you can’t say that.” 

Contrast this easy ride to the experience of Catholics, republicans, and northern nationalists under Section 31.

Far from the imperfect and equally as partitioned Ireland that O’Toole was born into in 1958 that was already commencing its process of denationalisation, the eponymous narrator would have the viewer believe those of his generation were born into the Gaelic Francoist Republic.

While it is fair to say that the Ireland that O’Toole was born into was bleeding to death of its economic stagnation, moral hypocrisy, and realities of modern life, the sleight of hand that the narrator would have you think was that liberalisation was the only way out of the malaise.

But far from being a lifelong opponent of the supposed ancien regime of the past, O’Toole claims to have embraced it with reluctant zealotry. He admits to finding Traditional Latin Mass “mesmerising” with a “mystical quality” with the addendum that “this is where power lay”. 

However, the introduction to Anglo culture was what began Fintan’s Damascene conversion away from antiquated Irish Catholicism and towards the path of enlightenment. The work of Shakespeare unshackled him from the chains of his Catholic upbringing with the “vitality and imagery” of Macbeth  ‘finishing him with religion’. “The solemn requiem Latin Mass was great but Macbeth was rather better,” he added. 

O’Toole’s final nail in the coffin for him and Irish nationalism was the Troubles. 

The Dublin and Monaghan Bombings (1974), when Loyalists bombed civilian targets in Dublin City and the outskirts of Monaghan, changed his outlook. The near-certain involvement of the British security state was a noticeable absence in O’Toole’s narrative reverting to form with denunciation of narrow-minded nationalism.

The spectre of bombs triggered outside a bus depot hit close to home as his father was a bus driver. “What’s this for?” he asked feigning moral certitude having already decided the nation is not worth fighting or dying for. “What’s it going to achieve? Is it worth it? I think, I pretty early decided it did not seem worth it to me.” 

Rather persistently the final quarter of the documentary candidly dealt with demographics with O’Toole visibly gulping on camera as he acknowledged the monumental task facing the Republic.

O’Toole masterfully seeks to imbibe the viewer with a narrative that ethnos as it was traditionally viewed and upheld is an outdated concept and a new understanding of identity must flourish in order for the Irish to, in reference to his patronising and derogatory book, truly know themselves. Living beside a Jewish cemetery in Dolphin’s Barn that was always ‘within his eye line’ reminded him of the struggle of Judaism in assimilating to the countries they fled to.  

With the camera panning the author sauntering the cemetery with typical Jewish names like Rubenstein engraved with Star of David’s pervading the hollow graves, O’Toole reminds us that he is “comfortable with an identity that doesn’t need to be defined in really narrow terms”. Despite the contributions of Jews to Irish life “they were not officially part of the Irish story”. 

“You’re almost certainly talking of people who were persecuted and fleeing persecution,” he laments before segueing into why mass migration into Ireland must be welcomed. 

“We’ve gone from being this huge exporter of people to being a very significant importer of people… The demographics are changing rapidly. You now have 20% of the population born somewhere else,” he extols. 

Wolfe Tone’s universalist Republic finding final form within a Turkish kebab shop off Moore Street O’Toole while visibly biting his lip at the rise of a nativist fightback is nonetheless anxious about the project of mass migration going forward.

Acknowledging that reflexively deriding opponents of mass migration as racist is foolhardy and lazy he nonetheless doesn’t resist the urge to condemn those who have taken to the streets to oppose the settlement of hordes of outsiders: 

“The people who now claim to be the Indigenous Irish are people who have absolutely no understanding of Irish history, of Irish identity,” he says before adding that, “Irish history has always been about… mixing” a far cry from his previous assertion that Irish life not too long ago in his upbringing was ‘monolithic’. 

Fintan O’Toole may have worked during a time of bomb blasts in Belfast or divorce referenda in Dublin but is retiring at a time when the politics of replacement migration are about to come crashing down on the modern Ireland he helped script.

If Irish separatism can be pinned for Omagh could the liberalism of O’Toole be blamed for beheadings in Sligo or dead children in New Ross?

Is there a final Pauline conversion in store for O’Toole similar to Graham Linehan where he realises the dividends of the social change he helped herald? 

Appreciative of the potent feeling of ethnonationalism on both sides of the border a mind like O’Toole knows where the next chapter of Irish history is going when it comes to mass migration and the social fallout from it.

Despite breaking the back of the Provos or Catholic constitutionalism Fintan O’Toole’s progressive utopia is in meltdown as much as De Valera’s Catholic Republic was at the time of his birth.

Liberalism economically and socially in Ireland has been grounded in the belief that limitless population growth courtesy of mass migration would and could never collide with basic social realities and a yet untamed spirit of tribalism in Irish society.

Similar to his 68er counterparts on the Continent the sun is setting on the hyper-liberalism of the O’Toole era. A thinker who cut his teeth playing to the gallery for the Dublin bourgeoise and who has been taking cheap shots his entire life what happens when the music finally stops on O’Toole’s liberal utopia is anyone’s guess but don’t expect to read about it in the Irish Times op-ed section.