Book Review: A first-hand look at how Ireland has changed utterly in 60 turbulent years

"O’Toole’s years as a theatre critic – his academic expertise is in Irish drama – inform the best of his writing about Irish politics, giving him an awareness of the inherent drama of daily life, and a heightened sense of the absurd – increasingly useful as the century progressed"

O’Connell Street in Dublin in the 1960s: The most shocking features of that period in Ireland were how total the power of the Church still was, and how absent women were from public life. Picture: H Allen/Evening Standard/Getty Images

• We Don’t Know Ourselves - A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 
• Fintan O’Toole 
• Head of Zeus, €25