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Maeve Higgins: My eyes blur with tears as O'Toole's words chart the emotional evolution of our State

Fintan O'Toole's book, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland, is a document of our time and made my emotions swell up to viral TikTok levels
Maeve Higgins: My eyes blur with tears as O'Toole's words chart the emotional evolution of our State

Two Christian Brothers College students wait for a lift home from school during a bus strike in Cork city in 1947. In Fintan O’Toole’s book,’ We Don’t Know Ourselves: A personal History of Modern Ireland’, he identifies the 1967 introduction of free secondary school education as “much more revolutionary than any rising”.

LAST year I was obsessed with the TikTok craze, summed up by the viral video “books that will make you SOB”. Certain books shot up the bestseller lists to the mystification of their authors and publishers until they traced the sales back to TikTok. 

Young readers were making videos of themselves in tears at the end of particularly moving novels, weeping into the camera and sometimes flinging the book across the room because reading it hurt so much. The videos are funny and knowing and very much how I felt this summer. 

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