Word: hanlons
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...church baiters are as fair to the op position as O'Hanlon. Yet he cannot help asking: "Is the quality of life affected favorably or adversely by the power of the church?" His predictable answer is that Ireland would be a better place without church-inspired censorship and brimstone bans on divorce and birth control...
Curiously, O'Hanlon's distaste for the old ways is matched by his distrust of the new. Ireland's energetic attempts to attract industry (and keep some of the natives at home) is described as "the selling of Ireland to foreign investors...
Intoxicating Malice. O'Hanlon's most controversial, heart-rending chap ter is one in which he blames the Ul ster savagery on the frustrations of Irish family life. In the Catholic Republic and the outposts in Londonderry and Bel fast, he argues, swarms of unwanted children bedevil hopeless parents: "Any body who lives in Ireland can testify to the absence of love in the average home." Fathers drink too much, then beat their wives and children with heavy, indiscriminate hands. Violence learned at the hearth is later re-enacted in the Irish Republican Army...
Author O'Hanlon fulminates be cause he clearly loves his former coun trymen and women. He is too much the Irishman himself not to revel in the ver bal excitement of Dublin life and its "maddening, entertaining stew of provincial chauvinism." Inevitably, his book is crammed with old-chestnut anecdotes, pub gossip "laced with the in toxicating ingredient of malice," and sharp observations. Most of these, also inevitably, take a dying fall: the slipshod car-assembly center in Cork that turns out "lemons (or limes)"; those ash trays proudly bearing the Gaelic legend, Deanta sa tSeapain (Made in Japan...
Unlike any number of Ireland watchers, O'Hanlon offers no neat chapter full of progressive suggestions about future pol icy. His attitude is finally a supreme, Celtic compliment to Irish intransi gence: the admission that nothing can be done about...